Silence

As I spend time in popular coffee houses, I notice that silent people seem to have more fun.

The last time I ran this test, I saw a woman of ambiguous middle age, with curly brown hair and no makeup, who sipped with quick deliberation from her iced tea while working on a little white computer.  

I imagined that she was involved with something administrative but fun.  Like arranging children’s book layouts or considering microeconomics.

Then she entered a conversation. She agreed with her interlocutor.  "Yes, I don't understand how..."

She could have been on topic with her work, but the very act of verbalizing anything, seemed to crumple the charm of the quieter time.  The depressing implication was that casual observation  of "silent waters run deep" is unreliable.

As with so much in human perception, assumptions come from the observer or even from the act of observing itself and not from properties of the subject, the "silent" one.

Henry James said that a reader's imagination is better suited to filling in the details of a story than are a writer's words.*  Imagination, in being broad, can be more accurate than language.  Imagination works with possibilities,  vague notions which, while unclear, are full of scope and complete in feeling.

Like matter in the form of wave rather than particle, a reader's experience is everywhere at once.  In this way, it misses nothing and, as James will say, delivers much better effect:  stronger fear, finer sight, deeper meaning. When imagination collides with language, it forces the condensation of a point. It spits out a word or a sentence, an outlined meaning.  It eschews vagueness, collapses into clarity and diminishes emotion.

This property of language to diminish experience is why fiction, the art built of language, works by showing rather than telling.   A storyshows a lively party rather than saying there had been one. Fiction wants the reader to dicide whether the party was lively by experiencing it. Fiction is not its plot summary.

Like an infant's brain, over-rich in synaptic pathways, a reader's imagination incorporates possibilities   without chosing a single path.  The protagonist may have looked away.  Or may have wished to have looked away. Or may have thought about it. Without choosing, a reader incorporates all possibilities into the story. 

Like the trajectory of a moving swing, whose character is defined by the motion rather than by any single position, imagination relies on sweaping through thought to get the full picture.

Words, as helpful as they are, collapse that sweaping path. They ask the wave-particle of imagination to fall into its single, tiny circumferance.   Sure, we see it more clearly that way, but we now removed all exogenous possibilities. Wave collapse is when waves die and particles are born. As far as we know particles are what we call collapsed possibility. In other words, non-possibilities, no longer stretched in all directions, now a single, limp spot. Dead.

If something has to give in this scenario, I would have it be the words.

* in “The Art of Fiction”

Valence Procrastination

In his 2012 book The Art of Procrastination, John Perry suggests that there is a lot of value in what we do when we are putting off important projects.  In between getting to the project and now, a lot of the work that really  matters gets done.

More rigidly, this amounts to something like:  in order to get important things done, we invent a project to contain the space around them. 

If you had an indefinite amount of time to putter around your computer and your coffee, there would be no structure to it, and, like empty space without a house, it would feel too vast and open to nestle down in.  So you put a parameter around your time.  You say, “by the end of the day, I must have accomplished half of A.” Now you have a boundary, a temporal home. 

You can function inside a home. You know how to do that.  Your space is between Now and “the end of the day,” and so you start to fill it. You check email, write that thank-you note, finally look up the address of the friend you had to buy a gift for after she moved away and now need to send it.   You get busy on a whole slew of to-dos.  John Perry is right.  They are all important.  Sometimes more important.  Often, they are the food you need to do a fine job on the Project that’s waiting at time X.

Most often, however, Project X is just an excuse.  It may be large and important and it may even be something you need to do, but it exists most directly as a temporal parameter within which your other tasks feel comfortable being filled.
This is called my theory of Valence Procrastination.  “Valence” for the outermost shell of an electron orbiting cloud.

Electrons fill the space around their atoms for the most part from innermost space to outermost, from close to the nucleus to farther out.  In the slightly larger atoms, however, electrons begin to “leave room,” as they fill the shells. They will fill the outermost sphere of an energy level first and then fill in below. 

In chemistry, this is taught an optimization of stability.  In order to fill the bucket proper, you first need to define the bucket.

Perhaps something similar happens with human perception of time. In being most fndamentally a measure of change, time – space-time – is most certainly not linear. In treating it as linear, we follow lines that curve under our feet, like the paths of light rays that travel “straight” until their embedded space track bends with them.

Maybe spacetime, in being one single property and holding all non-entropic impurities like atoms and people, has only a few rules:  same for valence shells and to-do lists, and we people have just been too busy or barbarous or hungry to notice.