Are there models for communication in which the answers to questions are not direct? One asks a question and seems never to receive an answer. But part of the answer arrives from one person, in another context. Another part from another, and so on. Altogether, the answers are there: they arrive. They have not been proffered, but they arrive. You only realize it later. Maybe even you forgot the question, but now it's not a question anymore anyway: it became knowledge somehow.

Is this a form of communication at all? Or is this noise?

Am I listening to myself all the time.

***

Another way to ask this might be to imagine a teaching situation that is, for me, very common in a writing classroom. We're talking about a text — an essay, a poem, a short story even — and something needs to be said, not necessarily as a correction to the story or poem or essay at hand but more because the occasion of our reading that text makes intelligible a point of consideration that will be important later. The author of the text of occasion may be confused for a moment, but I don't worry: the student will figure it out when this statement becomes a kind of knowledge, absorbed slowly and even indirectly, useful later and in another context. More and more I find myself deliberately teaching this way: communicating out into moments of confusion points that will clarify other situations later on. It's not what they teach you to do when they teach you to teach, but it seems to work. Maybe that's strange. Maybe that's me being confused and hoping someone else can sort the confusion out. Maybe, instead, that's embracing the noise that seems native to human exchange and trusting that somehow that system, as unshapely as it seems, will bear something successful, something right and orderly after all.

To ask this another way: is what is noisy always noise?

***

In faculty meetings, this seems to happen a lot.... A point is made in response to a specific problem or situation. It is considered and then maybe ignored. But the idea, or more often the language, comes back later, maybe to address the same problem, maybe another.

Is one to feel slighted that one's language gets used without credit or acknowledgment? Is the faculty meeting an exercise in plagiarism or cryptomnesia? Is all conversation?

And is it right to think of this—this crooked path to hearing, an almost anonymous recognition, a misrecognized recognition—as noise?

Emerson wrote: "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty." Maybe the faculty meeting is just a work of genius, or a confrontation with the genius of others.

For my part, I've come to accept my role as a suggestor, a suggestionist: no idea I articulate will be accepted immediately, but my words often drift back from the mouths of others, suddenly safe for consumption when they come off other tongues. I morse out my messages on the water in my sink and someone across town thinks it's his idea.

***

You never write me back, but somehow the message gets to the estranged neighbor. The dog next door is muttering it in his sleep.

***

Maybe this becomes a form of comfort.

Maybe this is just another kind of public.