conversational

life is a process, yeah?

on the topic of conversation-making itself, one can generalize and say that there are three ways of responding to anything that's said to you:

1. answering in a way that invites the conversation to continue - you know what this means

2. answering in a way that kills the conversation - the antithesis of "yes, and"; not "no, but", but just "no"

3. answering in a way that relocates the conversation - clearly sends the vital process of dialogic inquiry onward, freeing it from you, an aikido that receives the awareness of the other and energizes it by productive translocation; you do it right and it's generative, not evasive

(as an autistic person with zero social stamina who's wired for information-as-物理 I do a lot of the third thing - I am a regenerative repeater of attention, I think, a router, not a sink)

by treating the conversation as its own being, ... conversation-making becomes more like inquiry-tending? like the observer asking "what's the point?", unable to see that they are the first thing that is ever happening for themselves, making their function as "the point" unavoidable. a conversation is its own point, though (like the observer) it may not see it - what does it need next? you, or not-you?

(and, to illustrate: treating the conversation as alive enables really interesting questions-by-parallel about mercy-killing and abortion (and replication! think: The Prestige (2006), Mickey 17 (2025), and what this larger parenthetical is doing), though I can't imagine most conversation-beings are wired to enjoy unending onto-political cliffhangers)