Standing here believing that in the dark there is a clue.

[kiya]

Meaning is complicated.


Chance juxtapositions, incidental meetings, comments insigificant to the speaker (or certainly without the weight they acquire in the mind of the listener) are all part of it, not just the things that are marked with label Important (many of which don't actually mean much at all). Meaning is an emergent process in each mind. (Born-men like fractal patterns.)

Sometimes meanings are flexible things -- traumas can be retrained, new associations develop. Others are things that are irrevocably fixed in time -- the thing that led to taking one path rather than the other will always be that thing, because it happened, it's there in djet, its consequences are still resounding, even if one backtracks and goes the other way it's still why one chose differently in the first place. Those things have lasting echoes, sometimes lasting lifetimes.

If the thing that rang that particular gong is a chance meeting, it's fairly easy to categorise, to recognise: this was an incidental thing to the other party, something that they never realised would make that much of a difference. Stories are written about these things, that turning instant from a stranger; there's something magical about them happening, something about them that can resound of otherworlds and Wepwawet's domain, but they're known.

Likewise, the things that come of long-cultivated work and relationship have a comfortable place. Even if the relationship is done with and the work discarded, there's an understanding of things with that level of investment having some level of echo, they last. It's not out of scale for them to be there.

And then there's the middle.

There's always the middle.

There's the space where there's room to wonder how much the interaction meant to each party, where the scale of investment is muddy and was not clearly worked out by all involved.

Where, if one were to talk to the other person, presuming it's another person, about what a great influence they were on one's life, there's the possibility of the response, "Uh, yeah, you . . . who are you again?"

Or, perhaps worse, the knowledge of the freight of meaning might be taken as all out of proportion of what was consensually there, what was known, what was agreed to. That somehow it's too personal and intimate for what was there.

But at the same time, it's hard to try to maintain some sort of control over what other people use to make meaning; it's not like there's much I could do about it, even if I were unhappy about what differences I made to someone else's life.

I'm a storyteller. That's a good chunk of who I am, what makes up my sense of self, my feelings of identity.

Before there was Story, there was a feeling of inchoate longing, attached to a person; there was hunger and need and eroticism before I understood what "eroticism" meant. And stories grew up about that, stories tangled up in the need to understand this emotion, this response, stories that sank into it and followed it to its logical conclusion. And then the stories stopped being about him and about me, through a disjointed process beginning with an awkwardness about consent -- a fretfulness about whether it was okay to have this imagined him do things without knowing whether they were things that he would want to do. So I started changing the names, minor traits, thinly veiling things, tranforming them, and somewhere along the way that evolved into fiction that didn't directly depend on that thrum of tension, but was nonetheless a part of its ripples.

Would I have become a storyteller without A? I don't know. It seems likely -- but it was him who did it, not someone or something else. And perhaps I would have gone another way with a different muse; who knows? That it was him is fixed in time, and lasts, and its echoes are in dreams . . . and in the worlds in my head.

And still I wonder whether, had he had a choice about having that effect on someone, he would have given his consent. The thing is done, the turn is made, and who I am is who I am, all of this is consequences of what he and I and heandI were back when. And that's a lot of weight of mattering to put on a kid, even if the kid is subsumed entirely into whoever it is he grew up to be.

So I feel weird.

And I think some of my wishes to find him again, get back in touch, are me wanting to get that consent. And part of the terror in that is in knowing that if he did not want to matter like that -- or not want to matter like that to me -- there's nothing to be done to change it. Djet, djet, djet.

And that has made all the difference.



There's a meme thing going around that is asking people about books, and one of the questions is something like "five books that have a lot of meaning for you". Meaning is weird. But here are five books anyway:

Querencia, Steve Bodio. OOP, I think. Track it down anyway. Autobiography. Nature book. Love story. Portrait of New Mexico. And, goodness, Dad wrote a review of it.

Black Beauty, Anna Sewell. This was my first Grownup Book. I slept with it under my pillow or tucked into my covers until I was forbidden to due to damage to book and/or self.

Pogo, Walt Kelly. Or any of the collections of Pogo work will do. A solid grounding in this stuff makes me make much more sense. Really, honest. Ask donperros.

Cyteen, C. J. Cherryh. I could cite a number of Cherryh's works, actually, but decided on this one because every time I read it I get some new level of understanding -- sometimes of the world inside the book. Sometimes of my world.

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, Richard Feynman, Ralph Leighton, Edward Hutchings (Editor). Just because.

*snorts at music*

Standing on a dream
Isn't what it seems
Could we then reclaim a dream refused?
Knowing what we know
Could we let it go
Realising that all the years are used. . .

