I suppose I was looking for evidence that there is room in the black mind for at least a small period of unambiguous engagement with the parrot. If your preoccupation with race and injustice occupies you so completely that even the parrot cannot dislodge it, then it must be a sad life.

I dont follow. Are you saying that you believe that black people are constantly focused on issues of injustice and race that they cannot see even the simple beauty of a parrot? In my own experience I find that the “black mind” is quite capable of such unambiguous engagement.

A recent trip to Fort Lauderdale had me shaking my head at some of my friends, as they seemed to be fascinated by things that I think most people would find most mundane. Cumulonimbus clouds that were shaped liked Ogun’s Anvil, puddles on the ground shaped like Cuba, and some dude who was walking his pet pig.

OK. That pet pig was the shit. I think if I had given the pig some more coffee, it would have been mine. It wanted me. And I it. It even told me good bye and appeared to squeal my name as they left. We could have………

Er, what i am trying to say is that there may have been many other reasons (including obviously, your own unconscious bias) than “race and injustice” that could have caused a lack of preoccupation with the parrot.
And what is so that a preoccupation with race and injustice is cause for a sad life? It could very will signify that one has found cause in life, a cause in life, maybe one that is aesthetic, ethical or even unconditional in its commitment.

1. The Commons doesn’t seem to have changed much since the early 80s, modulo fashion trends.

2. Every town like Ithaca/Berkeley has a guy with a tropical pet (the more intellectual types often go with the African Grey). They tends to spend lots of time in public spaces preening (that would be the pet and the human). To avoid competition, I believe there’s either a secret CraigsList section or the equivalent of a Taxi & Limo Commission.

3. Given the display-frequency, this particular couple may have already been familiar to many passers-by, affecting their non/response.

Continue what you do sir.

As for sadness… yeah, I supposed I have an essentially tragic outlook on life, as I wrote about in a recent piece.

Not really ‘sadness’ in the usual sense of melancholy, but in an existential sense. I haven’t ever met somebody who I truly respected who didn’t have such a mindset… day to day, it plays out more as humor. As the greeks knew, in tragedy there is comedy and vice versa.

Venkat

No, I was suggesting no such complex. You’re a thinking man like me, and I sensed a bit of sadness in your writing regarding your questioning of the experiences around you. And as for the religious aspect, that’s why I put God it quotation marks and said “it”. Whatever created all of this, it must have been some undertaking. At some point “it” must have wondered how parrots would interact with humans. I think you wondering such things too would make our manufacturer proud.

Are you suggesting that I have a God complex or am a tortured free-associator? I’d like to adopt the pose of tortured genius, but frankly, I don’t think I feel particularly troubled (nice to come across as such though!). I don’t think I could ever get a God complex since I am too cheerful to feel responsible for the fate of the world. If were ever in the position of creating a universe (as a game programmer say) I’d probably try to make it arbitrary and silly just for the hell of it.

Since I am not religious, the God question doesn’t trouble me, since I think overwhelming diversity is the natural consequence of any blind evolutionary process. But I am sure religious folks consider it blasphemous to think that an omniscient, omnipotent being would take “time” to do anything or that it would need like “sketches”

Venkat

Am I wrong If I think you seem troubled at how creative your mind can get regarding such things?

Can you imagine the thoughts that must have gone through “God’s” mind when “it” had to create 2-trillion such creatures? Wonder how long it sat looking at it’s shetches prior to creating?

Good write.

If you hadn’t been one stanza too long, I’d have thought you were..yes…parroting! it. (Sorry) No, I don’t mean parroting, but inspired by similar things, and maybe doing a similar kind of exercise, or making a similar kind of point about imagination and reality.

Neat story.

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/620.html

tubelite:actually, I haven’t seen this idea beaten to death, at least not authoritatively. Cryptic koans and obscure allegories don’t satisfy my definition of ‘authoritative’ .

You are conflating two different things though. Sensorimotor skills moving from the neocortex (active decision making) to the cerebellum/brain stem (learned state) is, I think, fundamentally different from pre-verbal memories feeling qualitatively different. I’ll have to think about this, but I think there is something important that is different between the two types of background-receding cognition.

More later on the childhood stuff. I find Peter Pan a dangerous guide there, given the somewhat messed up life and dead-brother issues of J. M. Barrie.

If you have kids, by all means do preserve their books. It’s a legacy beyond price.

Another such repository of memory, though of little introspection value, is music, especially the type which becomes very popular and quickly fades away, never to be heard again. Listening to such (old) music gives a pretty good “feel” for that time period. Again, listen to it too often and it fades.

The brain has evolved the verbal filter mechanism to deal with information explosion. A feeble analogy would be my first week of driving in India. It was terrible – everything in my field of vision was flagged as a threat. I was immensely stressed out. Gradually, I evolved a filter which embedded itself in my firmware, so I can now drive through familiar routes on autopilot, with my higher consciousness free to wonder about parrots or read audiobooks. At the end of the drive I barely have any conscious memory about the route or obstacles encountered, unless there were any serious exceptions thrown up by firmware. Without such a mechanism, driving – and indeed most of our daily lives – would be impossible.

