Ideas - The 2024 CBC Massey Lectures | # 3: Personal conversations

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

Difficult conversations are almost always about something under the surface, and hidden. In his third Massey Lecture, Ian Williams illustrates what we’re listening for isn’t always obvious. He explains how personal conversations aren't about finding answers — it's for communion.  

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. If conversation is an art, many of us are playing roles written by other people. Our language arrives prepackaged.

Even with those closest to us, we reach for the safety of familiar scripts. Help me understand, we say. Or, what I hear you saying is... Self-help books teach us to fine-tune our interactions so we can get the most out of difficult conversations at work and at home. But in trying to perfect the way we speak to each other, we're often left grasping for what we really want. Communion. Connection. Consolation.

In the third of the 2024 CBC Massey lectures, Ian Williams explores personal conversations. From the eerie silence of an unstaffed hotel in Japan, to the endless chatter of a Samuel Beckett character buried waist deep in a mound of earth. He searches for new ways of speaking with others. Ian Williams is the author of seven books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. His first novel, Reproduction, won the Giller Prize in 2019, and he teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto. His Massey lectures are called What I Mean to Say, Remaking Conversation in Our Time. They were recorded on a cross-Canada tour, with stops in Sydney, Iqaluit, Saskatoon, Victoria, and Toronto. In a talk about conversations, there are examples of conversations. In each city, two other readers joined Ian on stage.

So throughout this lecture, you'll also hear CBC Saskatoon's Leisha Grabinski and Pratush Dayal. They play many different roles in this lecture, characters both real and imagined. One of the roles Leisha plays is Edna, a recurring character in the lectures, who pops up to offer editorial comments and disagreements. Today on Ideas, from the Broadway Theatre in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, here's Lecture 3, Ian Williams with Personal Conversations.

Hi, good night, everyone. This is my very first time in Saskatoon. It's a province I've been meaning to get to for about five years now, every summer, and it's finally happened, so I'm really happy to be here. It's only been a couple of days, but I feel like you're probably the least stressed province in Canada, right? We did a little field trip today, and all of our blood pressures, like collectively, from like Toronto pressures, just kind of came down very nicely. It's wonderful.

So this is Lecture 3, the middle chapter. You are the middle province, the middle child of Canada. So I really hope you enjoy this. This lecture is called Personal Conversations. The poet Ellen Bass writes, what if you knew you'd be the last to touch someone? I'm staying at an unstaffed hotel in Japan. After three flights and 17 hours in the air, hotel in Japan. After three flights and 17 hours in the air, I'm greeted by the cool black face of a tablet in the lobby. I input my information. It thinks for a moment. Then it says, welcome. There will be no tightly made beds on this trip. No one to call a taxi. No one to serve breakfast.

No one to call a taxi, no one to serve breakfast. The hallways are barely lit. The walls are black, the carpet is red. On the way to my room, I don't encounter a single person. I only hear the breathing of the ventilation system. I imagine all the guests behind the black doors, holding their breath and watching me through their peepholes as I walk by. My room is so dark that I have to use the flashlight on my phone to find the light switch. I sleep, I wake up, I turn on the TV. There are only a few channels and most of them feature

brightly colored game shows with upbeat hosts. I do not understand what they're saying or why they're so happy all the time, but it's wonderful at first, the deep solitude of the unstaffed hotel. I am locked out of language and therefore out of social intercourse. I will not be disturbed. In fact, this hotel does not even have a do not disturb door hanger. Difficult conversations. These days there's an endless supply of books on conversation, usually difficult ones, replete with advice, rules, steps, examples, and flow charts. As with self-help books generally, they promise to elevate you to a higher plane of being, in this case, as a suave and poised communicator. The people to thank or

blame for the most recent wave of books about difficult conversations are from the Harvard Negotiation Project. Difficult conversations. Difficult conversations. How to discuss what matters most. Difficult conversations. The art and science of working together. Difficult conversations in a week. Difficult conversations don't have to be difficult. Then there's...

