Friday, February 05, 2010

On Euphemisms and Their Limits

I had a close encounter with dentistry lately that sent me rocketing from flesh to philosophy and back again.  I promise I won’t make you linger in the dentist’s chair with me, but that is how it began, on a recent ice block of a Tuesday morning, with me tipped backwards, trying mentally to escape the humiliating construction project underway on my face.  When the grinders and polishers were being put away, the dental assistant suddenly began applying a lot of cotton to my mouth.  “Goodness,” she said urgently, “You are exhibiting a lot of irritation!” The dentist frowned at my mouth and gestured for more cotton, and echoed, “Yes, that is QUITE a lot of irritation.” More murmurs, more hasty cotton-blotting, and it became clear that “irritation” really meant something different.  “Irritation” was a euphemism. A lie, even.  I mouthed, “What’s going on?” and finally got the truth: “Well – don’t try to smile for several hours.  There’s actually quite a lot of blood pooling in your cheek.” With that, I stumbled out to my car, my mouth distorted with packing, and realized freshly that bodies often speak truths that euphemisms try to cover.

I thought of my dental experience as I followed recent campus events at Notre Dame, whose student paper, The Observer, ran a cartoon that tried to joke about hate crimes against gay people, using ugly euphemisms about turning a fruit into a vegetable with a baseball bat.  The cartoon revealed a jaw-dropping comfort level with brutality. But the public rebuttal reminded us of the truth, when hundreds of students, community members and faculty marched onto campus on an arctic afternoon to insist that real lives are at stake in those euphemistic abstractions. All those friendly, outraged, peaceful people marching together under a banner of a rainbow-transformed Golden Dome reminded me of the turning-point speech in Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, in which Baby Suggs, an unchurched preacher, calls her congregation to refuse the racist euphemisms that kept slavery’s violence alive, and to do it by loving one another, loving their own bodies.  She calls to them: “This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved.  Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support … and hear me now, love your heart.”

It’s hard to tell the truth about human violence.  J.D. Salinger, who last week left an ocean of mourning readers behind, paints this problem lavishly on the spare canvas of his story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” about a traumatized war veteran’s final hours before he shoots himself in the head.  Seymour Glass, the sweetly compelling veteran in the story, invents a fantasty about a bananafish with a grade-schooler on the beach, and he finds more sweetness and truth in their fantastic exchanges than in the orbiting grownups who wonder euphemistically about Seymour’s “funny” behavior, and miss the truth of his unfolding crisis.

Since Seymour Glass finds temporary solace from the war at the piano bench, I thought of Salinger’s story last Friday during a night of piano music and poetry that was a fundraiser for the local branch of the Iraqi Student Project.  This grassroots organization brings Iraqi undergraduates to the U.S. so that, given the near collapse of Iraq’s universities, they can complete their educations and return to Iraq to foster hope and regrowth.  As long as these talented students are here, they remind us, bodily, truthfully, of how much is at stake in the euphemisms humans use to justify violence. On that moonlit, sub-zero night, packed into Holy Cross’s chapel, I was grateful for human companionship and also, frankly, for their body heat, as we were washed along on the poetic lilt of an unfamiliar language, photographs of Iraq’s beautiful people, and the piano’s challenging waves of dissonance and harmony.  By the final piece I was undone, but then a baby in the pew behind me began to nurse ecstatically, lip-smackingly, and I was suddenly laughing through my tears, feeling crazily like truths were leaking out of my body, out of all our bodies, a tide that could carry all of us, if we are brave enough to float.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on February 05, 2010 • WVPE's Audio Archive
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