Italo Calvino: ‘perhaps no one can understand anyone’

from Thirteen Ways of Considering Black Birds by John Bennett and John Laidler

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lyrics

Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar is an eccentric man, ravenous for knowledge to establish order in a chaotic world. Listening carefully to a blackbird singing, he whistles, trying to mimic the song. There’s silence then an identical call comes back. Is his whistling accurate and rewarded with a response, or is the delay evidence that his attempt failed to fool the blackbird?

Calvino writes, ‘After a while the whistle is repeated - by the same blackbird or by its mate - but always as if this were the first time it had occurred to him to whistle; if this is a dialogue, each remark is uttered after long reflection. But is it a dialogue, or does each blackbird whistle for itself and not for the other? . . . A silence, apparently the same as another silence, could express a hundred different notions; a whistle could too, for that matter; to speak to one another by remaining silent, or by whistling, is always possible; the problem is understanding one another. Or perhaps no one can understand anyone . . .’
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Italo Calvino, ‘The Blackbird's Whistle’ (1975) in Mr. Palomar, Harvest Books, International Edition, 1985. It would not be its mate, female Blackbirds do sometimes sing in courtship, but it is a quieter subsong.