Music is not a Language

Often after playing music, never during, I fairly burst with expression and insight and desperately yearn to "communicate" it. Of course, this may be a side-effect of playing itself. The hunger, the need to express. Words are much more linear, of course, but both conversations and tunes are parsed by Time.

The difficulty is the shift, the translation back to "words". One can feel a knuckle between the word-net of "language" and the ringing-fruit basketry of "sound". We are able to do things with things we little understand -- words and tunes come from somewhere, loaded with skill-sets and feelings, and components which are shared. But most of the expressions are unique to their respective continents. Usually after playing, I literally have nothing to "say".

One of my favorite memories of performers in my youth were the lovable randy couple, Marais and Miranda. They were famous for telling musical stories. Their performance was both words and puns, and sounds sweeping across the arc of arts, with wisdom, flirtation, eyebrows and twinkling, and skillful bowing on vibrating strings. Their songs and sounds were blended, and now I deeply appreciate their skill at beckoning both.

Language can be used to perceive, to extend our perceptions. Music can be used to dip our toes into experiences. Both Words and Music can hit the sweet-spots of the brain and bounce thoughts aloft. Feelings can be lit up. Or smothered. But each is rooted and routed on separate places in the central nervous system. The mysteries of both are not the same.

Verbs and Loan Modification (not modifying lending)

I pulled over to think about the month. In mid-September my Office Manager and Department Heads met with me to brain-storm solutions to the fact that the income into our Practice had fallen off a cliff. It occurred to me that we had all become nouns, and we now needed to be verbs. Law Firms can become remarkably complacent.

It is our geography. Lawyers are isolated. We live on an archipelago populated by a fractious and internecine tribe, with its own language which we frankly boast is unintelligible. We are willing to change, to twist a word, so that it has no place at the table, or means the opposite. Contract is a type of breach. Negligence is never accidental. Proof is a mirage. Process is substance to us, our meat.

What our Clients really need, should be obvious. But what is that need when viewed through the lens of the Law?

For example, in Ojibway, many nouns can be turned into verbs. The tongue is filled with the possibility of action. In law, we turn verbs into nouns. We don't really "argue", we make "arguments". Ideas become things.

In 2008, most of the real estate lawyers in Orange County had home loan clients coming to us asking what they could do about the fact that they were faced with loan obligations secured by their homes. Most of the recent loan terms were predatory -- the monthly repayments were triggered to double or even triple, and borrowers could never ever pay off such loans.

The Lenders, not content with placing homeowners into inappropriate obligations, proceeded to offer the mortgages to investors, in layers of securitization. The amount of money seeking investments in the world doubled (Global Money Supply), but the places to invest did not. Bankers sought to service this expanding "market" (for investments) with "new" securities, and mortgages looked attractive. Since Bankers needed more mortgages, with the same number of people, they made the mortgages easier to obtain.

Curiously, however, the Bankers also made the "easier" mortgages impossible to pay off. The Bankers lobbied for laws removing restrictions on Pre-Payment Penalties. (The California Field Code had a provision outlawing penalties in excess of actual costs.) The Financial Industry re-introduced Option-ARM terms and credit default swaps that had been abolished since the 1930s. And to make these new loan forms easier to market, the Banks offered "teaser rates" and promised to "re-finance" the balloon payments. In most States, the Finance Industry eliminated lawyers -- on the consumer's side -- from the loan origination process.

When the Option-ARMS began to trigger -- when the loan repayments doubled or tripled -- the consumer borrowers appeared in lawyers' offices. Lawyers assisted the consumers in seeking "modifications" for the loans. Ideally, this would eliminate the predatory terms, but leave the obligation otherwise intact. The borrowers would be able to keep their homes, and the investment pools (the retirement plans, etc.) would still have cash flow from the income.

However, the Banks are not content with having sold loans to consumers who will never ever be able to pay them off. Nor are Banks content with having sold mortgage securities to investors in forms which have no marketable value (toxic). Nor are the large Banks content with taking tax payer bail out money.

Bankers have foreclosed on huge swaths of homes in neighborhoods across the country, and the benefits of home-ownership are compromised. The victimized families are torn by financial stresses. When the consumers to go lawyers, we tell them that the best of all the bad alternatives is to try to "modify" the loans. The Obama Plan provides guidelines and "commissions" to Lenders who modify the predatory loans. HUD and Fannie Mae provide "free" assistance to consumers.

