To listen the gift of listening, one must first listen
What a way to begin the year. This morning I awakened in the dark before the alarm went off, which is always a good way to start a day. Quiet thoughts ambled through my mind for awhile. At the conclusion of a chain of thoughts which have now faded[1], I was shown that Listening is what I have been uniquely crafted to give to everyone. The insight startled me fully awake and I came to the computer to write about it, because until today, I believed that Listening, with a capital L, was my father's gift to the world.
He says this because his name is Earl.
To anyone who doesn't know my 90-year-old father, that's a non sequitar, so allow me to explain a little about why he says this.
My father studies the meaning of words, letter by letter. After years of study, he is able to use insights about letters to build a structure for any given word which reveals an underlying meaning that is ancient, long forgotten, lost in the Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Phoenician roots of our language. Ancient meanings of words can be very insightful, especially when looking into people's names.
My father has a rather fertile imagination, and he's been at this as an intellectual hobby for half a century. He began when I was about six years old, starting with the letters of his own name. At first it was an idle curiousity, but a steady flow of insights captivated his imagination and the adventure kept growing more sophisticated. Slowly over the next three decades he unravelled deep and hidden meanings embedded within each letter of the alphabet. If you think about the timeline there, you can see that on average he was spending about a year for each letter. Some letters took less than a year, some took longer: I remember one time he said it took him 26 years to understand the letter C. The vowels were overall the hardest portion, but eventually he got them all.
Once the full structure was built in his mind, he had acquired an internal datalake of insights with multidimensional vectors connecting each of the 27 letters of the alphabet together. (The 27th he borrowed from Hebrew, the letter "ש," pronounced "Shin.") Now he's able to meditate upon any word and find its "true" meaning.
Each letter tells any one of several stories which, when linked with other letters, reveals larger stories, depending on the order of the letters, or which letter starts the word, or which one ends it, and so forth. Our names contain rich narratives that we fulfill with our lives more than we realize since our name is such an intrinsic part of who we are. But all words have rich meaning.
It's a beautiful theory
To me, as his son, the theory of my father's understanding of letters is the one of the most beautiful things I've ever encountered. He talked freely about what new insights he was learning many times while he was learning, so as a child I grew up learning the system he was developing along with him.
Only a few of of us cared about this linguistic adventure. Out of nine siblings, I've been the most consistently fascinated with his discoveries over the decades. I spent hours in conversation with him on this topic many many times. I once took notes and wrote a detailed account of a typical conversation I had with him 25 years ago, which is published elsewhere on this site. My interest was shared with two brothers who have now died, leaving only me to talk about these things with him. When we start talking about the letters, others politely exit the conversation; it's boring to them.
My youngest brother is casually interested in the study of letters, but more interested in the wise sayings of my father, his love of sports, and his appreciation of music. Another brother talks with him about sports, the wealth of his carpentry knowledge, his love of modern revelations, and his interest in astrology -- which is another ancient system organizing small pieces of information into a complex, multilayered matrix of meaning. One aspect of my father's elaborate system overlaps some insights carried in astrology. One of my sisters has the inheritance of being grumpy at him because of something which happened 30 years ago. The other is a nurse who runs a business caring for elderly people; she cares tenderly for him these days. And then my eldest sister who died a few years ago was a therapist who loved talking with my father about the psychological and mystical aspects of his unique insights.
For the last couple years of his life, knowing he was dying of cancer, my oldest brother made a deep dive into the datalake and learned the whole system. To give you a sense for how beautiful and complex is the theory, consider this: My brother was a brilliant Mechanical Engineer who spent the last couple years of his life talking with my dad every day about the letters. Hundreds of hours. The conversations took a foray through mathematics and physics for awhile, which helped give a more scientific structure to the system. They really bonded over this, and it was especially hard for my father to lose that daily phone call from my brother when he died.
As a way of comforting my father, I continued the intensity of those conversations for many months. I eventually got to the point where I began recording our conversations. I could see my dad was getting older, and someone needed to document as much of the theory as possible, so on a hard drive somewhere I have a hundred hours or more of those conversations, captured in the twilight of his life as he began wrestling with a new and equally challenging intellectual hobby called dementia.
I've always loved these conversations with him. My plan is, after I retire, to spend a year or two transcribing those conversations, drawing out and systemetizing the gems, merging the redundancies, incorporating my brother's engineering insights, weaving this all together into a book so others can join the adventure.
