``The beginning of speech is found in babbling of babies. At about five months children start to make their first speech sounds. Researchers say that when babies babble, they produce all the possible sounds of all human languages, randomly generating phonemes from Japanese to English to Swahili...'' (Kenneally, 142p)
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When I heard these quiet little voice sounds I was blown away. M was laying on his back quietly playing with his voice. I recognized that's what these noises were. There were also clicks, and little suck sounds, tongue flickers and little rolls and purrs. He would stop if I distracted him by coming into the room, so I stayed by the door where he couldn't see me or hear me. It went on for a long time, maybe a couple of minutes.
This stage doesn't last very long maybe only a few weeks.
What I associated this with was another amazing little routine that I think babies go through. When they are first born, they begin moving their face muscle groups, before they open their eyes and just after for a little while. Maybe they are asleep when they do this. What they do is make all the `faces' a human face can make. So that every expression you've ever seen on someone's face is made in these first few days. Questioning, quizzical, frowning, scowling, scornful, laughing, crying, miserable, depressed, horrified, content, smug, proud, arrogant, ... and the many combinations that can not be named because they are not part of our psycho-motive landscape. I think this routine is just a carry over from inside activity in the womb. Babies are just flexing and relaxing muscles and muscle groups in reflex activities to strength the muscles.
We have to somehow select out of this palette the correspondences to our emotive state, the correct repetoir. Before I had seen these expressions, I had experimented with copying Rembrandt portraits to understand how he created the sense of personality in his studies, especially of his own face. So it was an amazing art flash to see all these complex expressions in my son's face.
What cracks me up now, is he grew up to be a rather cool character with very little expression in his voice or face. He is very difficult to read. But my grandkids sure are not. Life goes from tragic drama to zeal and ectasy in about three seconds.
There is yet another motor routine that can be watched in post-natal infants in the first 3mons. It is a systematic sort of working out the muscle groups of the total body. It starts within the body core big groups, gross motor coordination and works it way out to the limbs, until the individual fingers and toes can be articulated at will. Then over again this time with some sort of purpose, like the strange little dance of baby fingers on the breast while nursing.
All these routines occur in some kind of time cycle from orgin to partial mastery, then all over again. They seem to start in a few week cycle that stretches to a few months, and then lengthens into a year or more. I could only follow the cyclic timing system which is intimately intertwined with physical growth, until sometime around four or maybe five. By then the cycles had elongated too much to follow them.
You can sort of follow the lengthen cycles by the teeth, when they fall out and when the permanent ones come in. They come in a specific order and these signal a pulse like or periodic curve. This isn't a smooth arc that increases. So you have to wonder what is driving this cycle? It is a little like Gould's punctuated equilibrium. It's not really a sawtooth, more like sin wave with complex overlays of cosine and tangent. The cycles seem to go in and out of phase.
Then as puberity hit, I got to re-discover the cyclic system of timing that had periods of about four to six months, with new thresholds or sign posts passed. Everything was involved in this growth cycle from physical prowess to mental agility, to verbal communication skills, to yet another round of outright lying and silly social pretenses, to new kinds of friends, and all the underground sex stuff that is mostly hidden from my view. When I reflected back on my own inner life, I realized that another aspect of this development was in interest and understanding of science and art, and mathematics. Doors opened. Suddenly I got a problem I couldn't get before. I could draw stuff I never knew I could. I could build really complicated models. My fingers were not clumsy, stupid stumps on the end of my hands. I could really give the finger and meant it. It's just wonderful stuff.
One amusing aspect is that I was becoming just plain weird as my kid went through puberty. I was having testoserone attacks, night sweats, crazy masterbation stuff in the bathroom. I was going through puberty all over again. This is truly weird. I had to hide this stuff because it was entirely unacceptible social behavior from a man in his forties. Was I getting somekind of contact high? I don't know. I desparately wanted to revolt all over again. Mid-life crisis? Sure, but the origin is still a mystery to me. Of course the outside world didn't help. It was in the late Reagan years, Iran-Contra, and yet another round of the spinless Democrat saga, yet other thresholds of corporate shit. Also I was stuck in a terrible job that tormented me hourly. You gotta be grown up here, Chuckie and just learn to take it for your kid's sake.
I came to think that these cyclic phenomenon form a kind proto-design scheme with which to build a social order around, or rather one that both constructs and depends on the presence of these timings of development. The social aspect was interesting to reflect on because I was being led through various stages of parenthood. I was also being trained, or entrained on this system. I had to adjust my behavior, my emotional reactions, the way I related to this social ordering system, where I fit and where I didn't.
There are so many layered meanings in these reflections that I am not sure a scientific mind can fathom the human experience to any depth at all. There is a kind of organic unity that demands a poetic sensibility to add living dimension to the raw empirical findings. Whenever I study Cassirer I get some of that dimensional unfolding, like I get from all the real giants, yeah from Plato to Hegel, from Homer to Conrad, Browning, Crane, Whitman, Melville, Mann, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Malraux, Camus, Beckette, Robbe-Grillet... and the more documentary and more overtly philosophical stuff...and then the films...prison diaries, odd pieces here and there. Images, always images.
The weave of a darking beauty is what I want to find in a terrible and hatefilled time.
CG