I think Ludwig Wittgenstein was there well before me “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”.
I come from a long line of conversationalists. Folks, mostly men in my ancestral line, who like (and liked) to talk. A line of enthusiastic, loud-talkers. I reflect back and think, well, it wasn't all nonsense, but, you know, we'd often get in loud, super-consequential, tooth & nail, verbal arguments about things, "whereof one cannot speak." We thought and fought about things we thought we knew about in a dark fog of "know-nothing-ness."
Was Joe Louis a greater heavy-weight boxer than Muhammad Ali?
Was Picasso the greatest painter? Or Matisse? Or Van Gogh? Or Warhol?
And, by the way, "Why is boxing even a sport?" And "What the Fuck is Art anyway?"
Is Michael Jordan the greatest basketball player of all-time? Well, yes, no doubt, this one is a no-brainer.
Was Stanley Kubrick the greatest filmmaker of all-time? Or was it David Lean, John Huston, Orson Welles, Martin Scorcese, Francis Ford Coppola, Frank Capra, Billy Wilder?
How would you measure any of these things? How would you know what's what? We all would wield our strongly-held opinions like they were deadly, blunt instruments.
You know, we all had deep, in the bone, opinions. Sometimes they'd shift, but often we'd just club each other with our opinions and smile.
And then there were the grand concepts that none of us really knew WTF we were talking about:
The Future
Reincarnation
Heaven, Hell, Purgatory
Original Sin
Damnation
Redemption
Economics
Revolution
Philosophy
God, Death, Life
Vietnam War
Iraq War
Gulf War
9/11
The Generation Gap
Meaning and Purpose
Nature vs. Nurture
Life AFTER Death
Love & Salvation
Topics of the Day
Blind Human Beings stumbling in a dark closet.
We were clueless even about simple questions like: Why are here? What should we do with our time? What to think? Where to go? What's it all about Alfie?"
So yes, well, we filled the air with our voices, thinking maybe it was important, or certainly entertaining, but, nowadays I'm thinking silence, quiet contemplation, sustained moments of staring into the yawning void, would have been beneficial. You can eliminate lots of topics of conversation right off the bat. Clear the deck of anything you can't pinpoint and verify. Clear the air. Keep it simple. Speak of things you know thereof. You could fit them in a thimble, a shot-glass or a matchbox.
For instance: "What did you do today?" "What did you do yesterday?" "What did you have for lunch yesterday?" "What's for lunch today?" Beyond that, well, it is sort of dropping into a pointless cloud of unknowing. What's gonna happen today? Maybe best to just live and find out.
