How to Talk to Tree Frogs and Other Lessons from the Wayanad Jungle Orchestra
Suprabha Seshan–educationist, earth doctor and environmentalist–has been part of the Western Ghats conservation scene for over 30 years. Returning after many years to speak at the launch of Sky Islands, Suprabha’s eyes were drawn immediately to Didymocarpus and Hoya–flowering plants of the Western Ghats–and other plants seen on the roadside. Speaking of her organization’’s connection with Palani Hills Conservation Council founder Father KM Matthew, and Bob and Tanya, she described how they were often looking out for endangered species in these mountains. Issuing an open invitation to the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary in Wayanad where she lives and works–for a long heart-to-heart conversation–she spoke of the need ‘to build a course of action’. The following is a transcript of her speech from April 17th, at the Sky Islands launch event, edited for the Sky Islands platform.
For many years, I’ve been training my voice with non-human neighbours and opening my ears and vocal cords during practice. In other words, I vocalise in the company of elephants, tree frogs, cicadas, dogs, langurs and hill mynahs, to name a few. My voice has thus changed and expanded in range and agility through my persistent attempts to follow these others, to imitate them, and to take their sounds into mine, so that when we have a conversation about the langur, we’re doing ahu-hu-hu-hu. We do that, and I’m serious, not just trying to be funny. This is the embodied work that indigenous people do, that actors do, that stand-up comedians do, that parents do with their children. When we bring the sounds of these others into our language, we are honouring them.
I’ve been learning the land through its speech and song. And in doing this day after day, year after year–and now into my fourth decade of living in the Western Ghats–I’ve been stumbling upon deep sound and faraway sound, on silence and symphony, upon polyphony, which is basically many sounds arising from polyphreny, which is many minds, and upon webs of sounds relating to webs of creatures relating to webs of meaning arising in each and every place; this bend of the river here, this rise of the hill here, this reeded hollow here. I now believe that this expansiveness and inclusiveness and this listening between creatures is a movement of empathy as well as ecology, as deep and subtle and infinitely more varied as that which flows between hundreds of musicians in an orchestral symphony. Think of these grand symphonies and all these different instruments playing, but come into the jungle orchestra and you’ll have thousands of frogs and thousands of cicadas, and they create an incredible and powerful moment.
I’ve been exploring mimicry and imitation as a powerful movement for learning, especially in musical education as well as in natural history. For, the fact is that both are rooted in acute oral as well as behavioural observation that is translated through the body and thence the emotions, rising to a fine comprehension and bonding between creatures. The very attempt to imitate a gesture, a phrase, a whistle [whistles], a posture, a shout or a song–to vocalise like other creatures, in other words–is coming closer and closer to their expressiveness. Now soft, now impassioned, now alarmed, now loving, I now have a faint sense of how it could be to be like them, to be them. For mimicry–as actors, musicians, children, indigenous people, hunters, anyone in an intimate relationship with a friend, a family member–is this unconscious or conscious stepping into another’s skin and being that person for that time, making it possible to almost experience their experience and to share their perspective, to walk their walk and to talk their talk, and if you’re like me, to hoot their hoot.
I’ve been exploring tactile sound, vibrations picked up through other parts of the body like the soles of one’s feet, collarbone or the nasal bone, the jaws, the small of your back or your stomach, or your heart. In other words, it is the subsonic or suprasonic reverberations and resonances of membranes, tissues, nerves, muscles, and speech in relation to others and how surround sound effect in theatres employs this earth-borne sound precisely because it is so effective.
I‘ve been longing to tell people about the sounds of trees, the songs of trees. Sometimes, I’m sure that the trees are singing. The sap sings as it flows, the leaves sing as they unfurl, the roots sing as they reach for water, flowers sing as they are pollinated, and the whole forest sings with the rain and the sun and the winds that blow.
I’ve been quizzing friends, all my funky natural history friends, the experts in birds and frogs and more, about phrases in bird and cricket and frog speech. Are they not many more than the crudely few categories described in natural history field guides? Is frog language not complex and rich with meaning and full of purpose and detail? Is it not resonant with emotion, superbly suited to the needs of frogs, transmittable to frog youngsters not only through genes but perhaps through memes, mimicry and practice, complete with its own frog syntax and lexicon? After long years of listening, watching, and participating, can you do the click-click-click-click? When you’re doing that with the frogs, it’s really incredible.
