I’m standing outside the front door of a complete stranger, waiting a step back from their front step, wondering how long to leave it before I knock again. Intoxicated by the scent of the jasmine flowering in an arch trained over their door frame, although it’s day time, although it’s blown cold and humid and strange all day. They don’t respond to the second round of knocking, all the lights are out, but I linger a moment longer in the embrace of the fragrance. 

A few houses down, yellow-gold rose petals have blown from the neighbour’s bush onto their front wall, an offering that seems as purposeful as marigold wreaths. It’s too early for the roses to be so blown, and that is why I’m out door-knocking for the Green Party, or part of it, a sense of urgency that – against and also to honour my own anarchism – harm reduction is needed, and this is one method available in the moment of the local elections. 

Our local council falls one short of a Green majority, wiping out decades of Labour control. It feels exhilarating amid the overall terror, and then it’s just bureaucracy. I go to the local party meeting and get quickly overwhelmed by cis male egos and meaningless procedure. Outside, when I leave halfway through, is a high, clear sunset pinking five clouds that streak from a central mass: palm and hand, and that is the only way I can envision what politics, or political action rather than parties, means to me. What moves outwards, autonomous but connected, towards not so much action as gesture and touch, communication. As I move over the brow the hill the clouds are silvering against the twilit sky. I write a poem about them, and that is political action too: eccentric, maybe, but meeting some unmet need that meetings, I realise, could never. 

I like to read poems to meetings that do not expect poems. When I was grad rep to my department, I ended my tenure by reading to the assembled faculty AGM a poem that compared the postures of meetings to those of pyramid acrobatics and those of sex. It went down as well as you imagine. 

*

What I mean is.

I have been turning this letter this way and that for weeks now, through waves of feeling needful and needless and unneeded and unheeded. Two minutes after I posted my previous letter (law) from a train, a man manhandled me and other men joined in inciting him, and other men still kept their faces turned away and did nothing. I refused to be moved in the moment, but have been shaken since. You write something that reflects back on writing something about being assaulted, and in the moments after, you are assaulted again. 

It doesn’t mean anything.

It’s the law of averages, isn’t it, violence by white cis men against those who are not. It’s the mean, even if it’s mean.

*

I knew I wanted to write the next letter about mean before I’d finished law, because I was deep in obsessive thinking about online betting markets and the ways they are reshaping news reporting and also government decision-making. I hadn’t yet seen the boggling story about a trader interfering with a weather sensor, possibly using a hairdryer, in order to win a bet of several thousand euros on temperatures at Charles de Gaulle airport, or the more seriously disgusting story that insider trading is clearly occurring on US military conflicts, with 98% win rates.

Insider trading of one kind or another has always shaped the news, but now it is doing so literally and sickeningly. 

So I was thinking about means in the sense of averages, and how gambling is all there is now, the definitional form of cultural and political production, because what an algorithm is is a gamble on an average. Everything is statistics, it sometimes seems, even and especially our sense of self as we are forced through the surveillant data mill. 

I for one do not wish to be a single data point, nor even a hundred data points, nor even a million – as in my experience, statisticians response to the challenge that a statistic is unrepresentative is that one just needs to drill down, to place a more minute and controlling grid, to ask more intrusive questions, to slice and dice like the nanotech fibres in the most gruesome yet honest (or because honest) scene of the TV adaptation of The Three-Body Problem. Because that's what the military-industrial complex does, without compunction, and that's what data-ification serves.

And, as I feel more and more data-scraped even as I try more to evade it, I was wondering – not unrelatedly – how the word for average or middle also comes to bear the sense of cruel, and yet also the sense of sense-making. What does mean mean, and how can we make meaning when it is increasingly defined by a market of means?

*

Mean and mean are what is known as convergent homophones: from two different roots, by different routes, they end up spelt and sounding the same in English. The mathematical mean comes from medianus (which also, of course, gives us median, thus making my GCSE-level understanding of probability mathematics even more blurrily confused), meaning middle or midpoint. 

Given the tilt toward statistics at least since the development of demographics in Europe as a way of mapping the effects of the Black Death (but let’s not forget that the story of Jesus is about people evading a census that has punitive intent), it’s perhaps not surprising that the mean and median of demographic data have come to be confused with the political centre (I wrote about centre, a thorny prick of a word, some time ago for Mugwort Magazine), to such an extent that it’s hard to unpick or describe why they don’t have to be the same.

That crasis is influenced by the other mean, which is not Latinate but Germanic with variants appearing widely across Germanic and Norse languages that signify to signify, that mean to mean, but also to think, to hold a good opinion of, to love. The concatenation could be explained as such: to invest with meaning is a sign of both emotional intensity and ethical value, and/or that love – respect, intimacy, friendship, mutuality – is the precondition of finding and sharing significance, of communicating intention(ally) through signs. High German has a variant that means to have dealings with, to share. 

