PERCEPTION or the art of piercing the darkness

wHerENogOdSEXiSt

What you see... is what you get.

I don't recall how I settled upon the name of this blog as it appears above but I like the way it emerged because , for me, it says something about two subjects that interest me greatly , the process that I believe got mankind into religion, belief, superstition, ritual and , and this is very much connected, the psychological veils, screens, clouds, distortions, delusions, mis-perceptions and so on that we sometimes deliberately, sometimes innocently and at other times casually, become 'lost' in.

Not quite sure how to start off this line of thought but since I've begun by mentioning the name of the blog, I'll tell a short story about how I came by my own name.

My legal name now is James Dylan Rivis. 'Now' ? You might ask.

Yes 'now'. I wasn't quite born with this name. Sure, my mother, Elma, who bore me while single, did name me James. She added Godfrey, supposedly after my 'god'father, Godfrey Woof who , with his wife, were very supportive of my mother through the difficult process of giving birth out of wedlock in the height of the second world war, in 1943.

I grew up James Godfrey Wright. Wright from my stepfather, Hubert Roy Wright, who, while in rehabilitation in North Yorkshire from wartime injuries enticed my lovely, vivacious mother with her infant son into marriage. I assumed he was my father.

In early 1966, while collecting the necessary documentation to emigrate to Canada, I went to get my birth certificate from Somerset House in London, the central repository for all the births, deaths and marriages in the United Kingdom. Unable to locate 'James Godfrey Wright'

I went to the help desk and the clerk did a search and also came up empty handed.

"What was your mother's name ?" he enquired of me and , armed with Elma Rivis, off he went into the stacks. Not too long afterwards he emerged and , with classic British diplomacy he quietly asked if I "...would mind stepping into the office." Here he handed me a copy of my birth certificate and with " This was not at all unusual during the war" , he pointed out that the place where my father's name should have been , was marked through with a slash.

No father. Now this was a shock, yet the more it sank in, the more my past years of distress at the hands of this man and his subsequent new wife ( my mother died in 1947) made so much sense.

I wasn't their child and they obviously had no parental attachment to me. Hence the abuse.

Now, suddenly, this new insight seemed to magically lift a weight off my shoulders. Here was a tangible separation between them and I and here was I about to add almost 7000 miles to that gulf between us.

"Upon a point of Darien." I stood, with my future stretched out in front of me.

In the 1970's I read Arthur Janov's "The Primal Scream" while suffering a miserable -40F degree below winter in an equally miserable Winnipeg, Manitoba. I wept all through the book. It seemed as if here was someone that comprehended my suffering. It did not take me and my lady love at the time, Kendra, long to return to Toronto, where I spent the next 5 years 'in' primal therapy. I'll possibly talk about that experience at another time but for the purpose of my (classically long winded) point concerning my name all I'll say is that in my process of 'self discovery' I opted, in the early '80's to legally change my name to what it is now.

I retained 'James', dropped 'Godfrey' in favor of 'Dylan' and reverted to my mother's name 'Rivis' which, strangely enough, was still my legal name as my stepfather had never legally adopted me.

I am doing it for 'personal' reasons I told the Ontario judge before a packed courtroom of folks with similar requests. His expression was a combination of disbelief and scorn yet he signed the document and I went home a new man, so to speak.

Now to begin the long swing back to the reason behind this meander, one of the added benefits, I naively thought, of taking back my Rivis name was that I would no longer have to suffer the moronic question (about Wright) "Is that spelled 'R-i-g-h-t ?".

How could you go possibly wrong with the simple, phonetically spoken Rivis, R-i-v-i-s ?

How indeed ! It wasn't long after that that, when asked my name and I proudly enunciated it perfectly, the person wrote R-i-v-A-s !!

Aaaarggghhh !!!!!! Jesus frickin' Murphy !!

This went on for years. No matter how clearly I spoke my name ( as emphasised in the exaggerated, emphasised enunciation of the old exercise , 'the RAIN in SPAIN, they say, falls MAINLY in the PLAIN), people persisted in writing Rivas. At times I questioned my own sanity. On top of this perceived indignity to my proudly carried 'new' name, this frustrated me beyond belief.

I must have 'meditated' ( read 'seethed') upon this point of irritation for years, if not decades, until one day it hit me why this occurred so regularly. I finally listened to myself saying , ad nauseam, how Rivis was such an unusual name that it wouldn't be a stretch of the imagination to suggest that if you ran into another Rivis, he or she was more than likely related to us. (It's not quite true but close).

Then I came upon the realization that the human brain, ladies and gentlemen, is basically, lazy.

Or maybe it is smart not to waste too much energy in actually listening with a totally open mind, to what is being fed into it through the ears. Maybe it is smart to scan it's files and , in nanoseconds, come up with an interpretation based strictly upon it's memory bank's records of known similar words !!!

Here we also come upon the birth of 'prejudice' or , in it's Latin form, pre judice, meaning pre judgement. The brains of those hearing my name were prejudiced into only seeking in the recesses (files) of grey matter that which it already knew !! What with all the bazillions of Spanish speaking Rivas's in the world the brain had heard that name with such frequency, compared to it's remotely, once in a lifetime encounter with Rivis that it could not justify the 'expense' of the added energy required to pay attention to this new version of what was in it's memory already !

Instead..as with governments...those with fringe demands are forced into using their own energy to see that the brain gets it right..and then..only this once for it still will not make the effort to file this new version as it is unlikely to require it again .

Smart brain. Or, is it ?

Is it smart for a device so fundamentally central to our survival, to set itself up for a potential 'glitch'. Surely we should exercise our brains sufficiently so that when it does not recognize incoming information that it asks the question "How do you spell that ?" or, better yet, it makes the effort to hear the word correctly the first time and adds it to it's store of knowledge accurately the first time. and in that process it expands the grey matter so it's positively oozing out of it's ears.

Hey, if the brain can store hundreds of thousands of separate words, declensions and derivations of words, then surely it can remember my fucking name !!

The sad truth is, if I recall accurately, that the majority of people make use only of a vocabulary of 450 words !! These days the average university level student probably uses half of that, if not less.
Crossword puzzles are designed to amuse while expanding our experience of the spoken and written word. But they will only fulfil that if they go beyond idiotic questions such as ' the mate of Days of our Life's doctor Ted'. This kind of trivia needs to be junked into a waste file, thereby making room for more valuable and significant information. We can learn from how our computers are built to function . When there is more information than file space we either junk excessive information or we expand the storage space and the only way we seem to be able to expand the storage space is to practice .. do more crosswords, or , at least, consult a dictionary more frequently instead of 'defaulting' to a simpler choice of descriptor.

Jumbles letters/fonts or designs confuse the mind. So, it would not surprise me that when faced with 'wHerENogOdSEXiSt' some might come up with the 'Her','sex' , 'nog' , 'sexist' or if it is an inquisitive mind, even the actual name of this blog 'Where no gods exist' ? Each person's culturally and self imposed screening system and prejudices will define that.

Which leads to the subject (to be explored another time) of religion, belief, superstition, ritual, psychological mis-perception, distortion, veils, clouds ..... not to mention power and fear.