How to have difficult conversations about race. How to have anti-racist conversations. How to have difficult conversations at work. And more. How to have anti-racist conversations. How to have difficult conversations at work. And more. How to talk to anybody. How to talk with God. How to talk with friends. On the stroke of the new millennium, Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen published Difficult Conversations, How to Discuss What Matters Most. They identify three types of conversations. The what happened conversation. The feelings conversation. The identity conversation. Those categories help identify what a difficult conversation is truly about. An incident,

feelings, or one's character. For the authors, the purpose of having difficult conversations, the why, is ultimately to resolve conflict. As for how to have a difficult conversation, they propose a process called learning conversations, in which you learn the other person's story, express your views and feelings, and then you problem solve together. It's a kind of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis model. Rules, rules, rules. Self-help books act as if after a few tweaks, our conversations would proceed with emotional professionalism and flawless logic. And I don't know about you, but I simply don't engage with many people in my life in this register. Advice that aims to create procedural neutrality is hard to follow if you do, in fact, have a fiery

stake in the conversation. These books ask you to subordinate your position, at least temporarily, even in a case where you have been wronged for the sake of the conversation. In a heated moment, it's hard to follow the author's advice and focus not on what is true, but on what is important. But the truth is always important, no? Here are a few more self-help titles. How to talk to women. Get her to like you and want you with effortless, fun conversation and never run out of anything to say. How to talk to men.

59 secret scripts to melt his heart. Unlock what he's thinking and make him want to be with you forever. And this one's my favourite. A man's guide on how to save your marriage without having to talk about it. Skip forward 25 years and we get Charles Duhigg's super communicators. When you're in a conversational jam, Duhigg suggests that matching principle. So pretty much the matching principle is identify what type of conversation you're in and respond by matching your partner.

So if your partner is discussing their daughter's loser boyfriend, then respond by sharing something about your family, preferably your daughter's loser boyfriend. The matching principle is not simply topical. If your partner is angry, you don't have to become angry, but you should respond in the register of emotion, like care, concern, acknowledgement of feelings. The point is that you're always calculating with these self-help books. Which conversation am I in? What does my partner really mean? How can I match them? There's a meta conversation running alongside our conversations that can be made explicit,

albeit at the risk of being pedantic. Too much meta can be clumsy. If someone were to ask me, as teachers are trained to ask students, do you want to be helped, hugged, or heard? I'd probably cringe and say, I want to be not patronized. But the poor partner is just following advice from these self-help books and identifying what kind of conversation we're in. They'd say, you sound angry. I'm exasperated. So we're talking about feelings?

Could we actually deal with the issue instead of diagnosing the conversation? You get the point. There's something avoidant and wooden about talking about conversations. Ideally, how we engage with each other should be intuitive rather than robotic. Of all the bullets in all of the self-help books in the world, I like this one the best.

We will make mistakes. We can't bring in renowned dramatists to script our difficult conversations. Instead, real-life difficult conversations sound more like something out of an improv show. If you screw up, if you break character, don't lose heart. Accept that it's just part of the genre. The Unstaffed Hotel No one serves breakfast at the Unstaffed Hotel. About 30 bowls of noodles are set out and covered with cling wrap.

The instructions say, please take only one bowl. Ghostly music plays in the background. Down the counter from the noodles are a microwave and two kettles of broth that you can pour into the noodles. Who would know if I helped myself to a second bowl? Thirty bowls and only two Japanese men in the restaurant with me. They are seated along a bar overlooking the street. They are dressed identically in black suits.

I am wearing a denim tuxedo. I space myself according to their pattern, as if we were all at urinals. As I am finishing my meal, I wonder how to clear my dishes. I look around again. No employees, for real. The other two guests are eating contentedly and staring into the middle distance. Then tucked away in the corner, I see a sign for dirty bowls, spoons, and chopsticks. Personally, I was hoping for more intrigue. I have no occasion to talk to the suited men.

The hotel preempts every question I have with a sign. A sign for extra towels, for laundry, for recycling. It makes all conversation unnecessary. Identity. A difficult conversation is often tied to someone's identity. When I was young, people who had the means went on trips after high school to find themselves. These days, young people build and declare their identities more deliberately. The whole business of identity is fraught. Is identity inevitable the way a body is? To what degree can it be changed? Does it give us insider knowledge into a worldview?

