CXL

131. The sounds that we call words and language are combinations of musical sequences overlaid as a camouflage to each other. Words are our means of disguising the music of our emotions. Since our real feelings are frequently in conflict with each other and with the emotions we wish to convey, the resulting sounds are an interweaving of different melodies.

132. The principle is as if you could play Dvorak’s New World Symphony and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at the same time and hear Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address out of the cacophony.

133. What is truly unique about the principle, however, is that a person may be able to play both symphonies and any combination of other sounds and hear each one distinctly and separately. That theory expanded means you may listen to the human voice and hear separately and distinctly, each emotional overtone and melody.

134. The tuning of oneself to the music of other people (97), stripping away the camouflage that we so carefully lay to conceal our feelings from others, leads to the empathic response (98, 99). But that empathy may be singularly painful to the receiver, who will hear not only the pure emotions of the heart laid bare, but also the desperate cacophony, that we spread in an attempt to conceal our emotions from others.

135. Emotion is non-programmed. It is basically the same across all cultural bounds. That does not mean that the triggering mechanism for the emotion cannot be programmed. Take, for example, fear. One person’s fear response may be triggered by heights, another by snakes or spiders or tight places. But all would recognize the basic response or emotion as the same. The emotion of fear is innate.

136. We recognize far fewer emotions than we experience. We know joy, fear, anger, love, and hatred, and little else. Despair, melancholy, and sadness round out our emotional vocabularies. Because of this, we find ourselves struggling to find words when we are struck by emotions that are unfamiliar. Either we seek and find a means of expressing the emotion, or we deny its existence and program ourselves not to respond to it.

137. The emotions that we recognize tend to be at the extremes of our emotional registers. In reality there is not a moment of our lives that we do not experience some sort of emotion.

138. As our emotions are carefully concealed in our words, they are just as much revealed there. Certain sounds that we make trigger certain emotions. These sounds, however, have become culturally relative. The tone of voice in which they are spoken remains a much closer clue to their meaning.

139. A more basic key is the written word. Since the handwriting is closely related to the gesture (92) and gestures are far more universally meaningful than words, it is possible to tell much more about a person from the stroke of a pen than from the words that are written.

140. It may be said, with as much logic as any other statement herein, that the gesture precedes the spoken word, i.e. we reach before we ask, etc. As such, it is frequently more descriptive of the actual object or emotion than the spoken word is.