ENIGMA 4

Every communication has to bear the risk of misunderstanding. But more fundamentally even, we have to face the fact, that there can be no guarantee, not even an expectation that the given message will be received as "the same" as intended by the sender. Even if that sameness could be achieved, there is no way to measure and prove it. All we can reach is an apparently sufficient level for all practical purposes at the given moment.

An "objective" measurement of the quality of communication is logically impossible, because the process of understanding crosses the object-subject borderline back and forth. Trivial "objective" tests can measure a trivial level of communication, which does not tell anything about the individual subjective side. In that sense all objective measures of communication remain circular.

If we want to reach deeper communication, we have to take higher risks. Poetry is one of the genres working with the risk factor. Of course a risk able to bring gains must not be an insane level of risk. But what is "insane"? There is no preestablished criterium for drawing the line: that is exactly part of the risk to be taken: not to know what is too high and what not. The heroes in our cultural history are those who took a seemingly outrageous risk which turned out to bring success.

But risk alone is not sufficient. The necessary complement of it has to be an equally high level of trust. What does trust mean in communication: Not only (or not even necessarily) a "moral" trust in the honesty of the communicator. It means trusting the language, the chosen means of communication. The trust has to come from both sides. The poetic bet runs like this: the poet completely trusts his/her perception and intuition and entrusts it to language, following in the most subjectively precise way what language has to offer in response to the given situation, - and then entrusting this formulation to the benevolent hearer or reader, who in turn has to trust the message and its author, entering the process of interpretation with an advance of confidence, assuming that it is ultimately worthwhile to search for a maximum of meaning, in spite of the given discrepancies and gaps in semantic plausibility, facing the fundamental abyss between self and other, i.e. the knowledge that understanding has no foundations that could ever be secured. When this gamble comes to a - more or less - happy end, it does so through the experience of evidence and recognition. The hermeneutic game stands under the motto "credo quia absurdum" on both sides, writer and reader.

What is the gain of this higher risk? While trivial and secure language can only bring a gain in external "objective" information in preestablished categories, i.e. nothing "thoroughly" new, the risky language can bring discoveries of how much in our individual inner landscapes can in fact be shared: it can induce new differentiations in experience and even shift and change given habitual patterns of categorization, i.e. it can affect both language and the way in which we experience the world.

(Of course what I say about poetry goes f or other (non-linguistic) art-forms as well. )