Sometimes I seem to go the whole weekend without saying anything out loud. Maybe this is in my head because of Speak, though it’s not that kind of silence. There’s just no one in the house to talk to, and I’m a hermit. I also seem to go the whole weekend in my “sleepwear” since I often don’t leave the house. (Did you know that if you wait late enough on Sunday night, it’s okay to walk your trash to the street without getting dressed?)
But back to the point, often I’m not even really thinking about the silence. I am chattering away with self-talk in my head. I’m just not saying anything out loud. Who am I gonna talk to—the plant? the refrigerator? Usually, it’s either the TV, the computer, the other computer, or my stupid self. Oh, and sometimes, general interjections caused by stubbed toes and whatnot.
Today, it was the stupid in my brain. I’m watching Dave Lieberman, who kinda annoys me but it was the best choice. I may not speak much, but if the house is totally silent it begins to grate me so the TV is usually on. So Dave is screwing around with pesto, and I’m realize that he’s just announced that he’s not using pine nuts for some daft reason and he’s using something else instead. But I didn’t hear what. So I go to the Web site. It’s walnuts. Okay. I’m not sure why walnuts, but okay. I scan the other recipes and read, “Beef Salad with Goat Cheese, Watercress and Shallot Thyme Dressing.”
“What the hell is beef salad?” my inner chatter asks. “There’s a salad I can get into. I have to check this out.”
I click through to the recipe. That’s when I spoke today.
“BEET, moron,” I say out loud to my stupid self.
The sound of my voice feels so odd suddenly. The inner chatterbox notes how long I’ve been silent. I don’t even realize I’ve been silent till I speak. The chattering certainly wasn’t silent. Even in my dreams last night, there was chattering. All night, there were dreams about the library. Earlier yesterday, I had been browsing around on the Ong Archive Blog, where there are new pictures of Ong’s Boy Scout trip to Europe in 1929. The thoughts of libraries and archives apparently took over my dreams.
Sometimes I was in the children’s section, reading various books and looking very out of place among the tweens and teens, but insistent that it was okay for me to sit and read there just the same. Other times, it was the archivist section of my brain, lost in handwritten letters and journals and notes. She was deep in reading and scanning and (even more importantly) touching yellowed pages with handwritten grooves pressed by an author no longer available, an person hidden in the text.
I’m not sure whose artifacts I was reading in my dream. I can’t even remember what they were about. I just remember the joy of touching the pages, of feeling the pen imprints, of the life there in the texts. When I look at my own pile of handwritten journals, I feel guilty for typing this. Rationally, I know that my carpal tunnel would make it impossible to write this all by hand, and yet it feels like something is lost. There’s something about looking at these archived documents in my dreams and knowing that I’m seeing a person that the general public doesn’t know, that I can discover something no one else has seen by piecing together the puzzle of artifacts. It’s the kind of dream where I wake regretting that decision I made to teach rather than be a librarian—and wishing that I had some legitimate reason to walk into some great library’s archives and touch whatever person I wanted. All those voices are silent to me. Packed up in boxes in the archives, no one to talk to.
