file: 07 weed in the yard [1999].mp4
composition: weed in the yard (failed 2013 remaster of 1999 cd demo)
status: downloaded youtube video
Thursday, December 19, 2013
thoughts regarding a repressed memory
it's amazing how repressed memories can just throw themselves back at you. i remember this clearly, now. which is remarkable, because i couldn't have been older than 2.
i'm sitting in a high chair, eating chocolate cake. which means it was probably my birthday. i've long deciphered the language that these humans around me are using. i'm struck by their deep corruption, and ultimately frightened by them. i understand that my safety in their presence is never certain.
somebody, perhaps my mother, tells me that once i learn to talk i'll be more like them. i can't remember the language, i can only remember the reaction, which was horror.
it was probably something parents or grandparents reflexively say on early birthdays. getting big. be talking soon.
my decision not to speak as a child, which lasted for several years, was a fully conscious attempt to keep myself pure from what had been identified as the source of human corruption: language.
...and i can now also remember myself walking around the hospital in circles, kicking a toy around the waiting room, and weighing the pros and cons of keeping my innocence by maintaining my silence, which i would, of course, eventually break.
for whatever reason, i've never told anybody this.
apparently, what the doctors determined is that i was disinterested in human interaction - not autistic, but simply highly introverted.
there was more to it than that.
and i'm not sure i've changed much.
existential dread is usually measured in terms of "teenage angst", but i wonder if anybody's studied it in toddlers.
i was saying "g-houst", with a soft g like j, but i interpreted gh the same way as ch or sh - always soft and never hard.
(i hadn't yet seen words like 'chromatic')
the day-to-day pronunciation of "ghost", as in "ghostbuster", struck me as a populist fallacy. i was certain that true poltergeist experts in the actual field would pronounce it correctly, correctly meaning in a way that conformed to my understanding of phonetic rules - gh must be just like sh and ch.
what was actually driving my insistence was a fallacy of precedence. i seem to have believed that words existed inherently in written form first and were only later taken up in speech. as such, they are defined by the rules of phonetics first and foremost and then corrupted by human speakers who impose populist fallacies upon them. i know now that it's actually the other way around, that written language is designed to capture the sounds of human speaking and that when humans change how they speak, written language changes as well.
i do, however, have specific and clear memories of what i'm saying.
i probably arrived at that fallacy of precedence (which is actually some kind of platonism, funnily enough) through experience. i mean, it's not like i had it formally postulated, but it seems to be the not-thought-through assumption i was working with because it's how i approached it: i was reading before i was talking.
the concept of the unwashed masses being too ignorant to pronounce 'ghost' correctly, gh clearly being just like sh or ch, must have also been an example of the fallacy of generalizing the specific.
so, i do fully admit to relying too much on deduction and not enough on experience and coming to some faulty conclusions as a result of that. in my defense, i'll state that i learned the value of scientific thinking very early - PRECISELY due to making deductive errors very young.
again, though, i specifically remember wrestling with the idea of whether i should talk or not and going through a long period of not talking due to rejecting it.
but, yeah, that's what i was thinking: ghostbusters was just watered down pop-sci for the masses, whomever put it together screwed up the pronunciation, and real ghostbusters that had advanced degrees in the topic would know how to pronounce it properly because they would understand that gh must be just like sh and ch (which i had never seen in a hard usage).
just to put it more in context, a word like 'zucchini' would have deeply bothered me as well. i would have argued until i was blue that it should be pronounced 'zook-cheen-ee", and then proceeded to phonetically deconstruct the word in a perfectly reasonably demonstration of that fact. i would have used phonetic rules that i only vaguely remember today, like the first i making the second long and the double cs making the u long. it would have actually been pretty complicated and impressive - and completely correct, in the sense of a formally logical deduction from first principles. i would have then accused anybody that maintained the popular, fallacious pronunciation as being functionally illiterate.
in other words, i would have not just expected there to be an underlying theory of pronunciation, i would have thought myself well-versed in it's rules, and then expected people to follow those rules. i would get very upset when people denied those rules and denounce them as pretenders and anarchists. my universe was very ordered through strict rules of structural logic.
of course, in time, i learned this isn't true. it was a valuable learning process.
ultimately, i wanted the world to be easily analyzable: i wanted everything around me to be understood through logical deduction. that way, i could say "this is why things are like this". the why, and the knowing why, and the knowing how to know why, was very important to me.
suggestions that the universe was different than this, that there were exceptions that could not be understood deductively, bothered me very deeply and would put me into temper tantrums.
the way to convince me, btw, would have been to argue with me on a phonetic basis, rather than simply tell me what is true and what isn't on an authoritarian level. and i think that's what eventually ended up happening. somebody explained to me that i had the 'gh' sound wrong, phonetically, that it's not soft before a vowel as one would expect by analogy through ch, and i went from there.
