By Crispin Sartwell

The most usual act of communication between people runs something like this: "Hey! How ya doin?"

"Aw not too bad. You?"

"I'll probably survive. See ya."

Now one could give this exchange a semiotic analysis: one could analyze the content of the various questions and propositions. One could look for "meanings"; one could grope for the intentions of the speakers; one could decode the exchange and describe the decoding that is going on in the heads of the people who are having it.

That would fundamentally miss the point, as there are no messages or meanings being exchanged and there are no intentions being formed or expressed. (Let us refer to the views of communication that center on the exchange of meanings as "semiotic" views; later the term will be made somewhat more precise.) What is happening is something autonomic, like breathing. The interlocutors are manifesting their presence to each other by producing the right sort of noise. What matters is, first, their physical juxtaposition, and second, in the most general way, the contour of the noise they are emitting: its overall shape. What is significant is something close to a pure syntax: a kind of overall topology of sound.

However, the greeting functions as it does in virtue of the relation of its basic syntax to the repertoire of ritual greetings in our culture. And the intonation with which the words are pronounced may also carry an emotional tinge; the exchange could manifest affection or indifference or even something approaching hostility. But for the most part these also sink below the level of consciousness; they sink into the relationship in general which is already characterized by, say, affection or suspicion. So I am not saying that nothing is communicated. What I am saying is that the semantic content of the exchange is of no moment whatever. It never occurs to either of the interlocutors to wonder about the truth value of the proposition expressed by the sentence "I'll survive," because the exchange has nothing whatever to do with truth value or with any sort of meaning that might be connected with truth value. (Many philosophers beginning with Frege have made the question of meaning turn on "truth conditions." If it does, then that exchange as a concrete speech occasion is meaningless.)

I assert that most cases of communication are like that: the loveliest and most profound cases as well as the most trivial. Here is the thesis: communication is first and foremost noise, not message. I am going to reverse the usual hierarchy and treat as deviant or impoverished communications those events which suit the semiotic model. Left over at the end are those perverse or anomalous cases where there is some content wrapped up in the syntax and transmitted from head to head.

I started playing the harmonica when I was fourteen. My brother Bob showed me the basic riff from "You Got to Move" by the Rolling Stones. That is a good little blues lick, adaptable to a lot of songs.

You may be rich.

You may be poor.

But when the law gets ready,

You got to move.

Blow, suck, move the harp. Blow, suck. Suck, suck, move the harp. Blow, suck. Sounds a bit obscene, maybe, but that's how you play it. Bobby actually moved the harp on my lips to show me, and we both laughed the first time I got it right. For months that was my only lick.

The basic structure of the blues is almost always exactly the same and the repertoire of riffs fairly limited. Indeed, part of the richness of the blues is its narrowness: any slight deviation is significant within a system that is so elaborately restricted, in which the expectations of the listener are so completely determined: the arc of the song is perfectly evident from the first few gestures. The expressive intensity of the blues is also due in part to its simplicity. When one no longer has to focus on what the next change will be or how it is to be accomplished, then one focuses on how to express oneself within it, how to exploit it emotionally. These bindings, in other words, liberate. When I first started blowing the harp, I wanted to play only the blues, and I wanted to play the blues all the time.

I'd like to say that the first time I heard the blues I was walking down Beale Street or hanging out on the south side of Chicago. But actually I was in Nepal. My cool cousin Lizzie and I smoked some hash; she said "here, check this out," and put on "The London Muddy Waters Sessions." My scalp prickled: I heard Muddy Waters and knew that was what music should sound like or at any rate I knew that was what my music should sound like. The most impure possible context for the blues: in a country where there were no black or white people, really: thousands of miles from the American south. Whereas I lived in Washington D.C., which is thousands of feet from the American south. It was strictly speaking unnecessary to go to Asia to hear the blues, but maybe I needed to hear the blues out of context, somewhere where it didn't sound normal, where the music in the bazaar sounded jangly and incomprehensible. Ten years later, I did see Muddy in D.C., at a bar called the Bayou, a few years before he died. The harp player was George Smith. Man the whole thing was unutterably good. But the "London Muddy Waters Sessions" featured British musicians like Rory Gallagher and Steve Winwood (though it also featured the astounding Chicago harp player Carey Bell; I doubt there were many decent British blues harp players in 1972, when the album was released and when I heard it). I didn't hear the blues in a bar or on a street corner, but on vinyl. I still own a copy of that disk: the damage on its surface-its crackles and skips-are traces of my intense relation to it, resulting in mutual damage, and they give it a kind of oldtime-sounding authenticity. But even with all that displacement-in Kathmandu listening to British guys play southern American black music on a recording--the blues seemed to me like an absolutely inevitable syntax, as though I was hearing my own voice the way I wanted it to be.

The first time I put a harp in my mouth, a couple of months after we got back from Nepal, it was a piece of wood and metal I stuck between my lips; my mouth didn't know how to make its shape. I didn't know how to find the holes in the harp with the breath stream from my lungs to the external air and from the air back into my body. The harp had numbers on each hole, and I would remove the harp from my mouth so I could look and see what holes I was blowing. I couldn't make the harp make any sense and I had the idea, common when you pick up a new instrument, that I never would be able to make the harp make sense, that it would always seem alien to me.

The story of learning to play the harp is a story of becoming something with the harp, of merger and emergence: "mastering a skill" is the least useful possible phrase: nothing masters anything, but body and instrument emerge into a system. The harp is a particularly excellent instrument with which to emerge into such a system, because for one thing it's tiny: you can carry one wherever you go. As I got bigger, it seemed smaller You can play it while you walk down the street; you can cup it perfectly in your hand; it was made for your mouth and is about the same size as your mouth. Its timbre is very much the timbre of the human voice and the sounds you produce with it come to feel like a voice. Notes can be "bent," so that you are not, as on a keyboard, limited to the tones that the instrument is designed to emit, and you can gradually pull a note up or down in a continuous tonal circuit. The tones are made by freely vibrating reeds in a column of breath: truly the most flexible and intimate musical system of body and body: one is doing exactly one thing at a time: one is simply working the object with one's mouth.

A traditional Marine Band harp has a wooden mouthpiece that is tongued as you play. This is divided into ten holes which open into the reed plate and through which the air must pass. The lips rest and move on metal wafers that are nailed to the reedplate. Within the reedplate, the reeds-just tiny rectangles of metal--vibrate. Some are set to vibrate when air is blown over them, some when air is sucked back across them, so that blowing and sucking produce different tones. Each hole is large and separate enough from the others to be blown individually, whether or not the air is shaped by the tongue. But the holes are close enough together that one can find chords by playing two or more simultaneously. You can also place your tongue on one or two holes and play the surrounding holes on one or both sides, and you can get a peculiarly satisfying and bluesy effect by slapping your tongue on the holes, suddenly stooping the flow of air to some of them but not to others. By shaking your head very quickly back and forth, or shaking the harp, you can get a kind of high-speed trill. When you really know or connect to the reeds you can make them wail, sing, squawk, speak.

Soon I was playing all the time. At first not because I loved the noise I was making; the noise was not so good. But just maybe because I am oral: I wanted something in my mouth; the harp was my teenager's pacifier. You blow and suck on a harp: you never need to stop: the music and the breath are absolutely the same thing: you coat it with spit and it bathes you in sound. I would walk to and from school blowing and sucking almost randomly. When I got home I would put on a blues record--Sonny Boy Williamson or Little Walter, maybe--and listen to what was happening through the harp. And slowly my playing acquired form. Soon I could play some of the songs I heard. Soon I could play some of them note for note. Soon I was playing louder. Soon I was playing without thinking about how to play or what I would play next or even how it sounded. I was just playing.

I do not try to play songs anymore, and I would never play the same way twice to the same song; it is all improvisation. The freedom of that sort of improvisation is only made available by the directness and simplicity of blues syntax. I am improvising out of a very limited range of licks I learned from the masters and a few I devised myself. Within this utter constriction I am perfectly free; I am not trying to play correctly or to play a song the way it should be played; I am simply releasing my body into the song and living there, at least on a good day.

Communicating intensely with something as an instrument (using it to communicate and also undergoing a communicative interchange with it), merging into a system with it or becoming familiar with its use, entails forgetting: you do not know how to do something until you no longer care how to do it; you know it when intentionality disappears, know it when your mind is empty and there is nothing but the pure physical system. I don't think about the harp and the mouth at all: there's simply an event of pleasure. Of course that is what I seek with the harp: that pleasure, which is still in part the pleasure of having something in my mouth, something between my lips, and working it, worrying it, breathing on it and through it, kissing it, licking it, shaping the column of air and bringing it in and letting it emerge: the dizziness of hyperventilation and the pleasure of an exchange into the atmosphere. I think that the mouth, putting the taste buds on hold for a moment, is underrated as a site of pleasure, at least for adults: I hope you know that oral sex can be pleasurable to give as well as to receive. You can't, I guess, have an orgasm in your mouth, but in other ways the mouth is a sexual organ analogous to the vagina: a wet, lipped opening. And it is filled with organs of sensation: sucking and licking are among the primordial pleasures of mammals.

The model for the view of communication put forward in this book is the musical jam session. I played in a few bands when I was an undergraduate; also jammed with anyone anytime I could do it. We used to sit out under a tree on campus noodling around. Now when you are jamming with a bunch of folks in a style you all know, or in a style you all feel, you can get into some extremely intense communicative exchanges that are happening across the whole group: basically everyone is communicating with everyone simultaneously. There's a kind of free coalescing and divergence and re-coalescing that can happen between two or three players and then spin through the others. The relationships are exponential: whatever the size of the group is (within certain limits) times whatever the size of the group is: everyone communicating with everyone at different intensities that shift moment by moment. And notice that musical semantics is very limited: there is nothing that a certain chord on which you're chugging means in particular; it's just part of the ongoing flow of noninformation. There are bits of emotional inflection, sudden sweeping changes etc., but nothing that ought to be called a meaning in a semiotic sense. And yet this is as intense, intimate, detailed, and important as any kind of communication I have ever experienced. The point is that we're all here together just letting it go. And if I start forming intentions, it's all over. If I start playing for goals or trying to accomplish x or even planning what comes next I stop communicating and seal myself off in my own little head. Then the communication ends because the merger into one sort of organism ends: intentions in this case as in most cases are the enemies of communication. You don't make it flow; you let it flow; and it flows best when you're not thinking about it; basically you want to be comatose and just make sound. First Law of Communication: Communication is inversely proportional to consciousness.

