Thinking and Speaking

            Well, hello to you reader. How are things? Now today I want to continue along the lines of what I was talking about yesterday, where I got into this idea that thinking might be something that’s only really possible between individuals, that thinking can only really take place as a kind of conversation. When we’re thinking to ourselves, even with the best intentions, we often end up following our own inherent biases, our own personal style of thinking, far too strongly. We can overlook the most basic flaws and absurdities in our thoughts because we’re looking at them from the inside, and we often need someone else to point out the mistakes in our thinking. Real conversation, real debate, requires an awful lot of all parties involved.

            Say you and I were debating some issue of moment, maybe trying to puzzle out just why that chicken over there decided to traverse the road. Now, if I was convinced that the chicken crossed the road because it was headed over to the avian convention on the other side, the interests of clear thinking and good debate would demand that I say so. But if you, with your extensive knowledge of the lie of the land, happen to know that the avian convention is in fact in the opposite direction, it would be incumbent on you to point this out. And once you tell me this, in the interests of the pursuit of truth I would be obliged to either alter my stance on the chicken’s destination, or else provide some alternate account that explains why the chicken may be approaching the avian convention by such indirect paths. Now, remember that all these rules also apply when the shoe’s on the other foot, and we’ve at least got the beginnings of an idea of what the two of us would have to expect of one another in the course of a debate.

            If this sounds ridiculous, even obvious, it’s important to keep in mind that the chicken is a trivial case. Certainly, it’s no great matter to either of us just why the chicken is crossing the road, and reasoned debate is easiest when it comes to matters that we don’t actually care about. This sort of attitude becomes much harder, and in a way much more important, when it comes to questions that we care very much about. Say, for example, in questions of politics or of religion, we very often find that it’s horribly easy to demonize anyone who disagrees with us. How often do we paint the other side as a bunch of self-congratulatory groupthinkers, and then proceed to surround ourselves with people who agree with us? There’s a kind of hesitancy I’ve noticed in myself, where I tend to think the best way to arrive at peace of mind is by closing myself off from what initially seems different or threatening—in short, from what challenges me. But I wonder sometimes if it would be better to surround myself with people who disagree with me very strongly. I’m afraid that we sometimes confuse disagreement with hostility.

Now, of course, there are times when disagreement and hostility coincide.

            Well, there’s a few thoughts on thinking, reader. I’m also writing up this post to let you know that I’ll be altering the format of this blog, starting tomorrow. Up to this point I’ve been writing this blog more or less in order to get a writing habit established, and I think I’ve managed that. But in the last few days I’ve become more and more dissatisfied with the essayistic form most of these posts have taken; I’m no great lover of essays, for a number of reasons. First off, it seems like it’s almost a defining feature of an essay that it never goes anywhere. An essay can trace a line of thought, suggest a realm of possibility, but it never gets to draw conclusions, it never gets to complete a line of thought. An essay really amounts to an author’s trying out a few thoughts, winding them up and seeing what comes of them. And while that’s all good and well, the thing I really dislike about essays, or at least the thing that’s getting under my skin at the moment, is that an essay is always written in the author’s voice. When you really want to write poems and stories, this talking in your own voice all the time can get very tiresome!

            So for the time being I’ll be switching over to posting poems daily, or very nearly daily—forcing poetry out never works out well. But I’m making it my goal to find an occasion for poetry every day, and I’ll post the results here. I hope you’ll enjoy it, reader.