Two Things at Once

In my research I've come across the book Artistry in Native American Myths by Karl Kroeber. In his discussion on Coyote he says something interesting.

He talks about the "duck-rabbit" and he says, "we can see the drawing as either a duck or a rabbit, but we cannot see both at the same time. Aurally, however, we can and do imagine Trickster - Coyote - simultaneously as human and as animal." (226-227)

I find this visual phenomenon even more evident with illusions that I must partially cover to see in another way, or illusions I have to turn upside down. Here are some good ones. It is when it is really hard to see the image one way that I can feel how I have to force myself to stop seeing it the other way.

Kroeber does not go on to make a definite claim that we can hear/imagine something as two things at the same time. He believes it is the case with Coyote, but he also says it hasn't really been studied.

First of all, I agree. I think we hear and imagine things multiple ways all the time. Puns. Lies (you are speaking something you "know" in two ways). There are other stories that rely on understanding something both ways, like "The Emperor's New Clothes." We know he is naked, once we have heard the story once, but we still imagine what the king is told to imagine. We can visualize him as both naked and finely dressed.

Beyond this, I wonder if our increasingly visual culture is encouraging us to categorize things more. I set out to break early oral narrative into historical, religious, cultural stories, etc. But then I couldn't. There is so much overlap in the old stories that these types of categories are meaningless. To us today these are all very different things and we access information that informs us in these areas in very different ways.

In my pursuit of sound and sense I wonder what is "true." Is our visual culture blinding us to multiplicities of meaning all around us? I think, maybe so. But there is a good chance I am biased.