Speaking Without Words

It's a strange thing about the human species. On one hand, we revere concepts like romantic looks that speak without words, gestures that sweep us off our feet, a glance that speaks volumes, the sparks that fly and the undeniable chemistry between two people that everyone around them can sense, but never capture in their hands or measure in a test tube. You can't study that kind of chemistry in a petrie dish. It's all undefinable, intangible and terribly exciting or touching or sometimes, so funny it breaks you in half.

What's that song? "You say it best when you say nothing at all?" Nice song, but I admit I always wondered if it was really just a nice way for a beleaguered husband with sore ears to shut his wife up.

On the other hand.......we vehemently deny such communication of it's very existence. It's unscientific precisely because we can't measure it. And as everyone knows, science is all-knowing. There is no such thing as telephathy, or any such energy mumbo jumbo, hogwash, bullbutter nonsense. You'll be laughed out of town. Never mind if you then introduce such concepts applied to an inter- species communication. Oh Em Gee!!! Stop the press, you're a lunatic! Certifiable! Ridiculous!

After all, animals don't speak and converse in a language we can understand. So obviously, they don't think, they don't feel and they just don't know stuff the way we, Masters of the Universe, do. Yeah, we know STUFF, man. As French philosopher Descartes so famously said: "I think, therefore I am." For centuries we've been told animals are not self aware, conscious creatures, just dumb machines in flesh and blood, so no worries, do what you will. They don't even know it's happening. They don't think, therefore, they are not. They are so dumb, they don't even know they are suffering.

So isn't it funny how these dumb creatures with no language learn to respond to ALL languages? It doesn't matter if I am danish, english, german, french, spanish or eskimo, I could be mute for all my horse or dog cares. They will still learn to respond to my words or signals, however I choose to communicate, in whatever language known to man. I could teach my dog to sit every time I said Atchoo, it makes no difference to him what I say - it is the intention behind my words and actions that he is interpreting. And half the time, they learn so fast I have to tone down my signals because they read them before I have barely begun. All of the time, they read me much sooner and faster than I ever read them.

Temple Grandin, a famously autistic animal researcher best known for her work and dedication to improving standards for animals in slaughterhouses, as well as her assertion that the brains of animals and autistic people function in similar ways, tells this little story. When she was in college, a professor pompously asserted that animals have no consciousness because they do not think in or have language. Well, thought Ms. Grandin, then I am a dumb beast, also, because I do not think in language, I think in pictures.

Don't we all, to some degree? At some point, or a hundred or a thousand times a day, switch from thinking in words to thinking in pictures - because they are worth a thousand words. And what accompanies those pictures, those words? Emotion. And it is not the words or the pictures that inform us, it's the emotion they invoke in us. So with all due respect to Monsieur Descartes - I feel, therefore I am.

So isn't it funny how science is now discovering animals have all the brain centers for feeling, too?

But enough about all this mumbo-jumbo nonsense. Tell me - what do you think is being said without words between these two people?