However, the Banks are taking the Obama Plan commissions, and then they are refusing or delaying the Loan Modifications. They place the borrowers in a Twilight Zone of delay. One tactic is to offer the consumers a three-month "trial mod", after which they require another round of documents because the previous financials are "stale dated". More delays.

Almost all "loan modifications" done by homeowners without law firm assistance go into default within six months. The banks are not really modifying their predation. No one is modifying Lending. We only have bail outs and laws written by the Loan Industry, and consumers losing their homes.

Origins of Language - and the Brain

How much of human language is actually "innate"? People seem to be able to speak "automatically", replaying tapes, much akin to the pigeon coo, the cat caterwaul, the wolf howl, and the monkey chatter. Elephants, bats, cetacea, and three orders of birds (parrots, hummingbirds and songbirds) have the ability to remember and reproduce sounds.

Yet humans, at least when young, are able to do more than "imitation", and can create different meanings from new sounds, a skill set no other creature has. The response of horses and dogs to specific vocal commands, the "sign language" learned by some Bonobos, and the mimicry of mynahs, all come short of the mastery which is the unique cultural artifact of humans, our Language.

Still, chemistry seems to lie at the heart of Language. Are there other brains we can study which would reveal the chemistry involved in producing Speech?

Enter the Zebra Finch. A native of Australia, with a brain smaller than most seeds, it has much to teach us about "vocal learning". The bird brain is in many ways more similar to a mammalian brain than first thought.

Erich Jarvis, 41 year old neurobiologist out of Duke University, is studying the chemistry of the Finch's songs. He asks: "What's the most complex thing a brain can do? Language." He says: "I am starting from the naive position that if you can decipher the most complex thing about how the brain works, everything else will fall into place."

The purposes of language: Thoughts, Feelings, AND....

It is a warm day. Wife is off creating Quilts with a dear friend. Stunning textile tiles, BTW. So it occurs to me that my Aristotelian-Hegelian diadic dialogue is just another one of my categorical imperatives which should be gently shown the door, or I will brake another wheel in the great mud-rutting of my already swung-too-low ram-chariot and be further nowhere faster.

I am caught, of course, on the idea that Language is the handmaiden of Thought and Feeling - according each in their measure, as the candle flickers its light and sputters heat. This is surely a mistake. Another "theory" which hag-rides the Data, distorting the actual facts. It should be obvious to anyone actually trying to herd the word-cats, that The Great Communicator, Language, gives a rat's ass for either thinking or feeling. Nobody thinks about what others say or write -- most of what Plato wrote was lost out of indifference, and what remains, is it guiding our lives?

It is as obvious as gravity that our leaders are as ignorant of any wisdom tradition as it would be possible to be, and our "artists" are more concerned about expressing themselves through their agents for a bigger shot at wealth than about any contributions to beauty or esthetic "experience". No. Language is not the servant of Thinking and Feelings. Most people go blank, they play tapes, they speak what they learned as 4 year olds in a sandbox magically contracting grammar like a disease. We spend out lives in an echo-chamber, like birds "winging it", and profiling our Who-ing we Are-ing, largely for the purpose of perpetuating genes, breeding the breeding of our breeding. As lofty as any other life form. As responsible as a worm, and with as many clues about the sources of validation, the meaning of life, the arc of choice growing like a wild rose on the tangle-trellis of choosing.

Language. No. It is not necessary to quote Buddha/Socrates/Jesus/Mohammad/Smith, none of whom wrote ANYTHING. It is not necessary to invoke the experts, the Harvard faculty, the Blue-bloody Ribbon Committee, the Congressional Record. Each Word is another brick in the Wall. Words are no more vehicles of "thinking" or "expression" than they are obstacles to thought and feeling. Words are more Are than the linguists admit. The Language has much more to do with Singing, with being able to "go on" after a death, with moving into Imaginary Worlds, with the disposition of "a" on the XYZ dimensional grid, with foreplay. The Words just Are. There was the Beginning of them, and the painting of them on skull-caves, and the elaboration of them in giant Guilt-tiles we sew together in color and in designs and in patterns we can explain we do not know why.

Language has a lot to do with us. The television of it is an insult to your residual intelligence and my hopeful dreams. The radio of it falls on my head and suddenly the gravity of words motivates a thousand Newton you's to devote all of them/yourselves to algorithmic mad math-ness, to "prove" the core, to score the more and worry the less. The computering of words is the General Rule that proves the exceptionals, the purple people-eating hypothemus, the death of understanding and long-live understanding!

Eat my syllables. Got milk? Eat in rememberance of milk. The language you learned at the nipple, hoping for more.