And that’s probably because the root meaning behind mean is y-mene or gemene which (squint and you'll see it) is related to communis, or common. ge-mene, that which is shared is what has meaning; that which has meaning is what gets shared. Beautifully, the OED suggests that further back still, the pre-Germanic base is derivative of the same root as mutare, to change or exchange, and the Latin word munus, gift.

Here we are in a true marketplace of ideas, a barter of hearts and words, the go-round come-around of conversation and mutual aid, of what speaks from the heart because it’s where we meet, and that changes and changes about. What a gift: to acknowledge that communication alters us, and that it is rooted in taking turns, and in making change. It is the song of the commons.

And we all know what happens to the commons.

*

Common and mean both become pejorative by the same route: once the commons are enclosed, both common and mean are used to refer to poor people, to those deprived of their share of shared land and the equal exchange of words that comes with having an equal share in grazing. Common and mean thus take on the sense of lacking, and then of moral judgement. How cruel, to attribute cruelty to those who are vulnerable, those who have been robbed. 

And that is how we end up with the three means that seem to collapse into each other under the power of our algorithmic era: the mathematical middle, supposedly determined objectively (but who is asking the questions and setting the scale); intentional communication of sense or (moral) value (which crosses over with mathematical value in a discursive field controlled by Christian colonial capitalism); and deprivation recast as moral failing.

What has been lost is love. Love in the sense of what is shared, what is gifted, what is mutual. Love as making sense. Making sense as an act of love.

*

Yes, part of this is an ornery maintenance of my outlier status. I do not want to be the mean, or be forced to conform to it. I do not want my socio-political life to be arranged around it (what else is the middle class but a set of abstracted statistical averages held up as nanofibres to cut ourselves whether we try to match up to them or outrun them). I do not want definition to be overwritten by it (which is very much what official dictionaries do). I hate statistics and I hate being a statistic. I prefer the wild unpredictable of possibility to the deeply unreliable yet conceded-to grid of probability.

Probability, like the genAI on which it is built, is wrong as often as it’s right, and maybe more, and yet we acclaim it as scientific and objective and all that shit. We vote according to how polls tell us others are going to vote. We decide what we’ll do tomorrow based on what we observed yesterday (maybe that’s why climate chaos and genocide are both so hard for so many people to think with: they go against the staid logics of probability, which is really just nostalgia for a never-existent world order). 

Possibility is dangerous and open and unpredictable and chaotic and more than a little bit undefinable. It’s a shrug and a leap, but it’s also research rather than relying on what I’ve been told. It’s front-loading through full catastrophe living, working through worst- and best-case scenarios by daring to say out loud both what we hope and what we fear. That requires a commons, a space of trust even between two people, where we know that our meaning has meaning: it is sense-making and it’s valued. Everything that dominance culture is doing right now, and has always done, is about fracturing and erasing the possibility that begins in the small, risky possibility of sharing the thing we feel most, the futures we see and want to reach or change.

And if we cannot do that, well then that is when the enforced becomes inevitable, because we have nowhere to stop it, no commons-sensing site in which to say wait, hold.

*

The difficult thing about meaning is that a word, phrase, narrative is involved with content in both its senses: a word contains, and it provides contentment or comfort, and those can pull against each other. We can want to be held, and wrestle in the close embrace. We can want to be filled up, and then feel overwhelmed. Listen.

Conundrum (on my birthday) (for Rico)

…

If letting go

is saying no, 

then what is holding on

saying?

            Come.

            Can anyone be held?

            Can I?

The impossible conundrum,

the closed circle,

why

does lightning strike this house 

and not another?

…

Perhaps 

one must learn to trust

one’s terror:

the holding on,

the letting go

is error:

            the lightning has no choice,

                        the whirlwind has one voice.

In writing about t/his struggle around holding on to/in love and meaning, in the poem 'Conundrum', James Baldwin rhymes terror and error, so close you can see the t- getting cut off. What’s happening there? The t-/error, he says, is thinking there’s anything you can determine; the lightning and whirlwind do not obey any law of averages or states. There is only possibility. Rhyme, we are told, works by probability – predictability; but I think it works by possibility, which is surprise and gift. 

It is a question more than an answer, rhyme, a conversation rather than convergence. How can two words become so close, yet carry such different senses? How can sound and semantics (two different senses of sense) stray from each other sometimes, and sometimes collide? How can we communicate given these uncertainties?

Words love each other, that’s the only explanation, because they are made of love, and because love is what we have in common, they move through our commons, nervous on another’s doorstep, stepping back to make space but inhaling the unfurling scent of the jasmine, the roses blown by the whirlwind.