"Deaf Sentence"

[fiefoe]

The comedy is slight, the nyphomaniac student trope is trite, but David Lodge is still a novelist who I'd like to think fondly of.

• He thinks not, she does not glance or point at them, and the intonation of her speech, which he can just about register, does not have the characteristic declarative pattern of art-speak, or art-bollocks as he sometimes disrespectfully calls it to tease his wife.
• a naturally shapely figure - he can tell from the shadowy separation of her breasts just visible at the unbuttoned opening of her blouse that they are not artificially enhanced by silicone, or thrust forward and upward by underwiring, but have the trembling plasticity of real unfettered flesh, with a faint surface transparency of the skin like good porcelain - and he doesn’t wish to make a bad impression on a comely young woman who has taken the trouble to talk to an old fart like himself
• ‘Can badness be interesting?’ <> ‘Sadness, an interesting sadness. Are you wearing your hearing aid, darling?’
• I decided to write an account of my conversation, or rather non-conversation, with the woman at the ARC private view, which in retrospect seemed rather amusing, though stressful at the time. First I did it in the usual journal style, then I rewrote it in the third person, present tense, the kind of exercise I used to give students in my stylistics seminar.
• * A poet called Larkin, too - it’s almost funny in a black way, deafness and comedy going hand in hand, as always. <> Deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic.Take Oedipus, for instance: suppose, instead of putting out his eyes, he had punctured his eardrums. It would have been more logical actually, since it was through his ears that he learned the dreadful truth about his past, but it wouldn’t have the same cathartic effect. It might arouse pity, perhaps, but not terror. Or Milton’s Samson: ‘O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, / Irrecoverably dark, without all hope of day.’ What a heartbreaking cry of despair! ‘O deaf, deaf, deaf . . .’ doesn’t have the same pathos somehow.
• The cause of my deafness is of academic interest, anyway (interesting that ‘academic’ should have that meaning of ‘useless’), because it’s incurable.
• ‘Not stone deaf,’ he said, frowning slightly as if this were a newly minted and excessively emotive metaphor. ‘In theory you could suffer up to ninety per cent hearing loss, but you’ll be lucky if you live that long.
• Deafness is a kind of pre-death, a drawn-out introduction to the long silence into which we will all eventually lapse. ‘To every man upon this earth, / Deaf cometh soon or late,’ Macaulay might have written. But not Dylan Thomas, ‘After the first deaf, there is no other.’ There are lots of others, stages of auricular decay, like a long staircase leading down into the grave.
• He missed the rhythm of the academic year as a peasant might miss differences between the seasons if they were suddenly withdrawn; and he found he missed too the structure of the academic week,
• The diagnosis of high-frequency deafness cast a faint shadow over his happiness, but their mutual enjoyment of sex was not much affected, the sounds which accompany it being mostly non-verbal and low frequency in wavelength.
• Putting aside my intuitive trust in her fidelity, the beautifying process more or less coincided with Fred’s return to religious observance, a development I deplore on intellectual grounds but which I feel is some kind of guarantee that I am not being cuckolded.
• if Peter seems a little “guarded” as you say, it’s because he thinks you must be silently criticising his English all the time because you’re a Professor of Linguistics.’ I laughed at that, because modern linguistics is almost excessively non-prescriptive, but I suppose there might be some truth in it... he is culturally a little undernourished and a bit in awe of the family he has married into. I tried to put him at ease next time I saw him by attacking Lynne Truss’s bestselling book on the apostrophe, but only succeeded in upsetting him - it turned out he is a devout believer in Truss
• * Any enhancement of the other senses? I don’t think so - not in my case anyway. Maybe in Goya’s. I read a book about Goya which said it was his deafness that made him into a major artist. Until he was in his mid-forties he was a competent but conventional painter of no great originality;... All his greatest work belongs to the deaf period of his life: the Caprices, the Disasters of War, the Proverbs, the Black Paintings. All the dark, nightmarish ones. This critic said it was as if his deafness had lifted a veil: when he looked at human behaviour undistracted by the babble of speech he saw it for what it was, violent, malicious, cynical and mad, like a dumb-show in a lunatic asylum.
