3:26pm December 18, 2011

Across The Divide part five

[This is Part Five of Across The Divide, a long article I’m breaking up into sections so it’s more manageable.  Please read the parts in order so it will make sense. Here are the links to the other parts:  Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five (you are here), Part Six, Part Seven, Part Eight.]

It takes so little time to be aware of all of the things I am writing while unable to type.  But so many words to say it.  The awareness is like a dance.  All of the experiences I am telling you about are little pieces of abilities, that move back and forth, side to side, lining themselves up until they become the one ability that I am able to have at that particular moment.  Feeling that movement takes little time at all but telling you about it takes so much longer.  Words are strange that way. A simple experience can take lots of words and a complex one can be described in two sentences.

And still, I stare across the divide.  I stare at the words that will dissolve the moment I try to physically act upon the world.  I feel the presence of the mind that won’t be there anymore if I show any sign of comprehension.  I see the people who think I can’t see them.

And I hope these words will get out.  For any word-stream that makes it through my fingers there are hundreds, maybe thousands, that are never in the right position to be heard.  Or that never form themselves into words to begin with.  If I communicate this, it doesn’t mean that I can communicate anything else I intend to communicate. Even if it’s important. Even if it’s life and death. Whether I can communicate is all about chance and practically never about intent.  One friend described my mind as these huge caves full of experiences, where the paths in and out open and shut at random and move all over the place unpredictably. That’s as good a description as any.

Except there are other ways in and out, that bypass the tunnels altogether. But those usually require one of two things. One is a person with a lot in common with me, enough to understand even subtle nuances of how I interact with the world.  Another is anyone with the capacity to sense where I’m coming from because of highly developed ability to pick up on certain (non-abstract) patterns. These abilities tend to flee from traditional intellect, so they are more often present in people whose access to even simple ideas is intermittent at best.  And people who do this can usually tell much more about my real experiences than words could ever say.  Cats have their own forms of idea-based thought, but they also often excel at a very multilayered, deep, sense based communication style.  So it’s no accident that the first person to work out how to help me to move when I’m frozen was grey, fuzzy, and only seven months old at the time.

But with most of the world I have to rely on words. Which simultaneously convey information yet kill awareness of the truth in people who read them, and people who use any kind of ideas(*).  It’s frustrating that no matter how much effort I put into perfecting my ability to match strings of words to experiences, barely anything will get across in the less than 1% of language that actually happens in the first place.

(*) I feel compelled to note that I am just as limited by ideas as anyone else when I am using ideas. The difference is several:  My ideas are of a different type than most people.  I do not consider ideas my home.  I often leave the world of ideas, fully or partially, and this creates an entirely different experience of the world, more weighted towards things like sensory patterns than thoughts, words, or even pictures. (Most “picture thought” is still more idea based and abstract than what I mean.)  But I don’t want to give the impression I am immune to what ideas do, because anyone who has the slightest kind of any sort of idea, is subject to the distortion effect ideas create.  Everyone.  No exceptions.  It’s an inescapable property of what ideas are.

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