Stop Making Sense

After one spin of a Talking Heads album and it's pretty apparent that their front man and creative steam engine David Byrne is an interesting chap, the name of their live album is entitled "Stop Making Sense." Ya. I do like their music, talented bunch. So I recently ran across David's book Bicycle Diaries. I admit I had judged it before I even laid my hands on it, I thought it would be odd and interesting. I even hoped that it would be weird and at points captivating in its oddity and hopefully include some discussion on cycling. David did not disappoint.

So he started riding a bicycle as his primary means of transportation around his adopted home of NYC in the early 80's when motorists didn't give a damn about sharing the road with anyone, especially cyclists. He found it to be more convenient and exhilarating to whizz down the dirty potholed streets. It also afforded him an opportunity to see and experience a lot of things you wouldn't if you were stuck underground on a train or crawling through traffic in the back of a cab. As his work and personal pursuits of interesting and different things took him gallivanting around the third rock from the sun he started bringing along a folding bicycle to explore his destinations. The book is broken out into chapters devoted to cities he's visited, a record of what he's seeing, doing, or people he's meeting with and most interestingly what he's thinking as he's cruising around these foreign lands. Oh boy.

In the chapter devoted to one of his trips to Berlin he ponders what he calls the biggest self-deceptions of life; that life has a "meaning" and that each of us is unique. He opines that "Maybe what we think of as self, of us as individuals, of each of us with unique personalities and character, also exists in dogs, and might even extend down the food chain as far as insects. Insects with character and personalities? Why not? Why stop with doggies? An insect might be just like me. I, what I call I, might not be unique at all." For the meaning of life he mentions that religions all over the world have dealt with this and continues on and on. We can skip that one.

Then there are his thoughts on language as a prison while cruising around Manila on his collapsible 2 wheeled steed. He said "The Philippines did have a written language before the Spanish colonists arrived, contrary to what many of those colonists subsequently claimed. However it was a language that some theorists believe was mainly used as a mnemonic device for epic poems." He continues, "One theory regarding language is that it is primarily a useful tool born out of a need for control. In this theory written language was needed for control. In this theory written language was needed once top-down administration of small towns and villages came into being. Once there were bosses there arose a need for written language. The rise of the great metropolises of Ur and Babylon made a common written language an absolute necessity-but it was only a tool for the administrators. Administrators and rulers needed to keep records and know names-who had rented which plot of land, how many crops did they sell, how many fish did they catch, how many children do they have, how many water buffalo? More important, how much then do they owe me? In this account of the rise of written language, name and accounting seem to be language's primary "civilizing" function." And ya, it gets better, "What's amazing to me is that if we accept this idea, then what may have begun as an instrument of social and economic control has now been internalized by us as a mark of being civilized. As if being controlled were, by inference, seen as a good thing, and to proudly wear the badge of this agent of control-to be able to read and write-makes us better, superior, more advanced. We have turned an object of our own oppression into something we now think of as virtuous. Perfect! We accept written language as something so essential to how we live and get along in the world that we feel and recognize its presence as an exclusively positive thing, a sign of the enlightenment. We've come to love the chains that bind, that control us, for we believe that they are us."

Wow. OK. So it would be difficult to get through a modern day without the written word but do we need all the trappings of modern society? Many cultures and people over the course of history seemed to get through their lives with the spoken word passed down generation to generation and some hieroglyphs to compliment some of their stories. Instead of texting IMing or emailing we could all revert to using crayons and pictures. I call dibs on the Burnt Sienna!