Read by Peter Kenny (second story in podcast, here)
It is not true to say that the dead have come back. That it has been said – and shall no doubt continue to be said among the “panicking classes” – is regrettable, but also rather inevitable. Such pronouncements have a certain romantic appeal, after all, and that is the cornerstone of any good naive theory. However, these claims are founded on a series of culture-bound misunderstandings which necessarily distort our perception of the matter at hand. Cultural baggage cannot help us here: this is not an occurrence which can be understood by appealing to our knowledge of lurid comics, holy books or late-night movies. It is nothing so easy to digest.
The first and most common misapprehension is the assumption that we are discussing some kind of new and heretofore undocumented condition. We are not. The fact of the matter is that said condition has been known of for some time, but it is so slight a thing that most members of society shall not have encountered it.
Those whose work brings them into contact with cadavers, however – cadavers in their natural, non-sanitised state – have been reporting this phenomenon since the early 1960s. It is something which is to some extent familiar to paramedics, morticians, hospital orderlies, care home workers, police officers, even end-of-life counsellors, but which taboo and common courtesy dictate is not discussed outside of these professions.
For several decades now, masking the effects of novae linguae has been accepted as an everyday part of the mortician’s job - that of making cadavers presentable to the general public. It is a simple procedure. A topical anaesthetic administered to the trigeminal and hypoglossal nerves, a relaxant injected into the laryngeal muscles; with the correct dosing these will suppress mechanical activity for long enough that a body can be identified by the next of kin, or paraded for the duration of a funeral, without risk of its causing unusual distress.
And these are the only parts of the cadaver which need to be suppressed. The more sensational accounts of this syndrome might imply that the body in toto regains motor function, but I can assure you that it does not.
The limbs, the eyes, the genitals, the tips of the fingers – all remain quite lifeless, quite inert. No gut motility is ever observed and an EEG fails to detect any activity save in the nerves already mentioned: the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems are both demonstrably dead. The only parts affected are the lips, the larynx, the tongue and the thoracic diaphragm - and the action of the diaphragm is not strong enough to require suppression. Often the breath it creates is so weak that a voice can barely be heard; were a mourner to ever encounter an unsanitised cadaver, they would be less likely to discern words than to hear the thick, dry slapping of its tongue against the insides of its cheeks.
A voice, when it is detectable, can take one of several forms. The sound of some voices is best described as a gentle hissing, rather like a deflating inner tube; some, particularly from newer cadavers, as a soft, slightly raspy bubbling; still others as a reedy squeak, like a blade of grass held taut between two thumbs. As you might expect, such variation is largely due to the condition of the larynx and its degree of desiccation; but this does not seem to wholly account for the quality of the sound.
It is critical to note that even if the vocal cords are rehydrated and the diaphragm manipulated artificially – that is, even if the speech apparatus is restored, as much as possible, to how it was in life – the voice which comes from the cadaver shall not be mistakable for that of the deceased. This voice is its own, distinct entity; I repeat, it is not true to say that the dead have come back because this is not the voice of the person who died.
Sometimes the vocalisations are pitched: they “sing” in a breathy alto, like a choirboy turning to powder. None of these sounds are ever louder than a murmur.
In the case of one who has died suddenly, the phenomenon of novae linguae can begin to emerge any time between a few minutes and several hours post-mortem. It most commonly begins as a series of subvocalisations (first detectable by electromyograph, later visible), graduating to audible sounds, phonemes, and finally words. Initial vocalisations are frequently clumsy: the movements of the lips, tongue and vocal folds are poorly co-ordinated and the voice will stumble over the simplest syllables.
However, over the course of the first week coordination improves steadily; and a voice, once established, is able to maintain a consistent, intelligible and continuous lexical stream for anything up to five months post-mortem, even when the speech apparatus is quite severely degraded. The surgical removal of any part of the apparatus does not affect the activity of the remaining parts.
Incredibly, it has been observed by those working in end-of-life care that the emergence of the voice can, in certain circumstances, precede the death of an individual. A patient receiving palliative care and under heavy sedation, or in the final stages of non-aphasic dementia, can sometimes be seen subvocalising in their sleep. It is not unheard-of for night nurses to report fully vocalised novae linguae phenomena among wards of patients in decline; I have myself stood, in the small hours, flanked by the beds of the dying, listening to this humbling susurration. Never have these voices seemed conscious of me or of anything else outside of themselves.
