I’ll tell you a secret.
I mean, it used to be a secret to me, until...
Okay, I’ll go back a bit.
The Person and The Story
First, I have always been drawn to the question of what it means to be a person.
Secondly, stories have always been my way of understanding truth, not in a direct, rational sense, but at a level beneath awareness.
And third, I believe that identity itself is a kind of narrative, forming and reforming as we live.
So when I decided on Personeum.com, I thought I was simply marking my fascination with personhood, the study and development of the self. I liked the way the name sounded: grounded, ancient, like it had weight to it. It felt right.
But, as with many things, sometimes mercifully, we do not fully understand the complexity of our motivations until later.
Discovering What Was Hidden
It wasn’t until recently that the meaning hidden within the name revealed itself to me.
One day, while thinking about how to explain what I wanted Personeum to stand for, I found myself staring at the name...
And then I saw it, the word “neum” (also spelled “neume”), embedded inside Personeum.
Did I discover it? Was it revealed? Did I do it unconsciously? Providence?
A deeper discussion for another time.
I think I had vaguely known the word before, from one of three possible sources.
Most likely, it came from my first real experience in a serious choral group during my college days in California’s Central Valley. Our choral director drew from classical and sacred music, giving us experiences that would stay with us for decades.
Or perhaps it was from my father, a music teacher and composer. In my teens, I absorbed a fascination with music theory watching him sit at the family piano, playing his compositions from the 1940s, lush, extended harmonies with altered chords that managed to be both sophisticated and playful.
Or maybe it was from my time as a music major in college, where I studied the history of musical notation.
Wherever it came from, it was waiting for me to understand it.