Arcs of Knowledge
Every sentence is composed of words that can go in their own tangents of knowledge. A simple search for “every”, “sentence”, “composed”...“knowledge” opens its own can of worms, again tangents of knowledge that build on the base of meanings we assign and know. To read or react in a conversation is composed of the selective suppression of these arcs of knowledge and generating meaning through a tunnel vision of absorption and translation.
It is similar to how we see, the world around is made of multiple components that each demand a life-time of inquiry into themselves. We do not wonder about the orange on the table or the technology that makes the screen come to life with what we do. The chairs we sit on, the skies we see and the houses that surround us all invite us with their temptation of meaning but we are limited in what we can react to.
When we interact with other humans the same process takes over, we see a face, we hear some words and we draw our assumptions. The depths that stare back at us when we look into the eyes of other people is quickly filled by their physical dimensions, the limits to our thought paints them into shiny boxes of fixed attributes, an art that we have even taught our computers in the classification of people. Simple definitions make us human, do we like cats? Do we like to sing and hike? Attributes, tastes, definitions all used as meshes to find a meaning, our soul an intersection of infinitesimal tangents off the globs of knowledge. This gives a shape-shifting narrative to the nature of truth as understood by us, absolute facts lie in the relative vantage of our minds.
As Proust's narrator wonders “And wasn't my mind also like another crib in the depths of which I felt I remained ensconced, even in order to watch what was happening outside?”, what we know of the outside world is a scratch of what can be defined. In the waxy darkness of closed eyes, meaning exists without words.