Unspoken Words Research Articles

Raven Hair

Raven Hair Julie C. Day (bio) Spring You were the wolf, the witch, the unnamed monster in the woods. Instead of blood offerings, the townspeople left you woven baskets full of waxy red fruit. I left myself: red cape and fiery virgin blood. I was the one who lifted my hand and knocked. I had black hair, dark as a raven, and the dress my mother had sewn for me. You saw me just the same: my already curving hips, my waiting breasts. My wolf, my witch, my monster: you had yellowed teeth, crooked, with one pointed canine peeking out over your lip. Your clothes were white, crusty, and full of angry stains. You were pretty even so with your salt-and-pepper hair, the sunrise of wrinkles radiating from both eyes. Gray eyes, of course, except on your soulless days when your stare was as blue as an ice-bound ocean. On those days you begged me to be silent, breathless, mute. Trapped with all my unspoken words, I never felt quiet when I was with you. Summer Our bedroom was on the second floor. Next to it was your den, carpeted in gray with carefully whitened walls and a scratched closet door you told me not to open. "It's mine," you said. "A closed door means keep out." Some days the door's metal handle shook like a cornered snake. Other days it was silent. On your ice-blue days you roamed the woods while I watched from our bedroom window. Step after step, you bent to examine the forest's undergrowth, searching for the waxy white stalks and scaly leaves of your favorite corpse flower, the Indian pipe. Your favorite was just as elusive as you. I watched until your bent back disappeared into the trees, and then if the closet handle was silent, I stole into your den. You kept unspooled rolls of 8 mm film in dark green garbage bags stacked against the wall. Your film lacked the black glossy sheen of store-bought. Orangish-brown and subtly dimpled, each length contained a string of tangled images: a felt puppet on a twig broom, a seemingly unending line of girls with freckles or milky-tea skin and sharp-toothed smiles. And that one repeated image—a woman with wolf-grey hair—not you. Words were printed in precise block letters on the bottom of each frame of film, so small I couldn't yet read them. The lettering, I could tell, [End Page 41] took hours, a magnifying glass, a steady hand. It was fairytale time. I pretended the lettering, not the film, was your daytime passion. Your evening passions were easier to ken. Your evenings were spent with me. ________ I took my time, silent, lips soft against your stomach. Tangled sheets. My hands clutched your narrow hips, then slipped higher until I felt the outer edges of your breasts. I tasted the dampness trickling from between your thighs, salt and musk. Like 8 mm film, my movements took sixteen frames one slow second at a time. Afterwards, you held pieces of your special brown-orange film up to our bedside light, sharing your work. Each cell was marked, scratched, the original image buried somewhere underneath. Your art, you told me, was about transformation. Even then I made mistakes. Pointed out a slash mark, an odd corner of red. Left the ghost of a fingerprint behind. "Love me," I cried, finally deciphering the film's tiny words. The long L and five smaller letters suddenly clear. Yet another transformation: your gray eyes glared, now ice-bound blue. Head bowed, I whispered my own special words: sorry and sorry again while your head nodded its agreement. I was never as sorry as when I lived with you. ________ My fairytale monster. My lover. My witch. As with all witches, the kitchen was your domain: bones and gristle, amber syrup clinging to your lips, green herbs disfigured across the chopping board. On late afternoons heat and flames rose up against the slaughtered flesh. I never asked you where our meat came from, the brown-and-pink flesh so tender as it fell from the bone...

An Old Friend, and: After Leaving, and: Mistake

An Old Friend, and: After Leaving, and: Mistake Amanda Allen (bio) An Old Friend A friend and I went to a museum. We hadn’t talked in a few years. There had been some falling out, some anger, someone to blame. Neither admitted to remembering, so in silence we agreed to let it all go. We had been meaning to go look at art, but stumbled instead, out of the cold, into the Museum of Natural History— dinosaur skeletons, a room of diamonds, the giant squid translucent and leathered sprawling inside a Plexiglas tank, it was all wrong. But we stayed. The cold outside kept us, encasing us in its own way so that we gave up hope of finding the place we had meant to go. In a later conversation, I asked what he meant by quoting Keats, So in my veins red life might stream again and thou be conscience-calmed. See here it is— I hold it towards you while we were looking at giant sloths. Strange, even for him, and I couldn’t remember the thing I had said first or if I had said anything at all. [End Page 124] It was only a response, he said, nothing to dwell on. Maybe I had said what I was thinking: that an unspoken word can never stand in for mercy. This formality we held each other to. We took the metro home, kissed each others’ cheeks, we’d meet for coffee sometime in the coming month. Or sometime. Outside the sky was so blue, so blindingly blue. After Leaving Eventually, I had to wash the clothes he left in my bedroom. To think he’d left his smell on purpose, to think he might come back for it or for anything. Here’s the thing about holding on: years ago, when the family dog died, my father kept her body out in the garage in a blue canvas bag. Waiting for a night when we were all home, waiting for a weekend or a nice day. Waiting then, of course—because it was late November and snowing almost every day—for the ground to thaw. For weeks the body lay curled and cold, stiffening in the bag. Our neighbors put up Christmas lights. Wire reindeer congregated along the edges of lawns, half buried after the snow plow went by. My sister and I would dig into the dirt-crusted mounds at the start of the driveway, snow collapsing in on us before we dug through to the other side. Those months were darkest, even in the daytime—the sky that terrible opacity, the scent of snow hanging dry and harsh in the air, urging us all inside. Even as kids we kept our heads down, [End Page 125] quiet, half the year spent waiting for it to end. And that November my father, going out each night to drink, sitting with the canvas bag. I would be in the kitchen doing homework, listening for goodbyes, for decay. Maybe I was young, but it seemed to me that regret is all the dead leave us. And we did bury it in the spring, dug up some of the lilacs that grew wild around the backyard. Where my father tossed them— half-heartedly over the fence like old brush, like a mound of garbage—they took root and continued to grow. Mistake The burn—I won’t say—is from an iron, innocent enough at first. The shirt laid out over the bed the heating metal a familiar thing, the smell, curling across cotton. But then, as if in a trance, my hand lifting to my chest. Thoughtlessly, directly, the small triangle tip touching—just for a moment, less—the skin above my left breast. I won’t say I did it to myself. How foolish a thing to admit. And for a moment I could think it didn’t happen really, just a strange impulse. Until the pink stinging of flesh, the smell. In sleep, the triangle burns cold. In my dreams, it is always winter. No more than a moment, but enough to blister, burst the skin. The thinness of each layer peeling back, [End Page...

Sonification and textification: Proposing methods for classifying unspoken words from EEG signals

EEG-based Brain–Computer Interfaces (BCI) are an alternative technique that aims to integrate people with severe motor disabilities to their environment. However, they still are not used in everyday life because BCIs are controlled by means of few intuitive electrophysiological sources. To address this problem, work has been carried out with the objective of classifying EEG signals recorded while imagining speech. In this paper, the emerging techniques of sonification and textification are applied to EEG signals, which allows us to characterize EEG signals as either an audio signal or a text document. The aim is to analyze whether these techniques can help to do a better discrimination or to highlight patterns, and assess which of the two methods performs better in order to improve classification results of unspoken words. For proving this we processed signals, from 27 subjects, with and without the application of the proposed methods of sonification and textification. The average accuracy rate using the original EEG signals, the EEG sonified signals and the EEG textified signals are 58.41 ± 12.41%, 63.82 ± 13.44% and 83.34 ± 6.12%, respectively. It can be clearly noticed that the methods of sonification and textification of EEG improve the classification rates obtained using the EEG signals in their original form.

El hablar y la palabra: psicoterapias en los márgenes urbanos de la región metropolitana de Buenos Aires

Based on an ongoing ethnographic research in a neighborhood located in the Metropolitan area of Buenos Aires, these lines describe and analyze the speech actions of treatment in the public health system, oriented to marginalized population, from the perspective of local residents turned patients. According to the anthropological developments on language, words and suffering on one hand and perception and senses on the other, speaking, listening and seeing those in treatment are understood as a set of bodily perceptual and expressive actions. This method being one among various ways for these individuals to express using ordinary language. Finally, due to the ethnographic approach, the speech actions in these treatments are analyzed as one component of a complex cartography that includes unspoken words, the use of words and speeches of others, running out of words, being silenced, acting out some words, demanding the others attention, listening, being heard, and their links to seeing and being seen in the ordinary life.

