August | 2023 | Richard Nilsen

“What do humans sound like?” That was a question that my late wife, Carole, used to ask. She meant something quite specific by it. Carole was the smartest person I ever knew, but her intelligence was not contained within the usual structures of thought. Not so much that she thought “outside the box,” as that there was no box to begin with.

She used to ask if it were possible to “fall into blue.” When she was a little girl, she used to bend over to see the world behind her, upside down, as she looked at it through her legs. “I wanted to see what it really looked like, and not just what I had grown to know it looked like,” she said. She wondered, as a girl, if the night’s darkness could leak into her bedroom from under the window sill. She was awake to all the input the world offered.

When she asked about the sound of the human voice, she meant, what it sounds like aside from its meaning. We know what a dog sounds like, for instance, or a bird or a cat. But what is the pitch, rhythm, tempo and tune of a person speaking? We know a bird’s song in part because we don’t know what the song means, only its music — but not even music is the right comparison, since music comes with a syntax and structure of its own. We know the raw sound of the birdcall, but we cannot normally know the same for human speech because our brains process the language instantly into content. We bypass the awareness of the sound for the sense.

I got some inkling of the sound this morning while sitting in my back yard. Normally, I hear birds and maybe the chatter of squirrels. But there is a house just beyond the trees that border my yard where the family runs a little day-care operation. And I can hear the children talking and yelling, but not well enough to hear what they are saying. I hear only the pitch and rhythm, the overlap, the space left between utterances, the rise in volume with excitement. I hear the adult voices, too, and their pitch and rhythm, all without knowing what they are saying. I am hearing the sound that humans make.

Yes, I know it is being filtered through the English language. I’m sure if I heard little Mexican children playing, their rhythm would be a variant, or French kids behind the walls of their school in Paris (which I once heard and listened to). French has a less percussive sound. Spanish has a rapid-fire rattle to it. And Chinese comes with a melody that imparts its own meaning. But the basic sound was there.

And so, I hear, in my back yard, the combined sounds of distant dogs barking, the “kweet… kweet” of a towhee, the “shshsh” of the breeze rustling the tree leaves, and the vocalizations of those dozen or so children. And it is all of a piece. It is an experience of the world before knowing.

One of the problems is that the human mind is a pattern-recognition machine. It seeks and spots them, even without our willing to do so. Understanding speech is an example. The sounds become words involuntarily and the words get in the way of hearing the sounds as sounds. Of course, the words are the point of speech and the desire to hear the sounds without the words is a peculiarity of mind that Carole had. For most of us, the actual sounds are irrelevant, as long as our brains recognize them as phonemes, morphemes, words, phrases, sentences and thoughts.

Yet, the patterns we recognize — not just in speech, but throughout our lives and culture — are, in some sense, second hand, a gloss on the primary experience. They are a colored glass through which we see the world. The patterns, like so many mullions in a large window, force us to see, hear, taste, smell, the world in the patterns that our brains force on it.

A frame separates the subject of a picture and points it out to us, but it also cuts away everything not in the picture — the wider context.

You might laugh, because functioning in the world requires us to make sense of it and our brains do that. But that pattern-making and pattern-finding aspect of our consciousness can also prevent us from experiencing existence directly. Really, only artists, visionaries and crazy people get to lift that veil. Artists want to; visionaries get to; and the insane have no choice.

Some of those patterns are the cultural baggage we carry. We have the expectation of a certain pattern for governments, for marriages, for friendships, for gender, for tribal affinities. These patterns may merely be inherited habits, but they are buried deeply in us. An attempt to escape them is one of the things that artists do. Entrenched interests often become agitated by the art and fight back. Eventually, the art becomes classic and everyone more or less agrees that the artists had it right in the first place. But by then, the art has become the pattern and is itself entrenched.

Trying to escape not only the patterns, but the incessant pattern-finding and pattern-making of the brain is difficult. Sometimes that brain outweighs the rest of our bodies. Getting rid of the “middle man” and experiencing things directly can be a revelation.

It is, I believe, what Walt Whitman was getting at in his Song of Myself: “The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,/ It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,/ I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,/ I am mad for it to be in contact with me.”

To smell the new-mown grass without knowing it is new-mown grass; to feel the radiant heat on your skin and not know it is caused by the summer sun; to taste the sweetness of spring water without knowing what you are drinking; to hear the sound of children playing without hearing mere words; to feel the earth under your toes and the air against your skin and never parse their meanings.

“You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor/ look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,/ You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,/ You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.”

I’m not recommending that we all turn into gibbering idiots; our minds’ ability to forge sense of it all makes life possible. We couldn’t give that up even if we wanted to. What I am trying to do is supplement its meaning-making drive with the ability to let that go for the sake of pure experience, non-judging, non-deciding experience. It would be a kind of return to roots, before all the layering of culture and idea, where we might discover some of those ideas have no foundation.

Meaning is important, and we all want meaning in our lives. But perhaps we are missing something more primary, more direct.

A wise person once said, “What we seek is not the meaning of life, but the experience of life.” The experience has precedence. We can hardly make meaning without it.

My brother-in-law, Mel Steele, is a painter whose work I not only admire, but truly enjoy. They give my eyes great pleasure.

