JASON AND I were talking last night about communication- well, arguing about it, ironically. His premise was that in order to communicate one must use only language; you had play the verbal game, so to speak, in order to get other humans to understand you. My counter was that humans communicate in a variety of ways: art, music, smoke signals, and so on. He dismissed all these and tried again: why must humans use only the avenues we traditionally think of as communication to communicate? Isn't there another hidden option out there that we could reach if only we could figure out what it was?

It's a sticky proposition he's making: humans can communicate in another way, but as this way is hidden to them, they... don't know what it is. I suspected that the problem Jason was really trying to talk about was slightly different than the somewhat enigmatic point he was arguing. He claimed that he found all forms of (known) human communication difficult, and that he really needed to find another way (and, by golly, would find it if it killed him!). I disagreed. I think Jason in fact does communicate, through his art, but because that art is architecture, (a) it is on a scale so enormous that it's difficult for people to bring it down to human level; (b) it requires a great deal of specific study to learn its language- study in a field people don't generally learn as much about as they do, say, art; and most importantly (c) can be stymied by the massive number of middlemen who can get in the way of the original vision of the structure.

The litany of architectural woes is all too familiar from my childhood: Contractors who don't follow the plan. Foremen who take it upon themselves to improve upon the original design. Clients. Inspectors. Unless one is Frank Gehry or I. M. Pei, the chances of getting your design from drawing board to physical structure wholly intact is microscopically small.

Jason's point (I think) was that human communication formed a box that constrains all interaction. There needed to be another way to interact, a way that simply doesn't exist, at least in a way our limited human brains can understand. Why must 'black' mean 'black' if what the person really means is 'white'? Shouldn't 'black' mean 'white', if that's what the person speaking really meant?

I suspected (and was foolish enough to say) that I thought the real problem was that he was currently feeling stymied in his efforts to communicate. Jason primarily speaks through his art and is regularly frustrated by his own attempts to beat the English language into submission. He often does say 'black' when he means 'white', lulled into laxity, I think, by the poetic cadence of language and his own lack of familiarity with the spoken/written word. I know he gets terribly frustrated when he can't explain in words what he thinks. When he's building, though, his ideas flow. Sometimes they're better, sometimes worse (hey, not every blog of mine is a gem), but the artistic language has always been one he understands instinctively.

Lately- like, since he got out of college- the world has conspired to totally prevent Jason from getting his design ideas out into the world. Contractors have been "improving" on his designs ad lib. Clients have nixed important elements of his architectural plans on the advice of friends, construction workers, and psychic visions. Other architects have changed his plans at the last minute. Instead of an integrated pod of architecture, the end result becomes a cheap version of his original ideal- death to his perfect communication with the world. In the tangled realms of trying to explain this verbally to himself and to me, he comes up against his own inability to articulate his thoughts using English.

I think that this has been building within him for some time. In college, he was able- and encouraged- to let his imagination run wild in designing buildings. Architecture students create hundreds of drawings and plans for buildings that will never exist (and from what I've seen, it's lucky all around that they don't). For Jason, college was a momentous five years. He was around intelligent, articulate people who were interested in making art out of buildings, just like him. Life had, I think, finally become what he wanted it to be: a place where imagination was rewarded and his particular (and peculiar) brand of communication was not only listened to, but given fuel.

When he left, Jason had to deal with a much more profound separation than most of us feel when elevated out of the safe, warm womb of a university campus. It had represented the first time in his life that he had been around people as smart and interested in the world as he is himself. His first task after graduation then was to deal with this new but all-too-familiar isolation from smart people. This manifested itself in a number of ways: holding onto a relationship with someone still at the university when emotional attachment was nonexistent; maintaining college friendships to the exclusion of creating new ones in his new town; living alone in an apartment distant from work and new aquaintances.

With admirable rapidity (I couldn't have done it as well or quickly myself) he weaned himself away from these attachments and began to create an intelligent and secure social sphere for himself in this new location. He moved into the heart of the city, secured a solid relationship with an (amazing!!) in-town girlfriend, and involved himself in a number of professional and social organizations. The most pressing task of socially evolving away from college life had been achieved.

However, now that the immediate problem of socially re-integrating his life into this new environment had been solved, an infinitely more complex one arose. When his mind was occupied with the more basic issue of getting to know this new place, Jason didn't have to think as much about the much larger challenge that lay in wait. Once you have a social circle, how can you communicate with it?

In university, it was easy: everyone spoke his language. They were all architects, and they all were aware of how good he was in his chosen field. Effortless to impress, effortless to communicate! Now, though, in the larger world that is comprised of doctors, contracters and psychic hotline workers, that careless empressment no longer works. In general, people don't appreciate that he is good at what he does, and being able to verbally convince them of this has suddenly become crucial. No longer does he show his work to people who speak his language. Instead, clients have an unpleasant tendency to say things like, "Yes, but where's the damn bathroom?" and "Can't we do that cheaper? It's just a light fixture!". My voice joins the throng ("I want you to make me a house where the closet opens into the laundry room and the bedroom!") and pretty soon he's lying on the bed, gibbering about how humans need another dimension in order to communicate effectively.

It's enough to make you feel sorry for the guy.

I don't know what the key is to integrating the way he speaks into the way people listen. He would, I know, like me to understand more about architecture so that my praise of his design has merit, so that I can see his genius in every dimension. Remarks along the lines of "That plan looks awesome!" are just vague and tepid enough to be wholly unsatisfying to him, as well they should be. But what he doesn't quite get yet is that even though I don't speak Architecture, I'm well on my way to becoming fluent in Jason.

And that plan looks awesome!