We say yes when we mean I would rather not. We say no when we mean I would say yes except for all the times yes has proven to be a terrible idea. We say no thank you when every fiber in our bodies is moaning oh yes please. We say you cannot when what we mean is actually you can but you sure by God ought not to. We say no by staring directly at the questioner and not saying anything whatsoever. We ask questions that way also.
I am fascinated by how language is a verb and not a noun. I am riveted by how language is a process and not a preserve. I am absorbed by the way that we all speak one language but use different tones and shades and volumes and timbres and pronunciations and emphases in order to bend the language in as many ways as there are speakers of the language. Perhaps every one of us speaks a slightly different language even as we seem to be using the same words to one another …
Perhaps languages use us in ways that we are not especially aware of; perhaps languages are aware that they need us to speak them, or else they go flailing into the dark to be forgotten except by stones and the oldest of trees.
Brian Doyle
One Long River of Song
Perhaps. Yes, perhaps languages do fear going ‘flailing into the dark to be forgotten.’ Perhaps that’s true of humans, too. We have a drive, a need to communicate (our need!) from the moment we enter life in this world and feel the power of our lungs! One friend of mine told me – a bit sheepishly – that he wasn’t especially interested in football but liked to go to a game on Saturdays so that he could shout his head off. I actually understand that – at least I think I do! But it is all a rather precarious business, this saying things, isn’t it? Pretty complex, this talking? A bit fraught, the exasperated ‘you know what I mean!’? – when, patently, we often don’t. How well I remember the apparent frustration in school teachers who were quite sure that their students were ‘just being perverse.’ Ah, and that word ‘just’ – I just wanted. You just said. They’re just awful. Just isn’t always very just. If only we could just …
Each of us is a deep mind. A bottomless well. Deep. Literally unfathomable, even to our most patient, reflective selves. Perhaps, over time, this teaches us some self-compassion. Hopefully, sooner rather than later, we learn to have compassion for others – who, battling to comprehend themselves, are at an early loss as to how they’re ever going to get to the bottom of us!
.
