We sometimes say that a person is good at conversation, but what can we say of what that means? When someone is good at chess, it’s because of how often they win. We don’t often say people win at conversation, but the contrast between chess and conversation could have something important to reveal.
Both chess and conversation have rules. There are, of course, variations on these rules—when I was young, my dad decided that in our house, “en passant” was against our “house rules” because it was too obscure. The house rules of conversation likewise change from place to place. They can be a bit different between families, workplaces, and friend groups, but the biggest differences are between cultures and languages. House rules can only be so different, though. If I came across a house where they decided that the shape of chess pieces didn’t actually matter, that all the pieces could only move diagonally and that you took an opponent’s piece by hopping over it, I might say “This isn’t even chess anymore. It’s checkers.” Likewise, when I see one person talking at length and the other only listening, I might say, “this isn’t even conversation anymore. It’s a lecture.”
Both chess and conversation have goals. In chess, the player’s goals are part of the rules. We all know that both players want to yell out “checkmate!” once they put their opponent’s king in a position where it cannot move without getting killed. In this respect, conversation shows its dissimilarity: it’s a game that lets its players bring their own goals to the table, sometimes clear, sometimes obscure. Stranger still, you or I can feel the pull of a conversation, sense there’s something critical to be obtained, but remain completely, willfully or unwillfully, oblivious to our own goals.
Both chess and conversation are made up of turns and moves. Each turn, the players make the move they think will best get them to closer to their goal. When we watch a game of chess, we can assess what each player’s moves do for their progress towards the goal of victory by saying, “this was a bad move” or “that was a good move” accordingly. In conversation, we take turns talking, and our moves are the comments we make, each taking us closer to our goals or moving us further away. When we watch people talking, though, it’s harder to say what’s good and what’s bad because we can’t be sure of everyone’s goals. I might say a comment was bad only to later learn that I’d misjudged the person’s goals.
So when we converse, it is critical that we understand what our goals are and that we have a picture of the way we’ll know we’ve attained them. Competitive games set up mutually exclusive goals. You and I cannot both win our game of chess: only one of us can cry “checkmate” at the end. Conversation’s flow is so flexible that not only can all players attain their goals, but new goals can emerge in a flash that change the meaning of each move. When a conversationalist’s shifting goals are out far beyond the horizon of his partner’s vision or sunk deep down below his own awareness, the radical change in the moves he makes can be alarming. To prevent this, he may need a higher goal, an anchor, a partner to the other goals that arise and fall in his heart.
People who study games call the study of moves “tactics” and the study of how they fit together “strategy.” If a chess player is a marvelous tactician and an excellent strategist, we might say she is a “good chess player.” But if someone told me they had a friend who has great conversational tactics and is very strategic in the way she talks with people, I wouldn’t say she sounds like a good conversationalist. I’d say she sounds like a politician.
Games don’t come to mind when I think of a good conversationalist. Instead, I think of dancing. Some dances have set rules, yes, but in the case of dancing, the goal isn’t set out by the rules: the goal is the rules. If you and I set out to tango, our goal is to perform the tango perfectly, with elegance and grace. Like conversation, the rules of dancing exist even when they can’t be expressed in words. Whether it’s the tango, or break dancing, or an informal night at the club, each dance is governed by the higher law of the beat.
When a dancer has spent years studying beats with her body’s motion, she develops ways of moving that are all her own. We call this her style. When two people have danced long enough together, they find a style that belongs to both of them and to neither of them, some strange admixture of the moves they make within a ruled constraint, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. The master duet is lost to self in a flow that follows the beat.
When I meet a good conversationalist, it’s like this. No matter the rules of conversation that govern our interaction, whether he’s mastered them or not, he listens first to discern a rhythm. Once found, he moves to it in a way that’s all his own. When I take his hand, we dance in turn, move by move, building the very beat we follow but losing ourselves so completely that it feels beyond us.
Everyone comes to conversation with goals, but we don’t always contemplate them. That’s not to say that no one is ever aware of their goals, but situations and needs tend to rule the day. I need money, so I have conversations with my colleagues at work that are governed by the goals of my role. I’ve offended someone close, so I seek to make amends. I want to persuade someone, so I put my voice behind a cause. Few people contemplate between all possible goals of conversation and discipline themselves to the ways of the very best one.
But is it possible to say anything that might apply to every single conversation? Can I find a higher goal to anchor myself to while I go about these lesser tasks so that whether I win or lose the small games, I can be sure to win the highest game I give myself to play?
Here we have a microcosm of the ultimate question: is there anything I can say about the whole of life that would apply to every situation or circumstance? Is life merely a series of moves we make for a game we can never win? What is the best the goal for a human life?
A good conversationalist, of course, would address these questions by holding out his hand and inviting me to dance. “What do you think?” he would ask. In my answer, he would hear the beginnings of a beat, and he’d follow it, then listen closely to my next move to watch where the beat would go. He would stay strictly to the beat of the talk but in a voice unmistakably his own. Before I could even pause to think of how it happened, we’d lose ourselves in the motions of a dance that would also be an answer, a high goal, an anchor and a partner to the flux of human life.
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