Talk, Talk

When I went to check out a few nights ago at Whole Foods, I discovered that it was raining extremely hard, had been raining in torrents while I was roaming around in the rear of the store---it really looked like a cloudburst---and I had left my car windows open. I find it interesting that I automatically felt the need to communicate my awful situation (even if not really a serious one at all) to the only available person, the young man at the check-out counter. This desire was obviously a knee-jerk reaction on my part, and a primate one at that. I didn't want commiseration from him, I just wanted someone to know of my predicament. I didn’t need help, there was nothing to be done, I just wanted to clone the fact of my experience in another’s consciousness, to get it out there in the social world. I wanted to take something private and important to me to its next natural stage, to place it in the world of other humans.

Marshall McLuhan said that we don’t know who discovered water, but it probably wasn’t fish. I don't think we notice in any conscious way how much and how constantly we talk to each other, how noteworthy it is that as soon as we clump together, we talk. In bars, restaurants, coffee shops, we're probably talking. We always find something to talk about; we try to keep it going for its own sake. Some have suggested that talk in humans is like grooming in other primates. Why do we talk to each other so much? The experience I describe above showed me clearly and simply one part of the answer, I think. What we communicate can be important or trivial, but as Marshall McLuhan said most famously, ultimately the medium is the message.