You Know . . . Like Life Itself

Awhile back, a friend texted me a word with a definition. It was a word I'd never heard before, one that applies, in particular, to early childhood education. It was a delicious, juicy word full of meaning and nuance. I fully intended to use it here on the blog, but now I can't find the message and, of course, I don't remember the word at all. It might have started with the letter "e".

I'll bet, however, that I'd recall it this morning had he spoken it to me instead of texting it, especially had it been part of a face-to-face interaction, used in a sentence, delivered with hand gestures. 

In human development, gesture known to precede language. For instance, long before a baby can talk, they have already learned to, say, point at an object, to which the loving adults in their lives respond by naming the object. They point at a dog and we say, "That's a doggie!" Those who study these things say that when we do this, we greatly increase the likelihood that this word will enter the child's vocabulary. 

Before the development of the Phoenician alphabet which was the first to assign specific sounds to specific symbols, there were hieroglyphics or pictograms. These were likewise used to convey and preserve information, but they weren't necessarily read in a linear fashion, nor did each symbol represent a sound as much as a complex of ideas. "Reading" pictograms is not an exact science, but rather a process of interpretation. One of the most famous poems in history is Wang Wei's "Deer Park," written in ancient Chinese pictograms some time in the 700s CE. This is one translation by Gary Snyder:

Empty mountains;

no one to be seen.

Yet -- hear --

human sounds and echoes.

Returning sunlight

enters the dark woods;

Again shining

on the free moss, above

But there are thousands of "translations" out there, some of which create entirely different meanings and moods and perspectives because each of the pictograms used in the poem have a multitude of ways to interpret them . . . You know, like life itself. 

Whereas our phonetic alphabet strives for concrete and narrow meanings, with as little room as possible for equivocation, this type of alphabet is more impressionistic and holistic, allowing room for interpretation, or, if you will, perspective. Pictograms convey a fuller sense of how things feel and move, opening things up where our alphabet is an attempt to lock things down. The Phoenicians were great traders and commerce was boosted by the precision of their invention, but the adoption of it for everyday uses, eventually killed off these older ways of writing.

When I consider human gesture, especially hand gestures, I like to think I'm getting a glimpse into the minds of pre-phonetic alphabet humans and they look a lot like the minds of our pre-literate children. Gesture is also impressionistic and holistic. When we say the word "water," for instance, we convey the thing itself, but when we accompany that word with a hand gesture -- making waves, for instance -- we evoke the thing itself more fully. When a baby points, we often interpret that as "What is that?" but we know, that a point may simultaneously mean, "Look at that!" and "I see that," and "I want that," and "Why is that?" and "I'm delighted by that!" and "I'm in the world with that," and, really, an infinite number of things that can't be put into words . . . You know, like life itself.

In her book The Extended Mind, science writer Annie Murphy Paul urges us to take gesture more seriously, that it's not just "hapless 'hand waving'," but rather a vital part of how we know and learn. Just as a baby's pointing comes before language, "people's newest and most advanced ideas often show up first in their gestures; moreover, individuals signal their readiness to learn when their gestures begin to diverge from their speech. In our single-minded focus on spoken language, however, we may miss the clues conveyed in the other mode. Research finds that even experienced teachers pick up on less than a third of the information contained in students' hand movements."

She goes on to write that this suggests "the startling notion that our hands 'know' what we're going to say before our conscious minds do, and in fact this if often the case. Gesture can mentally prime a word so that the right term comes to our lips. When people are prevented from gesturing, they talk less fluently; their speech becomes halting because their hands are no longer able to supply them with the next word, and the next. Not being able to gesture has other deleterious effects; without gesture to help our mental processes along, we remember less useful information, we solve problems less well, and we are less able to explain our thinking. Far from tagging along as speech's clumsy companion, gesture represents the leading edge of our thought."

Like hieroglyphics and pictograms, gesture encompasses so much more than mere words. I'm convinced that literacy as we narrowly define it, has made it impossible for most of us to fully appreciate the fuller, deeper communication that happens through gesture. In the process of learning one thing, we left another way of understanding our world, something wonderful, behind. But it still lives in our pre-literate children. Through them, we have access to this original way of being in the world, a way of being, in fact, that is shared by the rest of the animal, and perhaps plant, kingdom. I worry that in our current rush and crush to force literacy on children at younger and younger ages, we are not only robbing our children of seeing the world in this impressionistic and holistic way, but we are preventing ourselves from "remembering" that it is all too magnificent to be put into mere words . . . you know, like life itself.

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