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Readings

from “A Visitor’s Observations”

We are fortunate that a scholar of what we would today call linguistic anthropology visited the Vocational School during the Founder’s lifetime and was able to report on what he saw there. Unfortunately nothing more is heard from him³ after the truncated text—scarcely more than a pile of handwritten notes toward a book never written, and in no particular order—that appears here for the first time, discovered by myself in a mixed lot of old papers auctioned off by the Cincinnati branch (two old biddies) of the American Spiritualist & Temperance Society. As its length may try the reader’s patience, I have broken it into sections; those eager to read them consecutively may of course do so by skipping ahead. —Ed.

How I Conceived the Plan to Visit the Vocational School

I credit my involvement with the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children to a difficulty with the letter M.

Born into the hardworking, hardheaded middle class, educated expensively by the indifferent benevolence of a wealthy great-aunt to whom my parents applied for aid, and who had (and sought) no nearer relation to me, I had found myself a niche in the same small college in which I had recently completed my own graduate studies, dutifully inserting into the minds of the young what had been inserted into mine by my predecessor, recently and opportunely retired. I knew myself to be fortunate but was a martyr to indigestion and, dare I say it, boredom. But in my thirties, something put a period to my boredom in a most unwelcome way: I developed a stutter. How this delighted the young m-m-misses and m-m-misters who were my students, and how I suffered! It was in the search for a remedy that I came across a promotional publication of the Vocational School.

I found, not a cure, but a thesis.

I had long speculated that language had its origins in mourning. Without the desire to speak to and of the beloved dead, we would not have troubled to supplant simple grunts and gestures with words. Everyday necessity cannot account for the disproportionate ostentation of every known language. We do not need descriptive flourishes to say, “’Ware tiger!” or “Give me food!” No, language is the equivalent of those great monuments to the dead—your Sphinxes, your pyramids—the construction of which mulcted generations of the living.

I smoothed the pamphlet on my desk, and copied down an address. Here, finally, was direct evidence of the link between language and loss. If the Vocational School did not mourn their losses, since for them the dead never really departed, that did not confute my hypothesis. They had merely abbreviated the passage from loss to language, achieving consolation so quickly that the grief was never felt. And yet grief lay behind everything they did. I believed that before I ever saw those dark cornices thrusting into the oblivious blue of a summer sky, the stricken eyes locked in that imperious face.

On the Architecture of the Vocational School

The Vocational School is a huddle of mostly elderly buildings, much abused by the weather, and dank even in summer. The Chapel of the Word Church is the one recent addition. (As I came up the drive, I glimpsed above the dilapidated carriage house the Chapel’s narrow spire, like a finger raised to shush the sky.)

Did I say that language was like those great works of memorial architecture erected by the ancients? I found that for the Vocational School, architecture was language. Beyond the Chapel’s arched doorway was an introduction in three dimensions to Vocational School philosophy. The building alluded in its form to both Speaking Ear and Hearing Mouth. The nave was tiered, or one might say whorled, like an ear, and the vault ridged like the roof of a mouth. The children seated in the nave made up the Tongue. (Dressed identically in red flannel short pants, jackets, and caps, they looked a bit like those quaint statuettes known as Gartenzwerge.) Members of the faculty designated as Teeth, wearing peaked cowls of starched flannel of an ivory hue, lined the first tier above them and occasionally descended to impose discipline. Circulating freely through the congregation, the Salivary—advanced students, wearing large, pink, papier-mâché collars resembling the Egyptian usekh, and representing the pharyngeal opening—distributed gags, erasers, and other devotional items.

At the focus of the theater, the Analphabetical Choir was ranged in ascending tiers to left and right of a great hole, angled downward, and terminating out of sight of the congregation, with at the bottom a stoup kept brimming with the saliva of the devout, collected in spittoons throughout the ceremony. (I have contributed my tittle of froth.) In front of the hole, though not blocking it from view, was a standing screen of black paper with a small aperture through which the heavily rouged mouth of the Headmistress might address the congregation. The disconcerting effect was of a mouth, on the verge of being swallowed by a much larger mouth, turning back to utter a few last, barely audible words—“Don’t do it!” perhaps, or more mundanely, “White vinegar is sometimes efficacious in removing stains.”

