Re: yet another Microtonal parrot

Howdy again folks. I couldn't resist sending this
along since it has to do with listening carefully
and involves parrots.

I wrote it several years ago.

You may think it has nothing to do with tuning,
but it does - it addresses the whole reason many
people fear alternative tuning systems.

As we all know, xenharmonic tunings sound strange
when first heard, but your brain clicks and
suddenly it makes perfect sense. After listening
to my music for a while, music on the radio sounds
_especially_ grating and out-of-tune.

It's a matter of letting yourself accept something
without judging it long enough for it to have a
chance to speak to you.

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Folk Tales, Listening, and Multiple Realities
--------------------------------------------------
by X. J. Scott

One man's dream is another man's babble.

Each man's babble can be understood and/or
interpreted within at least one system of symbols
and beliefs, or language and culture.

All beliefs, all cultures, all art, is inherently
and intrinsically without value or validity until
it is interpreted. Then it is with form and from
form comes meaning.

All babble, like art, is truth when understood.

Thus one man's babble is another man's truth.

--------------------------------------------------

In the brain, perception of meaning occurs on a
very high symbolic level. Language may appear to
be perceived phonically, as it is in parrots and
some people, but some are able to achieve
understanding from creating rather than accepting
form. This is done through exercising associative
neural pathways (in the brain memory) and
insights, guided by sentience, which is directly
perceivable via planes of energy different from
those planes most people believe they can perceive
by their senses.

Because of this, what each person says is
interpreted and actually phonically heard
differently by different people, depending on how
compatible what he is hearing is with his own
system of beliefs. The phonic content of what you
hear is reconstructed from the original in your
brain from patterns of thought and symbol present
in the original physical communication. To see
this, note how what others say is internally only
understood by yourself as you transparently mimick
what they are saying in your own voice � even as
they speak. Also note how most of what you think
others have said is extracted from a short-term
memory image of what they really have said. You
think about what the speaker has said in order to
understand. You do this while he continues to
speak. Because in most Western cultures, thought
is linear, not parallel � you have to then listen
to what has been said in the meantime by referring
to your short-term memory, which is stored not as
sound, but as words and ideas, interpreted by a
complex process in the brain. These words are not
exactly what has been said, but a shadow. This
can easily be demonstrated by any simple "pass
this story on" experiment. By the time the story
gets around the circle, it has little relationship
to the original.

This idea of reconstructed, rather than literal
memory is discussed in the article "Memory,
Abnormalities of" in the Encyclop�dia Britannica
(italics added):

While confabulation is pathological by definition,
all people include an inventive, imaginative (and
therefore spurious) element in their
remembering.... it seems valid to say that all
remembering depends /heavily/ on /reconstruction/
rather than on mere /reproduction/ alone. ... The
difference ... between normal and grossly amnesiac
confabulation may well be one of degree rather
than kind.

Here is an example of a story told by a woman
raised in a village in Vietnam and now running a
restaurant in Southern California. She is a
normal, sensible, practical, down-to-earth woman.
Her story is heard by two people � the author, and
a friend � and corroborated as an exact recounting
of a true event by her family.

Back home we had a special bird like a parrot, but
different. This type of bird was allergic to the
color red. If it saw the color, it would die. You
couldn't have mirrors around it because it was
part red. The bird had to eat bright red chili
peppers because of a special vitamin they
contained, or it would also die. I don't know why
it could eat the red chili peppers without dying;
no one knew how this could happen. The bird was
very friendly. It could talk and often told us
stories about its life in the jungle. It was good
with children and our children loved it very much
but one day one of the children left a mirror in
its room. Usually the bird's cage was covered but
that day it wasn't. The bird saw its bright red
plume in the mirror and it dropped over stone dead
right away. Everyone was very sad.

Most Westerners hearing this story will pick one
of the following interpretations afterwards:

1) The woman is crazy.

2) The woman is speaking in symbols.

3) The listener will remember a different story,
compatible with their own belief system.

Choice #1 is common if the tale-teller is a
homeless person, or other disenfranchised
individual. When the story-teller is a friend of
the listener, choices #2 or #3 are picked. Choice
#3 involves the least amount of emotional and
brain power (the lazy man theory), and thus is
common � leading to endemic confabulation.

