The Flame Alphabet - Ben Marcus [85]
What was compelling them to come here in droves like that, to lay themselves open to such rank poison? What on earth, I wondered, was misleading all of these language martyrs into thinking there was something inside of Forsythe that would deliver them?
35
In his early writings, Thoreau called the alphabet the saddest song. Later in life he would renounce this position and say it produced only dissonant music.
Letters, Montaigne said, are a necessary evil.
But are they? asked Blake, years later. I shall write of the world without them.
I would grow mold on the language, said Pasteur. Except nothing can grow on that cold, dead surface.
Of words Teresa of Avila said, I did not live to erase them all.
They make me sick, said Luther. Yours and yours and yours. Even sometimes my own.
If it can be said, then I am not interested, wrote Schopenhauer.
When told to explain himself, a criminal in Arthur’s court simply pointed at the large embroidered alphabet that hung above the king.
Poets need a new instrument, said Shelley.
If I could take something from the world, said Nietzsche, and take with it even the memory of that thing, so that the world might carry on ever forward with not even the possibility that thing could exist again, it would be the language that sits rotting inside my mouth.
I am a writer, said Picasso. I make my own letters.
Shall I destroy this now, or shall I wait for you to leave the room, said his patron to Kadmos, the reputed inventor of the alphabet.
Kadmos is a fraud, said Wheaton. Said Nestor. Said William James.
Do not read this, warned Plutarch.
Do not read this, warned Cicero.
Do not read this, begged Ovid.
If you value your life.
Bleed a man, and with that vile release spell out his name in the sand, prescribed Hippocrates.
No alphabet but in things, said Williams.
Correction. No alphabet at all.
36
Sometimes an assembly was called, heralded by a long, dissonant bell.
Here the researchers, scientists, administrators, and the animal handlers who worked their tests in the walled-off southern wing could settle into the surgical theater and view the latest work on display, the experiments with comprehension, the medical tests.
Usually I sat through these assemblies inside a deep facial paralysis. The gatherings had a grueling familiarity to them, and to me they smelled of sport and torture.
Onstage we’d see language spoken through every kind of contraption on the mouth: filters, dampeners, horn-shaped protrusions that must have addressed an acoustical toxicity and turned subjects into ragged, costumed clowns, although by the results witnessed at assembly, they did not soothe the acoustical toxicity, but inflamed it instead.
We observed the testing of a whistle language, delivered through the gashed-open faces of mannequins. Subjects could tolerate, and moderately comprehend, the signals, but when they were forced to whistle, employing a rigorous system of codes, they declined rapidly, showing clear signs of toxicity.
Gesture was tested, mostly on the sick, to see how rapidly they would expire if exposed to unceasing and explicit mime.
Again a mannequin was commanded by remote control to produce the behavior.
We saw every kind of semaphore, like a silent and benighted exercise class conducted by the dead, from the arm-waving style, to be viewed at a great distance, to the single finger-sign languages developed on the middle north wing of the lab.
We watched through perforated masks, distributed upon arrival, lest some of the sickening stuff leak into our senses. Of what we saw, we saw as little of it as we could, which was more than enough for me.
With bloody persistence researchers tested how complex a language of touch