“Do you think I can’t read between the lines?”:Discourse of the unsaid in J. M. Coetzee’sDiary of a Bad Year

This article examines J. M. Coetzee’s use of intuitive and interpretive exchanges within and across the tripartite structure of Diary of a Bad Year (2007). It argues that Coetzee rejects strict understandings of the novel genre in favour of a more fluid form, enabling him to explore heteroglot exchanges within the two monologues on each page of Diary of a Bad Year and complicate conventional understandings of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism. Creating multiple layers that begin with unspoken words, pass through an “othered” interpreter, and arrive at the reader via the novel’s narration, meaning is reconfigured and reconsidered in a way that distances it from the author. The essay further argues that Coetzee’s use of dialogic discourse in Diary of a Bad Year privileges the perspective of the Filipina woman whose voice drives much of the novel’s commentary as she wins the interpretive game Coetzee creates.

Unspoken Words.

Unspoken Words.

Myth and meaning: San-Bushman folklore in global context

J.D. Lewis-Williams, one of the leading South African archaeologists and ethnographers, excavates meaning from the complex mythological stories of the San-Bushmen to create a larger theory of how myth is used in culture. He extracts their “nuggets,” the far-reaching but often unspoken words and concepts of language and understanding that are opaque to outsiders, to establish a more nuanced theory of the role of these myths in the thought-world and social circumstances of the San. The book -draws from the unique 19th century Bleek/Lloyd archives, more recent ethnographic work, and San rock art;-includes well-known San stories such as The Broken String, Mantis Dreams, and Creation of the Eland;-extrapolates from our understanding of San mythology into a larger model of how people create meaning from myth.

Unspoken Words

Much of what is communicated in the classroom is through nonverbal means. Sending appropriate nonverbal signals, as well as recognizing and interpreting the nonverbal signals of others, are essential features of the learning process. Students’ abilities to encode and decode nonverbal communication have the potential to affect all aspects of their academic and social outcomes. Students must process what they see and make sense of it in the context of the situation and the people involved. The author describes how students with nonverbal learning disabilities may reveal themselves in the music classroom, and provides instructional strategies that can be used in the classroom to help students with nonverbal learning disabilities and Web-based resources for educators.

Academic mobility in the Anthropocene era: a comparative study of university policy at three New Zealand institutions

Anthropogenic climate change is a wicked problem, requiring fundamental behavioural and technological responses now, in the Anthropocene, a term denoting the current era of human dominance of biological, chemical and geological processes on Earth. Travel and transport policies are key to effective responses, confronting both leisure and business travellers, including academics. This paper explores in detail the factors that promote or suppress academic travel, examining institutional policies which frame academic mobility practices at three New Zealand universities; University of Otago, University of Auckland and Victoria University of Wellington. It finds evidence of little congruence between sustainability statements, with their wide discourses on environmental sustainability, and the institutional policies governing academic mobility. Three overriding themes emerging from the analysis are presented: hollow words (describing a lack of meaningful commitment to sustainability, with disconnections between sustainability rhetoric and key policies), unspoken words (assumptions about the necessity of travel) and facilitating mobilities (promoting travel, rewarding those who travel). These themes highlight varying degrees of divergence between the sustainability imperatives of these universities and the carbon emissions of institutionalised academic mobilities. Concluding remarks highlight opportunities for New Zealand's academic institutions to align travel policies with growing sustainability imperatives and discuss future research directions.

Hearing patients' sometimes unspoken words

In Brief Patients' voices need to be heard to provide truly holistic nursing care. In this story, a patient teaches two veteran nurses how to listen even when patients have a communication dysfunction.