in fact, i remember that this person was my grandmother.
i'm sitting in a high chair, eating chocolate cake. which means it was probably my birthday. i've long deciphered the language that these humans around me are using. i'm struck by their deep corruption, and ultimately frightened by them. i understand that my safety in their presence is never certain.
somebody, perhaps my mother, tells me that once i learn to talk i'll be more like them. i can't remember the language, i can only remember the reaction, which was horror.
it was probably something parents or grandparents reflexively say on early birthdays. getting big. be talking soon.
my decision not to speak as a child, which lasted for several years, was a fully conscious attempt to keep myself pure from what had been identified as the source of human corruption: language.
...and i can now also remember myself walking around the hospital in circles, kicking a toy around the waiting room, and weighing the pros and cons of keeping my innocence by maintaining my silence, which i would, of course, eventually break.
for whatever reason, i've never told anybody this.
apparently, what the doctors determined is that i was disinterested in human interaction - not autistic, but simply highly introverted.
there was more to it than that.
and i'm not sure i've changed much.
existential dread is usually measured in terms of "teenage angst", but i wonder if anybody's studied it in toddlers.
i was saying "g-houst", with a soft g like j, but i interpreted gh the same way as ch or sh - always soft and never hard.
(i hadn't yet seen words like 'chromatic')
the day-to-day pronunciation of "ghost", as in "ghostbuster", struck me as a populist fallacy. i was certain that true poltergeist experts in the actual field would pronounce it correctly, correctly meaning in a way that conformed to my understanding of phonetic rules - gh must be just like sh and ch.
what was actually driving my insistence was a fallacy of precedence. i seem to have believed that words existed inherently in written form first and were only later taken up in speech. as such, they are defined by the rules of phonetics first and foremost and then corrupted by human speakers who impose populist fallacies upon them. i know now that it's actually the other way around, that written language is designed to capture the sounds of human speaking and that when humans change how they speak, written language changes as well.
i do, however, have specific and clear memories of what i'm saying.
i probably arrived at that fallacy of precedence (which is actually some kind of platonism, funnily enough) through experience. i mean, it's not like i had it formally postulated, but it seems to be the not-thought-through assumption i was working with because it's how i approached it: i was reading before i was talking.
the concept of the unwashed masses being too ignorant to pronounce 'ghost' correctly, gh clearly being just like sh or ch, must have also been an example of the fallacy of generalizing the specific.
so, i do fully admit to relying too much on deduction and not enough on experience and coming to some faulty conclusions as a result of that. in my defense, i'll state that i learned the value of scientific thinking very early - PRECISELY due to making deductive errors very young.
again, though, i specifically remember wrestling with the idea of whether i should talk or not and going through a long period of not talking due to rejecting it.
but, yeah, that's what i was thinking: ghostbusters was just watered down pop-sci for the masses, whomever put it together screwed up the pronunciation, and real ghostbusters that had advanced degrees in the topic would know how to pronounce it properly because they would understand that gh must be just like sh and ch (which i had never seen in a hard usage).
just to put it more in context, a word like 'zucchini' would have deeply bothered me as well. i would have argued until i was blue that it should be pronounced 'zook-cheen-ee", and then proceeded to phonetically deconstruct the word in a perfectly reasonably demonstration of that fact. i would have used phonetic rules that i only vaguely remember today, like the first i making the second long and the double cs making the u long. it would have actually been pretty complicated and impressive - and completely correct, in the sense of a formally logical deduction from first principles. i would have then accused anybody that maintained the popular, fallacious pronunciation as being functionally illiterate.
in other words, i would have not just expected there to be an underlying theory of pronunciation, i would have thought myself well-versed in it's rules, and then expected people to follow those rules. i would get very upset when people denied those rules and denounce them as pretenders and anarchists. my universe was very ordered through strict rules of structural logic.
of course, in time, i learned this isn't true. it was a valuable learning process.
ultimately, i wanted the world to be easily analyzable: i wanted everything around me to be understood through logical deduction. that way, i could say "this is why things are like this". the why, and the knowing why, and the knowing how to know why, was very important to me.
suggestions that the universe was different than this, that there were exceptions that could not be understood deductively, bothered me very deeply and would put me into temper tantrums.
the way to convince me, btw, would have been to argue with me on a phonetic basis, rather than simply tell me what is true and what isn't on an authoritarian level. and i think that's what eventually ended up happening. somebody explained to me that i had the 'gh' sound wrong, phonetically, that it's not soft before a vowel as one would expect by analogy through ch, and i went from there.
in fact, i remember that this person was my grandmother.
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