Below are the opening paragraphs of a chapter about Charlotte Selver’s encounter with General Semantics and how it informed her work. Charlotte had a fine sense for the use of language. Some of that came most certainly from being hard of hearing. It will also have been in part because English was her second language. I know from my own experience how that forces us to reach for words because they often don’t come by themselves. A third reason was her encounter with Charlotte Schuchardt Read and General Semantics in the 1950s. Because the chapter is as of yet unedited, I am not putting it on the web in its entirety. But I’m happy to send you a pdf. Just let me know. An email link is at the bottom of this blog.
General Semantics Seminar at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, 1957. Charlotte Selver is on the right.
“Central to Elsa Gindler’s work was to become quiet,” Charlotte explains at her summer workshop in St. Ulrich in the Black Forest in 1992. “As long as we are preoccupied with ideas and expectations we cannot be there for what is happening, for what could be happening. Alfred Korzybski’s central question, stemming from his personal experiences of World War One, was, ‘why must there be wars?’ After years of research, which led him to the study of the origins of language, he concluded, ‘Because people don’t listen to each other.’” I heard Charlotte speak about Korzybski many times and while I always had questions about her understanding of the principals underlying his work, General Semantics, especially with respect to its neurological foundation—the imagery she used seemed to stem from her study of photography rather than neuroscience—I was touched each time by her explanation of “how it comes to the word,” as she put it.
“Words do not exist in corpses.
Words only exist where life exists.
Words only exist where brains and blood and cells that live exist.”
Jeff Mordkowitz
“Sensory cells are like photographic plates. When light hits receptors in the eye, they are impregnated with a pattern of shapes and colors. This information spreads throughout the entire nervous system. We begin to perceive, to feel, we experience in our totality. This occurs, Korzybski said, on silent levels, that is, in complete silence. It is only after this that we begin to put our experience into words. But when there is all this thinking noise it is impossible for the impression to reach us in our totality, impossible to really perceive. To be really touched by what we see, or hear, or taste, we need to become quiet.”
“What on deeper levels we all long for,
what we are continually aiming for in one way or another,
is a feeling of contact or 'continuity' with our environment.”
Charlotte Read
“But that’s just the beginning, that’s just getting ready,” Charlotte added, “because once there is seeing, then you’ll see, once there is hearing, you’ll hear, but then you have to respond to what you see and hear. Then you have to play your part in the world, not just for yourself and your family.” From there, Charlotte moved seamlessly to a sensory awareness exploration, rather than discussing the matter. We were asked to place little sandbags on our heads, very gently, grain by grain, as it were. “Could the stillness and peacefulness of this little bag also bring stillness to you?” she asked. “Can you receive the weight and let its impact travel through you? Can you really let yourself experience this throughout? We all received such pretty heads. It would be a shame to use them only for thinking. We are smarter than that. The head can feel as well, just as we are capable of intelligence throughout. The legs, the toes, the hands, it all has potential for intelligence. When you are being touched you feel, you know immediately where you’re being touched and how it feels.” To this Charlotte added, modifying her initial remarks about becoming quiet being the heart of Gindler’s work, “What we learned with Elsa Gindler is to become ready.”
The focus of Sensory Awareness may be on cultivating the “silent levels” but just as in General Semantics, it is not for the sake of dwelling in silence but to create conditions for adequate responses to what we perceive or, to use a Buddhist term, for right action.
If you would like to read on I will gladly send you the whole chapter as a pdf. Just let me know by email.