Order in chaos

Today when Cleo - pictured above, right, with her colleague Quentin - awoke from her nap, she promptly unleashed a storm of consonants, vocalizations, and seemingly urgent gibberish that sounded much more like the oratory of an impassioned Ewok than our normal one-year-old roommate.

As I listened, though, and tried to respond, I kept hearing sequences of sounds that seemed, suddenly, meaningful, in a way in which Cleo's sounds have not generally been yet. Cleo does do a nice version of a mild-mannered dog, when asked to, and she's been delighting strangers with a reasonable Hi for a week now. But those are single syllables. So could she really have said, while indicating her desire to be placed in the rocking chair, a mealy mouthed version of Up there? Did I really hear her say something like Aye pat de dat when she petted the cat? Or was I simply in need of a nap, as well?

I'm still not sure. But I am sure - primarily because I've read Ernst Gombrich's Art and Illusion, one of the greatest books of the 20th century - that we tend to seek order in chaos, and to find the familiar in the unfamiliar. Confronted with an enigmatic shape, we think of analogies with more common objects (It looks like an anchor, or a battle axe...). Facing a beached whale for the first time, Baroque draftsmen carefully gave the animal ears, turning lateral fins into forms that we expect on the animals that we see all the time.

I had a roughly comparable experience, in fact, today, when WBJC played, of all things, the Love Theme from Alex North's score to the 1960 film Spartacus. It's been years since I saw that film, and I certainly didn't remember this 3-minute piece - which, it turns out, is part of a celebrated score that marries Hollywood's lush mood to rough period instrumentation and to a surprisingly modernist approach. Played on piano - rather than on strings, as with the florid rerecording that is available on ITunes - it is a spare, touching composition that's well worth a listen. And yet, as I enjoyed it, I found myself comparing it to other works that I did know. The spare sense recalled George Winston. And the main motif certainly brought Bill Conti's effective First Date, from the soundtrack of Rocky, to mind.

But there I go again, right? Faced with something new, we understand it by forcing it into well-worn categories. And confronted with baby talk, perhaps we - or at least that hypercaffeinated minority of us who are relatively new parents - try hard to uncover words, and phrases, and sentences, in the noise. Did Cleo say what I thought she did? She may not have meant to. But flippers can sure look like ears, if you've never seen a whale before.