Platitude Lacks Resonance

Boredom is never boring till it's flat!... Axiomatiq Resonance is more vital than energy Axioma Superlativa	In The Beginning was The Word... Because a word is a vibration, in fact. Verbs are vibrations... Sound makes energy... Athanor Distillations
Flatness Lacks Resonance... A crystal glass will sing for you. Flick an apple with the back of your nail; if it is crisp, it should not sound dull. The Morse Code is flat for being monochord.

The Mother of Voices... In The LONG SHIPS, Sidney Poitier, a Moorish Commander, eventually teams up with Richard Widmark, a stranded

Viking chief who is also a compulsive thief, in order to locate The Mother of Voices, a very large bell, made by monks from gold collected in all Christendom...This object allegedly produces sounds capable of creating or destroying... Being a hedonist, the thief only cares for melting any part of this metal and have a good time with Scandinavian women back home. A wise hedonist. The Moor already has a harem, now he is having hegemonic ideas!

In Indiana Jones, the Nazis were digging for The Lost Ark for the same frantic reasons: anyone who owns this biblical object becomes immediately invincible and cannot be defeated! Whether sound has anything to do with the so-called Power-God, this highly enjoyable movie does not suggest. Another rather brilliant bit of cinema which could have picked up an extra billion dollars at the box-office, had it so much as treated the selling-points. We only get to see lights & flashes—as with the UFOs or Saturday Night Fever, for that matter...

What is truly enigmatic about the Ark isn't whether it has ever existed, but the itinerary it followed when it was taken away from one place to another by all sorts of people, who didn't believe it existed...

Sound used as a weapon would outclass any WMD—even those one might find hiding in a hole on the ground... Plain verbal platitudes can do just as much social damage as a Neutron-Bomb and no one could tell, for the same inconspicuous reason. The last time someone tried to use sound for military purposes was in late 1800s. The Frenchman went mad, immediately. It was too abstract, probably... Back then people needed horses, heavy guns—and shovels, too—to feel that they were doing war. Anything more subtle than trench-digging was deemed injurious by social organisers of the day, who insisted evolution must be gradual... Luckily, late 20th century censors were able to think a little faster than all that! We are now so refined we even stick warning-labels on explosives, in case someone sits on a crate to have a smoke and then sues the factory, for lack of adequate designation... Proper warning now consists in sticking labels on cars, stating, Do not get into the automobile through the side-window!...

The Litigation-Culture isn't a problem, because of the financial transactions involved: these ruin lives, all right. But the greater problem is what can happen to a whole civilisation on course with its grandiose futuristic destiny, when it allows its commonwealth of intelligence to be quite mercilessly chipped away. Intelligence is a living breathing force, as real as trees and rivers to be cared for. The future of our children depends on the quality of intelligence we are fashioning for them, at present.

Platitude in self-expression
The sound produced by a wooden bell is typically dull. Dullness in sound has a low vibration-rate or none, it doesn't have a ring to it, no timbre and the tonality is flat. Similar effects are observed at all levels of existence in every aspect of daily living, both individually & collectively. However, assessing flatness in terms of self-expression involves several factors, apart from quality of sound in a speech. Also, all rules must be adjusted to the fact that millions of individuals have never produced the sounds of language since birth, and as many have never heard the sound of sound.

All platitudes in self-expression come down to a matter of (1) meaning, and (2) resonance.
Flatness has lost its capacity to resonate, to echo...
PHAEDRA

SELF-EXPRESSION is the total result of the things we say, what we mean, how we say it, and how we look when we say it...

And the room became quiet...

Self-expression is the totality of a person's output achieved by any combination of physical & abstract means, tools or faculties, including: language spoken, written, carved, symbolised; physical language in signs, facial grins, mimics, gait & gestures. We have defined Personality! Character is the nature of a thing—also a summary of all that one is; but this remains private, an internal experience. Personality is character brought into contact with a live ambience. Someone is said to have or have shown character usually because of some heroic deed, brave, noble, or even smart act—or because they acted on time—which is what heroism turns out to be! But morality often meanders in academic definitions as the first explorers in the Nile. Glenn Ford was a hero for going back to school after another day, in The Blackboard Jungle. Having character is a weighing of one's private experience against one's tendency to re-act to hostility all about. Results produced by this tentative balancing are regarded as quasi-supernatural— especially if a bully is looking at it!... Bullies really believe that all it takes to survive is to side with the natural hostility of existence. This technique was tried by the Visigoths siding with the Romans, when the Huns were coming too close; or vice-versa. It is still very fashionable. In the final analysis, anyone unwittingly encourages bullies-in-society who looks for solutions against hostility, but never thinks of contributing the simple effective wisdom they have in themselves.

1—MEANING
Meaning in a face...
Intended meaning shows in the overall tone of dialogue, personal presentation & body language—facial expression, chiefly.
The face, not the eyes, reveals all intents & options.
If there is a sincerity of love, you can see it in the eyes. But the face tells you if love has happened...