Here, I raise identity to remind us that it operates powerfully within a conversation, both in the interactive dynamics and the positions that a partner might hold. The intersections of history, demographics, social capital, as well as the available options for being, for example, L or G or B or T or Q or plus, often lead to elaborate, categorical, prepackaged definitions of the self, especially among millennials and younger. It's not uncommon to see the bio of an emerging writer like, I am a queer, Latinx, neurodivergent,

poet-activist whose work sits at the intersection of feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial praxis. Uh-oh. Here comes Edna for me. Clunky, sure. But there's something to be said for making these categories visible, especially if they've been suppressed.

Fair. Disturbances to these checklist identities have the power to destabilize or threaten the person themselves, hence why they are so fiercely defended, especially if the person believes that identity is something stable and intrinsic rather than malleable and applied.

Their terror. What am I without my identity boxes? It is as if we are all being asked to choose where we stand on various categories, race, gender, class, and once we have positioned ourselves in enough of these categories, then shazam, we come into existence as social beings. Identity is thrust upon us too. While I don't walk around with a chain of identity around my neck, I do wonder, how is my identity or presence a threat to you in this conversation? This happens especially when your identity at that moment is normative,

and mine has caused a sensitivity that forces the conversation to retreat to politeness. But I tend to believe, at least in this decade of my life, that there is a core human that is neither gendered nor racialized, a sensing, perceiving being that exists in transience. A bit utopian.

I'm not sure we can separate ourselves from those forces that create categories of class, race, gender, etc. Feel free to disagree. I find it useful to go forward with a healthy dose of doubt about my own beliefs. If you meet me on the street and bring up this point in 10 years, I bet my position will have evolved. There's always a chance that I may be wrong. The unstaffed hotel. At the unstaffed hotel, I am a blur of productivity. I work until I've eaten all of the food that I brought with me. It's not possible to order room service. I tough it out. I breathe all of the oxygen in the room. The air gets stale. I try to open the window, but it's jammed. This is my chance. I press chat on the tablet. A bunch of subject options appear. I ignore them all and click contact the operator.

appear. I ignore them all and click contact the operator. I type, how do you open the window? The operator replies, turn the handle 90 degrees and press the button at the bottom to release. I type, I tried that but one of the handles is broken. The operator thinks for a while, perhaps consults remotely with someone else, then replies, I'm sorry. The law of the city prevents window opening so pedestrians can't get hurt by material dropped out of the window. I'm struck by the reason. If anything, I was expecting her to say suicide prevention. I type, that's unfortunate. She replies, I'm very sorry. It is the law. I linger. I linger. At some point, the operator became a she. When it is clear that the conversation is over,

I type, okay, have a good night. And she responds, sorry. That's sorry. I felt like I was home in Canada again. I hang up and I look at the crown of a pedestrian's head. I can't even see her mouth from this angle. Other considerations. If I were to write a self-help book on difficult conversations I would add two considerations to all the rules and steps that preceded me

The first is, what is the truth and how do I know that? This asks us to account for our sources It may be hard to locate the root of a feeling or a received truth from childhood or a mood in the air, but this question of knowing, an epistemological one, is necessary to substantiate our place in a conversation. Sometimes there is no single truth. In that case, I need to consider

what is at stake for my partner and me. Are the stakes equal? It may well be that they have more to lose in a conversation, so they avoid having it. Or wave a broken bottle around while we're talking. The second consideration is, should I speak from a cool place or a warm place? That is, should I speak dispassionately, relying mostly on logic, or should I speak out of passion and let my convictions be known by the force of my belief?

Speaking from a cool place usually establishes the territory as neutral and the battle as logical. Note the language of warfare here. While speaking from a warm place conveys the importance of the issue and adds a human element to the argument. If, for example, you consider yourself an environmentalist and you're seated next to a climate denier at a wedding reception,

you could coolly assail the denier with evidence or you could go Greta Thunberg on him. How dare you, and such. To be fair, Thunberg addressed the UN with facts, too. I hope you're not mocking her. No, no. Indeed, my question is better formulated not as an either-or, but as, how much of drink A should I mix with drink B until we're all having a good time? There's a lot of useful advice in self-help books about difficult conversations, and the authors mean well. But the takeaway, it seems to me, is that we have all been manipulated by strategic people.