Comments

[ardaniel]

http://www.getcheapbooks.com/gcb_new/compare2.asp?isbn=0944439152

Couple copies of Querencia there for various prices, although the Amazon used price is extortionate.

[kiya]

Ah. Good. People can go get them.

They oughta.

[whispercricket]

(This may be incoherent, but it's sort of bubbling up into words so I thought I'd try. All of this is definitely my own opinion and not supposed to mean that you're supposed to feel or believe that way or change to agree with me or anything - I am half using a generic you and half responding to you, I guess.)

You own the mattering and meaning - it is yours, created by some congruence of the other person's action and just being with your own thoughts and feeling and self at that specific time and place. It's not necessary for the other person to know or accept that he had such a big impact on someone else, whether at the time or when told about it later. For most kind, nice people, even if they didn't know that they were having an influence at the time, they'd be flattered or interested (although likely a bit confused), or mortified in some cases, to find out about it later. (Of course, not all people are kind or nice or able to deal properly.)

I think one reason a lot of people don't understand their own worth is that it is too terrifying to mention these sorts of deep feelings of attachment and influenced change at the time, because the telling itself can change the situation, let alone finding out that the other person isn't reciprocating or willing to continue whatever is causing the impact. Thus, people aren't told, "you changed my life" or "I thought you were really neat in high school", or "remember when X happened? It may have seemed like nothing, but it was more than that", or "I had to rebuild my life because of how I reacted to what you did"... There's the telling because of the good, or the bad, or the what-might-have-been.

Things that happen when you're little, I think, affect you more deeply and intrinsically than most things when you're older (I'm using "little" broadly). (This is not a revolutionary thought. :) )

I'm not advocating you finding him and telling him (and not not advocating either - that's your decision, based on what you need and want). In the end, whether or not he wanted to matter like that (to you or anyone else), he did - he's responsible for what he did or didn't do but not for how you reacted and changed based on that, if that makes sense (there's a grey area in there). You own and are responsible for yourself, but you also never fully can control how you respond to outside influences (sometimes, you can't control at all, even if you know something's happening and try really hard). There's sort of a middle there where figuring out who's responsible for what probably isn't...useful, or possible.

Sometimes it's the telling yourself that's more important than actually telling the other person - like writing letters that never get sent, because it's the writing and thinking that's important, not the actual sending. Because sometimes you're writing a letter to the past, or to something / someone inside yourself who probably no longer or maybe never really existed in that form in the outside world (but is still something within you to be acknowledged). Or, sometimes the sending does have meaning as well, and sometimes it's very hard to tell.

(I don't know if you were looking for response - please take this as you will or need. It caused me to think, and that's a good thing for me, so thank you.)

[kiya]

You know, writing to him and just putting that written somewhere is an interesting idea -- I may do that and see what comes of it. I don't know whether I'd write it in the mode where I know I'm not sending it and thus can say all kinds of things, or the way where the possibility feels open. Harrum.

Meaning is very, very weird.

[linenoise.livejournal.com]

Meaning is hard.

I have this unformed thing in my head about the difference between Truth and Meaning. "This thing is True, that is for certain. But does it Mean anything? Aye, there's the rub." I tried to articulate it last semester, in my final paper for a philosophy course. I bombed the course, so I have to assume that I failed to articulate it properly.

Meaning is a big question for me, lately. That existential angst that has given Livejournal its well-deserved reputation as the premiere repository for dodgy teenage poetry. What can I say, I'm a late bloomer. But I have this *question* that I can't answer, and it nags at me.

You say that you're a storyteller. That defines you, in a way, it gives meaning to things. I don't know what I am. I lack definition, and then I fail to assign meaning to so much. I mean nothing. Truth is easy, I know where, when, what I am. I don't know *why* I am, and the not knowing captivates my attention and holds me in limbo.

[kiya]

Here's one of my Truths -- it's a Truth about Meaning, so it may be useful to you.

Meaning isn't something that get handed out. It doesn't happen, it's not as easy to deal with as fact. Somewhere along the line, everyone has to choose Meaning, in the big grand sense. (The process of things accruing meaning may also be chosen at some level, but a lot of that is kinda subliminal I think.)

But "Why am I here?" That's a question that is only answered by choosing a purpose and chasing it. There's nothing external that can make Why make sense, it's something that has to fit together in everyone's personal skull, individually. Or not choosing it. Or making the Why a pursuit of a What -- I don't consider 'storyteller' a purpose so much as a description of what I am, but it does have consequences in the whole "telling stories" thing. Or any of a number of things, but there's always choice.


I have 'Sri Syadasti' listed in my interests. Discordian saint, whose full name is "All propositions are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense."