What is your name?
My name is Nobody.
Excuse me?
My name is Exaybachay: He who talks loud, say nothing.
[Dead Man, Jim Jarmusch]
Having just watched the phenomenal Dead Man (again) by Jim Jarmusch, an account to all intents of the 'stupid fucking white man' and his (stupid fucking) ways, I cannot refrain from quoting Gary Farmer's native Indian Nobody, and contriving to tie it in with the following passage I read last week in a book called Quiet by Susan Cain:
From fruit flies to house cats to mountain goats, from sunfish to bushbaby primates to Eurasian tit birds, scientists have discovered that approximately 20% of the members of many species are 'slow to warm up' while the other 80% are 'fast' types who venture forth boldly without noticing much of what's going on around them.
If fast and slow animals had parties, writes the evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, 'some of the fasts would bore everyone with their loud conversation, while others would mutter into their beer that they don't get any respect. Slow animals are best described as shy, sensitive types. They don't asserts themselves, but they are observant and notice things that are invisible to the bullies. They are the writers and the artists at the party who have interesting conversations out of earshot of the bullies. They are the inventors who figure out new ways to behave, while the bullies steal their patents by copying their behaviour.
So...
Not only do we have a correlation between fast and loud (slow and quiet) but we also learn that fast types are, by and large, 'bullies'.... We might extrapolate this even further and conclude that the world of business (busy-ness, fastness) is a diminished context populated and driven by coercers and aggressors (preying on and exploiting the weak and the wounded). We could also conclude from this that the fast world is a world devoid of awareness and thus awakeness; that speed (though it may propel us from point A to point B quickly) is a form of sleep. One only has to read the opening preface to Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire to understand this.
In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get
out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands
and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When
traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll begin to see something,
maybe. Probably not.
And so we have the equation: Business = Fastness = Loudness = Vacuousness = Dead Man
He who talks loud say nothing. And he who rushes around like a headless chicken see nothing.
But of course, the converse is also true:
Stillness = Slowness = Quietness = Plenitude = Alive Human
Those who know do not speak...