You know where we're going. From my room in the unstaffed hotel, my sight line is the top limbs of trees. When I stand up and look down, I see tombstones through the leaves. Needless to say, no noise floats up from down there. The tombstones are shaped like buildings and arranged in an orderly grid, like streets. Without my glasses, the cemetery looks like a city. Einstein's Wife In 1914, Albert Einstein penned a nasty letter to his wife, Mileva Maric, that laid out the future conditions of their marriage.

A. You will make sure, one, that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order. Two, that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room. Three, that my bedroom and study are kept neat and especially that my desk is left for my use only. B, you will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they're not completely necessary for social reasons. And specifically, you will forego,

one, my sitting at home with you. Two, my going out or traveling with you. C, you will obey the following points in your relations with me. One, you will not expect any intimacy from me, nor will you reproach me in any way. Two, you will stop talking to me if I request it. And three, you will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it. I will leave my bedroom or study immediately without protest if I request it. D. You will not belittle me in front of our children, either through words or behaviour. Mileva was the only female physicist in Einstein's class.

She was his true intellectual companion. I'm not sure what led to this bitter marital list of demands. To be absolutely honest, I don't want to investigate too deeply. In our time, revered men have been exhumed and assassinated for their characters. Picasso was cancelled a few years ago, for example. Consequently, their genius becomes complicated, their mythology enlarged, their allure both inexplicable and undeniable. Maybe for you, or maybe you mean this in the way we find true crime stories compelling. I've slotted Einstein into this kind of man whom I'd rather not know too much about.

Suffice to say that around the time of his letter to Mileva, Einstein was already corresponding with another woman. Those letters don't have demands. And in any case, I'm more interested in Einstein's wife than Einstein himself. Item C2 is the condition that stabs me. He will stop talking to me if I request it. What was it like to share a house with a genius who did not want to talk to you? It must have seemed like he was saving all of his deep thoughts and humanitarian activism for other people. If I were Maleva, I'd question whether I was getting the real Einstein or whether his friends were. I would wonder whether the pain in my ankle qualified as a functional marriage conversation,

maybe only if it impeded my ability to bring him dinner. I hope that Mileva had at least one friend who came over when Einstein was at his office writing theories. I hope she had a friend who sat down at tea and called Einstein, NINESTINE, and drew equations on the back of envelopes for her to test.

A friend who laughed and smoked and plucked gray hair from Mileva's head. Good conversations are among the most sublime human experiences. To deny someone verbal contact is, to me, as cruel as denying someone touch. This reminds me of Harry Harlow's experiment with the baby monkeys and the terrycloth mothers. Possibly the deprivation of language is a form of abuse. Too far? Einstein's wife deserved better.

Virginia Woolf, at the point of suicide, was sure of her husband Leonard's constancy. She wrote, You have given me the greatest possible happiness. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. And Vladimir Nabokov talked to his wife Vera about everything. Yes, I need you, my fairy tale, because you're the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought, and about how when I went out to work today and looked at a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds.

Initially, Mileva accepted the conditions of Einstein's letter. But three months afterward, she left him and took the two children. Five years later, on Valentine's Day 1919, they divorced. Einstein married his cousin that same year. At the unstaffed hotel, I hear the rustling of plastic in the hallway. A service worker. I rush to the peephole, which, by the way, is really low, below the level of my nipple, hoping to catch sight of someone.

