Saying a lot to say nothing really gets a bad rap. Talking in circles
for a while is great even when, ultimately, it's only to prove that
there's not much to say in the first place. Because, really, there's
not all that much to say, anyway. And, the most interesting thing about
all this nothing is the only way to come to terms with it is the futile
act of attempting to symbolize it. If we don't do that. If we fail to
go through the motions of attempting and failing to symbolize the
something that is actually nothing, we might mistake it for something.
We risk pooling meaning behind shaky, fragile signifiers that we never
explore, never peel back the lid to see the emptiness inside. The idea that we always have to convey some datum, some rational and utilitarian fact with our speech seems noble on the surface, but that's the only place it can ever exist. It perpetuates shared delusion. It allows us to put too much faith into the fantasy that we have all this under control. What if the only real way to cast light on this lack is to dance around it? From this standpoint, saying a lot to say nothing is one of the most important things we can do.
Imagine if you and each of your friends wrote random things on index cards all day. You then made copies of them and whenever you saw your friend or passed by your friend's desk, locker, mailbox, etc. you gave him a copy of the index cards you wrote on that day. Each friend also gave you a copy of her cards. After a few exchanges with a few friends, you had a stack of cards to go through, reading each individual card (and they wrote a lot of them). And, since you wanted people to see your cards, and since trading cards became a social task in itself, you often started trading with just about anybody. Most of the messages were dumb and boring. In fact, your friends knew that many other people would see these cards, so most were stripped of any kind of controversy or antagonism. A number of the cards simply said "Here's something I like that I know many other people also like," and then other cards repeated the same thing and had things like, "Yeah!" ...
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