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Learning to Dance

The Paradox of Language

I watched a new life open its eyes to the world for the first time, and I was immediately entranced. Something about a child’s wide-eyed expression inspired a similar feeling in myself, something unnamable but immense, like a tidal wave crashing through those two tiny, soft and shining orbs. I was rendered speechless, just as the baby was speechless, not because I did not have the words at my disposal, but because the child did not have the words to define its world. It must have been a veritable sea of impressions…a confusion of colors…a bombardment of sounds, a…

What is it like, I asked wordlessly. My cousin just stared, and I smiled. I’ll never understand.

It was early in my life that I realized the freedoms language gave me. With the written word, one might travel with a knight to faraway kingdoms, explore galaxies with intrepid space pirates, or sift through the mysteries of a murder. With the spoken tale, one might live his father’s life in the streets of Rangoon, Burma, or the rocky immigration and eventual life in Chicago. With a pen in hand, one is free to smudge the line between dream and reality.

It wasn’t until later, however, that I learned of the limitations language places on the soul. Certain ideas don’t translate between languages, and even within the same language, ideas are up for interpretation. No thought is exactly as its illustrator meant it. Misinterpretations between those who would be lovers can make them into enemies forever. Tragically, no language can completely remove the barriers between peoples’ minds and souls and hence “I think, therefore I am” remains a lonely, yet enduring truism. The only self-evident truth, it gives the existence of others the benefit of the doubt…not impossible, but definitely not certain.

I could not help but feel envy as I watched my cousin. Her vocabulary was so limited as to be unlimited, an unending palette of impression and emotion and raw being, not limited merely to angry or hungry or sad, but angryhungrycuriousgladconfused. And that does not even begin to describe it. Or so I would imagine, in my structured, grammatical, limited fashion. I think in sentences, forming the subject, then the verb, then the object in a neat, orderly line, one by one by one. I wondered at the mind of the child before me, unhinged from such mechanics, and wondered what she was thinking about; my thoughts wandered from there to wondering if there was anything she was not thinking about. I wondered if she was omniscient and if I was right to start indoctrinating language into her with my speech. As Buckminster Fuller said, “All children are born geniuses. 9,999 out of 10,000 are swiftly, inadvertently, degeniused by grown ups.”

But without language, without the ability to communicate, my little cousin would live a forlorn life. She wouldn’t be able to ask for a hug, or a puppy, or any of a million desires that a child could think up. She wouldn’t be able to give her parents the gift of saying, “I love you,” or write her Nobel award-winning speech. She might exist in a beautiful, unique, incommunicado world, but she would be stuck, alone, in her mind.

The mind is a vast landscape of thick rainforests, sweeping sand dunes, frozen mountain peaks and wide open ocean. All of this is contained somewhere in relation to the body, most likely within the skull, though some point to the heart. The vast majority of the time, these magnificent vistas are cloaked in obscurity. Sometimes, however, the curtains fold and rise away to reveal a stage with a few props meant to represent the real thing, and unfortunate boundaries. The actress in the middle of the stage, however she chooses to dance, can convey a few ideas, emotions. Yet this is all the audience will ever be able to see. Though it would be a wonderful thing indeed to bring them directly into the environment, it is an impossibility that will never be surmounted. But a single pirouette and a deep curtsy is better than nothing at all. I can only hope to teach my cousin to dance well.