Now the reason I'm telling you all of this is so you understand the love and respect I have as I make the following statement: As is the way with theories, especially large and complex ones like this, my father gets things wrong in a few places.
I'm saying this candidly not to critique or even judge the masterpiece of his work of art, but because this observation is an important part of the story in my own work of art.
My own work is to receive the inheritance of his beautiful theory, fix some things which are broken, then use my skills as a writer and editor to deliver it to the world for others to enjoy. Until today I believed it was his theory, and it was my work to simply publish it as is. But now I understand a different interpretation of his name than the one he favored. And the new interpretation means that it's our theory, and it's my responsibility to fix the things which are broken, not to leave them as they are.
Let's talk a little about my father's name, and then we'll get to why my interpretation is different from his.
While studying the name Earl, my father came to the conclusion that he is a Listener. In short, the story of his name, the hidden meaning of his name, is the story of one who listens.
Anyone can see this is true by looking at the first three letters: E a r.
To a novice in the theory, it will seem this is a trivial point: "Oh, I see. Earl is ear with an L so that means listener. How quaint. Cool theory, bro."
However, that tiny little flower of insight is connected to a rose stem which leads to rich river-bottom soil[2] which leads to other flowers and trees and streams and forest animals and all the wonders of a whole fertile world that is the most wonderful of all worlds. It's the most wonderful because it is the one world which travels between all worlds, even the silent ones where never a word is spoken (which is, to a Listener, the most perfect world). It is the world of the deep hidden ancient meaning of letters, words, and languages.
If you think I exaggerate these sentiments, remember, the Lord is called Logos, The Word, for a reason. The ancient meanings of words are at the heart of who God is, and how creation came about, and they are everywhere, in every world.
The Duke of Earl and me, two of the worst listeners ever
I have a friend who loves the study of ancient meanings hidden in letters even more than I do. He was studying them independently before he met me, but one meeting with my father accelerated his own study, which I've seen evolve over the past few years. We talk about this often. He developed a sophisticated system also, more oriented around the Hebrew alphabet, but also heavily emphasizing the English version, like my father. There is overlap with my father's theory, but there are divergences, too. He's quite happy with 22 letters, instead of using 27. Some of the letters have similar meanings, and some are different. Insights like the four different ways of sounding the letter A are common between the two systems.
In case you wondered, I'm well aware that it's extremely unusual to randomly know two people who study language this way. We became friends about the time my brothers died, so I naturally consider our friendship a gift from a loving God who sees that this is an important part of my life: to have long, detailed conversations with people who study letters deeply.
One of the things both my friend and my father have in common is a love of puns. This is because playing with variations on the meanings of words is an important technique in uncovering the ancient meanings of words. Puns are the tip of this iceberg. My friend calls my dad The Duke of Earl, or just "The Duke."
As we've discussed the letters over the past few years, from time to time, I lament the paradox of my father saying that he is good at listening because his name means "ear."
It's true, as a listener to the ancient meanings of letters, he's phenomenal. Quite a listener. But as a listener to other people? I beg to differ. It's safe to say he's well into the autistic spectrum when it comes to that measurement.
All my life my father has told me the meaning of his name. He often uses the example of his name to make other points, such as how two vowels work together, or how there can be layers of meaning in a single word, or what it means when a word starts with a vowel, or ends with an L, and so forth. His name is a handy pedagogic tool. Consistently in these conversations, my father has observed that his name means he is a Listener.
As a child I simply believed him when he said this. However, after a couple dozen years went by, when he was fine-tuning the last few letters of his discovery, I began to see that he wasn't such a great listener. In fact, the more I considered the evidence before my eyes, the more I realized he is one of the worst listeners I know. He's a talker, not a listener. You know they used the call Asperger's Syndrome "the little professor syndrome?" He's an autist, not an empath.
I discovered this without intending to find fault, but rather, because I inherited it from him. I'm one of the worst listeners I know. This apple didn't fall far from the tree: logic says if I'm one of the worst listeners I know, then... likely so is my father.
When I discovered the parallel, I made the mistake of trying to tell this to my father.
He didn't listen.
He's the listener, remember? But I had found a class of information which contradicted his datalake. He refused to let me question whether he's a listener.
That was decades ago. Since then, I tried many times to bring forward a counterclaim to his insight that he's a listener, and I failed every time.