Two Poems

40 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 Two Poems by Hedy Habra How Much of Yourself Remains Within the Walls of a Home? after Jeremy Miranda’s Salt Marsh (2014) I wanted to dive into the troubled waters of forgotten memories, haunt the house of early emotions but found it empty. I wanted to find the lingering scent of jasmine where jasmine never grew, even if it wasn’t spring. Unspoken words fall heavily on the kitchen tiles: a cascade of rough-edged syllables flood the floor. My chair is glued to the table, I’m trapped within clouds preventing me from seeing how the marsh grows wider, how walls collapse, spikes and bluish-green leaves crested with plumes line the edge of the water where glasswort blushes against sea lavender. I’d run my fingers over the red round stems, crush the purple petals under my teeth to release its essential oils. I can still see the russet tree’s wavering reflections, its roots, that seemed to come down from the sky. Your body awakens each night under my fingertips, shortening the distance between my lips and your skin, until your body remembers, until the sky sinks into water, mist so thick, a hummingbird floats in minute droplets in suspension. I feel the current of the first kiss in my curls, our knees shaking. Jeremy Miranda, Salt Marsh, 2014, acrylic on panel. Courtesy of the artist. cover feature art poetry WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 41© 2015 artists rights society ( ARS ), new york / vegap , madrid photo credit : gianni dagli orti / the art archive at art resource , ny left Remedios Varo, Creation of the Birds (La creación de las aves), 1957, oil on masonite, © by the artist, dacs/vegap. For a biographical sketch of Remedios Varo, turn to page 39. Hedy Habra (HedyHabra.com) is the author of two poetry collections, Tea in Heliopolis (2013), winner of the USA Best Book Award and finalist for the International Poetry Book Award, and Under Brushstrokes (2015), inspired by visual art. Recipient of the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Award, she is also the author of a story collection, Flying Carpets (2013), winner of the Arab American National Book Award’s Honorable Mention. Jeremy Miranda is a contemporary artist, born in Newport, Rhode Island. He creates complex environments that are a hybridization of both interior and exterior spaces. He is interested in the landscape and how people control, fetishize, and dwell within it. A Bird’s Song, Unraveled after Remedios Varo’s Creation of the Birds (1957) All artists are night owls, she thinks, as circles grow wider around her eyes. Eyelids lowered, her brush, an extension of her violin-shaped heart, adds the last touches of blush to the feathers’ tips. She tries to remember the right words thrown pell-mell in the folds of memory . . . memory adds layers to meaning . . . wants to retrieve numbers and signs from slumber, relive the initial moment, imagines how wingless molecules rub against each other in the copper alembic. All it takes is a double binding broken loose to find the right combination: Only verbs are allowed. Aren’t they the heart of a sentence? What of a wordless message as those from the heart strung from the right chord? She holds iridium glasses to gather light from stardust . . . hoopoes, hummingbirds, kingfishers, finches, sparrows, swallows, warblers, orioles . . . she has lost track of how many species flew in search of an answer, each bird carrying its own song, from all corners of the earth. Her wings aren’t strong enough to cross the seven valleys. She needs to send an emissary to partake in the colloquy of birds. Barefoot, she steps over shades of silver dust strewn by shooting stars, conjures up their broken light night after night. The original formula . . . lost since time immemorial . . . led to confusing myths such as people drowning in their own reflection or making love to their own creation. She knows the secret of the bird’s song, its loops and roundness, but chooses silence, lets its wings flutter through the open window. She will try again. ...

Back From the Brink

Back From the Brink

On the Freedom of Speech and Expression: Interview with Noam Chomsky

It would be almost impossible to reduce all your work to one field or theme, and this is why I will try to touch on a few themes from the whole array of contributions you have made to science and human knowledge and spirit. You epitomized for years the freedom of expression for academics, media and the general public. How do you feel having such a distinctive tone in voicing the unspoken words of billions of people? Does it come as a great responsibility or as an exceptional emotionally charged challenge?

Sheets of Past: Reading the Image in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz

Sheets of Past:Reading the Image in W. G. Sebald's Austerlitz Mary Griffin Wilson (bio) Numerous critics have touched upon the use of images—particularly photographic images—in the fictional work of W. G. Sebald. The majority of these comments have focused on the implicit analogy between photography and memory, one in which the photograph becomes emblematic of—and bears witness to—an irretrievable past. In Austerlitz, Sebald's final novel, this analogy may appear particularly fitting. The novel centers around a character whose life is defined by the absence of memory, both of his origins and of the violence that erased them. Having escaped the European continent at the age of five, Austerlitz's experience of the Holocaust is one of absence, erasure, and lack. In this sense, it is akin to what Jacques Rancière describes—in reference to Claude Lanzman's Shoah—as an experience not of "the elimination of the Jews" but of "the elimination of the traces of elimination," the elimination of evidence (127). Against this absence, Austerlitz accumulates a massive compendium of knowledge, one in which photography plays a crucial documentary role. As J. J. Long points out, Austerlitz, like many of Sebald's characters, is "obsessed with processes of archivisation and with places where the past has deposited traces and fragments that have been preserved and in many cases systematised, catalogued, or indexed" (W. G. Sebald 11). These thematic elements are undoubtedly present. However, a close reading of the novel suggests that Sebald's inclusion of images in Austerlitz—photographic and otherwise—goes far beyond the rhetoric of trauma, memory, and [End Page 49] witness to which so many critics have attached it.1 Such rhetoric has tended toward the application of a preformulated theory of the photograph as temporal shock, one which, when applied to Austerlitz, divorces the image from its actual function within the novel. As Carolin Duttlinger argues, many of the associations between photography and trauma "remain based on structural, symbolic or metaphorical analogies between the two phenomena" and cannot fully account for the nuances of such analogies when transplanted into a work of fiction (155). While Duttlinger rightly points out the fallacy of reducing Sebald's discourse on photography to a theoretical or aesthetic exploration of this analogy, it nevertheless occupies a central place in her argument. She remains focused on the visual and temporal displacement enacted by the photographs, on their "belatedness" within the narrative progression (159).2 Hence those images which are, as I shall argue, quite explicitly integrated into Sebald's text are not entirely accounted for. By overemphasizing the mnemonic properties of photographs, these analyses have marginalized the radically nonlinear, non-chronological understanding of time that Sebald puts forth in Austerlitz, an understanding which could not have been accomplished without them. For beyond the mnemonic, the images Sebald includes in this novel serve several crucial functions. At times, they occupy an indexical relation to the text, by pointing back to the language that surrounds them or by becoming a kind of silent indicator or unspoken word within it. At other times, [End Page 50] their purpose is more metaphorical, as the images form various threads of visual contiguity in which places, times, and characters are implicitly linked through resemblance. Bettina Mosbach describes this tendency as a kind of superimposition, a word whose German correlate, Überblendung, is borrowed from the novel itself (390). In Mosbach's analysis, this term comes to indicate Sebald's ability to present disparate historical or chronological moments as being somehow contemporaneous, or to blend them into one another until the sense of time as a series of discrete fragments is all but obliterated. Yet despite its filmic connotations, superimposition does not wholly account for the function of Sebald's images in relation to the novel's temporal structure. Time, in Austerlitz, is not a linear progression. The superimpositions that occur do not necessarily take succession as their model, although the characters may use this model to account for them. Rather, the temporal structure at work in Austerlitz is, I would argue, more accurately a kind of Bergsonian duration, one which Gilles Deleuze defines as operating "less by succession than by...

Loving the Zombie: Arendtian Natality in a Time of Loneliness

Zombies need love. I come to this conclusion through interacting with the zombies who haunt my classroom. They lurk in the shadows and become visible at the most crucial times for me as a teacher, times when engaging my students counts most. For example, in a recent class zombies joined our discussion circle and sat blank-eyed and offered no response to a passionate question asked by a student outraged by evidence of student suffering in schools: How can we tolerate kids being treated this way? The question arose after our reading accounts of and hearing personal testimony from students who were psychologically and physically harmed in schools because of their sexual identities. With eyes cast down, we waited in silence for someone to voice a response. No one did. As the sole reader of their personal analyses of course topics, I heard their written but unspoken words reverberating loudly in the silence: Abomination. Unnatural. But beyond these perhaps too common responses to the issue we were discussing, many expressed another emotion, captured most succinctly by a student who described feeling numb when thinking about such matters.

Ajabu

Life is lovely, serene, and magical Fragile and tender Deep as the ocean Aromatic as the rainforests of South America Taunting you with its mystery and stubbornness Embrace it, tickle it Cause a baby to smile Know what you have Friends completing your soul A meditative rose Frozen in time Supple petals sensually succumb To the feeling you get after sneezing Unspoken words exhaled from lips Bodies seductively moving to circadian harmony Falling asleep on unmowed grass Smell of freshly cut grass

ENTRE "MOTS MUETS" ET SILENCE BRUISSANT: le 'je' en tension

Throughout his oeuvre, Beckett wavers between "unspoken words" and murmurous silences questioning in this manner the nature of the existence of "true silence." The tension between these two poles reflects the perpetual (re)construction, (re)definition of an inside and outside, interiority and exteriority. Indeed, the limit between these two spaces turns out to be more often than not mobile and porous, letting sound pass through. Thus the Beckettian subject is called on to search for a place in this profoundly dynamic space of tension, which is both limit and border and the ground of a precarious and elusive identity.

