How difficult is to start from where one left off and to carry the stream of thought which made what it was in the first instance? Is it really possible to construct and create something out of the ruins of memory which one just left behind when the context was different and the intensity and the desire to understand was also different? To live in the same context is not possible and to create similar conditions would be a desire of an artifice, a selfhood which I would not like to fake. But something has to be traced back and something has to be followed for if I have to be true to the title then it has to be a continuity if not in the original sense which it was meant but in the sense I construct it now. I would not be so relativistic to say that its not possible at all to go back and find those meanings to where they belong since those have already been etched and there are traces which are left on bits of paper, an act of writing which one can still go back to.
So this is where I start, having denied to a great extent any possibility of psychoanalysis in talking why do I go back to writing. Here I would neither do any sociological, political or philosophical analysis but just try to understand the stream of thought which the idea of talking would then imply. The idea of talking is then linked somewhere to generation of ideas which arise out of the intersubjective experience which manifests itself during a conversation. It is this intersubjective experience which makes one go back and reflect on those ideas and then create something out of it, here then one reflects on ones memory and all those symbols and history and traditions and culture which one carries within. But most of the time either this reflection only turns out as a blabber which would be more like coming from memory or just as an attempt to show to the other what one possesses and yes I have done that too, at times when one relates to a context which is not particularly relevant in those circumstances one is only trying to do that. Just exposit what one knows, at times one does it quite consciously at times unconscious since this is the way one would have pictured oneself. It might also be becuase one who expects a moment to come to talk would like to say all the things at once and in this saying one just moves away from the context. But is it also not in the nature of a conversation to sail away from where it all started, to grab all the tails and the tangential moments which keep on coming to be in a realm and a domain of its own and then one of those self styled moderators would have to pitch in and say 'lets focus on the topic in discussion'.
Not denying the fact that at times we generate hubris in a discussion and at times its all ugly chatter and blabber which might have an importance of its own, at times just to amuse oneself and the other or just have some fun or it at times throws issues which one would not have expected would actually arise and this is what interests me, certain ideas which stick which play out which seem to challenge age old theories and where it seems the old adage of wine and philosophy stick together. But then the question which haunts me and which at times people remind me of is this 'when you have amazing ideas when you talk why dont you write them down and let people take notice of it'? In this they are actually assuming that the written word has a primacy over the spoken one but was it really so always not so as the ancient greeks and the indians would so. In the ancient greek tradition according to my knowledge writing was not considered a good thing, reasons are beyond the discussion I want to have here. But then does the idea of talking a lot also masks a reality of not being able to write? I would say not really. but then does this precludes also a sense of not owing a responsibility of reflecting deeply on one's own thoughts, well this is also out of the way since we have seen that even in talking one does so but it might be quite possible that some aspects of thought might be left out while other vistas open up. so both genres have their own perfections and imperfections. But then the question would still remain whether writing is a more responsible act than talking, specially when one talks about oneself and not when one is talking about public speech which can still be quoted and people can still be reminded of what they said and what they promised but then by the act of denial which we quite hear more often than not from the politicians and what often we do ourselves in lives when the contexts sit heavy on us or the memory does not recall what we would have said or just the act of forgetting something or wanting to forget something, in those instances we do see that writing would be more of an act for what one can be held accountable for but talking is something which one can deny and is thus temporal while writing in this sense can be eternal. So an act of not writing would also mean to exist in the dimension of time rather than escape into eternity and still protect onself from being judged across different time dimensions.
But is it really wrong to be judged across time dimensions and even in speech we are akin to be judged across time but the only difference we see is that then we are playing with memory recieved and memory preserved and memory nurtured by ourselves since we have seen is what we really have are interpreted memories but then writings also dont exist only in the realm of facts but are also interpreted and then they are also interpreted in the different contexts which presents themselves, so in this instance both the genres fall in to the same issue and then do we still try to put one over the other? I would not be sure at this point.
One of the points which I would also like to explore that talking a lot would also somewhere hide silence, somewhere that part which misses out when one talks. it can be the silence of the other, whose silences we are not able to decipher or the silences of our selves or those silences which we are not allowing to be developed in ourselves. It has been a matter of great speculation for philosophers and mystics alike of what silence does actually represent and what does it hold for us? It is said that in silence lies the mystery to self understanding and self realisation, while the conversation one opens up different vistas of that intersubjective self, it is only in the silence that one really knows what that experience is and how that self is being formed all the time. It is only in those pauses where silence live that one becomes conscious of our selves but then it is also a matter of speculation whether silence lives in pauses or conversations do and what would be the most authentic means of existence. One can be tempted to say in this world where we are always surrounded by information which does not get processed at our end, one needs silence to interpret those observations and to keep oneself away from being manufactured. Its like a mass which one is surrounded by which manipulates, creates and recreates all the time to deny what it created in the first place and in this deluge of the mass one does not know what one really is and it was through discussions with many friends of mine where hours and hours I used to keep saying and they used to listen peacefully as if I had everything to say and I had all the problems in the world or its interpretations which had to be shared but the virtue of silence with which comes the virtue of listening was missing. In this way I was also doing injustice to those who listened since I never understood what they were in this chatter though they all the time quite understood what I meant. So for me it was not really an intersubjective shared life but a life which I was only presenting to them in my own ways and in this process I was making it more incomprehensible for themselves as well for me for it took them more away from me. For one does not only want to listen but also listened to, for one does not want only other experiences but share theirs too and in this I think came the question where pain makes one speak more, scream more or to reflect more. I guess its that person who screams who understands pain for the first time for those who see it at close quarters dont scream but as an artist go on creating something out of it. Here I am not talking about pains which arise out of material deprivations for those require screams to be heard, to manifest themselves for those causing them dont understand them. For those this pain is not what creates the self for how can it? or even if it creates it there are two layers at the level of the self it is understood in the silence and at the level of the social it needs to manifest itself through scream for this pain is not absurd, this pain is material, is artificial and arises out of the structures in which we live.
I am talking about the other pain which needs to be understood through silence and silence is what it tries to teach me through those conversations for it tells you that these are the ones who understand but they still need to be listened to and not only spoken to and maybe talking a lot hides this fact............never know where it takes.......
