“The fun of talk is to explore, but much of it and all that is irresponsible should not be written. Once written you have to stand by it. You may have said it to see whether you believed it or not.” Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction No. 21, The Paris Review, 1954.1
“Meanwhile, I’d put on my overcoat, and was waiting to say good night. He walked me to the door, where I put on my shoes. “Well, sayonara,” he mockingly bade me. “Tell them at the desk to get you a taxi.” Then, as I walked down the corridor, he called, “And listen! Don’t pay too much attention to what I say. I don’t always feel the same way.” Marlon Brando, New Yorker, 1957.2
It is not far-fetched to suggest that we must voice our thoughts to discover whether we truly believe them—or whether we understand them as we imagined we did. Our thoughts reveal their true nature only when spoken, showing us whether we truly hold them or merely imagined we did.
This premise reveals two sides: first, the trust and accountability that we need to extend to someone in what they say; second, the nature of the relation between language and ideas. I see this relation as a recursive type of interaction, where the idea that we mean to communicate through language is not a finished product before we utter it. It is rather a shapeless intuition. We can tell that it ‘feels right’ when we see it manifest, yet in its present state it is too nebulous for us to formulate it (ie. organise its components, give the idea structured coherence, imagery, an intelligible form).
The recursiveness in this relation between language and ideas lies in the provisional intelligible form that articulation through words bestows upon thought. When we speak, we have articulated an idea in words, allowing it to depart from our minds, and resonate out of our mouths as physical sound that another person will witness. In essence, words grant ideas both reality and a kind of substance.
It is only then—when we have tested a provisional shape, circumscribed by our eloquence, command of relevant terminology, shared cultural references,—that we can observe it and judge where we stand before it.
And I mean not merely judging how closely our words match the original idea. Rather, I mean something more subtle: that only when confronted by an idea taking any ‘real’ form (or ‘witnessable’, ‘shareable’, ‘crystallised’, ‘durable’, you name it), can we judge whether that initial, shapeless impulse is actually aligned with, or at least pointing towards, what we really believe —that is, a shapeless impulse which we considered something worth expressing as ‘our view’ or ‘the product of our mind’.
Often, it is only post-utterance that we discover that this initial idea does not represent us, that we do not believe in what we have just said. We realise we have grasped at something in this nebula of unformed ideas that was born out of something within ourselves that is, strangely enough, not who we are. Such deceptive regions of our thinking might include beliefs that we never truly reflected upon, and yet we decided to incorporate based upon an initial vague idea, or passing thoughts with implications we have yet to fully weigh.
This phenomenon can be called post-utterance clarity3: we do not achieve clarity until we have uttered the idea (or better said, after we have articulated it into words). Such clarity may expose whether we are truly capable of expressing an idea, whether we understand it, or —as Hemingway observed— whether we believe it.
It is a curious thing. And it is also troubling. The thoughts that are most authentic to our particular, unique experience of the world are the ones that are most resistant to verbal capture. Words (and above all concepts) are conventions, and they happen to be the limited ingredients that we must combine to organise and give utterable form to an idea. Thus, as we venture into the act of saying what we mean, we strive not to fall into the trap of allowing our idea to dilute into pre-existing slogans (political catchphrases, ideological formulae, stock metaphors, simplified concepts, and other fully articulated opinions that circulate in the public mind).
This means that when attempting to communicate our own idea, there is greater likelihood of missing the mark in our initial attempt, as we labour to find the right combination from the limited ingredients at our disposal. Faced with this inherent pitfall, the question is: what can be done when some thoughts —perhaps our finest ones?— must necessarily undergo the process of post-utterance clarity in order to be either developed further or discarded.
Many readers might identify with Marlon Brando’s claim (see quote above): that one does not always feel the same way about things. We might reframe this as acknowledging that a person’s can mind can shift frequently, capable of harbouring contradictory or incompatible thoughts simultaneously. We humans are complex being, rational and emotional, swayed by the tides of the wise, yet cryptic forces of our subconscious. We must express ourselves to discover and to explore ideas, even when momentarily seized by less agreeable kinds of moods that might prompt us to voice thoughts we may later disown. Nonetheless, there is a subtle distinction between saying things you might regret driven by a momentary emotion, and expressing the kind of thought that needs to be first expressed wrongly in order for it to eventually emerge. The latter can be still the case even if the ‘right’ emotion is there. And since the thought will almost unfailingly need to be ‘tested’, it is in a sense more a matter of intellect than emotion.
