An interesting phenomenon, I wonder whether anyone else experiences this, is sensitive to it - or am I unique? It's not a frequent thing; this is something that happens once every other day or every three days; I'm doing something - around the house, at work, on a walk, and suddenly, out of nowhere comes a word, interrupting my train of thought, a proper noun, a name of a person or place jumps into my consciousness. I must point out that this is soundless, not an auditory hallucination, more like a telepathic insertion.
Over time, I have learnt to notice this phenomenon, and examine it. First of all, I winnow through my immediate train of thought from the past few minutes, seeing whether there's been any thread or link that could have sparked that word, by association. If yes - dismiss. If no, I roll the word around my consciousness, seeking any other associations - with what? With anything I've read in recent weeks, or years even? Again, if it's an identifiable memory that's suddenly resurfaced - dismiss.
But these words which I will share below have passed these filters unscathed. They are genuinely puzzling. None of them I've ever knowingly pondered. Yet *PAFF!* and here there they are.
What's all this about?
These, then, are the puzzling proper nouns (nazwa własna) that have popped up, just like that, into my consciousness, unbidden, unassociated, unexplained, over the past month. At the beginning of last month I started to make a note of these in my notebook, for future appraisal. Popping into my stream of consciousness in the kitchen, over the laptop, or out on the street, they appeared the following order:
Capharnaum -- Demosthenes -- Pargeter (surname) -- Picayune (newspaper) -- Holy Sepulchre -- Karolinska Institute -- Brickyard 'M' -- Methuselah -- Scutari. What does this all mean?
There are two explanations: one is - this is a physical phenomenon of the brain - not one we understand, but nevertheless something rooted entirely in the tangible, within my skull.
The other is metaphysical, supernatural, magical, mystical, other-worldly meaning - there is some deeper significance, some message that I, Michael Dembinski, should... do what?
We are entering the Coen brothers' world of A Serious Man again. Was Reb Groshkover a dybbuk, or not? What was the meaning of the Hebrew letters found on the inside of Russell Krauss's lower incisors?
As I said, this is a regular, ongoing phenomenon; random names, place names; proper nouns.
Let's have a closer look at last month's main selection. Three are from the Bible (Capharnaum, a fishing village to the north of the Lake of Galilee, is mentioned in all four Gospels; the Holy Sepulchre is the tomb is which Jesus was interred after the Crucifixion; Methuselah is mentioned in the Book of Genesis, he lived to the age of 969 years old, and was the grandfather of ark-builder Noah). Demosthenes was an ancient Greek statesman; the New Orleans Picayune existed under that title from 1837 to 1914 after which it became the Times-Picayune. The Karolinska Institute is a research-led medical university in Stockholm, and Scutari was home to a British Army barracks and hospital (of Florence Nightingale fame) at the time of the Crimean War. Pargeter and Brickyard M - too broad to pin down.
They do seem like random misfirings of long-term stored memory; neuroscience, however, has more urgent tasks to take on that looking into this particular phenomenon, so I'm not hopeful of a satisfactory answer from science. Seeking metaphysical answers may take a long time, a fruitless search for meaning. A long wait one way or the other. In the meanwhile - it's fun, it's interesting. I shall continue jotting down these proper nouns as they come to me.
To quote from A Serious Man, "Please - accept the mystery."
This time two years ago:
Hops there for the taking
[Still making hop juice this year!]
This time three years ago:
Two weeks and two days of travel
This time four years ago:
Final end to a local landmark
This time nine years ago:
Independence Day
This time ten years:
Out and about in Jeziorki
This time 11 years ago:
Funeral of Lt. Cmdr. Tadeusz Lesisz
This time 12 years ago:
Puławska by night
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2 comments:
Perhaps a better question would be why your mind assigned them a special place when it registered them for the first time. They are not just ordinary words which you learnt when you were not aware that you were learning a language. Once that awareness awakes in us, language becomes music. Of course, you may be only half-aware of a word's appeal to you at the time of first encounter. Like with a tune which will start running around in your head when you least expect it. I am a dedicated advocate of euphony in language acquisition. Why would you remember a new word? The fact that it sounds nice, pleasing, exotic, etc., to the ear is a good enough reason for me. Vanity could be a reason too. We may want to insert an interesting word into a conversation later for kudos. Ask Stephen Fry? Maybe, when the word enters our consciousness for the first time, it is just the missing note or bar that harmonizes with the arrangement of the existing composition - the sum total of everything we’ve said, thought or heard in our life so far. When you whistle an improvised tune, or a jazz musician improvises, perhaps it is not quite random but fits snuggly into a gap in the soundscape of the mind. And this soundscape changes from minute to minute as we clock up more minutes in our life. And don’t forget the role of discordant notes in the overall composition! Will we ever know?
I think the more aware you are of language the more persistent the condition is. I variously suffer from it, encourage it and indulge in it myself. An improvised tune from someone who never listens to jazz and has just been told which end of the saxophone to blow to make sound will be a tad different than improvised jazz from John Coltrane. (Love Coltrane and melodic jazz myself, not so fond of improvised jazz).
Your question may also fit into the theory that in merely naming things we communicate possession or ownership or otherwise exercise of control of some kind.
Somewhat related to this, my pronunciation of the opening vowel in Iraq had been like in “irritate” before the Gulf wars, and still is when I think of the place independently of the US-Iraq wars. But when I think of the wars, my mind changes it automatically to a diphthong, as in ‘irate’. It’s as if they were two different countries. Too much G. W. Bush influence. Recently I heard the governor of Wisconsin say about Trump’s visit to Kenosha: He’ll be like a barrel of gasoline rolling in. It’s not just the image that is evocative – the sounds make a very English sentence. I’ve been rolling it around in my head.
@Jacek Koba
Excellent! This explanation is very plausible. Yes, when we first absorb new words/concepts/proper nouns, some resonate more than others, some euphonious, others discordant... [I'd still like to know why - that sense of familiarity...] You 'roll it round in your head' - and then forget that it's been internalised. All of these proper nouns I could have come across in later childhood, in Look and Learn, in National Geographic, for example. And I have long forgotten how the sound of those words tickled me initially.
One I can remember is coming across the Polish slang term 'udobruchać' in October 2007. That word kept on 'rolling around my head' on the bus from Dublin to Cork.
Lot of sense here.
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