Silence:Thereisnosuchthingas

I thought I'd experiment a bit with the pairing of different uses of speech (rhetorics) with silence, to see if the experience of silence varies depending on what kind of language it follows. After working an 8ish-hour shift at Slim Goodies, I returned home and gladly accepted a break from speech, and decided to make it one with intention. As I showered and began to unwind, I noticed something peculiar. Though I was very much alone in my very quiet house, I was still experiencing a carrying-over of the background noise of the restaurant. The din of the diner chatter and clattering of plates continued to play, like a ghostly record. The strange echoes in my ears were like the scent of pancake batter and oil soaked into my clothes and nose, the film of grease on my skin, like a sticky residue on my brain. As I lay down to nap, as I relaxed and let go of consciously-directed thought, the din became louder and the script I had repeated all day even started to surface in floating fragments: "...how do you want your eggs...", etc.

While there are certainly moments of a more quiet mind than others, and this is something that can be sought to expand through meditation, I am becoming very sure that I have never myself experienced silence, inside or outside. And even when refraining from speech, it is very rare that my internal dialogue of language ceases. The word "silence" seems to me much like the word "nothing"--in that exists in constructed concept, but not in lived experience. Or perhaps I can be proven otherwise? Takers?

I find contemporary composer John Cage's interpretation of silence to resonate with my own. Silence is not about a void or an absence, but the sounds, however seemingly insignificant, that fill a space (traffic). I would just like to supplement his definition for my own purposes to include the sound from inside the mind in addition to the ambient. That is music, and that is language: the-everything-in-between.

"John Cage on silence"
www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcHnL7aS64Y&feature=related

And a rendition of his infamous piece 4'33":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zY7UK-6aaNA&feature=related

Words weld human beams

A few weeks ago I had a day off, and so returned to my trial of silence. I wanted to test how I could get by without language in the public realm beyond Loyola's campus, and beyond interaction with only peer students, teachers, and friends. I started with the streetcar. While there is no real need for speech in the smooth systemization of waiting at a pictorially communicative sign of designation, climbing on board the car when it arrives, guiding my dollar bill into the slot in accordance with the red arrows, and finding an empty seat among strangers--I've been socialized, I know how to do these things-- I did find something lacking. Even just a simple greeting to the driver, a moment shared with the person I share the bench seat with, or a "Thank you" to hear an "Alllright" when I was getting off would have combatted that sense of isolation that I think is prevalent in many forms of public transportation where speech is not required to pass. The most thorough of public transportation systems post signs everywhere with arrows, codes, and pictures to guide passengers (think subway and bus stations, airports, etc.) with minimal need for human assistance, while the least thorough send you through a circular maze in which you can't seem to locate someone to ask where you are going. And so I could not speak to break this tension of separation from my fellow travelers and captain, but a smile would have to do.

I arrived at the Loyola bookstore a bit nervous-- I had never had to purchase anything without at least a small exchange of verbs. I pulled out a pad of paper, upon which I had written "I need a copy of 'When Species Meet' for the class Environmental Theory (used if possible). Teacher is Schaberg. Thank you." I was surprised that the woman did not seem to think (or act, since I can't claim access to another's thoughts) that there was anything out of the ordinary about my form of request, and obliged. I also wrote below it "And can I return this please?" referring to another book I had brought, and this too was carried out smoothly. When it came time to pay, I was asked if my card was credit or debit. I tried to point to the latter as if her words were still hanging in the air in front of us, but I suppose from her spatial angle, the latter looked like the former. "Credit?" I shook my head, pointed back again in the floating sentence. She asked if it was debit, and I nodded to confirm. When we were finished with the transaction. I circled the "Thank you" written across my yellow notebook and pointed to it with emphasis. This time, she smiled.

