1. Traduttore, traditore

 

An inveterate read/write learner, I crave text. A misophonia sufferer, I am particular about what vibrations I want rattling my cochlea. I know I am not alone in finding actors’ voices drowned out by all those shoot-em-up bangs, booms, throbbing subwoofers, and other cinematic onomatopoeia generators. Truly, the art of close captioning is underrated, whole epics wrangled into brackets and footnotes:

 

Human sounds [machine-gun-fire-like laughter] [urinating forcefully] [loudly implied cannibalism]

 

Music [tense, percussive] [unsettling, atonal] [dire synth notes]

 

Ambient noise [cellphone bloops] [demonic mumbling] [audio warbles disconcertingly] 

 

Descriptions that, themselves, defy description [Intensity intensifies] [Spock sobbing mathematically]

 

Text translation fails [These symbols mean stuff in Japanese]

 

Malapropisms and mondegreens that you hope are the fault of poor speech-to-text programs:

 

Read Off the Rent Those Reindeer 

I did my job with a plum 

Firefighters deal with people ejaculating

 

Sound fidelity implies faithfulness, but we all know the distance between what is spoken and what is heard, between what is meant and what is taken, between access and accessibility, between prayer and wishful thinking.  

 

2. How to Lose Your Accent 

 

In kindergarten, I pretended I didn’t know how to read yet. I pretended to struggle with phonics and sounding out words on the blackboard so I could be like everyone else. In high school Spanish, I deliberately flattened my accent. Same reason. Now, that accent is gone, as is most of the language that I grew up with. In every music class and at every mass, I sang as softly as possible. Now, I can only sing goofy, a warbling falsetto parodying corny power ballads that I still secretly love. In the days when I was beautiful, I hid myself beneath baggy clothes and unkempt hair. Now, I look back at the strewn wreckage of all I have crushed out of myself, afraid to be seen, afraid to be heard, afraid to be. 

 

3. Message Deleted

 

One morning, I got to the office to find five voicemail messages had been left on my phone. All left after midnight, all from the same man, all in a language I didn’t understand or even recognize, a voice that seemed to float from out of the aether, crossed wires from another time, another place, another realm altogether. Back in those days, caller ID didn’t log calls, so I couldn’t see their phone number. I had no way to call them back to see if we had a language in common. I listened to the messages several times, trying to pick out a phrase or a name, part of me wondering if I was really here in my cubicle after all, or if I was still asleep, having one of those dreams where someone is telling me something very urgent and important that I know I won’t remember after I wake up. 

 

4. Last Words 

 

As the dementia set in, my grandfather started calling my grandmother Luz. (Her given name was Maria de la Luz, but she’d always gone by the Americanized Lucy.) In 65 years of marriage, he had never called her Luz before. On his death bed, he kept calling for her, calling for his mother, eyes wide and terrified, fixed on some distant point.

 

Mama, Luz, Mama, Luz 

 

Mother, light, mother, light

 

I am unclear as to whether I was witnessing one life ending, another beginning, or both. I am unclear as to whether he was calling out for what he wanted, or if he was telling us what he was seeing in those final moments. Decades later, I do DMT and way too many mushrooms, trying to simulate the dying brain. Every time, the visions take me back to that moment, the ICU room, the doctor shutting off the ventilator. Every answer is circular, elliptical, life constantly doubling back on itself. 

 

5. Tetragrammaton

 

It is forbidden to say the name out loud. Many four-letter words are considered profane. According to some, God is actually a four-letter word. (My grandfather would have said Dios.) But then, so is love. (Amor.) The unspeakable word of God means to be, and God spoke the world into being. Words are the domain of God, the domain of man. I think when people say that they love God, they’re really saying they love the world. Gabriel spoke one four-letter word to Mohammed: Read. Another four-letter word is joke. Did you hear the one about England and America, two countries separated by a common language? Presumably, man and God have a common language somewhere, but we’ve lost our accent. The phrase “Tower of Babel” does not appear anywhere in the Bible. It is simply “the city and the tower.” The name of the city was actually Bāb-ilim, “gate of God,” for language is a gate and understanding is its key and these mortal tongues are so tragically limited. Is every divine message a breakdown in communication, filtered through our faulty hearing apparatuses, interpreted by our even more faulty brains which are already dying? Is every religious text a collection of eggcorns and holorimes and ambiguous syntax, one big cosmic game of Telephone, two tin cans and a string? Now phones dominate our lives. Don’t leave me on read. Now the whole world is our phones, fiber optics like the Earth’s own nervous system. And England and America aren’t really separate, no more than birth and death are separate, or God and the world, or life and mystery. And we are inseparable, indistinguishable, from the world, from God, from each other. It’s been said that area codes have become like ancestral clan names or heraldry, a marker of your homeland. When we die, they say hearing is the last sense to go, which is why doctors encourage us to talk to our fading loved ones. Shema means “receiving the kingdom of Heaven.” Hear, O, Israel. Trumpets, harps, psalms, a voice ringing out. Be the receiver. Four letters, each one a pillar that holds up the universe. Hello, how may I direct your call?