The experience of having the conversation
A quick reprieve before heading into the week.
We underestimate the value of physical experiences. And conversation is one such experience where we create space to think—alone and together.
A well thought out conversation delivers on many levels, including the emotional sphere. That hard-to-reach spot between fuzzy feeling and moved to tears is the core of how we operate in the real world.
It’s thus not surprising that seasoned pros would seek situations where they get to experience feeling their way through what they think about—this is how good conversation works.
As a kind of conversation with the imagination and its characters, good writing works in similar ways.
On Value in Culture is a reader-supported guide to the role of narrative, language, and art in how we organize, perceive, and communicate about reality. Support my work with a paid subscription.
Terry Gross, host of ‘Fresh Air,’ has mastered the art of opening up (gated link.) Her guests relish the opportunity to experience what it’s like to have that kind of interview.
Matthew Weiner, the creator of ‘Mad Men,’ has been among the most frequent guests on ‘Fresh Air.’ He imagined being interviewed by Gross years before it first happened, and once it did, ‘‘you’re like: Oh, this is my fantasy of a conversation,’’ Weiner told me. ‘‘I’m not even talking about people hearing it. I’m talking about actually having the conversation.’’
‘‘Having the conversation’’ — that’s what’s compelling about the wish. It’s a wish not for recognition but for an experience. It’s a wish for Gross to locate your genius, even if that genius has not yet been expressed. It’s a wish to be seen as in a wish to be understood.
In conversation we can bridge the distance we have within ourselves, and with others. Conversation is an important emotional tool to negotiate meaning, to create strategic direction and impact, and much more. Yet we are unlearning how to stay in conversation long enough to benefit from it.
The contained intimacy the medium is the reason why radio is not yet obsolete. Many years ago, I read something Italian singer Mina wrote about listening to the radio for La Stampa newspaper, which expresses the feeling well (my translation):
“In a world that has alas celebrated the extinction of the verb ‘to listen’ what is left is visual enslavement. In such a world, radio is a last oasis, a natural environment where among bushes and stones one can still find everything—literature and gossip, from Cole Porter to Puccini, from politics to some extinct musical form.
On the radio, it is still possible to find words offered to the listener with that tact that TV abhors.”
I was reminded of the value of radio as a medium this weekend when journalist Tara Henley said, “When done well, radio takes these moments of shared humanity and transmits them to the wider world. It is a remedy for isolation. A healing balm for the grief of being human.”
Carlo Emilio Gadda was an engineer from Milan who worked in Italy, Belgium and Argentina. He became a full time writer around 1940 in Florence and then in the 1950s in Rome, where he worked for RAI (Italian National TV). In 1953, when RAI asked him to write up a compendium of ‘Policies for Radio Programming,’ Gadda wrote:
‘‘Radio listeners are not a ‘public,’ so to speak. In truth, they are ‘single people’... every listener is alone... sitting in their own armchair, after having captured the essence... the noble act of listening, he/she is bound to the secret susceptibility of being able to get irritated by the inopportune tone of a catechizing radio apparatus.
It is therefore better that the voice, and the text entrusted to it, avoid all those mannerisms that provoke the idea of a condescending tone, an imparted lesson, a sermon, a message coming from on high. It is equal to equal, free citizen to free citizen, thinking brain to thinking brain.’’
Equal to equal, with the freedom to think along the person thinking out loud—thinking brain to thinking brain. This more nuanced form of experience is likely one of the reasons behind the renaissance of podcasts, which are still in the early days.
I’m working on an article on media theorist Marshall McLuhan for supporters (next week.) But I wanted to share a bit relevant to radio here. On the tail end of a conversation with the classically trained professor in 1977, McLuhan explains how cultures that revolve around acoustics play it by ear, they feel their way through.
His juxtaposition is with people who have a point of view, or play by the eye and have a logical, connected, bottom-line and product-driven way of thinking. Amount of product vs. way of life, in his language, the latter interested in quality more than quantity.
“Acoustic space is not lineal or connected, it’s a sphere (we hear from all directions at once), it’s center is everywhere and it’s margin is nowhere. That’s a simultaneous sounds which creates that kind of space.”
Marshall McLuhan
We have that kind of acoustic experience with conversation, where we feel our way forward. However, it takes some practice to develop a sense of timing to create the kinds of conversations that change us.
Over the years, Gross has done some 13,000 interviews, and the sheer range of people she has spoken to, coupled with her intelligence and empathy, has given her the status of national interviewer. Think of it as a symbolic role, like the poet laureate — someone whose job it is to ask the questions, with a degree of art and honor.
[...]
In a culture in which we are all talking about ourselves more than ever, Gross is not only listening intently; she’s asking just the right questions.
New York Times, 2015
Because of the acoustics involved as a primary sense, good conversation is an act of deep listening. When Terry Gross sat down with Jon Stewart in front of a live audience at New York City’s 92nd Street Y to talk about ‘The Daily Show’ and his role in the media they billed an upcoming rally, “Woodstock, but with the nudity and drugs replaced by respectful disagreement.” The space of the sound is akin to that of rock music.
I’ve enjoyed a great deal my research into old videos and radio clips, the conversation is calm and leaves enough space for the listener. We rarely forget the experience we have with a good conversation—it changes us, and we change the way we look at things as a result.
There’s something to be said for a more acoustically-oriented culture.