The Art of Conversation

I was raised in a small, isolated community. I became friends with several of those born from the Germans and Scots clans who settled the original tracts of land. We were all foreigners, on the unexplored border territories, needing to find a way to survive. It was a test ground to see how humans establish their niche.

Like most public workers, I earned my living by providing a service. I remember when I first met members of the Irvine clan. They originated in Scotland. The Irvine’s came from an old line where good manners, with the prescribed traits of empathy, tolerance, self-constraint, patience, honesty, truth, and understanding, tempered with wisdom and compassion, usually opened the channels to the public domain. The Irvine's often use their genius to write stories and essays and designed poems and songs that celebrate love, friendship, work and drink. Celts generally have a highly developed sense of humour that addresses the dour human tendencies with hilarious and sometimes tender sympathy.

Irvine genius spawned Robert Burns, John Galt, who also developed a plan to populate Upper Canada and Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was adopted by John Allan, an Irvine merchant, who lived in Virginia. Although provided a good education by his foster parent Poe also gained a distrust of the Irvine genius that led to Poe’s macabre tales.

Many members from the Irvine clan made their living through small shipbuilding operations and aftermarket businesses that stemmed from the cargo of the brigantines. They turned into shrewd entrepreneurs with foresight born of understanding human nature. They held the predisposition to know the Rule of Forty, making decisions to obtain a 40% growth and profit-margin.

One of my unique talents is that I can subitize situations. This means I can see a set of objects or events then predict the probabilities of what might come to pass. Pattern recognition is useful in more than playing dominoes or chess. Since the 1800’s, when the history of Canada’s colonization began, there have been multiple growth steps recorded, that have contributed to exponential population growth. This made me part of a generation that could, over a period of ten years, acquire sufficient data to establish trends that had taken far longer to identify in the past.

The body works like a complex machine that can be programmed for efficiency based on statistical probability. Life has a way to teach an individual that humans are not machines, and that statistics hold mysteries. I had gained knowledge of the effect of low probability events that occur, and accept humanity’s darker sides. Most people are opportunistic. Selfishness drives most behaviours. Some people seek only short-term profits that are measured without respecting variables like interpersonal bonds or maintaining long-term retention of clients. Others look for a richer measure of profit, that include an elusive concept based on interpersonal or environmental interconnections.

I recall when I sat down with my first client. It was our introductory meeting. We were to establish my rates and services. I was the next generation of representatives for my family business, trained according to the secret code of creating the key to open relationships. I had been taught the heart and soul of the old lessons, based on skills and the art of conversation. Dabbling in the arts, math, physics and philosophy to help give meaning to life provided me with access to many keys.

No time was wasted. I was dealing with an Irvine. I had done my homework. The interview started off with the usual “How is the weather?” My response was, “The weather is not bad- it is only my choice of clothing.” The preliminaries were sufficient to bridge into the point of the meeting. I was asked about my rates and asked to defend they were fair. I began. “Education is key to spreading knowledge. It takes an artist years develop the skills to efficiently create a masterpiece. I have learned the skills of my family business and through my schooling l learned the loopholes and ways to avoid hurdles.”

My client said, “You sound like a windbag.”

The windbag comment, that randomly came spinning through the universe, presented me with the challenge of finding how to reset the password that could authenticate communication between we two parties. Predators and prey coevolve. I was adept in developing symbiotic relationships. I was ready to test if I could follow my ancestral wiring that was based on the ability to 'reset your password.' I could see patterns and calculate the risks and benefits of low probability variables.

Many individuals would point blame at the situation as an excuse to explain their failure to succeed. Few people take personal responsibility for finding out how to fit into the poorly made jigsaw puzzle of life. I was trained to triage the comment through my heart, and logically process it in my brain where I let a sacred power resonate throughout time and space to help me find the password that opens possibilities into the private domain.

I knew the world before technology changed the way communication was conducted. Irvine innovation had spewed from the mouth of the mighty Grand, into the valley where another Scot, Alexander the Great, signalled as a Bell. He adapted the human memory system, identified by Guido of Arezzo to teach musical notes, to transmit messages and connect to others through the telephone. Using a two or three letter exchange system made it easier to access levels within hubs of organization and recall five memory retention bins. Over the centuries, technology has increased, but not the human capacity for memory. The old system is applied to the organization of computer systems.

Computer technology depends on an exchange system that uses password identification key (PAK) to establish multifactorial authentications, first in the public domain, then in the personal domain, was originally used to ensure privacy between two parties. Believing in truth and open conversation had become dangerous. It increased vulnerability. The Internet created a curtain of anonymity behind which moral standards can be ignored and lies, and deception and piracy became the next evolution of what was considered clever. The originators of computer systems predicted piracy would occur, but the flimflam artist explosions had led to fear and the need to protect what was private. The keys that were once the foundation of relationships were replaced with passwords. The general rule is that it is essential to reset your password. This was my chance.

I responded. “Indeed. We both function as windbags. They are part of our cultural traditions.Like a magpie that steals the shiny materials and tools, many nations developed a great variety of windbags. The use of the aerophone, thought to originate in Egypt, spread to nations and throughout the European dominions.

My roots are set in Greece and the boot of Sicily, the island that bridges to Italy. As Greeks extended their territory, they met new peoples and were civilized and being civilized, teaching and being taught. The traditional Tsambouna music of the Aegean Islands in Greece passed to the Zampogna and Ciaramedda in Sicily, and bagpipes in Spain, Persia, Russia and Turkey and the Celtic nations where the Irish Uilleann pipes and Scottish ‘war pipes’ were used to unsettle the enemy and communicate with allies.”

