LOST ART OF CONVERSION

Alfred North Whitehead said, “Expression is the one fundamental sacrament”.

Every morning, as my infant niece lies cooing in his crib, I make sure that he hears his name before seeing my face.’Davi….David Senior,” I call out in a drawn and almost forlorn tone of voice. His cooing stops. He hears a familiar sound. If I hide around the corner out of sight, his eyes watch, all his energy goes to listening. This big gal is making noises again, he thinks. Vibrations that name me, and prove that I exist, have travelled across the air from Someplace Else and into my fuzzy and not-well-focused world.

This may not sound like much, but it is the essential human transaction. We speak the world into being-It is “linguistically constituted,” as Heidegger would say, because humans are Homo loquins (speaking animals).The whole of our civilization and sophistication depends on language. In the poetry of Genesis, God speaks the world into being,saying”Let there be light…”.In John’s Gospel God’s best word, which “became flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and peace.”

The story of the Tower of Babel is meant to show that when language fails, human communication and cooperation fails. These days, the tragedy is not confusion, but silence-people moving, ghostlike, in glass houses against which no one dares to throw the stone of a word.

Consider my little niece again. He is learning not only that human beings make sounds to reach out to another, but a face will follow the sound-because the world is acoustical cause and effect. It’s the ear that welcomes the footsteps of the world. The dog barks, the thunder rolls, the screen door bangs out its hyphenated greeting. Sound is a messenger, and an interpreter.

The world is full of noise, but starved for meaningful discourse. There is plenty of clatter and droning, the kind that spills and churns out insults over talk radio. But there is very little real communication. Our homes have become the noisiest place of utter silence on earth and you know why?

TV’S has replaced the linguistic impulse. It turns faces away from one another and toward the mosaic monologue that is entertainment. The art of conversion began to die when we moved from the table to the couch. Passively we listened to others talking, and there was no place for us to speak our lines. We laughed at other people being funny, cried when others were sad, and cheered our sport heroes as if we were playing. As the flickering light of the tube reflected the zombie-like faces of a whole generation, the sound of families-arguing, teasing, cajoling, encouraging, setting and testing boundaries, investigating one another’s feelings, and telling stories-faded to black.

The extent of this silence in a world of racket is so far advanced that drastic measures are needed. Love cannot survive silence. Children cannot grow apart from the words that bridge their fears, and adults cannot rehearse and refine their relationships if they never hear the sound of the voices of their loved ones.

In a world where divorce is commonplace, it is no secret that marriages not only end in silence, they are ended by silence. Conversation is the currency of passion; it is the courier of concern. To be listened to, really listened to, and to be heard is so fundamental to the renewal of understanding that it has become the desperate refrain of our time.

How do we recover from this desperate situation?

It is to cut the cord on the TV that keeps us all drugged with impossible images of unattainable life. It is to say by action, and not by sentiment alone, that you refuse to let yourself be shown how to look, how to act and what to wear. For only when the blue light of the television fades will people get to know themselves again in the white light of the morning?

But conversation, like all the best things in life, cannot be forced. Language is the house of being. Sometimes all we are looking for in this life is a word from someone. A word of reassurance, a word of forgiveness, a word of reconciliation. The authentic life is worth talking about. Talking about it makes it more authentic still. It’s time to move off the couch and get back to the table-because we cannot live without the sound of each other.