A Little White Lie

     "Hello darkness my old friend; I've come to talk with you again," wrote Paul Simon, a bit ironic since the 81-year old went completely deaf in one ear four years ago.  As he told The Times (UK), So everything became more difficult...I'd think, 'You're like a Paul Simon cover band.  You should go home.'   Simon was one of many prolific songwriters (another, Cynthia Weil, recently passed away), but perhaps not as good as the scout and producer who "discovered" him; at the time Simon was paired with his high school friend, Art Garfunkle (who sang but never played an instrument or composed any material) and were strictly an acoustic duo.  The producer agreed to pick them up but only if he could embellish their song, The Sound of Silence, with an electric guitar and some drums (you'll have to listen to the song to hear just what and when that was added)...the rest as they say, is history.

Norman Catwell by Lucia Heffernan

     The topic of language seemed to be popping up over and over for me recently, from magazines to books to audio clips and more.  The example of Simon's marketing was captured in two recent films my wife and I watched, Forever My Girl (an "unknown" discovered and swept from his roots) and A Beautiful Life (a similar tale but with the singer trying to hang on to where he came from).  In both films, the portrayals were well done and, unlike Daisy Jones and the Six,* the two leads were established artists in their own right (one is still Denmark's most popular singer).  Add to all of that came the audio book Big Tree by Brian Selznick.  Originally planned as a movie with his friend Steven Spielberg, Selznick (already a writer of screenplays and children's books) decided to base the story on science...a story of two seeds, to be precise.  The result became Meryl Streep adding more than a dozen voices to the story, and convincingly so (you can listen to a clip here).  All of this after I completed the audio book End of Watch narrated by the talented Will Patton.  Like impressionists, we as adults grow captivated by such changes in language and vocalization, and perhaps even more so by those who can see or hear what we can't (as in talent scouts).  But my question became, is it because others were better tuned in or was it simply because we weren't listening?

     That was the basis of Big Tree, ancient voices that said that they were always speaking but that few, even among the wise and the faithful, weren't really listening.  As Paul Simon wrote long ago: Because a vision softly creeping left its seeds while I was sleeping; and the vision that was planted in my brain still remains within the sound of silence.  I often hear dialogue in my dreams, about half of which I can remember (but not make sense of).  Can there be another form of communication that comes to us only in another dimension or while our conscious bodies are asleep?  Picture yourself standing between two people talking in a language you don't understand; you grasp that it makes sense to those talking but is basically just gibberish to you.  As if to emphasize this point, I remember long ago attending a hypnosis show where one person was told that he was from the moon and only spoke "moon talk;" the other person was a noted professor famous for being fluent in "moonology."  The conversation, of course, was dead serious to the two people so hypnotized, their two faces as convinced of the discussion as if they were reporters breaking a big story...but for us in the audience, their "talk" made no sense at all.  What were we missing?  But then who knew that the coded Voynich Manuscript from Italy has yet to be broken (and it was thought to have been written in the 15th- or 16th century!).

     Language turns out to be much more than simple linguistics or the diluted (at least from their "native" tongues) and condensed versions we have today.  There were more languages spoken in France five hundred years ago than there are now, linguist Justin E. H. Smith told The Sun.  They were somewhat like French but not the French we speak today. The Niger-Congo language is thought to have the largest number of languages in it (Nigeria alone is thought to have over 500 such languages) and when the interviewer asked if percussion or music as a language is still in use, Smith added: There’s the Silbo Gomero whistling language in the Canary Islands, which has survived in some limited way.  The Guanches were the Indigenous people of the Canary Islands, probably a Berber people who were massacred by the Spanish by the end of the fifteenth century.  But some of the mountain dwellers continued to use a system of communicating across vast canyons by whistling, and it turns out that, rather than being a limited code, this has the full repertoire of a real language, such that it could replace spoken language when necessary.  That’s a key difference linguists are always looking for.  Sign language is a real language and not just something people do when they have no other choice.  It has full generative recursive syntax — everything that we expect from a language, as opposed to a code.  As to sign language, just 30% of American Sign Language (ASL) is able to be understood by British Sign Language wrote the site, akorbi (who knew?)

     So music.  I used to write songs, and enjoyed doing so, proud when one of my Christmas songs played in the background of an NBC soap opera years back (thankful for small things).  It was then that I discovered the sliding rates such sites paid, mostly by 15-second increments (mine played for 43 seconds so I was moved up to the third tier for royalties).  I wrote mostly country songs since they were so similar to writing in general: tell a complete story in three verses with a chorus filler throughout.  No heavy thought-provoking stuff involved, no need to wonder "what's he trying to say?" stuff.  Even back then, songwriters such as Paul Simon and Roger Waters were somewhere in the stratosphere, even in their 20s.  But that was all back then.  As Justin Smith remarked: I think we’re now moving into a period when we will leave it to the machines to speak to each other.  A lot of the tedious work of coding came during an early phase of computing.  We’re developing artificial intelligence to do that for us.  When we have only machines speaking machine, however, it’s going to be a big problem, because their language is going to proliferate beyond our ability to fully grasp even how it’s proliferating.

    This was the premise of the book, The Song Machine by John Seabrook.  Said the opening cover:  Pop songs have always had a "hook," but today's songs bristle with them: a hook every seven seconds is the rule.  Painstakingly crafted to tweak the brain's delight in melody, rhythm, and repetition, these songs are highly processed products.  Like snack-food engineers, modern songwriters have discovered the musical "bliss point."  And as with junk food, the bliss point leaves you wanting more...specialized teams composing songs in digital labs with "track-and-hook" techniques...The Song Machine explores what the new hits may be doing to our brains and listening habits, especially as services like Spotify and Apple Music use streaming data to gather music into new genres invented by algorithims based on listener behavior.  Added Smith: There are probably a billion people in the world now who are illiterate in the classical sense but are communicating by text all the time using pictures and animations.  It’s an unexpected twist in the history of literacy.

