Tuco and the Scattershot World by Brian Brett

Author:Brian Brett
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-77164-064-0
Publisher: Greystone Books
Published: 2015-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

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SPEKE, PARROT

“WHAT’S THAT?” a woman’s voice said from my office.

There was a pause: “It’s a parrot!” replied a much higher voice, obviously excited.

I looked in the room as I strode down the hall. Nobody was there except my little devil friend. There usually isn’t. This was a conversation Tuco had picked up from last night’s epic party, and he liked it.

I’ve been trying to teach him phrases since we first met, and he continues to look at me as if I’m mad, barely tolerable because I feed and entertain him. In fact, I’m sure he thinks he’s merely allowing me around for his entertainment. It’s more fun tormenting me than repeating a dumb phrase. Like most African greys, he has a large vocabulary as well as a rudimentary knowledge of grammar. He has spoken, I estimate, close to five hundred words in our years together. Some only once and never again, some repetitively. I’m told you are considered fluent in Chinese if you know three hundred characters. That great intellectual among parrots, Alex, had a larger conceptual grasp of human intellectual requirements than Tuco, yet his researcher claims he only knew one hundred words, but he used those words well. Tuco’s five hundred words would be sufficient to consider him fluent, though I don’t know if I do. He speaks his own language, and English is merely additional slang for him.

He also utters gibberish, lots of gibberish. He loves gibberish, noises that are almost words yet not quite, like someone faking another language. Maybe with good reason. The French word “jargon” derives from their word “gibber,” which is said to be a term for the chattering of birds. Yet when I am talking to Tuco, I often wonder if he considers English a form of gibberish, fun to imitate yet otherwise uninteresting.

It can hardly be mentioned enough times in this ramble through the world of friends and Others that the limits of human intelligence, spiked with our arrogance, have caused us to spend a lot of time attempting to explain our superiority to our animal relatives. That gap again. Now philosophers and scientists are finally recovering from the “animals are automata” delusion, which only illustrated that many a brilliant thinker spent too little time in physical contact with animals.

Animals have always been “brute beasts” in the histories of Western thought. In the Eastern universe, the wall between the natural world and human world remained ambiguous or transparent for centuries, and creatures that blended sexes, or even several creatures merged in one body, were not always monsters. In fact, many were beneficial—and tribal cultures worldwide also generally exhibited a similar attitude to their relatives in the animal kingdom as well the universe of plants.

THE GAP CONCEIT, as I’ve previously noted, is everywhere evident in Western thought. First in the need of Christian fundamentalists to find gaps in evolutionary theory and between the human race and the rest of the planet. “And God said, Let us make man in our image,

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