Human beings are infallible. What’s worse is that human memory is even more than infallible. The issues with being human lie in our inability to see anything beyond what our own two eyes can see, our own two ears can hear, and our own memories can remember. If by some happy chance, one can manage to do all of those things and actually create a memory, the complications are far from over. Humans are trapped in their own perspective, and can’t see everything. Beyond angles and sound waves and the physics of life, the human mind can choose to see certain things over others. But it doesn’t stop there! Human beings understand by relating to previous experiences, so not only do we suffer from our own perspective bias, we also suffer from the bias of those who taught us and everything else we have seen before hand (which we already know is a pretty shaky resource as it is). Then, just as it seems impossible that there could be any more complications to human understanding – language enters the equation.
Language is impossible. We learn words related to symbols and concepts. We are taught to speak by our elders who were in turn, were taught by their elders. When you extrapolate language like that, it comes down to generations of people sharing their experiences via person to person connections. Words really complicate things. Diction in and of itself is problematic, what selection of words I might think describe what I’ve seen perfectly, might not process in another person the same way. My audience’s imagination might not see it the way I see it. In fact, I would wager that largely it doesn’t, unless they come from the same cultural-symbolic background, but even then, the odds are absurd.
So with all that on the plate, seems like humans would have a very hard time communicating, right? Perhaps not. We can still convey ideas and share thoughts and experiences in various forms. Welcome to the birth of art. Seems easy, right? No matter how the facility of art can help or allow for the flow of ideas, expression, and interpretation, it is important to consider (and not forget!), that art is just that. Subjective. It is about what it means to you, the reader, the observer, the audience. (Granted, considering you cannot escape your own perspective it would have to be about you, wouldn’t it?)
