He Fa on Serres

The blue-purple sweater's V-neck reveals a patch of the blue-and-white checked shirt, whose longer cuffs also extend at the wrists. Serres's outfit repeats the meeting of inside and outside at several edges. It makes me think of a message passing through different people: a sentence leaves one collar and returns through another cuff, often already carrying small changes.

People usually want to clear away those changes and keep only the original meaning. But that meaning must travel through tone, time and experience; it cannot be carried directly like a sealed object. An extra question or a misunderstanding may reveal that the background I assumed was shared does not exist. Calling all of it noise leaves me raising my voice along the same channel.

This face of He Fa's looks like someone who might miss a word, which makes it poorly suited to acting out lossless transmission. I am willing first to repeat what I have heard and let the other person identify the difference. This small act has a cost: conversation slows, and familiar content must be traversed again. But it makes a deviation identifiable, rather than letting it accumulate until we discover at the end that we have been doing two different things.

Noise need not all be romanticized, either. Malicious interruptions, irrelevant information and repeated demands really do exhaust attention; greater openness does not always yield greater clarity. A channel needs thresholds, but they should concern particular effects, rather than exclude every unfamiliar expression. In deciding which part to hear first, we should also leave a way back for what has not yet been received.

I let the long cuffs remain visible. They will touch the table edge before the knitted sleeves do, and may be marked first as well. Communication passes through bodies and rarely leaves no trace. Bringing that trace back to examine together may sometimes help things continue more than insisting once again that I have already made myself perfectly clear.