“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
― George Bernard Shaw
We watched Bohemian Rhapsody last night. Bohemian Rhapsody is the well-regarded movie about the band Queen and most specifically, about its lead singer, Freddie Mercury. Freddie Mercury wrote the lyrics to the song “Bohemian Rhapsody” but he never revealed what the song lyrics meant and the band stood by him on that, as much as people like to guess and surmise about what the lyrics mean. Many people thought that the song was about Mercury coming out as a gay man. Others thought that it was about Mercury leaving his homeland of Zanzibar when he was a young man. This is what Freddie Mercury himself said about the song “Bohemian Rhapsody”: “I think people should just listen to it, think about it, and then make up their own minds as to what it says to them.”
Whether we realize it or not, we do what Freddie said, with all forms of music, art, dance, and even most communication. We bring our own mindsets, past experiences and moods to everything and everyone we encounter, and we create a layered story about what we are seeing, hearing and encountering, that has a lot more to do about us, than the object or person we are communing with. When I was in college, one of my roommates broke up with her boyfriend. She played Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me, If You Don’t”, over and over, ad nauseum. The song became about her own love story and playing it over and over again, is what helped to soothe her and to heal her pain. For me, it became an annoying, whiny chant that I couldn’t get out of my head. I remember my own teenage summer vacation relationships, where we would end up writing letters to each other from afar. While I was still feeling the waves of a summer crush, I read those letters like they were great sonnets of overwhelming love, tragically unfulfilled by the cruel fate of distance and youth. When I was older and found some of these letters in a mementos box, my detached view saw nothing more than, “Hey, how are you? Summer was fun.” I had a hard time even picturing the person with whom I had exchanged letters.
Nowadays, with so much of our communication being in the form of texts (full of abbreviations) and email, it seems so much meaning gets misconstrued. I find myself needing to take pause and to separate my emotions before I react to any and all, correspondence coming my way. When I understand that all forms of art and conversation are every bit as much about me and my state of being, as it is about the artist and the conveyor of information, I can see the bigger picture and a fuller, more empathetic, compassionate and passionate understanding takes place.
“We’re all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.”
― Rudyard Kipling
“As soon as we start putting our thoughts into words and sentences everything gets distorted, language is just no damn good—I use it because I have to, but I don’t put any trust in it. We never understand each other.”
― Marcel Duchamp