To me this is clear evidence that he's not a listener. To him this is clear evidence that I challenge his authority on the meaning of letters, which is not at all my intent.
So eventually I stopped trying.
The story of how to make a grown man cry by simply listening to him
I'm not very good at listening to people, except in very specific circumstances, and then it turns out I am an excellent listener, able to listen to people so deeply that I have stories to tell about things that only happen to people who listen deeply to others. This cannot be a boast because I have equally many stories about things that only happen to people who are not good listeners.
So what am I? A listener or not? Let's explore:
My favorite of the listener stories is a tale of the friend of mine who talked and talked and talked in every conversation. You couldn't get a word in edgewise. Many of my friends are this way, so I'm used to it. But all of us agree: he's the worst of us all. In fact, my dad simply refuses to have conversations with him anymore, of course missing the irony.
My friend doesn't come across as autistic, but after you get to know him for a while, you can see: "oh yeah... he's one of us." His intelligence is well hidden, or at least it was when we met decades ago. A rough and raw redneck hippie, poorly educated and beaten and bullied as a child, whose formative years were spent on a marijuana plantation in the backwoods of Florida, he carried a lot of pain into the world. Some people take such pain and they turn it into meanness. They're simply not smart enough to do anything else and they make the saying true: "hurt people hurt people."
However, my friend was more intelligent than his hillbilly origin belied. He found a way to transmute all that pain without becoming mean. Even though he's a weightlifter bristling with muscles and tales of bravado, he's also a very kind person. He's intensely selfish but also very giving. He's full of paradoxes like this. He translated his pain into talking. You might think this would make him a verbal bully; but like I said he's kind, so it's more of a barrage than a bully experience. A conversation with him is like a conversation with a chainsaw with no off switch. It's a memorable experience, at the least.
When I met him in the 1990s he had spent the last few years making friends with skydivers. He'd been working in a skydiving supply shop in Florida where rich and powerful people come from all over the world to skydive. He made friends with many of these people and had amazing stories to tell about them. Due to this job, he was exposed to people from a completely different cultural universe than him. His role was the redneck, talented with leatherworking, who fixed skydiving gear. This was a great little window into the world of well-educated never-beaten never-bullied people who know how to stop talking.
But none of this rubbed off on him.
Back then, you could tell he was intelligent not because of a large vocabulary or well-researched polemic or ability to deliver philosophical epistles or any other show of academic intelligence, but because he invented new ways of saying ordinary things in every single conversation. He has a rare gift for completely new similes. As far as I know, nobody ever told him that, so his gift is delightfully unentangled with ego. It was just there in raw form, and as a wordsmith, I loved it.
Being a son of a man who talked a lot, it was easier for me to listen to him. And I was always delighted to hear his completely new turns of phrase, like "he was stupider than a flea on razorback pig trying to use an iPhone on airplane mode." I'm not kidding, he sprinkled such colorful similes into conversation as liberally as Shakespeare coined new words. He was like a character out of some Mark Twain story. However, although his stories about rich and famous people were fascinating, when they ended, he relaxed into his normal thought process which was a rather wild and untamed narrative, full of that pain I said he carried into the world. The barrage of free-association began. That's when most people started tuning out.
Unfortunately for anyone listening, he completely dominated conversations, and had almost no listening skills. After thirty minutes of genuinely fun entertainment from him, people were ready to switch to another channel. The strongest ones could survive an hour with him before they'd find some way to forcefully exit the conversation. He caught absolutely no hints that someone was ready to do something else than listen to him.
He was among a group of people with whom I went on a lot of road trips, and eventually became a roommate, so I was around him a lot. As time passed, I was fascinated with his narrative enough that I was able to slowly develop a tolerance for how tedious it was to listen to him. I could occasionally get past the one hour mark.
One day at random, I had grown weary of inventing new ways to exit conversations with him. I resolved instead to listen to him "until he stopped talking." It was not easy. At the two hour mark, I was beginning to really regret my decision, but I hung in there. At the three hour mark, still talking continuously, there was a shift and he started talking about more private and personal things than he ever had before. I remember at one point he was talking about how he couldn't sleep at night, and instead when he closed his eyes, he immediately entered a dream world but was still wide awake. Years of sleep deprivation helped explain the intensity of the firehose-of-consciousness style of narrative, I mused to myself as he continued, saying only a few words every now and then to let him know I was still listening.
