When Words Would Just Get in the Way

[Video: a little about the Silbo Gomero whistled language of the Canary Islands *.]

From whiskey river (somewhat continuing last week’s theme):

When you stop talking to yourself and you are simply aware of what is — that is to say, of what you feel and what you sense — even that is saying too much. You suddenly find that the past and the future have completely disappeared. So also has disappeared the so-called differentiation between the knower and the known, the subject and the object, the feeler and the feeling, the thinker and the thought. They just aren’t there because you have to talk to yourself to maintain those things. They are purely conceptual. They are ideas, phantoms, and ghosts. So, when you allow thinking to stop, all that goes away, and you find you’re in an eternal here and now. There is no way you are supposed to be, and there is nothing you are supposed to do. There is no where you are supposed to go, because in order to think that you’re supposed to do something you have to think.

It is incredibly important to un-think at least once a day for the very preservation of the intellectual life, because if you do nothing but think, as you’re advised by IBM and by most of the academic teachers and gurus, you have nothing to think about except thoughts. You become like a university library that grows by itself through a process that in biology is called mitosis. Mitosis is the progressive division of cells into sub-cells, into sub-cells; so a great university library is very often a place where people bury themselves and write books about the books that are in there. They write books about books about books and the library swells, and it is like an enormous mass of yeast rising and rising, and that is all that is going on. It is a very amusing game. I love to bury my nose in ancient Oriental texts — it is fun, like playing poker or chess or doing pure mathematics. The trouble is that it gets increasingly unrelated to life, because the thinking is all words about words.

(Alan Watts [source])

…and:

Naming the Stars

This present tragedy will eventually
turn into myth, and in the mist
of that later telling the bell tolling
now will be a symbol, or, at least,
a sign of something long since lost.

This will be another one of those
loose changes, the rearrangement of
hearts, just parts of old lives
patched together, gathered into
a dim constellation, small consolation.

Look, we will say, you can almost see
the outline there: her fingertips
touching his, the faint fusion
of two bodies breaking into light.

(Joyce Sutphen [source])

Not from whiskey river:

A Book Full of Pictures

Father studied theology through the mail
And this was exam time.
Mother knitted. I sat quietly with a book
Full of pictures. Night fell.
My hands grew cold touching the faces
Of dead kings and queens.

There was a black raincoat
in the upstairs bedroom
Swaying from the ceiling,
But what was it doing there?
Mother’s long needles made quick crosses.
They were black
Like the inside of my head just then.

The pages I turned sounded like wings.
“The soul is a bird,” he once said.
In my book full of pictures
A battle raged: lances and swords
Made a kind of wintry forest
With my heart spiked and bleeding in its branches.

(Charles Simic)

…and:

Now what I had to say in my scene with Sam [Waterston] was simple — it was a little technical, but simple: “A computer malfunction put out the wrong set of co-ordinates. Seems a single B-52 opened up over Neak Luong. There’s a homing beacon right in the middle of town. Check it out, Sid.”

All right. Simple enough…  for some actors. But this actor needs images for technical words like that. I have to build my own internal film, you see, or I can’t remember the words.

[…]

“Okay, boys and girls, let’s go. Take sixty-four.”

It was a night shoot and we were up to take sixty-four. And it was just the first scene of the night. I thought I had it down. “A computer malfunction put out the wrong set of co-ordinates. It seems a single B-52 opened up over Neak Luong. There’s a…” and I couldn’t get the image of the homing beacon. I said, “There’s a housing device right in the middle of town.”

“CUT. Okay, let’s go back. Keep it together now.”

I don’t know why I was feeling under so much pressure. I had already done my worst scene. It was one that was cut from the film, in which 888 Thai marching troops passed in front of what was supposed to be Lon Nol’s reviewing stand. They were real Thai army troops playing Cambodians, and when the drummer got to my shoulder I was to be seen leaking information to Sam Waterston. When the drummer got to my shoulder I missed my cue. In 110 degrees, 888 troops had to march all the way back. It took about twenty minutes. Then Sam missed a cue. Then something went wrong with the camera. It took six takes, and by the sixth take, far into the day, I saw these troops coming at me and an insidious voice inside me was whispering, “You’re going to miss it, you’re going to miss it, you’re going to miss it.” Now who is that voice? And what is that voice? That’s all I want to know.

“Okay, boys and girls, let’s go. Take sixty-five.”

“A computer malfunction put out the wrong set of co-ordinates. It seems a single B-52 opened up over Luong… over Neak… sorry.”

“All right, Spalding. Take sixty-six.”

At last I had the image for the homing beacon. I saw a pigeon, a homing pigeon, flying towards a lighthouse beacon in a children’s storybook. Got it.

“Let’s go. Take sixty-six.”

“A computer malfunction put out the wrong set of co-ordinates. It seems a single B-52 opened up over Neak Luong. There’s a…” and I knew it would work. It didn’t matter what I was thinking, so long as I was thinking something. Because everyone looking at the film would bethinking their own thoughts and projecting them on me.

“There’s a homing beacon right in the middle of town. Check it out, Sid.”

The entire crew burst into applause.  Sixty-six takes later and five hours into the night we had finished the first scene of the evening.

(Spalding Gray [source])

______________________

* Reading about the Silbo Gomero language made me wonder about the interrelationship of whistling, the song of canaries, and the Canary Islands. Turns out there is no interrelationship between the birds and the islands on one hand, and whistling language on the other. The islands were named first, and the birds (native to the islands) were named for them. Here’s Wikipedia, in part:

The name Islas Canarias is likely derived from the Latin name Canariae Insulae, meaning “Island of the Dogs,” a name applied originally only to Gran Canaria. According to the historian Pliny the Elder, the Mauretanian king Juba II named the island Canaria because it contained “vast multitudes of dogs of very large size.”

The world’s a funny place, isn’t it?