Eli was standing in the backyard holding a crust of dried French bread he’d swiped from the bird feeder and talking to a crow, a long rambling conversation of ten minutes or so. He leaned forward, lips extended like a bill, and squawked in the raspy language of the crow perched two houses down on a utility pole.
When Eli came indoors I asked him as casually as I could what the crow had said.
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Humans branched off from other hominids a million years ago and during millennia of social development lived intimately with the natural world. It’s only in the last blink of time–500 years, 5,000 years–that humans in large numbers divorced themselves from the planet: yoked the ox, held or became slaves, planted row crops, and wore Walkmans on the train downtown.
Some people who study neural psychology and language acquisition say that the intrinsic pathways in the brain available to grow into language highways will, if denied the normal social development of language, atrophy or be co-opted for other uses. If children don’t learn to speak by the time they’re eight or nine they probably won’t be able to assemble the neural parts needed to put language together. And since human thought is expressed in language, such a person is hobbled, seriously deficient in the ability to be human. Such was the supposed fate of the Wild Child of Aveyron, a feral child captured in a forest in France at the turn of the 19th century. His inability to ever learn more than a few human words greatly dissappointed his enthusiastic teacher, Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, disciple of the Age of Reason.
Where do the birds go and what words do they use to talk about fundamental things? Terence Moore and Chris Carling, linguists at Cambridge, write in The Limitations of Language that the basic problem in communication is the dichotomy between the “I” who ultimately experiences the world and the “we” through whom any of it makes sense. Only “I” can cognize the world and attempt to give it meaning, but “I” can do it only through the interaction with “we” in language and communication. These constraints make language inherently faulty and inexact, given to frequent and total collapse.
A math teacher at Lane, Fred Schaal, described how on March 3 he looked out the school window toward the river and saw trees in the tiny woodland flopping over, one after another. “Scarlet tanagers come there in the spring. Where are the scarlet tanagers going to go?” he asked the contractor at the public hearing. The answer could have come from the Plote employee quoted by the Tribune: “These are rag trees. They’re just wild trees that grow anywhere.”
