I’m currently using a vocal synthesizer called Cantai as a compositional work tool. Though imperfect, with a limited choice of voices, it is somewhat miraculous. The illusion of reality it creates is very useful in imagining a work. The program, like a small child learning to read, has certain problems. One is its sometimes-faulty pronunciation. Another problem is that it chooses between words that sound the same, like read (present tense) and read (past tense) seemingly at random. I suspect in another 1 or 2 years most of its problems will be fixed thanks to some type of AI interface that would analyze the words within the body of the text. Working with this program has led me to think about the highly complex mental processes that we take for granted when speaking. It also made me wonder about why certain double meanings seem never to occur to us.
For example, I know a poet who is very interested in words as pivots, she likes to play with their ambivalence and how they can lead in different directions, like alleys off the main street. She writes what could be called analytical/intellectual poetry where the double meaning of words is always at play. A few years ago, she had a child who she named Wye. I told her that it was interesting that she named her child as a question. She looked at me and said she had no idea what I was talking about, so I said “W-Y-E sounds like W-H-Y”. She got a strange look on her face as I saw her computing what I said. Then she quietly said, “I had never thought of that”.
Once I was looking at a friend’s notebook on which he had placed a sticker that read “color a do”. I was puzzled and asked him what it meant. Did it mean that when you do something, you should try to give it color, that is, make it interesting? He looked at me and said “Colorado”. I looked back and there it was, the single word “Colorado”. Why didn’t I see it at first? I recall driving in the USA and seeing a sign that said, “Steel plates in the road, a head.” For several seconds I had no idea what it meant until I finally saw it for what it was, “Steel plates in the road ahead”. I theorize that his type of thinking is what gave rise to the comedic style of Groucho Marx with his lines like “Last night I saw an elephant in my pajamas.” Perhaps my misreadings reveal something about the wiring of my brain, still, I offer the idea that erroneous readings can reveal hidden truths or at least provide food for thought.
Consider The United States. I think a great service would be done for its citizens if people started to read it and think of it not as “A collection of politically united groups” but rather as “a group of people with widely varying emotional and intellectual dispositions all living together.” A political state suggests unity, as if all the people in a given place form a single body with a shared sense of purpose. This clearly does not represent the United States as it exists in reality. Perhaps at the time of the Founding Fathers a shared outlook and sense of purpose did exist, I can’t say, but now it doesn’t.
The emphasis in our reading therefore should change. What exists now is a great need for the recognition that other people hold positions radically different from our own, that this is the reality of things and should be expected and therefore must be the base from which we move forward. In short, our emotional states should be recognized as primary in our thinking process. In fact, once we move beyond merely shared political concerns into the vast realm of humanity, each person you meet is like a country to explore unto themselves. This is the subject of psychology and psychoanalysis.
Consider your own daily life. Would you say you live in the state of Maryland, Texas or Iowa, or is existence better described as living in a state of uncertainty, a state of chaos, a state of imbalance, a state of tension, a state of transition or a state of exhaustion? Thinking of The United States in the sense of a collected set of varying emotional dispositions would assume from the start that when you are dealing with another person you must be prepared to deal with a perspective different from your own. And similarly, the perspective you are expressing is probably from your interlocutor’s view, equally as different. This obviously would slow things down a bit, but after all, what’s the rush?
It would be a much more interesting way to meet people and to run a country if it was based on real humanity. It would also encourage people to see themselves as something other than political units with rights. Each new person you met would be like an adventure beginning with the question “I wonder where he or she is coming from” rather than “does this person share my political perspective?” Because the odds are, once you leave the surface and go deeper, he or she probably doesn’t.