Moving Prose

When I tell you about how I used a French press to make coffee this morning, I move a lot. My lungs expand and contract as my diaphragm pulls itself taut and then relaxes. My mouth and tongue make funny shapes as the air passes by, and my larynx bounces up and down. Depending on how excited I am by the coffee this morning (or how much sleep I had last night), I may gesture. I may even pump my fist with enthusiasm if I have truly nailed it.

Likewise, as you listen to my raving, the sound waves reaching your ears induce a subtle but important dance inside your head—tiny bones sympathetically vibrate as part of a Rube Goldberg machine that brings the fact that I let the coffee bloom for about 20 seconds to your brain. You might also roll your eyes.

The eye-rolling is important, because it’s an example of what we call body language. (We will all be paying particularly close attention to this phenomena over the next few weeks as politicians attempt to persuade us of a number of things.) And while body language is more ambiguous and less intentional than spoken language, many important things can be perceived or inferred. Pay particular attention if there’s a large number of people running in the same direction: there’s probably a reason.

Sign language is, of course, almost completely reliant on the movement of the hands and arms. It’s not “body language” in the same sense as eye-rolling or panic-running—it’s fully-developed human language performed with different parts of our body.

Even just reading (certainly typing) is dependent on movement. Our eyes move about in their sockets to absorb the details of text encoded in light: funny little sudden movements called saccades, from the French, “violent pull”.

Language is movement.

(And making a second pot of coffee says a lot.)