This regret reflects the other pole of the issue of post-utterance clarity: how do we foster cultural expectations that allow people to reach their most authentic ideas without fearing the repercussions of crossing that threshold – of expressing themselves themselves imperfectly (even wrongly) the first time?
Surely we have all experienced this, not least in matters of love: seized by infatuation, we encounter that cruel peculiarity of the human mind where we must first stumble upon our words before understanding what we truly meant to say, sometimes when it is too late. We do not gain the necessary clarity to say the reasonable thing until after we have uttered our feelings or thoughts in ways that betray our authentic thought.
As Hemingway says, one answer lies in writing. Through writing, we can test our ideas and refine them before sharing them with others, making it more fitting to be held accountable for our written words. Yet writing lacks spontaneity and the immediate feedback from other people’s minds of back-and-forth conversation; it stands too rigid and remote compared to real-time conversation, and its demand for commitment to the expressed idea can prove too binding. The thought becomes fixed, losing the fluidity and malleability of the spoken word.
I believe we must more widely grasp that expression does not equal intention. Expression is the act of pressing something from within the self outward. Intention is being ‘tensed’ towards a specific aim; like a bow tensed towards its target, a speaker’s utterances are shaped by a specific desired state of things: “this element, region, part of the world/reality should be like this”. Intention is thus not exploratory, as opposed to how Hemingway depicts spoken conversation.
In contrast, expression can be exploratory —the act of making something from within the self manifest in the world (even if only as words and sound) seeks no other aim beyond leaving one’s interiority, unwitnessed by none but the self. In other words, the arrow yearns to fly free, piercing the air above, bound to no target.
The responsibility rests both in the general culture and in the very speaker. The general culture needs to develop consensus around the idea that in a great majority of cases people are trying to express something by wrestling with all the intricacies of language, especially its under-attended difficulty in allowing authentic thought to gain form -a facility that is reserved to a certain level of linguistic skill-. Such consensus implies that one might be expected to comment on their misstep, revealed to them post-utterance, and admit this without a loss of dignity (on the contrary, such gesture should crown the person with dignity). The second consensus that needs to be nurtured is that embodied speech -speaking in person, with our vocal apparatus and body in the presence of others- has a singular quality that sets it apart from other instances of communication: it is the arena where raw thoughts are hammered into satisfactory forms, and ideas emerge.
On the speaker’s side, they need to recognise that words have weight, and that it’s best to clumsily articulate one’s thoughts with the words one finds to be the most precise in an imperfect and provisory manner. The poorer choice is to assume that echoing pre-formulated slogans or deploying worn labels will suffice to ‘communicate’ meaning. One might be tempted to believe that it would be easier to perform the act of speaking by employing these. Yet the inevitable result is that this won’t be true expression. Instead, it will result in the mere channeling of an idea drifting in the current of general discourse, and that will likely fail to reflect one’s true thinking, values, identity, and so on.
Authentic thought is valuable enough that it is worth acknowledging the universal human condition of post-utterance clarity. Many ideas need to pass through this initial failure to find an outer form most adequate to them. It is like secluded areas in a map that are only accessible through a series of treacherous terrains. And it is a pity that many of them never see the light of day, stifled by inhibitions and discouragements. They are casualties product of a lack of consensus on what communicative contexts an utterance will be treated as exploratory expression or as articulated intention.
- https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/the-art-of-fiction-no-21-ernest-hemingway ↩︎
- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1957/11/09/marlon-brando-profile-truman-capote ↩︎
- Yes, the pun is intended. The feeling in both cases is similar in many ways, one in the realm of mind, the other in the visceral domain. They share, above all, that profound sense of unburdening oneself of something. ↩︎
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