Of goldfish bowls and wooden boxes

I tell a friend frequently that she lives in a goldfish bowl. Mistakenly, she believes that the bowl she inhabits functions as her one way mirror to the world, concealing her behind it. I tell her this often. I tell her that it isn't the shield that she imagines. I tell her that I can see her inside, just as she can see me outside. She laughs, a nervous laugh. Perhaps a bit amused too.

But what of wooden boxes? They reveal nothing of what's inside them. And provide no view from the inside out. What's inside has no real grasp of what's outside. What's inside can only hear faint whispers and muffled sounds from the speaker outside. Using that as data, the creature in the box, creates an interpretative picture of the speaker- what the speaker is saying, what the speaker means, what the speaker means to convey. The speaker has no way of knowing whether the message has been received intact or whether reconstruction has modified it to a point of altering its essence. There's no reliable way of checking the effectiveness of the communication either, because the creature's whispered and muffled responses are left up to the accuracy of the speaker's reconstruction too. At best, inspired guesswork with a touch of intuitive knowing, results in the creature and the speaker nervously believing that they have understood each other, that the essence survived. And here comes the problem. If each of them nervously hold on to the belief that the essence survived and neither have any way of actually ever verifying this l, then whose essence is it that survives? Surely it would be naive to assume that the essence of communication from both parties was the same. Perhaps both essences survive. But they have the wooden box to thank for that. It's the box that allows for the creature and the speaker to each believe that their respective essence survived. If it wasn't for the box, there would light shining through the conversations, illuminating the meanings hidden within them. If it wasn't for the box, there would be crystal clear sound travelling between the creature and the speaker. And both essences wouldn't be able to survive. One would have to concede. Like the unstoppable force and the immovable object, one would have to give up its existence to allow the other its existence. If either of the essences ceased to exist then so would the conversations, for what would there be left but a monotonous reminder of one's victory over the other.

The box is important. It leaves a wide chasm open for data to enter and be picked up by both creature and speaker. They pick it up, like a chit out of a lucky dip game and construe meaning based on the few words scribbled on in it. They construe meaning and throw the chit back in the chasm, for the other to do exactly the same thing. And then they look at each other with a smile, the smiles of two individuals who both equally smugly believe they 'know', that they have captured the essence.

Both are fools. The essence has a life of its own, it belongs to neither creature nor speaker. It will reveal itself only when both fools wipe the smug 'knowing' grin off their faces.