'Language Speaks Us'

Pain invites metaphor. The busy, well-intentioned doctor asks, “On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain?” and I never know quite how to answer. I understand the desire to quantify. It has the appeal of mathematical precision. He tries again: “Is it sharp? Dull? Burning? Stabbing?” and my reaction is the same. I wanted to please him (after all, he’ll be operating on my spine), so I tried this: “Sometimes it feels like a neural explosion. Like epilepsy, but in the bones, not electrical.” Even I thought that was a little fanciful, and he looked puzzled. “It hurts a lot, doctor. I can no longer walk up stairs.” He was polite enough to settle for that.

On Sunday, I felt something pop in my left knee as I twisted to shelve a coffee cup in the cupboard. I say “pop” though I heard nothing except the sound that came from my mouth: Gink-ah! That’s a rough transcription. It corresponds to no word in English or in the scraps of other languages that I know. It comes closest to “ginkgo,” as in Ginkgo biloba, but that’s not much help. Could this be a modest secular sample of glossolalia, speaking in tongues? It felt involuntary, unrelated to anything that had been in my thoughts immediately before the onset of pain. Had something undisclosed even to me bubbled to the surface? It’s a threat to our vaunted self-control that we contain undisclosed linguistic realms. God knows what I’ll say under anesthesia. In “Poetry as Isotope” (Facsimiles of Time, 2001), Eric Ormsby writes:

“Language has an inexhaustible exuberance. At some moments, and not only at moments of inspiration but rather quite humble moments of simple human giddiness or even silliness, we do not seem to speak but to be spoken through. At such moments, it seems, language speaks us.”