The Man With No Tongue

lingual musings and music

Context: I made a deal with myself to only focus my (already limited) writing time on whatever projects boil my blood with excitement. Recently, those projects have been fiction. This one is different. This one relates to an experience I had at my day job as a crisis phone worker. If you’ve recently subscribed for fiction (welcome!!), have no fear!—there is SO much fiction bubbling on the stove of creation. Anyways, onward with today’s programming…

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I’m speaking to a man with no tongue.¹

He is kind, or at least I think he is; I can’t really understand him.

His body’s been purged of the semantic worm; the micro-politics of his mouth are topsy-turvy.

It’s normal for voices to slip and stumble, stutter and retreat, slurp and hiss; so long as the speaker comes home to Mother Tongue, understanding is possible.

But what happens when one’s voice is all slippage?

What happens when a voice is severed from linguistic habit and becomes a wet mess of flapping skin and saliva?²

The man was born with the whole kit and caboodle—the boilerplate cast of tongue, teeth, cheeks, and lips composing the virgin mouth. He made his parents gush when he managed mama! and dada! Through mimicry and school, he stumbled ass-backward into communal choreographies—those repeatable, lingual sashays and pirouettes that allow us to reach the mystical Other.

Through linguistic mastery, the will to speak and the mechanics of speech (two separate entities in newly minted humans) merged into a single entity: voice. With this voice, he became fluent in traversing the Self-Other divide.

Then something happened—something that agitated the boundaries between will and mechanics into reassertion.³ His once refined mouth—its plentiful surfaces working in concert—devolved into the virgin chasm, thrusting him back to the infantile mud of pre-/paralinguistic gobbledygook.

Now, every time he sets his ex-lingual nub into motion, his utterances portray the dissonance between a subject’s imperative to speak and a body’s inability to come home to Mother Tongue.

He no longer has a voice—only desperate outpourings of vulnerable frictions, the clanging sounds of Mind and Body locking swords on the battlefield.

But, despite all this, he speaks.

He does not fall into silence.

He’s out there, pressing the phone to his face, entering the crucible of simultaneous destabilization and galvanization—persisting in the face of tremendous disadvantage to address a lack by inventing novel forms of quasi-/para-/ur-lingual telecommunications, aiming his experimentation at the poor schmuck on the other side (i.e., me.)

What the hell am I supposed to do?

Call center SOP implies “listening” means, “I’ll pay attention to the words you speak, and because I know the same words, I’ll arrive at an understanding of your wants, needs, opinions, regrets, etc., so I can help you (quickly) and move on to the next caller.”

Here, right now, with this man, if the act of “listening” is to result in anything other than open-mouthed gawking, and IDFK! shrugs of frustration, it must pull me away from myself—force me off the high horse of codified English and bellyflop me smack dab in his quasi-linguistic web.

Imagine: with each uvular flutter of his oral stump, he knocks down the posh block tower built up and cherished by Habit. At first, it’s inconvenient; you’ll be tempted to wade through the rubble, cursing as you pick up shards of the familiar, but soon, you’ll realize this man is a gift.

He’s asking you to shed the cloak of habit and step into the vulnerable world of not knowing—the infantile world of play. Meet him at square one. Tolerate his cryptic outpourings long enough to palpate a personal poetics. It’s not a one-sided task; it’s a collaboration. His sounds inspire a drive to create rather than a passive drive to recognize pre-digested symbols.

Brandon LaBelle suggests sound is “that which agitates the boundaries of things.” The man’s sounds agitate boundaries between volition and lack, mind and flesh, self and other—agitation at work in both speaker and listener.

When I speak to a caller, what do I do? I say X, and because they also know X, we nod in understanding. We chat but create nothing; we glide on constructed semantic ice without sharing our respective selves lurking beneath.⁴

Perhaps his sounds are true sounds, purer than my own. Perhaps his way of speech is superior to mine. It’s refreshing to shed the mundane robes of Habit—to work alongside an Other to create something that allows us to meet one another rather than notice each other through linguistic binoculars.

It’s the coldest lemonade on the hottest August day.

Take a sip.

Feel the sour on your tongue…or whatever you’ve got flapping around in there.

Photo by Roman Petrov on Unsplash

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I’m speaking to a man with no tongue.

He makes me think of music.

I sit, listening to him, thinking of music for the first time in a long while—his sounds remind me of a piece composed by a younger (and less jaded) self, one I treasured but have not visited in three years.

This one here:

I want to thank him for putting music in my brain.

Or maybe I don’t.

Maybe I’m angry he reminded me of the things I made and left for dead.

Thankful? Pissed?

Leaving? Going?

Who knows, I’m just a visitor.

Photo by Richard Jaimes on Unsplash

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I’m speaking to a man with no tongue.

I poke my tongue around my mouth, letting it roam—it’s not something I think about often.

I should change that.

Tonight, I’ll shove my tongue so far down my partner’s throat he’ll pull away, saying, “Where the fuck did that come from?! Are you French?” when he knows full well I’m Irish.

Photo by Yahor Urbanovich on Unsplash

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Thanks for reading! If you’d like to read more about the crisis line, these may be of interest:

Hold the Line (v)

Hold the Line (iv)

If fiction is more your style, check these babies out:

daisy broth

the big'un

1. “Please bear with me. I don’t have friends or family or a tongue, but my face is very strong—I’ve got a very strong face; I can talk for fifteen minutes before I stop making sense.” (This was his “hello,” at least…that’s what I think I heard.)

2. Have you ever thrown a blanket on a dog and watched them play/squirm around in there? If you haven’t, please do so—if you have, then you know how the sheet becomes alive; you’ve probably stood there smiling, watching it expand as nameless appendages manipulate the fabric. You can see the blows but haven’t a clue what made them—snout? leg? tail? It’s anyone’s guess… The man sounds a lot like such a scene looks—like a boiling pot of nameless energy.

3. Heidegger and his broken hammer…

4. This is not to say speech is not an act of creation or that it’s impossible to be vulnerable and share the self via speech. Sharing the entire self via language (when a speaker is inclined to do so) is time-consuming and (often) incomplete.

As David Foster Wallace writes in Good Old Neon: “You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.”

The absence of a tongue has freed this man from language. There is no keyhole to gawk at him through. There is no door. He comes to me vulnerable, naked, and afraid— inviting me into his room. Together, we watch the immense everything flash through him and try to make sense of it like two children watching clouds in a busy sky: a hippo! no…no…a dragon? No….Oh! Oh! I know…a rabbit!