Voices of the Languager

and sounds of wilderness

Before language found a home in the mouths of human hominids,

it was not fully language and we were not fully human.

Humankind not only possesses language, we also are language.

〰 Richard Lederer 〰

Finja Peterson on Unsplash

Sounds of Speaking

The most important thing in communication

is hearing what isn’t said.

〰 Peter Drucker 〰

There are numerous apps designed for birdwatchers ~ who are also birdlisteners ~ to identify feathered and winged vertebrates by their distinctive voices. Every bird species trilling, chirping, warbling, cheeping, twittering, whistling, squawking, croaking, screeching, chattering, hooting, tu-whit-tu-whooing, singing, calling in their own language, can be identified by their voice.

I assume the birds in our garden can identify each other by their voices, sans birdsong app, presumably even tell one sparrow from another by their distinctive chirps, inaudible to the human ear. We can identify individual humans by their voice. Why wouldn’t birds be able to do the same?

A young mother recently told me that she can sleep through a multitude of sounds. But when her baby utters the slightest grunt or squeak at night, she’s awake in a heartbeat. I remember the same when my kids were babies. Other toddlers crying on the playground could go unnoticed, while the (sometimes not so) small voice of my own young offspring would instantly hit my eardrums, piercing the cacophony of playground noise.

Voices are as unique as their speakers, as identifiable as facial recognition. And like facial expression, every voice has a scale of sounds. The same person’s voice can come out high or low, clear or muffled, bright or dark, sprightly or subdued, upbeat or downcast, and anything in between.

When I enter our kitchen, and Josh is already up, kettle boiling on the stove for our morning cup of lemon and ginger, I can tell by the tone of his voice, whether he has slept well, looking forward to the day, or worrying about a leaking roof, for example, because a thunderstorm has kept him awake last night, which has completely passed me by in the blessed oblivion of sleep.

Of course, I cannot immediately tell what is bothering a person, just by reading the tone of voice. Picking up a mood and inner turmoil versus inner calm and serenity, however, is easy.

The sounds of the human voice are made by the vocal cords acting like the strings on a musical instrument. Having said that, the so-called vocal cords are not really cords; they are more like vocal flaps, composed of a core muscle called the vocalis, supported by the thyroarytenoid muscles of the larynx.

It’s this pair of vocal flaps at the back of the oral cavity, opening and closing like a pair of curtains at the entrance of the windpipe, which enable us to form audible words, phonetic units which make sense to others, and speak a shared language.

Words can change their meaning, depending on the tone of voice. A simple request, such as “come to me,” can be welcoming, seductive, commanding, threatening, surprised, or imploring; it can be charged with hope, impatience, despair, yearning, expectations and desire, anger or angst, trust, confidence, trepidation, or the wholehearted joy of reunion ~ words literally dancing to the tune of the voice.

Ahmad Odeh on Unsplash

The Voice of Silence

Who cannot understand your silence

cannot understand your words.

〰 J.R.R. Tolkien 〰

Voice is a complex process, produced when breath is expelled from the lungs, pushed along the trachea, passed through the vocal flaps, and out of the mouth. Air transforms into vibration.

The basic word for this is speech, or voice [from Latin vox = speech]. The related verb in English is identical to the noun voice [from Latin vocare = to call].

The same root has given birth to the words advocate, equivocal, evoke, provoke, vocabulary, vocal, vocation, vociferous, and vowel.

Despite the intimate connection between voice and making distinctive sounds, or explicitly uttering a noise, we also use the word for its opposite, the complete absence of voice and noise.

The ‘voice of silence’ sounds like an oxymoron. How can silence, which makes no audible sound, have a voice?

In a comment to my earlier wordcast The Languaging Process,

Robin Payes

responded with a quote by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, ". . .when the Prophet Elijah stood at the same mountain after his confrontation with the prophets of Baal, he encountered God not in the whirlwind or the fire or the earthquake but in the kol demamah dakah, the still, small voice, literally 'the sound of a slender silence’ (1 Kings 19:9-12).”

Robin explained the intriguing linguistic relationships between the keywords further: “In the silence of the midbar, the desert, you can hear the Medaber, the Speaker, and the medubar, that which is spoken.”

The comment prompted me to take a closer look at the word midbar, which lead me to a blog called ‘hebrew word lessons’ by historian Sarah Fisher, and a post called Midbar: Into the Wilderness.

“Wilderness is often depicted as a desert space in the Bible…” Fisher writes, “ the place of harshness, where water is scarce and the ability to grow is limited. In my neck of the woods, the wilderness is the uncultivated forest or the winter tundra… a place where sunlight is limited and the cold is harsh and biting. Generally the wilderness is a hard-to-thrive place.”

Interestingly, the word midbar has a range of meanings, which to the contemporary English mind sound like they have not much in common.

Original Word: מִדְבָּר
Transliteration: midbar
Phonetic Spelling: mid-bawr
Definition: wilderness, desert
Meaning: a pasture, a desert, speech

The voice of silence is associated with retreating into ‘the wilderness’ in many religious traditions. In the holy books of the Abrahamic religions the voice of silence represents the voice of God speaking to a prophet, or other individuals who for whatever reason find themselves in the desert, withdrawn from the soundscape of the mundane human world.

Robin’s understanding ~ “The ‘sound of a slender silence’ speaks above language, above words. It is the meaning heard in our own inner voice, available to any who can hear it, anyone who will listen.” ~ resonates with contemporary interpretations.

… and it’s not just in the desert that God and humans communicate.

“Monks read Latin poems aloud, to connect with God through their voice. The text had no power in itself, their voice was the conduit for the connection with the Divine.”

Vincent McMahon

writes in his recent post The Bluff of Agentic Personæ

The voice is the conduit for the connection with the Divine.