But by the time I arrive, there's no one there, just the black walls and the red tongue of carpet in the hallway. As I'm walking away from the peephole, I hear someone sneeze, and I can't help myself. I say, bless you. On Ideas, you're listening to the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures, What I Mean to Say, Remaking Conversation in Our Time, by novelist and poet Ian Williams. You can hear Ideas on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM,

on World Radio Paris, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. You can also find us on the CBC News app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm N to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list

goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. In the third 2024 CBC Massey lecture, novelist and poet Ian Williams turns to personal conversations. There's a whole cottage industry devoted to teaching us how to have better conversations. But difficult conversations are almost always about something other than what's happening on the surface. And what we're actually looking for in a conversation isn't always answers. It's communion.

From the Broadway Theatre in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, here's Ian Williams with Personal Conversations. There's an episode of Portlandia, Breaking Up, in which a woman is fed up with her man-child partner. She frames the problem in terms of the quality of their conversations. I am done with this. You don't ask me about my day or my job. We never go to museums.

You don't talk to me about books you're reading. Claire, I'm sorry. How was your day? Do you want to go to the museum? How was your job? Did I tell you about the book I read? I want you to move out, Doug. The post-mortem of a relationship might reveal an imbalance of communication,

a lack of depth, attempted excavations that reveal nothing under the surface, impatience that manifests as frosty silence when one falters to find one's thoughts, a state of suspension after throwing a heavy ball toward the partner, the partner's triumphant return to themselves as speaker and subject. So I've heard. But hey, not everybody wants the same thing from their conversations or their relationships. And in that case, a simple do unto others dictum will do. A life coach would take Claire's side during the first consultation. They might go so far

as pathologizing Doug and ordering Claire to cut him off. But if your partner is not, in fact, a member of the dark triad, then what? Do we only speak to gracious people? If possible. How are we supposed to engage with difficult people? We don't. Do we go Einstein on them? Well, not so extreme. Do we punish people for being inconvenient to us? They brought it on themselves. Is there a way to stay in that relationship that is helpful developmentally to the problematic partner and to ourselves? Okay, okay, Mother Teresa. What does one need to say to them or show them? And what adjustments does one need to make within oneself to actually be in conversation with them? I occasionally wonder what happens to flawed conversational partners who keep getting cut off by others.

In Portlandia, Doug's best shot at sustaining a relationship is with Claire. But Claire, she could be with anyone. Without Claire, Doug is like an astronaut whose cable has been cut. He will drift slowly away from the rest of us into oblivion. I hear a vacuum in the hallway. Surely there must be a human being attached. I rush back to the peephole. This time I see someone,

a young Japanese man with dyed blonde hair. His shirt is untucked as if he expects not to be seen today. He's vacuuming erratically, turning the machine off and on frequently. He's concentrating on all the spots that he misses. I know I shouldn't disturb him with small talk about hotel design. He looks as if he's searching for footprints so he can vacuum all traces of himself from the red tongue.

I've presumed here that we all live in readily social environments where there's a constant stream of glittering people to talk to if we'd only engage, but I know this is untrue. In Samuel Beckett's play Happy Days, Winnie is buried to her waist in sand while delivering a garrulous monologue that is occasionally punctuated by her husband, Willie. His presence for most of the play is forgotten. Yet, Winnie cannot speak without him. Ah, yes. If only I could bear to be alone.

I mean, prattle away with not a soul to hear. Not that I flatter myself you hear much. No, really. God forbid. Days, perhaps, when you hear nothing. But days, too, when you answer. So that I may say at all times, even when you do not answer, and perhaps hear nothing, something of this is being heard. I'm not merely talking to

myself that is in the wilderness, a thing I could never bear to do for any length of time. That is what enables me to go on, go on talking that is. Whereas if you were to die, Whereas if you were to die, to speak in the old style, or go away and leave me, then what would I do? What could I do all day long? I mean, between the bell for waking and the bell for sleep? Conversations are fundamentally social. Reports describe our present social condition in North America as an epidemic of loneliness. The isolation has affected all segments of the population, even that usually invulnerable demographic of white men.

