Dedicated to the Game

ATTENTION

An older gentleman lay on the gurney. His son had brought him in from the ranch suffering from abdominal pain. I pushed on his liver.

“Does that hurt?”, I asked.

“Well,” he replied after a moment’s reflection, “it ain’t sore, but it is a little tender.”

Attention

Tender, not sore. Twelve years and I still don’t know what the hell that means. A former colleague grew up in Wyoming, and since she habitually spoke more than three words in a day (not including ‘Yep’ and Nope’) I asked her a couple of times to explain it to me. She just looked annoyed and said it didn’t matter. I finally understood that she was right. The difference between sore and tender is clinically irrelevant.

attention

‘Tender’ does not have any distinct denotative value, only a connotative one. It still bothers me not to understand its meaning. I’d like to think language can give me a working knowledge of other people’s thoughts and feelings. My expectation of understanding is not realistic. Symbols and their associated concepts just approximate the sets of unique experiences that constitute our shared mental universe. It’s all a big analogy of me to you, words or no. While imprecise, the analogy has one great advantage: it is durable. I may not be able to compare my experience of tenderness to the rancher’s to any good effect, but I can achieve a dialog with the dogs.

Attn.

I can even predict the salamander’s response to me looking at it and it can anticipate my response to it clawing at the glass. All of us know our perceptions of each other are about something, which allows us to form these relationships, however vague and riddled with projection they may be (though the salamander does not beg food from people who are not looking at it or objects moving outside the glass, it does respond to the cat staring at it and she is surely looking in with a different intent than it understands).

Attention

I’m pretty sure I share an extensive mutual understanding with the mammals in the house, even the ones with ear-buds. I’m less confident about what passes between myself and the slimy monsters in the terrarium, but after a day of contemplating human tenderness with all its consequences and deficiencies, an amphibian’s intentional stare is the most reassuring.