how is it that people can ever understand each other? the massive amount of context we assume when we communicate is staggering.
today i found myself retracing familiar steps – around the house i grew up in and the county fair i’ve been to 25 of the last 27 years. of course with time these things have changed, but even in trying to think of how to describe them or capture them in photographs i realized that it seems impossible. the writer or photographer faces this most difficult of tasks – to convey their context to another, compacting everything present for them into a shadowy representation of the moment.
even if i had brought you with me to the fair today, your experience of it would be almost completely distanced from my own. from the way the musty smell of the livestock barn makes me hungry for the fresh milkshakes i know are on the other side to the way i can look out over the new ampitheatre and reminisce about how i used to play in that same field when we stayed there with our camp trailer. or, in walking around my house to see how the blackberries are ripening, you could never feel the sheer familiarity of the coarse grass on your feet or the memories tied into the very slope of the hill.
of course not. but i would like you to.
we all pack around with us decades of stored content, sensations that our sophisticated pattern-matching brains have analyzed and stored away. i think part of communication is conveying at least tiny parts of that context to one another, at least enough so that conversation can have some kind of a foundation. but how do we ever get there? and what if we longed to express ourselves more thoroughly, would it even be possible?