Communication

This here writing is communication. Maybe nobody will read it. Maybe someone will read it. But it’s still communication even if it just loops back to me.

Communication is such an interesting aspect of life that I can’t help but think about it. Communication in handwriting, verbal communication in pretentious scenarios and supposedly unpretentious scenarios. Communication typed onto a piece of paper, communication in pixels. Music, a facial expression, a punch in the face. Everything is communication because there’s always at least you to observe it. Maybe the term communication requires two people, but I do think it loops back to you even if you just read something back to yourself. It loops back to you if there are others to absorb your communication too in the form of feedback of any form. Everything is communication.

Art. Is it actually subjective? It’s certainly communication but the question of whether an article or even event is art is often a topic of speculation. Art has to be a two way function of communication in order to exist as art. Some people claim football to be art. I personally don’t think football as it happens to be art, but perhaps later it could become art. There is so much beauty to art and I think most of it comes from the feelings instilled in the observer.

I’ve been to galleries where were the picture painted to be viewed just after it was done I wouldn’t consider it to be art at all, no matter how photographic the image the brush strokes conjure. Viewing an image in a dark gallery, however, surrounded by other pieces of prospective art seems to inject an old painted image with something, though. Seeing the people in the gallery look at it hundreds of years later in an atmospheric room with people looking and thinking about this piece, perhaps sometimes just because they think they should, to me that makes the art in that case.

Music is very often art. So many beautiful tunes through the decades that I would call art now because of how they make you feel. I was very, very much into the anti-Vietnam-war movement which sounds proposterous. But I was. I fed myself music from the sixties, watched the Woodstock Festival film countless times because I fell in love with the desire for change and freedom and for people to care about each other. I almost jumped into it head first in my teens. I never stopped loving all of that stuff, but today’s society, oddly, to me it seems, isn’t ready for it. Mainstream music, the awful boy bands and girl bands of today’s world, it’s not art now. It says nothing worth saying. Sure if it makes people dance, but it’s not art. It will be in thirty years time, perhaps.

Internal communication without a pen or external outlet is also interesting. I seem to spend a lot of my life asking myself the question “Is this what normal people would do?” despite knowing the obvious flaws to it. I get nervous. Your body communicates with you, it tells you not to do something you feel you should, it tells you when you’re in pain, it tells you when others are in pain sometimes just with a facial expression. People look down on you and you internalise that, people look up to you and you might feel some pride. Nature causes us to do all kinds of things, dreams communicate with us if we remember the nature of the dreams but still society is losing its grasp on the fundamentals of living. I refuse to believe that I’m a grumpy old man. Well I am in some ways, but I’ve always been like this. I didn’t like shit music when I was a teen and I don’t like it now. My musical taste’s never changed, it’s just grown. Music is a great way of communicating though. The best ways talk to segments of the mind, such as tapping into your sense of rhythm.

People communicate with drums. What do they say? In a way, they say nothing that your conscious mind could appreciate but the best drumming will grab another part of you and drag you into another world.

Social expectations. I’m not good at those. I do try. I even try to stand with other people from time to time but I find it easier to just sit down and feel less uncomfortable than I would were I stood with them. I’m not good at norms. I’ve given up. Having said that it’s so easy for me to circle the “outside world” as being one way and I another. All of the other people in this world must live very internally, though I am a snob and I think they’re usually a little bit simple. Unless simple people are attracted to me. I probably come across as more simple than they do, actually, because I don’t talk an awful lot. God I type, but talking less so.

Okay. I’m tired. I’m going to be communicated at by Netflix because I’m on the last episode of After Life.