About Speech

 

It’s dark. The stars are out, but the lush canopy of tree leaves blocks the sky. It smells like wet earth and budding flowers. A breeze separates heavy humidity as a stooping hominid urinates next to a bush. It’s a male. You can tell by his stance and the trajectory of his urine. He barely resembles humanity as we know it. His spine is a question mark, his head is large and angular, his hands and feet are canoe-like and he is covered in gnarled hair.

A female is curled up with the same posture, breast-feeding her baby on a blanket of crinkled leaves. Her other physical characteristics are difficult to discern because of a great mane of hair concealing her body.

She is startled. Her mane prickles. She is looking at the man, still urinating. She trembles. The baby cries. There are shapes behind the bushes that the male cannot see. They are gathering. Glowing eyes. The patter of dripping saliva. The female stands. She breathes deeply. Her hair is sucked into her mouth and…

 

The first utterance. The first word. By this, I mean communication. A sound, a syllable, a purpose directed vocal direction. Synapses fire, an idea sublimes, the tongue moves, the mouth opens, a word (really only a symbol) filled with possibilities erupts from the throat and the idea travels. It enters the ears, it’s interpreted, the symbol translates to new symbols, more synapses fire, and the word is understood—communication is achieved.

 

I’m standing at the front of a classroom playing the role of teacher. Sixteen students sit in chairs with a wooden arm curled around them. They’re watching me: class has begun. I can hear the tiny smacks of eyelids shutting and opening. There is a cough, a yawn, some whispers in the back. My role as teacher dictates I should say something. I have to say something. They have to understand what I say. My words are supposed to have meaning for them.

I take a few deep breaths. I stand wide-legged. I am frozen.

 

When Patrick, my brother, was a toddler, maybe 5 or 6, my Mom was giving him a bath and to make the time pass she sang Aretha Franklin’s “Daydreaming”:

 (Hey baby let’s get away, let’s go somewhere far

(Baby can we’)

Well I don’t care

(Hey baby let’s get away, let’s go somewhere far

“Hey baby”, said another voice. Who said that? She looked around wildly, trying to find the voice’s owner. Was it my Dad being uncharacteristically playful? Was it me, her eldest son, trying to join in on the chorus? A burglar with a sick sense of humor? When she realized finally that she was alone with Patrick, she looked down at him splashing and laughing in the tub.

“Patrick, look at me”, she said. He looked. “Hey, baby,” she said.

“Da-da-da-da-di-da-da,” he said.

“Patrick, look at me,” she said, pointing to her mouth and moving her fingers around her lips: cues Pat had learned during speech therapy. “Hey, baby,” she said.

“Hey, bay-bee.”

She told me she cried. She started singing and dancing like a pinball in the compact bathroom. “Hey, baby,” she said. “Hey, bay-bee,” he said. She repeated it again and again, and again and again, and he said it again and again and again.

“Hey, baby.”

“Hey, bay-bee.”

 

My brother is autistic. He was diagnosed when he was two years old. Now he’s twenty three and non-verbal. He can respond to cues that have been repeated for years, but he cannot purposefully craft a sentence.

I wonder about his thoughts without language. He moves constantly and makes echolalia-like[1] sounds. If he were brain-dead, he wouldn’t make any noise.

He can’t relate socially, he has trouble making eye contact, and he can’t connect to other people with language, but the sounds he makes and his actions are symptoms of brain activity. Something’s happening in there. Are his thoughts pure imagery? Are they auditory? Gustatory? Without words, I can never know.

 

I was around seven when my Mom told me what Pat had said. And, of course, as a seven year old, I took advantage. Any time a girl was over the house[2], I would whisper into Pat’s ear and he would say “Hey, bay-bee,” directly to the girl like he was a soft-spoken, six year old, cat-calling construction worker. I thought it was funny. Most of the girls thought it was adorable. Pat, of course, never refused; he went along with the gag every time.

He never knew what he was saying, or what the words meant. The act of speech, for him, is not meant for communication. Speech was just something that happened. It was a response. There was no agency involved.