My client reacted. “Ay. We share a history that passes an invisible force through the air that comes from the gut of the beast. Can ye play?”

“Auch no” I replied adopting the familiar expressions of the speaker. “But we both are musicians, who know how to use the music of conversation to find the unprecedented, unpredictable and unrepeatable improvisations needed to synchronize the beat with the pulse of the heart. Here it is, simply put. My rates reflect a profit margin that balances my needs to make a living without exploiting my clients.” The deal was soon settled, and a friendship ensued.

No formal education in theory or organized learning system can help a person collect the secrets of the art of a conversation. How a conversation resonates depends on the construction of the instrument, by the players themselves, and how the audience responds. Conversation can create a moment, where an invisible zero set point can reset the password and open doors of possibility that allow interconnection in an almost secret milieux.

Passwords are set even by those who claim to be non-mathematical. Humans have natural tendencies to identify commonalities and compare differences, then make empirical decisions based on the zero, one or infinity rule that is used in computer science that says to allow none, one or an infinite amount of ‘foo’. Foo is a placeholder, such as a password, that can change, depending on conditions. Foo is intended to be modified or substituted in secure file transfer protocol.

In Chinese, Foo is one of the deities associated with Orion’s belt. It is the god of good luck and happiness. The guardian lion-dogs that protect buildings are called Foo. Chaucer used ‘foo’ to describe the devil or an enemy. In the early 1900's ‘foo’ was used as a nonsense word by a zany fireman in comic strips associated with foolishness. It became FUBAR, from the German word meaning terrible, which in the slang means f…ked up beyond all recognition. During WWII, the crews of the 415th Night Fighter Squadron became known as the Foo-fighters, when they reported inexplicable bright orange red, blue and green lights following their aircrafts as they were flying at high speed. The explanations ranged from the lights being some sort of amorphous spectre, a bogeyman, seen out of the corner of the eye, to UFO’s or a form of electrostatic discharge known as St. Elmo’s fire.

A conversation holds the properties of Foo. If communication is delivered in the lingua franca, a common language between speakers whose native languages are different, it can emanate a common memory that holds the quintessence of a collective identity. Conversation holds the power of a folk song with familiarity of generations of human experience. It acts as a password that can elicit trust in common values at the heart of celebrations, and feasts. Perhaps that is why I was invited, by this friend, to attend the First Communion of his daughter.

The little girl, dressed in the white frock of the initiation ceremony, piously explained what she had been taught. “I am ready to partake in the Eucharist. It promises a complete, abundant a combination of truth, beauty and goodness, that can be summed up as love, that can be offered to others and is never exhausted.”

I was impressed, “I do hope that the Eucharist delivers on the promise.”

I did a quick google search on the Eucharist. It comes from the Greek word for gratitude for abundance. Looking at the etymology of Eucharist, Eu means well or good. Charism is defined as a spiritual gift or talent granted by the divine power to the recipient, for the benefit of others. Charismatic leaders hold extraordinary power. Their spirit holds a magnetic charm that can arouse fervent enthusiasm in the masses where the most unlikely positive possibility can be realized against all odds. In many religions, the Eucharist takes the form of round host that looks like a zero.

It left me thinking about the enigmatic concept of Love. It reminded me of how love in tennis, refers to an opponent receiving a score of nothing. The game, originating in France, describes the zero score, that resembles an egg, as ‘un oeuf’ , which sounds like love in English. I considered that Love is nothing, nought, nada, zip, zilch, zero.

The concept of Zero was discovered independently by Mesopotamians, Mayans and later by Indians. Zero is a placeholder. Zero implies an empty space. It was once considered to be equal to 1, an entire unit. The use of zero was originally outlawed by European governments when Fibonacci introduced zero, calling it a ‘sifr’. The government feared it a cipher meaning code.

The form of the circular zero does hold a code. As an exponent, zero makes any number become the equivalent of one. Logarithmic scales, to the base 10, attribute zero with the power of exponential growth. When diametrically opposite ends of a circle slowly unroll, it forms a linear bell-shaped curve, called the Witch of Agnesi. When a point is fixed, and a perpendicular tangent from a moving point along the circle is followed, it unfolds into a sine wave. The Sine function was used by ancient Indian mathematicians and astronomers. Sine tables go from zero to one, as a curve arcs over an angle of zero to 90 degrees. Sine waves apply to light and sound and in magnetic materials which have a hysteresis curve that holds a memory of what went before.

Hysteresis depends on residual magnetism that is equal to a reversed field after permeability and resistance occur, making the flux return to zero. Zero-point energy, the lowest possible energy that molecules retain, even at the coldest temperatures of a vacuum, is believed to have existed in vacuum energy wavelengths within a primitive fire ball. When squeezed to Planck lengths by gravity, this zero-point energy is thought to have given rise to an elementary seed particle of matter and then the universe. Zero can become one and then everything.

It dawned on me that each moment in a conversation is like each swing in a game of tennis. The angles of the serves, the when, where and how of volleys and smashes, the spin of forehand and backhand and the trajectory of each drop shot and lob, affect what happens next and can change the outcome of a game. The family secret behind the art of conversation was to hit the sweet spot, that unlocks the volatile, complex, uncertain and ambiguous possibilities of life.

My friendship with an Irvine taught me that the art of conversation is mastered by those who are able to evolve and change. It creates a niche where possibilities can be realized as relationships form. It requires finding a connection that I call love. Love is a form of foo. It is a placeholder that measures a force of connection. It will follow the zero, one or infinity rule depending on how well a person adapts. Following the timeless advice to 'reset your password' is essential for love to open possibilities.