Dead Languages

by David Shields

  The thing about the translation of Latin is that you can’t force the translation: you mustn’t make one language into another prior to prolonged contemplation, you must—as every good stutterer, who has a set of synonyms for every conceivable situation, knows—exist within the dizzying ambiguity of a dozen words, not committing yourself in one syntactical direction or another but, instead, letting the language itself take you where it wants to go and where it has taken so many other sorry souls for millennia…. Well, I forced the translation. When called upon in class to read aloud I’d do even worse than before because, after such elaborate preparation, I felt such self-imposed pressure that I couldn’t perform. There appeared to be an inverse relationship between how much I knew and how little I could communicate and this dichotomy was deepened in my, as well as the professor’s, mind by the excellence of my term paper, “The Pun on ‘Gemina’ in Terence and Plautus: Twin as Paradox,” on the last page of which Dr. Dreissen wrote: “Optimum opus, only slightly vitiated by occasional vagueness. Please come see me.” “Please come see me” was a passionate plea for a student-teacher, Roman-style love affair, which I ignored despite the fact that I was lugging around an erection as imperishable as Aristophanes’ phallus.

  IT’S AN ANCIENT STORY, beginning before Demosthenes, and it has a simple moral: we try to but cannot construct reality out of words. Catullus has nothing to say to the cab driver. A poem isn’t a person. Latin’s only a language. Stuttering’s only wasted sound. It can’t become communication.

  Sandra strongly disagrees concerning the next point. She says personality disorders arise from stuttering whereas I seem to want to feel only the stutterer is faithful to human tension every time he talks, only in broken speech is the form of disfluency consonant with the chaos of the world’s content. Stutterers are truth-tellers; everyone else is lying. I know it’s insane but I believe that.

  I was having such extreme difficulty conducting conversations anywhere other than the shower that in March, out of semi-suicidal desperation, I walked down Westwood Boulevard to the UCLA Speech and Hearing Clinic. My hearing was fine. I could hear high whistles and low whispers. The structure of my cochlea was impeccable. The clinic is—“is,” for two years later I still see Sandra twice a week—a four-story marble building with brightly colored carpeting inside, long echoing corridors, stone staircases, and room after room of one-way observation mirrors, black cameras in the corner cassette recorders on wooden desks, and anxiety attacks in plastic chairs.

  I’d called a few days earlier—depressing dialogue in which my voice betrayed my purpose before my message did—to schedule an appointment, so I gave my name to the receptionist, then sat in the waiting room until Sandra approached with a clipboard and, briskly shaking my hand, said, “Jeremy? Jeremy Zorn? Hi, I’m Sandra. I’ve been assigned to be your clinician.”

  I didn’t like “assigned.” It suggested reluctance. I didn’t like “clinician.” It suggested Buchenwald. I went with her into a private room that was apparently meant for three-year-old possessors of cleft palates and six-year-old lispers, as all the chairs were tiny wooden structures and there were coloring books stacked on the undersized table, plastic toys to play with on the multicolored carpet. Sandra and I sat at the absurdly small desk in our absurdly small chairs, like double Gullivers among Lilliputian furniture. She turned on the tape recorder, signaled to the camera, then asked me to tell the abbreviated tale of my titubancy. I said, “I see Mother hovering above me like a hawk on some spring day in the living room. I see Father, barefoot, sweaty, bored, bouncing a tennis ball on the Persian rug. I see Beth—no, I don’t see Beth, since she’s always absent—away at a classical guitar lesson. I see myself lying on the couch, watching Mother flip flash cards in front of my face, and not being able to say what each picture depicted. That’s the beginning of all this business, Sandra. I see myself alone at Lido Isle, determined either to cut out my tongue or abandon English for Chinese. I see myself, at six, being unable to read ‘The Death of Bozo the Clown’ to my Open House audience; at seven, on the playground at Currier, surrounded by the Fifth-Grade All-Stars, with bats in their hands, being told to say Golden Gate Park. …”

  I thought it was going okay. I wasn’t stuttering. I was using language as well as I could to communicate the difficulty of using language, but Sandra punched off her tape recorder and said, “You realize what you’re doing, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “You’re afraid you won’t be able to start up again once you stop, so you just keep talking.”

  In what little space there was on the minuscule chair, I realigned myself slightly. I thought Sandra would be impressed with my rhetoric, but she was closer to being embarrassed for me. The chair creaked and I was afraid the legs would collapse, so I stood up.

  She continued: “I hope you also realize that in a phrase like ‘the beginning of all this business’ you’re getting back at all those years of bouncing Bs.”

  I didn’t think anyone else was aware of the secret pattern of my speech. I assumed no one else understood that, for instance, “the beginning of all this business” was meant as mock commentary upon and partial triumph over being eight years old, wearing warm-feet pajamas, and saying, “Mommy, what’s our b-b-b … what’s the name, Mommy, of our b-b-babysitter?”