At the four hour mark, I was astonished at my own ability to keep going. It was truly a labor of love to sit there and nod my head and listen, listen, listen. Then about twenty minutes into that fifth hour, he started crying. It was funny how it happened. He kept talking, talking, talking, and as tears were running down his cheeks, sadness cracking his voice, he said: "I don't know why I'm crying right now, this never happened before" but continued talking as if nothing unusual were happening.
I knew what was happening. I had literally listened to him longer than anyone in his life had ever listened. He experienced a cathartic release. That wasn't my intention, but as soon as I understood what was happening, I was careful to give him space to just emote for awhile. He recovered quickly and soon continued as before. Eventually I found an exit to the conversation, sad that I hadn't been able to listen until he stopped.
But it turns out, I had. Ever after that, his intensity was a little less. He was more interesting to listen to. Now that, to me, was a surprising development, and it wasn't just a change in me which made it seem like a change in him. He was changing.
Thereafter, I listened to him for long stretches from time to time, knowing that it was therapeutically good for him, although I never got to the four hour mark again.
We were friendly acquaintances in those days. We eventually become good friends and I've watched his social awareness continue to evolve over a span of decades. He's a much more interesting conversationalist now. He can listen to other people almost at the level of normal conversation now. He also started reading the dictionary -- yes, reading the dictionary -- and took some community college courses in writing. He fell in love with a writing teacher who saw the diamond in the rough and really improved his storytelling ability.
Cultivated for love instead of raw brute redneck domination of all who can hear, his intelligence began to shine through more and more. Learning to write gave him the skills to redirect his intense narrative into the written form. I don't think he'd written anything more than his signature for years when he started, but he began writing voluminously, and rewriting, and rewriting. The existing feedback loop of rejection continued into his writing, and he learned to write a dozen drafts for something before he was ready to share with others.
Writing allowed him to effectively speak to other people without driving them away. This was better therapy than all the listening I'd given him years before.
Overall, I would say his IQ has improved by ten points, but in truth he was that smart all along; he just gained the ability to put thoughts together more coherently. A letter from him is a dozen or more pages long, written by hand with little respect for margins, and jam-packed with a wide-ranging narrative which reads similar to his spoken form. There are moments of majesty and poetry sprinkled throughout, and still all those wonderful similes which are like a whiff of cayenne pepper in the nostrils[3], in a good way.
On the art of simultaneously being a great listener and a rotten listener
The point I'm making here is that this is only one story of a dozen I could tell about how I have an unusual ability to listen to other people. If I told you the other stories you'd come away thinking I'm a great listener. But I'm not going to do that because I'm not a great listener. That's not at all what I'm saying here.
You see, I'm a great listener in certain specific circumstances. In other circumstances, I'm more like my father, and I talk and talk and talk. Way too much. Like most of my brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, like many of my friends, I know how to dominate a conversation, well beyond when I should. Even being self-aware of this and working to catch social cues, I still miss them a lot. This is why I said "I'm one of the worst listeners I know" earlier.
So, to complete the point I started earlier: I inherited from my father the fact that he's not a good listener except in certain specific circumstances. What are his circumstances?
My father is socially friendly and he listens well in small talk conversations. Talk about sports, weather, current events, and small personal stories, and he really is a good listener. Amiable, kind, thoughtful, engaging, all the social skills of a great listener. Or, put him in front of a decent quality preacher giving an hour-long sermon, and he'll listen intently. He can also listen very well to anything driven by his own curiousity. However, I think it's safe to say he's not capable of listening to anything outside of this narrow range.
Try and challenge his beliefs in any way and you'll get shut down quickly. He has no ability to debate anything. I do not mean a weak ability, but absolutely no ability. With him, there is always only a single way of seeing things. Yes, he can persuasively convince you of a point he's making, and yes, he can tolerate other people being different from him, but he cannot be convinced of an opposing viewpoint.
Note that this is not simply because he has strong opinions and vigorously defends his position. That I could understand. But instead of that, he has strong opinions but no concept of the idea that someone could think differently from him and still be valid. If you think differently from him, you're "wrong." Not "different" or "equally valid," but simply "wrong." It's categorical. Remember, I know this because I inherited plenty of it.
