Wordlessness—Part 1

Words are at the core of what it means to be human. They are, by definition, speech sounds that we can make with our voice mechanism in almost endless variations. No other creature has the ability to create so many different sounds and thus build a highly complex way of communicating amongst themselves. With the invention of writing, we further extended our ability to communicate by generating visual symbols of words with which we can create a written record. Printed words are a powerful way that we learn from each other—a unique way that we pass on knowledge.

To be human is to use words. Language is the key to our intelligence. Words are wonderful. And yet, they can also cause problems. When two people use the same word, but have different mental images for it, confusion and even conflict can occur. We sometimes employ words, believing that the other person understands our usage, when in fact they may see things very differently. We might suppose that we are effectively communicating when, in fact, we may perhaps be fueling dissension. We tend to create conventions and rules for words we use and then insist, in an insular manner, that others conform to our concepts and notions.

The mere use of some words invites trouble, depending on the context and who we are talking to. These are called trigger words or hot-button words—such as terrorist, welfare, liberal, abortion, taxes, the Koran, illegal immigrants, and a few more that I don’t wish to write.

Another way we can run into problems with words is when we come to live too much in our heads. Words themselves have no material existence—they’re just abstract symbols in our minds. If we frequently remind ourselves that they are just symbols, we’re OK, but we can go too far and become out of touch with reality. If, for example, we create words for things that do not exist and then try to make them real in our mental realm, we delude ourselves. It can lead us to making up spurious stories about imagined things.

So words are wonderful tools, but they also can have a shadow side. They can lead us into discord—with others as well as with ourselves. So it can be useful sometimes to intentionally go beyond words, to experience what it means to enter wordless realms. This kind of experience can break us out of a narrow way of thinking. It can even bring us into better touch with reality—by directly engaging in life (without the mediation of words), much as an animal does.

Living without words is impossible for us, for anything but a brief moment, but it can be enlightening to delay putting words to an experience—if only for a second. The typical process that happens to us is that we have a sensation—we hear something or see something, for example—and then we immediately name it. The split second we name it, we’re also likely to categorize and judge it. We deem it good or bad, right or wrong, beautiful or ugly. We’ve instantly decided whether we want more of it or to ban it from our presence.

A similar precipitous response after we name something is immediately to decide that we know enough about it to group it with similar things that we’ve seen or labeled in the past. “Oh, that’s the same dumb bird I heard last week.” Or: “When she acts like that, she’s probably lying to me.” We thus close ourselves off to learning anything new about that bird or that woman. We’ve locked them into a rigid interpretation—not only limiting our understanding or our ability to learn more about them, but not even allowing for the fact that our perceptions may be erroneous.

It can be very helpful to rein ourselves in a little, to try to hold ourselves back from naming and labeling. Can we stay wordless for just a moment? Can we just be with the experience, without thinking or categorizing? It can open us up to a deeper understanding of life, if we momentarily pause and see what more we can learn, rather than hastily assigning the experience to some closed file cabinet in our mind; a dead-end slot where it atrophies.

As an antidote to being overly wordy, some people attempt to escape the world of words (that abstract universe in their minds) by engaging in intensive, attention-grabbing activities. A high-speed chase, or a bungee jump, or watching a horror movie can bring us visceral experiences that are beyond words, as long as our attention remains captured. It can be fun, as well as a welcome diversion from our humdrum mental images; they can be thrilling experiences, as they wrench our minds from that artificially-manufactured interior world. But the danger in going that route is that we can come to rely on external—and often imitation—means of touching reality. It can be an escape from the conceptual world of words by turning to sensational methods.

More wordless ways next time…