Among white men, especially those in the Midwest, isolation is traced to an increase in suicide. It is also linked to political radicalization. Now, I don't think these men are cantankerous brutes. I think they are caught in a mesh of unemployment, divorce, addiction, and rigid gender roles that sever their connections. Reminds me of Medea. Are you hurt, Jason? Are you hurt to know you're not the man who won the Golden Fleas or planned a royal family, but a man, a poor, sad, pointless man

who has no wife, no home, no children? Since high school, I've heard about mild men who seek out sex workers, not for sex, but for conversation. On university campuses, the epidemic of loneliness is coupled with an epidemic of anxiety. Soon enough, we may need to take Japan's lead and appoint a minister for loneliness and isolation. Japan's lead and appoint a minister for loneliness and isolation.

In Japan, about 1 in 50 people between 15 and 64 are hikikimori, which is their word for people living in social isolation. Can you hear me? I beseech you, Willie, just yes or no. Can you hear me? Just yes or nothing. Yes. And now? Yes. And now? Yes. And now? Yes. Bless you, Willie. I do appreciate your goodness. I know what an effort it costs you. Now you may relax. I shall not trouble you again unless I'm obliged to.

By that, I mean unless I come to the end of my own resources, which is most unlikely. Just to know that in theory, you can hear me, even though in fact you don't, is all I need, just to feel you there within earshot. And conceivably, on the qui vive is all I ask, not to say anything. I would not wish you to hear or liable to cause you pain,

not to be just babbling away on trust, as it were, not knowing, and something gnawing at me. Doubt? Oh, I don't need to worry about retro in-person social connectedness. I have all the people I need online. I suppose that's better than nothing. Online communities have saved lives and expanded worlds, but we know those interactions are more perfunctory, paced more slowly, often leave us hanging, create insecure attachment styles,

are prone to mystifying and painful abandonment, and release neurotransmitters in unhealthy ways. When we have no one to talk to, we find ourselves in conversation with our social media, with the 24-hour news stations, with human voices bottled in other forms, many of which are extreme and predatory, using our loneliness to gain support.

Like infants becoming accustomed to the voices of their mothers, we come to love these voices. We learn to talk like these voices. Like Amala and Kamala, two feral girls who grew up without conversation, we learn to howl like the wolves that raise us. There's a touch of the feral, the isolation of the feral child, in many of us at this moment, that leads to the ferocity with which we regard what we don't understand.

This disconnection from ordinary relations accounts perhaps for our disrespect of civilization, our disregards of structures like democracy, our indifference to suffering. Somehow, we have found ourselves raised outside of civilization and are having a hard time with its institutions. No, no, you've got that wrong. We've actually stepped out of the matrix. We are woke now. We finally see all of those institutions

as corrupt and bankrupt. Our disrespect and disregard for them are rooted in their disrespect and disregard for us. The way any system built by humans eventually transcends the human and has us working in its service instead of working in ours. This makes me think of AI. Yeah, and all right, but the ramifications of our isolation, feral or otherwise, are not simply about whether we respect institutions, tear down statues, flout civility or not.

In isolation, we deny ourselves the opportunity to care for others and to have that care reciprocated. Now, you don't have to hang out with everybody. You don't have to talk to everybody, be best friends with everybody. But I don't think isolation as a protective measure is doing anyone any good. To allow ourselves contact with the unknown person,

to behold their frustration, to witness the vicissitudes of their years, to laugh and listen, all of these efforts strengthen the heart. And now, was I lovable once, Willie? Was I ever lovable? Do not misunderstand my question. I'm not asking you if you loved me.

We know all about that. I'm asking if you found me lovable at one stage. No? You can't? Well, I admit, it is a teaser. And you've done more than your bit already, for the time being. Just lie back now and relax. I shall not trouble you again, unless I am compelled to,

just to know you are there, within hearing, and conceivably on the semi-alert. Is paradise now? In a moment of lucidity in the middle of the night, I sit up. What has happened to me? In my 20s, the best part of traveling was meeting locals. And now I'm booking myself into unstaffed hotels? I go to the hotel's website for the first time.

There's an image of a woman overlooking a city. Her back is to us. She has no face. The text over her body says, It is an urban hotel with a completely new concept, a place where you can free yourself without interference from anyone, a place where you can find simple time

and being honest with your feelings. I cannot fall asleep after that. Who owns our conversations? I find it interesting that the verb we use for conversations is have. We don't say we are conversations or we do conversations. We don't typically use the verb form and say we converse. Instead, we say we have conversations. I want to take this possessive cast literally.