〰 Vincent McMahon 〰

This voice is not about physical hearing. It represents inner guidance, which is available to each of us by tuning into our own intuition, conscience, heart or soul. To perceive this voice we don’t need to retreat to the desert. We can also enter the inner wilderness, the inner ‘midbar’, where inner speaker and listener may meet, out of earshot of the noise of mundane everyday life.

In her book The Voice of Silence, a translation of ancient Buddhist teachings, Madame H.P. Blavatsky writes:

Before the soul can comprehend and may remember, 
she must unto the Silent Speaker be united
just as the form to which the clay is modelled, 
is first united with the potter’s mind
For then the soul will hear, and will remember.
And then to the inner ear will speak —
Before the soul can see,
the Harmony within must be attained, 
and fleshly eyes be rendered blind to all illusion.
Before the Soul can hear, 
man has to become as deaf to roarings as to whispers, 
to cries of bellowing elephants 
as to the silvery buzzing of the golden fire-fly. 

Rafael Cisneros Mendez on Unsplash

Breath of Life under Pressure

Words are the daughters of the earth.

〰 Samuel Johnson 〰

While the still small voice is associated with the soul, the mundane voice of the languager serves as a common medium of expression in everyday life. The still-, small- and slenderness of the soul’s voice give the impression that the embodied voice is loud (or at least audible), big, and rather corpulent. This cannot be taken for granted.

Voice, beyond the production of sound, is an instrument of expression.

Voice, beyond being a carrier of language, expresses what’s on someone’s mind.

Voice may mean to express wishes, choices or opinions.

Voice can be the right to express your own thoughts, to speak your mind.

Voice can be a unique creative expression as a writer.

All these variations of, and associations with human voice are not necessarily loud, big, or easy to pick up. They can be just as difficult to hear and connect with as the sound of a slender silence.

Express [from Latin ex = out + pressare = to press, push] late 14 c. literally to push, press, squeeze out; figuratively to delineate, depict, represent visually, put into words, speak one’s mind.

In most contemporary English-speaking and -reasoning minds, expression is the human way of sharing our innermost thinking, feeling, questioning, intuiting.

Expressions are responses to impressions, often attempts to make sense of impressions we receive from the outer world. Unlike the movement and rhythm of breathing, this exchange of impression and expression is not as simple, smooth and straightforward as inhaling and exhaling.

Exhale [from Latin ex + halitus = breath, steam, vapor] literally to emit vapor.

Before our voice can catch our breath ~ or the vapor transforms into vibration ~ it moves through and past several hurdles exerting pressure on human inspiration. We’ve all experienced this as compression, depression, oppression, repression, suppression, or a combination of all five.

Compress [from Latin com = together + pressare] late 14 c. force something into a smaller space, squeeze together; cover.

Depress [from Latin de = down + pressare] late 14 c. push down by force, conquer; from 15 c. push down physically; from 1620s deject, make gloomy, lower in feelings and spirit; from 1878 lower in value (economic sense of depression).

Impress [from Latin in = into + pressare] late 14 c. have a strong effect on the mind or heart.

Oppress [from Latin ob = against + pressare] late 14 c. to push unduly against, overburden, weigh down; figuratively overwhelm.

Repress [from Latin re = back + pressare] late 14 c., put down, restrain, overcome, subdue; figuratively check, confine, restrain, refrain.

Suppress [from Latin sub = under + pressare] late 14 c. quell, cause to cease; from 1520s put down, prevent from expression by force; from 1550s prevent or prohibit the circulation of, withhold from disclosure.

The soul is closely associated with the breath of life in religious and philosophical traditions ~ “the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living soul” ~ so it says in the creation myth of the Genesis account.

Every living soul receives impressions from the moment of birth, if not before, without the ability to express herself in ways that the human mind can grasp.

Along with the endless stream and overwhelming flood of impressions, the living, breathing soul is exposed to all other forms of pressure listed above, including compression, depression, oppression, repression and suppression, long before the mind develops the corresponding skills, knowledge and understanding to make sense of it all, never mind find its own authentic expression.

Writers should know. We must learn the significance and value of expressing volumes of ‘shitty drafts’ ¡! albeit reluctantly ¡! in the solitary, slow, and silent slog towards developing that elusive unique voice.

That’s why we turn to the wilderness ~ be it desert, forest, wetland, ocean, or shoreline ~ in all her forms of expression, in solitude, in the hope of receiving an authentic answer, if only a fleeting impression in an authentic voice, in search of finding our own.

I GO DOWN TO THE SHORE
by Mary Oliver
I go down to the shore in the morning
and depending on the hour the waves
are rolling in or moving out,
and I say, oh, I am miserable,
what shall —
what should I do? And the sea says
in its lovely voice:
Excuse me, I have work to do.

Some inspiring posts about the languager’s voice ~ in the voices of fellow languagers.

I didn’t lose my voice all at once, 
I lost it like a slow leak.
Drip by drip.
A word held back here.
A truth swallowed there. 

From How Poetry Gave Me Back My Voice by

Debra King

“Now, sitting here with most of my life behind me I realise that my relationship with my voice is such an essential and complex part of who I am, who I was and who I wish to be.” from Fairytales and #Metoo by

Katrice Horsley

“The voice does not vanish” from Louisa May Alcott is The Voice from Within about Subjugation by

LaMonica Curator

“I’m not going to bench press 150 kilos in one go - but I can flex the muscle of truth.” from The Voice as a Vessel by

Moe Aloha

“In a very real sense, to find your voice as a writer is to find yourself. And when you do, you may discover that your voice was there all along.” from Find your Writer’s Voice by

Noam Leon Kaestner