Thus, one listener to the woman's story re-related
it as follows, only a day after hearing it:

She had a parrot that could talk a lot. Did you
know that birds are allergic to chili peppers?
The bird liked to look at itself in the mirror.
One day the children fed the bird red chili
peppers and it died almost right away. Everyone
was very sad, especially the children who loved
the bird very much.

Note that the new version of the story has
retained many of the details, but has been changed
to comfortably fit the Western framework of
pseudo-scientific belief.

--------------------------------------------------

As a second example, exhibiting Choice #1 ... when
my father was dying, I visited him in the
hospital. He sat in the hospital bed saying
"Noben, roben. Soben?" My brother and his wife
were embarrassed by this. My sister-in-law said,
"Oh dear � he's been like this for days, babbling
incoherently. It's so sad that he's like this,
since he once was such a great man."

But this was /their/ interpretation of what Dad was
doing. /My/ interpretation was significantly
different because my life experience was
different. I immediately said, "Yobehn and Lobehn"
to which Dad replied, "Oh yeah, that's it! I've
been sitting here for an hour, bored out of my
mind since these guys wouldn't talk any sense to
me, trying to remember the words for left and
right in Chinese." Dad was still in full control
of his faculties, but since my brother hadn't been
in Taiwan with my Dad and I, he simply assumed
that Dad had lost his mind and was incoherent.

What might appears as babbling to many people
makes sense when you have a common belief or
experience.

--------------------------------------------------

This final example also demonstrates Choice #1...

On this January night many years ago � it was the
Sunday night before classes started for my last
semester at Palomar College � Dee, Barry and I
found ourselves chatting in a coffeehouse about
this and that. There were two other tables with
customers as well, chatting along. We amused
ourselves with the free New Age newsletters,
poetry pamphlets and civic notices we found
stacked on old oak tables, as ubiquitous in San
Diego coffee shops as nutmeg and three-dollar
brownies.

A raggedy looking man came in, ramble-babbling
like a mad man. He kept talking about the
"idle-ators", but it didn't make a whit of sense.
People in the shop tried to ignore him � as if he
didn't even exist � but were slightly alarmed,
nonetheless.

He freaked Barry out, but Dee and I were quite
amused. I myself was also intrigued. The strange
thing is that the things he were saying were
bizarre in the way a foreign language sounds
bizarre. There was an intelligible rhythm to his
words. It sounded like it made sense in some way,
I just didn't understand the words. Perhaps it
helped that I had seen the movie "Naked Lunch"
with Bill Winklemann just the night before�a movie
which I found deeply disturbing. I was indeed
deeply disturbed as a result of seeing that movie
and this probably did help me relate to the old
bearded guy.

We invited the old man to sit with us; he reacted
as if we were some automatons whose request he
decided to comply with. I started asking him
questions. At first he didn't know what to do and
just spurted back more confusings. I stuck to my
guns. I was going to decode this guy's symbol
system! I asked for definitions of every oddball
term he used. They were all defined in terms of
each other, a mish mash of contorted symbolism,
but after a sound grilling things started to come
together, albeit in a way most would find
irrational. Luckily 'irrational logic' is my
specialty. Before an hour had gone by, I could
understand everything he was saying. He'd
developed his own shorthand language to express
concepts that people didn't think about so often,
but which were dramatically important life issues
nonetheless. His philosophy questioned everyone
and everything in his life. As he realized that we
were understanding him, the lecture or recital
stopped and a little more of a dialog emerged. He
started thinking about our questions before
rattling off an answer. I wouldn't let anything
ununderstood slip past. In the end I understood
his theory, his philosophy, his perception of
reality. It was consistent, logical and it made
perfectly good sense. In fact, it was totally
compatible with my own experiences and I could
adopt it with few qualms. However, to do so would
make me an outcast. No one would understand me. It
was just too different from mainstream reality.
Inconvenient too. But totally valid. It's a lonely
path to chose�but for some individuals reality is
a little less rigid and predetermined than for
most others.

