The Gibbledeschnarf: An Essay on Communication
“Conversation takes the importance, the
seriousness, the truth out of everything.” --Franz Kafka
“Know what that is?” Emi asked, pointing to the grayish-pink splotch on her knee. It was the first day of first grade, and we had just come in from recess. I did not yet know this girl with the shiny black hair.
“A scab!” I answered, feeling brilliant. “Does it hurt?”
“No,” Emi said. “It’s gum. I fell on gum yesterday. It won’t come off.”
“Eeeew!” I shrieked, delightedly. “Can I touch it?”
“Yeah. Okay.” Until she moved away a year later, Emi was my best friend. Her family went back to Japan before the start of third grade.
“Write,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. She did. Then I did. And the pattern continued for sixteen years. During this time our letters had progressed from “Hi! How are you? I am fine. School is fun!” to “Hey, what’s up? Things here suck . . .” and finally grew deeper over the years.
“Emi,
what should I do about James?”
“UCLA?! Congratulations!”
“My mother is still in a coma . . .”
We sent each other photographs both with and without braces, early Christmas and belated birthday cards, postcards and souvenirs, music tapes and sound advice. We always had each other’s current addresses from summer camps to college internships, and we sent our phone numbers along, too. Not once did we communicate by
telephone, but in every letter, I heard Emi’s voice, and she heard mine.
In the seventh year of our written correspondence, Emi’s family returned to the United States, settling in San Jose, three thousand miles away from their first home in New York. In the tenth year of our friendship, I accompanied my father on a trip to California, and
decided to surprise Emi by showing up at her home. I called her parents to arrange things, and found myself waiting in their house one afternoon, to see the girl I had not seen in a decade. When Emi came in from school, she noticed someone sitting in her living room. She looked at me, then looked away. She furrowed her brow, then unfurrowed it, and looked back at me. The books in her arm fell one-by-one onto the floor. She stood there in silence for a moment, staring at a seven-year-old in a seventeen-year-old body. Emi was wearing shorts. I noticed that the gum scab had healed. Speechlessness is a deafening form of communication.
I have kept all of Emi’s letters, and she has done the same with mine. It has been suggested to me that I keep them bound with a velvet ribbon, because they are very special. I keep them jumbled in a cardboard shoebox, because they are very special. They lie here like puzzle pieces, out of order but complete in number, and there is no need to put them in order because I already know what the finished arrangement would look like. Emi’s voice, incarnate.
I shuffle through these letters from time to time, and listen to them. I search the pile for old envelopes marked with Hello Kitty stickers, and large, wobbling, block-letter addresses that slanted or squished together because we were still learning that written words took up more space than spoken ones. I listen to the different sounds of magic markers, mechanical lead pencils, ballpoint pens, type-set impressions, and computer processed words, and notice that you can tell time not only by numbers, but by alphabet as well. I listen to white-out splotches, and how their tone is much more controlled than the harsh streaks of a scratched-out word and the meek cries of the better-word or the correctly-spelled version above it. Emi used white-out. I used an eraser, sometimes. I listen to the “theirs” that should have been “there’s” knowing that they’re both right, because when letters speak, homonyms can’t be heard. I listen to the fonts of handwriting in Emi’s letters, and recognize that, despite the letterheads of Arthur Anderson, LLP or the yellowed Snoopy stationary, the tone of her words still sounds the same. When we read, we listen with our eyes. I read in between the lines of lineless paper, and listen to conversations that never took place. I own one-half of a chronology of sixteen years; the half that is not actually mine. I listen to this unique timeline, and all of these letters announce to me that because of each of them, I am a writer today.
As a writer, I have been trained to search for the true pulse of the story, hidden deep within the print. I must tune into the subtle whispers of tone and theme. If the subtext fails to palpitate, the story is dead. If a strong and healthy rhythm is located, the story survives. What gives life to a letter? Perhaps just the fact that when it is sent, it becomes immortal, and can talk forever.
Everybody’s was a busy restaurant during the summer of 1996. Most of the patrons waited patiently for a patio table, even in the sweltering, southern heat, with the hopes of catching a glimpse of a famous gymnast or cyclist, who were being housed in the fraternities across the street at Emory University. From time to time, an Olympian would come into the restaurant and order a pizza, but the majority of non-Atlantan customers were foreign officials, judges and other fate-deciders who waltzed into Everybody’s five minutes before close, drank dozens of imported beers, and left little or no tips when they finally staggered out. The servers despised waiting on these foreigners who were either deliberate evaders of or ignorant concerning the concept of gratuity. As a hostess, I did my best to shuffle the ingrates around the seating charts, so that no one server was constantly left shortchanged. During the Olympic rush, the management had hired extra staff, especially busers, to keep the hungry crowds flowing smoothly.
