Neither Wind nor Glass will Hold Us Back

Language, it’s great isn’t it? With words we communicate so much, with words we paint pictures and explore and share our deepest feelings. Or so we like to believe. But really, does it? Think back to the last argument you had with your boyfriend/girlfriend/colleague/parent/sibling. Did that really go as planned? Or did a ragged burst of words and ideas come blurting into life, tearing your beautifully constructed ideas of how they are completely and utterly wrong to shreds, leaving you flushed and angry and on the losing side?

Yep, language: built to do one simple job, still fucks it up.

What about language that’s been corralled together into a user guide designed to help you bring your mobile phone or some other whizzy gadget to heel? And I won’t even mention self-assembly furniture, where even the pictures leave you scratching your head with a dangerous and pointy screwdriver while you call your therapist and plot a zillion ways to disassemble the manufacturer.

Instead of it helping, language is often actually working against you. That said, it’s often down to user error (in this case the user can be both the speaker and the listener).

Time to regress a few thousand years (more probably) and consign the language-bitch to history. In this case a history that hasn’t happened because we’ve plummeted back to a time before our grunts, gasps and squawks had coalesced into something called a language.

Have you ever wondered what we did before we could talk? I don’t mean when you were a baby with nothing rolling off your tongue other than gooey bubbles and sick. I mean before we, collectively known as Man, started forging sounds that got repeated enough to be a word, a sound that other people heard and recognised often enough to know it had a specific meaning, that it represented a specific thing?

How would we have communicated? Although there can be little doubt that we’d have used our tongues and mouths to grunt out our opinions on whether that sabre-toothed tiger that’d just been chasing us really was that massive and we really were this close to getting our high-speed arses bitten off, there is another thing you would have used, and used it without thinking. I’m talking about your body, and specifically your hands, arms and face. And in extremus, possibly your whole body.

I’m talking about gesture, body language. Or as we like to call it nowadays: miming. Oh yes, mime.

I know that when we think about mimes our minds are immediately filled with images of the painted faces of dozens of silent but annoying comedians trying to smash their way through a glass wall, or maybe they’re going backwards/forwards against the wind whilst never quite leaving the same square meter of stage they started off in. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about the waving of arms to communicate specific ideas: i.e. non-verbal communication.

I don’t know about you, but I find this whole concept totally fascinating because not only were we less able to communicate, but the way we thought was different and almost everything we were thinking about (not dying of hunger, not getting eaten, not freezing to death, not waking to find the sun hadn’t risen) was so different that we can barely begin to know what was going on in our heads way back then.

These ideas began floating around my skull when I began considering if it is possible to write a whole novel about a group of people who lived in the time before language. Apart from trying to get inside their heads, there’s also the problem of describing their gesticulations in words: by my estimation a short story would need so many words to describe all this that it would top out as a novel at least, possibly a trilogy.

As an aside, can you imagine how hard and frustrating it would be to communicate anything this way? There’s not a lot of room for subtly is there? And we all know how difficult it is to communicate with language – so without one? No wonder we invented it.

There are many theories about why language evolved and I’m going to add mine to the heap. Man is inherently lazy and incurably nosey. Plus everywhere you go someone somewhere is trying to invent something, often just for the hell of it. These things combines to make a species that will always be looking for an easier way of doing things. I believe that, after a lifetime of not being able to communicate and the frustration that brought, some of those with more time on their hands (perhaps they were too old to hunt or couldn’t because of injury) stamped their feet and decided to do away with the grunting and arm-waving and created language. It’s simple, but I’m certain that my theory will one day be taught at all sensible schools.

So how do you describe the landscape and everything in and above it through the eyes and conscious of a being who doesn’t call trees, trees? Or call anything by a name? Or doesn’t have certain concepts such as flying (useful when trying to grasp what’s going on in a night sky full of falling stars). Suddenly there is no tree, no rock, no giant sabre-toothed tiger trying to bite your arse off (which is comforting to know). There are just things without names, some friendly, some less so: some useful, some just there.

Think yourself back to when your genes were a-hunting and a-gathering, what would the landscape have looked like? Were there not times when Man stood and looked out at his world as the sun dropped over the horizon and was not touched as we are now? Assuming he was filled with the same feelings that we have, how would he have expressed these subtle feelings to those around him without the aid of words? I can only guess that it must have been limited to the sorts of sounds that most of us utter when confronted with fireworks, which is basically ‘oh’ and ‘ah’ ad infinitum.

How did the amorous man express his love for the object of his desire; in fact did he even feel love? I’m sure there are many emotions and feelings that Man would have felt that we can easily relate to: fear, hunger, cold, pain – but would he have felt what we call love? (Anyone care to define what love is? My own theory involves money, cash preferably.) We could take a look at the great apes and see what they get up to, but having seen Gorillas in the Mist and Tarzan (no, not the cartoon version) I can say that while there is a lot of grooming and bonding, neither were exactly filled with what the French call amour as we know it, and as great as the great apes are, they haven’t yet produced anything that compares with Romeo and Juliet.

Of course he could have drawn what he was trying to convey, you know, a stick and some sand, as opposed to cave art, but would that have gotten the message across? I’ve a feeling it would possibly get the idea over, but not the more subtle meanings. The nice thing about drawings is that they can be repeated and do definitely represent objects. Sadly there’s no evidence that I know of for this sort of thing happening and if you remember that the Egyptian hieroglyphic language was only created a few thousand years ago, then you can see that our pre-language Man was not likely to have anything remotely similar: he would have not talked like an Egyptian.

On top of this a few years ago a British Professor Steve Mithen published his book The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body. This is going off the beaten track a little here but the basic idea of the book is that singing came before language and that there came a point when their path bifurcated and language took a left and wandered off on its own. Personally I love the idea that pre-language man sang (and presumably communicated what was being sung by acting it out, aka, dance). In fact I can see him now singing a story about how a great wind is coming, one that will take all the strength in his outstretched hands just to remain in the square metre he was standing in when it hit. And we all know what that means…

So just how the hell am I to write a novel where the main human sounds are grunts that emerge at various levels of volume and intensity? Well that’s another story I suppose, or it will be if I can figure out how to write it. Ah, I think I feel a film coming on…