The Seagulls Eye View and Amavissem : More on the Polyglot Method

The seagull has only a partial, bottom-up view. Maybe he hears only certain pitches as well.
From his niche, the 11:00 a.m. Channel crossing from Dover to Boulogne is a confused
blur, but its one we may imagine that he recognizes and (who knows?) even remembers.
I have likened it to the view of Note C5 on the piano, when Twinkle,Twinkle, Little Star
(first 8 notes only, at one per second) is played
Thus the seagulls brief cortical activity is a fact of the cosmos, however inaccessible its
details may be to our scrutiny. By the same token, these stages in our diagram below

have only in their first and last phases (Look at Word; Pronounce) anything in
common at all with what we might call the Amavissem systems stages of perception
and reasoning.
In order to explain Amavissem (which in Latin means that I might have loved ; or
in German [dass] ich htte geliebt) a glance at the chart below is eloquent beyond
any explanation I could give

Or again, see Mr Crocker-Harris declaiming Aeschylus in The Browning Version
in Mike Figgiss 1994 film of that name, which I do not tire of referring back to. In
the Clytemnestra scene we see the two approaches in succession, the haltingly
Amavissem approach of student Laughton this, by the way, is a splendid
cinematic in-joke from Figgis as there was a very famous British actor, not halting at
all, called Charles Laughton! and the seagulls swoop par excellence in deliberate
and telling contrast, when the schoolmaster speaks and almost acts out - the
cathartic text in a visionary and magnificently stirring manner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ts0yT-FEDs
(In this clip, Spanish subtitles add philological richness; but the premature editing
out of the classroom bell ringing at the end of the declamation, to bring the teacher
back to the everyday world, is a small defect from the uploader, which I hope to
make good by eventually supplying a new version)
O.K. I have slightly shifted my metaphor: the seagull has miraculously left the niche
which I was likening to a single mental act; and is able to perform a whole succession
of them, and acquire richer and more organic data than from the harbour wall or
cliff ledge: but I do not think that I have done any damage to my essential premise.
Or perhaps, along with the picture of this mornings soaring Hammergeier at the top
of my article, Neuhauss legendary account of meeting Sviatoslav Richter for the first
time, wherein we must exchange for an Odessa seagull, a Russian eagle, makes the
point equally well:
On the suggestion of a friend, [Richter] left for Moscow to see if Heinrich Neuhaus -- the teacher
of Horowitz and several other famed pianists -- would accept him as a student. Neuhaus reluctantly
agreed to listen to him. The young man had no formal training, and at 22 a career as a pianist
seemed out of the question.
Nevertheless, what Neuhaus heard astonished him. "It was as if I were hearing certain pieces for
the first time," he said. "He treated each composition like a vast landscape, which he surveyed from
a great height with the incredibly keen vision of an eagle, taking in the whole and all the details at
the same time. He played like no one else I had ever heard, and there was nothing I could teach
him.

Key here is Neuheuss perception that Richter [was] taking in the whole and all the
details at the same time
There is the same duality of levels, the same richness of procedure and of results, in
the workshop situation of the Polyglot Method: as the chart below, extrapolated
from the one on the previous page, makes clear (compare Case B, contrasted with
the more normal procedure in case A)

It is time to listen to some Richter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIOgiotfJ3c
Contessa: Ei gi il resto capir. And the rest he'll understand
Susanna/Contessa: Certo, certo il capir. Certainly, certainly he'll understand.


Certo, il capir.