Most of these dish collectors were “punk kids,” with multiple piercings in various orifices, monsterish tattoos that gnawed on shoulders, necks, and forearms, prism-colored, multi-length hair and other physical attributes that begged to be stereotyped as wild, ruthless and sad. The busers took too many smoke breaks, and in-between, they wore impenitent facial expressions as they cleared tables and washed dishes. But not Russ.
Russ was a quiet kid, not older than eighteen, with permanent markings and metal attachments just like the other busers displayed. Russ, however, went about his work with care and ease, holding no grudge against the customers who spilled their sweet tea or diet cola, and requested his cleaning services by calling to him, “Boy, hey boy . . .” Russ did not converse much with the other busers, or the servers, and he spent his breaks reading tattered paperbacks in a corner of the kitchen, or near the kudzu vines by the parking lot fence. My only communication with Russ was a small “hello” when he came in for his shift. Passing shyly by my hostess stand, Russ answered my daily
salutations with a timid “hi” and then disappeared into the kitchen. We spoke two words everyday to each other, for two months. A couple of days before I left Everybody’s to return to college, Russ quietly approached me.
“I hear you study English. I write poetry. Would you like to see my book of poems?” Russ asked, eyes studying the floor.
“Yes, Russ, of course I would. Can you bring in your notebook tomorrow?”
Russ smiled, then nodded and walked away. The next day, when I arrived at work, there was a book waiting for me on my hostess stand. A black, gloss-covered, 186 page, published paperback book of poems from the Ridgewood Press in Minnesota, copyright 1995, first edition. Webs and Arrows, by Russell Nye Barton. Russ the busboy.
He was watching my reaction from the kitchen door, and I motioned to him, still in shock, to come over. I expressed my surprise that he was already a published author, and wondered why he was working here. Poetry didn’t pay the bills yet, he told me. I told Russ I would read the book immediately and get it back to him tomorrow.
“No,” Russ said, “Keep it, please.” I asked him why he was giving me this gift after I said nothing but “hello” to him all summer.
The shy busboy looked me in the eye, “You’re the only one who has.”
Until I met Russel, I did not know that there was a subtext to “hello.” Sometimes, I did not even say “hello,” but surrendered an interaction even more fleeting, like “hey,” “hi,” or a wordless wave of the hand. In speaking less, it seems as though I had said more. Not everybody needs the specific banter of communication, just the general enactment of it. In an untitled poem on page 64, Russell Nye Barton had written,
“your eyes swallow your voice . . .
in our own way
we all say who we are
and what we need
even though sometimes it goes along
unheard”
Kafka would have been proud of Russ.
Something profound occurred last night, I think. I cannot say what time it happened, but it was at one of those indistinguishable hours, perhaps two or three or four a.m. My boyfriend nudged me out of sleep and whispered, “Kathryn, what if I told you something . . . I have something I need to say to you.” He propped himself up on his left side, and leaned his head against his hand. With his free hand, Drew gently brushed his fingers across my cheek. He looked into my eyes and held my gaze longer than he ever had before. Something big was coming. An affirmation of happiness? A declaration of love? The impossible opposite of either? After a moment of silence, Drew sighed away the breath he was holding in, and shifted position. Lying on his back, he broke eye contact with me, and refocused on the ceiling. Another minute of silence passed. Something huge was coming.
I touched his shoulder, meekly prodding “Drew . . . what? What is it?” Again, silence. The his lips parted, and he softly responded, “kkkhhhuuuuuuhh.” He then repeated his response. Over and over. Again and again.
“Drew!” I pressed, shaking him awake.
“Huh? Whuh?”
“You were about to tell me something? What?! What was it?!”
“I was?”
“YES!!”
“Oh. Ok. Hmmm&.. kkkhhhuuuuuuhh.”
