Tangential Dynamics

The gears of garrulous jaws are energized by the long winds of concurrent forces that are, at once, internal/pathological, and external/social. Take, for instance, a dinner party: when the gurgling of stomachs impels tepid conversation from the silence of guests gathered in the living room, it is understood, without mention, that the proceeding chatter of marvel movies is an attempt to accelerate the protracting passage of time before the meal is served; not an invitation to make acquaintances of strangers. This talk becomes smaller under the increasing weight of a communal resentment with a pair of hosts who, forgetting the date of their own dinner party, begin preparing a meager dish of chicken tetrazzini well after the first of their unexpected guests arrives: a catalyst for the contraction of open speech inside containers/arenas of dialogue now hushed and limited to familiarities: friends or family—comfortable social proximities—who recycle jokes and stories and opinions, while the solitary chew hangnails and swipe, absentmindedly, at screens: a front for busyness doubling as deterrent for small talk. Talk, once great, now retreats to shrinking; talk that lacks the seriousness and sincerity of closeness is dismissed as banter; boundless and creative great talk is now replaced by the solemn guest list of serious talk, which has neither the time nor the patience for child-like small talk. This marks a downward trajectory of sociability/collapse of commonality: the inward-folding of innumerable social dimensions to the two-dimensions of screens (personal, if you have a cell phone; communal, in social spaces where the walls glow from the flickering mosaic of flatscreens mounted well above the plane of eye contact); and the draining of existing depths of sociability to the private shallows of predictability where the waters are sterile and boundaries are fixed and firmly established. The screen incites a widespread will to comfortability by offering an alternative to the challenges of intrapersonal reflection/inter-personal communication in the form of a cyber identity that is readily edited, altered, and curated by corresponding external identities. The Mobility of Comfort Like Never Before! Yet, as an individual withdraws from direct conversation with the unfamiliar—audible discourse that cannot be aborted with the click of an ‘X’—their identity fractures further into the chasm separating “real” events from their mediated reenactments—both real and reenactment crumbling into this abyss of hyperreality which expels their impossible blend of dust in a fog that settles and thickens across all civilization, infusing an effusion of drunken laughter from the kitchen which silences a debate amongst the guests regarding the easter egg in the third act of guardians of the galaxy—adding insult to injured egos—and returns the living room to its inaudibly-shrill chords of spiteful fantasy. The scowls of guests stab through the narrow opening between door frames, prowling for a moment’s contact with an unsuspecting host with whom they would communicate disgust, appropriately, through the silent intensity of a gaze—all guests, that is, apart from the desperately far-sighted individual who is positioned in the middle of a tweed-upholstered couch, penetrating the epicenter of tense silence with a glazed stare, and does not/can not sense this hostility culminating in the party’s psychosphere: they draw no connection between the rigid postures of their fellow houseguests and the negligence of their hosts; they are the type to confuse the debilitating silence of prisoners awaiting arraignment with the hush of an audience prior to curtains parting on opening night. And so, during one silent intermission from the natter of computer-generated comic book heroes in the living room, they, the socially inept guest, senses that their moment has arrived; that the floor is finally theirs, and, boldly, they break from the silence, foregoing a predictable point of departure from the previous discussion concerning the girth of the hulk’s jugular vein to promulgate their praises for a boiled peanut joint in an alley off 1st Avenue South…. the one with the cobbled streets made of brick that has not been replaced since 1830…. the place where, if one were to go, they should avoid parking under the first bridge from the north (due to pigeon shit), as well as the third (because they’ll tow your ass quicker than you can lock your car and put your keys in your pocket). The response—a baffled blankness of expressions—fails to register with the boiled peanut connoisseur who uses, most might say abuses, the expanding silence in the living room as an output for the raging currents of thoughts that fill their head until mounting pressures force them out from their mouth in a spew with a duration exponentially proportional to the time elapsed since such a stage last presented itself—a spew that takes aim, with increased volume and verbosity, at any private conversation that encroaches its flow—the diuretic flow of the logorrheic—the sub-symptom of a symptom found listed under an array of mental disorders outlined in the DSM V—a manual for modern cultures with meandering definitions of sanity; with a loosening grip on a predetermined reality—cultures which, in the faces of writers and believers of such manuals, only truly flourish and evolve in those outer-social spaces of multiple dimensions—dimensions that unfold from within the boundaries of the recognizable world and unravel beyond the realm of intuitive social dynamics. The ideal candidate for mapping these outer-social spaces must have uninhibited access (a backstage pass) to the silence of their vacuous depths. The ideal candidate is the boiled peanut connoisseur is the logorrheic, seeing that the logorrheic-as-cartographer senses unimaginable emptiness exuding from the silence of social spaces—the silence of potential voices represented as static points dissolving into a void of potential communication/connection—and, out of fevered anxiety, attempts to re-fuse the lines of communication through pathologically/unaware distances of language, i.e., what they lack in immediate social understanding is compensated for/magnified in their comprehension of these outer-expanses of silence. The Logorrheic circumnavigates social spaces at the insistence of an inscrutable compulsion: theirs is a course that they blindly follow, and follow blindly, into the void outlying common communications. The blusterer, the loudmouth, The One Who Talks Loud, Says Nothing…. only these awkward few are capable of exploring the outer workings of communication and returning, via logorrheic expression, the vitality of spontaneous voice to social spaces.