 

A group of hominids[3] are gathered in a circle under an outcropped rock. One is squatting and striking two stones together. He grunts and sighs as the stones collide, harder and harder. A spark flashes for an instant and disappears. His grunting becomes animated, excited. The other hominids–stooping postures, dirt colored skin, and mangy hair–watch eagerly and expectantly. They are waiting for magic.

At the other side of the circle, another male, shorter than the rest, stands (as best he can). He looks at the frantic striking motions across the circle, holds out his hands, and says “da-da-da-da-di-dada”.

The stones stop colliding. Every eye in the circle has turned to this figure holding out his hands. “Da-da-da-di-dada,” he says.

There is a slight tremble in the stone holding hominid’s arms. The smaller hominids are backing away from the standing male.

“Da-da-da-di-dada,” he says with force and a stone strikes the standing male on the forehead. He backpedals, holds his head, and the second stone hits him in the chest. He tumbles backwards down the rocky decline.

The circle dissipates. The hominid that threw the stones follows the tumbling body, picking up another stone on the way. There is fear in the stone holder’s eyes.

 

I’m amazed that someone can walk into a crowded bar and strike up a conversation with a stranger. It’s insane. You walk up with no knowledge of this stranger’s background, their likes, dislikes, political views, ideological views, preferences, ethical foundations, etc; you walk up and you just say anything. It’s a leap of faith, it’s a magic trick, it’s confidence from a Higher Power. You’ve got to hope that what you say will be understood, will be received and processed and responded to.

And yet, even if you are understood, there’s always the chance that the stranger will not share your views, will draw you into a confrontation where emotional and physical pain are a possibility.

It’s crazy. The anxiety that people accept to create new social connections.

But there has always been a risk. Speech is not safe. Connections are not guaranteed. Still, we keep speaking. We keep leaping. There is a sort of crisis in our attempts. Otherwise, we would not leap so often or get up after every fall.

 

The period when our ancestors began speaking is hotly debated in linguistic circles. The estimates range anywhere from fifty thousand years ago to two million years ago. There’s really no way, at present, to be certain. Speech organs like the tongue, the vocal chords, or the brain don’t fossilize. And even if they did, how could we tell if they were used? Do the requisite organs come first or does speech? It’s a chicken or the egg question that’s philosophically circular without any physical evidence.

 

There was a study in 2013[4] that used FMRI[5] to study a proposed co-evolutionary link between speech and, drum roll please…tool building.

Their hypothesis was that the blood in the brain would move in the same lateral direction and at the same rapid speeds when study participants built tools as when they spoke, proving, maybe, this co-evolution. And, indeed, they found what they were looking for: “Our results support the hypothesis that aspects of language might have emerged as early as 1.75 million years ago, with the start of Acheulean[6] technology”[7]

What could this mean? If tool building and speech are concurrent, if they developed at the same time, then speech is, in our minds, always a form of action. Speech is a tool with the power to change the world around us. It is a hammer in the cruelest arguments; a screwdriver when we’re offering evidence; a drill when we want to “poke holes” in an interlocutor’s foundation; or, it’s the wood and nails of the foundation that constructs something habitable. It’s fire to warm our worries.

 

I’m still standing at the front of the class. I can feel sensations swarming in my gut, like ants marching over my stomach and intestines. Lave erupts in my heart, runs up my spine, pools in the back of my skull. I feel an enormous surge of adrenaline, as if my body is a rocket about to lift-off. I know what to do. I feel the warmth like a wave and as it recedes something catches: a spark, a fire, a magic trick.

“Hello, everyone. Welcome to English 102, section 2.”

 

Uomini and Meyer’s findings should be taken with a mammoth sized dose of skepticism (the “might” in their conclusion says enough). Their study examined present-day tool makers, not our ancestral relatives who first crafted tools. Present-day tool makers have a pre-conceived concept of “tool-building”. They have done this repetitively for their careers and the brain’s ability to hone this craft has been evolving (presumably) for a million plus years. It’s an exciting possibility, what Uomini and Meyer are proposing, but the only real conclusion that can be drawn is that blood moves rapidly and laterally when present-day hominids make tools and when they speak. Any further conclusion is baseless.