The problem, of course, is that overuse of the mechanism leaves us jaded, bereft of the childlike wonder and excitement which characterized the early stages of life. Among my friends, I notice that the ones who are visibly the happiest and have the most “fun” are those who are still capable of being excited, by toys, by places, who still exhibit some of the impulsiveness which is a hallmark of of children, who, in short, have a teeny bit of Peter Pan about them.

I am sure this topic has been authoritatively beaten to death in one of your high-falutin’ books, but part of the whole meditation idea, I guess, is to suppress the verbal side of the brain, to open the doors to experience things which need not be reducible to words. “Tao” and “Brahman” and “fire” are mere words to those who haven’t experienced them. Personally, I have experienced fire, but not the others

You read my intent with the piece bang on target, so that means I managed to transcend Wiio’s law (“Communication usually fails, except by accident.”)

In fact, one of the original forms of this idea that I had was to take a photograph and overlay it with a huge tag cloud of verbal associations and somehow illustrating the spreading web of verbal associations drowning it (maybe as a movie starting with the raw photo and then drowning in words). Unfortunately my photoshop/animated gif abilities aren’t there yet.

Pre-verbal memories or just-verbal memories are interesting. I mostly don’t have any, but smells occasionally will bring back very powerful, vivid but semantically foggy memories.

My response to the parrot. Hmm… I guess it was authentic for about 5 seconds, but then I got sucked into watching the unfolding surrounding drama. I did exercise some self-discipline and at least continued to engage the whole human+parrot scene rather letting my eyes glaze over to allow my mind to wander off on some tangent like “how people are like superstrings” or something. I think I stayed in truly observer mode for almost an hour before the itch to take notes for this piece overcame my greed for more data, and I disengaged. It is really really tough to actually observe something as a way of starting to write about it. Unless there is an obvious story playing out with an abstractable narrative arc, your eyes and mind will want to wander.

Excellent piece, by the way.

As we gain verbal abilities, other experiential modes seem to get smothered by the verbal filters we place over our eyes. At least that’s been my experience, as I look through the relics of my past.

I remember a calendar full of pictures from my 3-year old days. I was barely verbal then, and I have vivid memories of what I felt as I gazed at those pictures for hours and days. It’s very different from any kind of memory I’ve synthesized since then – infinitely richer – and by definition, I can’t straitjacket those feelings into words and share them with others. I looked at the same calendar the other day, and were it not for my 3-year old self, I would have dismissed them as rather commonplace picture post-card material – oh, that’s a bunch of boats, that’s an aerial photo of the countryside, that’s a snow-covered mountain…

Remember the scene in The Matrix, with weird symbols falling down the screen in a green deluge? Neo asks Cypher, “Do you always look at it encoded?” Cypher replies, “Have to… you get used to it, though. Your brain does the translating. I don’t even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette.”

We accomplish the inverse. Our brain does the translating, annotating each object in our field of vision with a word and dismissing it. That’s a tree. Not a tall towering greeny wavy splotches of bright colour…

I close with a quote from Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light. I have no doubt it’s heavily inspired by Hindu/Buddhist canon.

If they come upon one who still has not seen it and they speak to him of fire, he does not know what they mean. So they, in turn, fall back upon telling him what fire is like. As they do so, they know from their own experience that what they are telling him is not the truth, but only a part of it. They know that this man will never know reality from their words, though all the words in the world are theirs to use. He must look upon the fire, smell of it, warm his hands by it, stare into its heart, or remain forever ignorant. Therefore, ‘fire’ does not matter, ‘earth’ and ‘air’ and ‘water’ do not matter. ‘I’ do not matter. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him. He looks upon the great transformations of the world, but he does not see them as they were seen when man looked upon reality for the first time. Their names come to his lips and he smiles as he tastes them, thinking he knows them in the naming. The thing that has never happened before is still happening. It is still a miracle. The great burning blossom squats, flowing, upon the limb of the world, excreting the ash of the world, and being none of these things I have named and at the same time all of them, and this is reality — the Nameless.

There is one thing which left me with an uncomfortable feeling in this article.
“If your preoccupation with race and injustice occupies you so completely that even the parrot cannot dislodge it, then it must be a sad life. In a very real sense, your mind is not free, and therefore neither are you, if there is not even temporary room for the parrot.”

In general,
Preoccupied mind = mind not free

What about
Mind Preoccupied by choice (as in involved in solving a puzzle say!!..)?
I wouldnt call that a sad life

You can see his drawings of parrots here (one resembles your description very closely) or use the link in the title to learn more about representations of birds:
http://cidc.library.cornell.edu/Fuertes2000/SResults.asp?index=B&RecQuery=parrot&HasThumbs=0

Happy birding!