Ben Marcus - Notable American Women

1942

A woman is found collapsed in a field, her arms sheathed in metal sleeves, nearly burned down to the bone. Her mouth is void of teeth and likewise charred. When a microphone is held to her skin during a routine exam by a Listener, muted voices and noise can be heard, suggesting her body has been crushed or otherwise altered with sound. During the same month, a caravan of women is intercepted by the Texas Mounted Police. Among their possessions are found a set of foil-lined sleeves and leather hoods, which the women will only say are used to “fight sound.” When they are addressed during a group interrogation, they use quick actions with their hands to nearly silence the questions coming at them. The turbulence they generate with their limbs is recognized as Jesus Wind. They are apparently able to quiet the local sounds in a room simply by making shapes with their hands. A child Jane Dark is among them, who demonstrates that by standing next to a passing train and engaging in an odd form of gymnastic pantomime that appears part karate, part dance, the girl can mute the forceful racket of the train so that it passes by in virtual silence. Late in her life, it will be this talent that will prevent her from hearing even her own voice, as the orbiting wind of silence she herself has created becomes so potent that it can no longer be penetrated, and she appears to the people around her as a character in a silent movie. She can neither speak nor be spoken to, a deprivation of language that causes her hands to wither.

1952

The Women’s National Pantomime group gathers on an athletic field in Dulls Falls, Wisconsin, for their largest event since their inception in 1946. Fifteen new gestures are introduced by the group leader, a slender teenager named Jane Dark, and so many women suffer seizures and vomiting after performing the difficult new movements that the local hospitals cannot contain them and Ms. Dark is forced into hiding. Four women die, while many others turn in their memberships in protest. The wounded women are so disoriented that they must relearn basic movements such as walking and kneeling, drinking and sleeping. The men’s chapter of the Pantomime Association publicly renounces Dark and her followers, calling her modifications harmful and contrary to the chief purpose of Pantomime, which is to entertain. Dark explains that her fierce group of aggressively silent women will no longer exist to glorify the “false promise” of silent motion, or Pantomime, but will instead attempt a new system of female gestures, to replace sound as the primary means of communication, declaring motion the “first language,” with a grammar that is instinctual and physical, rather than learned. It will be the first instance of a women’s semaphore that will not be an imitation, but, rather, a primary behavior with, according to Dark, “very real uses in this country.” Dark will begin authorship of a series of pamphlets called New Behaviors for Women. The pamphlets argue that gesture and behavior alone can solve what Dark calls “the problem of unwanted feelings.” She also helps market Water for Girls, small vials of “radical emotional possibility,” under the premise that water contains the first and only instructions for how to behave in this world.

1960

The English language is first overheard in a wind that circles an old Ohio radio operated by an early Jane Dark representative. Words from the language are carefully picked out of this clear wind over the next thirty years and inscribed on pieces of linen handed out at farmers’ markets. When the entire vocabulary of words has been recovered from the radio, it is destroyed, and the pieces of linen are sewn together into a flag that is loaned out to various Ohio cities and towns, where it is mounted over houses. Once the fabric is hoisted on a flagpole, the language is easily taught to the people inside of their homes, who have only to tune their radios to the call sign of the flag station, extract and aim their freshly oiled antennas, and position their faces in the air steaming from the grille of their radios. When their faces become flushed and hot, they can retreat to other rooms and say entirely new things to the children who are sleeping there.

1965

A noise filter is created at Dark Farm to muffle radio and television frequency. It will be the first nonsacrificial attempt by Jane Dark and her followers to mute the noises of the air and bring about a “new world silence.” Mounted upon the roof of a hilltop barn, the filter is a dish-shaped sieve filled with altered water that will supposedly attract and cancel electronic transmissions, including television, radio, and women’s wind. The water, which absorbs the intercepted frequency, is considered a master liquid of supernutritive value. It is removed monthly and administered to the women as a medicinal antibody. The drink is called a “charge,” or Silent Water, said to render women immune to sound.

1985

Quiet Boy Bob Riddle constructs his home weather kit, to definitively prove that speech and possibly all mouth sounds disturb the atmosphere by introducing pockets of turbulence, eventually causing storms. By speaking into the tube that feeds the translucent-walled weather simulator, which resembles a human head — in this case, the head of his father — Riddle demonstrates the agitation of a calm air system. The language that Riddle introduces to the test environment — whether English, French, or the all-vowel slang of the Silentists — repeatedly smashes the model house within, proving that sound alone can distress and destroy an object. His essay, “The Last Language,” argues for an experimental national vow of silence, claiming that spoken language is a pollutant that must be arrested, first by stuffing the mouths of unnecessary speakers (“persons whose message has already been heard”) with cloth. Before his death, in 1991, he will build a mouth harness (the Speech Jacket) that limits its wearer to a daily quota of spoken language, beyond which he or she must remain silent until the next day, or else trigger a mild explosive that will destroy the mouth. The Speech Jacket is tested first on children. Although it causes intermittent blackouts and fainting, it serves to restrict their speech to requests for food and short displays of all-vowel singing.

I’LL NOT BE ABLE TO LIST each name we called my sister. The process would be exhausting, requiring me to relive my sister’s pitiful life. There are additionally copyright issues connected with persons that are officially the holdings of the government, which is still the case with my sister, despite her demise. To reproduce the precise arc of names that she traversed during her life in our house would be to infringe on a life narrative owned by the American Naming Authority. It will suffice to select those names sufficiently resonant of her, ones that will seem to speak of the girl she was rather than of some general American female figure, although it could be argued that we can no longer speak with any accuracy of a specific person, that the specific person has evolved and given way to the general woman, distinguished primarily by her name.

The names defined here derive from a bank of easily pronounceable and typical slogans used to single out various female persons of America and beyond. A natural bias will be evident toward names that can be sounded with the mouth. The snap, clap, and wave, while useful and namelike in their effect (the woman or girl is alerted, warned, reminded, soothed), are generally of equal use against men, and therefore of little use here. Gestures of language that require no accompanying vocal pitch, such as gendered semaphore, used in the Salt Flats during the advent of women’s silent television, or Women’s Sign Language (WSL), developed in the ’70s as a highly stylized but difficult offshoot of American Sign Language, now nearly obsolete because of the strenuous demands it placed upon the hips and hands, were never successful enough with my sister to warrant inclusion in the study. She plainly didn’t respond to the various postures and physical attitudes we presented to her — our contortions and pantomime proved not theatrical enough to distract her into action. No shapes we made with our hands could convince her that there was important language to be had in our activity, and she often sat at the window, waiting for a spoken name, without which she could not begin the task of becoming herself.