Notable American Women (8 page)

Phase two of the diet begins when the tongue is hard enough to produce a clear knocking tone when addressed with a small mallet. This indicates that the mouth is ready to be filled with linen. The cloth recommendation here is not strict, but the dieter would do well to avoid wool and wool substitutes. The psychological setback would be too great, and I would no longer be of help through the many discomforts that wool-assisted reading might elicit. In addition, a dieter would sacrifice the claim to free technical support while reading this book if wool is used to stuff the mouth at this stage. Cotton may be used, but cotton does not wick away moisture, and it can thus prevent the full storage of the body's base language (which is nearly 95 percent water), in which case the language detox process would not be complete before reading, so there would still be sentence pollutants awaiting excretion. Cotton additionally begins to rot and expand if used as a language towel, whereas linen simply erodes into the earth. At any rate, enough cloth should be stuffed into the mouth so that the jaw extends to its full hinge and the cheeks appear ballooned. A neck brace at this time might also assist the dieter. The head, generally, cannot be supported enough, and shoulder splints may profitably be fastened up the ears to the level of the crown.

During phase two, it is difficult to take a full breath or to exhale around the obstacle of cloth in the mouth. Oxygen restriction while fasting (ORF) forces the body to derive oxygen from within itself, particularly from memories and extraneous behavior (which are highly combustible); unnecessary emotions are cleansed from the system through its natural furnace, and the body learns inner breathing. The primary use of feelings, in this book, will be as energy seeds for the body to burn, although the body, when gagged, needs to be trained to view these conditions as flammable. Fainting again becomes a danger here, so netting and helmets should be used to prevent injury. Indeed, a helmet should be worn
the entire time
this book is being read, and during any foray you might make into the world at large. A helmet will be one more barrier that could possibly save your life.

Food-Intake Strategies

Almonds are language-neutral. They will not affect the perception of sentences by the human head. Eating almonds additionally provides almost certain protection from fainting, which is a very real danger when reading this book. And although it will be demonstrated that repeated fainting is probably the purest way to permanently eliminate behavior, and thus rid the body of unnecessary emotions, it is not a career to enter recklessly. Strategic fainting requires equipment, preparation, and commitment, as well as a supportive family or diet team who are trained to catch and revive you when you collapse. Before I was ejected from Team Quiet, I was able to faint with regularity several hundred times a week, and stayed relatively free of injury (although my father would certainly disagree with this claim).

The Food

Directly before reading each morning, the reader should undergo a full-body flush, drinking at least one gallon of reader's water. Warm-up exercises should be light: basic limbering stretches, but nothing to increase the heart rate. If desired, a language enema might be taken (speak spontaneously until exhaustion, and your body will purge all of its unspoken messages and sentiments. It might prove useful to record this ceremony, as details about yourself can be discovered). Throughout the day, feeding can occur on fibrous vegetables and fruit, with occasional yogurt gargles and snacks of hard bread and butter. Since it is not recommended that this book be read in the evening, neither should any food be consumed during that time. Total rest is suggested and motion of any kind is discouraged.

For Advanced Readers Only

For those readers looking to optimize their time with this book (or people reading the book for a second or third time), the eyes should be masked in black cotton during the daytime hours of the fasting procedure and no other written language should be regarded. Thoughts, if necessary, should be conducted in shorthand or steno, and if communication is required, though I cannot authorize it (and in theory oppose it), a set of flash cards should be used, with easy-to-understand pictograms that will satisfy the demands of the basic interactions: commerce, expressions of love, hunger signals, and warnings of impending disaster. At the time of this writing, images are far less taxing than words and should be deployed anytime the head needs relief. If another book or pamphlet is placed before you and you are required to read it, which I cannot recommend, or if navigational messages are presented to your person during a period of travel (also to be avoided), a simple technique of nodding, squinting, and ducking should be used to quickly scan the message, which you would then do well to vowelize before it can take hold of your thinking in any substantial way.

Who Were the Jane Dark Gods and What Did They Want?

The first Jane Dark gods were invoked by members of Team Quiet in Ohio to solidify Dark's authority as a silence expert. Most organizations require a deity scaffold to boost their veracity with recruits. The deity referred to as Thompson has been used in fiction and nonfiction alike, and is not scheduled to die, or to suffer myth remission, until certain concepts have fully integrated the culture. The Jane Dark gods were never described physically, and they had no special powers.

Why Cloth?

My family believes that the inside of the mouth is equivalent to a cave. Words accrue and marinate as pockets of vibrational sound, changing the delicate structure of the palate, which influences the acoustics of spoken language, inevitably launching speech wind—an early form of menacing weather—into the atmosphere or deep into someone's body. Cloth is used not only to pad the surface of this cave but to absorb speech residue, to store the elemental messages of a person and delimit personal wind output (the Barking Quota). If every person carried a language towel such as this, much preliminary misunderstanding between people could be avoided. People could simply exchange language towels and chew them for instant, intimate knowledge of one another, rather like a peace pipe was once used, no doubt.

Does the Skin Eat?

It would be foolish to simplify the role of the skin in reading, thinking, and eating. Nearly everything that can be said about the skin can be disproved or at least convincingly denied. For the purposes of this book, once the fast is completed, the arms should be wrapped in the cloth you had stashed in your mouth. You are training your body to be a full-scale receiver of language, to feed on the noise of words as it does with so-called food. The sooner the head is decentralized in the nutrition-intake process, the more ripe the body will become to decipher nonlanguage communication streams like wind and electronic women's frequency. The skin should be frequently brushed with a wire scrubber to clear the pores; the skin of the arms might further be primed with a sixty-minute daily bath of high-volume radio static.

Why Nuts and Milk?

When milk is understood as
animal water
—a nutritive liquid produced by nonlanguage creatures enduring their brief term on earth—it becomes clear that this edible product of creatures allows us access to the bodies of strangers without risk, to steal their life information and expand our own possibilities as people. In this sense, milk is probably the primary learning water, a deep liquid that tells us how to act. It is precisely when I feel estranged from myself that I drink my own milk. Most men won't have this option. Their first choice should be another man's milk, or to cultivate milk from one of their male children. Nuts, on the other hand, can be derived artificially by a Voice Blizzard, in which hundreds of people speak rapidly (hark) into the same container until the vocal waves congeal, or “nut.”

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.

Dates

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.

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.