     It's all a matter of distraction, wrote a review in the London Review of Books.  83% of Americans had at least one streaming service, said the author: TikTok, which nearly half of all Americans have signed up to, offers ‘infinite scrolling’, an addictive feature that allows the continual flow of its seconds-long videos, a loop of distraction...on average citizens spend six or seven hours a day in front of screens, two and a half of them on social media...You find yourself both overwhelmed by all the interesting people you’ve listened to and wondering what to make of it all.**  Then came the story in Smithsonian about silence...and how we "hear" it.  “Silence, whatever it is, is not a sound,” Firestone (Chaz Firestone, cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins University) tells Scientific American’s Shayla Love.  “It’s the absence of sound.  And yet it often feels like we can hear it.  If silence isn’t really a sound, and yet it turns out that we can hear it, then hearing is more than just sound.”

     So jump now to a series of articles in Orion whose cover was titled The Language of Nature.  One story was subtitled "capturing the flare of ancestral language" and began this way: Every shaman in Mongolia has their own translator.  My colleague and translator, Erdene, tells me that every shaman speaks their own private language: Part ancient Mongolian.  Part tongues.  Part something else that's indescribable, untranslatable.  The translator has to know them intimately.  They not only know the shaman, but also every ancestor the shaman becomes.  "As soon as the shaman sits (after their trance), I know from the first word spoken who they are," says Deegii, translator to a shaman.  "Then I know the specific language that the ancestor is speaking.  The different ancestor spirits speak a different kind of language in a way.  It is something that I have learned only by observing and being a translator to this shaman for many years."  I learn early on in my experiences of visiting Mongolia that I could never hope to fully understand everything.  There will always be a part that remains inaccessible.

     Another story in the London Review mentioned the damaging earthquakes that hit Turkey earlier this year, the buildings that collapsed, the streets left in rubble.  Wrote author Zain Samir about one resident, Samer Fa'our: By the second week, foreign rescue teams began to leave the country, and the search for survivors gave way to the task of bringing out the bodies (night temperatures had dropped to below zero)...He rushed towards his brother’s house in the next street, but in the darkness and rain, and with the howling of people crying for help, he lost his way in this unfamiliar landscape, where nearly every new multi-story building had collapsed.  He finally found his bearings and reached his brother’s building.  A couple of people were already trying to clear the rubble.  His brother was trapped in the living room and cried out for help. ‘I told him I am here to free you,’ Samer said.  ‘Hold on.’  After four hours they had dug out enough of the debris to create a window, but his brother was badly injured, sitting in a pool of blood.  He died soon afterwards.  His sister-in-law and her baby were still alive.  For days they pushed food, water and milk through the opening they had made, and waited for rescuers to bring equipment.  Five days later they got her and the baby out alive.  ‘I have seen war.  War is much easier.  One building falls and we all rush to help.  But here –’ Samer said, gesturing at the rubble, as if there was no other story to tell.

     For me, this post took far longer than expected, not because there was no material but rather that all of it was scatter shot as if a spilled bag of peanuts on the floor.  And then suddenly, at least to my mind, it began to coalesce as in a film on fast-forward.  King's story was about telekinesis, my dreams were being processed nightly, the Big Tree tale echoed that spirits and ancestors were "always" speaking, and my wife's words stayed with me, "you don't listen."  I was trying to just make sense of it all and perhaps that was the problem...in gathering all of those random thoughts I had missed the most important one, that of being still, of being silent and just listening.  Listen to your gut, we always hear.  What is your body trying to tell you?  What is your spouse or friend or brother or ancestor trying to tell you?  What is this planet trying to tell you?...your essence of being?

Kitty Throne by Lucia Heffernan

     The crying eyes of a survivor in Turkey can express more to us than an entire book, as can the crying eyes of a child ready to discover words of their ancestors which they felt were long lost (such was the case of Professor Jeff Fadiman who led our group to Africa, he capturing the tales of elders when he was in his twenties, and now some sixty years later, being named an elder --the only white person to be given such an honor-- by a very grateful Meru nation, all captured in a book he wrote).  Our music and art and words can reach us in a tactile way; but there is likely so much more that we cannot hear or see.  But we can feel.  And so it was that I discovered the words of artist Lucia Heffernan, two works which I've posted here.  Said a tag on one giclée: Through my paintings, I seek to give animals a voice and a personality, while making light of our uniquely human existence.  By imagining what animals might do if put in human situations, I stage tableaus that shine a spotlight on both their innocence and raw instinct...As I evolve, what remains constant is my respect for the animals that inspire me, and my desire to bring a smile to the face of every viewer.

     

*As to Daisy Jones and the Six, Elvis' granddaughter, as well as British actor Billy Clafin had never sung before or played an instrument; what followed for them and the other cast members were two months of intensive musical training.  The result, as you'll probably discover, is that they can perform quite convincingly as a cover band (I know that my wife and I would probably go see them if they ever toured...which they have said is not in the books, yet).

**A couple of interesting tidbits came from that review, one being: The moving image was big magic and big business. (By 1917, when the average yearly income was between $800 and $1000, Charlie Chaplin’s salary was $670,000.)  The other was that once sound came to the movies, swashbuckling actors such as Douglas Fairbanks were doomed and cast aside...Fairbanks' voice was considered far too high for his movie "image."  As to the title (if you've managed to read this far), it's a movie about a writer who may or may not have both lost and found himself...give it a try (costars Kate Hudson).