  Sandra knew the answer to that question and she had large, technical words like “two-to-three unit repetition of initial phoneme” and “reinitiated voicing” with which to describe the circumlocution (her word) of the question itself. If I laughed, I guess it was nervous laughter, but I was also sincerely grateful that she instinctively knew what I could never have explained.

  I should have realized but somehow I forgot that while I was discussing Mother’s domination of dinner table discussion and Father’s faint second fiddle; Beth’s sad brilliance (in high school she painted a picture of a strawberry and mailed it to James Kunen, the author of The Strawberry Statement, who flew out to meet her but feigned a connecting flight immediately after lunch); my extreme dislike of the label stutterer (Sandra: “ ‘Stutterer’ has, for you, negative connotations?” Me: “No k-k-kidding”); my particular fears of addressing an audience, reading aloud, talking on the telephone, confronting a stranger; my current dread of F and S (emblematic, Handsome Loud Blazer might have asked, of fuck and shit? “Good god, no,” Sandra would answer, F and S are fricatives, that’s all”); my previous dances-of-death with M, N, B, and D; my allegiance to long, and anxiety about short, sentences; my consistent substitution of any approximate synonym for a feared word; my reliance upon stutter steps, saying sentences at a certain pace so I would be able to leap through the dreaded word—while I was talking about all this and while Sandra was outlining the philosophy of the clinic (behaviorism, patient responsibility, bimonthly fee payments), I forgot that the miniature black camera in the corner was rolling. Toward the end of the hour Sandra and I marched downstairs, down the rainbow hallway, past people with monogrammed coffee cups, down the terrible stone steps to the Audio-Visual Center to study my speech.

  Joined by the taping equipment technician, who sucked Lifesavers that were Platonic models of the discs he rotated, Sandra and I watched and listened to the last ten minutes of our talk together. The Audio-Visual Center was nothing more than one square room bound by glass walls and populated by a dystopian number of closed-circuit television screens. The picture on screen nine kept flipping vertically until the graduate student technician stepped forward and touched a switch. The image popped into place: Sandra, composed but a little pallid with her chalky skin, closely cropped hair, boyish chest, white blouse, dark jeans; me, my hippie hair tousled as always, my pimples glistening in the fluorescent light, my shirt sleeves so poorly rolled up as to resemble Elizabethan armlets, my head bent so low it was almost touching the top of the tiny table.

  Not on the tape but in reality, Sandra turned to me and said, “You really can’t stand to look at your listener, can you?”

  “
I’m sorry.”

  “Jeremy, will you please try to stop being sorry?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I mean okay.” The most amazing postcard ever written was written by Mother and mailed to me from Stanford Hospital exactly a year later: “Beth says I’m always making you feel guilty. About what I don’t know. That certainly isn’t my intent because you have nothing to feel guilty about so far as I’m concerned. But I have a strong need to let people know where I stand and, if in their judgment I’m wrong, then it’s their responsibility to argue it out with me.”

  On the screen I encountered considerable difficulty with the word “sister.” Sandra put her finger on my screen neck and said, “Do you see how tense your thorax, glottal, and mandibular areas are?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

  “Now watch as you raise your eyebrows and blink your eyes before releasing the air flow in your blocked vocal folds.”

  I watched. My eyebrows raised. My eyes blinked. My vocal folds, whatever they were, released the blocked air flow, whatever that was. After a few seconds, I said, “sister.” Unblamable Beth, cause of so much confusion. Sandra turned the sound down, but not off, in order to discuss the types and patterns of my disfluencies while she had the audio portion of our program in the background as quiet collaboration. I wasn’t paying much attention to her, though, since I was owned by the image on the screen, horrified at how high-pitched I sounded, how consistently spasmodic my speech was—how many pauses, interjections, and restatements there were.

  Sandra realized I wasn’t listening to her, so she turned up the sound and the two of us sat there, silently watching TV with our hands in our laps. On the screen I was reading an article from the sports page of the San Francisco Chronicle. I was doing fine until I came to the final word of the following sentence: “The record was previously held by Whitey Ford.” Note well, sweet Sandra, the variables: the oral recitation, the short sentence, the dreadful F at the end of the phrase to arouse my suspicion and apprehension all along. I simply couldn’t say it. I blinked my eyes, raised my eyebrows, wrinkled my nose, threw my neck to the left, said the first seven words of the sentence over and over again, but I couldn’t complete the final sound.

  Ford. Ford. It’s so easy to write. Why was it so difficult to say? Name of the spastic President, brand of a bad automobile, reefy part of a river: what was so imposing about it? Almost cruelly, it seemed to me—or, if not cruelly, then for what ostensible purpose?—Sandra played this portion of the tape perhaps ten times rapidly in succession. At the end of the last showing I still hadn’t said the word.

  “Turn it off,” I said. “Please turn it off.”

  Sandra didn’t turn it off. She told the grad student technician to freeze the final frame of that sequence, then leave. He left. There was a sickness about my lips that threatened to bleed the black and white of the picture into lurid purple and so much fear in my eyes I thought I might faint. Off-camera, for the first time in years, I cried. So maternal, Sandra handed me a box of Kleenex and killed the lights. The only lucidity in the room was the bleak image of myself babbling.

