musingsonwomenshealth.com

Reflections on 40 years as a doctor in Women's Health

I have that within which passes show.


I suppose I have known all along that there were rules. Each time I engage in conversation with others there are hidden conventions at play: modes of conduct, standards for engagement, topics that are avoided, words that are inappropriate under certain circumstances, and yet welcomed in others. I have to decide which rules to follow, but often on a knife’s edge: protocols change, standards mutate. I have to be quick, ever alert for cues; it is a game – a conversation game whose rules evolve as it progresses. Sometimes, it’s either accommodate or capitulate.

A while ago I happened upon article about the dynamics of conversation[i] -a topic which I had never examined seriously before. I was particularly interested in something it mentioned: it was a paper published in 1979 in the Journal of Philosophical Logic by David Lewis; he called it ‘Scorekeeping in a language game’. Accommodation would seem to be the paramount rule: ‘Lewis talks about the master and slave in a conversation – the master deciding what is permissible, the slave accommodating it.’

But who is actually in charge is a constantly moving target. Sometimes, if you want to be able to gain something in a conversation, you have to risk being impolite and be able to play with the rules; to know that politeness and norms can be sacrificed for intimacy and connection, without becoming wholly insensitive. 

Humour is an example. ‘We take a risk when we joke with each other, since we don’t explain the background necessary for the joke to work. The point is to see that we already have that shared common ground… laughter marks a kind of success. It tells us something about how the two of us can fit together.’ Otherwise we laugh alone…

We discover intimacy in a similar manner: by discarding norms. In fact, ‘we have to step outside what is expected to know that we are enough like one another to sense each other.’ With a joke, there is a risk that you won’t laugh without me having to explain it; when you share an intimacy there is a risk that it will not be reciprocated. Conversations, it would seem, are much more complicated than just sharing words.

Of course, it’s something most of us learn fairly early in our social lives through trial and error. Years ago, I remember sharing a secret with a girl on a date when I was in my first year of university. We had decided to have some coffee and dessert in a little nearby restaurant after coming out of a movie. I don’t remember the movie now, but I do remember Cathy. She was the most beautiful girl I had ever met -or more accurately, I suppose, the most beautiful girl that had ever agreed to go out with me.

Cathy loved colours, and that night she was wearing a soft dark blue dress, large dangling silver earrings, and a bright red and green silk scarf wrapped loosely around her neck. I was mesmerized by the colours and told her so.

She blushed and told me that she often had trouble knowing whether colours ‘agreed’ with each other before she wore them together.

When I replied that I had a similar problem, I remember her rolling her eyes as she glanced at my brown turtle neck sweater and faded jeans. “My mother has the same problem,” she said rather defensively, although I wasn’t sure whether she had just criticized my choice of clothes. Then she seemed to realize her inadvertent blunder and glanced around the room at the increasing number of people coming in for a late evening meal. “This place is certainly popular on a Saturday night isn’t it?” she said as a group of four scraped their chairs as they occupied the table next to us like the vanguard of an advancing army.

“I think I recognize them from the movie theatre; they were the ones sitting several rows behind us who kept giggling at the wrong time…”

She smiled and shrugged. “So were you, G…”

I returned the shrug, uncertain whether it was a criticism or just friendly banter; I figured I’d better change the subject anyway. “I’m hungry,” I said, studying the menu. “What are you going to have?”

She glanced at her menu for a moment and sighed. “I think I’ll just have some dessert,” she decided, maneuvering the edge of her silk scarf off the table and back around her neck. As she did so, its green flashed brightly neon under the ceiling lights.

I couldn’t help noticing the scarf again. “I just love the scarf, Cathy. The green and red are complementary colours,” I added, as if she hadn’t known that in her choice.

She blushed again. “You really notice colours, don’t you G?”

I shrugged. “I always have. Nine is green; it’s my favourite number…”

She stared at me with a surprised look on her face, for a moment, I remember. “What do you mean? Why is nine green?”

I shrugged again. “Lots of numbers are coloured…” I said, matter-of-factly. “Three is lime-green, seven is yellow, eight is brown, ten is…”

“What are you talking about?”

I cocked my head at her, I think. I figured everybody saw coloured numbers. “What colours are yours?” I asked her, wondering if some people saw them in different colours than me.

She took a deep breath, I remember, and I assumed I’d done something wrong; I wasn’t very good on dates -in fact on three fingers I could count the total number of women I’d ever dated.

“I think you have synaesthesia, G,” she said with a smile. “Three or four percent of the population have some degree of it.” She was a psychology major and it often showed up in her words; I think it was why I had been attracted to her. “I have a mild form of aphantasia -like my mother,” she added, glancing at my face and then realized it was blank. “It’s an inability to visualize objects that are not present,” she explained. “It’s about as common as synaesthesia, I think…” But she didn’t sound very sure about it.

I sat up straighter in my chair. “I knew we had something in common, Cathy…”

“They’re different things, G,” she said, apparently unwilling to admit the commonality.

“Yah, but we’re both…” I struggled for a word that described us. “…we’re both abnormal, eh?”

Language certainly is a scorekeeping game, and I couldn’t help remembering that date with Cathy when I read the article; I never got to go out with her again. I guess she was sensitive about her condition; perhaps I’d misread our conversational norms…

I wonder if she stayed in psychology.

[i]https://psyche.co/ideas/to-have-deeper-conversations-try-being-more-of-an-asshole

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