I had an interesting experience last night concerning mass silence. For the second time in my life, I’ve torn a vocal cord and am on doctor-ordered silence for at least six weeks. Besides the obvious positives a condition like this offers to my writing career, I also find that it creates a strange, disconnected existence. When I venture into the “real” world, people (for some reason) generally assume I’m either deaf or retarded and speak verrrry slowly and loudly to me, even after I make it abundantly clear that I can hear and comprehend just fine. The obvious discomfort on people’s faces when they realize I can’t converse back, the quick closure of social interactions… it’s amazing how much we rely on non-verbal sound for conversational feedback. I’ve begun traveling everywhere with friends, just so they can explain my temporary condition, but strangely, it doesn’t appear to help. Strangers are just as uncomfortable around me, and most even keep eye contact to a minimum. Perfect opportunities for people watching, but a less than opportune time to make new acquaintances.
In any case, a large group of my friends (all of whom are aware of my condition) threw a surprise party last night to celebrate my latest sale. The location for this was a Thai restaurant with a 5’2’’ Thai Elvis impersonator. This is even more incredible than it sounds, but strangely not the oddest part of the evening. The kicker here was that the table, when I arrived, was covered with pads, pens, post-it notes, colored pencils and markers. The rule they’d all decided on was that complete silence had to be maintained at all times during the dinner – if I couldn’t talk, then they weren’t going to either. After the initial dread drained out of my stomach, this experience became phenomenally entertaining. Even the wait staff (who, after the meal, admitted that they thought we were all deaf) began writing down notes to communicate with our table.
It is now my firm belief that a completely silent meal is something everyone should go through at some point in their lives, especially with a large group of people. A sort of instant intimacy is created, a necessity of language, a conservation of words. Cliques become highlighted, private jokes become focal points of table attention. Personalities become heightened, as some people grow increasingly impatient, using abbreviations, chopping their sentences short to simply get the gist across. Others, conversely, write incredibly long missives, taking 5-10 minutes before passing the letters on and then falling silent for a comparable amount of time. And, perhaps most interestingly, there is a written record of everything that is said. This bag of trash sits beside me now, and I can literally, at my leisure, recount every single word “uttered” at that meal. A random drawing from the bag brings out the phrases “I just WANT BEER” and “…the doctors figured out why my dad was collapsing, so that’s good news…” and “I ride my bike a lot and recycle – so hopefully, Mother Nature won’t strike me dead.” A strange, multi-colored bag full of serious conversations and Post-it notes with “Deez nuts” written on them. Numerous times throughout the 2 and a half hour dinner, I looked up to see an entire table full of people furiously scribbling onto notepads, not one of them looking up, all of them bypassing the so-called 80% of non-verbal communication in favor of words and symbols and emoticons. Expressions and hand gestures get me through 95% of my social interactions these days, but my friends didn’t rely heavily on these things. Perhaps that comes with mute experience? Who knows.
Any cohesive divergence from social norms results in a bonding experience for large groups, and this was no different. At the end of the meal, we all felt like we’d been through something, understood a tiny aspect of the world that had been hidden from us. Of course, as one of my scraps of paper reads “I feel like you all just put on a fat suit and walked around for a couple hours. I’m actually fat.” So they go back to the world of the speaking, and I continue my six-week experiment. On the plus side, there’s plenty of time for new blogs.