I thought about this exchange for many days, about how much worse it could have unfolded. I wondered why she was utterly nonplussed about a conversation held entirely on paper and with unskilled hand signs. Perhaps she thought I had laryngitically lost my voice, was physically incapable of uttering, and took pity on my condition. Or working in a bookstore on college campus had come to expect such silly experiments. Or maybe she just thought I was weird, and so was kind.

I decided it would be a good idea to go back and ask her today. I asked her if she remembered me, that time someone came in and wasn't talking and asked her for a book with a note and if she thought that was weird. I could see in her eyes that she was straining to remember, but she said she did and no, she didn't think it was weird, that that's how people come to her, lot's of people do that. Her answer perplexed me, and I doubted if she really remembered the interaction, being that it had taken place several weeks before. I thought it possible that she was confusing our interaction for perhaps the many instances students bring with them the titles of the books they need scrawled across paper. Or maybe there is an underground society of silent students at Loyola I just don't know about. The most compelling hypothesis I could come up with was because it had been a smooth transaction and words were still used, though not in the spoken form, that she simply hadn't really registered that anything was out of place. Curious.

Words Over-Easy

In balance of my silence, I want to examine the different ways in which I use language, and the particular effects its different uses have on me. I realized that we all engage in a variety of rhetoric, depending on our moment-to-moment situations. There is a rhetoric for conversation with friends, generally less formal and hinging off of an implied context of mutual understanding than say would be academic rhetoric, in which we would employ an elevated use of vocabulary and make context explicit in words for utmost clarity and proof of intelligence. Speech with friends includes more play and wit of words, can make great leaps from topic to topic, and even come back full circle after multiple interruptions and interjections. There is a sort of loose, free-form weaving of ideas that encourages the meandering of thoughts, the effusiveness of emotions. When we speak in an academic setting, we imitate the language, the vocabulary, trajectories of thought, and meanings of those that we read, who we deem to be of certain authority. There is a rhetoric for parents, which could include some degree of censorship or filtering, a rhetoric for lovers, draped in terms of endearment and often a rawness of emotion encapsulated in words exchanged (words delicate and highly flammable). It is possible we even have a rhetoric that we reserve only for our own inner ear.

My work rhetoric as a waitress at the breakfast joint Slim Goodies is full of repetition. After many hours waiting tables, I feel as if I have slipped into auto-pilot, thoughtlessly running through a handful of phrases that apply to most communicative needs. Like a mockingbird that sings as if on loop, I become an automated recording of myself, and hear myself speaking as if from afar. While I can surely snap out of my floating reverie of detachment to my immediacy if something on the outside engages me, such as a customer who actually desires to interact with me as the person and not just me as a figurehead representing the means to a full belly, I am mostly insulated in my inner world of thoughts with content far removed from my speech. I thus experienced it entirely possible to be speaking and thinking worlds apart, especially through the use of habitual rhetoric that does not require much focus or effort.

I realized too in this setting that we not only draw from distinct wells of language depending on situation, but our voices, the very sounds we make, too change. We speak a different plane of sound to affect or appeal to different listeners, inflecting and texturing, sweetening or deepening to the ears of particular listeners. When I serve customers, my voice becomes higher in pitch, my accent rounded and my rhythm chipper, my language polite but decidedly informal (this was a definite change from the rhetoric I had been required to use at my previous job, an upscale tapas restaurant). After some time at Slim Goodies, I caught myself saying “ya’ll” very often, and didn’t remember ever having used it regularly before. While the choice was most likely not conscious, I reflected that I probably had adapted my accent to be more accepted by locals, and “more southern” for tourists looking for that local color and flare that affirms they are having a “true New Orleans experience.” I highly encourage this exploration of the ways in which we conform (consciously or not) to the uses of different rhetoric in different circumstance. One might even try switching to an out-of-context rhetoric and see how odd it feels. Speak to a baby as you would to your Environmental Theory professor. Or perhaps this is a good idea.

Welcome fellow dwellers of language!

