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.