is layered.
The choice of words form the medium, conveying the content and substance of the conversation. They are the material, the tangible; yet they are merely a symptom, a manifestation of the attitude and intent that lies underneath. One can be sophisticated, laconical, bombastic or simplistic. The choice of words merely reflect such characteristics, and they are means for further evaluation of the conversation.
Attitude. Different people have different attitudes. Callousness is my gesture of intimacy – it tests the waters, impinges on your comfort, and lets you know how much you have learnt to tolerate me and my trespasses, and hence the depth of our relationship. It brings along a discomfiting frankness, a reminder of my probing presence that you should never be at ease with the decisions you have made. I never readily show my support; I play the devil’s advocate, because everyone ought to be surer of their choices. I see no way out but to question it.
The intent in conversation. Oftentimes the intent lies unconcealed and naked, but seldomly explicitly defined. It involves a peripheral awareness of the conversation : the relationship between the party, the situation, the content of exchange, the words, the attitude. I believe that there is the least ambiguity in intent: it is the most derivative of deductions, and it draws from such a myriad factors involved – any disparity between the hypothetical intent and the identified factors easily rules it out.
The army obliges me to those whom I do not choose to concern myself with, and vice versa. The reasoning which bore our bond is tenuous, yet I try my best to make some meaning out of it. I grow frustrated, yet I remind myself that people come and go, nothing is at stake. I attempt to treat them with some sophistication, I fail, and lose some respectability in the eyes of the observer projected by my own imagination. People who do not ask, people who are convinced of their respectability, people who are intoxicated by their self-righteousness. I too, am a victim of my self-righteousness, but on a different level – I rarely lash out, because I am wary, because I second-guess my deductions, because I am aware that I could be wrong. Yet I have such a deep trust in this habit of repeated self-questioning (and generation of doubt) that I wonder if it would have been correct to have tried to be less conscious of the correctness and validity of my position, and harshly struck out anyway.
And I wonder if this is a lesson of life, when all I reach is an impasse- I am overwhelmed by its opacity and their impregnable skulls, and strangely, I can’t shrug it off.