In the end, Dee with very impressed. Barry had
long since stepped out to smoke some cigs and had
not returned. A hearty and symbolic /Bon Vivant/ he
seemed to puff our way. He later chided me for
taking any risk on reality. My long time
friendship with him abruptly and permanently ended
about one week later. In fact, I think I still
have the jacket he left in my car. The other
patrons in the shop had also long since escaped.
They freaked out, one after another, as they
overheard snippets of our conversation. In their
faces, I saw not mere fear, but intense terror. To
them, such a sensible and logical but different
perception of reality is a real threat. When
Raggedy Man was just babbling to himself, things
were fine ��but now that it was clear that a
normal-looking person like myself completely
understood him � well, that was just too much,
since it ruled-out the "choice #1" insanity
assumption, leaving their perception of reality
unable to defend itself. To them, understanding
and perhaps even tolerating alien belief systems
means possibly believing them. Belief in such a
system is a one-way ticket to total and complete
social alienation. Not you as alienated from
society, but society as alienated from you. It's
just not acceptable to believe in something
/totally/ different. It was actually scary,
considering the things he said. No way to disprove
any of it, it was a wonderfully constructed,
totally consistent system. Not many people are
genius enough to invent something so fantastic,
complete and logical, yet totally different from
everything we know.

Here's a sample of a snippet of the conversation
between myself and Raggedy Man:

RM: The idle-ators, they don't see the river!
The idle-ators don't see the river!

Me: Who are the idle-ators?

RM: They are the ones that look but who don't
see.

Me: What don't they see?

RM: They don't see the river! The idle-ators,
they don't see the river!

Me: Why don't they see the river?

RM: They don't see the water. They don't see
the fish. They don't see the grass. They don't see
the rocks at the bottom of the river. They don't
see the sky or the wind. Because they only see
themselves! They cannot see the river if they only
see themselves!

Me: Oh! They see their own /reflection/ in the
river and thus don't see the river itself! Because
they are enraptured with their own importance.
Like Narcissus whom you're referencing through
this metaphor. Idolators�those who idolize or
worship material things rather than spiritual.
They worship themselves.

RM: Yes.

So with an open, nonjudgmental mind � so
nonjudgmental that you can attentively listen to
just about anything without getting upset, you can
do a bit of sleuthing, buy someone a cup of
coffee, and learn something remarkable, such as
the details of how the birds were telling RM what
was really going on and the CIA's successful plot
to silence the birds.

As an intriguing aside, there is a species of
North American Click Beetle known as the "Eyed
Elator" (/Alaus oculatus/).

-------------------------------------------------

This reconstruction of meaning, cast into the
context of the listener's own belief system, is a
serious problem when listening to stories told by
others, particularly stories told by others who
are from a different culture. Unless a story is
labeled as an allegory, metaphor, parable, or folk
tale, it is tempting for the listener to map the
entire tale into his own perception, thus
distorting, or even obliterating the point.

But it is also a problem when translating poetry
and spiritual books, both dealing with abstract
concepts, symbolism and hidden meaning, which was
assembled within the context of the writer's own
experience and culture.

-------------------------------------------------

If you listen very carefully and attentively with
the belief and understanding that other people you
encounter may actually be living in a unique
universe � one very intriguing and very different
from yours, yet just as valid and every bit as
real � then you may find people to say many
surprising things, such as we found in our first
story. Some things beautiful and some terrifying,
but all true in that other person's universe.
Theirs is a universe that does not conflict nor
contradict, that need never threaten your own
universe should you realize it is separate from
your own, but equally valid. It only coexists
with yours in a vast system if swirling twirling
churning, occasionally interlocking and/or
intertwining realities.

If you like, you can accept certain new concepts
you encounter and throw out others, creating,
evolving, perpetually modifying, even transcending
your own reality. Just make sure it is true to
you and what you really want, need and want to
believe, and not accepting of influences and
pressures to change your reality to match that of
another's. Insecure and fearful people may try to
force other people to change their perception to
match their own. They do this in order to make
their own perception seem more valid, more real.
They feel a need to do this because they do not
understand. Succumbing to these pressures will
eventually result in imprisoning yourself in a
false system, thus losing your true freedom,
freedom to perceive in your own way and perhaps
losing your own soul, annihilated by the beliefs
of others. Only one person may experience each
perception of reality; to accept another's
perception is to annihilate your individuality,
your sovereignty, your sentience, your soul, to be
one with them, giving them a perverse and twisted
power that is the seed from which evil grows,
develops, and matures.