Serpents, skulls, and the search for meaning (Italo Calvino's Mr. Palomar)

This is a text transcript based on the video. The spoken word has been slightly modified to be read as a blog post.

“The refusal to comprehend more than what the stones show us is perhaps the only way to evince respect for their secret trying to guess is a presumption a betrayal of that trues lost meaning.”

Hey, I’m Brian Miller, a magician turned speaker and author. I work with organizations, educators and students who want to create an environment where everyone feels heard, understood and valued. And in this video we are talking about meaning: what do things mean and how can we know?

Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar

This book changed my life. It really profoundly impacted my life in an unexpected way. This is Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino. Italo Calvino was a mid-twentieth century Italian author, a wizard with language. He was internationally renowned and every single one of his books had a different tone, a different feel. He reinvented his voice as an author for every individual project which makes his entire body of work really spectacular to go through as a whole. A lot of his different books impacted me in different ways but maybe none more so than this one. Mr. Palomar was recommended to me as reading for my 200-level metaphysics class as an undergraduate philosophy student.

Believe me or not you may have heard me reference Mr. Palomar without even noticing it. In my now very famous TEDx talk “How to Magically Connect with Anyone,” the very opening line was, ‘Our world is a shared experience fractured by individual perspectives.’ Where I got the idea from that line is actually right here on the back cover of the book. It says:

“A vision of a world familiar by consensus fragmented by individual perception.”

And so, it’s this idea that the world as a whole is an experience but that each of us walking through it has our own perspective, our own perception of that shared world. And of course, that idea has been the foundation of all the work I have done for the past three years, and will probably continue to be the foundation for I think decades to come.

This book is only 126 pages in total. Each chapter is just 2-5 pages and each chapter is an individual story that has one main idea that’s designed for the reader to kind of think about themselves and their lives and their relationship to others and to the world. And I want to do something unusual: I would like to read to you. I know that sounds silly, but I’m going to read a small passage from one of the stories in this book called Serpents and Skulls.

Serpents and Skulls

In this story Mr. Palomar is visiting Mexico in Tula the ancient capital of the Toltecs. They are at the Temple of the Morning Star which is a step pyramid, and he is with a friend who acts as kind of his tour guide who supposedly knows the area and knows the stories behind the things that they are seeing.

So here we go. I will skip around a little bit, eliminate a few things just to make this a little bit more brisk. Story time with Brian Miller.

In Mexican archeology every statue, every object, every detail of a bas-relief stands for something that stands for something else that stands, in turn, for yet another something. An animal stands for a god who stands for a star that stands for an element or a human quality, and so on. We are in the world of pictographic writing; the ancient Mexicans, to write, drew pictures, and even when they were drawing it was as if they were writing: every picture seems a rebus to be deciphered. Even the most abstract geometric friezes on the wall of a temple can be interpreted as arrows if you see a motive of broken lines, or you can read a numerical sequence, depending on the way the key pattern is repeated. Here in Tula the reliefs depict stylized animal forms: jaguars, coyotes. Mr. Palomar’s Mexican friend pauses at each stone, transforms it into a cosmic tale, an allegory, a moral reflection.

A group of schoolchildren moves among the ruins: stocky boys with the features of the Indios, descendants perhaps of the builders of these temples, wearing plain white uniforms, like boy scouts, with blue neckerchiefs. The boys are led by a teacher and not much taller than they are and only a little more adult, with the same round, dark, impassive face. They climb the steep steps of the pyramid, stop beneath the columns; the teacher tells what civilization they belong to, what century, what stone they are carved from, and then concludes, “We don’t know what they mean,” … At each statue each figure carved in a relief or on a column, the teacher supplies some facts and then invariably adds, “We don’t know what it means.”

