Just Dance

Last Thursday I went to see a friend's senior project.  She is a dance major, so she talked some and then she danced some.  She quoted some famous dancer who talked about how dance expresses what words cannot.  When she danced at the end she invited other people in the audience to come dance with her.  And watching it all was so beautiful, making words seem completely irrelevant and unnecessary.

I've been thinking that a lot lately.  About the unnecessary quality words sometimes have.  You watch something creative and wordless unfold before your eyes and you suddenly wonder if you don't sound like "blah blah blah blah blah" all the time.  So all this hate for words was great making me hate my major, making me hate the lexical items that come pouring out of my mouth by the minute.

But then I started thinking that maybe, just maybe they're connected somehow.  That maybe I could learn about the beauty of words from watching wordlessness.  That just as words are used for evil, they can also be used for good.  Just as words are used to demonstrate academic superiority, they can also be used for beauty.  And sometimes, yes I should just shut up.  But sometimes words should be used and their beauty reclaimed.

Maybe part of reclaiming the beauty of words for me is using them in ways I don't usually use them.  For example, more than anything I use words to communicate concepts.  And that is all good, but I think language has more use than just the communication of one abstract concept from one human brain to another.  We get so caught up on meaning, on understanding, on grammar, on perfectionism that our words stop looking beautiful and start looking like rule driven blobs on a page.  Could be that I only feel this way because I am writing paper after paper full of rules, arguments, facts and assertions.

One of these many papers is about the phonology of speaking in tongues.  In doing the research for this paper I came across this master's thesis written by Marcos Donnelly at the State University of New York Empire State College titled, "Divine Methodology: Speaking in tongues and insights on second language acquisition."  He writes about speaking in tongues and he says some really interesting stuff about it.  like this (note: glossolalia is the linguistic term for speaking in tongues):

"Goodman's idea is intriguing: is glossolalia an utterance of "words" without meaning—not stripped of meaning, but never having been assigned meanings? Recall Paul of Tarsus's assertion that when he prays in tongues, "my spirit prayeth, but my understanding is unfruitful" (I Cor. 14.14)—or even the popular adage attributed to Blaise Pascal, that "the heart hath reasons that reason knoweth not." Assuming that thought exists independent of words (argued thoroughly and persuasively by Pinker 44-73), and granting Chomsky his insight that human speech capacity is something altogether different from the lexicon of a particular language, we can hypothesize an alluring role for glossolalia on the spectrum of human linguistics: pure form without function, an expression of language that comes from the most basic level of human language production—signifiers stripped from the signified, to borrow terminology from Saussure's semiotics" (Donnelly 2008, p. 19).  

So this is an example of words used in ways they are not usually.  Words used without meaning to communicate things of the heart.  This is just one example and I am guessing that there are a million other ways in which words are connected to beauty and not just to manipulation, ways in which wordless creativity and words are connected.  And I don't really know what it looks like, but I'm hoping it looks like words dancing across a page and dancers speaking their dance.  It's true, maybe this is all idealistic and it really looks like dancers high kicking linguists in the face and linguists writing nasty critiques of dance performers... but wishful thinking can't hurt. 


- Lydia