Cymbalism and the streetveil between

July 8, 2026: 🗓 

Is language the veil between us and the rest? Not “the” veil as explained in religious texts, but everyday streetveil.

I’ve been seeing a lot of ideas about frequency recently. Sound frequency, brain frequency, spiritual frequency, AC. I wonder how many subconscious opinions we have about certain frequencies based on the pitch of people’s voices when they say certain words.

A person’s pitch oscillates (usually) when they tell a story. The connotations a hearer associates with each of the frequencies are strung together in real time to form what I guess would be the song lyrics, the pitches being the notes of the song.⁴ The lyrics probably don’t match the words.²

While speaking the previous paragraph (for ASR so I don’t have to type), I started having a physical response. My heart beat faster and I was breathing faster. I don’t know what caused it. And now there’s this idea of maybe my body responded to the frequencies of my own voice, and it wasn’t about the actual story. ³

This is why I don’t try to come up with reasons for why I do or say or think things when I don’t know.⁵ I had a really inaccurate and frankly gross idea of who I was for most of my life because of it. I would allow myself or other people to explain to me why I did or said or thought something, instead of holding space for the real reasons.

Just now, I wondered if the act of holding space is more like a mechanism than a reservation. Maybe the real reasons don’t take form in the space being held for them but use the space to plant seeds or bridges.

I don’t really know if I have any answers to anything. What I have now are ideas that move freely within and through me like sublime weather and a connection to something I can’t explain but know to be right without needing to know it from wrong.

Also, what is the neutron doing? Totally unrelated but somehow fitting here.

Which brings me to my favorite scene from One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Disney’s 1961 version. Not sure what type of logic this progression is following, but I’m going with it.
How I remember the scene: a collie or shepherd dog calls out to the Dalmatian adults, “we’ll be standing by!” Even though he has to yell for them to hear, his voice is steady and calm in an unforced way.

I just found a clip of that scene, and the collie was actually a Great Dane. He said “they’ll be standing by,” not “we’ll be standing by.” This was in reference to The Barking Chain. “If you lose your way, contact The Barking Chain. They’ll be standing by.”

The original novel was The Hundred and One Dalmatians. Interesting how “one hundred and one” translates to 101, but “the hundred and one” isn’t mapped to a numeral. A numeral is a symbol representing a word. Or is a word a symbol representing a numeral?¹ Or are words cymbals, not symbols?

According to AI (an AI? one AI? the AI? Bypass the inclusion or omission of a grammatical article by saying Google AI?), cymbalism can be described as “the sonic characteristics and textures that a drummer colicits from them.”

I wonder if my biggest takeaway from this will be that Google AI wrote “colicits” instead of “solicits” even though it knows “colicits” isn’t a dictionary word.

Footnotes:

1. 1st inversion?

2. People tend to form habits with their own speech inflections. Maybe it has less to do with other people and more about your own speech inflections. Like you create your own subconscious connotations from the way you talk.

3. Maybe I tend to say the word "connotations" using a certain pitch or inflection, and I have subconscious connotations with the word "connotations."

4. Maybe the hearer only has connotations for like 4 of the frequencies, so the song only has 4 notes. Maybe the storyteller is monotone. Maybe there's compound connotations because the hearer also has connotations for specific melodies or sequences of notes within the song.

5. I actually do this all the time but as thought experiments and as a sounding board, not actual beliefs.