But while Finster’s campaign advanced, its object was slipping out of reach. For it had become increasingly obvious that the Headmistress was very seriously ill.
Readings
from “A Visitor’s Observations”
On the Patois of the Vocational School
We come at last to the heart of my topic—how, in a school devoted to the necromancy of the word, people actually spoke.
With experiences to describe and ideas to convey to which an ordinary vocabulary, adapted as it is to this side of the veil, was not always adequate, it was natural that the students developed their own vernacular. Some curious terminology found itself in common use. I am not speaking solely of the technical vocabulary developed to discuss the techniques, devices, and theories of thanatology, though it was extensive, but also of terms coined by the children themselves. Another source of linguistic curiosities was the dead, for defunct words, as well as people, were given voice anew in the halls of the Vocational School, and some once-common words that had not been heard in years or centuries enjoyed a second coming—though not always in quite their original senses, for children, especially these children, like to play with words.
Too, these children lived such different lives from ordinary children—and were so isolated from those other children—that the school represented a sort of linguistic Galápagos where new verbal life-forms evolved at a fast clip, quickly diverging from their increasingly distant cousins on the mainland. The vernacular at the Vocational School was always changing, and I was never entirely sure whether terms or constructions that mystified me had simply never come my way before, or whether they had only just been introduced. Periodically I even stumbled into what seemed like an entire new wing of the language. A new vista opened up to me, for instance, when I realized that the children were using physical objects as linguistic elements. It turned out that the same word spoken in a room with wood paneling meant something different than in a room with plaster walls or one in which there was a puce velveteen settee on which rested a round, ruched, gold-fringed cushion, flattened by long use and rather stained with hair oil.
Some rooms seemed to have their own tense, which I would describe as a sort of optative pluperfect, for use in expressing aspirations for one’s past and for lives already over (the nearest approximation might be “I hope to had done”). I was told that in the land of the dead, and only there, one often must have recourse to a special tense used for describing the activities of things that have only just always been there. The refectory imposed the passive voice and the southwest stairwell tinted anything said in it with wistfulness while the northeast stairwell inclined to sarcasm. The Headmistress’s own office seemed to put even innocent observations in the imperative mood (“It’s a bit windy out” becoming, say, “Go and latch the shutters,” “It’s five o’clock” becoming “Go away”), but that may have been due to the somewhat daunting presence of the Headmistress herself.
I had barely mastered the inflections imposed by architecture when I discovered that certain smaller, portable objects could be used as prefixes, suffixes, and infixes. Sometimes held up and turned from side to side while speaking, but as often merely situated somewhere nearby (such that the inexpert linguist, sensing that the conversation was getting away from him, had to paw frantically through the bric-a-brac for the one relevant linguistic element), they altered the whole sense of the root, though what precise shades of meaning they added were not always clear—could not always, in fact, be explained without use of the new prefix itself. That this was no doubt why a need for the prefix had been perceived in the first place made it no less frustrating for the researcher. When I inquired into the meaning of visit when uttered in the presence of a particular bed warmer in the shape of a clock, the students simply shook the bed warmer at me, dealing me, incidentally, a painful rap on the ankle.
To use material objects as elements of speech was not as eccentric as it might appear, since according to one of the hypotheses of necrophysics, the material things of our world were already a debased kind of speech, just as the ectoplasmic “mouth objects” were. The Headmistress held out hope that we would eventually come to understand this language, and she had set a team of advanced students to studying the possibility of translation, though she confided to me that it was her private belief that a breakthrough would not come until after the mouth objects themselves had been successfully translated, those having suffered, in her view, less distortion, being a degree closer to the form in which we might be able to understand them (i.e., speech). The students, however, impatient with the slow and cautious methods of the scholar, had simply set about using them. Never mind that they had no real idea what the objects that they chose meant; they simply assigned them new meanings. The result, of course, was that they never knew what they were really saying (though who knows, perhaps by luck or instinct they sometimes hit upon the objects’ real meanings, thinking they were inventing them). Just as the deaf who have mastered a sign language must sometimes read in our random gestures, or even in the tossing limbs of trees, mangled fragments of words, or, who knows, whole phrases of genuine if accidental beauty, so some explorer from the dead might “hear” in the students’ juvenile chatter strains of poetry or prayer, oddly mixed with curses, banalities, and sheer nonsense.
Some students seemed to add the same prefix to virtually every word they spoke, carrying the object everywhere, so as never to be at a loss for words. They guarded these tokens jealously, allowing no one else to handle them, so that while according to convention as I understood it, others standing nearby could also have employed them in speech (though a little weakened, no doubt, by distance), I concluded that whatever shading of meaning they added was wholly private. It was as if the first person, the use of which was strictly curtailed in the classrooms and halls, had returned, displaced and disguised, in the form of some external thing: a doll’s handkerchief, a candle snuffer, a charred piece of wood. I imagine that the meanings of these affixes were as varied as the objects themselves, and maybe even changed from one hour to another, according to whether the speaker was angry, sad, or in that peculiar state, a kind of anticipatory homesickness for death, that the students called simply “the shortage” or, more jocularly, “a case [or fit] of the shorts.”
