At a Loss for Words: Artistic Expression, Communication & Understanding

In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous Vuong examines generational trauma with a particular emphasis on mother wounds, although the blind destruction of fathers, often a destruction wrought in absence, conditions every breath exchanged by the characters within, the air they speak into and hope for something to come back. Otherness receives its due diligence too in the alienation of culture, country, language, generation, and personal identity. Personal identity here is a queerness not only of sexuality but of all the other ways the narrator is set apart, incongruent and made to feel incompatible with a dynamic blend of dissonant cues from the inherited and adopted cultures. I enjoyed the honesty and admired the effort to seek the right words even when they might not exist. From this effort we get the beautiful prose of a poet. Disparate concepts are synthesized into a new poetic language that spans temporal, cultural, and ideological boundaries in order to express a queerness that escapes conventional language, conventional communication between mother-son, son-father, man-society, man-man, and author-reader.

“It’s in these moments, next to you, that I envy words for doing what we can never do—how they can tell all of themselves simply by standing still, simply by being. Imagine I could lie down beside you and my whole body, every cell, radiates a clear, singular meaning, not so much a writer as a word pressed down beside you.” —Ocean Vuong

Herein lies the beauty of poetry, the virtuosity of the poets. Through poetry, the poet transcends conventional limits of expression and mines new meaning from the pieces of culture and perception that lie jumbled in his mind. The poet, through his lonely craft, is seeking and often discovering new ways to free ideas about existence that lie trapped and dormant in the individual as well as the collective consciousness, to facilitate an escape from the confines of the individual mind, to defy solipsism, to exist for an immeasurable moment in the space between minds. What bits of meaning are lost to the air between us, vibrating the walls and dissipating as heat? With luck these bits enter the mind of another where they recombine and expand, blooming into mutual understanding.

Without the virtuosity of poetry, shared experience is a powerful precondition that can also lead to mutual understanding. If two individuals can share enough context, if their minds can occupy similar enough schemas, then this shared experience can generate shared understanding with a completeness proportional to the degree of overlap. An individual schema as it relates to the potential for total, sympathetic understanding is very difficult to replicate. This, among other contributing factors, is why human societies tend to coagulate into relatively siloed in-groups, an in-group being a social group an individual belongs to or identifies with, and with whom they share a sense of belonging, loyalty, and identity. In-group members typically share similar beliefs, values, and normative behaviors, and may perceive outsiders or out-groups as different, unfamiliar, or even threatening. In many ways this is a reasonable byproduct of geographical isolation: humans in certain areas clump into groups that have enough overlap in schema to make living together manageable. If you share common language, religion, and class or economic status with your neighbor, it makes spatial proximity and the subsequent low-friction exchange of concepts and ideas much more palatable. Of course we have always had neighborly and even familial disagreements born of misunderstanding but wars are fought over extreme incongruencies in schema, the collective body and framework of knowledge that dictates how we understand the world. If I can’t make you understand me, I’ll make you see the colors of my mind with my fists, with my sword, by destroying what you value. Effective communication is paramount to conflict resolution but it is unavoidable that another mind perceiving the same situation from a drastically different place, a drastically different schema, is never going to fully understand what God is to you, why the resources should be allocated according to your desires, why they should stop what they’re doing and do as you do. Conflict is inevitable.

We seek to reduce these incongruencies through the development of technologies and have done so since history began with the invention of language, organized religion, systems of currency and credit, and, more recently, with computers. The development and study of human-machine interfaces (HMI) is an important and active area of research. We have become intertwined with our computers and life today is much different than even 50 years ago because of it. If you don’t believe me I invite you to mentally walk through your day, step-by-step, and ask whether each object, each process, each action is influenced by a computer in some way. How was the chip in your alarm clock or your electric toothbrush designed and fabricated? How do you check your calendar for the day? How do you communicate with your coworkers and family? How do you travel? Do you need directions? What delivers and plays your entertainment? Who designed the roadway and how do you do your work once you get where you’re going? We are a species that has, for better and worse, grown to depend massively on the utility of computers across nearly all aspects of life. This relationship will continue to define how we live, how we evolve, and how we create the future. Computers and related digital technology have changed our languages and how we communicate. In many ways, this has broken down the barriers between geographies and diverse minds to enable near instant, species-wide global communication and collaboration but there is still a long way to go before two minds can share total understanding. One likely method to accelerate our approach to this future is proposed by the conceptual HMI—more specifically Brain-machine interfaces (BMI)—of Elon Musk’s Neuralink:

“There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing. That’s what language is—your brain has executed a compression algorithm on thought, on concept transfer. And then it’s got to listen as well, and decompress what’s coming at it. And this is very lossy as well. So, then when you’re doing the decompression on those, trying to understand, you’re simultaneously trying to model the other person’s mind state to understand where they’re coming from, to recombine in your head what concepts they have in their head that they’re trying to communicate to you. … If you have two brain interfaces, you could actually do an uncompressed direct conceptual communication with another person.” —Elon Musk, I cribbed from Tim Urban’s “Neuralink and the Brain’s Magical Future”

It may seem strange or obtuse to familiarize two things so apparently contrary as poetic language and the sci-fi aspirations of some Elon Musk backed BMI research and engineering endeavor but it might not be as far of a reach as you think. Technology is a physical representation of our effort to answer questions and issues we face in life and within the patterns of the technology we create are revealed the ways we view the world, how we perceive reality. We are addressing the problems of the world as we see them. But we must not forget that there is another tool at humanity’s disposal, another technology that has always existed alongside the sciences in this effort to understand existence and our place in it: art. Art is a collection of languages and methods across many media seeking to expand the boundaries of human understanding and this technology is endlessly leveraged in communication between cultures, between minds. Isolated brains create and pass around art in order to feel less alone. This painting excites my circuits, maybe it will excite yours? Maybe we can smile, cry, laugh, argue about it together? Yes, I believe art is a technology we created to package up part of an individual or in-groups’ schema alongside meaningful sensory information as an instruction manual for other groups to re-assemble complex and idiosyncratic ideas, potentially integrating those ideas as well as that portion of your schema structure into their own. Artists are explorers at the edges of consciousness, our collective human understanding. They not only discover new ideas but create new pathways of communication across which understanding can be shared. I think that one day humans will build a technology that enables us to seamlessly connect with one another, to transfer whole ideas intact from one mind to another without information loss or compromise. Understanding will no longer rely on arduous reproduction of schemas or the coincidence of shared experience; transfer of knowledge will be instantaneous and understanding will be complete. Until this distant utopia is realized—or if it sounds rather abhorrent and dystopian to you—it is fortunate that we have art. And in our songs, in our films, in our paintings, and in our poetry lies the embedded potential for deeper meaning and deeper understanding. To make a more expressive film, a more innovative song, a more striking painting, a more poignant metaphor is to expand the capability of man to better understand himself and to be better understood by another.