Friday, February 12, 2016

Notes on Memory and Communication

Three years in to caring for Fig, life is still full of surprises.

A tale of memory...

So recently Fig insists on washing the dishes together. She sits on my shoulder, chatters and begs for hugs, by which I mean she tugs my hair, then when I turn to look at her, she rotates her head and leans into me which means she wants to touch foreheads, and feel the heat of my breath, and skin against her feathery head. I can look directly into her upturned eye as if she's a whale turned on its side in the open sea, and she peers lovingly at me through her white nictating eyelid winking, and blinking adoringly. A forehead hug, nose nuzzling, hot breath in feathers affectionate romantic interaction like this can go on for sometime, so I have to keep reheating the dish water.

Anyway, I was washing the colorful plastic cutlery my son has now outgrown but still likes to use, and I was showing them to Fig, trying to recall the words/syllables I had assigned to the 13 colors I had taught Fig three years ago. Fig do you remember this color, I said, Ao, that's blue. She cocked her head as if to say, okay. And this one is green, what was that, oh yeah Do! I got through four colors, and could see she was paying attention. But I was now out of plastic spoons, and down to regular cutlery. I lifted up a silver spoon. What color Figgy? I had totally forgotten what I had used for Silver. Arrrr she said, dragging out the rrrrr like a pirate. Indeed that was correct. She had remembered the color for silver from two years back. I was quite surprised and impressed. My son heard her say it too, and he instantly recalled that she had learned colors, and he insisted I get down Figs box and give him the color swatches so he could practice the colors with her. What a wonderful son I have.

A tale of communication...

Crow communication is complex. But more than that, it is different. I have not proven to be a great learner of the Japanese language. My main weakness is listening. I can prattle away about my own thoughts well enough, but listening to others, a radio, or a TV is much, much harder. It is no different listening to a Crow, but the main difference here, is that I am the only person I know who is learning the language, so that being the case, I listen harder. Maybe I like animals more than people. Certainly, I empathize with animals more easily, and a big reason for that is their lack of voice in a remarkably unempathetic, human world.

I used to write things down. I used to record contexts, and details. But now, I realize that doing all that is rather more distracting than it is worthwhile. So now, I just really listen when Fig talks, and almost every time she talks, and I really, really listen hard. You have to. There are subtleties going on, but there is also a biologically different mechanism functioning. The voice, and the ears of an animal are a set. To a certain, perhaps large extent, the ears of a being are designed to listen to the voice of that particular being. I suppose that makes some sort of sense, but it is not necessarily an intuitive observation. One sort of assumes one can hear just about everything, but this really is not the case. One only realizes this sort of thing after hours, weeks, months, and perhaps years of listening to an animal speak, and realizing that one is still standing there shaking one's head, saying to one's disappointed self, and said animal, nope, I still did not manage to quite catch that sound, or a glimmer of meaning, pardon me, could you kindly repeat that, please. But as I have stated, I am not really a fantastic natural listener. I have gotten better though.

There is a certain amount of learning that goes on by osmosis in regards to listening, to be sure. Giving up has its merits, almost as much as deciding to try really damn hard. I have tried both. But to be honest, with Fig, because I am the only one in her life who she really needs to have understand her, 98 percent of my approach has been along the listen really, really damn hard route. I wish I could say the same for my Japanese.

Anyway, I have figured out a few general things. First, Crows use a small vocabulary of words, such as water, food, friend, enemy. Second, they use those words to create a far greater variety of meanings than the sum of the words alone, and they do this by using repetition, emphasis, tone, pitch, modulation, and most subtly by changing the ending, very similarly to the way humans change meanings by conjugation of verbs, for example.

