A Voice

Henry and Oliver always ask whether Sophie will ever talk. At one point in their short lives they were pretty obsessed with it. I know that candles on birthday cakes were blown out with that wish and more than one coin was thrown into a fountain with that wish. There is something about the spoken word that defines our humanity and without words, we are all hard put to define Sophie. It's ironic, too, that I am somewhat obsessed by words. Not just by what they signify but by the words themselves. The words on paper, the words out of the poet's mouth, on the paper.

I have been so enamoured of words since I was a little, little girl and even today I am most thrilled, most excited by speech and by the careful and beautiful work wrought by writers. Sophie, though, is silent and has no words and I have felt bound, somehow, to defining her through words. Being an other's voice. And when I read, I don't actually hear the person writing -- I have a couple of CDs of writers reading their work and the combination of words and speech is almost too much to bear. It's him, I think when I listen to W.B. Yeats reciting in his thick Irish accent "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." His words and his voice make me shiver and I'm not sure whether it's the words or the voice or knowing that it's Him.

Michael told me that NPR did a special today about some recordings of British and American writers. The BBC possesses the only, actual voice of Virginia Woolf reading for a radio broadcast for over eight minutes. You can listen to it here. When I listened to it, I kept thinking, It's Her, it's her, that sound, those proper vowels and streams of thought are embodied in voice.

I'm rambling, now, but I had some kind of thread going -- the notion of our own voice and Sophie's lack of one. My intense devotion to word and voice, really, and struggle to understand the silent in Sophie. The ineffable.