night speech

Beyond the bounds of eye and ear

When my wife was a teenager growing up on the edge of
New York City, she and her friends used to skip school
sometimes for kicks and take the bus to Grand Central
station to panhandle. One of their amusements was to
talk in a pretend language, thinking people would believe
they were befuddled foreigners.
They thought it was a pretty clever trick. Some people
were fooled into feeling sorry for the attractive but needy
girls and donated quarters. But the girls were too
inexperienced to realize their gibberish fooled virtually
no one. Long after the fact my wife realized, of course,
that the whole thing was dumb. Eventually she became
an extraordinarily good English teacher, of all things.
What's amazing is that you can tell a real language from
gibberish just by listening. Even though you don't know
what it means, you can tell when meaning is changing
hands. You can tell sign language from finger-flapping
just by watching. It seems harder to read lips. It must
take some study, possibly even lessons, to distinguish, in
silence, lips speaking actual words from lips mouthing
nonsense.
But it can be done. With a little concentration, you can
tell order from chaos.
An example of this occurs on the first look into space
through a telescope. Many people see exactly nothing.
Your head bobs around and aims your eye at the inside of
the eyepiece, which is blank. After a while the aperture
appears, revealing a blotch of white light. A knob brings
it into focus. If it's a star, it becomes a scintillating crystal
to your eye. If a planet, it becomes a disk.
At first you think: Great, a blob of white light. Is that all
there is? If you're impatient and stalk back into the house,
that is indeed all.
But if you keep looking, you notice the disk is not exactly
white after all. If it's Saturn it has a faint yellowish tinge.
Mars is reddish. If you have the patience to find Neptune
and look at it long enough, you see it's bluish. On Jupiter,
streaks appear after a while, and the same on Saturn, and
also on Mars which turns out to have features so
Earth-like that at one time they were thought to be
canals.
We are equipped to detect the patterns that strike
beyond what the eye and ear normally notice. We're
equipped, that is, but we have to learn to use the
equipment. A baby cannot tell words from gibberish in
Grand Central station, but in one of nature's
extraordinary events, learns language. An inexperienced
eye cannot tell Jupiter from Venus in a telescope, but with
instruction and practice can tell them apart before
nightfall.

It makes you wonder what else is going on that you don't
see or hear, but might recognize if you could only learn.
What is that faint stir of meaning, sensed by neither eye
nor ear, in the night woods of Maine? The silence in the
trees is so clear it seems almost - but not quite - like a kind
of speech. Or are the woods giving off something that
seems meaningful, like the noises of panhandling girls,
but up close is just nature's random gibberish? Is it lines
that look like canals, but which up close are just canyons
and ridges? Or is it really the night-speech of plant and
stone, whose meaning is not heard but is read, like on
silent lips?
I went to church services for a time in which the
congregation was urged to recommend prayers. One
long-time member, a mentally handicapped man, often
proposed prayers to heal a needy person or mitigate some
terrible world event. His sincerity was powerful, but his
speech was so badly garbled I never understood what he
was saying. But the pastor - one of those unusual,
extraordinary clerics who has actually been spoken to
and listened - had with great, interested concentration
learned to clearly understand the man's words.
If there are angels, I thought, they would have to listen to
us with great, interested concentration to understand us.
I wonder what they sound like.