After long years of listening and watching and participating, I believe we have dumbed down all these others because we have been taught that they are lesser, simpler or more backward and primitive than Homo sapiens, and that language is the sole prerogative of humans. And, because this is a Sky Islands launch, I want to speak about language. I’ve been worrying about vanishing speech, endangered and extinct human and non-human languages and the deeply endangered sounds of the earth. A chance visit many years ago to an exhibition called Homelands in Bangalore revealed to me the sheer ineptitude of my own ears in hearing phrases in other human languages, reminding me also that we have this play with homophones in our own language. We make up all sorts of riddles in our own languages–different languages, different wordplay. What sounds like the same syllables repeated and the same phrases, turned out in that exhibition, to be a complex story with names, tenses, events, encounters, dialogues, tonality, context, the all-important speaking gesturing body and the fine awareness of pitch. A lot of tonal languages have absolute pitch, so they render layers of meaning impossible to capture through words alone. What then, of non-humans? What then, of birds? What are we missing? What incredible stories are we missing all the time just because we think that they are incapable of narrative and that we think we are incapable of hearing it?
I’ve also been wanting to gossip about new age healing tricks using sound, mood music, vibration, harmonics, binaural beats, and the age-old Om effect. What a roundabout, devious way to restore harmony in the body, between body and the surrounding medium, and between feelings and thoughts, when something far more direct and health-giving is there in us and around us all the time! Listening to the sounds of nature and responding is free of cost and effort with no technological mediation, and this responsiveness between species, between individuals, is part of a vital ecological balance requiring all of us to listen and to be in tune with each other and to sing. So, I’ve been inviting friends into this little jungle orchestra that I play in because I’m discovering how joyful and what a marvellous educational medium it is, for it physically opens up the senses and widens the perceptual field. It gives primacy to the ears, and better still, it creates this chord of attention to evoke empathy in a circle of young people sitting together, listening, chorusing, creating, softly beating, murmuring and singing in the sounds and songs of the forest. I’ve been wanting to explore attunement – how all life is attuned, sounded, speaking, singing, how sound is simply part of the universe at every level, from atomic to cosmic, and how each being finds a specific sound niche so that it can be heard, not only by others of its kind, but also by all others in its community.
And so it is that many indigenous and traditional peoples believe that the universe was sung into being and is nurtured through song. And so it is that sound is sacred to all traditional communities.
Watch: Suprabha Seshan speech at the Sky Islands Launch
Now flip that. I’ve also been thinking about ear torture, how pain can be inflicted through sound alone. How living tissue can be violated through machine-made sounds, and about shattered tympana and jangled nerves, not to mention derangement, shutdown, zombification and the march of civilization into my once quiet forest area, heralding the end of elephant eardrums–how sensitive are those incredible animals – and with it, their thread to sanity. We go mad if it’s too loud. I’ve been questioning the ones who investigate and uncover the real world truth and universal laws, and yet, require super machines and the engines of industry. The ones who know. The ones who heft their machines like familiars to inform the rest of us about the living world–how incredible, how amazing or special some cell or animal or forest is–having first subjected it to unnatural study. And, these recent spates of articles on elephant intelligence, whale intelligence and dolphin intelligence. I don’t know if you’ve come across that, but there’s a lot of popular literature now on intelligence. It first started with women, that women are intelligent. Then it went to the brown people, that brown people are intelligent, then the black people, that black people are intelligent. Then it went to the whales, then to the chimpanzees, and now finally, slime mould has intelligence and it can map the universe. Basically, they’re all much more intelligent than we first believed. But do you need incredibly powerful machines to discover that, when life is just all around us and in us?
I’ve been really alarmed by the cunning silencing of the natural world, by the hijacking of conversations between humans and non-humans into mystical mantras, and into super equations to be deciphered and spoken only by a select few thus, leaving entire psyches and populations bereft of that contact. The means by which this has been done is to appropriate ritual and interspecies discourse into a secretive domain, be it by the priest or the expert. This has achieved a kind of break between mind and body, between humans and non-humans, and this is a stealing of the language of the commons. We all can understand nature. We all can understand each other, and we don’t need to outsource it to other people. Basically, in a sense, there is joy, but there is also desolation about the end of listening itself because of the unspeakable horror that is all about. Can we dive deeply into the body of the world, our own limbs spiked by the pain of others and our own senses made joyous by the beauty of others? For when you start to listen, your ears refuse to close. It is simply not true that we have no voice. It is just that there is a relentless silencing, the all-powerful arm of hubris flattening ancient and sustaining bonds of community and conviviality between humans and non-humans, and between us all and the great singing, speaking planet, our only home. Is this our destiny?
For more about the author, please read our interview, ‘Re-growing a Forest: The Remarkable Life of Suprabha Seshan and Her Rewilder Friends’.
