Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

What Is the Di ference Between a Vow of Silence and a Language Fast?

In a language fast, cleansing measures and word purging accompany the quietude. A vow of silence is only an early step toward controlling the role of words in the head. Women’s Pantomime, if performed according to Jane Dark’s criteria, can sweat excess language from the body, accelerating the benefits of a vow of silence. A linen mouth guard, or any cloth gag, with the exception of a riding bit, might also allow the muted language to be stored and archived, for the purposes of later listening and self-study.

Should a Helmet Be Worn When I Make Love?

Until the notion of Helmet-Assisted Life catches on with more people, you may be seen as a threat if you wear a helmet during moments of intimacy. Yet it might also be true that relaxed intimacy cannot occur unless the head is fully protected. Desire is difficult to maintain during moments of risk and danger — men regularly attacked or humiliated by animals have frequently proven to be impotent. Perhaps the best solution is to encourage your partner to wear a helmet first, gently implying that it increases your arousal or fulfills a fantasy you’ve always had — that is, to make love to a beautiful person who is wearing protective headgear. Then when you introduce your own helmet into the bedroom, discreetly, of course, through a lights-out equipment-debut strategy, the helmet will seem natural and lovely, like a headdress once may have looked to warriors — honorable and sacred and sexual— and you can make love safely, without unwanted risk to your head. Helmets should slowly become a regular feature of life. Until that time, users should respect those people not yet accustomed to them, who still prefer a naked, vulnerable head.

Caution

The author discourages travel and indeed all extraneous motion during the reading period, both of which will tend to minimize the sympathy/fascination quotient by increasing circulation and allowing outside events to shape the emotional palette. A reader’s sock, to immobilize the body while the book is being read, is the ideal harness. I favor a Smart Noose, which flushes my head to an itchy but excitable degree of swelling, allowing every word I hear or read to tickle me deeply at the back of my head. Other readers have used coffins, straitjackets, or have employed “the pinch,” to temporarily paralyze themselves for the duration of the reading period.

The reading of this entire book should profitably occur over the period of one week, although “Kevin R.” (not his real name), from Denver, took nearly a year to finish the book, and “Deborah,” from the North, read it straight through and finished in nine hours, mostly because she could not endure the stricture of the reader’s diet (due to a vomit response to language). These extremes in the reading duration are not encouraged. Indeed, both of these participants are still suffering from vertigo, rapid weight loss, and a flattening of the vision. I have attempted to correct their diet and offer language antidotes; children’s verse, vowelized, seems to be the most effective, along with dry morsels of shortbread. (The stories of Hans Christian Andersen, recited without consonants, appear to relax and rejuvenate most American people.) Yet I cannot say with certainty that these readers will ever fully recover.

As for the reader participants “William L.,” “Roger K.,” “Sandra S.,” and “Angela B.,” I offer my condolences and apologies to their families. May they rest in peace. They were heroic young people, the bravest of readers, and they will be sorely missed.

1825

THE FIRST DOCUMENTED INSTANCE of the Female Jesus appears in England in the form of a seven-year-old girl. Using rapid clapping and tongue clicks, the girl lures various species of birds from hundreds of miles away, who assume a circle of protection around her and raise a field of sharp wind in the area. When her father attempts to rescue her, the birds are able to beat out a rudimentary language of ricocheted wind to command his own hand against him, and he dies, a suicide. Several male witnesses also die, and the air that the birds have stirred with their wings remains sharply turbulent at the seaside site for the next five years, repelling any men who try to approach. This form of barrier comes to be known as “Jesus Wind.” It will be used against men, together with a clear sock covering women’s heads, to neutralize their language at the End of Sound protest in 1974.

1922

Finland proposes a separate language for women, becoming the first European nation to do so; all men and women twenty-four years and older not considered suicide risks are fitted with a Brown Hat, to enable or prevent them from performing the new language. The Brown Hat, in women, is fitted into the mouth to allow a broader range of vowel production, which is considered a vastly unfulfilled potential of women (see The Vowelists, 1940). The flesh-colored apparatus is meant to camouflage the head. For a time, it becomes a symbol of status and wealth; streamlined designs create striking new possibilities for the human head, accentuating its animal shape. Women in Finland seen without the facial gear are considered incompletely attired and are refused admission to the black-tie Head Theater conducted in the countryside. Men are to utilize a smaller, darker Brown Hat (the Carl Rogers Cage), resembling a bridle, which will restrict their vowel production and crimp the skin of the upper face to narrow the ear canals, deafening them to the new language. Both men and women will be advised to speak nightly messages of personal import into a cloth screen that will be used to test for a possible chemical element of language (see Language Poultice, Shame Towel, Prayer Rag, 1962). No chemical difference is discovered between the speech of the sexes, only a marked absence of water in each, which will prove to be vital for later projects of the Listening Group, who will add water to its language filters, Brown Hats, or Thompson Masks in order to scramble or falsely translate their speech.

1928

The American Naming Authority, a collective of women studying the effects of names on behavior, decrees that a name should only have one user. The nearly 1 million American users of the name Mary, for example, do not constitute a unified army who might slaughter all users of the name Nancy, as was earlier supposed, but rather a saturation of the Mary Potential Quotient. Simply stated: Too many women with the same name produces widespread mediocrity and fatigue. A competition of field events, centering around deployment of a forty-pound medicine ball into hoops and holes, is proposed to determine which women shall rightly hold the title of their name, with all losers in the same-name category to be designated as helpers — subsets — of the winner, forced to wear wind socks or hip weights to slow down their progress, enslaved to the first Mary, the first Nancy, the first Julia, as the case may be. Parents still able to name their children begin to seek either unique names or names that are considered neutral by the authority, such as Jesus and Smith. Many girls are given the name Jesus Smith, which, when pronounced as an all-vowel slogan, becomes a crucial new word in the Silentist movement, and is also possibly responsible for enabling the new strains of female behaviors seen at this time.

1935

Boston widow Claire Dougherty is arrested on her doorstep October 3 by detective Sherman Greer as she tries to swallow a coded message. In prison, she refuses to speak and appears to suffer at hearing any kind of sound, a condition termed Listener’s Disease, in which even sounds produced by her own body appear to cause her agony. She must wear a soundproof suit and a life helmet. State doctors report that there is nothing unusual in Dougherty’s hearing, but they agree to relieve her with a quiet cell in the prison and a full-body muffle, later termed a Claire Mitten and worn by young girls who are sickened or distraught at the sound of their own voices. Before she dies, in November, she writes in a letter to her daughter that “. . a new sound is upon the world. We have erred greatly and will be killed for it. Look to the soil, for the sound to me was beneath it. Walk slow or do not walk. Hide. Duck. Listen.” Detective Greer, the arresting officer, will die a year later, complaining of a “sharp noise” in the water near his home. His cause of death is listed as exhaustion. The two deaths will launch several studies of diseases caused by sound, and Greer’s wife will later appear in the streets of Boston wearing an executioner’s hood. Her body, upon examination, will reveal heavily damaged ears.