Akin to other sounds that hiss off the tongue like air leaking from a tire, it’s called a sibilant.
Although I’ve not done exhaustive research, I think I’m safe in saying it’s no accident the word sibilant starts with a sibilant sound.
The word came to my mind the other day while I was in the passenger seat of a small station wagon fitted with four perfectly sound tires, all rolling northeast in a section of S-curve between Springfield Regional Medical Center and Wittenberg University.
As the car came out of the curve and began its descent to Buck Creek, the driver mentioned her fondness for the picture postcard scene in front of us.
As I took in the sight that’s welcomed me back so often from out-of-town jaunts, I ticked off a little laundry list of elements that each year welcome people back to the Springfield Summer Arts Festival: The creek, the cliffs, the college, the cemetery.
That’s when the word sibilant came to mind.
Because, for a moment, its sibilant soft-c sound of cemetery hid from me the connection it shares with cliff, college and creek: All begin with the same letter.
My sense of it is that, wherever we live, we connect with special spots that speak to us in the same way.
Because they lack the grandeur of the scenes that draw people to the National Parks, we don’t always mention the local watering holes that quench the same thirst.
But as part of our day-to-day lives, they have the power more distant places lack: the power to pry us away from our everyday lives and worries.
During a recent solitary drive from Springfield to Chicago, little nooks like the one at the bottom of the Plum Street Hill seemed to leap out at me from the Ohio and Indiana landscape.
And that made me think of all the little scenes in all the little places that speak to people of all sorts.
It made me think of how often they, too, come upon a favorite scene and notice, like I do, things like the iron gates and stone house on the Ferncliff Grounds; the stand of trees that rise on the right as Plum Street climbs the hill; the street lights that dot the tops of the cliffs in Veterans Park; and the dark silence along the creek.
That, in turn, made me wonder about how our minds are drawn to such things.
Sure, there’s the physical process by which our brains take in what the eyes give them, absorb the experience and create memories, which are added to our neural networks in the usual way.
My sense is that after this happens, we start using words to try to lock the feelings in place to hold on to the experience and somehow explain or recreate the power it has over us.
But I also think there’s something beyond logic or maybe that comes before logic that draws our eyes and has us on the lookout – that creates an expectation for these sights and sites to emerge from the scenery.
Neuroscientist Antonio Damassio, offers a simpler and more powerful explanation for all this, and I recommend anyone interested in a more powerful explanation than can be offered by a small town columnist Google Damassio’s name.
He says that, in the process of storing information, our brains pack emotion and information together in a kind of epoxy mix that bonds them together. This means that when we recall them, we get both as well.
That squares with the experience of a certain small town columnist who sees a face in a vast warehouse of faces collected during a long career spent interviewing people and remembers the good feelings associated with that face more quickly than he recalls the name.
It may explain, too, why, on a solitary drive away from his hometown, his eyes search for scenes reassuring him that people everywhere feel as at home as he does whenever his car comes out of a certain S-curve on Plum Street and begins a slow descent toward a creek, some cliffs, a college and a cemetery.
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