The Shape of Conversation

Discussions are great fun, and not only for the content. We can enjoy the topic being discussed, and the minds we're discussing it with—but sometimes it's even more interesting to step back and look at the "shape" of conversation itself.

Conversations are carried on at different levels. There is the main subject and then various sub-levels underneath. Each of these sub-levels deals with issues that are successively more distant from — or subordinate to — the main subject. I can liken it to a series of threads, some long and some short, some continuous and some broken.

Generally, a single thread is declared (or tacitly agreed) to be the "main thread" of discussion. All other threads are classified relative to this. Some threads run parallel to this main thread.

Since we're already talking about threads, let's use a metaphor from weaving. In the fabric industry they call the threads that run long-wise the warp threads. When a speaker/discusser traverses a parallel thread ("walking a warp"?), this is normally considered merely an alternative way of walking the main thread — after all, you get to approximately the same place as you would if you had stayed on that main thread.

But there are also the threads that run at right angles to the main thread. Fabric makers call these perpendicular threads the woof. From the standpoint of the main discussion warp, woof threads are a detour; discussions that spring from such woof are considered digressions from the main topic.

In this model, a conversation can be a single thread or, more interestingly, a piece of fabric with both warp and woof. One-dimensional conversations are the most limited; they have only warp. The average conversation is two-dimensional; it digresses a bit, weaving in some woof with the warp. And from time-to-time, you find yourself in a very digressive conversation where there is as much woof as there is warp — so that you'd be hard-pressed to identify any single topic as the main one.

But all this is based on a flat piece of fabric. But some fabrics are multi-layered, which give us the possibility of traversing the layers. Conversationally, you could make a "meta-comment" — a comment about the discussion itself — which often engenders a "meta-conversation." This, strictly, is not the same as a digression from the main thrust of the discussion. It's not simply taking a detour to the same goal; it's stepping outside, or above, the original conversation, to look down at it from a new viewpoint. Following the fabric analogy, this requires looking at the third dimension of the cloth: the layer of the fabric.

The really skillful conversationalist can lithely skip from warp to woof to layer, never losing the thread of conversation. To such a person, 3-dimensional discussions are the most delightful. They require more effort, needing as they do an ongoing intellectual peripheral vision. But they offer far greater rewards, not only in what you may discover, but in the pleasure of getting there. A tapestry is so much richer than mere cheesecloth.

Now, if we carried this dimensions thing just one notch farther: What would the fourth dimension map to?

I leave that, dear reader, as an exercise for you.

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