In the morning, he remembered nothing about our “conversation” but was greatly amused at the power of his nocturnal subconscious. Drew often speaks in his sleep, reciting sentence fragments from the unwritten paragraphs of his dreams. On separate occasions, I’ve been told to get the mail, watch out for descending airplanes, and keep a “heads up” for an incoming foul baseball, that is headed towards the bleachers where he thinks we are sitting.
“Really?! I did that? Ha!”
“Yes, very funny. Ha-ha-ha.” I hit him with a pillow. Touching my cheek, he told me I was beautiful. When he swung the pillow back at me, I believed him.
Like written communication, there are two pulses to our verbal efforts of conversation: the one we hear, and the one we feel. One is a rhythm loud and clear, a hearty snore. The other is faint and soft, impressionable, like a pillow. Our auditory senses give us no choice in what we can and cannot hear, but the underlying pulse of these sound waves allows us to choose what we will and will not listen to, or believe.
Five months after receiving my driver’s license, I was assaulted in my car. In a parking lot not far from the skating rink where I was headed, a man approached my door and opened it before I even noticed his arrival. In one swift movement, he communicated what he was after. Grabbing the back of my neck, the man twisted his fingers into my hair and yanked my head away from his, so that my head craned towards the ceiling in the back of the jeep, and I could no longer see his face. His mammoth build began to heave itself into the car, as he reached across my body towards the keys that dangled from the engaged ignition. I flailed a helpless arm, and caught his face with the side of my hand. “Bitch . . .” he warned.
My hand then landed on the gearshift. I pulled it from first to neutral, the stripped gear retching out with a metallic squawk, and the car began to slowly roll backwards down the incline where I had parked. To this day, I do not know how I came to do that. My instincts whispered soft, clear instructions and my body shouted them out in actions. The man, who was half inside my car, felt the momentum and was forced to abandon his entrance. He shoved me with frustration, and then, he noticed the parking brake and pushed it down. The jeep lurched to a halt. He climbed back in. Again, my instincts spoke. Push! they instructed. I put my sixteen-year-old hands on his brawny, thirty-something chest, and felt a strange surge of strength course through my arms. The man lost his balance, and fell from my car. My senses put the car into first and drove it away for me, out of the parking lot, and safely across four lanes of traffic that I still do not remember crossing.
I spoke not one word to this man who carried on a monologue of actions. Although both of us knew what he wanted and neither of us knew if he would obtain it, this man and I conversed in silent clarity. We both articulated physical communication that stemmed from private words inside us, each of us “discussing” among our inner-selves how we felt about the situation. I do not know where my survival instincts came from, or how they knew the things they did, but I heard them. I recognized the voice they spoke in. It was my own, although I did not understand how that could be. I have never heard anything like that again; those shift instructions, put the car in neutral, and push. These words that resonated in my exact vocal tone, have not spoken to me like they did that day, seven years ago. The words were loud and clear. Actions, I believe, do not always speak louder than words. Actions and words are in cahoots. We are used to only hearing half of their
conversation.
My mother underwent brain surgery immediately after an aneurysm erupted in her temporal lobe, five years ago. Following the operation she had a stroke, as the doctors predicted she might. After fulfilling that expectation, she had another. The next step was to enter a coma, from which we thought she would take no more steps. After a few comatose weeks, my mother proved us wrong. For the next two months of hospitalization, our family would witness the full range of powers of the human brain. Specifically, the power of communication.
At first, every day was different when we entered the hospital ward. Mostly, she slept. When she was awake, there was always a new
adventure in frustration awaiting my father, brother and me. Sometimes my mother babbled unconscious speeches to an audience she did not recognize, as we nodded in agreement to all her nonsensical points. Some days she though she knew us, and we played along to the roles she assigned.
“Yes, mom,” I lied, “swim practice was great today.” I was not a swimmer. In the hospital, I learned how to tread water before I sank into the sea of her confusion. The doctors warned us that any of these stages of her thought process and her communication pattern might be permanent, we would have to wait and see. Wait and see. Wait and see. Wade in sea.
“I see,” said my father, nodding to the doctor, as his wife of 25 years cooed sweet gibberish to him. Communication as I knew it was over. Lost for good. My father would not accept this. Weeks passed by like the squares of a calendar; same size, same shape, same consistency, differing only by the little number in the corner that
eventually repeated itself too. One afternoon in late May, something, namely conversation, had changed. When I arrived at the hospital, my father—pale and worn—explained that my mother had begun to use coherent words in structured phrases, but mixed her own made-up language into most sentences.
