Beyond the bounds of eyes and ears

When my wife was a teenager growing up on the edge of New York City, she and her friends used to skip school sometimes for kicks and take the bus to Grand Central Station to panhandle. One of their amusements was to talk in a pretend language, thinking people would believe they were befuddled foreigners.

They thought it was a pretty clever trick. Some people were fooled into feeling sorry for the attractive but needy girls and donated quarters. But the girls were too inexperienced to realize their gibberish fooled virtually no one. Long after the fact my wife realized, of course, that the whole thing was dumb. Eventually she became an extraordinarily good English teacher, of all things.

What’s amazing is that you can tell a real language from gibberish just by listening. Even though you don’t know what it means, you can tell when meaning is changing hands. You can tell sign language from finger-flapping just by watching. It seems harder to read lips. It must take some study, possibly even lessons, to distinguish, in silence, lips speaking actual words from lips mouthing nonsense.

But it can be done. With a little concentration, you can tell order from chaos.

An example of this occurs on the first look into space through a telescope. Many people see exactly nothing. Your head bobs around and aims your eye at the inside of the eyepiece, which is blank. After a while the aperture appears, revealing a blotch of white light. A knob brings it into focus. If it’s a star, it becomes a scintillating crystal to your eye. If a planet, it becomes a disk.

At first you think: Great, a blob of white light. Is that all there is? If you’re impatient and stalk back into the house, that is indeed all.

But if you keep looking, you notice the disk is not exactly white after all. If it’s Saturn it has a faint yellowish tinge. Mars is reddish. If you have the patience to find Neptune and look at it long enough, you see it’s bluish. On Jupiter, streaks appear after a while, and the same on Saturn, and also on Mars, which turns out to have features so Earth-like that at one time they were thought to be canals.

We are equipped to detect the patterns that strike beyond what the eye and ear normally notice. We’re equipped, that is, but we have to learn to use the equipment. A baby cannot tell words from gibberish in Grand Central Station, but in one of nature’s extraordinary events, learns language. An inexperienced eye cannot tell Jupiter from Venus in a telescope, but with instruction and practice can tell them apart before nightfall.

It makes you wonder what else is going on that you don’t see or hear, but might recognize if you could only learn. What is that faint stir of meaning, sensed by neither eye nor ear, in the night woods of Maine? The silence in the trees is so clear it seems almost – but not quite – like a kind of speech.

Or are the woods giving off something that seems meaningful, like the noises of panhandling girls, but up close is just nature’s random gibberish? Is it lines that look like canals, but which up close are just canyons and ridges? Or is it really the night-speech of plant and stone, whose meaning is not heard but is read, like on silent lips?

I went to church services for a time in which the congregation was urged to recommend prayers. One longtime member, a mentally handicapped man, often proposed prayers to heal a needy person or mitigate some terrible world event. His sincerity was powerful, but his speech was so badly garbled I never understood what he was saying.

But the pastor – one of those unusual, extraordinary clerics who has actually been spoken to and listened – had with great, interested concentration learned to clearly understand the man’s words.

If there are angels, I thought, they would have to listen to us with great, interested concentration to understand us. I wonder what they sound like.

Dana Wilde is a BDN copy desk editor, a Fulbright scholar and former university professor. He has written and lectured extensively on religion and literature.