Adam Blatner

I am impressed with mind as capable of confabulating, making all manner of thoughts as meaningful. The effectiveness of confabulation depends on the seemingly convincing things that are made up by the person, consciously, un-consciously, or in-between. It often serves in dream-work and occasionally while awake. (It’s a feature of alcoholic encephalopathy or some types of strokes.) What inspired me is my reading recently about speaking in tongues—jabbering, really! It was all the rage in certain populations in Christianity in the USA in the 19th and early 20th century. Nobody noticed that, given a freedom of mind, comedians such as Sid Caesar in the mid-1950s, or even myself with some friends as teenagers, could make up strings of nonsense syllables that sounded (at least to us) like real foreign languages. For me, I imagined my made-up language was from Azerbaijan, south of Russia and to the east of the Black Sea. That region north of Armenia seemed deliciously mysterious.