When I went to DC to obtain a visa at the Austrian Embassy I was fortunate enough to be able to stay with my cousin Abby and her husband Kenny. Due to various circumstances I was unable to travel to Hawaii last Christmas for our last reunion. While talking about my move abroad I remembered how difficult describing cities is for me. I love traveling and exploring, and every place has its own character. But I fail to be able to capture a place's essence in words. The same goes for people.
So I have to ask myself: Is there a problem in describing anything in a meaningful way, or am I just poor at doing so? The problems of language aside (translation, names, shifting definitions or meanings, connections to thought processes, and if our thoughts are limited by the language we have mastered, a la George Orwell's 1984) I think that meaningful description generally starts after an account of physical truths: size, shape, age, history.
Putting aside cities for a now, you know a person more and more as you progress from how they look, to what they do as a career, to what they think, to what they believe. When you know someone very well you can recognize habits and thought processes and patterns of behavior. You might be able to finish their sentences, predict how they will react to certain things, how they cope with bad news, or know if they need space or a hug. Your descriptors change from "green eyes" to "passionate about their work" or "analytical problem solver."
I have always been fascinated by tests like Myers-Briggs or the Big Five personality traits. I believe self-knowledge can go a long way towards improving your interactions with people and finding a lifestyle that makes you happy. But although understanding personality traits helps narrow down ways to describe a person, I am of course not the same as every other INTP. Our tendencies do not define us.
This brings us to a topic that I would like to delve into another time, the relationship between who we are and what we do. I view our actions as individual expressions of our character. Suffice it to say that I find that we are more than the sum of our parts, which makes true and full description impossible. I think technical language completely misses the essence of a person.
We must turn to poetry to say something with deeper meaning than surface level descriptors. The difficult thing about poetry, which makes it beautiful, is how subjective it is. The implied notion that poetic description is personalized, saying, "This is how I see you," bypasses the problematic claim that you know the person beyond the context of your relationship. People are different depending on who they are with. How I know Chris is different than how Trey knows him, and I cannot know Chris as Trey knows him because of my own bias. Poetry is rather like a Rorschach inkblot; people see what is a reflection of themselves.
Back in high school and college I made a sort of game where I wrote down descriptions of friends and tried to get them to guess which one was about them. It was a fun way that I could tell my friends how much they meant to me. I believe that you don't really know a person, or anything (like a city) until you are able to describe them in some way. If I were to create a new version of this game, I would like to use poetry rather than factual statements.
Unfortunately, I am not generally predisposed to writing poetry. Metaphors and similes take effort in crafting. I make logical connections rather than fanciful ones. That's why I am worthless at improvisation. I used to be rather inventive and imaginative. Somewhere down the line I lost those qualities, and I wish to get them back. This year I have enjoyed honing my writing skills, and I am happy with my voice in my thoughtful posts. Hopefully soon I will flex my creative muscles and return to the world of poetry.
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