Said the night wind to the little lamb

Occasionally, I wonder: whatever happened to Sherlynn? I won’t tell the whole story here (it wouldn’t reflect well on me, but that’s not why I won’t tell it). But Sherlynn was the only person I know of that ever really understood the way I talk.

A couple of blog entries ago, in describing my reaction to hearing Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car for the first time, I said that I was surprised to be so affected, because “it wasn’t about my life”. Sherlynn would have understood immediately that although I meant just that, I also meant at the same time that of course it was about my life. That was, after all, the whole point of the long preamble about my life as it arrived at that point, right? Even though I didn’t plan it that way – I simply found it necessary to provide the stage directions, as I tried my darndest to get to the scene. All along, I was actually trying to write the sentences about how I felt at that moment, but I found that describing my state of mind required establishing certain perspectives... thus demonstrating, res ipsa loquitur, in exactly what ways it was about my life.

Let me say it another way. The key to the way I talk is that the whole point of my saying that “it wasn’t about my life” was precisely to also express the opposite, in counterpoint. And at the same time, I had in mind the orthogonal meaning: that my life was the life of the people around me, not in the sense that their lives made up the world I lived in, but in the sense that I reflexively inhabit the minds of the people I observe and interact with.

We are all the same, and we are all unique. We all think this way, but some more than others. I pretty much always think and express myself in this kind of multiple, overlapping, self-referential, self-contradictory way, without intending or trying to. It is rare for me, when I've had my coffee anyway, to say something (or hear something) without being aware of the truth of its opposite, and of the perspectives that shape that view, and the alternate views implied by those perspectives. This is probably a useful way of thinking for a mathematician, or a writer, which are the callings I am most drawn to. It is less helpful for a Big-4 Partner wannabe, which explains a few things.

Sherlynn understood (and shared) this with no explanation – in fact, like me, with a smiling disinclination to ever put it into words. I can’t remember exactly how we discovered this. She used to sit and read at the long tables in the big dining room at Ridge Project, and since everyone in the house wandered through there and hung out there a few times a day, we eventually were reading at the same table. We were both shy in a certain way – she was just plain shy :-) and I was reserved – unwilling to express my true feelings. There is always a little thrill in getting a shy person to open up, is there not? Somehow, in the course of some initial banter – related, I think, to Narcissus and Goldmund – we mutually realized that we both preferred to use words in the same reflective, oblique fashion, almost like probes into a system governed by Uncertainty Principles, like shields protecting our auras of over-sensitivity.

We began to play a game, without ever planning to. Someone else would come to our table – it became, for awhile, our table – and strike up a conversation. And as the three of us talked, Sherlynn and I were hearing and responding privately – but in the open – to the invisibly interweaved threads in each other’s responses, of which any other participant was unaware. There was no cleverness or double entendre going on; it was simply that we were tuned very sensitively, almost painfully so, to the multiple, subtle meanings of each others’ thoughts. Sometimes this would go on for hours. We would do this when we were alone too (how could we not?), but in that case it was a more dangerous, more tender enterprise. It was a very intimate kind of relationship; one that was not meant for a long season. One of the many things that go by the wayside as life goes on. I do not regret the passing of this very special connection, but I do wonder what might have become of the individuals involved.