WHEN APES WEEP
WHEN THEY WEEP, APES WILL SPEAK
Professor Iledebouche, M.D., PhD writes: Any discussion of language development in the animal kingdom must include these orders: birds, bats, and whales. Through a process of triangulation we may arrive at the point of departure into language for Homo sapiens, and furthermore conjecture the form that first language may have taken.
Because Professor Klogsmitscheiz of Rottingdam University has chosen to parody my paper “The Dynamics of Evolution on Animal Linguistics” rather than speaking to the point, the real thesis will bear repeating. If I may be allowed a small rejoinder before commencing: responding to a Professor of Theology seems to this scientist an adventure in irrelevance and is embarked on with reluctance.
Macaws and parrots and minas have all the necessary physical constituents to reproduce speech. Though they may be taught to initiate an entire short sentence to receive a reward, that sentence serves as no more than a noun and the conceptual use of language represented by verbs and tense is impenetrable to them. It is to be noted that these birds are able to imitate not only the tempo and tone of speech, but also that of almost any other sound, animal or mechanical. What then might we speculate? The devout Professor from Rottingdam could hardly contain his elegance in ridicule over my interpretation of their language skills as being closer to hieroglyphics than a spoken tongue. Let us recall my points without his elaborations. It was my supposition that the sounds these birds produce can symbolize the thing to them, this at the very most, but to what extent or completeness we have little idea. Such a system of audio graphics resembles a hieroglyphic or ideographic system in which an image is meant to represent some thing or state. I did not fail to mention that those language systems are not limited to nouns and are capable of conjugations denied these birds. Ideograms display the ontogeny of a word or state including its etymology; they could be compared to gestations, seeds or a puppet theater. The mind of man is capable, even compelled, to fuse and fission any object it takes into itself, this is not true for macaws, which therefore suffer none of the erosion of the symbol after its initial absorption, nor enjoy any of its growth. Though symbolism may be a conceptual leap it is more immediately a reduction and quarantine. It is then to be asked what fertile viscosity in the human mind is working on its own acquired assets, and for this I compared the speech of macaws to the songs of larks, mockingbirds and nightingales.
My arguments on bird song can be summarized thusly: That as territorial marking and mating announcement bird song is linked indissolubly to sex and reproduction and as such it not only advertises the vigor of the singer but is a compulsion arising from that very vigor, and furthermore the exercise of that energy, the release of it and dictation taken from it, is accompanied by joy of a type found in mating itself, and such joy is simultaneously the motivation and shaper of this expression.
The Professor had a salaciously good time with the word joy. If I substitute feeling for the more specific and theologically tainted joy, perhaps the professor would not be so exercised, although I believe this is a quixotic wish. He still would not hear. Who has listened to a bird’s song and feeling joy not received it as a triumph over grief? We feel joy as ecstatic grief, life springing from the mortal moment.
Bird song is closer to speech than parroting, I stated, because speech is driven by feeling, and it is in the parrot's inability to hear and thus internalize the emotional content of spoken language that we find the reason that symbols remain hermetically sealed and no movement towards conjugation can occur. I further noted that the composition of bird song is in practice a conjugation and that another characteristic it shears with true speech is metamorphosis and metaphor. It is the most sullied and diminutive of birds that resort to song. The realized grammar of the genes is painted on macaws and peacocks, and advertisement is by display. For swans and cranes the dotted "i" in the lyrical ballad of wing is recited in the courtship dance. For the runty nightingale and mockingbird, lark and wren, all that harmony of being and existence is transformed into song, an economy that is known as metaphor and may be a further clue, not pursued here, for the more fluent reading of the entire bible of evolution.
Was it an example of inhumanity to have compared the language skills of macaws to those of the autistic? The history of religion does not seem to stagger under the weight of charity it has extended to the mentally aberrant. I stated simply that damage sustained by some area of the brain either through heredity, allergy, environmental pollutant or virus, has split feeling from language and thus aborted its development. The skills of high functioning autistics are all pitch perfect and tone deaf, like a macaw. Their graphic art talents, not even to belabor their powers of useless memorization, would put to shame a Mandarin bureaucrat. Brick by brick a building is reproduced, the pantheistic attention to each stone precluding any grasp of the structure itself, even to the non-aesthetic conjugation of form into engineering.
From whom or what the Professor thought he was defending soul and miracle when I speculated on the computational skills of some autistic people, I do not know, but hope he might pause in his screed long enough to read what I actually wrote. It has been remarked that some victims of autism are capable of specific mathematical feats that others must leave to computers. How they do it is unknown. It was not my intent to deprive them of any consolation such activities bestow on them, as enduring more than a perfunctory reading of later passages would have revealed. In the case of those idiot savants who could in seconds find the square root of a twenty integer number, or find the prime of a hundred digits, I simply speculated on the difference and overlap of language and mathematics. I postulated that math was essentially deracinated text, a script without subjectivity or emotional nuance. It is the ruins of language, not its clarified architecture. It is its soundless, breathless, integral symbolism that makes it accessible to the autistic. Exactly which road they traverse through it (never to use it for a description of events in the world) we can never know or duplicate because of our added burden of impassioned language. Perhaps, the closest we can come is in our vision of the asteroid belt. Existing in the perfection of vacuum is the naked physic of mathematical relationship. It may have no visual component, even that may overly complicate it. Instead, without distraction, the play of immaterial, soundless phonemes, internal rhyme and puns may be directly read.
