Austin Kleon

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We all have three voices

A (painful) entry from my 1911 Roget’s Thesaurus

When John Hendrickson and I were talking about his memoir, Life on Delay: Making Peace With A Stutter, I asked him about the advice to “find your voice” when your voice so often betrays you.*

He said this beautiful thing that I keep thinking about:

“We all have three voices: the one we think with, the one we speak with, and the one we write with. When you stutter, two of those are always at war.”

The more I think about it, the more I feel like these voices, if not warring, are always in a weird dance with each other.

Even if you’re fluent, your voice is constantly saying things that your thinking voice disagrees with and needs to correct.

If you’re someone like me, you hear yourself say things with your speaking voice that you haven’t heard your thinking voice say. (Tristan Tzara, obviously not an introvert or a person who stutters, said, “Thought is formed in the mouth.”)

If you’re a writer, your writing voice consistently says things your thinking voice hasn’t said yet, and there’s often a tension between your speaking voice and your writing voice. A writer friend, soon after meeting me in person, said she liked my blackout poems, but she didn’t think they were in the same voice I speak with.

These tensions can be painful, but they also contain energy and possibility. Joe Brainard, another writer who stuttered, said, “Writing, for me, is a way of ‘talking’ the way I wish I could talk.”

* I realize now I was stealing the subtitle of Jake Wolff’s “A Stutterer’s Guide To Writing Fiction.” 

Our stutter

My 8-year-old son who stutters has a Korg Volca Beats drum machine that has a “stutter” function. The stutter function makes every beat sound cooler, much like my son’s stuttering has made my world sound cooler, and I find it poetic that the stutter function’s knobs are “time” and “depth,” because I feel that my son’s stutter, over time, has made me deeper.

There’s a wonderful This American Life segment, “Time Bandit,” about the musician JJJJJerome Ellis, who says:

Sometimes I refer to it as “my stutter,” but sometimes I refer to it as “the stutter.” […] Because to me, stuttering is not bound to my body, that it is a phenomenon that occurs between me and whoever I’m speaking to. I like to think of it like it’s something that we share.

Ellis’s distinction sank in so deeply that I made it my own and misremembered him saying, “our stutter.” Because that’s what it feels like in this house: We have a stutter. It’s something that we share.

Our Stutter.

* * *

Around Christmastime, my son started stuttering differently and more frequently.

“Why are you so glitchy?” my 5-year-old asked him. “I’m worried about you.”

We might’ve been worried, too, except that we’d been through it before. The previous Christmas, we’d called Dr. Courtney Byrd at the Lang Stuttering Institute here in Austin, Texas, and she assured us that it was perfectly normal for stuttering to change during the holidays and that even good, exciting events can cause changes in stuttering.

So now, when Our Stutter changes, our listening changes.

We listen with more love.

That is not to say that our patience is endless. My son, like many an 8-year-old, talks all the time. Sometimes we wish he would shut up already and let us have some peace!

Which reminds me of another Dr. Byrd story. I once said to her, “I’m just glad it hasn’t stopped him yet.” And she replied, “There is no ‘yet.’ If we keep doing what we’re doing and we do it right, there is no ‘yet.’”

There is no yet. As somebody who is constantly imagining the worst, that stopped me dead in my tracks. You could write a whole book with those words: There is no yet.

* * *

I continue to be grateful for Our Stutter. Our Stutter has opened me up, sent me down new paths of inquiry, introduced me to new ways of thinking, put me in touch with some amazing people, and made me aware of a whole world that I was missing.

A lot is going on in the stuttering world right now. We have a president who stutters!

The Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation was so impressed with Dr. Byrd’s vision at the institute that they gave a huge amount of money to establish a new center for stuttering education and research. As part of the celebration for this event, I was invited to join a Zoom call full of writers and creative people who stutter. I was blown away by their stories, and how often their stuttering influenced their creative work.

If you are new to the stuttering world, welcome. If you’d like an orientation, I highly recommend this list of work by and about people who stutter by journalist Barry Yeoman.

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The comedy of survival

One of the most intriguing and helpful books I’ve read all year is Joseph Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival, first published in 1974. I heard about the book years ago in an essay by Mandy Brown, whose wonderful website, A Working Library, has several posts about it.

As Brown notes, Meeker argues that Western Civilization is mostly founded on the “tragic mode,” inspired by the great tragedies in which a “larger-than-life character attempts to bend the world to his (and it’s always his) image.” The character’s success “is also his undoing,” and tragedies end in bloodshed, death, and a funeral of some kind. Our civilization has been built on the tragic idea that we can bend nature to our will, the result of which has been complete ecological catastrophe.

Meeker proposes an alternative for surviving our disastrous times: the “comic mode,” inspired by comedy:

Comedy is not a philosophy of despair or pessimism, but one which permits people to respond with health and clear vision despite the miseries the world has to offer. Its mode is immediacy of attention, adaptation to rapidly changing circumstances, joy in small things, the avoidance of pain wherever possible, the love of life and kinship with all its parts, the sharpening of intelligence, complexity of thought and action, and strategic responsiveness to novel situations. It permits people to accept themselves and the world as they are, and it helps us make the best of the messes around us and within us.

Upon reading this, I was immediately struck by how well the tragic and comic modes map to Brian Eno’s concept of genius vs. scenius, with one being a egosystem and the other being an ecosystem. Our world is an ecosystem in which our only real chance at survival as a species is cooperation, community, and care, but it’s being lead by people who believe in an egosystem, run on competition, power, and self-interest.