The time has come to enter into yet another phase of my thesis experiment. In choosing this medium of a blog, I wished the form of the project to reflect the nature of its content. Those who study linguistics are aware that languages change shape over time--words are added and lost, shortcuts fortified in search of the quickest route to meaning, social and cultural dynamics serve as sieve to favor certain expressions that are period-relevant, as well as favor possible meanings of words highlighted by their positive and negative associations of that time ("Oil" means something very specific in 2011). Language changes especially in exposure to other culture's languages, a process likely accelerated and intensified by increasingly globalized communications made possible by the internet. (Note: "Add to dictionary" option as Spell-Check gives "globalized" the red flag). In an age of demand for instant gratification, the speed of language exchanges must be even quicker, even more efficient and effortless. A professor wrote "LOL" on one of my papers. Shakespeare would be trampled for tarrying.

Language is not static. And so, I wish to be neither this thesis about language. My practice of silence and other means to acute observation to study how language connects us to the world indicates that language is as ever-changing as the world(s) it signifie(s), and that the way to its ephemeral truths is to encounter it subjectively. I can only listen so much, read so much, and live so much language to stumble across so many questions that lead me to possible discoveries. Language does not exist for an individual, but between individuals. Language is an ecological interaction. For these reasons it is time for the blog to go public. I have laid the grounds (?) and planted the questions, but now what this project needs more than anything is to grow into its own organism. And evolve.

And so. This is an invitation for fellow dwellers of language to participate in an examination of their residence in the world of words. Please feel free to stalk silence, or stay in speech, or embark in any language-related experiment of your own, whatever way is most revealing to you. Be as concrete or as theoretical as you wish to be, as long as what you wish to share may be a spark for another. Or not. Dead ends can be interesting too.

Feed the blog! I thank you!

Language Frames Ecological Relations

One of the essential questions that I wished to explore in this thesis is that of how language shapes our ecological realities. In Jack Turner's The Abstract Wild, he asserts that the rhetoric used to define Nature or the Wild determines how a relationship is thenceforth carried out. To begin to tend to the wounds of the planet and patch our damaged marriage, we must first opt for a new way of referring to it (and I would even venture to say addressing it). In Turner's words:

"Since a theory is merely a description of the world, a new set of agreements about the West [environmentalism] requires some new descriptions of the world and our proper place in it ...The fight is over intellectual, not physical, resources. Environmentalists fight to reduce the authority of certain descriptions--e.g., 'private property'-- and to extend the authority of other descriptions--e.g., 'ecosystem' "(p. 54).

Turner especially hones in on how "economic language (and its extensions in law) exhaustively describes our world and, hence, becomes our world" (p. 58). Examples of this observation is how forests and ore become "natural resources", cows become "livestock" (pay close attention: live-stock), land becomes "property", wildlife becomes something to be "managed", etc. If we change our language, perhaps we will feel differently about the ways in which we interact with our ecological counterparts, perhaps even change those ways.

My ears attentive for more evidence of this phenomenon, I picked up on the following exchange at my friends' house, where they are starting a small urban farm, in regard to the ladies of the coop. I noticed the slight differences in the way the questions were phrased by different members of the house reflected subtle attitudinal differences towards their feathered friends:

"Are we getting any eggs?"

vs.

"Are the chickens giving any eggs?"

vs.

"Are the chickens laying?"

The first sees the chickens for their pure utility, and "we" are the important center around which the question revolves. The chickens themselves are not even mentioned, only their purpose (eggs) in relation to us. In the second, the (us) is still implied in the "giving", but the chickens are honored in being the subject of the question and acknowledged in their bestowing of eggs. The language of the third is perhaps the most respectful in that "we" are not in the sentence but rather the chickens as autonomous subjects fulfilling their natural cycles, which "we" only happen to benefit from.

If there is anything I have learned in my times of silence, it is how loose we can be with our tongues, how oft we speak without realizing the true implications of the arrangements of our words. Let us extend to those who provide our plates with food the courtesy of making them the subjects of our speech.

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?