The world being full of material things, any or all of which might be parts of speech, one would think that a few small human voices would be drowned out by the hullaballoo of the furniture. But it didn’t happen that way. Only certain objects were used in the way I have described, and while I was often unsure which of many likely objects were exerting an influence (palpable, if not identifiable) on a given utterance, the students themselves always seemed to recognize them immediately. Whether they actually “heard” that one spoon in the drawer or that brush handle, plucked bare of bristles, shoring up a wobbly washstand—perhaps with some organ that has atrophied in the adult of the species—or just picked up the identifying information from the other students, I didn’t know.
According to what criteria did one scuffed boot-heel become a prefix and another just something to stand on? I never understood it, but I am brought to mind of a tattered pincushion in the shape of a little bird that I lifted from my mother’s sewing basket so many times, as a child, that she at last relented and bought herself another. I carried the pincushion everywhere. When it fell apart, I was inconsolable; my mother offered me her own much newer but otherwise similar pincushion, but I slapped the imposter away, as revolted as if someone had tried to pass off a wax doll as my mother.
What is my point? I have forgotten . . . I seem to hold again that little bird with its single button eye, the firm batting bulging through the frayed spots in the faded oilcloth, whose original color could still be found hiding in the seams, shockingly bright . . .
Oh yes, that material things speak even to ordinary children. And maybe we understand them better than we are willing to credit, later on.
The vernacular at the
Vocational School went through fashions, as it does in the world at large. There was a time when it was de rigueur to bestow upon every conceivable object a first and middle name: Winnifred Johnson Table, Lowell Himmelmeyer Coal Hod. One student, cornered, explained that this was merely practical—table was a sort of family name, while an individual table was unique, like an individual person, and required its own moniker to spare one the onus of such laborious periphrasis as “the small gateleg table in the upstairs sitting room, no, against the right-hand wall, no, under the window, no, the one with the stained dropleaf.”
Another, however, assured me that the fashion stemmed from the belief that all material objects were living beings (on another turn of the wheel, so to speak, that carries us through the various dimensions of speech—but I will have to let another explain the intricacies of Joinesian necrophysics, for I never fully grasped it) and thus deserved the dignity of their own names—only to be interrupted by a comrade with the amendment that they already had names, from an earlier pass through our world, and it was common courtesy to use them. Thus everyday speech teemed with proper names to a confusing degree (“Lydia tried to strike Herbie with Lowell, but he hid under Winnifred”). Later it seemed that verbs, too, acquired proper names, perhaps because one moment’s walking, running, or even dying is quite distinct from another’s, but here even the students seemed to become confused (Lydia Jonquiled to Patterson Herbie with Lowell, but he Abrahamed under Winnifred), and one day a few weeks later, the names were abandoned wholesale in favor of a new fad: compound words in which one of the two conjoined terms they pronounced themselves and the second was intoned by the dead.
To hear their high young voices break in the very middle of a word and give way, with results not unlike the hee-haw of a donkey, to the characteristic hollow honking tone of the dead was very disagreeable.
Still more did I reprehend the later and possibly consequent development of words with a great many prefixes and suffixes, uttered by the children and the playful dead in quick succession to create a sort of two-colored mosaic in sound. Though I consider myself fairly insensitive to the incursions of the other world, even I felt the world strobing in and out of presence at such moments (strobe was one of their words), and this was disconcerting enough that I covered my ears and fled, not even trying to figure out what the children were trying to communicate. I imagine that they took some delight in my discomfiture and may on occasions have introduced—invented?!—the offending terms to tease me. And lest readers think this admission casts my description of the novel linguistic climate of the school in doubt, understand that far from being reprimanded for their gamesomeness, the children were encouraged to introduce innovations, for although the Headmistress was a martinet and brooked no rebellion from her living charges, she regarded the children essentially as vessels for the dead, so that when she considered a legitimate representative of the dead to be speaking through them—a matter that was not always easy for me, at least, to determine, for the cleverer mimics among the children could deceive me with feigned communications that often ended in the grossest insults followed by peals of high-pitched laughter—she would permit the youngest and least experienced child to hold forth on equal terms with any member of her crack faculty or her wealthiest trustee.
I was privy to a short-lived experiment at the Vocational School. The Headmistress had issued a statement deploring the excessive garrulousness of the student body, which was drowning out the dead. Among the living, speech was strongly discouraged. Soon thereafter she took stronger measures, implementing a quota. Those who spoke too much were put on a restricted vocabulary and moved to smaller quarters, to associate only with other offenders. In this atmosphere of verbal privation, new pidgins evolved, entailing much tedious repetition. As this was deemed a sort of induced stuttering, involving larger parts of speech, Vocational School experts monitored the situation closely to see how the dead responded; it would be uniquely easy to tell if the speaker was dead or alive, one expert advised me, since the dead had license to use the full range of their vocabulary. This enthusiasm was premature; naturally the children hit at once upon the idea of imitating the dead in order to obtain use of their vocabulary, and the fakery was so endemic that the Headmistress terminated the experiment with disgust.