“Some words we know,” my father said smiling, “others are pretty original.” He walked over to her cot, and took her weak hand in his.
“Hello Hello Hello Hello,” my mother greeted me, in a string of salutations.
“Hi Mom,” I responded, weakly surprised.
“Yes!” she replied. I placed a large stack of get-well cards by her side.
“Look, dear, Kate brought more cards for you,” my father explained. My mother’s eyes grew wide, and she picked them up and frantically shuffled through the pile.
“Oooh! Yes! More cucumbers! I like cucumbers!” She began to count the cards out loud, “One! Two! Three! Four cucumbers! Look how many people like me today!”
Cucumbers? I felt sick to my stomach. She lost interest in the cards before opening most of them, and began to babble in the direction of my father, forgetting about her cucumbers and me. I tried not to listen to my parents’ dialogue and turned my attention to the television in the corner of the hospital room. A commercial came on. My mother stopped babbling and turned her frail neck towards the screen.
“Ooh! I like this!” she insisted, squinting at the t.v. She ran her hands along the sides of the bed, searching for something. She bolted upright, glancing around the room with narrowed eyes. “Where are they?” she mumbled.
“What?” my father asked in a soothing tone, “What do you need, dear?” My mother began to grow more and more frustrated.
I can’t find my . . . my . . . my . . . rigglerts! Where are my rigglerts? Have you seen them? My rigglerts?” she asked, and then called out, “Riiiiiigglerrrrrrrts . . .”
My father looked over at the window. My mother’s ancient pair of black, horn-rimmed glasses, held together at the cracked nosepiece by a worn-out band aid, were lying face down on the sill. Without a moment’s hesitation, my father pointed over the ledge and said, rationally,
“Dear, your rigglerts are over on the gibbledeschnarf.”
“Oh! Is that where I left them?” She reached over and put on her glasses just in time to see the end of her favorite commercial.
My mother made a full recovery, mentally and physically, in less than a year. She speaks perfect English, and can still answer just about everything on Jeopardy. The brain surgeons believe that their acute skills saved my mother’s life. The hospital doctors and nurses and therapists think that certain combinations of medicines and drugs and rehabilitation enabled her to survive. Close friends and family attribute both dumb luck and my mother’s stubborn persistence to bettering her chances of life over death. I believe that it was the gibbledeschnarf that nursed my mother back to health. It put the importance, the seriousness and the truth back into conversation, and saved both of my parents' lives.
Kafka was on to something when he summarized the power of communication in one simple line. If verbal conversation does indeed take the importance out of everything, what forms of communication put it back in? Letters, pillowfights, assaults, surgery, and even the syllable “hi” are branches on the tree of communication, that like any other living thing, will thrive or perish depending on how it is cared for. What Kafka was getting at is that too often conversations are void of sincerity, and although each participant can sense this, the words continue to flow, flooding communication instead of quenching its parched cry for importance, seriousness, and truth. Given the innumerable branches of communication, and whether we adhere to either philosophy—we communicate by what we do say/we communicate by what we do not say—we all experience the effects of miscommunication from time to time. Verbal miscommunication is often our primary introduction to conversation.
If we read the lyrics of Metallica to a baby, in a soft voice that burbles consonants and vowels together and fluctuates through our vocal pitches like a roller coaster of tender speech, the infant will not know the difference between heavy metal and Mother Goose. Unlike babies, once we understand communication, we learn the perils of miscommunication. We are accustomed to using the phrase, “I do not understand what you are saying” but it is not often that we look at this dilemma from the standpoint, “I do not understand how to hear you.” What do we do with communication when it catches us off-guard, when words are non-existent, nonsequitors or even nonsense? Like the gibbledeschnarf, sleep-induced babble, cartoon stationary, angry fists or again, the ever basic hello, all the secrets of communication can be discovered by one word. Asking.
Kate Bertine is a graduate student in creative nonfiction at the University of Arizona. She graduated from Colgate University in 1997. During long episodes of writer’s block, she is a successful triathelete and duathelete. Her work has been published in Blue Mesa Review, The Aspen Times, and The Colgate Scene. She is also the current nonfiction editor for Sonora Review. Her nonfiction essay, “The Gibbledeschnarf: An Essay on Communication” was the winner of this year’s Touchstone graduate nonfiction award.
All rights reserved. Copyright KSU Touchstone 2003
Last updated May 2, 2003