R-59 Symbology

 

Noticing the symbology in my life. Or at least the most obvious bits of it.

Symbols are what we use to signal the other islands in our universe. I can’t remember who said “No man is an island”^[1] but he or she was, without putting too fine a point on it, about as wrong as it’s possible to be.

The fact is that inside our skulls is about three pounds of finicky wetware full of problematic wiring which IS us in the most literal sense. The only way we can interact with other chunks of wetware that turn up in our sensory range is to transmit and receive symbols we define as “language” largely made up of words, inarticulate noises, and the semaphore flags of non-verbal communication which are in fact the biggest part of actually communicating.^[2]

I don’t think I need to expound too much on how imperfect any of these are. They are the very definition of “low-bandwidth” and if most of us didn’t happen to share the same raw, evolutionary-defined chain of basic databases, we’d be communicating about on the same level as you would with a cat. (No offense to cats, but they can't be bothered with any symbology that doesn't involve getting scratched or fed.)

Perfectly defining or describing something as simple as a stone is an astonishingly complex problem. To do it full justice you would have to include stuff like its size, its shape, its shadowing, right down to a complex formula as big as a book that just describes its physical dimensions as a complex three-dimensional curve, and another describing its thousands of subtle colors under various light down to the nearest Angstrom.

And you still haven’t gotten around to the REALLY complicated bit about how the damned thing makes you feel. There are not enough words in the universe nor time to use them really define this simple lump of corundum between two people, much less anything as complicated as what a sunrise or love evokes in either of them.

“The sapphire was deep blue-green, iridescent in the fading sun, like the shifting metallic sheen of certain beetles’ shells as they unfold their wings to fly…”

Perfect? Oh, hell, no. You have a completely different thing in mind about the stone than I do, and we aren’t even considering whether the idea of a beetle has distracted you from the description altogether. Every single word in that sentence is a symbol condensing down and taking the place of what would take till the end of time to really describe to you, and at best will result in a rough idea what I’m talking about, and even then only if we have a common database to work from.

And so we plug these cryptically coded, honey-drip slow Morse code fragments into our communications channels and try to reconstruct an accurate model of what we believe the next island over is “really” like from our Ouija-reading of the fading and broken lighthouse flashes they send in return.

Now THAT'S entertainment...

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Footnotes:

^[1] It was John Dunne, a 16th/17th Century poet, priest, lawyer, and slayer who was partial to metaphysical pronouncements and sermons. I can’t imagine why I couldn’t remember that. Anyhow, the whole thing goes:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

^[2] An old boy by the name of Albert Mehrabian came up with the study in the late 60s and early 70s that claimed that 7% of communication was verbal and the othe 93% was non-verbal. Since then, everyone has pretty much bitched about it for a variety of reasons although they continue to be the standard numbers quoted everywhere, but even the bitchers seem to agree it's somewhere well north of 50%.