Rockin’ Robin

My mother talked to the birds. She’d stand under the Jonathan apple tree in our Missouri back yard and whistle up a cardinal or a yellow warbler or a black-capped chickadee, just by changing the melody and timbre of her whistle. “But what are you saying to them?” I’d ask as the birds tipped their heads quizzically from the perches in the tree.

“I’m just telling them hello,” she’d answer. “Letting them know they’re safe.”

Which they weren’t, always, given our cat, whose mouth she would sometimes force open to let an unwary and miraculously unhurt bird fly out.

Now researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are suggesting, not that Mom could really communicate with the birds, but that the language she used in her other verbal communications could have evolved from, or be related to, birdsong.

It’s a lovely idea, but less because of the questions it answers about the origins of human language—being speculation, it doesn’t really answer any—than because of the mysterious nature of birds and our longing to be like them. Ah, to fly, to sing, to build nests, to follow the stars on great airborne migrations! When Thomas Nagel wrote his famous essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” he attracted two generations’ worth of philosophers interested in the question of consciousness. Had he titled his essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bird?” he would have roped in the dreamers and poets as well. In 1979, when I read William Wharton’s extraordinary novel Birdy, the scenes that transported me were not those of war and male bonding, but of the main character’s hallucinatory fantasy of having sex with and being married to Perta the canary. The language was erotic without hinting in any way of pornography, since it was impossible to imagine bird-sex in any graphic way. The lure was a disembodied, completely Romantic longing.

But back to the origins of language. The MIT folks have divided human language into two “layers,” the lexical and the expressive. As with other dichotomies, it’s tempting to categorize these as the dull and the exciting. In the sentence “I ate the banana,” I, ate, and banana are all part of the lexical layer, whereas the things you can do with them—“Did I eat the banana?” “Why did I eat the banana?” “Whose banana haven’t I eaten?”—are part of the expressive layer, which is obviously a lot more fun.

Where the MIT researchers’ ideas get strange is the notion that birdsong contains the patterns of the expressive layer without any of the lexical layer. Moreover, they contend that this layer existed first, with the lexical element added later. Add in a couple of other observations, like the phase of life at which birds and humans pick up their language or song, and you might postulate that our primordial tendency to express ourselves is directly correlated to birdsong.

I’m in no position to argue with these long-researched findings. But to steal from Nagel: Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has wings rather than arms, that one can lift effortlessly into the air, that one uses a hard beak rather than soft lips. Insofar as we can imagine this, it tells us only what it would be like to us to behave as a bird behaves. It does not tell us what it is like for a bird to be a bird—and therefore, it does not tell us what it is like for a bird to sing. Attributing expressive or lexical layers to birdsong, in other words, cannot escape a certain dash of anthropomorphism.

I do think it’s worth noting (as the researchers do) that the closest equivalent to birdsong, in human expression, is music. My mother’s whistling was music; flute playing is music. Homer supposedly sang his epic poems. The Navajo Night Chant, though now transcribed and studied as literature, is actually an uninterrupted nine-day song. Reading the program notes at the classical concerts I often attend, I’m consistently astonished by musicologists’ ability to discern how the recent events of a composer’s life find articulation in a particular combination of key, melody, harmony, and tempo. Listening to opera on the radio, without those supertitles, I can usually get the gist of what’s going on emotionally and care little about the plot.

It seems to me, then, that whether or not verbal language evolved from birdsong, musical language echoes and refracts such singing in a number of ways. And isn’t our speech in a constant, productive tension with our song? Think of how an orator is said to “soar.” How a truly great soprano “sings like a bird.”  How poetry aims at “melody” and “harmony.” How we set words to music and fit melodies with words. How, from Tchaikovsky to Mozart, we have bent not only musical composition but also the construction and playing of instruments to the goal of mimicking birdsong. In strict evolutionary terms, birds are not our ancestors, and I doubt their means of communication with each other is the ancestor of our language in that same sense. But they are our teachers, and from them we continue to learn.