I
trusted too much in human language. What a ridiculous oversight! Oh yes,
we now know that dolphins, by putting balls in hoops, can demonstrate
the limited syntax of our communications . . . but is there one human
yet who has even begun to fathom the most rudimentary elements of dolphin
language?
You
see my mistake? For years I’ve been attempting to translate the
songs of birds into human language when what I should have been doing
is converting our human speech into the expansive language of birds.
In
the language of birds there are no subjects or objects, no distance between
the singer and the song. You can’t fix the meanings of their calls,
as if they were little machines: putting a stranglehold on the sounds
and squeezing out every drop of logic; trying to control the outcome of
the experiment just to prove the hypothesis; reading things into the songs;
hearing what you want to hear; creating connections that were never there
. . .
No.
Forget useful—forget want. Understanding the language of birds demands
an irrational discipline, demands listening without the tyranny of meaning,
without the rigid toy soldiers of reason firing their puny cannons of
syntax:
Subject. Object. Predicate. Fire.
Punctuate. Modify. Fire.
Noun. Verb. Fire. Fire.
Fire. Fire. Fire. Fire. . .
Until it’s all finished. All complete.
Until the story’s ended, and the book is closed,
And not another sound is uttered--
Not a cry
Not a song . . .