Comedy and scenius show us a way forward. A chance at survival that, in Meeker’s words, “depends upon our ability to change ourselves rather than our environment, and upon our ability to accept limitations rather than to curse fate for limiting us.” Comedy, like scenius, gives all the characters in the story a surviving role and a chance to live to see another day.

So how do we get into the comic mode? In the third edition of the book, published in 1997, Meeker argued that play was the quickest way in. Giving ourselves over to open-ended and improvisational activities, like music, art, gardening, etc.

Humor and jokes, too, of course. I’ve been struck in recent years by how many activists and writers — especially women! — emphasize the importance of a sense of humor for survival.

bell hooks: “We cannot have a meaningful revolution without humor. Every time we see the left or any group trying to move forward politically in a radical way, when they’re humorless, they fail.” 

Mary Beard: “A bit of outrage is good, but having your only rhetorical register as outrage is always going to be unsuccessful. You’ve got to vary it. Sometimes, some of the things that sexist men do just deserve to be laughed at.”

Gloria Steinem, when asked why she’s lasted so long:

If I had to pick one reason, it’s because I have a sense of humor. That’s crucial. It allows you to laugh at yourself and say when you’re wrong. One of the things that Native American culture understands and we probably don’t is that laughter is the only emotion you can’t compel. You can’t make anybody laugh unless they want to. I suspect that the people who last the longest, who continue to be trustworthy, are people with a sense of humor.

Camille Paglia: “Comedy is a sign of balanced perspective on life and thought. Humorlessness should be grounds for dismissal. ”

Comedy is also a crucial survival strategy as a parent.

Tragedy vs. comedy maps to Alison Gopnik’s The Gardener and the Carpenter, in which she argues that being a good parent is about being a “gardener,” and nurturing children as a plant with the right air and soil, etc. (I should note that I love the gardening half of the metaphor, but I don’t think the other half is right: carpentry seems to me to be an artisanal trade, which requires a sensitivity to materials similar to gardening. Do not some pieces of wood cry out to be certain objects and not others? Think of the story of Pinocchio, which literally starts out with a talking log, and is about the perils of trying to “shape” young boys.)

In the tragic mode of being a parent, you rigidly try to shape your kid into your ideal of a Great person; in the comic mode, you discover who the child is, together, with constant adaptation and improvisation.

An excerpt from Charlie Chaplin’s Own Story explains how I feel about being a parent:

Life itself is a comedy—a slap-stick comedy at that. It is always hitting you over the head with the unexpected. You reach to get the thing you want—slap! bang! It’s gone! You strike at your enemy and hit a friend. You walk confidently, and fall. Whether it is tragedy or comedy depends on how you look at it. There is not a hair’s breadth between them.

Here is another tangent: Tragic and comic modes also seem to me like they could map to the “medical” and “social” models of disability.

Take stuttering, for example.

In a tragic or medical mode, stuttering is seen as a pathological impairment you try to “fix” with endless hours of speech therapy, trying to turn the person who stutters into a “normal” speaker. In the comic or social mode, stuttering is only a disability if it’s made one by the people surrounding the person who stutters. Given the right environment, supportive and understanding of difference, a person who stutters can teach us new things about time and patience, silence and rhythm, and the art of conversation.

I could go on, but I need to stop there for now.

A question we could all ask ourselves every morning: Do you want to live in a tragedy or a comedy?

I know which one works best for me.

“Less blood. More drink.”

More notes on stuttering

Back in June, I wrote about writers and stuttering, and how many writers feel that their stutters make them better writers. In the past few weeks, there have been two notable essays written by journalists who stutter:

1. In his essay “Stammer Time, Barry Yeoman writes about how he and other stutterers are starting to feel that fluent speech is not only overrated, but that stuttering can be a gift, both to those who stutter and the people around them.

I’m most interested by the idea that stuttering messes with our notions of mechanical time and efficiency:

“There’s something interesting about stuttering in a world that moves at increasingly breakneck speed,” says [Joshua] St. Pierre, the Alberta professor. For most of human history, we measured time in lunar cycles, menstrual cycles, agricultural cycles. Today we rely on “clock time,” standardized and designed for industrial production. Clock time values efficiency; it has no patience for silences and repeated syllables. “Stuttering highlights that fact: that clock time runs roughshod over all these other ways of creating time, but that they still persist and are still important,” he says.

Elsewhere, Yeoman has written about how he thinks his stuttering makes him better at his job. One, it helps him empathize with marginalized people, and two, he knows how to “shut up and listen.”

2. In The Atlantic, John Hendrickson wrote about “Joe Biden’s Stutter, and Mine:”

Yet even when sharing these old, hard stories, Biden regularly characterizes stuttering as “the best thing that ever happened” to him. “Stuttering gave me an insight I don’t think I ever would have had into other people’s pain,” he says. I admire his empathy, even if I disagree with his strict adherence to a tidy redemption narrative.

One of the frustrations Hendrickson writes about in the piece is how Biden speaks about stuttering as something that’s behind him, something he’s overcome. (“I don’t say I was ‘cured,’” says another stutterer, James Earl Jones. “I just work with it.”) “The underlying message,” Hendrickson writes, “­beat it or bust—is out of sync with the normalization movement.”

“I don’t want to hear Biden say ‘I still stutter’ to prove some grand point; I want to hear him say it because doing so as a presidential candidate would mean that stuttering truly doesn’t matter—for him, for me, or for our 10-year-old selves.”

Yesterday, Yeoman tweeted, “With today’s attention on Biden’s stutter, here’s a contrast: @KatarMoreira, a politician in Portugal who embraces how she speaks. ‘I stutter when I speak, not when I think. The danger in parliament is individuals who stutter when they think.’”

Filed under: stuttering

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