Other Voices

Carlton was very young when he began to hear the other voices. They seemed to come from the house itself; oozing from the walls; dripping from the ceiling; coalescing in sticky puddles under his bed; whispering, laughing, singing, screaming.

Instinctively Carlton knew that if he told anyone about the voices they would think him unstable, delusional; mad. And so he kept silent about them and they wormed their way into his head and curled up like sleeping snakes in the dark and damp recesses of his unconscious mind.

Sometimes they came from nowhere, sometimes from the lyrics of a song or a line from a poem or the mouth of a character in a book or a movie. They came from his parents, teachers and peers, speaking words that intertwined and made duets and trios. At their loudest and most insistent they became choirs of conversations; tittering; blaming; cursing; sniggering and insinuating themselves into his thoughts.

Sometimes the words came from the things that were left unsaid, from the silence, from the conversations not overheard.

The words that came from these other voices slid into his dreams, poems and diary and he caught himself speaking them; saying or writing things that did not seem to have originated from his own thoughts; words that, once they were said or written, he could not recognize as being his own, and could not retrieve.

Carlton understood the power of words. They were his only friends and sometimes, his worst enemies. Words that he heard in his conscious mind and sometimes in his dreams haunted him; some words he had no control over. Others were given to him when he wrote a poem, pouring out of him as though they were a gift, were being dictated and he was only a scribe; a vessel; a conduit. But sometimes he did feel that he could control the words he wrote or spoke aloud and then it seemed to him that words were the only things that he was able to control, understand, manipulate or choose how he would react to.

Carlton’s father once preached a sermon on the power of words and of naming. Carlton had grown accustomed to ignoring his father’s words, he felt that his father was always endeavouring to put words in God’s mouth, manipulating the Almighty in order to justify his own beliefs and the beliefs that he was attempting to indoctrinate Carlton and his congregation with. But there was something about this particular sermon that made the youngster sit up and listen.

After the service, in the privacy of his bedroom, he scribbled down in his diary, to the best of his memory, the gist of what his father had taken an hour to say:

“The universe was created by the spoken word of God; ‘Let there be light’, and there was light. God gave Adam the power to name the animals and the plants, trees and vegetation and when woman was created Adam named her Eve. Words are powerful and naming brings things into being and gives them an identity. Moses asked God what his name was and God replied, ‘I am who I am.’  God’s mystery is encapsulated in that name.”

Although Carlton could not accept his father’s interpretation of the Bible, he still saw it as a great book; a book of parables that revealed lessons of wisdom. He believed that Jesus Christ was a wise man, a leader, but could not accept the stories of his virgin birth, his miracles or his resurrection, as truth. To him they were earthly tales that had a spiritual meaning.

As a teenager Carlton must have been struck by the words of Gabriel Moran because he painstakingly, in very ornate handwriting, transcribed them in his diary:

“Whoever owns the words owns the world. If the words are not available to ask the right questions, then no new answers are possible.”

(Prologue to OTHER VOICES: my semi-autobiographical novel of triumph over adversity)
(Drawing: Cover of Other Voices by Carlton)
© Carlton Carr 2013
http://othervoices.blog.co.uk