And then one day I come in, and I show him the trays, and it was…three, four, and six things on the tray…and I said, “Alex, what color three?”  And he looks at me, and he looks at me, and he says, “Five.”  And I’m thinking ‘there’s no five on the tray.’ And so I say, “Alex, c’mon, what color three?  Let’s go.”  And he looks at me again,, and he says, “five.”  And this goes back and forth several times, and I’m thinking, ‘What's going here? He's not throwing everything on the floor. He's not giving me wrong colors.  He’s saying a different number. And there isn't any of the stuff on the tray.’  So I finally said, “Okay, smarty.”  (You know)  “What color five?”  Not knowing what to expect.   And he looks at me, and he says none.”  So not only did he transfer this information from that task to this task, but he was responding to an absence of number, a kind of zero-like concept.  Plus! He had figured out how to manipulate me into asking him the question that he wanted to answer. Which I think was pretty…pretty sophisticated, on his part.

(“The Hidden Minds of Animals,” Interview with Diane Pepperberg about Alex the African Grey Parrot, Fresh Air, 11/12/08)

 

 

 

My first thought upon listening to this was, well, that very visceral fear-sense of the overlooked and forgotten iceberg in failed communication.  And then I promptly replaced that affect with the shooting-fish-in-a-barrel instance of the herniated analysis of abstract art.  And then my mind drifted back, flashed back, really, to the the pinhole transmission of knowledge—to that slow, blinking alphabet of communication in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.  Which retrieved the visceral fear-sense.  But what was really at the core of the iceberg of my associative mind, was this:

The character is at home when he is at ease in the rhetoric of the people with whom he shares life.  The sign of being at home is the ability to make oneself understood without too much difficulty, and to follow the reasoning of others without any need for long explanations.
                       (Vincent Descombes, qtd. in Mark Augé, From Places to Non-Places, trans. Who knows?)

 

I remember parsing with S. over the phone, last summer, the difference between people with whom one feels “at home” and “almost at home,” and how the fact that, throughout the remaining conversation, we ending up hyper-extending the readily available analogy of the ersatz, overly processed Almost Home cookie was explanation enough.