Voice

Vale, I may not be coherent enough to express the whirling thoughts in my head but the need arises to relay an event of the evening. Next to me tonight was a friend of a friend who decided to not speak for 48 hours.

He did communicate, however. He nodded or mouthed words as needed. And more often, he would scribble down his words, in every which way, of every corner of many scraps of paper. He obviously had much to say.

Instinctively I found this to be a pretense. "Here we go again", I thought,"another artist trying to be mysteriously profound". Here he is trying to use the shock factor in the name of art.

Now, bear in mind, I do not know this guy. I do not even know if he is an artist indeed. I very well may be inappropriately mislabeling him. (and yes, I intentionally meant to use the double negative in this situation). Nonetheless, this guy has chosen to not speak.

I could not just let this happen uneventfully. I found myself biting at the bit to challenge him, maybe stir enough emotion to cause him to blurt something out. What mischievousness, no?

But here is the thing.

A few things happened in the course of the night.

First of, here we were, feverishly writing down our commments, back and forth, back and forth. And then my friend looked over and said, "What are you doing?!"
"What?" I say, "he is not speaking'. And she replied, "Well, duh, it is him that is not talking. You do not have to write down what you want to say!"

hee hee, egg on my face :)

And then the next thing happened. Here we were, deep in "conversation", and the person next to me said something...aloud. Instantly I switched my focus and begun a conversation (a speaking conversation) with my neighbor. It was only until many moments later that I realized I so rudely dismissed the written conversation in progress. So easily distracted, I am.

I will note, in the time that I was responding in writing, my thoughts were carefully edited and expressed with intent. Is that what it means to not speak?

Most striking, however, was a little incident that lasted all of a second but carried the weight of a million exclamation marks. There was another written conversation in progress, back and forth they went, when all of sudden I see the mysterious non-speaking guy cringe at a comment and slowly and very deliberately, take the piece of paper and dramatically crumples it up into a ball. Wow. End of conversation. What could possibly have been written to cause this reaction? And who would have thought crumpling a piece of paper could say so much?

Maybe this guy is on to something. What it is, I am still not sure.

Regardless, the question begs to be asked," Do we have a presence without a voice?"