• But the one that always has the most spectators lingering in front of it, intrigued and puzzled, is lighter in colour tone than the others. It’s known as the Dog Overwhelmed By Sand (none of these titles was Goya’s). It might be a modern Abstract Expressionist painting, composed of three great planes of predominantly brownish colour, two vertical and one horizontal, if it wasn’t for the head of a little black dog at the bottom of the picture, painted almost in cartoon style, buried up to its neck in what might be sand... I know what it means to me: it’s an image of deafness, deafness pictured as an imminent, inevitable, inexorable suffocation.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Paintings
• What kind of a speech act is a suicide note? It depends of course on what classification system you’re using. In the classic Austin scheme there are three possible types of speech act entailed in any utterance, spoken or written: the locutionary (which is to say what you say, the propositional meaning), the illocutionary (which is the effect the utterance is intended to have on others) and the perlocutionary (which is the effect it actually has). But there are lots of further distinctions and subcategories, and alternative typologies like Searle’s commissive, declarative, directive, expressive and representative, indirect speech acts and on. Most utterances have both locutionary meaning and illocutionary force. The hazy area is the line between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary. Is the perlocutionary properly speaking a linguistic act at all? Austin gives the example of a man who says ‘Shoot her!’ (a rather odd example to invent, when you think about it, a symptom of male chauvinism and misogyny among Oxford dons perhaps). Locution: He said to me ‘Shoot her’ meaning by ‘shoot’ shoot and by ‘her’ her. Illocution: he urged (or advised, ordered, etc.) me to shoot her. Perlocution: he persuaded me to shoot her. The interesting level is the illocutionary: even in this example you can see how the same words can have quite different illocutionary force in different contexts.
• ‘I’m afraid I could never trust someone who would make irremovable marks in a library book,’ I said.
• I take off my jacket, roll up my right shirtsleeve, then with the fingers of two hands adjust the angle of her hips and lightly caress the curve of her buttocks, like a dog fancier steadying his trembling thorough-bred for display. I draw back my arm and then swing it forward, bringing my open palm smack into contact with her bottom.
• * It had been a kind of unexpected holiday, a reprieve from the tedious duty of visiting Dad, but most of all I had enjoyed the unaccustomed urban quiet. Paradoxically, being deaf doesn’t make quietness any less attractive, but rather the reverse. Aural experience is made up of quiet, sounds and noise. Quiet is neutral, the stand-by state. Sounds are meaningful, they carry information or they give aesthetic pleasure. Noise is meaningless and ugly. Being deaf converts so much sound into noise that you would rather have quiet - hence the pleasure of walking those traffic-free streets. Terror had temporarily pedestrianised the whole of central London.
• When we get up to leave a middle-aged woman at a nearby table smiles at me sympathetically, and as we pass she says, ‘They can be very stubborn at that age, can’t they?’ I notice people at other tables looking at us with interest and amusement, and realise that Dad and I have been talking at the tops of our voices. Leaving the cafeteria feels like walking off a stage.
• 30th November. I had my first lip-reading class today. The experience evoked dim memories of my first day at primary school, which I joined halfway through the school year because of illness: there was the same sense of being a new boy, uncertain and self-conscious, in a group that was already bonded and familiar with the routine.
• ‘And did you?’ Fred would ask, and ‘Of course not,’ I would say. But she would know that I had desired to do so. I had committed spanking in my heart. That too is silly, but also shaming. And worse still, she would realise that I had sought to act out my fantasy on her.
• * ‘Haven’t you noticed anything odd, not to say bizarre, in her behaviour?’ <> Remembering the panties in my coat pocket, the vandalised library book and the invitation to spank her, I could only produce an unconvincing, ‘Not particularly.’
• ‘You mean that Writer’s Guide to suicide notes? Yes, I’ve seen that, she directed my attention to it. I very much doubt whether she wrote it.’.. This suggestion surprised me, but I immediately saw how plausible it was. I felt a strange disappointment.
• * a black Peter Pan. The young actor playing the role was actually rather good, but I found his exotic appearance in the middle-class Edwardian milieu, which would certainly have excited comment from the Darling children, but which the text did not permit them to notice, a constant distraction. I might accept the socio-political case for colour-blind casting, as I believe they call it, if its proponents would admit that it often carries a certain aesthetic price, but they won’t.
• And the writer used a chilling phrase to describe traumatic hair-cell loss: ‘exposure to damaging drugs or noises causes these hair cells to die with a kind of suicide program. They basically commit suicide in your ear.’ Is it possible, after all, that that rock band at Fillmore West provoked mass suicide in my inner ears?
• Nicola is a commercial lawyer, but has decided to take four years out of her career to have two babies - the figures are specified precisely, like a balance sheet. One feels sure the babies will balance too, a boy and a girl. She is good-looking in a featureless sort of way,
• low-temperature physics: The object apparently is to get the temperature of substances down to a point as near as possible to absolute zero, which makes particles behave in odd and interesting ways. I remember him saying: ‘You have to identify the energy within a given substance and then devise a way of removing it.’ It seemed to me a strange and obsessive sort of quest, a kind of reverse alchemy.
