No one wants to be a grown up on Charlie Brown. No one wants what they have to say to amount to WA-WAH-WA, sounding off in the background, unintelligible. And yet, that’s what happens to the majority of words, of communication that comes our way and a good bit of what we put out into the world. We talk too much and say too little.
…only at a time when the fresh creation of meaning has become a rare occurrence, a time when people commonly speak in conventional, ready-made ways, “which demand from us no real effort of expression and… demand from our listeners no real effort of comprehension”–at a time, in short, when meaning has become impoverished. – David Abram, summarizing Maurice Merleau-Ponty in “The Spell of the Sensuous”
When meaning has become impoverished, what we get, and what we become, are grown ups from Charlie Brown.
But this isn’t what language is for or what it is meant to do. Language, words, gestures, expression, body language, is supposed to be us trying to convey, to express our wants, needs, fears, questions; trying to get someone to understand something of vital importance–otherwise, why bother?
If we go back to the feeling of being alone, unheard, not understood, language works miracles, it attempts to do the impossible: to communicate with another being something that is inside us. But only if we find the right words or the right way to get something across.
Abram talks about language also being physical and touching our senses as well. Maybe we can all reach back to a time, place, way we have felt someone’s words wash over us, where a gap has been bridged. But Abrams doesn’t just limit it to people.
If language is always in its depths, physically and sensorially resonant, then it can never be definitely separated from the evident expressiveness of birdsong, or the evocative howl of a wolf late at night. The chorus of frogs gurgling in unison at the edge of a pond, the snarl of a wildcat as it springs upon its prey, or the distant honking of Canadian geese veeing south for the winter, all reverberate with affective, gestural significance, the same significance that vibrates through our conversations and soliliquies, moving us at times to tears, or to anger, or to intellectual insights we could never have anticipated.
There have been times where I have physically felt God was communicating me without a word spoken, simply with the sounds and language of the landscape alive around me. In the mornings, I sit with coffee and listen to birds, cicadas, neighborhood dogs, the buzz of hummingbird’s wings as it goes to the feeder. Sometimes that language means more and says more than what we hear from people.
If our own language, our own words, are going to mean more, it’s up to us to use them wisely, and maybe less frequently; to look for, and listen for, the right words to speak our hearts and minds. And to listen to others who are making the effort to do the same.
I’ve had this notion in my crawl about reclaiming language, trying to come to meaning, to get back to the primacy of saying something worth saying. And then was moved all over again by words I’d heard before.
In the movie version of “Into the Wild,” towards the end, there is a scene on the magic bus in Alaska, where Chris McCandless is reading Boris Pasternak’s “Dr. Zhivago” and comes across this notion:
For a moment she discovered the purpose of her life. She was here on the earth to grasp the meaning of its wild enchantment and to call each thing by its right name.
Maybe that’s the challenge we need to give ourselves. To strip away the static, the clutter, the convention, the emptiness of the words so often around us. And to call each thing by its right name.
Let things sink in. Let them wash over us, trying to come to our own truth about them. And when we talk, when we pray, when we write, when we see, when we hear, to call each thing, and each other, by our right names.
