I need to get around to answering the question I so often get from those who knew me in what I think of as my first eighty years on Earth – However in the world did you get started on this strange journey so far from your usual academic, existentialist materialism? Perhaps someday here, I’ll get around to that. This would be the place for it.
For now though, and briefly, it was the butt calls from my deceased wife that came first at the lovely meditation spot some friends and I have up on Thumb Butte here in Prescott, Arizona. That was the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend in 2016. I was there alone to spread the last of Doris’s ashes. She had died some eleven months earlier. I was in fact eighty years old. It was a good, sweetly nostalgic event for me. I asked for a sign, as people are wont to do, and I got what I asked for in a couple of small ways and then in a big one that nevertheless took a day and a half to finally register with me unequivocally.
“Register with me unequivocally.” That’s me talking in the first 80 years. It’s my academic habit still. How about this? – to finally leave me spine-trembling in silent dread before the weird, and weeping with gratitude.
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OK. All right. In the pages that follow this I tell that story in detail. The detail includes an audio recording I was able to make of the third butt call I got from Doris. That one came the next day, at home. I had a Sony audio recorder at hand that I could place alongside the cell phone. Which was on speaker phone.
Now even though I was able to hear the Doris voice well enough to recognize one of her words at the time (You will hear me say it aloud on the recording.) the other words are less clear and require careful listening with good equipment and good ears to hear. Thus I begin my detailed exposition with a section called “Baseline What a Whisper Sounds Like.” On that page you can test your hearing and your equipment against a recording I made with my own whispering at different levels. Of course, the Doris voice is not a whisper, just not always very loud and sometimes obscured behind other noises. Still, you need a baseline before you can feel secure in your listening conclusions. (And, as it turns out, there do appear to be whispers there. I did not notice them at first.)
Another reason you need to be this scientific about things is that the scientific world tells us there is a common and self-delusional phenomenon we suffer from called pareidolia.
So far I have not been able to find the scientific term for the converse condition of self-deception: failing to see patterns in seemingly random data. Both self-deceptions, I figure, arise from inner psychological needs. A little work establishing a baseline may help you feel more confident in your own objectivity.
