Mum Mummy Mummer

While watching the Mummers Parade, a New Year's celebratory march of outlandishly costumed street performers (imagine Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans meeting Rio's Carnival in downtown Philadelphia, PA), I flipped through some books I'd bought at the annual used reading material sale from our local library. As many of you know, libraries toss tonnes of texts into the garbage every year but some libraries try to make a little profit selling books, magazines and other physical goods in decent shape. These days, you can buy ex-library or remainder books online through resellers hanging their shingles on websites like amazon.co.uk or daedalusbooks.com.

But I'm not here to talk about books, purchased or otherwise (such as the free one I got from David Bach via email yesterday, "Start Over, Finish Rich," a reminder that you/us, the average investor, should not let short-term setbacks move you off the track of long-term financial success, a down economy means an up opportunity for you (e.g., find out more about your neighbours who need to move a house/condo quickly because of dire financial straits and scoop up a cheap rental property in the process), etc.). But maybe I am [reminder to self: write blog entry about when my newly-married, one income parents used their discretionary funds for housekeeping/au pair type services which, as empty-nesters, they now use to pay for high-speed Internet, mobile phone and cable television services - you don't need two incomes to survive in today's economy, you need wiser spending habits; teach your offspring and yourselves the value of opportunity costs].

You see, I found an interesting book. Old. Dusty. Ragged edges. The type of book that the H.P. Lovecrafts and Dan Browns of the world love to whisper about finding in sepulchral out-of-the-way digs. In other words, a book published in 2008 which never made it to the bestseller lists, ending up on piles in places like Mike's Merchandise or the local library sale.

No ISBN. No reference numbers of any kind. Presumably self-published. Donated to the library? Purchased by the library for a curious reader? I don't know.

"Dissidence and Dissonance" by Presonia La Fontaine. No picture of the author. No self-inflating biographical sketch of a home in the Hamptons and a Paris apartment where the author lives with a spouse, three children and two dogs when not traversing the planet spreading joy and happiness to others.

A slim volume. Less than 100 pages. Full of facts I haven't doublechecked and verified against what I always hope are reliable sources. Interesting reading, though, even if the facts aren't real.

You see, Presonia (guy or gal?) proposed that the world's great musical composers were or are members of a secret society dedicated to spreading the voice of freedom, seeking victories not in direct clashes with governmental authorities but through the subversive use of music to tell stories that contradict the official party lines told by their political leaders and teach others to interpret the text hidden in the musical notes.

The author ended the book with the question about whether other communication methods like spread spectrum technology are also subversive means of conversation for intelligentsia.

And now you know why I've become interested in writing musical compositions of my own. Presonia presented what s/he considered actual textual interpretations of classic music from sources all over the world, including tribal music from the Amazon, North America, Africa and Australia. Presonia also proposed that the music of the opening and closing ceremonies of the Olympics in China were specifically written to thwart government censorship there, following in the footsteps of great Russian composers before the fall of the Soviet Union, encouraging revolt not in physical attacks on the government but in dissident thinking. Presonia showed why the prepared piano was created and musical scores of John Cage were written for dissidents within the United States.

Presonia then wrote several chapters analysing the dissonance of modern music, from jazz and bebop to hip hop and rap, showing that the same symbols or "letters of the alphabet" can be found in all music, once one understands how one frequency can be both the stroke of the letter (in a chord) and a letter, too, and how rhythm has multiple purposes, like combining musical symbols onto a set of three-dimensional dice, where one has to know not only the symbol on the face of a die but also the symbols on the die's faces that you can't see and the supersymbol (or alphabetic letter) formed by the specific placement of dice in a song.

In the chapter where Presonia presented what s/he determined was the ultimate goal of music, to allow anarchy to disrupt the evil plans of world governments, I lost interest. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I don't see or care if there are ulterior motives of the people around me. I have no hidden agenda to achieve. My goals are announced for the world of people to see. Either you're with me or you're not with me. My purpose of seeing if Presonia's theories are true are to improve my means of communicating with those around me. If I can use music to achieve a richer, deeper sense of understanding what others are saying, then my current view of life is worth living in this moment. Otherwise, I'll find another view.

And while I investigate music as a sound-based hieroglyphic symbolic text-writing machine, I'll dig into the use of other seemingly arbitrary combinations of waveforms as more complex means of talking and thinking. I spent too much time in my youth seeing analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog chips as the only way to convert one energy state to another that I never gave much thought about analog-to-analog or digital-to-digital as the message-sending means. What if ultra-wideband is the medium and the message?

Makes me ponder the old saying, "Only the blind can truly see." I've spent and continue to spend too much time trying to believe what my eyes tell me that I forget we think and communicate using multiple methods already - voice, body language, touch, low-power "brain waves," hormones, etc.

Look at a map of the universe's gamma ray energy sources from Earth's point of view and you see why a single planet or solar system is a poor, low-resolution viewpoint of the universe around us. Like asking a jungle pygmy to describe the purpose of a nuclear power plant - the pygmy may be able to create a curative salve with the leaf of a rare orchid but could not, by looking at the nuclear plant, know how to compute the decay rate of radioactive material.

All these years I spent studying written languages, worrying myself about grammar and sentence structure, watching as linguists try to assemble the set of "original" words spoken by our species... and here in front of me has been the primary or aboriginal language all along: the sound waves themselves. For those who are already in the know, I ask your patience as I come up to speed. For those of you already using multiple waveforms to communicate, I commend you. For those of you who know the extrauniversal conversation tools, I look forward to meeting with you soon.

To know I am here only because you are / exist and I am not here because I do not exist, all while I discover ways of being me I never thought possible is really what my life is all about. And only a few days ago I thought these words were all I had! Instead, I see (blindly and lately) that how I talk to you, my friends, is just as important as what I say.

Have a great day!