Who owns our conversations? Who controls them? In Canada, to legally record a conversation, all you have to do is hit record, as long as you are part of that conversation. Your partner doesn't have to know that you are recording him as he recounts his adventures in Vegas. To ethically record a conversation,

you should request your partner's permission since the contributions of both parties compose the conversation. Don't you think so? Doesn't your gut tingle at the thought of recording someone without their knowledge? There must be some ulterior motive to ensnare them in a confession, to blackmail them later. Almost certainly, if the situation were reversed and you were the one being recorded, you'd like to know. When I hear that Zoom disclaimer, recording in progress, or the customer service disclaimer, this call may be recorded for quality assurance purposes and training. For a moment, my pupils dilate, and I become hyper-aware of my words.

It's easier to answer the question of ownership for text and email communication because we have the model of letter writing. The writer is the first owner of the contents of the letter, while the recipient is the second owner of the physical object. There's still joint accounting at work. The writer of the letter has a claim to the letter since the words and thoughts are hers. And the recipient of the letter

also has a claim to the letter since it was given to her as a kind of gift. Now, imagine if the ownership of conversations were divided among similar lines. Imagine if we owned each other's words. What an opportunity that would be to affirm each other. But the world being what it is, if words could be given away,

then they could also be used for nefarious purposes against the speaker. We may put forth our words with good intentions, then have them taken by a listener, manipulated, and sent forward unrecognizable. We can attempt to reclaim our words and restore them to their original intention, but they have already been sullied and loaded with the freight of malice. In the digital space, we know that media platforms own our content. By and large, the model of ownership is futile. If we want to stay on the land, we must agree to giving the companies the rights to our content. And although this transference of ownership is true in a legal sense, I reckon that it doesn't cause us as much anxiety anymore because our will has been eroded,

much like with cookie notifications, and because we know that it is impossible for these companies to lay claim to the generative power of human creativity. With respect to conversation, we believe that because I said it, it will always be mine. The way a biological parent is always genetically connected to the child. At the unstaffed hotel, I tap my room card in the elevator and it takes me to the right floor. I've withheld my opinion about this unstaffed hotel, but for the record, I think it's a cash grab by the hotel developer to maximize profit by avoiding paying staff and denying service to guests. But you do you. The voice in the elevator is cheerful and thanks me multiple times in Japanese, for what I'm not sure, for visiting her. Then I realize that I've been

engaged in a conversation with the building during my stay. The sign at breakfast, please take only one bowl. The sign in the hallway for amenities, help yourself. The signs for garbage. Without people in the way, I can finally see how the building is the girl next door who has been steadily caring for me. She has loved me, and I can love her back. We can live together. I'm anthropomorphizing. I'm like Tom Hanks in Castaway, etching a face out of a bloody handprint on a volleyball and talking to it like a friend. I consider knocking on a neighbor's door just to see what would happen. I plot all sorts of ways,

from knocking sharply and miming an emergency to accidentally knocking a door with my elbow then tying my shoelaces until someone opens it. But of course, I don't do any such thing. I wish someone would dare me to have a conversation, though. That way, I could have a reason to approach that was not my own loneliness. What happens to our conversations?

Short of a recording, a conversation does not have a material form. It exists in real time and it exists in memory. That's it. When it crosses over into memory, it is not solely the property of the people who had the conversation. Anyone who heard the conversation can reactivate it in memory. The question of ownership is itself capitalist. Conversations resist this impulse.

