Tau(gh)t and well

"Speak!" I yelled and his body--startled--jerked momentarily to the ringing of the sudden noise rather than to the word itself. Lying on my kitchen floor, my student, who after 20 minutes of breathing relaxation and guided awareness exercises, hesitated in opening his mouth after I suggested that he begin his speech. With forced precision, he attempted to verbalize an improvisational confession; he still could not let go of his mind. The mind continued to hold all impulses back and it wasn't until I yelled, yanking him out of his resistance, did his body let loose an actual impulse with this slight jerking of the arms.

He is a cerebral artist. Not to say that there is anything wrong about the mind, but this instance reminded me of Nietzche's point that there is more wisdom in the body than in our deepest philosophy. The body will not lie to you the way the mind would. "We live up here," I pointed to my head, "but that is a reduction of our actual experience. We experience the world in our bodies, it knows more than we think." I sympathize deeply with my new student, for I understand the fear of plunging into a new experience without fully recognizing one's innate inhibitions.

In a previous post, when I examined Mac Wellman's Three Americanisms and the force of sound embedded in his jumbled language, I defended the notion that a logical rendering of his piece is highly plausible for the words he chose has sonic logic: that is to say, it has emotive, visceral communicative powers that we understand upon the words landing in our ears. This impact of sound creates an sensorial knowing beyond the pale of strict rational, linear interpretation. In short, a logical trajectory can be traced if you pay attention and recognize how the phonetics drive the meaning rather the sequential arrangement of the words. What appears irrational because of repetitions like "I do not, donut" for instance carries emotive significance upon utterance and a speaker can communicate actual meaning that is not arbitrary but can be understood uniformly by him and the audience. The sound in Wellman's piece are not mere mesmerizing tools. Meaning can be gleaned if we recognize how the body responds to vibration, volume, sound repetitions with the impact of vowels and consonants as organizing elements in our experience of the sounds. Notice that I say 'experience' of the sounds rather than 'understanding' of the sounds: to make something intelligible for the mind is by its very nature a reductive process. Once experienced and absorbed, the words are funneled to our understanding by translating the abstracted sound into their concrete equivalent. The word 'table' maps out a picture of an object with a plank atop four legs; hence, our understanding. But an experience of the word has the possibility of force by the rendering of the voiceless alveolar plosive 't' sound, for instance, in the word 'table'. A performer can communicate meaning even on this strict sensorial plane.

For Wellman, his piece, Three Americanisms, with the poetic use of sounds as variables for communication, and the seeming diminution of the importance of the words' sequential arrangement to produce intelligible phrasing, one can say that the piece aims to illustrate the futility of words in our daily life, satirizing how it has been relegated to such commonplace status that real communication rarely happens on this level. Chitchat, small talk, all these are mere noise to fill in the dreaded silence rather than to truly convey meaning. Although that would be a valid observation, I would add nonetheless that in the vacuous sounds, lay potent messages. So that, yes, a piece like Wellman's, can be construed as one illustrating the futility of words with their unintelligible arrangement, but also, within this chaos lies the beauty and power of sonic communication.

In fact, to my way of thinking, this proves to be a much richer and interesting investigation of such pieces that seemingly penetrate silence with sounds that appear irrational. On the one side, it hearkens to Pinter's notion that words in drama are elements to interrupt a silence. Dialogue, in other words are simply interrupted silences; thus, further making the point that life is a mere sum total of these interruptions. We experience our lives based on the noise that compete for our attention. Our values precipitate from where we place our attention. Meanwhile, underneath the noise, silence remain where our thoughts, our desires, our private internal selves live. What we choose to communicate and leave out is a matter of deliberation or failed deliberation. Hence, the concretization of abstracted words carry by their very nature diluted meaning and have serious limits to what it can communicate. Subscribing to this notion, we may well consider Wellman's piece, presented as a variegation of words, as punctuation to the idea of language's failure and limits; however, these words, in spite of their illogical sequence, unwittingly carry sounds' inescapable potency, alerting us to their deeper meaning.