If the Chapel was an educational tract, what was the main school building? The original structure, formerly the Cheesehill Home for Wayward Girls, dates back to 1841, almost sixty years before the school was founded, but in it the lines of a once-dignified building in a restrained Victorian style have been lost under additions so peculiar as to raise doubt in the mind of at least one observer as to whether they could be described as architecture at all, or might not better be classed, to quote Jim Jimson’s Notable Architectural Abortions of Old New England, as “biological growths of the persuasion mushroom.”⁴ But those who, suspending judgment, pass under its preposterous porticos to amble down its hallways and faint in its fainting rooms will find a kind of fascination stealing over them. Without perceiving anything obviously outlandish, one begins to feel that one has entered another world in which planar surfaces curve; parallel lines meet; and up, down, left, and right have all been subtly twisted out of true.

One day the Headmistress handed me the key to this mystery with one of her characteristically gnomic remarks: “A building, like a person, is a free-standing hole.” Like all holes, it has a special affinity with the dead; only consider how many more haunted houses there are than haunted paddocks or playing fields. But this affinity can be amplified, tuned. When a hallway is adjusted with dropped ceilings and wainscoting to the exact proportions of the trachea, larynx, or oral cavity, who knows but what it may even speak.

I do not know whether this contributed to the eerie way that, when the wind blew up from the valley in the late afternoon, and was channeled down the hallways through a great oculus that was winched open at this hour (in which a wedge-shaped piece of wood, very thin at one end, acted as a reed), the hall and indeed the whole building hummed with a note so deep that it was more felt than heard—a mood, not a sound. The doors to the classrooms opening and closing acted as finger holes to a flute, changing the pitch. Over time I was able to pick out more and more elements of this symphony, as for example the grace notes supplied by the almost inaudible whistles and peeps that issued from tiny holes or spiracles drilled in the walls here and there.

After some months of listening to this curious music I realized that I was anticipating its changes. Unlikely as it seemed, the students, teachers, and menials passing through the doors did so in an intricate but repeating pattern. Remarkable! Perhaps the Headmistress had used musical principles to schedule both classes and the rounds of the domestic help—a logistical challenge, no doubt, but theoretically possible. But the building was a perpetual bustle at this time of day: teachers flapping by in a whirl of black robes; students, some loitering, some hurrying, their oversized shoes slipping off their heels to percuss the floor at every step; maids with expressionless faces and exaggeratedly humble posture, passing up, down, and across the halls, closing doors, opening others. Could all this activity really be choreographed? And if so, what was it for?

I was offered on different occasions various answers: The house was a receiving device, in which the students could be made to vibrate in tune with the dead. The house was a pedagogical tool. The house was a philosophical disquisition about language, death, and no doubt, architecture too, given that capacity for recursion for which language is notorious. It was all these things. But I did not really understand its song until I learned who⁵ had been a tenant at the Cheesehill Home for Wayward Girls, and saw that the house was also a ghost story.

I felt, I would say, relieved. Not just that I had saved my theory by finding the link I had predicted between language (in its architectural form) and loss. But also that there was a familiar, a human basis for the grief that came over me in those moments when, at twilight in the gardens, watching a firefly make its slow way through the still air, I caught a snatch of the school’s eerie song, and looked back to see a woman’s head in silhouette, turning away from a lit window . . .

You may judge how far I had already come from conventional thinking. Ghosts? A commonplace. But the half-heard, half-imagined song of an old house, that confounded and even, I will admit, frightened me. Why then do I find myself humming it now?—in a manner of speaking, at any rate, it being pitched so deep. I do not transpose it into a higher register. No, I hum it in its own register, which is—as I said—that of emotion: I hum it with my soul. It does not make me happy. But then I have often noticed that the behaviors people feel compelled to repeat are not necessarily those that make them happy.

There is a whole wing of the school, incidentally, that has no material form. It exists only in the form of verbal descriptions, rumors, and reminiscences.