Whirling World, Dancing Words: Further Echoes of Sir John Davies in T. S. Eliot

PERHAPS the most rhetorically elaborate passage in T. S. Eliot is the opening paragraph of ‘Ash-Wednesday’ V: If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent If the unheard, unspoken Word is unspoken, unheard; Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard, The Word without a word, the Word within The world and for the world; And the light shone in darkness and Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled About the centre of the silent Word.1 Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled About the centre of the silent Word (my italics).2

The Empire of Lionel Trilling

The Empire of Lionel Trilling George Watson (bio) The empires of the future are the empires of the mind. —Winston Churchill, at Harvard University, September 1943 Lionel Trilling once had an empire in a manner of speaking—an empire of the mind. At least that is how it looked when I first lived in the United States in the 1950s when The Liberal Imagination (1950) enjoyed in some literary households the authority of Holy Writ. In those days he was a force in the land and far beyond it. He also had decided views about the British Empire which, strange as they were to a visitor from England, seemed half a century ago to be held by almost everyone in the United States, whether conservative or radical, Left or Right. It was a view summed up in Dean Acheson's celebrated remark that England had lost an empire and had not found a role. The crushing implication was that empire was its only reason for existing; and for a year, as an academic visitor to the U.S., I was bemused to find myself in the unexpected role of an exile heartbroken at the thought of having lost India. No use trying to tell anyone that Indian independence had been a triumph of British diplomacy, welcomed in 1947 by every element of British opinion, or declaring that Britain by the late 1950s was richer than ever—that, whatever empire did, it did not enrich. A part had been written for me as the sad and seedy relic of a mighty past, and I was expected to play it. At that time Lionel Trilling was in midcareer as the most influential academic critic of the English-speaking world, and in 1958 he gave a lecture at the University of the South that promptly appeared in the Sewanee Review and Encounter as "Reflections on a Lost Cause," collected years later by his widow, Diana, in Speaking of Literature and Society (1980). The lost cause was the literature of England, and the talk was tinged with sorrow, since Trilling in his own youth between two world wars had been inspired, as had numberless others, by courses on Shakespeare, Milton, and Dickens. And suddenly, sadly, it was all over. Why? "The chief reason for the decline of the literature of England is the decline of England." That may sound unlikely, simply on literary grounds, but Trilling's grounds were in no way literary. They concerned—nothing less—world dominion. "It is inevitable and expectable that the culture of a powerful nation should have a special interest," he told his Sewanee audience, quoting William Hazlitt's remark that the literary imagination allies itself with power. A Faustian dream of omnipotence haunted his mind, as it often haunts academic minds [End Page 484] fascinated by men of action, and the unspoken word here is India, which had just become independent. The bulking power of England, as he bluntly called it, had ceased to bulk; in consequence, its long literary tradition—even Shakespeare—had ceased to matter. * * * I met Trilling a few months before the lecture. Already in his fifties, he had just returned from a first visit to Europe; and until his death in 1975 I had the pleasure of seeing a lot more of him, both in New York and in England. The first meeting, however, over lunch at Columbia in December 1957, was plainly a diplomatic effort, since his recent visit to London and Edinburgh, in a land still dingy after years of war and austerity, had done nothing to moderate his view that one small island without an empire could count for nothing in the new world of the Cold War. His first book, on Matthew Arnold (1939), seemed by then remote to the point of embarrassment. How could you talk significantly to someone who willfully chose to live in a country that had abandoned its entire reason for existing? The sympathetic gaze of his jade-green eyes across a lunch table in the Columbia faculty club was studiously compassionate, and ten years later, when I spent an evening with Diana and him in their nearby apartment, the atmosphere was little different on...

The Unspoken Words

The Unspoken Words