Jack Spicer’s Articulatory Correspondences, or Why Should We Have to Use Our Mouths to Hear Messages?

Abstract

ack Spicer famously blamed his vocabulary for his demise, but as Robin Blaser’s recollection of his final words shows, it is perhaps mouths that gave him more trouble while he lived. On his deathbed, drifting in and out of his alcoholic coma, Spicer’s “speech was a garble,” coming out as “nonsense sounds” as he “struggled to tie his speech to words” and finally “wrenched his body” to produce his last lines (Blaser, The Fire 162). After this, Spicer “tried again, frowned, and failed to put his head and his words together again.” Or, as Blaser puts it in his Astonishment Tapes, “The head and the tongue had separated and you got nothing but a garble” (64). This last moment of heroically trying to marshal his uncooperative body to bequeath a final bit of language to the world sums up Spicer’s life’s work maybe better than the words his body finally (and finally) produces: “My vocabulary did this to me; your love will let you go on” (Blaser, The Fire 163). While Blaser resolves the scene of illegibility into this line on love and language, the struggle to produce that language (to mark that love) highlights the nontrivial effort it takes for our physiology to produce speech. Putting one’s head and words together requires lungs, a diaphragm, vocal chords, the tongue, lips, hard and soft palates, and oral and nasal cavities. As Brandon LaBelle writes, voice and mouth are so wrapped up in each other “that to theorize the performativity of the spoken is to confront the tongue, the teeth, the lips, and the throat; it is to feel the mouth as a fleshy, wet lining around each syllable” B E N J A M I N K O S S A K