On Learning How to Be Articulate

Or "Um..."

First, something pleasant for you to listen to while you peruse this article. Think nothing of it — and no, the man is not resting there, but dying.

I have on occasion been accused of articulacy, even eloquence. On others, still more rare if not rare in an absolute sense, I have been put in positions of responsibility where it was my express duty to explain, cajole or entreat someone to do, or convince someone of, something. It has happened bewilderingly often that I have been finagled into leading/having conversations that, while necessary for the health of an undertaking or organisation or collective relationship, no one else wanted to have.

I say it as no self-effacing thing that I am often frustrated by my powers of expression at least as often as I am delighted by them, but it is churlish and, in its way, extremely vain to ignore or deny these flattering reviews of my ability to speak good — for denying them would amount to casting aspersions upon the intellect or intellectual honesty of those who have bestowed such praises upon me, and some of them number among the people I most admire for just these qualities — and so I thought I would recapitulate for the record a conversation [1] I had with a good friend when he asked recently where I’d learned, in as many words to “speak like that.”

You will see from what follows that I do not consider facility with language a mere dressing to human nature’s more substantive qualities, any more than you’d consider Virgil an idle spectator on Dante’s journey through the afterlife’s more challenging terraced paths. Rather, like Virgil, facility with language is the light by which those other qualities steer. For too long we have expressly and resentfully degraded the primacy of language and linguistic skill in the centre of human education, and we are beginning to suffer pronouncedly for it.

I’m not satisfied with that. Here’s how I have tried to fight against it.

How I Learned to Speak as I Do

“The construction of my mode of speech started as a love of the conjuring effect of words in sequence - distinct from an appreciation of pure grammar, but rather an interest in syntactic rhythm, image and symbol. I noticed in school how directly language models and tempers thought, and how I could kind of synchronise linguistic habits, in respect of both form and content, to measurements of my peers’ intellectual levels and capacities. How they spoke wasn’t just how they thought; how they spoke was more or less what they were, at least insofar as what of them was accessible to themselves is concerned.

I realised that so much modern language is about bypassing epistemological objects as holistic obstacles, where older language can fillet them and reveal layers within - this rationalised my feeling that people now seem stupider than the surviving sources from times bygone, which is a prejudice I have tried, I think honestly, to disprove, but which I have never so far been able to. I noticed in my own work that language is also vehicular for the subconscious; that it carries certain hidden conceptions and elaborations of things. The more of it you can use the more hidden stuff it dredges out in train from your within-spaces (I think this is the point of figural poetry as a medium; it is a schooling in information density as is directly made possible through aesthetic elegance and fine construction, and is thus the ultimate rebuke to the customary modern notion that what is beautiful is merely superfluous and does not hold, admit, or allow miraculous metaphysical condensations[2] of, function).

I challenged myself to keep more complex extempories in my head. I codified different registers of linguistic use and tried to apply them first with contextual sensitivity (i.e. as the schema suggested they should be) and then with contextual insensitivity to test the strength of their classification. I chided myself for using filler words. I did not record myself speaking — for my musical exploits had taught me that learning the shape of one’s recorded voice, while useful for executive purposes, trains a very different kind of listening muscle than the one wherein one is able to listen to oneself in real time. Moreover, accustoming your speaking habits to the sound of yourself heard speaking previously moulds your speech to the presumption of its effect, which while effective for some things was not tailored to my aim, which was to actively develop a power of shaping all the components of speech carefully in the very slim moment between when a thought has left your head but not yet arrived at your tongue.

In summum, I tried to speak how I write, and I found people:

a. Found me more persuasive for having done so

b. Found me more likeable/interesting/attractive, presumably in part because my efforts made me look odd, but also because my oddness thus was a matter of my complete commitment to my pursuit; because it amounted to a kind of party trick no one else could do; and because there is something admirable and mysterious in the spectre of the individual adept enough to find their own paths of pursuit and brave enough to go down them (at least I find these things admirable and presume others do likewise)

c. Found themselves stimulated in my company in ways they, apparently, weren’t generally. I was most interested by the small number of people who, after telling me this, cut back the time they spent in conversation with me thereafter.”

This basically is a kind of perfection of spoken communication — I don’t mean that I achieved this then or have yet achieved it, or am ever likely to achieve it on any very consistent basis; simply that I feel I have arrived at the devision of the mode, an understanding of what such perfection in spoken communication looks like.

And, indeed, it has worked for me. I have been able to have, to success, almost every kind of conversation for which one might be called upon in a given context. I live almost completely free of one of the heaviest and most pernicious forms of debt, which is the debt acquired by not being able, by lack of courage or eloquence, to have said what I wish to have, to someone, at a key moment in time. My accounts of this kind are settled. This alone was worth the effort expended to learn what I have, and worth the adorable scepticism of those less generous than my friend and more prone to make inquiries more along the lines of “why the hell do you have to speak using so many long fucking words?”

At my worst, I am a mere dictionary with shoes, who with that tool can give my interlocutors small epicletic gratuities or else a perry combobulation at my, or else their, leisure; and on some days, not unlike today, I feel completely infuriated at a current ongoing spate of inarticulacy, perhaps the natural corollary of the heaviness of the engine I’ve built which, when I don’t have the mental charcoal in-cab, is hard to move.

But at my best, I feel like I live with no barrier at all between what I think and what I am able to say.

This is a privilege.

---

[1] Conversations will likely form more of the bedrock of Heir content going forward. While my other work has generally begun to occupy the ability stores, and take up the type of energy used for, long-form writing, by dint of the very work in question I have more interesting conversations than I’ve ever had before, and I will be happy to share them. As a function of the same set of circumstances, I will also be writing articles that are shorter, a development that, I understand, many of you will find something of a bittersweet relief.

[2] ‘Metaphysical condensation’ — a condensation of something into a space that is, by measurement of the space (physical or figurative) question, too small to ever contain it. Otherwise known as poppinsry, after Mary.