Your author no longer has anything to say to anybody.
Even the blank, prepared statements which are dispensed from my mouth like placebo now fizz away to nothingness under the suffocating carpet that is my tongue. I am mute, because the wire that I dreamed about manifested itself and cut my vocal cords to pieces.
There is a constellation of imagery floating around as internal processes - if they were made of gas, the pressure would soon build and blow a hole in the side of my skull. The frieze of metaphor and suggestion, liberated from the temperature of its oven, would spill out and emit their heat in a time series. The heat and light I recognise as being the force behind words. Once cold, there is nothing left but convention.
I go about my days sullenly, discouraging others from engaging me in conversation. Those who do are dismissed as quickly as possible, even though they only ever request functional things: what's the time, do you have a light? Often, I won't bother to speak at all, shaking my head as I move along quickly. Those who ask the time are given an answer in a stiff, robotic voice: Itisfourteentwentysevenwillthatbeall?
This is what it means to be devoid of anything, to have allowed yourself to be emptied for the course of a lifetime. I am a stickler for convention, because the predictability of its intonation gives away as little information as possible. Answering the question 'how are you?' with the empty receptacle 'not bad' is far less revealing than 'well, you know,' or 'now you come to mention it....'
Perhaps the first line of this post should be revised. It is not so much that I have nothing to say, as having nothing that I want to say. The silent ones mark themselves out thanks to the utter paucity of the information they supply. As with some of the local phrases I listed that are at the heart of every dramatic work, sentences which are used so often that their meaning has worn away are the mechanism which turns conversations.
It is when such clichés become torn from language, and supplant language itself, that a person becomes a silent one. A retinue of grunts, short words which pin down no specific idea, these become an under-language in their own right. They express everything that needs to be expressed, yet say nothing.
