Spinning Golden Yarn

I have heard my gaze is like a pin to an observed moth. I pay hefty attention to people when I can, trying to ferret out the gold yarn in their midst. I care about it because I love to weave. I like the finest materials. I was told the other day it was apparent the moment that I got bored in a group conversation, because I immediately stopped engaging when people started talking about video games. It’s not that I don’t like talking about video games; I have played a lot of them, and I think many aspects of them are fascinating. However, the aspects of conversation about them that I like are somewhat absent from the things that people usually talk about when they talk about them, and in order to get the group to talk about the parts of them I like would have required some exertion of will. It was after stair running that night, and I was too tired to move the group toward what I wanted to talk about, so I retired to observation, a cozy nest of mine. I take such care in eliciting wonders from others. I dig great gems out of myself as well. It requires tact and a delicate touch to condense the subconscious into little strands of pure self. There just often isn’t time, or sanctity, for prolonged amounts of such an activity in groups. Maybe I am in the wrong groups, but I think it is a feature of them as a concept that is unavoidable. Groups are audiences, groups are mobs. There isn’t much to be done about it. Everything is in response.

Vibe Distortion

I want to talk about vibe distortion, which is unavoidable in groups due to the amount of everything flying around all the time. Vibe distortion is when the process of collapsing the subconscious into some tangible thing gets hijacked by an external force. It could be the wind, capitalism, or another human. I want to talk about avoiding it. That is how I snatch the golden yarn from the woolen psyche and bright eyes across from me. Well, really they hand me an end, and I hand them mine, and we dance around until we’ve made something beautiful. This is a technique of inquiry. The idea is to drive conversations while constraining their scope as little as possible. How? By asking perfectly open-ended questions.

Inquiry

I started learning to ask questions after I learned to shut up, which I learned to do quite a long time after I learned to talk. Eventually in my mute period I decided I was tired of watching people squirm with perceived awkward silence. I thought maybe I ought to put an end to it. I would come up with things that I wanted to talk about and then ask others about them. If I had an opinion, I might say it and then ask theirs, but then everyone’s opinion was in response to mine, so I stopped leading with my opinion. Without claiming it as my own, I would ask if they agreed with it. If they didn’t, that was often the end of the conversation instead of the beginning. I started offering a second option, which just trapped people in a dichotomy of my creation. I tried adding, “Or some other thing,” but that isn’t always enough. The gravity of preformed opinions is too strong for many.

I started catching on that I just needed to be more open ended, so I would ask what they thought about the aspect that I had an opinion about. The problem with this is that often the things I have opinions about are 1. Specific and 2. Somewhat thought provoking or controversial. So people start scrambling to think of what the right opinion to have about this thing is, because they want to be correct or emit the right image, or they would try and guess my opinion and then say the same thing. It is so possible to watch the cogs turn, and it’s not my favorite thing to do. It is another exhibit in the museum of vibe distortion, just at a different floor of abstraction.

What is the alternative? I tried asking about the whole tamal for a while, but I was surprised to find out that a lot of people react negatively to extremely open ended questions. I still don’t quite understand why this is. I guess it’s because many individuals expect the next conversational direction to be somewhat apparent, and being asked what they think about, like, nature or something vast is just too overwhelming. Too much work to summon all those thoughts. Perhaps that is what it is, a discomfort with taking five seconds to figure out what you actually think or feel about something. Or maybe it is an inability or unwillingness to synthesize something you’re proud of in that time. Anyways, asking about the whole thing doesn’t always work (though I still like to do so with the right people). We have scoped out too far for the masses. Let’s zoom in again:

Spinning Golden Yarn

The technique that I have found to work well for making good conversations, which I would like to call spinning golden yarn, is to take the specific part of the larger thing which interests me and then abstract along some aspect of it. What does that even mean? I am going to incorporate some examples now in order to provide levity and, possibly, clarification.

Let’s say I have an opinion that it is lovely that raspberry croissants can have jam inside. I just think it’s neat. The progression of questions, loosely following the evolution of my inquiry process detailed above, might look like this:

1. I like that raspberry croissants have jam inside. Do you?
2. Do you like that raspberry croissants have jam inside?
3. Do you think that it is lovely that raspberry croissants have jam inside, or do you think it is an affront?
4. Do you think it is good that raspberry croissants have jam inside, or do you think it is bad, or do you think it is more nuanced?
5. What do you think about the fact that raspberry croissants have jam inside?
6. What is your relationship with croissants?
7. What are your opinions on pastry fillings?

So the cool thing about the last one is that it is quite open ended, yet it still makes sense for me to follow up by sharing my opinion that I think it is quite lovely that raspberry croissants can have jam inside (even if I often won’t end up doing so, as the other person will say something captivating in response). Assuming that this is not a random question and that we are perhaps in a bakery or at least talking about raspberry croissants, it carries the general context of what I am thinking about: I am thinking about the thing that goes inside them. But it does not betray what I am actually thinking about: I could be loving it, or hating it, or even contemplating whether it is moral to put nutella inside of a piroshky. And this is the beauty: the inquiree is encouraged to give up on playing the game of trying to figure out what I want from them. I have put them inside a realm of things I like to talk about (for, truly, I love filled pastries), and freed them to remark on whatever they want. And remark they will, often with a wondrous statement I could have never hoped to stumble upon with a more acute inquiry.

Choosing the Right Abstractions

This does kind of beg the question, “How do you choose which aspect to abstract along?” which seems like an important choice. The most obvious answer is that you should choose one that is interesting to you. The more pragmatic answer is that you should choose one that is mid-sized. Too large (“What do you think about things that contain things?”) and you run into the open-endedness problem from earlier. Too small (“What is your favorite type of jam?”) and you risk enfranchising them to play the guessing-your-preference game, or not leaving space for the golden yarn to appear (Though perhaps this a bad example, as jam often has childhood memories associated with it and these are golden wool). Now, I remember one of my friends telling me abstraction is one of my greatest strengths, and that not everyone does it as readily as I. In that case, perhaps the aspect that is best to abstract upon is the one that is present in your mind when it’s time to ask the question. I think that a heuristic that balances intrigue, measure, and availability seems best, but I would encourage any avid reader to explore their own. Some might say this is how you could cultivate your own personal brand of interrogative angles. Someone once said, “Harper sure knows a banger of an interrogative angle when she sees one.”

What do I do this for?

Is it to keep myself entertained? Kind of, but if I wanted to do that I would just only do bits, or write a song by myself. This is about connection, which I think comes from cocreation, or something. What does this manner of elicitation do? It allows us to share in the facilitation of becoming. You perceive me perceiving you sharing your perception of yourself, and through this we paint each other into the world we share. Why is it important not to distort the vibes? For the same reason we keep the locks separate when we braid. The final product is just so much prettier when there is separation inside the unity. I don’t want you to shepherd yourself into the world in the way you think will make me happy, I don’t want to muddle the colors, I don’t want to be melted together. I want to be beside you in our truest forms, and I want to have the conversations that allow us to figure out what those are in harmony. Hopefully this piece is a conduit for more of those to take place.

Happy weaving :+)

~hhh