The most precious legacy received from my grandfather Alban is the Gaspésie chat, the volubility, this frivolous desire to come into contact with the other, the unknown, live, without a screen. When I was little, I would go shopping on Saturdays with him in the countryside, and we would return hours later. I had attended a master class on introduction to the subject, humor, banter, seduction, lightness and connection.
My grandfather knew he could ride for a long time on a compliment, a knowing smile or a joke. He went out to glean gossip and confidences and gave me my best lessons in journalism at the university of life.
This verbal ping-pong without an appointment, without commitment on your part, by the way, remains free and spontaneous. It’s a change from the boring (no, boring) arguments on social networks. It allows us to anchor ourselves in the life drive. We meet, we brush against each other, we leave each other and this local craft is practiced especially in good weather. And the more chat, the better the show.
These encounters of the third type are necessary for me, almost vital. Even if I can be wild and walk along the walls at my leisure, I am also very comfortable with the live model.
I chat with the onlooker who comes to play at the public piano in the square (there are fewer since the pandemic, he tells me, and his ex didn’t like the piano, now he has two, well suited for her) , with the only Italian waitress at the Rosetti cafés (hi Carla!), with Simon Blanchette at the ONF (some people say that our surname comes from goat shepherds), with the greengrocer behind his kiosk who shows me the disaster in his tomato fields (in exchange for which I give him my tomato pie recipe).
The unknown is always exciting.
In short, I constantly drop the 4e wall without knowing people’s names at the start, leaving with a slice of life. This always surprised one of my exes, who was rather formal in the innocuous exchange:
— But damn! How do you do ? People tell you their life stories after five minutes!
I ended up thinking that I had a hereditary talent for the volatile and oral.
Practice your repartee
It’s about building confidence and placing yourself at the right height, heart level, on the humanity level, like “on this planet at the same time, and how is it going for you? “. It’s about having fun frankly with the repartee, sharing one’s troubles, blowing on the embers of one’s curiosity, welcoming, also picking up, the anecdotal, health is good, good weather to extend (no , I didn’t say to expand), to build culverts to cross the puddle.
Hey, nice exchange with Philippe, our talkative waiter at the charming Café du Clocher de Kamou this summer, in front of a sample of the last rare specimen of shrimp roll that I had decided to let my Mexican roommate taste:
— You can say: “Guédille 2023, Kamouraska, I was there!” »
Philippe told us about the decline of Matane shrimp because of redfish (but the real reason is climate change). And then, seeing my umbrella placed on the chair:
— Circassian arts are well established in the area…
— Wireferist, do I have a future?
— You could retrain yourself. We have a tightrope here too.
Philippe is a master of the genre, puns to match.
The day before, waiting in line at the Tim Hortons bathroom in Montmagny, on the road, I had almost been invited to a wedding in Nova Scotia. The father of the future groom wouldn’t let me go.
These exchanges, which owe a lot to chance and genetic predispositions, break down social codes and barriers. Like Jack approaching Rose on the Titanic. (The Jack Rose, calvados and grenadine, is also a cocktail mentioned by Hemingway in The sun is also rising.) I like padlocks that jump, anything that escapes me a little and needs to be tamed.
Post-techno with Chomsky
The actor Gildor Roy said in an interview the other day that certain directors ban cell phones on sets, just to create a bond between the actors. We have atrophied this pre-technological muscle.
But the chat with a chatbot It’s also possible. I went to meet Chom5ky vs Chomsky twice rather than once last week at Espace ONF. I had a lot of fun questioning the famous 94-year-old linguist and activist with a virtual reality headset. The idea is to ask questions to this database created with the digital traces of the libertarian socialist intellectual who published 186 books, including 112 on politics.
The truth is that I’m afraid of dying of boredom when you come home alone in the evening.
The mentor of several generations of admirers answers all the questions, even those you would ask in front of the MIT coffee machine. I asked him what he would like to be reincarnated as: as a dolphin, for his intelligence. What would it take for trees to vote? “Opposable thumbs” (I laughed). And why do humans continue to vote for politicians who lie? “Because the truth would be unbearable for them. It is easier for them to live with lies. »
Virtual Chomsky wanted to know if I was comfortable with the idea of reproducing a brain identical to mine. I replied that I didn’t care, even though he was expecting a binary response. He looked insulted, which is quite an achievement for a robot whose ego function should be put on the back burner.
He was more evasive about the possibility of AI dominating human beings, but when I asked him what the difference was between my mind and ChatGPT, he became more forthcoming. Basically: “The human mind does not gorge itself on hundreds of terabytes of data by extrapolating the most likely conversational answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; he seeks to create explanations. » (A response adapted from this text.)
But the human mind also loves facial expressions, (human) warmth, laughter, emotions and surprises. All things that we still find within sight, as long as we make the effort. I dared for my “friend” Chomsky: “Love or freedom? ” I will let you guess. His response next week…