This summer I wrote two essays that must plainly be classified as “TMI”. The first of them is here. I am glad I got that out of my system, and intend to go back to writing about the world, still in all its richness, but now again as though I did not exist in it (for little, almost nothing, is lost after such a subtraction). Anyhow the second of them was for TANK Magazine, where I was asked to contribute something on the theme of 'play'. To read the whole piece, go here.
I have always been a babbler, a vessel of some kind of glossolalia, appearing as nonsense sounds from the outside, as the tongues of my own private Pentecost, but which I know, from the inside, to be governed by a strict set of rules. Attempts were long made to cure me of this orientation to language, as futile as any campaign to convert the gays or to right the sinister-handedness of the lefties.
My father, for all his cool free-spiritedness (Vantage cigarettes, a Datsun 280ZX, an eight-track cassette of Leon Redbone), seems to have had only one parenting principle he could clearly articulate: “No baby talk.” Is that what I was doing? Talking like a baby? If there is any truth to the accusation, it lies in my evident stuckness at the level of the phoneme, when ordinary first-language acquisition is supposed to progress fairly early on from exploration of the range of mere sounds to a mastery of meanings.
There are certain sounds I have preferred for as long as I can clearly remember, and others to which I relate as if phobically. I do not believe I will ever be cured of this. I hate voiced bilabial plosives, voiceless labiodental fricatives, and I especially hate – but I mean hate in the very depths of my being – the voiced glossopalatal stop.
In other words, I hate b, f, and d. This might have something to do with my schoolboy perfectionism, when, around the age of 12, I first began receiving letter grades à l’américaine for my homework, and developed various avoidance rituals associated with the undesirable letters (c is an exception, I imagine because in English, it is arguably not a letter in its own right, but only a dual-purpose placeholder for either s or k). By the time I arrived at university I found myself compulsively swallowing in the direction of shop signs or billboards featuring the letter a, and compulsively going through a sort of retching motion whenever my eyes landed on one of the hated consonants, as if to incorporate the desired royal letter, a, the vowel of vowels, and to expel its grotesque consonantal adversaries. Sometimes, when I happened to see a d as the last letter on a road sign by the California interstate, I found myself exiting the highway at the next off-ramp (often some miles further on), driving two on-ramps back in the other direction, in order to pass the same sign again and to counterbalance the d with whatever a’s I might have missed the first time.
I developed an entire counter-language, a sort of private pig English, but which I have always thought of as a shadow or spectral English, the cackling ghost of an earlier English I spoke before I learned to speak English with other mortals. In the voice of my ghost I repeat sotto voce sentences I have just spoken that naturally contain forbidden letters, but now with replacement sounds that serve to counteract those letters’ negative effects. In addition to a, I also take comfort in l, p, r and m, and these are the basis of numerous ghost-suffixes. One such suffix is -les or -lz (pronounced as in lulz), which proves particularly helpful in defusing the power of a charged phrase. Thus, for example, if for communicative purposes I find myself saying to another person, “That’s kinda weird,” I might immediately afterward mutter the counterphrase: “That’s kimpo weirples.”
A different suffix, -pers (or -purz), seems to have a function similar to -ples, but is even more potent in the discharging of negative phonetic energy and in the restoration of my lips and tongue and palate, and of the language regions of my brain, to their quiescent state. Thus, if I am forced in conversation to say “I don’t understand,” and the d echoes in my mind too strongly afterward, I can cancel it out by mouthing the ghost sentence:
I pon’t umperstampers.
There are even longer suffixes whose function I understand less well, even if I know how to use them. I am the person who came up with them, so it would seem that any use I make of them must be ipso facto correct, and yet this is not so. The rules are strict and unambiguous, and I never decided upon them; they just arrived to me as if fully formed. Thus, one suffix is something like -ulusrz, which can be lengthened to -ulzulusrz, or -pulzulusrz when attached to a word that ends in a vowel. To get a deeper feel for this phantom language, why not take as our sample sentence the opening line of the Gospel of John?
In the peginningulzulusrz was the worples.
Sometimes, if unmodified English is flowing too fast and heavy from my mouth, and too many of the hated letters have built up for me to cancel them out individually, there is an all-purpose sentence I can mutter, replete with all the soothing sounds of the private counter-English. This sentence, a carefully guarded secret until now, is as follows:
That’s not great-lz lovely man-lz.
I have no idea what this means, who the man in question is, what makes him lovely, or what it is that I wish to tell him is not great. I don’t know what it means; I only know that it soothes me. I seldom stop to think about its meaning at all, even though I have been reciting it, I would estimate, around 20 times a day for the past 30 years: so, roughly, somewhere over 200,000 times.
When I see these words written out for the first time, as they are here, in the ghost language, I feel as if I am seeing an X-ray of my soul.
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To read the whole piece, go here.
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