A history should be written of innovation and its enemies. How does it come to pass that there arises out of distant Rottingdam a sequestered troglodyte to question not just my theories, but my credentials, sanity and the residence I will occupy in the after life? Who is this man and why must I be plagued with his queries and slander after having delayed publication until my twilight years to be certain of my data and to gain the maturity that will accept the laurels of fame with a certain wry humor? It would have been easy for me to submit these papers years before when I suffered grave loneliness. The propositions of animal loving matrons and freshman coeds fall now on ears deaf in the higher registers, while twenty years before I could have heard those siren strains in the quietest cubicle in the deepest bowels of the library. Into those recesses I have buried the illuminated years of my life, casting out distraction, which is how the inter net spun its web without my knowledge and why I am not advertised on it in the manner the so-called Professor from Rottingdam would accept as proof of my curricula vitae. I think back now on those years of labor, my life, thrown into a deep well like a heavy stone, and when finally the echo returns it is with the quarrelsome voice of Professor Klogsmitscheiz. Hopefully, truth shall be my lantern.
What follows provoked the dubiously titled Klogsmitscheiz to accuse me of apostasy. I wrote that we might more fully understand the ontogeny of language by studying the echolocation and sonar of bats and whales. What both have in common is the use of sound to illuminate a world otherwise in complete blackness. I compared this to the symbiotic mapping of the internal and external worlds by language that also employs the instrumentality of ordered sounds. I felt compelled to note differences between these two species to throw light on both the evolution of differences in linguistics between cultures and the architecture of perception such differences can impose.
Possible wing load sets a limit for practical weight for a flying creature. The heaviest flying bird weighs around forty pounds. This is probably not a limit set by flight in and of itself as fossil remains reveal flying dinosaurs of greater size that must have weighed more, but the total of the economies of avian existence with flight as the salient factor, governs their weight. Bats, as far more recent converts to the air with all the jerry rigging of existing structures to accommodate it, have generally remained small, only rarely exceeding the size of wrens and larks and sparrows because of the inefficiency of their improvisation. The three-foot wingspan of the fruit fox bat is an exception, but it still is far smaller than whole families of birds.
Mammals have never developed feathers, and besides being a better technology for flight, they are also superior insulation by weight than fur. A small body loses heat rapidly, and there is no more effective means of strewing that alm to the winds than relatively large expanses of thinly sheaved arteries and veins as are found in the wing of a bat. While rapidly beating their wings, they can offset the loss, but at rest they bundle in colonies and hibernate in winter. The creativity of a species is circumscribed by the more inclusive tiers of evolution from which it is descended, and hibernation rather than migration is the solution inherited by this parsimony, either by a later launch into the airy ecology or from burrow dwelling ancestors. The birds whose lineage stretches back a further hundred million years have fixed within them chords tuned by the migrating continents. Inside that small chamber the harp grieving the diaspora of summer is still echoing.
Water whisks away body heat more rapidly than air, and a warm-blooded aquatic mammal is at an advantage being large and surrounded by insulating blubber. All this leading to the fact that a mammal whose weight is prescribed and supported by water is permitted a far larger brain than a bat. Certainly, the great size of a whale's brain is mostly dedicated to physical processes involving a gigantic body, this equilibrium between brain and other organ size is noted throughout mammal species and deserves further study. Mammalian organ systems have a more nuanced response to stimulus than other phyla. Maintaining an even body temperature demands an enormous amount of monitoring. This return loop allows more individuation and also a keener awareness; the first glimmers of consciousness probably manifest as anxiety. Warmth is a precarious trust to cosset in the world.
The size of the bat's brain should not limit it to a less heroic part than a bird on the stage of the sky, but its disposition does. Relegated to the night by more efficient diurnal flyers, the bat becomes a burrowing animal that has used great ingenuity to import his warrens into the air. Birds have a congenital sense of infinity; we may speculate that this is an attribute of their reptile brain, which had it remained incarcerated in snake, turtle, lizard or crocodile would have shown itself in those aphasia of existence during which the animal becomes inanimate, as immersed in infinity as it might be in death. The ability to return to the world across those timeless realms summoned by the sun’s spectrums may be the key to the bird’s genius at migration.