Cankerous

She sat smug like a child asserting her importance, self-congratulatory, feeling she has conquered her family's inadequacy with the few dollars in her pocket. She was beautiful back when she was kind, not defeated but ever expanding in her possibility without trading what she knew about the downtrodden, for this knowledge of hunger blessed her with a wistfulness, an understanding unique to angels who see the sorrow in man's eyes as he struggles with himself and the world. "Luxury numbs the mind and the heart," an old sage once said, "it's a cankerous poison that divides more often than unites." Is that true, I wondered. Seeing her smug, she inherited the most hackneyed evolution of one who thought herself at the height of a minor success. A few dollars in her pocket betrayed her impoverishment far worse than if she had none. A few dollars in her pocket bought out grace with a vulgar smile on a face now devoid of charm and beauty. In its place lay a tone in her voice with an insidious measuring up of things according to their market value, a slant to her coercing look, a kind of twisting of the arm dictating 'let my will be done'. All were desperate maneuverings of an ascent to a modicum of power. So hungry. So so hungry still for self-worth that the few dollars in her pocket cannot make right....

Wondering Where the Water in the Well Went...

...calling to a dry unwritten page.

Yoga and Quotables

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." Anais Ninn

The Dog and Jerry

"Don't you see? A person has to have some way of dealing with SOMETHING. If not with people...SOMETHING. With a bed, with a cockroach, with a mirror...with a[...] You see how hard it is to find things?[...] with a wisp of smoke...with God, who I'm told, turned his back on the whole thing some time ago...with...some day, with people. People...And[...], where ever better in this humiliating excuse for a jail, where better to communicate one single simple-minded idea than in an entrance hall? Where? It would be a START! Where better to make a beginning...to understand and just possibly be understood...a beginning of an understanding, than with...A DOG. Just that; a dog."

This passage from Edward Albee's Zoo Story explains pointedly the crux of every human attempt.

As soon as I awoke, I held my breath but remembered the yoga teacher crying out, "BreathE". An intake of breath, even this, must be remembered. It has been four years since I wrote on this here blog and the fear of having (yet again) nothing to say engulfs me and I have a hard time breathing. So I borrow from a text that I recently read which points out the poignancy of human endeavor, as I belabor an inhalation. It turns out that even breathing--the very act of life, a seeming solitary venture, is not so solitary after all. Gulping in air is itself an act of communing with the elements, a need that binds us to something outside of ourselves and frees us from ourselves. All things are instruments for an essay to some " beginning of an understanding."

And yet, the attempt at any expression faces the enormous possibility for misunderstanding and bespeaks the fear of any person who ventures to open the shutters of his ideas to light. With the complexity of interpretation and the resulting possibility of confusion, however, cries out what Albee surmises as the beginnings of love, for, "I have learned that neither kindness nor cruelty by themselves," Jerry says, "independent of each other, creates any effect beyond themselves;[...]the two combined, together, at the same time, are the teaching emotion...We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other...If we can so misunderstand, well then, why have we invented the word love in the first place?" Precisely the point and the convolution of this need to express with the quagmire we face. IF we can so understand, there won't be the need to attempt to understand for it would be so easy. The effort to speak and to listen are the preemptive acts to confusion. And yet, even in failing to assume full clarity, only compassion could soften the mire of the inevitalbe limits of our understanding. The invention of love is how we survive the pains of our failed communion. For in spite of it, we keep trying to cross a ruptured bridge in our desire to reach each other.

Tomorrow, a student will come to me asking, "how do I make this Albee thing come alive?" I sit on my desk now pondering the same thing...(oh boy?!) forgetting and remembering to breathe.

Four Years Later...

The chasm of time is the subtle pin-prick trick on skin: imperceptible but for the bloodstained cloth that marks its ruptured passing.