Dr Walter Willies – A subject matter expert for ThinkTree Hub
Setting the tone for cosmic talk
Various people have set out their views and experiences of communicating with the universe at large: Mike Dooley with his TUT: the universe talks, Neale Donald Walsch’s “Conversations with God”, so many writers’ expositions on the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, while others have narrowed it down to communicating with angels, guides and souls of the deceased. I remember a colleague laughing after I’d said something to someone else, and remarking, “I’ve never heard anyone say the things you say and get away with”.
When I was ten, I read “Wuthering Heights” for the first time, and although I understood little of that story’s intricacies, the mood grasped and fascinated me. Teaching literature at school, later on, I tried to simplify what mood and tone mean. This worked: mood is the general feel of something, and tone is the way the voice behaves. Using voice consciously is initially difficult, but liberating once you have the hang of it. Recently I had to set up my voice identity for my bank. “You voice is unique” I was told, and what strikes me is that uniqueness is at the end of each finger-tip, in the timbre of each voice, in each snow-flake and generally everywhere. Yet coherence permeates and perseveres: from galaxies to stellar to solar and planetary systems, living species and familiar landscapes. And to each and everything there’s a feel, an energy, a sensate acknowledgement. The link between tone and mood is that the voice is so much like a musical instrument, even when it’s shouting and profaning. Notice the way your guts respond to sound in general and voicebehaviour in particular. It’s also interesting to observe how posture, culture, accent, tone and trust overlap. Try speaking in an accent that isn’t yours, and you’ll experience how your throat, jaw and neck muscles have to be manipulated to get there. Just like a piano with many strings, the body isn’t one vibration, but more like a chord that’s either struck by the performer whose name is Choice, or resonates with sounds in the room, however subtly. The body isn’t merely physiology, it’s sensate, cosmic music that bypasses the much later development of cognition, and the body intuits all the tones and moods thereof.
The point I want to make is that voice precedes language, and linguistic ability precedes your language and some-one else’s language. Fascinatingly, the collective human brain chose the path to language, when it could have chosen many other routes to whatever, and now we sit being overwhelmed by the masterful magic of our words and their supposed meanings. Remove words and what do you have? The peanut gallery shouts “Aphasia and dyslexia!” but that isn’t what I’m getting at.
“Since feeling is first…” said e.e.cummings, and his grasp of both medicine and poetry is instructive: this is where I’m going. Another poet, Robert Graves, has suggested that were it not for language, we’d go mad and die that way. And indeed, the mood of overwhelm is regarded as a disorder. A colleague from long ago, a school principal, had a remarkably direct way of saying, “I haven’t got a clue what’s going on here. Somebody please tell me what’s happening”. I often get the sense that if more people could say “I am utterly confused, and don’t know what to think, or what I’m feeling” there might be less depression in the world. Speaking personally, I’m often overwhelmed just by being alive, and that’s because the thoughts that I’ve been taught to think are too small for the experience of sensate vitality. Words are inadequate, as the cliche goes. Fortunately, they’re not all we have. Art in all its various forms helps to express the numinous, and complementary therapies medicate the soul, where pharmaceuticals and surgeries can’t reach. I’ve said before that in my view, five per cent of psychotherapists know what they’re talking about, and I think that still holds. Barbra Streisand’s been at both ends in “Nuts” and “Prince of Tides” so who can argue?
Does the cosmos communicate or is that just another dream?
Our dream for this month, to get us through the dismal cold clamminess of winter, is Christmas. Now, I come from South Africa, where Christmas is bright skies, meat on the fire, family fun in the swimming-pool, and there’s more sparkling wine than sparkling trees.
And perhaps we reach out to the lonely and sad people because this is strongly suggested.
I’d ask here: why do we associate Christmas with extra compassion? And for once, my heart beats more slowly than the days, weeks and months of the year, and knows something beyond language, labels and the glitz of superficial love.
We’re alone, each of us in or own way, and in our aloneness we’ve the unusual ability to set the tone for ourselves. When I sang in choir, we tuned and hummed ourselves, getting ready for performance, and perhaps this is what compassion does: it allows the more rather than the less to recognise and speak, and even sing, which to me is the evidence of soul.
Perhaps that really awful Haribo advert “We ARE the police” could help here: indeed, we are the cosmos, and when we take an opportunity such as the turning point of cosmic ballet, the solstice, deliberately confused with an all-important Western symbol, the birth of Christ, to set a tone that could spark so much, we could hear ourselves for the first time, and begin to know what we say, because the heart speaks before the tongue, and the tone is set within our body’s knowingness.