Irreconcilable Accents

My mind has been fooling me again.

I am hearing voices, although that's not the problem: people are actually speaking. And they're even saying things that make sense.... But it's how they talk that threatens reality: I am hearing an accent where there isn't one.

(More correctly, since there is no objective standard for unaccented English, I am hearing an accent other than the one they have.)

So here I am this morning, walking into a spartan "breakfast" in the lobby of a sterile EcononLodge in Olympia, Washington. Two young businessmen are yakking away in the broadest Cockney accents you can imagine. I say hello to them, and find my way to the Raisin Bran. Milk. Weak black tea and a hard-boiled egg. Chat with Rob about his trip to Japan—funny, after almost a year, he has yet to tell me about so many of his adventures in the moist summer heat of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Rob is distracted by the two men. They are not actually speaking Cockney, or even English. We don't know what language it is. Rob says it could almost be German, maybe some regional dialect he can't understand. "Maybe it's Danish," I say.

Oh help. This has happened before...

...at dinner with my mother, two weeks ago, when she was visiting me in Corvallis. We went to Evergreen, the Indian restaurant in town (no relation to Evergreen State College, whose Student Activities Center is at the moment hosting my quiet keyboarding).

A tall young father with two small children came to sit at the table next to us. I entertained the obvious thought: that perhaps mom was away, and he didn't want to fix dinner for the little ones. He was a lovely dad though, and he spoke to his kids in such kind and resonant tones, with a classic North of Ireland accent. I reveled in it, as discreetly as I could; it's not something you hear every day. And I do miss it. More than I know, as it would seem.

Conversation at my own table distracted me, and when I turned my attention back to my neighbor...he sounded as American as I do. No trace of Irishness, or of anything other than a standard west-midwest English.

I can't even describe this accent properly, yet I hear it where it doesn't exist. And I persist in hearing it, giving it my attention—only to find that it has evaporated. That it never was.

This is hardly news to Buddhists, or philosophers, or Buddhist philosophers. I guess I should be grateful for these prolonged hallucinations—for these glimpses of the dream-within-the-dream. It's one thing to hear that our experience of world is determined by mental constructs, another thing entirely to emerge, blinking, from a manufactured experience, and to wonder what other flaws of perception are propagating themselves undetected.

It's also impossible not to experience a certain measure of humility: that my affinities and predilections shape the world; that I don't see myself and I don't understand myself; that, as Hogen says "the unconscious is just that: unconscious."

It's a bright day; I like coffee; and I'm on the trail of Irish resurgents at this college, where the woods are so deep that the road signs have moss on them. That's what I think about myself. But really, who knows?