I feel justified in concluding that not only are these voices not those of the deceased, neither are they something which only comes into being at the moment of death. Rather, the voice is something which is already present within us, and to some degree developed, prior to death: something which emerges to take the reins as our own hold on our body weakens.
I have not found the voice which emerges from an adult cadaver to become fluent in its speech any more rapidly, on average, than that which emerges from a child’s. From this one can only infer that both are equally developed at the time of death. The voice is not a hitch hiker in the body, acquired as we approach our final years: it is instead a passenger which has, I suspect, been with us since infancy.
I should make a further thing clear: since 1996 the prevalence of novae linguae phenomena in non-neonatal cadavers has been very close to 100%. It shall happen to me, I am sure. It shall almost certainly happen to you.
Given the unavoidability of all of this, let us fall back on romanticism: let us ask the one great and obvious question which remains.
If these voices are uttering words, what words do they utter? It was the dream of the Victorian medium to hear speech from the beyond – it was the dream of the apostles to speak in new tongues and be reborn on the other side of death - but if we have any hopes in this regard then again, we are confounded: I repeat, a novam linguam is not the voice of the dead. Its speech is bound to disappoint any who believe they could learn from it: the vocalisations, while syntactically correct and not without meaning, are without sense. A voice is as likely to speak of the cornflower blue of a long-gone sky as it is to describe a child’s impressions of an elderly aunt: the smell of her; the uncanny, rubbery largeness of her ears. It is as likely to repeat the names of London’s sunken rivers as it is to mutter about the correct care of tropical fish, or to hiss in fury at the grease which cakes a frying pan. These are thoughts that nobody would bother to think, words that nobody would bother to say. They are the speech of something mindless wearing down. The whistling, gurgling, rustling voice of the cadaver births junk utterances in a long, slow, relentless exhalation – until, after months of mumbling, one day it doesn’t.
And so science fails me.
I have spent decades studying the literature. I have conducted research, published papers as much as funding has allowed. And still I can explain these things on neither a medical nor a teleological level. I can describe the phenomena, but I cannot identify their cause. I can describe the speech, but I cannot determine its purpose – if, indeed, it possesses any. I can outline the history and the development of the condition – I can describe - but I cannot understand why the earth is filled with the babbling dead, with the stumps of tongues singing at their coffin lids, with the caved-in mouths that whisper of their first kiss while the rest of the body lies cold. And I do not know what I shall say, when my time comes.
Theory has been exhausted for me. I cannot answer any of this with theories, only with myth. Only with this, and I present it with no evidence: it is all I can offer, and it has no worth.
In the time of Asclepius, ascended god - the first healer, the first to deny death - the sick would travel to his temple, would offer prayer and oblation, would drink a draught of poppies and would sleep.
And in their dreams Asclepius would reveal himself, vast and incomprehensible; he would speak, and he would work to heal them, and the babble of dream would be his voice.
In antiquity a dream was a message: it was a vessel for change and for the divine, as our bodies are vessels for us. It was a channel for knowledge and for epiphany. In it we saw a part of ourselves that our waking life was too small to hold, something so alien and so impossibly mundane as to appear godlike. But we have denied it for so long, and in so many ways. This is not the world of Asclepius. Babble is only babble; dreams no longer heal. I believe we have sealed a door in ourselves, and that door holds back an ocean. And a door cannot hold back an ocean.
You misunderstand. It is not true to say that the dead have come back.
(c) Cassidy Phillips, 2019
Cassidy Phillips (left) mucks about with crumbly books for a living, occasionally taking a knife to them or hitting them with a hammer. One time he found a dead man's fingernail stashed in an archive. It's not a bad old life, really.
Peter Kenny has worked for: A&BC, The Royal Shakespeare Co. and The BBC Radio Drama Co. An award winning recorder of audio-books, he’s read over 100 titles: everything from Iain M. Banks, Neil Gaiman, and Andrzej Sapkowski to Jonas Jonasson and Paul O'Grady “... from the sublime to the cor blimey!” Visit www.peterkenny.com
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