Verbal Jiu Jitsu of a Dialogue
The banter must go on…
You know, when you’re having such a good time conversing with someone and you don’t want it stop because why would you? There are these moments of awkward silences between dialogues of the great play of life, when you’re both trying to keep up the conversation, fishing for topics to talk about, and you don’t want to leave anything out that’ll make for a good banter at that moment. There’s this energy to impress the one opposite with the prowess of your anecdotes and to match theirs with an even better one along the same themes. You’re trying to sort of one up each other and at the same time, trying to participate in improving the other one’s retelling of the experience. You’re actively engaged in recreating the memory and be a part of it, and probably as a protagonist. You be a good audience to the other person, marveling at their oration and when it’s your turn, you be the incarnation of Shakespeare himself.
When it has been some time, you’ve been collecting all these experiences in your four-dimensional pocket of memories. And when it’s time, you’re going to spend it like there’s no tomorrow. When you wake up the next the day, you’re going to be collecting them all the same for the next time because now you’re looking out for it. There is this aspect that some significant time has been passed between subsequent conversations to make it meaningful, almost depriving yourself of the experience so that it’s effect is maximized when it is happens. You’re going on a fast so that you could delight yourself with that buffet. There has to be sides of humor in that meal, it’s got to be ‘fun’ny for it to be ‘fun’.
There’s this very complex dance to an engaging conversation where we try to weave our experience within theirs. We’re so good at weaving their stories with ours and the alternating ping pong narrative that it creates. Maybe the most efficient form of communicating some information is a dialogue (ironically this makes this essay inefficient, but I’m sure a reader is able to form a dialogue out of it by filling their voice in between these line, it would not be ‘reading between the lines’ but ‘participating between the lines’).
We don’t realize that we have mastered this verbal jiu-jitsu and it’s evident because of how it easily it flows through us; so much so that we don’t even acknowledge that we are involved in such a complicated phenomena.
Is this divine? I know some people who are not their best self without a constant flux of such dialogues, and maybe we all are not our best selves without such experiences, we are just not self aware enough to realize it. Or maybe we’re just lazy. Well, fuck that! We did not ask for this room or this music. But because we are here, let us dance.
