A Change of Gears

Having spent the beginning of this semester struggling to find a suitable day to continue my practice of a weekly vow of silence, I have come to a cross-roads in my thesis. There is no single day of my week in which it will be possible to spend the great majority of it in silence and observation, as I am pulled into the world of verbal communication seven days a week through my duties of two jobs (as a study abroad peer adviser at the Center for International Education and as a waitress), a volunteer internship at the Audubon Aquarium in which I am required to interact with guests, and classes in which my success hinges on my participation in group discussion. These difficulties only reinforce the reality that language is a necessity for those who wish to live in and keep up with such a fast-paced modern world that is sustained by the interactions of an increasingly expanding web of human (and other) individuals. Being social animals, each of our survival depends greatly upon our cooperation with the community, and this community has oozed beyond the mere local to become a global supernetwork. And it is not just for our survival, but fulfillment of needs beyond the physical that we must partake. We participate, or perish. This being so, it has come into my awareness through trial that perfect execution of my thesis at a time in which I am not able to withdraw from my social roles is not possible. I must change direction.

And so, I propose a new plan. If I cannot spend large blocks of time the length of a day in silence, I will have to with more intention carve out condensed periods of not-speech. And perhaps this juxtaposition of participation in spoken language and withdrawal in the same day for a given activity will be even more revealing of the truths I seek to uncover with my experience.

If you, the reader, has any recommendations of possible situations I could put myself in during which I would choose to be silent that would be non-detrimental to my work and school lives, I am, appropriately, all ears.

Intention>Language>Misinterpretation>Separation

I have been thinking a lot recently about language and intention. About how, specifically, some synaptic spark or flute of the muse gives rise to a Thought (amorphous) that is selected in the mind for external expression. And how it is intended that this Thought be expressed as it was when it rose in the thinker, that it remain pure and be understood by a receiver as such. And how, somewhere along the tangled lines of language, in the processes of expression and interpretation, it may inadvertently become Another Idea altogether through fumbles in articulation on the part of the speaker, or misunderstanding on the part of the listener. And this misunderstanding of the listener could be due to the possibility that the listener's brain has over time and shaped by experience not acquired the compatible concepts in its web of mental schema, and therefore substitutes relevant meaning by a slight adjustment to the message. The underlying question that begs my attentive excavation as I dawn upon my 8th hour of silence today is whether or not, or perhaps less severely, how often we understand exactly what was intended upon expression, and how often we just get "the gist". It is unsettling when it becomes apparent how in our everyday lives we are constantly and unwittingly engaged in the game of "telephone" with all we encounter, each of us subjectively filtering from the overwhelming mass of stimulus that bombards our sensibilities that which is personally pertinent. Through the existence of our separate sieves we work most efficiently by throwing aside our overlappings in perspective once confirmed and weeding through our differences to pin down a single granule of Truth (whose solidity is less and less certain the further we move past the post-modern mark of human-interpreted-History). While sharing perspective with others and receiving confirmation facilitates the warm-fuzzy comforts of human bonding, makes one at ease in his identity, and secure in the World, the hypothesis arises through this study of language that it is not our coinciding in interpretation and perspective but our divergences that are most revealing. We depart by the sheer impossibility that we could perceive the same stimulus and have the very same interpretation. It is into these cracks of difference I wish to fall and dig, into these gaps of understanding that disrupt our lulled illusion of continuity, these spaces we bump into that remind us of our distinct perceptions, and coax us to rummage through our toolboxes of words and explain ourSelves to the Others in repair. And perhaps we find we are missing the precise tool we need. What other ways can we convey our intentions, and connect?

A Bye-Month for Many Degrees of Separation and Reflection

When I went to Puerto Rico over winter break, I chose not to practice my vow of silence as to not complicate further language barriers I would inevitably encounter or make uncomfortable the family to which I was the guest. The said barriers threw me--were not what I had expected--as it turned out that mostly everyone I encountered in the country spoke English. This would have been a relief rather than an ironic obstacle had I not gone to practice my Spanish and keep my cognitive cogs well-oiled. The trip became an absurd game of me speaking to others in Spanish, and being responded to in English. I felt strangely disempowered and defeated in being forced to use my native language to save exchanges from awkward incongruence. I wondered if the insistence of others to speak English with me was a gesture of hospitality under the impression that this would make things easier for me, their own eagerness to practice their skills, an underestimation of mine, or (and) an automated response to blonde-hair signifier for "gringa". I was also working against the assumption of those that approached me first that being American (or shall I say more officially American than they), surely I did not share their language. And with this assumption, I also sensed a certain level of guardedness, for who does not feel a subtle but distinct instinct of separateness when in the proximity of someone with a different first language? And does that distance not diminish when two people of separate cultures discover with delight that they do in fact stand on a common ground and can communicate in the same tongue (though prejudices of an imperfect use of that language may reside)? In probing this phenomenon and recalling my experiences abroad in Chile, a handful of other South American countries, Costa Rica, and now Puerto Rico, I can only conclude most simply that language not only serves as a tool of communication between individuals (and media masses), but is also an important function of culture. Language allows a social group bound by this commonality a sense of union (in-group), while also creating an Other (out-group)--those who do not speak the language. And there is still a deeper sense of unity (real or perceived, and thus made real) in an understanding of the world amongst speakers of a common language. A popular practice amongst those who study linguistics is to take cues from a language's grammatical structure as clues to its culture's world-view. An oft-accounted example used as evidence for this theory is that in many languages of indigenous cultures, it is senseless to use the possessive adjectives "my", "his", "our", etc. for members of the family, the land, etc. because in their world-view, none of these subjects can be "owned". So I suppose learning another language must include learning another culture in a self-feeding loop, while simultaneously broadening (because it is impossible to replace) one's existing world-view. In my last "Lost in Translation" class, a course I am taking this semester with Professor Dewell, we were told that there is no true translation in any language that holds the same meaning as "blue". I took this to mean that because every word in every language is loaded with culturally-specific connotations, it is impossible to translate a word to imply exactly all the same things. There is a lurking worry that if a common human denominator of language does not shout its presence known, this material of study may lead one to feel that we live in a world of infinite fractions, each one a tiny mirror reflecting everything except itself.