  As I was crying, sniffling, and coughing into my Kleenex, Sandra said, “I just wanted to demonstrate how severe your speech problem is, Jeremy, how unhappy it has made you.”

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  SHE DIDN’T HAVE to demonstrate that. She really didn’t. I already knew how unhappy the problem had made me. Still, until Sandra’s telecast I hadn’t experienced the depth of my distortion. I’d sounded the shallows. The last six weeks of the school year I gave more attention to my clinic sessions than I did to all my academic courses combined. Critical Theory—Longinus to Barthes—was all right, as classes go, but in speech therapy a late entrance into the human equation was being studied. Sandra said, for instance, that all locution could be divided into five “parameters”: airflow, voicing, tension, movement, timing. Some scientist somewhere had separated utterance into a pentathlon of interrelated aspects and everyone had agreed with him, so now Sandra preached these divisions and sometimes spent as much as half a session saying, “Raise your thoracic tension, now lower it, lower it still further, now say ‘feather.’ Increase the air flow at your articulators, increase it even more, now decrease it, decrease it even more, still more, now say ‘sincere.’” Lightly I said feather. Sincerely I said sincere. These abstract conceptualizations continued to carry very little meaning for me, even after I’d completed over and over the assignment of walking up to a stranger at the bus stop on Wilshire and asking what time it was, saying each word at a slightly different level of tension or slightly different volume of voicing.

  Once, a woman with a digital watch said, “Four fifty-six and fifty seconds.”

  I said: “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.”

  She waited a moment, then said: “Four fifty-seven.”

  There were also five levels of tension: abdomen, thorax, neck, glottis, articulators. Anywhere from your lungs to your lips your language could get lost. Sandra would have me tighten up, then relax my stomach muscles, tighten up, then relax my glottal folds, tighten up … et cetera. This was all very educational, but I didn’t see what good it was doing me since I was still ruining Plautus every time I read him aloud and, in Critical Theory, still too self-conscious about communication to correct the teaching assistant when he got his Schiller wrong.

  Somewhat more interesting, or at least a little more personally relevant, was Sandra’s chart of my struggle sequence: fixate articulators while stopping airflow at the level of the larynx; tense thorax, glottal, and mandibular areas; increase subglottal air pressure until the glottis is forced open; reduce tension in the glottal and mandibular areas; reinitiate voicing and movement of the articulators toward the next phoneme. Toward the exposure, I thought, of some larger precept underlying the pain, I was instructed to compose a hierarchy of situations, beginning with the least and finishing with the most traumatic. Although I was fascinated by the numerous dichotomies that emerged here—darkness and light, distance and intimacy, vertical and horizontal, me and everybody else, disruption and silence, affection and function, men and women, authority and weakness, fear and admiration, anticipation and regret—Sandra, wisely, wasn’t. The whole purpose of the assignment, she explained, was to show me how unnecessary my over-reactions were. I nodded. I knew. I’d heard it all before.

  We argued for the first time when, during exam week, I did what passed with me for exploding. “Sandra, please. Language is more than just a lot of lists. Speech isn’t just a mechanical behavior, some neutral physical activity. It’s suffused with emotion.”

  Which is obvious and yet I had to say it. We’d been transferred to a clinic room designed for normal human beings rather than midgets. The blackboard, presently untouched and never to my knowledge touched, was glistening in the corner like the reminder of a headache. Someone—Dr. Hemley, the director? Neil, the technician?—was peering through the black-edged, silver, one-way mirror. I was sitting with my legs stretched out and my hands tapping on the table. Sandra was sitting with her legs crossed and her hands held politely together in her lap. When I said what I had to say, her hands fairly flew out of her lap, landed on my happily tapping hands, and squeezed them.

  “Don’t you see?” she said, lifting my hands in the air, rubbing them, dropping them back to the table. I didn’t understand this business with my hands. Maybe it was an imitation of Shaking Sudden Sense into me. “If you’re ever going to make any progress, you’ve got to distinguish between, on the one hand, the emotions surrounding speech and, on the other, the mechanics of communication. Sure, stuttering has psychological, though not necessarily pathological, origins; sure, speech is a highly emotional activity, but if you want the romance of psychoanalysis you’d be wise to take a good hard look at what Freud said about disfluency. His only hypothesis was the half-baked notion that the quivering of the stutterer’s lips was a rather futile attempt to return to infantile nipple-sucking. Is that what you want?”
>
  No, Sandra, that wasn’t what I wanted, and you knew that wasn’t what I wanted, and you knew if you phrased the question that way you’d succeed in persuading me to take back to San Francisco in June, and pursue, the UCLA Speech and Hearing Clinic summer home program—reading aloud to myself, making deliberate changes in the five parameters when talking on the telephone, not avoiding feared words, noting stressful situations, observing and analyzing speakers I admired—but, Sandra, let’s face it: the summer home program was a colossal flop, my speech went to hell because I was too busy writing my first short story, and I was too busy writing my first short story because Mother contracted cancer right through her heart.

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