I concealed The Proofs and looked at the issues alone in bed. But with each delivery I put everything back in my mailbox as I’d found it, creeping out in the dark of morning so Murphy could not know for certain I had received what he sent.
Inside The Proofs I found historical precedent for the language toxicity. A kind of medical foreshadowing from earliest history. Signs from the past that this would happen, or that it had happened before and been snuffed out, forgotten. Hippocrates, Avicenna, a long list of experts who knew without really knowing that our strongest pollution was verbal.
The master dissector Gabriele Falloppio, forerunner of the modern autopsy, found what he termed curious erosions in the brain from multilingual patients. Or more notably Boerhaave, who registered speech aversions in the infirm and began to use small doses of speech as homeopathic treatments. Boerhaave saw only one way this could go, hoped to trigger immunity through controlled exposure. Hoped to, but didn’t.
Throughout The Proofs were phrases lifted from as far back as the medical spookeries of Laennec and Auenbrugger, sometimes misattributed, sometimes attributed to medical scientists I’d never heard of, because, I suspected, they had not actually lived.
Theories of exposure, but more than that. A grammar detected in breath, in wheezing. A new rationale for listlessness. Epidemics like cholera reimagined as speech-driven, miasmatic cyclones, an airborne disturbance, to be sure, but one that fed on the denser pockets of speech, grew stronger in such places, dying out in regions of controlled silence.
The finer print offered no attribution. No masthead, no bylines. Just the name LeBov raised in a sickly script. You almost needed night vision to see his name. With a computer one might have mocked this up alone and run off copies at the supermarket.
A list of speech rules filled the inside cover. A caution to ration one’s I statements, suppress reference to oneself, closing off a small arsenal of the language. The various speech quotas scientists were proposing now, even if they didn’t believe it would matter. Grammatical amputations. A list of rules so knotted that to follow them would be to say nearly nothing, to never render one’s interior life, to eschew abstraction and discharge a grammar that merely positioned nouns in descending orders of desire.
Presumably if you wanted nothing, you’d have no occasion to speak.
In a section of historical anecdotes I read that in 1825, Jacob Gallerus, a chemist, was sickened by his family. A letter to the medical dean of some Dublin college, written by him, asking for outside verification, which was not granted. He recorded symptoms of nausea and dizziness while in their company, determined the sickness occurred only when they spoke to him. Troubleshooting not listed, diagnostics similarly absent. A form of inbreeding, he called it, to listen to his family. There is congress in speech, he wrote. It is illicit from them. It is obscene. A sentence from The Proofs I will always recalclass="underline" I am not similarly ill with strangers. In his cellar Gallerus built a soundproof room to recuperate and to purge himself—these were his words—from the exposure to his wife and children. To what end it isn’t said. Of what he finally died neither.
Alongside the historical anecdotes were medical recommendations, refutations, preventative treatments.
If a child was deemed viral, he was salted. This by the Jews, I read. What kind of Jews, it was not clear. Circa sometime that was not mentioned. Salted in the deepest sense. A cake of it rubbed over the limbs, salt poured down their mouths, into their cavities.
It is possible, I thought, that these were stories. Fancies. But if so, they were not good ones or even whole ones, but facts made wrong, broken open and remolded into lies. Someone reaching back into history and rearranging the parts, but with a filthy hand. Which would be to what end? The urge to falsify such details was without any purpose I could name. There was too much, additionally, that I knew to be true.
In a section related to materials I read of pariahs and salt, lepers and salt, the use of salt when it comes to lunatics. Salt as a detoxifier. From Jews comes the idea of salt as the residue of an ancient language, which I’d heard at the hut. Such salts were dissolved in water and dispensed to mutes, to the deaf, to infants on the threshold of speech. Acoustical decomposition, the powder left over from sounds. What this proved went unsaid.
In The Proofs a pattern of cryptic evasions became clear, of failing to deduce.
From recorded language, broadcast in a controlled environment and subjected to freezing temperatures, is collected trace amounts of salt. Whorf and Sapir perform this work with some graduate students. A salt deficiency lowers language comprehension in children.
The practice of language smoking originates in Bolivia but quickly travels north. In Mexico City it is perfected. Words and sentences tested by a delegate in a smoke-filled tube, at the end of which is stationed a sacrificial listener called, for unknown reasons, the bell.
The bell’s brain, when he dies, is pulled and separated into loaves. The loaves are tagged and named. Only drawings survive.
More instances of rot in the brain from those who have exceeded the threshold of listening.
In 1834 a family of five in Rotterdam are discovered expired in their home, parents and children blanketed in hives. That same year, farther north, a series of rashes observed in children, rashes with what is inexplicably called “a tonal element.” Rashes, hives, welts: of inordinate concern in The Proofs. And the connection is, I wondered.
In the island of Port Barre the citizens employed expired animals for soundproofing. Walls of pelts on stilts over fault lines. The typical strategy of shielding with organic matter. Usage of animals for such purposes not being the point, apparently, but rather the unanswered question, from what were they soundproofing? What was so loud that needed quieting? Autopsies show a nonmedical diagnosis. Blackened cortex, they call it.
Perkins refers to the “person allergy,” a toxicity to others. Uses the phrase as if it’s an accepted disorder. He fails at developing any effective shielding. Scoffs at the use of animals for such work. Meat is in fact an amplifier, he will say.
The young Albert Kugler has a superstition against the utterance of certain words. Proper names are volatile, likewise imperatives.
A section, mostly inscrutable, written perhaps in code, or in an eroded language, on which words are volatile. A volatility index?
None of them not, the conclusion?
A tribe from Bolivia rations their use of spoken language by appointing a delegate. Again this term, delegate, who uses language so others don’t have to. A language martyr. These tribe members speak and write on behalf of the entire community. They die young, their hands bloated, hearts enlarged, goes the claim. No asterisk, no footnote. How the others die goes unmentioned.
Hiram of Monterby calls language the great curse. Esther of the Fire, in her almanac, decries the pollutions of the mouth. It will burn in your mind, says Pliny, of a speech he hears an unknown traveler deliver at the roadside at Thebes.
If I could only speak such words at my enemy, would say Pliny. What weaponry I would have.
I knew my Pliny pretty well and I was fairly sure this was wrong, hadn’t happened to Pliny. Or anyone. Yet the tone was assured, hardened in the rhetoric of fact.