Talking is usually like a jam session. It is usually completely unintentional; you just pour or just listen; you do not sit there saying now I'm going to express x and she's going to get x and reply; you are just immersed in the sound of voices, your own and another's. If you start thinking about how to convey what you want to convey the conversation is instantly stilted, groping; the most intense communication occurs when you are not trying to do anything at all, when you are simply uttering, or screaming, or sputtering, or cooing in someone's ear. The semiotics is just bullshit; it's the music that's doing the work. Communication is not (excuse the hyperbole: is not always, is not usually, is never only) the manipulation or exchange of meanings; in the best case it is a letting-go of meaning; folks are just disintegrating into a pile of words and gestures. What you're doing is creating a medium in which all the players or all those who are speaking are suspended; you are literally altering the environment between yourself and the other people, and altering them as well because a change in your rhythm changes theirs. Together, you are vibrating the air in which you're all located, which you're all breathing.

Eventually, I stopped playing the harp all the time. I got as good as I wanted to get; not as good as some folks, but good enough that I could forget what I was doing as I was doing it; which is absolutely needful for me somewhere in my life. There were periods sometimes of many months in which I did not play the harp, and engaged in other forms of meditation or skilled unconsciousness: alcohol abuse, for example. But as in the proverbial skill of riding a bicycle, which is also a proverbial merger of body and object, my body always remembers how to ride the harp: I might be rusty but before long I'm just blowing.

I know the blues, too, deep in my body, know what has to happen next. The blues is the basic structure or rhythm of my life; has entered into my body or transformed the rhythm of my body, or become my body so that the shape of my life is the shape of the blues; the shape of my mouth is the shape of the harmonica. I know the blues better than I know anything or anyone which is to say that I have let go of the project or fantasy or absurdity of coming to know it at all. It is always there somewhere, so I can let it go, just as I let it come out of my harp; I can't lose it and remain myself. The relation is identity. Ingested into my body through my body's openings, the blues is the syntax of my body and an environment for my body that I myself create or participate in creating as it emerges through the holes of the harp. And it's like that for a lot of folks. I remember one time in Nashville watching Kim Wilson of the Fabulous Thunderbirds blow for two and a half hours without playing a single less-than-perfect note: it was as though the blues was a medium in which he was suspended, like a fish in water, like the blues was his body and his body the blues and nothing could go wrong because all he had to do was be.

The blues is like the air or the English language: something that is outside me and inside me, something that I find and use and then simply allow to emerge, something public that is also mine alone or my possession: a vocabulary, a medium, a breath, a sound, an event, a connection, an identity, a profusion, an emptiness. I can live in the blues like a room, though unlike Kim I still go wrong sometimes. I can live in it and move in it like a space that is designed for the comfort of the human body, even when I'm banging my shins.

Communication, to repeat, is not or is at least not always and is never entirely the manipulation or exchange of meanings; at its best it is a letting-go of meaning. You're touching someone. You're groaning. You're saying things. In short, you're making love. And you had better stop thinking about what you mean or what the other person means; you had better just let yourself slide toward the fucking with all its fraught and frightened and ecstatic degrees, modes, and flavors of communication, all rolled into one, all a single act. It is wrong, crazily wrong, to see the words as signifiers and the groans as inarticulate noises and to sort all that from the gestures and the touching or maybe to try to find a semantics for that. It is all one act of communication: mutual, senseless, clumsy or beautiful, clumsy and beautiful, a music on the instrument of the body of which the words are just a part, more or less exactly like the movements and the inarticulate cries of pain or pleasure.

That's what it's like to be a human being communicating, and if you think it's more like conceiving of and conveying messages or building consensuses where we all get together and come to believe the same thing, you need to shut up and fuck. Or you need to become aware of the ways you are communicating all the time and the way persons and things and animals and machines are communicating with you. You need to shut up the sad lonely philosopher in your sad lonely head and relax into the noise, the senseless beautiful noise that is our medium of life. Stop trying to suck up messages that you can regurgitate on the standardized test in your mind and start blowing the blues or something. Your goddamn life is not a multiple choice examination; it's a gorgeous chaos or cacophony of communication bombarding you from all sides at once. Stop trying to organize a rational polity and come back here where we are playing, because your rational polity is in fact just a whole lot more empty noise. Stop trying to convey to me what you know and start playing with me, start messing with me, start kissing me, start beating me, start dancing with me; and start calling all of that communication. The going accounts are so barren that they're empty. You know and I know that all we do is hiss.