We visit Mel and his wife, Deborah, a few times each year and usually I bring along a big bag of DVDs, mostly art or foreign films. Mel and I share a common taste for such things.

Indeed, our tastes match up surprisingly well, not only in movies, but in music and art as well. We love the more difficult music, like Bartok quartets or 20th century operas, and for all that we get along admirably.

But there is a sticking point, a point of contention that we have never been able to resolve. There is a movie he hates and I love; and one I cannot stand that he adores. And I see no way of settling the dispute.

Mel grew up in Madison, N.C., in the 1940s and ’50s and only a block from his house was the local movie theater. He and his sister went to the movies at least once a week growing up. They saw all the usual Hollywood offerings, with Burt Lancaster, Greer Garson, Veronica Lake, Dorothy Lamour, Kirk Douglas — you get the picture.

I am a few years younger than Mel and since there was no movie house where I grew up, my film education came via television — old movies packaged by studios for rebroadcast on fledgling TV channels, such as WOR-TV from New York and its Million Dollar Movie. I was fed a lot of films from the 1930s, and, of course, all those marvelous-awful sci-fi films made for a pittance with Richard Carlson or Sonny Tufts.

I don’t know if our different childhoods made the difference, or what, but that sticking point revolves around the best Western (not the motel chain). I mentioned once that I love The Searchers from 1956, a film in which John Wayne shows that he can actually act. It is a tough film, in which Wayne is an unsympathetic character, a bigot returned from the Civil War, having fought for the Confederacy. For my money, it is the best Western ever made, highlighting the shadings of culture clash and personality.

“Can’t stand the thing,” says Mel. “Can’t stand John Wayne.”

Indeed, it seems as if the presence of Wayne is the primary objection Mel has to the film. And I suspect that Mel’s dislike of Wayne has more to do with Wayne’s later right-wing politics — and the number of undistinguished star vehicles he made as an ever-paunchier alpha male — than with Wayne’s actual performance in The Searchers.

It is clear that Wayne didn’t always have to act, and could rely on nothing more than his screen persona in lesser films, such as North to Alaska, The Comancheros, McLintock!, Hatari, or The War Wagon. He seemed always to be playing a caricature of himself.

And then, there are those absolutely embarrassing moments in The Alamo or The Green Berets. Wayne’s shallow jingoism does not wear well. Nor does his support of the Vietnam War or Richard Nixon.

I used to share Mel’s disdain for John Wayne. The actor was pretty much a punchline. Really? Genghis Khan in The Conqueror? Gimme a break.

I first became acquainted with Wayne when I was a little kid, watching ancient Westerns on TV, where he was Stony Brook in the Three Mesquiteers films, or as “Singing Sandy” in a bunch of old Republic or Monogram Westerns. Compared with some of the old cowboys, Wayne had a graceful presence on screen, if no great acting chops.

Only as an adult, did I come across films in which Wayne played a character not merely himself. After seeing Howard Hawks’ Red River, director John Ford famously said, “Who knew the big lug could actually act?” Well, he could, even if he didn’t always feel the need to.

Then there are such films as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, where he convincingly played a part 20 years older than he was at the time. And most of all, perhaps, his role as John Books in The Shootist, his final film, in when he seems to want to prove once and for all he can be an actor and not just a star.

Mel, of course, was having none of it. “Can’t stand the guy.”

In contrast, Mel proclaimed that the greatest Western ever is Shane, a movie I cannot abide. For me, it is the epitome of Hollywood phoniness. It is pure artifice, with not a believable moment in it.

Even its widescreen projection on release was fake: Paramount wanted something to compete with the then-new Cinemascope and Panavision — both anamorphic widescreen formats — and so they cropped the original Academy Ratio Shane at top and bottom to make a phony widescreen version.

“But it’s so beautiful,” Mel says. “Look at that landscape.” Yeah, I feel, a rip-off of Ansel Adams, with the Teton Mountains prominent in the background. It seems so self-consciously meaningful, so arty, so pretentiously “mythic,” that I cannot take it seriously. There is not a second in it that feels real — apart from the acting of Jean Arthur, who is the only fully human character in the film. These are not people but ideas moving around in the plot, as if they each wore a sign telling us what they signify. Again, only Arthur feels like a real person.

Allegory, for me, is always a tough sell.

I’ve never been able to warm to Alan Ladd. He is one of those movie stars from that era of Hollywood movie in which the dying studios made turkey after turkey.

Van Heflin always feels to me like someone the studios felt they could turn into a major star, but never managed to.

And Brandon deWilde is a blank-faced homunculus, as if that look of animal stupidity should be taken as the face of innocence. Actually the kid gives me the creeps.

The Searchers, in contrast, is filled with all the great character actors that John Ford used over and over. They are people, not cardboard cutouts.

Perhaps I have overstated my case. There are other great Westerns that may be as good as The Searchers. Ford probably made them. Modern Westerns tend to be more period-aware and historically better informed. And perhaps Shane isn’t the worst Western. There are plenty of hack Westerns with much less ambition than George Stevens brought to his work.

But the fact is, the comic disagreement Mel and I had was about these two films in particular. I was not able to persuade him; he was not able to persuade me. Let’s leave it at that.

—Richard Nilsen

Archive

Monthly Archives: August 2023

La Voix Humaine

Dueling Westerns