I've noticed that everyone in his generation and earlier does this; they're very set in their ways. But it's not just about being old, because I started making attempts to challenge his opinions decades ago, when he was still middle aged and in firm command of his intellect. The real reason is that he grew up before the 1960s when our whole culture learned to challenge authority, and I grew up after. He learned to never question authority, and so did everyone else at the time.
With all that in mind, I ask you a question: If you're a good listener in some circumstances, but a bad listener in most other circumstances, can you honestly say you're a Listener? With your only evidence being that your name says you are?
My answer is No. I need more evidence to support the claim.
So this is an example of a hole I found in his theory. It's actually a hole he will readily understand structurally if he could admit it personally. He knows that people do not fulfill the meaning of their name in a direct, linear manner. Names are multidimensional, just like people are. He knows that names can be interpreted forward (Earl = great listener) and backward (Earl = poor listener). We've talked about such structural things in detail many times over the years. For example, we've talked about how beautiful the name Lucifer is, and how the negative interpretation of it is someone who brings darkness instead of light. In this example, the word "if" in the middle of the name plays a big role, and Lucifer "ifs" things, meaning he doubts things. This reversability is a core feature of letters, words, names.
To listen the gift of listening, one must first listen
You should have enough context now to understand what I said at the beginning of this essay: "Until today, I believed that Listening, with a capital L, was my father's gift to the world. He says this because his name is Earl."
Now that I know this is my gift, not his as I always thought, a lot of unanswered questions are now starting to make sense. A new dimension of life's mission is beginning to forge in my mind. The insight falls in line with what I've been learning though, ever since I figured out what Wittgenstein was saying a century ago, which so few people have understood.
I've written about it elsewhere in this weblog, so I won't got into detail here, but the sum of it is this: Wittgenstein took on the nearly-impossible challenge of teaching people to stop talking. He wasn't working on the "listening" side of that coin, just the "stop talking nonsense" side. There's a paradox involved in this task: If you teach people pedantically to stop talking, you have to talk to do so. You're doing one thing and saying another. The means cannot achieve their end. Wittgenstein realized this, and wrote a book which he said was the end of philosophy. After completing philosophy, the final chapter of the book was a single sentence: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
He published the book, gave away his massive inheritance, left the university for good, and went to live an ordinary life as a school teacher for young children, intending to never have anything to do with philosophy again. I believe he was elaborately saying something simple, knowing that if he said it in simple form, no one would listen. Sadly, everyone listened but nobody understood, because they were looking at his words instead of his actions. He never corrected anyone because he would be invoking the paradox to do so. This is a brief summary so there's more to the story, but hopefully you got the gist.
That brings me to the gift of listening. What I was shown this morning was that my life's mission involves developing a new and interesting way to say what Wittgenstein said. More people need to see it and say it, over and over, until everyone gets it. Wittgenstein was influenced by Tolstoy, who likewise was quite wealthy but walked away from his wealth to live on the common, ordinary side of life. Gandhi is another person influenced by Tolstoy, who came from a wealthy family, but abandoned his lifestyle to live with the commoners.
I'm not wealthy, so I do not yet know how to do this, but I see now for the first time that it is my life labor to invent a way to do something along these lines, letting my lifestyle speak as loud or louder than my words.
[Update, five months later]: I think about this often, and have not found a way to do this yet. It is not easy to come out of being a talker into being a doer.
Note(s)
- ^ I do remember one precious fragment of the chain of thoughts. It's one of my favorite gems of all time, which is this: "What shall I give him, small as I am? If I were a shepherd I would give him a lamb." There is an implicit question being asked here, which is "what will you bring?" My answer to that question, which I have asked many many times over the years, and to which I have never been happy with the answer, was for the first time satisfactory. It was: "Listening."
- ^ We live near the Missouri River, and our whole region is covered in rich river-bottom soil, some of the finest dirt in the world. Having grown up on a farm in California, my father knows the value of good dirt, and loves this soil immensely.
- ^ Funny store there. One time I was going through a Dr. Christopher-inspired healthy-eating phase which had me eating cayenne pepper and apple cider vinegar, about a teaspoon, on a daily basis. Each one alone is horrific, but somehow mixing the two made both of them easier to bear. My friend, who was a roommate at the time, decided to one-up me with the cayenne, and snorted it. I remember him saying it was better than cocaine in some ways. I took his word for it. Never having used cocaine, and struggling with taking cayenne by mouth, I had no desire to compete, and let him win that one.