They are no more valuable in America than they are in Cuba. Their pleasures and liberatory potential simply cannot be regulated by market forces. But I still think it's worth thinking about conversations in terms of ownership because it exposes a beautiful slipperiness to our conversations. A conversation's ephemerality

suggests to me that it is forgiving. The words come and go, they are present, then they disappear. One can hold on to them in memory, but at that point, we're dealing with fragments. The actual conversation in real time disappears. You can change your mind about what you said and inscribe a new conversation over the old one. So if conversations are so temporal, so merciful, even ethereal, then perhaps we should

grant each other a similar lightness to be. Pressure builds inside of me. I contact a friend and we make plans to meet in Osaka. I check out early from the unstaffed hotel. I bid farewell to the tablet. I leave my key card in a box in the elevator. The hotel shrugs at my departure. My friend is almost an hour late to meet me at the airport in Osaka. He doesn't apologize. Instead, he greets me by pulling my

ears to turn my head from side to side. He embraces me. He says, more muscle. I say, you've lost weight. Seven kilos, he says. It's golf. Are you sick, I ask. No, really, it's from golf, he insists. Are you sick, I ask? No, really, it's from golf, he insists. Right, right, from swinging a club for one second, I say, playing my part. We have dinner. It's my first time eating with someone since arriving in Japan.

When he pays, I say, thank you. He looks pained and appalled. Don't thank me, he says, playing his part. This moment always makes me smile. We walk around Osaka for hours after dinner. We talk about his mother, about blood sugar, about cities with good doctors. He puts his arm around my shoulder. Lanterns hang across the street. Drunk men stumble out of Izakaya. We talk about white sneakers, his, mine, everyone else's. We talk about airline classes. He flies first class.

I flew a discount airline from Canada, I tell him. No pretzels, no almonds. Ten hours, and you even had to pay for water if you wanted it. He is incensed on my behalf. That can't be legal, he says. He is a man who lives apart from his family. Whenever we get into a subject deeply and I break eye contact, he jostles me. Although we just ate, he is hungry. We buy sour candy and chocolate-covered almonds. He points at a picture of a mongoose advertising beer and tells me that a mongoose can kill a cobra. You should see it in slow motion, he says. We play a shooting game at a kiosk, the kind you find at an amusement park.

I miss all seven of my shots. He asks, which toy prize do you want? I point to a yellow duck. He hits it on his first try, then a pink duck, then three boxes of candy. We talk about guns, about the army, about America, about Yakuza. We debate which mafia is the most cruel. The Mexicans, he says. He saw somewhere that the cartel rips people's heads off with a spine attached

and hangs them up in front of a town. Is that possible, anatomically, I ask? We talk about cancel culture. We talk about the unstaffed hotel. He says, it's like a prison. No, no, it was fine, I say. His company has so overwritten my days there that I don't know if I'm lying.

He rubs my thumb over the bridge of his hand. He says, feel my calluses. He tells me that he has only been golfing for three months, but already he's beaten two experienced colleagues. I say, you've always been athletic, you know. He beams at that. But you said you'd never play golf, I say. We weren't going to become those guys. It's a betrayal. No, no, he says. You've already crossed over, I tell him. I'll teach you, he responds, to which I say, I don't want to learn. He scoffs and says, that's not true. How can you even watch it, I ask, just a lone white ball sailing through the sky?

And he counters with, how can you even watch a tennis ball go back and forth? You get obsessed with whatever you do, I tell him. He explains bogeys and birdies and eagles better than anyone I've ever met, until I can't help myself. I think, yes, I will play golf with this man. Then we're talking about mafias again. Italians originated it, he said. But there was organized crime before the Italian mafia, I say.

It's almost midnight by now. Now we're talking about pear trees and whether mine has flowered. As we near the hotel, he lights a cigarette, moves his hand back and forth between our chests. This, he says. What, I say. This. Talking to you.

This is better than sex. Thank you, guys. Oh, thank you. Ian Williams. It was wonderful. Thank you, everyone. On Ideas, you've been listening to Personal Conversations. It's the third of the 2024 CBC Massey Lectures,

What I Mean to Say by novelist and poet Ian Williams. This lecture was recorded at the Broadway Theatre in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Special thanks to Liesha Grabinski and Pratush Dayal, the readers in tonight's lecture. You can get the entire 2024 CBC Massey Lecture Series at cbc.ca slash massys after the

broadcast week. Your local bookseller will have the book version of the lectures titled, What I Mean to Say Remaking Conversation in Our Time. Our partners in the Massey Lecture Series are Thank you. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.