In short, it’s not just humans who communicate indirectly. It’s all dogs, cats, bats, birds, and buffalos, as well as every creature that makes and hears sounds and sees movements that are meaningful; every creature that feels a touch or a lick or a bite from another.
With the sound-making/sound-gathering system we communicate within our species. With it we communicate between species. With it we “receive communication” from plants — think of all the information different sounds, such as wind in the leaves, can bring us under different conditions (i.e., evokes in us) — as well as from the entire inanimate world: falling rocks, breaking waves, thunder, and trees cracking and crashing to the forest floor. But in all cases, the meanings of those sounds and their attendant contexts must be built up in the mind of the hearer (or wired in by evolution: some of us animals are wired to wire ourselves that way upon the encounter with certain “experiences” or “linguistic signifieds,” such as learning to walk upright or learning to speak) through experiences for any subsequent interpretation to take place, whether curiosity or fear, recognition, prediction, or negotiation (“I don’t want to get wet. Let’s go inside. Listen to that…” “I am listening. Hey, we can make it to Margaret’s before it really comes down…”) is the function. But mammals in general and primates in particular — as well as whales, dolphins, and octopods — seem to have a knack for learning.{11} Because, until recently, there has been no pressing need to understand the complex mechanics behind some of evolution’s effects, that’s why many of us don’t — though we are capable of learning and, with the help of writing, remembering. There is also an educational, stabilizing superstructure, however, where intervention can reasonably occur, and where it is possible to stabilize necessary discourses with the help of beneficent technologies — if you allow cultures to learn in their own way. But this must be both an active and a passive process. This is not cultural relativism (which always moves toward an initially passive approach that ignores learning and eventually tends toward a dominant destructive approach to behavior, which is sometimes confused with learning), but is rather cultural respect (which acknowledges that learning/teaching is always an intervention in the elements that comprise culture, during which both sides must learn if there is to be beneficent change). There is a difference between dialogue-and-respect and imposition-and-domination. And if many more of us don’t start to understand those process-effects and their imperfections as well as their successes, soon, directly or indirectly, we’ll kill each other and ourselves off. It’s that simple.{12}) The fact that so many creatures — from mice (who squeak) to mastodons (who trumpeted), bats to beavers, giraffes (who mostly listen but sometimes mew) to gerbils (who chitter), pigeons (who coo) to primates (who grunt, growl, or talk) — share an auditory form of data emission and reception (i.e., hearing and making more or less informative noises; though we all do different things with them) attests to its efficacy for multiple tasks at every level of development as well as to our genetic connectedness over the last 250 million years since the early Triassic and before, and the incredibly intricate road to language that a purely synchronic linguistics system is inadequate to untangle without a great deal more extension into semiotics, animal and human, and their evolutionary history, much of which is lost.
Given that we have separate brains, that we can “communicate” as well as we can is quite amazing — but don’t let your amazement make you forget that “communication” begins as a metaphor for an effect (a door that opens directly from one room to another, a hall that leads from one place in a building to another) but is thus neither a complete nor an accurate description of many things that occur with sound-making and sound-gathering. The fact that so many different creatures have eyes, ears, and kinesthetic reception systems speaks of the efficacy of these effects as well as the genetic relationships among us since before they and their precursors — from gills, extraneous jaw bones, and light sensitive spots on algae and the forerunners of nerves themselves — evolved over millions of generations. That is an index of their usefulness in this landscape. Bear that in mind, and you may start to perceive how complex the process is and why language is only the effect that something has passed from person to person, creature to creature, from landscape to creature, whether from speech or in writing or by touch or through any sound — or perceptible signs.{13}
It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, “We must treat other people as if they exist, because perhaps they do”—though we’ve gotten a lot more biological and neurological evidence that they do.{14} Because of this, the force behind that “perhaps” has strengthened to a strong “probably,” though in theory we haven’t gotten much further. The similarities and differences from which — neurologically speaking — we learn to interpret the world, unto birth and death, comfort and discomfort, safety and danger, pleasure and pain, and the existence of other people and other creatures and other minds and — whatever ours is — other sexualities and orientations and the worldscapes we share, are all still effects, even as they form our only access to the life, the world, the multiverse they create for us. But they would appear to be extremely useful effects for keeping us alive and functioning in our nanosection of a nanosection of that multiverse — that is, if what many of us take to be failures of tolerance among the general deployments and our own employments of these effects of difference don’t lead to our destruction.
Now that we’ve had a romp through space and time, and a general ecological agape, which — since Poe obliged an audience of sixty with a talk taken from his then unpublished Eureka, A Prose Poem{15} — we still expect certain sorts of imaginative writers to indulge in from time to time, I can tell the following without, I hope, its taking on more critical weight than it can bear: an anecdote that pleases me and makes me smile. For — largely — that’s what it is. (The indirect gesturing toward metaphysics is done with for the nonce. And, no, we can’t say anything about it directly, which is probably why it takes so long to suggest anything about it at all; and, no, we are still never outside it…)
All three books of my Fall of the Towers trilogy sold.
Every once in a while, even today, someone writes about them: “Hey, these are interesting — certainly better than I ever thought they would be….”
I don’t make too much of it.
Still, the trilogy was the favorite of a young man who wrote subtle and involving avant-garde fiction, published by a very respectable press, and also of a sharp young woman who wrote crafted and exciting science fiction — and, in his green T-shirt and his orange rubber glove, my neighborhood New York sanitation worker.