Riddance. Shelley Jackson

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Readings

      from “A Visitor’s Observations”

      We are fortunate that a scholar of what we would today call linguistic anthropology visited the Vocational School during the Founder’s lifetime and was able to report on what he saw there. Unfortunately nothing more is heard from him³ after the truncated text—scarcely more than a pile of handwritten notes toward a book never written, and in no particular order—that appears here for the first time, discovered by myself in a mixed lot of old papers auctioned off by the Cincinnati branch (two old biddies) of the American Spiritualist & Temperance Society. As its length may try the reader’s patience, I have broken it into sections; those eager to read them consecutively may of course do so by skipping ahead. —Ed.

      How I Conceived the Plan to Visit the Vocational School

      I credit my involvement with the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children to a difficulty with the letter M.

      Born into the hardworking, hardheaded middle class, educated expensively by the indifferent benevolence of a wealthy great-aunt to whom my parents applied for aid, and who had (and sought) no nearer relation to me, I had found myself a niche in the same small college in which I had recently completed my own graduate studies, dutifully inserting into the minds of the young what had been inserted into mine by my predecessor, recently and opportunely retired. I knew myself to be fortunate but was a martyr to indigestion and, dare I say it, boredom. But in my thirties, something put a period to my boredom in a most unwelcome way: I developed a stutter. How this delighted the young m-m-misses and m-m-misters who were my students, and how I suffered! It was in the search for a remedy that I came across a promotional publication of the Vocational School.

      I found, not a cure, but a thesis.

      I had long speculated that language had its origins in mourning. Without the desire to speak to and of the beloved dead, we would not have troubled to supplant simple grunts and gestures with words. Everyday necessity cannot account for the disproportionate ostentation of every known language. We do not need descriptive flourishes to say, “’Ware tiger!” or “Give me food!” No, language is the equivalent of those great monuments to the dead—your Sphinxes, your pyramids—the construction of which mulcted generations of the living.

      I smoothed the pamphlet on my desk, and copied down an address. Here, finally, was direct evidence of the link between language and loss. If the Vocational School did not mourn their losses, since for them the dead never really departed, that did not confute my hypothesis. They had merely abbreviated the passage from loss to language, achieving consolation so quickly that the grief was never felt. And yet grief lay behind everything they did. I believed that before I ever saw those dark cornices thrusting into the oblivious blue of a summer sky, the stricken eyes locked in that imperious face.

      On the Architecture of the Vocational School

      The Vocational School is a huddle of mostly elderly buildings, much abused by the weather, and dank even in summer. The Chapel of the Word Church is the one recent addition. (As I came up the drive, I glimpsed above the dilapidated carriage house the Chapel’s narrow spire, like a finger raised to shush the sky.)

      Did I say that language was like those great works of memorial architecture erected by the ancients? I found that for the Vocational School, architecture was language. Beyond the Chapel’s arched doorway was an introduction in three dimensions to Vocational School philosophy. The building alluded in its form to both Speaking Ear and Hearing Mouth. The nave was tiered, or one might say whorled, like an ear, and the vault ridged like the roof of a mouth. The children seated in the nave made up the Tongue. (Dressed identically in red flannel short pants, jackets, and caps, they looked a bit like those quaint statuettes known as Gartenzwerge.) Members of the faculty designated as Teeth, wearing peaked cowls of starched flannel of an ivory hue, lined the first tier above them and occasionally descended to impose discipline. Circulating freely through the congregation, the Salivary—advanced students, wearing large, pink, papier-mâché collars resembling the Egyptian usekh, and representing the pharyngeal opening—distributed gags, erasers, and other devotional items.

      At the focus of the theater, the Analphabetical Choir was ranged in ascending tiers to left and right of a great hole, angled downward, and terminating out of sight of the congregation, with at the bottom a stoup kept brimming with the saliva of the devout, collected in spittoons throughout the ceremony. (I have contributed my tittle of froth.) In front of the hole, though not blocking it from view, was a standing screen of black paper with a small aperture through which the heavily rouged mouth of the Headmistress might address the congregation. The disconcerting effect was of a mouth, on the verge of being swallowed by a much larger mouth, turning back to utter a few last, barely audible words—“Don’t do it!” perhaps, or more mundanely, “White vinegar is sometimes efficacious in removing stains.”

      If the Chapel was an educational tract, what was the main school building? The original СКАЧАТЬ