• * he is engaged in explaining to her why the famous line in Noël Coward’s Private Lives, ‘Very flat, Norfolk’, is funny... But if she’d said, “Norfolk is very flat”, which would be the most logical way to convey the information, it wouldn’t be funny at all. Amanda has given a rhetorical spin to this banal statement of fact by inverting the normal subject-predicate word order, and omitting the finite verb, transforming “Norfolk is very flat” into “Very flat, Norfolk”. This foregrounds the word “flat” both positionally and intonationally.The intonation of “Norfolk is very flat” is almost completely level, whereas when I say, “Very flat, Norfolk”, my voice rises and falls in pitch, peaking on “flat”. And there’s a slight pause, a kind of caesura, after “Very flat”, which creates a tiny moment of suspense for the audience. What, we wonder, will this portentously foregrounded adjectival phrase, “Very flat”, qualify? The answer is a bathos: “Norfolk”. And that’s one reason why the line is funny - as if in spite of Amanda’s efforts to make her remark seem interesting and original, she is defeated by its semantic content. It remains irretrievably, irredeemably, “flat”. Like Norfolk.’
• but would a woman address her own breasts as “boys”? It seems unnatural - surely she would personify them as female? She would say, “Hallo girls!” Alternatively she is addressing actual boys, and we are to assume that she is looking down at some young men who are below her, out of the frame of the picture. But where are they - where would this scene be taking place? Is there a knock on her door, perhaps, and she opens it in her underwear, liberated young woman that she is, looks down and sees these boys who have been irresistibly attracted by her wonderful bust, and have prostrated themselves at her feet? It seems improbable. And in that case they are in the worst possible position to view and appreciate her bust. They can’t see her cleavage from where they are lying. You see the problem?... my point about personification, but doesn’t explain what “boys” means in the Wonderbra ad . . .’ It occurred to him that his addressee, who was showing signs of impatience, might know the answer to the puzzle and be about to give it to him, in which case he would have to pretend to understand it,
• * a theory he had long entertained that it had been of enormous advantage to song writers of American popular music that so many American place names, because of their Spanish or native Indian origins, were anapaestic, the stress falling on the third syllable, like California, Indiana, Massachusetts, Carolina, San Francisco, or iambic, like Chicago, Atlanta, Missouri, words which were easily set to syncopated music, whereas English place names were typically dactylic, like Birmingham and Manchester or trochaic, like Brighton and Leicester, inherently unmusical.
• GLADEWORLD. What a strange phenomenon. Like a negative image of a place with properties, such as confinement and induced pain, that you would normally regard as being themselves negative, which has the curious effect of turning them into positives, or so it seems from the contented looks of the inhabitants. A benevolent concentration camp. A benign prison. A happy hell.
• Change the soundtrack, substitute screams and howls for laughter and badinage, put a red filter on the lens to give a fiery glow to the spectacle, and you would think you were in some modern version of Dante’s Inferno, or the hells depicted by medieval painters. These half-naked crowds tossed in the turbulent waves, or hurtling down the spiralling semi-transparent tubes at terrifying velocity, or tumbled arse over elbow through the rapids, choked with water, blinded by spume, spun round in whirlpools, dragged backwards by undertow, entangled with each other’s limbs, bruised and battered by impact with the fibreglass walls, to be at last tipped into a boiling pit at the bottom, irresistibly recall those antique images of the damned, condemned to endless repetition of their punishment.
• It surprised me that the most common adverbs qualifying happy in the corpus were entirely and perfectly, rather than, say, ‘fairly’ or ‘reasonably ’. Are we ever entirely, perfectly happy? If so, it’s not for very long.The most interesting word is days. Not day, but days. Larkin has a wonderful poem called ‘Days’, which also contains the word happy.
  What are days for?
  Days are where we live.
  They come, they wake us
  Time and time over.
  They are to be happy in:
  Where can we live but days?
  The familiar, nostalgic collocation happy days doesn’t actually occur in the poem, but it’s inevitably evoked; it echoes in our heads as we read, and reminds us of the transience and deceptiveness of happiness.
• Corpus linguistics is always throwing up interesting little puzzles like that. I looked up deaf a few years ago in the biggest corpus of written and spoken English available, about fifty million words, and the most common collocation, about ten per cent of the total, was fall on deaf ears.. what’s puzzling is the verb fall, given that the human ear is positioned to receive sound waves from the side, not from above.
