What I mean to say

A few days ago, I posted a piece where I explained how I fretted and worried over words and phrases. How important meaning and nuance are, how I struggled with expressing what I intended. It's a difficult thing to do, express a thought you have, communicate deeper meanings.

Each thing that I post, each article, is intended to tell you about me, about how I see the world, and to invite you to consider how you view it. Just yesterday, I posted something that had a certain meaning to me. But I did not realize that it could be interpreted in so many ways. It drew a number of comments that ran the gamut, I thought.

The comments are important to me. They tell me that the piece had been read, that it provoked thought, perhaps stirred some emotions. They guide me toward future postings, provide me with ideas about which to write. So do comments on other blogs. Even when I do not comment on someone else's article, I read the comments and sometimes get ideas from them. I suspect all bloggers do.

The last comment I made on "Wouldn't it be nice..." was:

"I am often amused, amazed, perplexed, and/or impressed by how various people perceive what I write."

I could have said "...by the reactions to what I write." but that wouldn't have truly expressed what I felt. There were a few different perceptions of the meaning of the piece. The reactions stemmed from those perceptions. So, in that way, the reactions were all perfectly correct.

The perceptions, however, were personal. They were yours, not mine. I remember classes I took at various times where the instructor would be explaining what the author of some poem or book or essay meant. In each case, found myself wondering "How the bleep does he know what the author meant?" Even if I agreed with the meaning presented, I still questioned it.

Only a few teachers seemed to want to know what we, the students, felt was being expressed. The best of those did not question the validity of those feelings.

I seem to recall, a long time ago, some reporter asked Bob Dylan what his lyrics meant. His answer was something to the effect of "Just what they say." I could be wrong about that, it could have been John Lennon or someone else, or I could have hallucinated the entire conversation (it was the 60s, after all) but the concept stuck in my head. We who read may not really understand what we who write are saying. But the important thing is that this does not matter.

To use my painter/artist analogy, a painting has a specific meaning to the artist. He may try to explain that meaning. He may not. What is important to the viewer is what meaning the viewer perceives. What meaning the artist has is important primarily to the artist. If, by some chance, the two meanings converge then communication has occurred.

What I have come to understand over the years is that if the meanings do not converge, maybe a more important thing has happened. In the case of blogs, comments serve to reveal that important thing.

You, dear readers, teach me something about myself. You provide a different perspective. You also validate my own.