the rivers that have lapped gently into your words

thoughts on channel bias

In my twenties, I was in the tight embrace of a tiny religious cult with huge maps of reality. A lot of my life was trying to track and grip all the good reasons to believe, and survive the terror that I didn’t, fully.

My best friend had long bright gold hair and a much cleaner, quieter attachment. In the long lectures we sat through, she often held her head, neck tension spiking pain upward, and said it was hard to think. I imagine this was her doubt, expressed somatically while mine nightmare-marched my mind.

In our friendship, she spent hours that would total days, listening to me. I believed best when I preached, when I animated all the evidence I could see, and made looping connections between this and that esoteric. I would surf waves of charged-up articulation, impassioned from enjoyment, from my not insignificant conviction, and from the relief of feeling, in her presence, convinced.  

And much of the time, a part of me was screaming at her, Say something!

I was continually unsatisfied by her gentle, supportive listening. I wanted her to match me. I wanted her to tangle.

I was made more alone than I was, and made her more alone, because of something that could be called Channel Bias. I discounted – even effaced – the deep contribution of her listening to my generation, my channeling. I missed her contribution to my thoughts themselves. She was “only” listening. I was doing all the work. 

This was never true. 

There is no flow from the channel without a ground to flow into. The positive pole needs a negative pole for electricity to flow; a source needs a sink; the wind comes in through the windows only when you open the door opposite. Just remember the silence that strikes you when eyes go dead, the frustration of sending a ball sailing in offer and hearing it land, airless, in the disinterested court of another. Different words emerge to different listeners. A speaker can access vocabularies and channels, depending on what they perceive in their listener. Non listening or defensive listening can dispermit thoughts and expressions from even occurring in the speaker. There are roads we will never travel because the vehicle of its sojourn was the gift of another’s attention. Yet how easy it is to miss the transport when you have it, to imagine you alone are the locomotion. 

Channel bias is thinking the river did not lap gently into the words you wrote while sitting beside it. Channel bias is imagining the city did not send its horns through your paragraphs via the open window.  

Channel bias is shrining the messenger, or even shooting him.

Channel bias is when a hundred and eighty people regularly use the printer but its last user is blamed when it breaks.  

Channel bias is when a store is shunned because a product from its shelves was defective.  

Channel bias is when the CEO gets all the credit, and all the accountability. 

Channel bias is holding only politicians responsible. Obama was unsure about gay marriage. His situatedness moved him. The ground moves the politician. She is not a lone actor. 

Channel bias is thinking you are alone in the world. To think: you are doing things. 

But there is no you. Things are happening. You are not an actor on a stage. 

Channel bias is monocausality: mistaking a thing’s most proximal producer as its author.  

I was angry in university when teachers made the postmodern claim that I could never completely understand what a writer meant. But it’s true. The smoke that uniquely clouds just for me around each word co-creates the meaning I extract. The Jane who lives in my Thornfield Hall lives in no one else’s. I myself am a character who exists in no two minds the same. The sensitivity of the eater produces a very different meal of the same ingredients, to a person who becomes a different cook just for them – a figure created on and by the ground of reception. 

Influence is so much more than the grade-school vision of pressure toward action. We constantly exert subtle pressures, open all sorts of spaces, within the beings with whom we are in relationship. This is particularly by how we ground or fail to ground the channels within them. And in our grounding, we also are their channel. 

The ocean brims its beds. Waterfalls jet off their basalt. The rivers fill with the flour of their floors. We are not separate. Much as we might wish – or wail – to sometimes proclaim ourselves, we are, none of us, speaking solo.