The small head of the bat houses a tiny inner ear, though relative to its size much of the skull is dedicated to the audio sense. This means the bat cannot hear lower registers. The clicks we hear bats making are the lowest notes in their scale, slightly lower than a cricket's chirp. Suited to his temperament, the bat is a creature of detail. The longer the wavelength of sound the farther it can travel. The bat's perception of its immediate surroundings is exceedingly fine, but it is myopic in the extreme. It is the omnipresence of the bat's prey that enables it to survive: it is bound to stumble on it as it flies forward in relative blindness into empty air. It is possible to compare the free flight of bats to a motorist at night following the tunnel of its headlights. Past a given distance, in bats likely far less than the motorist, all is hidden. However, in close the smallest moth can be tracked. The bat's small wingspan allows for impressive maneuverability, and this enables it to dodge and swerve through cave or forest or city with little advance warning. In complex surroundings even if not in pursuit of evading insects, a bat would still fly in its erratic manner, tapping out obstacles like a man with a cane or a mouse feeling along a wall. Never to migrate, never to swoop from a quarter mile up on fast moving prey; the bat is master of the miniature world where space is measured by the three mile per hour limit of a flying moth. The bat is able to interpret darkness, but not silence
The exigencies of a marine life have worked a different metamorphosis on the whale. Water supports the enormous weight and size necessary for a mammal living in heat leaching water. Water is also a better medium for the propagation of sound waves. The whale’s large skull and lungs permits it to emit tremendously strong, penetrating and sustained waves of sound that can travel for miles through the water. The whale's image of his world has far greater circumference than the bat. The depth and contour of the ocean floor is probably known to him as the passage of clouds and flocks overhead is to us. There is undoubtedly a lack of fine resolution in these bands used by the great whales, but their diet which is creel congregate in schools which in their multitudes are hundreds of times larger and weightier than the pods of whales that hunt them. Greater precision is of course possible, the toothed whales can image a fish, but it is the exaggerated slowness of everything, the dilation of seconds into minutes, and hours into days by the long intervals between heartbeats of the great whales and the tuning of their brains to the elongated reaches of the basso profundo, a tuning which ingests the oceanic and expands their inner space into the realm of meditation which has a more cogent meaning for us in the development of language. Their world of larger orbit and more leisurely regard is formed from music and that music can touch the silence with full sight.
What form do their two worlds take when they sing? Perhaps only madmen and composers would risk a guess. Can a scientist try without Professor Klogsmitscheiz naming him Doctor Doolittle? Apparently not, but I will repeat my speculations so that the reader of this journal may judge for himself.
Allow yourself enough wonder to follow them into the realms of passion. Might this world resemble a mirage? Each oasis the moment's paradise made of desire? Their broad notes will not resolve that detail of kingdom come promised in Revelations where each jewel is enumerated, but why doubt that song is the substance from which all paradises are built glowing in our hearts, and that for them, fortunate to live within their own verses, returning to them with each echo is the true onomatopoeia of every object, its proper name given in Eden to which it answers with its actual presence, shimmering in its new creation by the word which existed before it?
Gogol. Gogol. Yes, Professor, I have read him, but what do his madmen talking to squirrels have to do with my thesis? Does one of them propose that the formless void with darkness covering the deep where the infant floats is an amniotic chorus that his language will emerge from in melodic warbles and this is the doodles and palette of cartographic speech and echoes creation’s joy? Is that messianic? And if I was classically insane as the Professor has gone beyond hinting, would I bring up as examples both madmen and composers as having a greater interior space than is usual and one in which the liability and advantage of a more porous and inclusive privacy has retarded and prolonged the original adventure of navigation? What madman would risk tarring himself with the association? But, sobriety is wasted on the digitally crowned “Doctor”, to him is given the rewards of algorithms: dead letters once inspired.
Dr. Bruno, please find attached the writings of my patient, John Green. I am recommending against his release from the hospital. I do not feel this patient is a danger to the community, but he is not capable of taking care of himself. I would like your confirmation of my diagnosis of schizophrenia. I invite you do come here for an interview and evaluation, but in the meantime I believe his notes can prepare you. I add here that John Green, a middle aged Caucasian, was found living out of a dumpster and brought to us by the police in response to a complaint. I have little doubt that upon his release he would soon return there.
Professor Iledebouch does not exist; he is one of Mr. Green's altar egos. The patient has no degrees and has never published in a scientific journal. Iledebouch's preoccupation with language is characteristic of dementia, though this is the greatest elaboration I have ever encountered. When not decked out in cloak and mortarboard, he has referred to himself as "speedy jet junior", obviously a name he gave himself as a child originating in the son’s comparing his immature phallus to the father. It demonstrates the ontogeny of his fixation. Even in that first phrase we can see him condensing symbols (speedy jet is a double entendre for pre-prostate urination and junior is the signature of the son) into psychic objects that will eventually replace the outer world with a menagerie of conversing beasts.
Of course, I am the scatological Professor Klogsmitscheiz, but remain for you Doctor Pismo, awaiting your input.
