![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueIt has occurred to me that being whatever it is I am (I know that it is a category but can't easily assign a category name to it; it is something like artist - intellectual - highbrow - but is not exactly any of these things; someone trained to look; someone who observes and synthesizes; this category kind of blends social sciences, raw intelligence, a strong visual and/or poetic sense, abstract thinking, cultural critique, and creative urge. I think you know what I'm getting at - this is clearly a thing and not a thing unique to me. I suspect it is what people mean in a bad way when they sneeringly say "academic" but I don't find it maps particularly one-to-one with academia and it has an artistic component. Anyway, whatever it is I am) is something like having synaesthesia - a particular synaesthesia that causes you to draw symbolism from things that are not obviously semiotic to other people, but which you can't unsee and which symbolism is simply true and present. For you.
To be clear:
1. I don't mean this in a schizophrenic sense of believing you are receiving messages from God or aliens or have uncovered a conspiracy. You know that the meaning is being imposed by your perception, even though you are not actively doing it. It is like madness, but is also not at all like madness.
2. I don't mean it in a braggy way either; when I notice it is when it has a signal-to-noise quality. I could also say it is like the general human tendency to see faces everywhere. Except with a lot more emotional content.
3. It somewhat reminds me of Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. - the same sort of compulsion to analyse and free associate. Except, again, with a lot more emotional content.
4. The central character in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition has an extreme version of this thing I'm talking about. I mean, there's obviously a continuum.
I'm not going anywhere with that; I just thought it was interesting to note that it was like synaesthesia. It's some weird stuff.
Incidentally, this is why I really don't like to open gifts in front of the people who gave them to me (and relatedly why I probably do better shopping if I'm on my own); I need a certain amount of time to work through my complex feelings about the conversation I perceive us as having just had, which was in fact one-sided by me, and then I need to make another pass where I rewrite this with what the gift-giver almost certainly actually meant (or more essentially did not mean), which often involves reconstructing the circumstance in which the gift was purchased (i.e. you got me this shirt because it was the most to my taste of the shirts available in the store, rather than because you thought it was the right shirt for me in a more global sense, and the fact that grunge references are in right now does not mean you cared to reference grunge, let alone that I was supposed to make a host of inferences based on the way the pattern interacted with the silhouette.) I'm not trying to be a jerk. I'm trying really hard to not be a jerk.
To be clear:
1. I don't mean this in a schizophrenic sense of believing you are receiving messages from God or aliens or have uncovered a conspiracy. You know that the meaning is being imposed by your perception, even though you are not actively doing it. It is like madness, but is also not at all like madness.
2. I don't mean it in a braggy way either; when I notice it is when it has a signal-to-noise quality. I could also say it is like the general human tendency to see faces everywhere. Except with a lot more emotional content.
3. It somewhat reminds me of Jeremy Hillary Boob, Ph.D. - the same sort of compulsion to analyse and free associate. Except, again, with a lot more emotional content.
4. The central character in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition has an extreme version of this thing I'm talking about. I mean, there's obviously a continuum.
I'm not going anywhere with that; I just thought it was interesting to note that it was like synaesthesia. It's some weird stuff.
Incidentally, this is why I really don't like to open gifts in front of the people who gave them to me (and relatedly why I probably do better shopping if I'm on my own); I need a certain amount of time to work through my complex feelings about the conversation I perceive us as having just had, which was in fact one-sided by me, and then I need to make another pass where I rewrite this with what the gift-giver almost certainly actually meant (or more essentially did not mean), which often involves reconstructing the circumstance in which the gift was purchased (i.e. you got me this shirt because it was the most to my taste of the shirts available in the store, rather than because you thought it was the right shirt for me in a more global sense, and the fact that grunge references are in right now does not mean you cared to reference grunge, let alone that I was supposed to make a host of inferences based on the way the pattern interacted with the silhouette.) I'm not trying to be a jerk. I'm trying really hard to not be a jerk.
