THIS TIME THAT MY JOURNEY TAKES IS LONG

The time that my journey takes is long and the way of it long.

I came out on the chariot of the first gleam of light, and pursued

my voyage through the wildernesses of worlds leaving my track on

many a star and planet.

It is the most distant course that comes nearest to thyself, and

that training is the most intricate which leads to the utter simplicity

of a tune.

The traveller has to knock at every alien door to come to his own,

and one has to wander through all the outer worlds to reach the

innermost shrine at the end.

My eyes strayed far and wide before I shut them and said 'Here

art thou!'

The question and the cry 'Oh, where?' melt into tears of a

thousand streams and deluge the world with the flood of the

assurance 'I am!'

THE STARE THAT DEHUMANIZES

The cowpuncher sat his horse loosely and his fingers hovered

above his gun while his eyes, ice cold, sent chills down

the rustler's back.

A familiar situation ? It happens in every Western novel,

just as in every love story the heroine's eyes melt while

the hero's eyes burn into hers. In literature, even the best

literature, eyes are steely, knowing, mocking, piercing,

glowing and so on.

Are they really? Are they ever? Is there such a thing

as a burning glance, or a cold glance or a hurt glance? In

truth there isn't. Far from being windows of the soul, the

eyes are physiological dead ends, simply organs of

sight and no more, differently coloured in different

people to be sure, but never really capable of expressing

emotion in themselves.

And yet again and again we read and hear and even tell

of the eyes being wise, knowing, good, bad, indifferent.

Why is there such confusion? Can so many people be

wrong? If the eyes do not show emotion, then why the

vast literature, the stories and legends about them?

Of all parts of the human body that are used to transmit

information, the eyes are the most important and can transmit the most subtle nuances. Does this contradict

the fact that the eyes do not show emotion? Not really.

While the eyeball itself shows nothing, the emotional

impact of the eyes occurs because of their use and the use

of the face around them. The reason they have so confounded

observers is because by length of glance, by

opening of eyelids, by squinting and by a dozen little

manipulations of the skin and eyes, almost any meaning

can be sent out.

But the most important technique of eye management

is the look, or the stare. With it we can often make or

break another person. How? By giving him human or

non-human status.

Simply, eye management in our society boils down to

two facts. One, we do not stare at another human being.

Two, staring is reserved for a non-person. We stare at

art, at sculpture, at scenery. We go to the zoo and stare

at the animals, the lions, the monkeys, the gorillas.

We stare at them for as long as we please, as intimately

as we please, but we do not stare at humans if we want to

accord them human treatment.

We may use the same stare for the side-show freak, but

we do not really consider him a human being. He is an

object at which we have paid money to stare, and in the

same way we may stare at an actor on a stage. The real

man is masked too deeply behind his role for our stare to

bother either him or us. However, the new theatre that

brings the actor down into the audience often gives us

an uncomfortable feeling. By virtue of involving us, the

audience, the actor suddenly loses his non-person status

and staring at him becomes embarrassing to us.

As I said before, a Southern white may stare at a black

in the same way, making him, by the stare, into an object

rather than a person. If we wish pointedly to ignore some- one,
to treat him with an element of contempt, we can

give him the same stare, the slightly unfocused look that

does not really see him, the cutting stare of the socially

elite.

Servants are often treated this way as are waiters,

waitresses and children. However, this may be a mutually

protective device. It allows the servants to function

efficiently in their overlapping universe without too

much interference from us, and it allows us to function

comfortably without acknowledging the servant as a

fellow human. The same is true of children and waiters.

It would be an uncomfortable world if each time we were

served by a waiter we had to introduce ourselves and

indulge in social amenities.

THE SONG THAT I CAME TO SING REMAINS UNSUNG

The song that I came to sing remains unsung to this day.

I have spent my days in stringing and in unstringing my

instrument.

The time has not come true, the words have not been rightly set;

only there is the agony of wishing in my heart.

The blossom has not opened; only the wind is sighing by.

I have not seen his face, nor have I listened to his voice; only I

have heard his gentle footsteps from the road before my house.

The livelong day has passed in spreading his seat on the floor;

but the lamp has not been lit and I cannot ask him into my house.

I live in the hope of meeting with him; but this meeting is not yet.

THE CHILD WHO IS DECKEDWITH PRINCE’s ROBES

The child who is decked with prince's robes and who has jewelled

chains round his neck loses all pleasure in his play; his dress hampers

him at every step.

In fear that it may be frayed, or stained with dust he keeps

himself from the world, and is afraid even to move.

Mother, it is no gain, thy bondage of finery, if it keep one shut off

from the healthful dust of the earth, if it rob one of the right of

entrance to the great fair of common human life.

THE AWKWARD EYES

The look-and-away stare is reminiscent of the problem

we face in adolescence in terms of our hands. What do we

do with them? Where do we hold them? Amateur actors

are also made conscious of this. They are suddenly aware

of their hands as awkward appendages that must somehow

be used gracefully and naturally.

In the same way, in certain circumstances, we become

aware of our glances as awkward appendages. Where

shall we look? What shall we do with our eyes?

Two strangers seated across from each other in a railway

dining-car have the option of introducing themselves

and facing a meal of inconsequential and perhaps boring

talk, or ignoring each other and desperately trying to

avoid each other's glance. Cornelia Otis Skinner, describing

such a situation in an essay, wrote, 'They reread

the menu, they fool with the cutlery, they inspect

their own fingernails as if seeing them for the first time.

