A Soup of Communication

I imagine a bowl of soup. On the fatty surface of the soup I see letter noodles floating among the oil patches. I dive deeper into the rich broth. On the bottom of the bowl: potatoes, onions, carrots, peas. Textures, tastes and colors held together by the flavor of salt and herbs.

Now I imagine that communication is this bowl of soup. I have letter noodles to stand for writing, for letters, for typography. If you can speak, write and read, there is communication for you, in letters, words and sentences – written and read. I love the alphabet noodles. I love typography, reading and writing. But is that all there is in the soup? What about the broth, the spices and the vegetables? What about the cooking process, the age-old chemistry of mothers? Letters float on the surface; the rest makes up the essence of the soup. These latter nourish, they flavor, they connect. They stand for the essence of communication. An essence beyond letters, beyond words, beyond what we consider human. An exchange of information that is nonfigurative, nonverbal and non typographic.

I was pregnant. Baby floated for months in a uterusful of soup that smelled like second-day pasta water. The amniotic fluid, as male science calls it. Baby and I had an organ in common to connect our blood circles. Mother cake. Womb bread. Placenta. It was a placenta-mediated blood-based communication. I did all the experiencing of the outside world, all the input giving, all the food searching and food eating. Baby did all the requesting, evaluating and feedbacking.

Too much sugar?

Kick!

Too little sugar?

Turn, turn.

Too much emotions?

Turn, kick, turn, kick.

I couldn’t have a good whole-hearted quarrel without being reminded of my adrenaline-levels. Baby mapped all the emotions into movement. Baby told me what to eat: a different menu every week. Baby had a fine pallet. Baby was like a project manager sending emails made of hormones. Managing and mismanaging moods. Regulating sleep schedules. Prescribing vitamin intake. Working on the famous project that generations of the alchemists – the men, those wise men! – have failed to complete: creating life out of matter.  That’s what our hormonal chats were about.

Then baby was born. They wriggled on my chest. Snorts and cries, snorts and cries. As if the telephone line were cut, no more messages, no more oxygen passing between us through the cord. Baby looked for another way to communicate out of panic. They found a nipple.

Milk became our next shared language. Milk became everything and all the time. Milk became their obsession. Their frustration. Their satisfaction. Their calm. Once again, they became the manager of milk. They asked for it. La-la-la-la, they said. Lait?! They visited Paris in gestation. I heard their cry and my milk started flowing. Lait. They regulated the amounts of milk I made. Every time they wanted to grow a bit they requested an increase of their portions. Then I knew to buy a set of the next size of clothing. They regulated my sleep patterns so that I could regulate their breathing rhythm, night and day. They kept themselves alive by keeping me awake. An intricate system of communication without a word passing between us, without a word written.

Milk can be used as an invisible ink. Write your secret message with milk, let it dry and watch it disappear. Milk is white and so is blank paper. To read, hold it above a heat source. Heat activates dried milk. Milk-based communication is invisible, sort of a secret, sort of a taboo. It is made into a secret by being made into a taboo. The other day I breastfed on a park bench and my father was standing in front of me, blocking my view. It wasn’t until the next day that I realized that he had been blocking everyone else’s view of me. The patriarchy trying to defend their daughter’s honor: an unnecessary effort. I’m proud enough breastfeeding, anywhere. The body of this baby has no particles that were not directly derived from my body. I am creating her every day, while she is remaking me in turn.

Imagine communication as a bowl of soup again. The broth of that soup is what makes the soup into soup. Bodily fluids are this broth. Blood, hormones, amniotic fluid are the things that make human life possible. Milk is the first instance of communication. It is the archetype of communication. An invisible layer of conversation in every person’s subconscious.

*

Baby will not speak for another year or two. Baby will not read or write for another five years. An absurd state of affairs, I used to think. How would one understand an infant’s needs? How would one guess if they are hungry or cold or dirty or suffering from an infection or overtired or overslept or overheated? This worry seemed so overwhelming that it would have made me really anxious if I had taken it seriously. Therefore I ignored it. I blindly trusted that my baby would be born already speaking. Frankly, I did not know anything about speech development in practice. But I was quite curious and determined to listen. And as listening may make one speak, it made baby speak: not a language I already knew, but their own.

With coercive cries she started.

La-la-la-laaaa, she started.

That meant: milk, I want milk.

Nee-nee-nee, she contniued.

That meant: I need comforting.

Ging-ging-ging, she said.

And that meant: I am tired,

To-sleep-I’m-go-ing.

I learned that crying was the baby’s first language. Their feelings were forceful and so was their expression. After sorrow comes the smile, after screaming comes the chatter. After a few weeks they started talking. Their speech was a flux and mix of sounds and meanings and meaningless sounds. They produced some sounds that carried messages clearly directed towards me and required immediate response, and others that were voiced into the air, broadcasted to an invisible audience (baby meaningfully looking away from me) without any particular purpose. Other times I could notice a repetition of vowel sounds with a gradually changing consonant attached, repeated over and over and over again. Practice makes perfect. Every week, new sounds appeared: squeaks, screams, gargles, grumbles follow. In the fast succession of expressions I lose track of my attempts to match sounds to meanings, so I sit back and enjoy the variety of sounds, many of which are banished as taboos from adult communication. And while keeping myself entertained with the parade of vocalizations, I listen and listen beyond listening for the clues that will tell me how to care for baby.

The exchange between child and caretaker in the first years is suggested to be the basis for skillful communication and healthy social-emotional functioning, according to psychologists. Yet, it is rather hard to take the exchange of gü-gü-gü and baá-baá or ppbbff-ppbbff-ppbbff seriously. It is not how one is trained as an adult in our  fast-paced information-based consumption-focused society of today. Things that are easily taken seriously use complicated words, transmit knowledge, can be fact-checked, sound intelligent, generate profit, contribute to progress and as a baseline, they are written down.

Babies’ babbles have not been alphabetized, logged and archived. There is no script that could capture this ur-speech, no transcription method that could decipher what an infant talks about, no way of documenting what passes between parent and child. This communication of care remains as obscure and unrecorded in the eyes of capitalist society as the working hours spent on care labor. It is invisible work carried out in an invisible language, with no way to track it. I imagine an attempt to counter this: an attempt to develop a notation system to represent an infant’s speech. If there were a script for the babbles, would we be able to see preverbal infants as intelligent actors? Would it perhaps expose the complexity and intricacy of their communication? Would it present babies as the fastest possible learners, and the work of parenting as a high-paced job of mastering multiple levels and layers of communication while performing life-sustaining activities?

I imagine my communication soup once again. Babies' babbles’ are the vegetables in my soup: large round potatoes of giggles and babbles, long carrots of cries and spicy peppers of screams. And the varied responses from caretakers, salt and herbs that comfort, regulate, modulate. I see now that communication has a function beyond mere information transfer – it has the essential and primary purpose of care.