Speaking

This episode explores speaking — not as communication or self-expression, but as the act that crosses the distance between inner life and the presence of another. Drawing on the peep show confession scene in Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas and an excerpt from Anne Carson's long poem "The Glass Essay," the episode moves between film, poetry, and the consulting room to ask what becomes possible when someone who has been watching in silence finally begins to speak.

Excerpts from Paris, Texas (1984, directed by Wim Wenders, written by Sam Shepard and L.M. Kit Carson, featuring Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski). Poem excerpt from "The Glass Essay" by Anne Carson, from Glass, Irony and God (Knopf, 1995), read by Yerina Rock.

Script, music, and production by Jonathan David Moss.

Listener correspondence is welcome at contact@publicreveries.com

Transcript

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Travis 1:00

And for the first time, he wished he were far away. Lost in a deep, vast country where nobody knew him. Somewhere without language or streets. And he dreamed about this place without knowing its name. And when he woke up, he was on fire. There were blue flames burning the sheets of his bed. He ran through the flames toward the only two people he loved. But they were gone. His arms were burning, and he threw himself outside and rolled on the wet ground. Then he ran. He never looked back at the fire. He just ran. For five days he ran like this until every sign of man had disappeared.

Narrator 3:13

She cannot see him. She can only hear a deep, vast country without language. The only people who matter are gone. Running without end. Never looking back. Every sign of man has disappeared. He reaches her. She calls him by his name. This is Public Reveries . Somehow, even after years of building trust that this kind of moment is actually an opening to something deeper, I also feel a kind of quiet panic. What if there's really nothing to say? Sometimes the silence feels full, almost pressurized. Other times, it feels genuinely empty. The experience of not knowing where to start, and the experience of feeling there's nothing there. They look the same from the outside, but feel completely different in the room. In either case, together, we begin to speak anyway. Sometimes I hear a kind of voice whispering, Say whatever comes to mind. Say it even if you don't want to. Let your mind drift, like a traveler watching the scenery from a railway carriage. Even when they do find the words, they might say, I'm sorry for going off subject, or, this might be a tangent. What if what we talk about matters less than the experience that speaking creates? What would it be like to speak without yet knowing what you're talking about, or to whom you're speaking? Let's return to the scene where we began. The 1984 Vim Venders film, Paris, Texas, begins with a haggard man walking through the desert in a sport coat, a tie, and a red baseball cap. He looks like he's been out there for weeks. When he finally stumbles back into civilization, he refuses to speak. For days, nothing. Then fragments, single words, only in response to questions. We learn his name is Travis. He had a wife, Jane, and a young son. Something devastated this family four years ago, but nothing about it is spoken directly. Sometime later, he finds Jane working in a peep show on the outskirts of Houston. Men come to private booths to look through a one-way mirror at women in rooms decorated to look like other places. A hotel, a coffee shop, a swimming pool. Most of them come not for what you'd expect, but to talk. To speak to someone who can hear them but can't see them. Who will listen without ending the conversation. A confession booth in a casino. Travis sits in the dark. Jane comes in on her side of the glass. For the first time since he ran from their breakdown out into the desert, he sees her.

Jane 8:49

Is this your first visit here?

Travis 8:53

Yes.

Jane 9:01

You realize that I can't see you, even though you can see me. Well, that takes a little getting used to. I'll just listen. All right. I'm a real good listener.

Narrator 9:28

On this first visit, he tries to speak to her, but he struggles, becomes flustered, and leaves. Another day, he comes back and tries again. He sees her through the glass, turns the chair around, so that he can't see her either, and picks up the phone. This time, he tells her their story. She doesn't know who he is, or that the story he's telling her is her own.

Travis 10:00

I knew these people.

Jane 10:02

What people?

Travis 10:05

These two people. They were in love with each other. And together they turned everything into a kind of an adventure. She liked that. Just an ordinary trip down to the grocery store was full of adventure. They were always laughing at stupid things. We like to make her laugh. Because all they wanted to do was be with each other. They were always together.

Jane 10:54

Sounds like they were very happy.

Travis 10:58

Yes, they were. They were real happy. And he he loved her more than he ever felt possible.

Narrator 11:14

Travis speaks for a long time. As he goes on and starts to describe the ways it went wrong and how he destroyed their family. She begins to recognize him.

Travis 11:29

He was surprised at himself because he didn't feel anything anymore. All he wanted to do was sleep. And for the first time, he wished he were far away. Lost in a deep, vast country where nobody knew him. Somewhere without language or streets.

Narrator 11:59

She says his name. He thinks that's the end of it. But Jane asks him not to leave. To hear her too. She turns away so they can't see each other.

Jane 12:14

Don't go yet.

Narrator 14:17

At first, Travis is stunned to look at Jane. Later, he turns away and evens the terrain. Neither of them can see. Then he asks her to turn off the light so she can see him. Then she sits on the floor out of view, back turned, and begins to speak to him. They try every configuration, except the one they can't bear, facing each other directly. The past is enormous and unspeakable, and they're trying to be in the room with each other anyway. What they do here is choreograph who looks, who is seen, who speaks, and who listens. They move between tenses. He speaks in a distant third person. She addresses a you, but the more vivid you is the one that she used to make speeches to in her mind. The dance brings the past close enough to live in its shadow. To speak here is to come close to what was never quite experienced when it happened, but not too close. Too close would mean feeling the blue flames cremating their marriage bed. Too close would mean not surviving the long desert. Too close would mean Travis living with who he was and what he did to the only two people he loved. The words circle and tell a story, with enough space that the flames give off warmth rather than singe. Jane and Travis speak to each other like pilgrims circumambulating the shrine of their shared devastation. They never make it to the center, but they don't run away, and they don't go silent. They speak their way about as close to the truth of their relationship as they can get without burning up. And that might be just enough for some kind of life to continue. He missed his session on Monday because of a word. Jane made long speeches in her mind to the man who wasn't there. My patient did something different. He registered the need.

