Text/Sound/Music.7

I was going to proceed next to making Roussean guesses at what first language might have been like. Then I took a trip to Cazadero over the weekend for a friend Jeremy Fisher's birthday. One of the guests was the 10 or 12 year old son of another of the guests, who has Down syndrome. I never got the young man's name or his parents', mostly because I'm not very social. Anyways, the guy is on the far end of the spectrum where he is not verbally communicative. What he does do is find audiences of people and go through elaborate gestural plays, some of them obviously symbolic, some of them not so obvious and very puzzling to watch. They all, however, have the feel of intentionality- they are all delivered in such a way as to make the audience feel that the gesturer has an intention he wants to express.

I'm going to stop short of drawing a straight line from this incidence to a notion of what first language would have been like. That would seem to rest on bogus theories of development directly mirroring evolutionary stages in ways that are too murky to sort out (if a development psychologist wants to chime in and start shoveling here, have at it). What I do think is instructive is the fact that, based on the responses of everyone watching this guy try to communicate something without recognizable language, we all still recognized that an intention was present. This says to me that natural language might not be necessary for intention, even if we think it is always sufficient.

I have often thought this about the composition process, either in poetry or music. When I feel like writing, it is rarely the case that I have any idea what it is I feel like writing. Occasionally, some chunk of melody or text will actually propel me over to an instrument, but more often I simply have the vague sensation of some nascent intention dwelling within, and I either go fit it to some language, or it gets lost. To me, it is far more interesting to imagine first language as developing out of these kinds of impulses than from ostensive gestures- gestures that point to the external world. So, as much as I tend towards empiricism in questions of epistemology, I want more to explore a movement from the inside out as opposed to a movement from the outside in. Because, after all, if you go looking for language in the world outside of humans, you aren't really going to find any (but is this true of music...)