A platitude is a flat statement
If a man's face is not animated and his tone is unchanging, he is more than likely to issue platitudes all day long. Unless he were Bill Collins. None of the above applies to women—they look good, even if they are very liberated. A woman may only be dull if she is concerned with her self-worth in excess of the circumstance, or if she is going on a date. The apprehension of landing a boring fellow is terrifying in advance... Concern over self-significance is seldom appropriate. This positive commercial curse affects both genders much as convicts in Charles Chaplin's days used to drag a gun-bullet in shackles. There is no real liberation until we learn to feel good without the self-tormenting hype—which can be done without depleting the economy! We never know how to congratulate ourselves when we pick up an award, anyway... The words are the same whether we have obtained a wife, a world title, a medal, a wage-increase, a seat at the Senate—or when we thank our fallen heroes.

In short, self-esteem doesn't add up.

A reporter [any gender] interviews an athlete at the end of a race:
REPORTER [very excited] :
How do you feel, now you've broken the world record!?
RACER [panting away] :
Don't know, great... feel I could've done better, perhaps...

No need to go deeper into the interview. The reporter is guilty of a double platitude: for asking the obvious, repeatedly... and not guiding the conversation to more enriching ends, considering that performers are eager to please a world of fans & spectators, via the interviewer, and will oblige the latter's directives, implicitly as a rule. When you keep being asked "How do you feel?", you end up believing that this question must be central to all purposes for the rest of eternity. This persuasion is detrimental to champions and is liable to weaken performance over the years, rather than particularly enhance it.

Contribution has a ring to it!
Axiomatiq
No statement however low-keyed, monotonous or casually ridiculous is a platitude, if it brings some contribution.
Axioma Contributiva

Vital issues have a ring to them...
Preachers, commentators, teachers—politicians too, sometimes—often get away with a clay-bell performance. This is followed by the usual criticism: "Anyone says as they please or nothing at all, if they have power & authority!" In fact, people in key-positions tend to raise vital issues for everyone, and we take it as it comes—because when there is talk of crisis, we want to know what is going on & what to do; who cares how it is said? Unruly pupils pay attention when the stakes are high, even if the presentation is acutely boring. Bigger bullies will actually put up with severe nonsense, for that same reason. The problem facing parents, educators & social organisers is to determine a ratio between what is of critical interest in certain frames of mind, and completely dismal in others. Such an equation would resolve a great number of instances where one thing is mistaken for another. This should be a good start. The social mathematics for this equation must try to clear the matter of whether emotional states are an indication of any particular potentiality—can the fact of feeling very aggressive or in a rotten mood be pacified by a promise of professional expertise?

No one is born a rebel.
A child has to learn how to do this, step-by-step. One learns to howl with the wolves—but where does one acquire the bad habits, before going with the pack?...

Contrary to prevailing opinion, men listen to what women have to say—and carefully—because what women say always is of great moment to a fellow! Most men might struggle to put it into words why that is, if they have never thought of it—but every boy knows it, before he learns spelling. Then comes the shrugging!..."It's not worth the bother!" In a nutshell, this is what a shrug reveals. Highly specialised Body-Language Seminars still teach that. There are variations. A young man pretending he isn't interested in the girl over there... An assassin planting a bomb-device in public bins, looking at his watch and quietly walking off, after giving a silly shrug... Since then, finding a disposal-bin in a city, train-station or shopping-complex is like finding an oasis in the Gobi Desert.

Shrugging it off is a reaction to something important that cannot be psychologically integrated. Men dismiss feminine views in a shrug—and vice-versa—because reverse biological perceptions are much too difficult, important & revolutionary to be casually accepted. Based on this formula, dealing with relational problems may require as much interest in exploration as in cooperation—exploration as in Discovering America, Diving Deep, checking out life on Mars or going to Nepal.

Making it interesting enough for a boy to suddenly acknowledge that he has a capacity of soul, a potential hiding away in a charm that also hides away..., is another matter. Men know that they have feelings—even grotesque bullies do, or would they take pleasure in hurting?—but in most cases, sensitivity tends to be regarded as a manifestation of Santa Claus: whenever it happens, it feels good—especially because it never is what you had in mind when you wrote for a Christmas wish... And this feels good, because it absolves one from having to worry about the next situation, whenever that might be...

In other words:
Feelings are central to a woman, because it really feels good, when it happens. But men enjoy sensitivity, because it is completely unpredictable. As to brutes & villains, they like sentimentality above all when that happens to them, because then do they discover the joys of masochism.
Freudiana

No one is sadistic who doesn't long for the reverse psychological trends.
Examples of this latter process abound in History.
S & M, or sado-masochism has been accepted in every social era. Excluding this game of Yo-Yo, the human agenda would fit into 153 pages, the rest blank!

The following definition of S & M does not hint at contemporary trends.
Freudiana is now doing a piece of psychological sculpture:

Sado-masochism was in vogue long before the two men who gave it their names were born. Freudiana describes this way of being as stemming from a need to hurt in order to feel guilty, so that being hurt in turn becomes enjoyable, as a relief from guilt.