 

But I can see the similarity. Tools were accidental. Must have been[8]. How did our ancestors know to use tools? Was it some need for action? A flame that grew bigger and bigger until action was the only option? A demand from the body that burned until tools burst forth like Athena from Zeus’s forehead? Does speech burst forth in the same manner? If there was no one to learn from, how else could it have appeared?

 

A prophecy was foretold: Zeus’s offspring begotten from Metis would usurp Zeus. And thus, Zeus swallowed Metis, killing her to prevent the prophecy’s fulfillment.

Then Zeus began having splitting headaches. He screamed and wailed, shooting off thunderbolts in agony. The pain was so terrible that Zeus asked Hephaestus to cut open his head with an axe. Hephaestus obeyed and when he chopped, Athena leapt from Zeus’s head fully armored and prepared for battle. I am dumbfounded by this coincidence: that Hephaestus is the God of blacksmiths, sculptors, metallurgy, fire and volcanoes; and that Athena is the Goddess of intelligence and wisdom.

A tool unleashes intelligence and wisdom: qualities necessary for speech.

 

Athena is often paired with Hermes: the attributed God of speech. In early Greek mythology, their abilities are similarly described. Eloquence, in speech, is their mutual strength.

 

I’m sitting in a 99 Restaurant across from my brother as he crams fries by the handful into his mouth. My Mom and I have to remind him to slow down, to take a sip of water, to wipe his mouth with his napkin. He’s not concerned. The food is what’s important. Food keeps him alive. Food makes him feel good. The food desires action.

He always finishes eating before us and when he’s done, he weaves his fingers together and flaps them like five birds leaving their perch. He makes noises that sound like Scooby-Doo ghosts; noises that sound like a parakeet trilling; noises that sound like martial arts movies; or just noises.

My brother will never know what it means for noise, for speech, to mean something. He makes noise not to alter the world around him, but to make a noise. Making noise, asserting his own sounds, is enough.

For most of us, that assertion is not enough. We have to feel that our noises are understood and that they mean something to someone other than ourselves. Patrick is free from this necessity. This burden.

I envy him sometimes. I wish sound itself was enough. But existence is fragile. Existence is cracked. Existence needs the glue of social connectivity and the shared reality that connectivity perpetuates.

 

I have a dream in which Pat can speak, but I cannot. He is not disappointed, nor is he upset when I don’t understand him. Everything he says sounds profound. I can sense density, gravity in his speech. He does not try to educate me. He’s not forceful. He does not lead me. I follow.

The dream ends as we sit on a bench overlooking the ocean. The tide washes up before us, white foam sprinkling closer and closer to our feet. A purplish, red sunset that is alien and beautiful fluoresces on the horizon. We sit smiling. We say nothing as night descends. The lips of the incoming tide kiss our feet as we put our arms across each other’s shoulders and listen to the rhythmic noises of incoming and outgoing waves.

 

[1] Repetitive syllables that vary in volume and tone

[2]This includes babysitters, girls from my school, Pat’s aids, my Mom’s friends, my sister’s friends, etc.

[3] Early man. Could easily be replaced with caveman, proto-human, etc., exactly what species unclear because the actual period when speech originated is unknown.

[4] Run by Natalie Thais Uomini, an archaeologist, and Georg Friedrich Meyer, a psychologist

[5] Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: it captures the movement of blood within the brain. The theory being that blood-flow is correlative with neural activity

[6] Meaning a period in which hand axes were used from 1.5 million years ago to 150,000 years ago. Acheulean technology was the apex of tool building for the majority of hominid history.

[7] Uomini, Natalie Thaïs, and Georg Friedrich Meyer. “Shared Brain Lateralization Patterns in Language and Acheulean Stone Tool Production: A Functional Transcranial Doppler Ultrasound Study.” PLoS ONE 8.8 (2013): n. pag. Web. 4 October, 2015

[8] Unless we assume that aliens provided hominids with tools: an assumption that I’m not going to entertain. If you would like to submit to paternalistic alien fantasies, check out Ancient Aliens on the History channel.