When Animals Speak

by Edoardo Albert

I have always been vaguely surprised that animals don’t speak. Maybe I am unusual in this, but I believe my reaction, on being addressed by a cat or spoken to by a dog, would more likely be relief that I had finally been let in on the conversation rather than amazement at their speaking. And it’s not just cats and dogs either – the last few, sweaty hot nights have seen me sleeping with windows thrown wide, only to be roused from the fitful slumber of the early hours by the extraordinary racket set up by the birds at four in the morning. There’s definitely something going on in the avian world that they keep to themselves, relying on slugabed humans not being awake to hear.

Nor would I stop at animals, be they feathered or furred. Who has walked at twilight through a wood, when the wind gets up as the sun goes down, and heard the creak of timber and the hiss of leaf and not thought, with a twinge of mingled excitement and fear, that the trees are speaking of the day. Although the idea of the music of the spheres now seems ridiculous, how much is this down to the haze of light saturating our cities and excluding all but the brightest stars from a sky that is no longer black but a neon grey. The city nightscape is a dull, closed in bowl. But on those occasions when I have been beyond the reach of artificial light, and innumerable stars have arched across the sky and the night has been so black I could not see my own feet upon the road, then the idea of crystal music reverberating around the heavens seems considerably less outmoded. I suppose the distant receding echo of the creation that suffuses, well, everything is the drone over which the stars and galaxies weave their harmony. Honestly, sometimes it seems that all creation is engaged in one giant conversation from which we alone are excluded. ‘For everything that lives is holy’, as Blake said, to which we might add it’s busy talking too!

Of course, the question is why we are excluded from the conversation of creation. In CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy, the Earth, Thulcandra, is called the silent planet due to the revolt of its presiding spirit against the presiding spirits of the other planets. However, that does not really address why we are excluded from the conversations of the creatures that share our world. Moving from biology and astronomy to mythology and folklore, stories and legends from throughout the world and almost all eras attest to creatures talking to us: elves, dwarves, djinn and devas, the list is long, the conversation not always edifying – interviewing a vampire only recently becoming something desirable – but for most of human history it has been ongoing. Until now. The last century or so has seen a trickling away of such stories. There has been the odd, overly intimate, encounter with aliens, but the beings whose worlds used to intersect with ours have retreated. We live alone in a world gone silent. The question is why.

Having dragged you this far, it would be a pretty poor show if I didn’t at least attempt an answer, so here goes. The world has not fallen silent. The animals and birds speak, the creatures of legend and myth walk their shadow paths, but we are too preoccupied, too caught up in our own endless chatter, to hear or to see. As we have been able to talk more, through letter, telephone, television and now, ceaselessly, online, all other conversations have been drowned out. The human party has grown too loud and rowdy to allow anything else a voice. It is indeed a wonder of our age that we should be able to talk across the world but in doing so we, necessarily, tune out everything else. Returning to our human party metaphor, talking to someone there requires the suppression of everything else: concentration and exclusion. Our whole world is a cacophony of competing human voices. To hear any of them – to keep from going mad – we have to concentrate and exclude. Is it any wonder then that we can no longer hear other voices, and tune in to different conversations?

So, and pace the wonderful people at Penumbra, my suggestion is this: switch off your computer (or phone, or iPad). Turn off the television. And listen. You never know what you might hear. There are all sorts of conversations going on around us all the time. Falling silent ourselves allows us to eavesdrop on them. And, who knows, if we listen, quietly, patiently, politely, they might, in time, include us in the conversation again.

This is the road less traveled in human history: the one taken by the quiet ones, the hermits, the monks, the people who see the overgrown path leading up to a cleft in the hill and take it, the ones who shut the door against the noise of the city and listen to their walls breathe. Uncomfortable, uncomforted people, garnering little sympathy in our compulsively sociable world. There is no guarantee in such a journey. The path might peter out, the walls become a prison, but still and still…

Listen. Close your eyes. Listen.

Who knows what you might hear?

The responses to Edoardo Albert’s work rather prove what he argues. The stories, the books, the articles, have drawn some compliments, but the best response ever, which saw a friend rolling on the ground, helpless with laughter, was a lonely-hearts ad. It was probably the bit about tickling the belly of a wolf that did it.

Find Edoardo Albert’s books (he’s particularly proud of Northumbria: The Lost Kingdom) and stories via his website although the lonely-hearts ad will not be making an appearance in the foreseeable future. Connect with him through his blog, Twitter or Facebook.