In addition to a new vocabulary, the Headmistress devoted hours of toil to developing a new alphabet, supposedly better suited to writing of the dead. This took place gradually, the process passing through several distinct stages that I was fortunate enough to observe.
The first was the case-by-case expansion of our ordinary alphabet with already extant symbols that, unpronounceable themselves, served to alter the sound of letters with which they were associated, such as the German Umlaut, the Russian “soft sign,” and musical notations such as crescendo, diminuendo, and the scalloped line of a trill to expand the range of vowels—for the dead are very fond of vowels, to the near exclusion of other sounds.
More innovative was the introduction of seven entirely new symbols (I remember the day she came into the sitting room where the senior faculty and I were enjoying a postprandial port and thrust a slate blanched with curious notations before us, her manner triumphant; it was some time before one of us, fortified by the port—it was Mr. Medlar—could bring himself to confess that he did not know what those symbols were meant to represent!) standing for vowel-consonant combinations, expressing, for instance, the sound of a long e forced through clenched teeth.
After these new letters had been taken up and were in pretty general use, she began to introduce others, the first of these standing for sounds that while rare in the general population are common among ghost speakers—those extended fricatives, for instance, some of which sound like the hiss of a snake, others like its rattle; some like footsteps in dry grass, others like something heavy falling into snow and lying quite still, and some like nothing more ordinary—or more miraculous—than a breath.
Later she added what I might call several decimal places of refinement to sounds for which we already possess symbols—a slight cast of e or a in the pronunciation of an o (sounds she was previously content to collect under the broad heading of the o, or at most, to indicate with the addition of an Umlaut) would be designated with a whole new symbol, at the center of which the original letter could sometimes, however, be made out.
She was pretty well along in this series when her process was overset and many if not most of her new additions were disqualified by the revelation that all letters ought to contain a hole or, in typographical terms, a counter. This, in order to stand for and harmonize with the hole that is the self, which is given physical expression by the hole of the throat, and finds its purest form on paper in the letter O. “The letter I, like all leggy, unperforated letters, gives the false impression that we have something to say for ourselves. Only the letter O expresses the essence of speech, which is to express nothing—to hollow oneself out.” She immediately issued an ukase: The first person would henceforth be expressed in writing by the letter O, with the result that many school documents from this period seem to be apostrophizing their readers, exhorting them in the elevated tones of prayer: “O require several pints of your blackest India ink soonest.”
By the way, the Headmistress saw the hollow tube of the quill pen as a neat reiteration of the hollow tube of the windpipe, and recognized no very great distinction between speaking (writing on the wind) and writing (speaking in ink); in both cases, the hollow was the important thing, not the physical substance—ink or wind—that passed through it, nor the substance of the walls of the hole (which are not, strictly speaking, part of the hole, merely the internal terminus of the holed object, the hole’s “host”).
Having established the aforementioned constraint (that each letter must contain a hollow), I believe the Headmistress found not only her inventiveness sadly taxed, but also her memory. In transcriptions of the words of the dead from this period we often find that the Headmistress has let
a simple o stand in for a great range of sounds, being as it was the essence of every letter—and perhaps also because, as she had by this point designed many tens of letterforms, possibly as many as two hundred, she may not have been able to remember them all, nor look them up fast enough in her reference books to take down a transmission as it was made. There are even a few notebooks extant, dated late in this period of lexicographical invention, in which every single letter is an o. It is notable that these are not identical ovals, as if mechanically produced, whether in idleness or as a meditative practice, but that some seem to have been dashed off in great haste, others inscribed with careful slowness, and some few (most remarkably) scratched out and replaced by more o’s, not dramatically different, to this eye, at least.
It is our good fortune that this period did not last long. Perceiving, one imagines, the weaknesses of an alphabet of either excessively great variety or none, she discarded nearly all her designs and reverted to the noble Roman alphabet. Perhaps in this she was influenced by the difficulty of reconciling the idea that no ordinary alphabet is adequate to the speech of the dead with her claim that all literary works—all written documents of any kind—are nothing more nor less than communication devices employed by the dead.
When I say that she discarded her designs I mean that she issued instructions that her notebooks be taken into the yard and burnt. Fortunately for subsequent scholarship I had long since primed Clarence with a weekly allowance to bring to me any substantial documentation that she discarded. With the result that I possess all—all—her typographical designs, as well as many other interesting and unique documents that I will eventually release to the interested public as I see fit or when suitable remuneration is offered.
Riddance Page 26