Comes the inevitable moment when glances meet, but

they meet only to shoot instantly away and out the

window for an intent view of the passing scene.'

This same awkward eye dictates our looking behaviour

in elevators and crowded buses and subway trains. When 

we get on an elevator or train with a crowd we look briefly
and then look away at once without locking glances.
We say, with our look,' I see you. I do not know

you, but you are a human and I will not stare at you.'

In the subway or bus where long rides in very close

circumstances are a necessity, we may be hard put to

find some way of not staring. We sneak glances, but look

away before our eyes can lock. Or we look with an unfocused

glance that misses the eyes and settles on the head,

the mouth, the body - for any place but the eyes is an

acceptable looking spot for the unfocused glance.

If our eyes do meet we can sometimes mitigate the

message with a brief smile. The smile must not be too

long or too obvious. It must say, 'I am sorry we have

looked, but we both know it was an accident.'

THE ABC OF BODY LANGUAGE

In an attempt to outline certain aspects of body language

and unify the science, or perhaps make body language

into a science, Dr Ray Birdwhistell has written a preliminary research manual on the subject, a manual

he calls An Introduction to Kinesics. Basically, he has attempted to
 put together an annotational system for

kinesics or body language, to break all relevant movements

down to their basics and give a symbol - much the

way a choreographer breaks the dance down into basic steps and gives each a symbol.

The result is a little like Egyptian pictographs, but hopefully not
 as hard to read. Starting with the eyes,

since they are the most common source of communication

in body language, he has decided that is the

best symbol for the open eye, fot the closed eye.

A wink of the right eye then becomes ( ), of

the left eye ( ). Open eyes are () and

so on. Dr. Birdwhistell calls each of these movements

a kine, or the smallest recordable movement.

The first premise in developing this type of notational

system for body language, Dr Birdwhistell says, is to

assume that all movements of the body have meaning.

None are accidental. Once this is accepted, we can proceed

to a study of every movement, its significance and a

means of labelling it.

I find that this basic assumption is the most difficult one

to accept. Perhaps scratching the nose is an indication of

disagreement, but it may also be an indication of an itchy

nose. This is where the real trouble in kinesics lies, in

separating the significant from the insignificant gestures,

the meaningful from the purely random, or from the

carefully learned.

When a woman sits with her legs slanted, parallel and

slightly crossed at the ankles it may indicate an orderly

mind, but it is far more likely to be an affected positioning

or even charm-school training. Certain charm schools believe

that this is a graceful and womanly pose and suggest

that women condition themselves to fall into it when they

sit. It is also a pose that allows a woman with a miniskirt to
sit in a comfortable but unrevealing position. It was also a
pose our grandmothers considered 'very ladylike'.

These are some of the reasons we must approach

kinesics with caution and study a motion or a gesture

only in terms of the total pattern of movement, and we

must understand the pattern of movement in terms of

the spoken language. The two, while sometimes contradictory,are also inseparable.To standardize body movements before making them

into kinesic pictographs, we must have a zero point or a

resting point. An arm movement, for example, is only

significant if we know how much distance it covers.

We can only know this if we set up a standard zero point.

In Dr Birdwhistell's work, he sets a zero point for

'middle-class Americans'. This is the semi-relaxed state

of the body, head balanced and facing forwards, arms at

the side and legs together. Any perceptible position is a

motion away from this zero point.

It is significant that Dr Birdwhistell limits his own work

to middle-class Americans. He recognizes that even in our

culture there is a surprising lack of uniformity in body

movement. Working-class people will give certain interpretations

to movements, and these interpretations will

not apply in middle-class circles.

However, in America there is, I think, a greater ethnic

difference in gesture than there is a class difference. Although

he does not say so specifically, I would assume

that Dr Birdwhistell is primarily concerned with body

language among middle-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestant

Americans. If this is so, it presents serious students

of the subject with an overwhelming amount of data to

learn. They must absorb not only a system of interpretation

for white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans, but also one for
Italian-Americans, Jewish Americans,American Indians,
black Americans and so on. Then there

would be class lines in each of these categories, and the

total number of systems would become overwhelming.

What must be found is one common system that will

work for all cultures and all ethnic groups, and I suspect

that, with some variation, Dr Birdwhistell's system will.

Dr Birdwhistell also points out that a body movement

may mean nothing at all in one context, and yet be extremely

significant in another context. For example, the

frown we make by creasing the skin between our eyebrows

may simply mark a point in a sentence or, in

another context, it may be a sign of annoyance or, in still

another context, of deep concentration. Examining the

face alone won't tell us the exact meaning of the frown.

We must know what the frowner is doing.

Another point Dr Birdwhistell makes is that all of our

movements, if they are significant are learned. We pick

them up as a part of our society. As an illustration of the

learning power of humans he considers the most common

kinesic motion, that of the eyelid. We tend to think

that eyelid movements are reflex movements. We squint

to guard against too much light, or we blink to keep out

dust and to cleanse our eyeballs.

Contradicting this, Dr Birdwhistell cites the numerous

cases of learned eyelid movement. Fakirs in Indian

religious cults can learn to look at the sun without blinking

or face a dust storm without closing their lids. Girls

in our society learn to ' bat their eyelashes' in flirting, even

when there is no need to clean the eyeball. He suggests

that examples like these prove that not all lid movement is

instinctive and, he adds, that lid behaviour varies from

culture to culture, the same as language. An interesting fact
 here is that when a bilingual personchanges his language,
he also changes his body language,his gestures and lid movements.