Methods of Interpretation

I’ve never given much though to the innumerable ways that a given word can be interpreted. Now lets expand that by a couple hundred thousand words, and we’ve got a slew of issues ready to burst. This lovely can of worms has arisen throughout the years, as people considerably more intelligent than me have deemed an inconceivable amount of ways to understand things. What I’m so shipwrecked on is why no one admits that there’s not only one concrete way of interpreting something, but rather a volatile smattering of all these high-brow philosophies they parade around like birthday pony rides. These intellectuals on high, harpooning off of logic and reason into the nether regions of near incoherency (all in an effort to make something that is relatively understandable into something that now needs to be decoded). Through the process of gleaning information via interpretation we’ve somehow arrived at a kaleidoscope of options that ask you to suspend one idea in favor of another. To simultaneously look and not look, and yet derive the one truth that has to be there. It’s all rubbish.


People bring their own experience into understanding–it’s that plain and simple. I vouch that it is impossible to suppress your own experience while trying to interpret something. The main reason being, is that it is the only viable body of work that we have to compare things to. Someone that’s had a charmed life and had everything handed to them on a silver platter will not be able to empathize with someone that has soldiered through poverty on the mere dregs of their willpower. It’s not possible because our imagination can not duplicate reality, and more importantly you can’t mimic the real anguish of experience. This is not to say that these two individuals won’t be able to see some issues the exact same way, but I’m talking about “thinking about thinking”. The act where in every second of being alive, your bringing your codex of scarred wisdom/experience into any mundane situation.

Information and experience are processed differently, handled in ways we can’t begin to comprehend because in truth we can only ever barely understand our own thought process, let alone that of anyone else. All I’m making a case for is letting things be, and not attempting to suffocate anyone in someone else’s idea of thinking. Let them know it, teach it to them, but don’t abdicate that they must understand or even grasp the rationale that goes into it. I loathe methods of interpretation, because if anyone else were ever to read this I wouldn’t force them to grasp the agonizing mind set that went into writing this.