Show and Tell
On Sharing’s Limitations
We’re past the days of slide projectors, but I’ll bet several of you can cobble up the old stereotype of someone eagerly sharing vacation photos in a dim room. Maybe it’s a warm summer afternoon outside. One could hardly be blamed for being lulled to snoring by another one of Uncle Rick’s fantastic tales and remarkably rudimentary photography skills.
Yet, from Rick’s perspective, the soft snoozing goes unnoticed as he relives the experience of a lifetime and attempts to pass some small part of it to the group.
Something’s off here.
One of humanity’s most significant evolutionary advantages is our ability to transmit information across time using oral and written means, but there are severe limitations. First off, we can’t even witness reality’s full splendor. Personally, I’m still waiting for my nascent mutant powers to allow me to see x-rays. Second, whatever complex and vast slice of the universe we can experience must be distilled into language – an imperfect if fantastically useful invention.
Worse still is how language effects the sharer. Whether conscious or not, we spin narratives that conform to the ideas and feelings of the group with which we’re sharing. As we take the ineffable and squeeze it into a paragraph, the experience shrinks in our mind. That new, smaller form replaces the memory and changes our fundamental understanding of reality.
As much as we may try, and I’m obsessed with the practice, the experiences we have are simply non-communicable and our obsession with attempting the impossible actively changes us. It feels like a tragedy. Humans are considered “ultra-social” animals, collaboration is in our genes. You can’t collaborate without sharing, right?
So, we must share, but we can’t share.
This is probably a feature more than a bug. Anyone who’s prone to spurts of analysis paralysis (hand way up in the air over here) can tell you that seeing “all” the possibilities is more of a curse than a gift.
Thus, we compress. We create heuristics and models to help us navigate both reality and culture. This is the true melting pot.
Still, we feel compelled to express the inexpressible and share the unsharable. Brilliant moments of deep meaning feel too big to hold alone.
We develop myths and metaphor, prose and pictures, to fill the gaps.
The Parthenon is a fantastic example of how we distill complexity into a simple, appealing narrative. The famous building has stood for thousands of years – well, it’s in tatters now, nothing compared to the great pyramid of Giza, but the columns still look good.
Much like the pyramids, archeologists have had a lot of conversation around the construction of the Parthenon. The angles are so crisp, the construction so perfect, there must have been great diligence and consideration for the project. A common narrative is that the Greek’s loved all the special math they had discovered and built the Parthenon using the golden ratio.
This is such a convenient, memorable, and believable statement that I’ve carried it since I first heard it – probably in elementary or middle school.
The truth is far more impressive. The columns are not straight. They’re angled toward the interior to give the illusion of straightness from a distance. Every surface was treated with precision beyond the complex, but straight forward golden ratio. The floor and steps are convex, and inner walls are angled to enhance the effect, and the columns were built with a barely perceptible swelling to make them appear straight.
Indeed, upon inspection, archeologists have found that each cut of stone is closer to a puzzle piece than a machined copy. Were it removed from its spot, there would be no other place it would fit.
To me, this is far more impressive than building to a math equation. It’s more like building to the human equation, one informed by heuristics and guesses. It shows a deep understanding of engineering and aesthetics to make something that stands the test of time and looks good doing it.
The Parthenon, then, may be the perfect metaphor for this phenomenon: The builders used deeply complex understanding of the observers’ perspective to construct something that looks a certain way while existing in another. Objective reality versus shared reality on full display.
However, we don’t always create things for the purpose of sharing. I’ve never been good at consistent journaling, but when I experience something significant, I like to make a testament.
I don’t have a projector, but I do have pictures.
The other day I shared my journal entries and pictures from my trip to Alaska almost 10 years ago. I reread the journal entries, just to make sure there weren’t any egregious spelling errors, and decided to look through the photos afterwards. The memory bloomed behind the words and pictures.
The smell of clean air, thick with humidity, filled my nose. The burn of a 3,500-foot elevation climb warmed my quads. The rush of running naked on a secluded beach tingled in my swimsuit zone.
I was grateful that I’d documented the trip. It turned it from a memory into a hallmark.
For me.
Awe is non-transmissible, but that wasn’t my intention. I’d written these journals and organized the pictures almost ten years ago for my memory. I shared the unaltered version, less as a presentation and more like a sliver of my soul.
I think that writing it down was easier to do because I’d had someone in Alaska with me sharing the experience in the moment. I could hold that awe more closely because it wasn’t too large anymore.
If I were to stand before the Parthenon holding the hand of a loved one, would I care whether the columns were straight or not? What if an objective view isn’t the one that matters?
Now that I think about it, what meaning is there in the curvature of a floor?
Maybe sharing isn’t as imperfect as I’d thought. There’s beauty in the futile act of trying to communicate the ineffable, if only to combat the unbearable loneliness of an unshared experience. Perhaps there’s as much brilliance in the indescribable and solitary personal moment as in the negotiated reality shared by two minds. That just may be where meaning emerges.
Sharing is imperfect. It’s necessary. It destroys reality.
But it’s a worthy trade off.
From the Rift,
If you’re interested in my attempts at describing the indescribable, check out It’s Loud, But Not Loud Enough
Thanks for Reading
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