Listening to Corn
Shhhh
Our reading for my cultural studies class (Hum) this week was "A Different Yield" by Linda Hogan. She wrote about Barbara McClintock, a Nobel Prize winning biologist studying gene transposition in corn plants. "Her method was to listen to what corn had to say and translate that into human language."
I can get that.
It's been a while but I've been in cornfields (and many other fields) and they are alive with sound.
Most of the time that all gets blocked out. But it is a thing I like to do; just pick a spot and sit there and listen.
Corn is easy to hear but it takes a lot of experience to know what the sound means.
I can imagine that with a lot of study one could learn how a particular genetic change causes the sound of a cornfield to change.
That's a very normal thing in human experience. To a certain extent I can tell the time of day from the sounds coming through the window. There are bells and whistles and passing trains. I spent a couple of months tracking crows in the grove outside my window using a database. That tool led me to track other things (like trains) and all that tracking sensitized me to the associated sounds.
There is a lot I hear that has no particular meaning. That stuff is ignored.
That is, it's like the meaningless stuff isn't there. Perceiving is the act of finding or making meaning within the infinite data provided by reality.
A perception involves a story about what's going on around us. To put it abstractly, data that doesn't fit the story isn't perceived. My own reading has led me to understand that this capacity to create a story from data is physically expressed in the structure of our brains and body to the extent that now we make machines with the same capacity.
I find that to listen you need to stop talking.
When a person talks, the thing they are trying to say takes over that storytelling apparatus so we can't hear. I experience this vividly in the class. I can't say much because I'm listening and then in the silence of the night I think of all sorts of things to say.
I have a meta-observation here. The direction of my discussion here is different from Linda Hogan's.
My account is based on a materialist view of life and reality. This is a view that depends on stories that are supported by objective evidence. So in this context; information becomes meaningful.
Hogan implies that meaningful information is said. That is, the corn was saying to McClintock. Surprisingly, I find that runs smack up against my materialist view in a triggering way because there is a LOT of historical baggage packed into that simple little implication.
The implication speaks of something with a mind that says. After all, we have lots of experience of other people speaking and we think of them as having minds. Then we think of rocks and clouds as speaking - those things have no brains so how could they speak? The short answer is that minds exist in a non-material spiritual dimension.
This triggers me because it's an erroneous way of thinking that causes lots of harm in our world. But I sit back and listen to what people are trying to say rather than to the distracting trigger.
The teacher of that class was Daniel Heath Justice (http://danielheathjustice.com) and he showed us some beautiful wampum belts and explained a bit about their meaning. Seems the idea I got in public school was a bit off (gasp :-)
Daniel presented them as literature with meaning on many levels that you needed training to read. He explained some of the meaning.
Wampum was not created as a decoration nor as a means of exchange. It was created to be exchanged with other groups in a meaningful way. He spoke of the sort of misunderstandings that arose when indigenous people gave settlers wampum that the settlers couldn't read. The settlers couldn't tell an offer of peace from an offer of war.
Daniel spoke of the importance of storytellers in his culture. People would be trained from an early age to be storytellers. They learned to tell standard stories in creative ways. The standard meant that everyone understood the overall meaning and the creativity enabled nuance and richness.
When I was a kid I got a bunch of standardized stories within the Christian context. Some told a cultural story. Others (like be good or Santa won't bring you any presents) were plainly (even to a little kid) behavioral training tools. The sum of those stories made Christmas a glowing time of year.
I've changed since then. I'm listening to different stories. And now I'm kind of like corn too. Is anybody listening?
What do you think?
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I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.