• * ‘But the chairperson will be Polish and speak with a thick accent which I won’t understand. The vowels will be distorted and I won’t hear the consonants,’ I said. ‘Polish itself is pretty well all consonants, isn’t it? Must be hell being a Pole with high-frequency deafness.’
• to get away from the dull routine of a house-husband, the worrying problems of a mildly demented father, and the dangerous attentions of an importunate, unscrupulous postgraduate groupie; anywhere where I would once again be respected, deferred to, entertained and looked after, with the decorum appropriate to a visiting scholar.
• One that foxed everybody was A customary tax. I pretended I didn’t know the answer: ‘a scot’. Nothing to do with Scotland of course - it’s Old English, now obsolete, though it survives in the expression ‘scot-free’.
• * Auschwitz: One feels pity of course, and sorrow, and anger, but these feelings seem as superfluous to the immensity of woe this place evokes as tears dropped into an ocean. Perhaps tears would in fact be some relief, but like Richard I do not weep readily. In the end perhaps the best you can do is to humble yourself in the face of what happened here, and be for ever grateful that you weren’t around to be drawn into its vortex of evil, in either suffering or complicity. By chance - through my own incompetence - I experienced this place of desolation in a way I knew I would never forget.
• I called the British Council chap and cancelled the meal. He knew where I had been that afternoon and was understanding. ‘A lot of people feel they’d rather be on their own for a while after they’ve been there,’ he said. I told him about the birth of Anne’s child. ‘Well, that’s great!’ he said. ‘That should cheer you up.’ And of course it did, but I didn’t know quite how to balance this private joy against the experience of Auschwitz, one new life against a million deaths.
• Chaim Hermann described Auschwitz as ‘simply hell, but Dante’s hell is incomparably ridiculous in comparison with this real one here, and we are its eye-witnesses, and we cannot leave it alive’. He also said that he intended to die ‘calmly, perhaps heroically (this will depend on circumstances) ’, hinting at a final act of resistance, but it is not known whether he achieved that. He himself had no way of knowing whether his wife would ever receive his letter, but in the midst of all this diabolical evil he asked her forgiveness for not sufficiently appreciating their life together, and this was the sentence in his letter that most affected me: ‘If there have been, at various times, trifling misunderstandings in our life, now I see how one was unable to value the passing time.’
• * Caroline looked at me in a slightly challenging way and said: ‘No, I’d like you to help Delphine wash your father.’ I was taken completely by surprise. Inwardly I recoiled from the idea, but I could think of no way to refuse that wouldn’t discredit me in their eyes.‘All right,’ I said.‘What do I do?’‘Delphine will show you,’ Caroline said, and left us to it. Delphine put on a waterproof apron and a pair of latex gloves taken from a sealed pack, and looked at me sceptically. ‘Better take off that nice jacket,’ she said. <> It was an extraordinary experience, which took the reversal of the infant-parent relationship through the taboo barrier. Basically I was helping to change a nappy on an eighty-nine-year-old man, but he happened to be my father.
• As for Alex, it is hard to know whether she is mad, or bad, or a bit of both; but now that she has gone I can feel a little sorry for her, and hope that somewhere, somehow, her unquiet soul will find some peace.
• The ashes were surprisingly light in colour, almost white, and more like grit than ash in consistency. I wondered if the ash of cremated human bodies is naturally like this, or whether they put something in the ovens to produce these clean, sterile, free-flowing granules. Did the ash-heap beside the crematorium at Auschwitz in which Chaim Hermann’s letter to his wife was found look like this? Somehow I doubted it. <> The events of the last couple of months keep provoking echoes and cross-references like that: the votive candle flickering in the dark on the rubble of the Auschwitz crematorium and the night-light I put on Maisie’s bedside table when she fell asleep for ever; hospital pyjamas and striped prison uniforms; the sight of Dad’s wasted naked body on the hospital mattress when I helped to wash him, and grainy photographs of naked corpses heaped in the death camps. It’s been something of an education, the experience of these last few weeks. ‘Deafness is comic, blindness is tragic,’ I wrote earlier in this journal, and I have played variations on the phonetic near-equivalence of ‘deaf ’ and ‘death’, but now it seems more meaningful to say that deafness is comic and death is tragic, because final, inevitable, and inscrutable.
• The sure extinction that we travel to
  And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
  Not to be anywhere,
  And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.  -- Philip Larkin, the deaf bard of timor mortis.