Anne Carson Poem 18:57

She watched God and humans and moor wind and open night. She watched eyes, stars, inside, outside actual weather. She watched the bars of time which broke. She watched the poor core of the world wide open. To be a watcher is not a choice. There's nowhere to get away from it, no ledge to climb up to, like a swimmer who walks out of the water at sunset, shaking the drops off. It just flies open. To be a watcher is not in itself sad or happy, although she uses these words in her verse as she uses the emotions of sexual union in her novel, grazing with euphemism, the work of watching. But it has no name. It is transparent. Sometimes she calls it thou. Meanwhile, Emily continued to brush into the carpet the question: Why cast the world away? For someone hooked up to thou, the world may have seemed a kind of half-finished sentence. But in between, the neighbor who recalls her coming in from a walk on the moors with her face lit up by a divine light, and the sister tells us Emily never made a friend in her life is a space where the little raw soul slips through. She spent most of the hours of her life brushing the carpet, walking the moor, or watching. She says it gave her peace. Yet her poetry from beginning to end is concerned with prisons, vaults, cages, bars, curbs, bits, bolts, fetters, locked windows, narrow frames, aching walls. While there are many ways of being held prisoner, I'm thinking as a stride over the moor. As a rule, after lunch, mother has a nap and I go out to walk. The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April carve into me with knives of light. Something inside it reminds me of childhood. It is the light of the stalled time after lunch when clocks tick, and hearts shut, and fathers leave to go back to work, and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering something they never tell. You remember too much, my mother said to me recently. Why hold on to all that? And I said, Where can I put it down? She shifted to a question about airport. The last time I saw Law was a black night in September. Autumn had begun, my knees were cold inside my clothes. A chill fragment of moon rose. He stood in my living room and spoke without looking at me. Not enough spin on it, he said of our five years of love. Inside my chest, I felt my heart snap into two pieces, which floated apart. And now it was so cold, it was like burning. I put out my hand to touch his. He moved back. I don't want to be sexual with you, he said. Everything gets crazy. But now he was looking at me. Yes, I said, as I began to remove my clothes. Everything gets crazy. When nude, I turned my back because he likes the back. He moved on to me. Everything I know about love and its necessities, I learned it that one moment when I found myself thrusting my little red, burning backside like a baboon at a man who no longer cherished me. There was no area of my mind not appalled by this action, a part of my body that could have done otherwise. But to talk of mind and body begs the question. Soul is the place, stretched like a surface of millstone grit between body and mind, where such necessity grinds itself out. Soul is what I kept watch on all that night. Law stayed with me. We lay on top of the covers, as if it weren't really a night of sleep and time, caressing and singing to one another in our made-up language, like the children we used to be. That was a night that centered heaven and hell, as Emily would say. We tried to fuck, but he remained limp, although happy. I came again and again, each time accumulating lucidity, until at last I was floating high up near the ceiling, looking down on the two souls clasped there on the bed, with their mortal boundaries visible around them like lines and a map. I saw the lines harden. He left in the morning. It is very cold walking into the long, scraped April wind. This time of the year, there is no sunset, just some movement inside the light, and then sinking away.

Narrator 25:35

Nowhere to put down memory. Nowhere to receive the little raw soul that slips through. For Emily, and perhaps for Carson, the act of watching becomes their primary relationship, the beloved for whom they keep vigil. Yet to be a watcher of the world without someone to speak it to is its own kind of prison. All one can do there is brush the carpet again and again. Rumination is often mistaken for circling endlessly. To ruminate is to metabolize something fibrous and dense, to draw out its nutrients, just slowly and with great patience. When the stories remain untold, or there is no one to listen, they congeal into bolts, fetters, cages, aching walls. The world empties, and a shadow falls over the soul. It has no way to slip through. Only speech passes through the glass. Carson's mother chooses not to hold on, to remain silent in the face of all that. The nap can't be disturbed by too many questions. Clocks tick and hearts shut. Without having a way to speak, Travis can only wander the desert, and Mother stands over the sink, not telling anyone. Where Travis and Jane circle slowly closer, Carson disrobes and turns her back. She stops just watching and reaches out her hand, knowing that everything will get crazy. She lets the body lead where the mind and language cannot go. Offering herself up in this way also appalls her, and yet she insists the conflict itself misses the point. The grind is the working through of the grit spread across the surface of her soul. There is no ending to this working through, just movements in the light. People wander a landscape constituted by the others they have lost, or perhaps never fully had. When speech begins to lead, it gets less clear who is speaking and who is being addressed. The voices of the absent start to find their way in. The room fills with spectral traces of the people who mattered once and do again now. As I listen, I begin to feel something that isn't mine, as though I'm being conjured by the patient's absent loved ones. Why do I feel this surge of pride, this broken-hearted distance, this searing pain? Are these not my own? Until someone listens, allows themselves to be momentarily possessed by our broken places, our absent others, we have nowhere to put them down. Love reaches out its hand towards the April sky and meets a locked window in September. To lose our place, to forget what we were saying, and to whom.