…

Though Mr. Palomar continues to follow the explanation of his friend acting as a guide, he always ends up crossing the path of the schoolboys and overhearing the teacher’s words. He is fascinated by his friend’s wealth of mythological references: the play of interpretation and allegorical reading has always seemed to him a supreme exercise of the mind. But he feels attracted also by the opposite attitude of the schoolteacher: what had at first seemed only a brisk lack of interest is being revealed to him as a scholarly and pedagogical position, a methodological choice by the serious and conscientious young man, a rule from which he will not swerve. A stone, a figure, a sign, a word reaching us isolated from its context is only that stone, figure, sign, or word: we can try to define them, to describe them as they are, and no more than that; whether, beside the face they show us, they also have a hidden face, is not for us to know. The refusal to comprehend more than what the stones show us is perhaps the only way to evince respect for their secret; trying to guess is a presumption, a betrayal of that true, lost meaning.

Behind the pyramid is a passage or communication trench between two walls, one of packed earth, the other of carved stone: the Wall of the Serpents. It is perhaps the most beautiful piece in Tula; in the relief-frieze there is a sequence of serpents, each holding a human skull in its open jaws, as if it were about to devour it.

The boys go by. The teacher says: “This is the Wall of the Serpents. Each serpent has a skull in its mouth. We don’t know what they mean.”

Mr. Palomar’s friend cannot contain himself: “Yes, we do! It’s the continuity of life and death; the serpents are life, the skulls are death. Life is life because it bears death with it, and death is death because there is no life without death. …”

The boys listen, mouths agape, black eyes dazed. Mr. Palomar thinks that every translation requires another translation, and so on. He asks himself: “What did death, life, continuity, passage mean for the ancient Toltecs? And what can they mean today for these boys? And for me?” Yet he knows he could never suppress in himself the need to translate, to move from one language to another, from concrete figures to abstract words, to weave and reweave a network of analogies. Not to interpret is impossible, as refraining from thinking is impossible.
Once the school group has disappeared around a corner, the stubborn voice of the little teacher resumes: “No es verdad, it is not true, what the señor said. We don’t know what they mean.”

We are meaning machines

Alright so I’m going to talk about this just for a moment. I don’t want to talk about it too much because I actually think it’s better if you think about it for yourself, if you consider what that story, that I just told you, that Mr. Palomar went through, that Italo Calvino has gifted us: it’s better if you think about it for yourself. But here is my kind of bracket on that, the kind of thing that I hope you will go think about, which is: when we go through the world, we look to assign meaning to virtually everything it.

We are meaning machines. We are story machines. We look at something and we want to know the story, we want to know what it means. And we don’t just do this with things, we do it with people. And that can get us into lots of trouble, because not everything means the thing you think it does. And lot of times we fool ourselves into believing that we are really good at figuring out the meaning of things, and in particular figuring out the meaning of people. Because we think we are really good at assigning meaning to the actions, and to the thoughts, and to the beliefs of the people closest to us. And because we are so overconfident we don’t check. We don’t double-check we don’t ask; we just assume that we are right. We believe we are right and so we just act on those assumptions and we get it wrong so often: that’s why it’s so easy to hurt the people closest to us.

Stop guessing

So, what’s the solution? How do we get better at reading the thoughts and feelings of the people closest to us, let alone strangers? We don’t guess; we ask. If you want to learn to get better at reading the thoughts and feelings of other people, what we really need to learn to do are two things: We need to learn to ask questions, meaningful and relevant questions, and we need to learn to listen better.

I’ve got a great resource free for anybody who wants it on my website called “How to Use Your E.A.R.S.” It’s a four-step system, E-A-R-S, for mastering the art of active listening. You can grab that anytime you want at HowToUseYourEARS.com (or put your email in the box at the bottom of this page).  If you do that you will also be able to get emails from me. I send an email once-a-week with communication tips, strategies, techniques, stories, and modern research in the field of human connection and social psychology. I think you will really enjoy being a part of that.

Well, I hope that’s something for you to think about. I really, really recommend you pick up Mr. Palomar. Here is a link to the book on Amazon. It is an affiliate link which means if you buy it from Amazon through there it supports this blog at no cost to you.

Thanks so much for sticking with me, and always remember that our world is a shared experience. Be well, and be kind.