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”