There is neither a first nor a last word and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future)… Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming festival.
–Mikhail Bakhtin in Speech Genres
“I said to him, I said…” I caught myself saying in a bout of storytelling at dinner with friends the other night as I relished another swallow of Tsing Tao.
When I was only old enough to drink white pop cherried up to look like wine for family holidays, I would smile at my uncle, Deloss, for his liberal use of of this folksy attribution.
“So, I says to him, I says, I says…” he would tell us, dentures clicking.
We called him Uncle Dee, but he was actually married to my grandmother’s aunt, Rosie, which would make him something like my great-great-uncle. And he was great. He would speed us down the river in his old aluminum boat through the backwater sloughs of the Mississippi to his cabin where my sister and I would fish for bluegill with bamboo poles, and he’d save us from long green water snakes.
I was perhaps 23 when he died, and he 93, but with the friendly, upbeat, and active life I have chosen as my example. I am mostly a failure in living up to the example, but I try.
Weeks before he fell asleep in his chair for the last time, he’d slipped me five dollars specifically earmarked for ice cream. He was famous for big bowls of ice cream. I bought a half gallon of the rich and expensive stuff with nuts and ate most of it.
After he was gone, I couldn’t let go of this frozen talisman in my ice box. It wasn’t until nearly a year later, when my first wife, Lynn, and I were packing to move from Madison to Des Moines that she took me aside and told me it was time to let go, and I washed my creamy memories down the sink.
In an English class at Iowa State where I passed some time and tried, unsuccessfully, to find myself, though never completed a degree, I remember a spirited discussion on Bakhtin, in which I was cast in the role of lone white male positivist kibble fed to hungry post-modernist, Marxist wolves. On college campuses, where sophomoric dialog devolves into vitriol faster than you can say ad hominem, it’s easy to start something if you like a scrap and know how to pick the wrong side.
“So,” I wrinkled my nose, “You’re suggesting that Bakhtin would say that the words my great-great-great-grandmother, whom I never met, uttered in German at some distant time in the past on another continent has a discernable presence in the utterance that I’m uttering at this moment?”
“Exactly,” came the chorus.
“And you all agree with this?”
“Of course,” came the credulity, followed by the stares of a zealous mob, suddenly awake to the presence of a nonbeliever.
“Bullshit,” I said simply.
Tonight, however, I am up late, unable to sleep, anxious about a marathon for which I haven’t trained and troubled by a quarrel I’m unable to resolve with the person I love most over the placement of some storage boxes, and Bakhtin’s words are alive in mine, his thoughts in my mind and my conversation with you, the way my uncle’s words crept into my speech at dinner, the way my father sometimes says “Outen the light” with a wink as his Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother did, the way raisins find their way into my family’s dressing at holidays because of our German forbears.
I wonder about the people because of whom I’m here, who boarded boats in Cork and Plymouth, who left Hanover on the river Leine for the bluffs along Big Muddy in the old Wisconsin Territory. When I speak, are they saying, “Can you hear me, now?”
We are all, I think, part of a conversation that has been going on a long time, and I am so glad to hear Deloss’ voice from my mouth, that I think I will use it when I wear dentures and have my own great-great-nephews.