Week 1: Emotive Phase

If any one reason could be found as to the reason communication exists today, it is that nature favors those who work as a team and as a community. A powerful suggestion indeed, as one can infer from the numerous communities that color the Earth's surface - perhaps the one constant among species is that each has invented its own method of special communication. Pheromones, for instance, are used quite effectively by insects to communicate and relay important messages - of impending danger, or a need of assistance - in order to better assume a cohesive unit that can collectively work towards mutual benefit. The necessity of exchange is apparent here - not merely in resource but in collaboration. Every community, it is revealed, is a complex network of which the cohesive is communication; without some language in some form, no creature would ever be able to form any sort of infrastructure of cohabitation beyond itself.

The first seven days of my month of silence was thus dedicated to our own kinesthetic faculty of communication - the contorting of faces to display emotion. I would refrain from all forms of linguistic communication whenever possible and attempt to communication using only this basic communication method. Initially, my predictions on my ability to remain an active partner were gloomy, and my resultant experiences during that fateful first week had all but confirmed my prediction, in what was to be perhaps the most socially devoid stretch of time. After the initial bemusement to my peculiar social plight, and a few awkward attempts at a modicum of a normal social exchange, I was left largely to my own devices, and was no longer bothered to provide any further exchanges. (My later inquiries as to the cause of this aversion were met with varied but depressingly similar responses. 'Talking' to me, if even it could be called that, was "too hard for what it was worth." I experienced this depressing trend even with my own family.) As a unfortunate result, my first week was largely disabused of any real social exposure.

My social shock from going to a lively and active social lifestyle to one of near nonexistence helped to put into perspective the importance of communicative systems, however. Emotive communication, in all its usefulness in its simplistic applications in (for a lack of a better word) simpler species, seemed so paltry when compared to the powerful and versatile linguistic system that was being used around me. Emotion, as a singular system of human communication, doesn't seem to work. Remember that without communication in some form, lasting communal structures cannot form; human language 'the qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to humans," (Chomsky) takes the purpose of communication beyond mere cohabitation and forges for itself a society of sophistication and convenience, where, as Myers put it best, "thanks to language, we know much that we've never seen." (313)

Though my first week left me with a lack of concrete social data, it did help me to put into perspective the unique position that language has provided us in the world.