A Note on a Note
by Bob Buddemeier
Once, in a time long ago (60 years) in a land far away (cold war West Germany), my assignment was to test recent graduates of the Army Language School to see if they could extract information from tapes of intercepted Russian radio transmissions. When Rusty came in for testing I thought it would be easy. He was brilliant, with a degree in music theory. Pretty far out on the weird end of the spectrum, but brilliant.
To my surprise, when we sat down at the double-headphone tape machine, he bogged down very quickly. Russian is a synthetic language, with each of many syllables contributing its nugget of significance to the overall meaning of the word. I figured out the syllable he wasn’t getting, and rocked the tape back and forth across that section. “OK, Rusty, what was that?” I asked. He looked at me with a beatific smile and said, “C-sharp.”
I assume he was right; I wouldn’t know a C-sharp if I cut myself on one. I don’t know what, if anything, Rusty got out of this, but for me It was an unforgettable lesson — there we were, in the same room, wearing the same uniforms, hooked up to the same electromechanical device, listening to the same sound, and he was in the C-sharp world while I was in the ‘prefix meaning out or away from’ world.
Now I’m here at RVM where people tend to look and sound pretty much alike, but I find there are still C-sharp people and prefix people (plus others, with still other answers). By definition it’s a community, but is there anything very communal about it?
The Complement is an effort to find the commonalities that beget real community. On one side of the page is Preparedness – the rude objective reality where the individual’s chance of survival increases exponentially with their degree of cooperation with others. On the other side, there are the contributed arts — a very different reality with the potential to transcend barriers. And in between, the world of words with which we build walls, or occasionally bridges. Let’s try rocking the tape back and forth across that junction – if we do it long enough, maybe we can start hearing some of the same things.
Bob, allow me first to congratulate you on your master and professional, well-thought-out design of The Complement. It is way beyond what I would have imagined. You have surprised me by its depth and width.
I liked your story of Rusty but I am not surprised because as you must know, music has close affinity with language and sound. At a very basic level music is simply an arrangement of various types of sounds presented at different modes of pace and velocity, some pleasing to the human ear and others not so. What’s more interesting to me as a non-musician but certainly a music lover is that Rusty discerned C-sharp by merely rocking the machine back and forth. Thanks.
Rereading my comment, I need to correct .. I meant “masterful” and not master design