My son rescued our dog, Buddy, from a kill shelter seven years ago. They had taught him three basic commands: Sit, stay, heel. He was housebroken, too, so those commands seemed good enough for me. What else would a dog have to do, other than sit, stay, and heel? Anything else would be superfluous. Neither I nor anyone else in the family tried to teach him any other commands. But Buddy — a Boxer/Pit mix who was found roaming the streets of Los Angeles — has always paid close attention to the words his people say. Whenever people are talking, he cocks his head and pricks his ears (wow, two in one sentence and neither one meant as a pejorative or in a sexual context!), focusing on every word. In this way he has taught himself the meaning of many words and phrases. He knows the difference between “going for a hike,” and “going for a walk,” and even just “going for a ride in the car” with no exciting destination to look forward to. He knows “upstairs,” “downstairs,” “toy,” “bone,” “cracker,” “Get your leash,” “get your collar,” and the names of a dozen animal and dog friends. There’s much more, but I won’t bore you with all the details.
My point is, language is very important to him. He’s made it his mission to learn it — at least the parts of it that have relevance to him. But he only listens. He never talks.
Now, I know most pet owners have probably wished their dogs could speak to them at some time or another. But really, wouldn’t that just ruin it? For him as well as for us. There’s something sacred in the act of listening and watching without interrupting those experiences with the noise of speech. Reading is all about listening, isn’t it? We read to listen to someone else’s story.
For me, writing is also listening. I am listening closely, silently, so I can hear the story I am trying to tell.
In the book I’m working on now, one of my characters practices echemythia — the maintaining of silence. The Greek mathematician/philosopher Pythagoras had two groups of followers: the mathematikoi, or learners, and the akoustmatikoi, or listeners. The first thing one did upon joining Pythagoras was to practice echemythia for a duration of two to five years. Upon completing this period of silence, one joined the inner circle of learners. Apuleius said of Pythagoras: “This, I tell you, was for him the first axiom of wisdom, ‘Meditation is learning, speech is unlearning.’ ”
What I take away from this idea of talking as a kind of unlearning is that we have to commit to listening in silence in order to hear what our characters want us to know about them. We have to listen with profound commitment in order to understand the meaning in their stories. We have to refrain from interrupting with our own speech in order to catch the subtle details, the undertones. We can’t learn what we need to know about them unless we first listen in silence.
My dog is very in tune with the rhythms of our lives. He knows when we are leaving without him, when someone is about to show up to change the routine, when he will be going out with us, when he’s about to get a treat or some play time. He knows all this because he listens without speaking. Can I hear as much in the handful of words my protagonist whispers in my ear as I drift off to sleep? I am willing to believe that a few simple words I have heard perfectly because I have listened perfectly can give deeper meaning to the stories I want to tell. But I have to be willing to do the hard work of unlearning to talk when I should be listening.
“Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together.” — Thomas Carlyle
The Phantom Word 