Quixotica

Humor me.

I recall a brutal lecture on Confucian theory but I rarely pay much attention to the world around me, and consequently lack confidence in the veracity of my memory. Thankfully web publishing is pretty lenient when it comes to fact-checking, which is sort of discouraging; I routinely stumble on grammatical errors in the opening paragraphs of articles posted on websites I respect, and bristle when the heavy hand of an editor is revealed in spasmodic chunks of narrative.

I remember a fiery professor of theology reduced to passionate fits and starts of impotent rage in his attempts to convey the Confucian concept of true beauty. I take great liberties in paraphrasing his angry admonition that beauty is not debatable, it is not skin-deep and it most certainly is not in the eyes of any fucking beholders. True beauty is a verifiable constant, and your dissent is proof you have not cultivated the necessary harmony with rén to recognize it.

I hated Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; what began as a curiously engaging roadtrip narrative ended as an obtuse deconstruction of Quality, and I pushed myself to finish the weathered paperback out of sheer spite. At the time I felt certain a life in pursuit of Quality needed no justification, that chasing excellence and a paycheck were not mutually exclusive.

That certainty has waned in the past few months, and I marvel at the sacrifices I have made for the sake of expediency. I accepted too many responsibilities for my meager abilities this semester, and my coursework suffered. I work hard to prove myself a brilliant and celeritous writer in the office, and the quality of my writing has dropped precipitously. Near the climax of every feel-good family comedy there comes a moment of anagnorisis when the protagonist realizes what a fool he or she has been to focus on material sucess to the exclusion of truth, love and (you guessed it) beauty. As a child the choice seemed obvious, but confronted with the opportunity to compromise quality for quantity I find the same old ethical handholds so stable and strong in the dark superiority of adolescence proving a trifle less sturdy by the light of maturity.

Indulge me.

Human communication is an exercise in frustration, because we cannot understand each other.

Leon Trotsky meets Sarah Palin waiting impatiently in the express checkout lane of the Berkeley Bowl, and they exchange pleasantries about the relative firmness of the fall persimmon crop. Trotsky surreptitiously reaches out to assess the relative ripeness of Palin's produce, and letting his hand linger he casually turns the conversation towards animals husbandry.

"Did I mention I adopted a Shetland pony?" enquires Trotsky.

Immediately an image of Palin's ideal pony begins to coalesce in her mind, and we can already conjecture a reasonable divergence between the two parties' conception that (for the purposes of this example) heralds the beginning of a dissonance cascade. Palin has called to mind the Shetland ponies depicted in the illustrated reader of her childhood, an image of the common animal perfect in structure and form (the Platonic Ideal pony, if you will.)

"Elton and I adopted her from some kindly circusfolk, but the poor thing is a genetic dwarf! The AMHA claims she's too small to compete with standard miniature horses, but we're suing them to create a new 'Pygmy Pony' category."

Now we're well and truly down the rabbithole of cognition, and what Trotsky sees in his mind's eye (the true animal, a misshapen dwarf horse with flesh the color of stale coffee) is vastly different from the hodgepodge of images Palin has cobbled together (the ideal Rockwell-esque pony of her childhood squashed and stretched into an approximation of what a dwarf pony might look like, based purely on a pictorial she flipped past once in a magazine exposé detailing the exploitation of dwarf actors in films like Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz)in an imaginative attempt to communicate effectively.

"Oh, that's wonderful!" gushes Palin, and her characteristically severe tone softens as she warms to the adorably misshapen genetic misfit she's imagined. "The poor thing, it's so sweet of you to take care of handicapped livestock like that!"

Trotsky flinches, and his hand returns to the safety of his shopping cart as the conversation quickly returns to more mundane topics. Palin is confused and a little hurt by his sudden coldness, unaware that her conception of the dwarf as a cute castoff worthy of pity is directly at odds with Trotsky's image of the shrunken animal as a disenfranchised lower class, a sort of genetic proletariat trampled beneath the full-sized hooves of the miniature pony bourgeoisie. The pygmy pony is an allegory for Trotsky's fledgling manhood, and Palin has inadvertently offended her fair-weather friend because of an error endemic to the process of human communication.

Obviously, there's no clear solution to this problem short of divine intercession. Cognition of even very simple objects rapidly diverges between two or more people; one says "yellow lamppost" to a group of five strangers, and there immediately springs to said minds five different interpretations of "yellow lamppost" based on a lifetime of unique experiences.

The problem seems trivial on the surface (two millennia of recorded civilization seemingly belie any serious concern that mankind is doomed to a miserable existence of misunderstanding) but consider this; how much needless pain might be avoided if we could only clearly express and understand what each of us meant by the word "God?"