I do not want to write a long dissertation on Crow communication at this time. I only wanted to write a general description to give some idea of my understanding of what is going on because recently Fig gave me one illustrative example which struck a chord in my rather hard, old, frontal lobe:

I had gotten busy, and Fig was in the bathroom. She had been behaving well, and was quietly grooming, but I knew she must be getting ready for some attention.  Sure enough she started yanking away at her perch cover; this is her way of saying, Hey, hey buddy! Come and show a lonely Crow some love!!!! Well, I was pretty busy, and admittedly, I ignored her much more than usual. Eventually, she settled back down, but she was not preening or occupying herself, so I could tell a storm was brewing. Then I added the straw that broke the camel's back. I started washing the dishes. Well, that was just too much for Fig. She knows that I know, that I know that she knows that washing the dishes is something that she and I do together. She wasn't having it. She launched into a loud vocal scold which hit home. It was a scold that I may have heard before, but probably quite rarely because honestly, I pay Fig extremely devoted attention most of the time, so she would have very rare occasion to use this language.

What she did is she screamed the word friend. I cannot reproduce how she said it here, in words alone. I can only describe it. If you say the word friend with the usual tone, attitude, and pitch and volume that you might usually scream the word, ASSHOLE, that will give you some idea. The effect was that she was saying, You are supposed to be my friend! In English, if you are really pissed off, you might drop the end of a word, as in, Assho-, if you really say it fast, well that too is also what Fig did with the word friend, as in Fren-. I am certain that she was being sincere and direct about her feelings, but was she was employing sarcasm within her language? I certainly felt that was the case.

I am not sure why, but this was a mini-cathartic moment in understanding Crow communication for me, particularly because I realized that I really have to fill in, or listen for subtle ending changes on words.

The word for friend in Fig's language is Ha-oh, or How.  So, if you drop the oh off, it just sounds like Ha which is a totally different word, and meaning depending on several ways that it might be said.

Anyway, this moment in particular solidified my listening approach with Crows. First and foremost, I try to accurately pin down the word being used. Secondly, I listen for the emotion. Is it cheer, excitement, worry, surprise, annoyance, anger? Crows spend a lot of time nagging one another. And they have incredible teamwork, and expectation of replies when they communicate. More and more I feel as though they communicate much like a human mother and child, only in the case of the Crows, the children roam more widely and freely, perhaps because they are much more willing to answer back when nagged, and not just to mother, but to whom so ever happens to be part of their perimeter. I have to wonder why Crows are so good at the "answering back" while humans, especially human children, seem so infuriatingly poor at it. Perhaps it is the way human children keep their parents close. And perhaps Crows are good at two way communication because that works better for groups. Anyway, Crows spend a lot of time nagging each other, and so they inevitably find themselves using an annoyed tone of voice quite a lot, just as humans do, especially if no one answers their calls when they ought to. Thirdly, I listen to the pitch, volume, and repetition because this tells me who they are talking to, far or near, what they are talking about, something immediate, or abstract.

So once again...
1. What is the word?
2. What is the emotion?
3. What is the emphasis(es)?
Listening in this way has greatly helped me to understand exactly what Fig is saying and to whom much more of the time.

To give one more example:
Ah is used to say hello.
Hello, is flat. Ah. (Ah, you're home.)
I am here, goes up. Like if you say, Hi! (directing attention here, more at oneself)
I see you, goes down. Like if you say, Hey! (talking about there)
I love you (aka I'm so happy to see you.), is drawn out in a croony song. Ah-ah-ah-ah (I missed you so-oo-ooh much!)
Same word, same general meaning "hello", different stress, pitch, repetition, therefore expresses a variety of emotions, frames the subject, suits the context.
It is very similar to human language communication in all of it's minute subtleties. Yes, yes, I realize that I started out by saying it was different, well mainly I had meant about the physical, mechanical apparatuses of the vocal chords, and the ears, in my defense.

It is a lot of fun, listening to an animal which is so willing to speak to you in it's own language, and doesn't mind trying a bit of yours as well. It is humbling. I suspect I will never be truly fluent in Japanese or Crow, not like I am in English. But trying has made me a better listener. That is quite a gift.  There is something perhaps about our first language which can never be replaced, or duplicated equally, and I suspect the reason for that is because our need to express our emotions satisfactorily is so deep, and utterly tied to our very first words, and contextual experiences. How can one rewrite such defining memories? One can't. Neither I, nor the Crow can anyway. But we have come a long way, and I believe we have a long way still to go.










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