Lawrence Lenhart

How to Talk Dlak Thooted-Therret:     

                                                                Ventriloquism for the Eremocene

This trimester, we call him Whatshisname. One friend thinks it is a commentary on my mild anomic aphasia, an ironic baby name given by a father whose inability to retrieve names is a nightly, if not hourly, concern. It’s not meant to be ironic or scatterbrained, though. It’s just that the baby is unborn, and my wife and I haven’t agreed upon a name yet. Whatshisname is equal parts placeholder and genuine question.  

In the first trimester, I called him Superpredator. As in:
        Modern Humans Have Become Superpredators
        ‘Superpredator’ Humans Are Hunting Other Animals Out of Existence
        Human ‘Super Predator’ More Terrifying than Bears, Wolves and Dogs
        The Human ‘Superpredator’ is Unique—and Unsustainable, Study Says

Read enough about the subject, and it will trigger early-onset misanthropy. Not only will you not want to have a kid; you might become an advocate for non-coercive small family ethics. You might soften your stance on China’s erstwhile one-child policy. You might even thumb through a Bible and read up on Herod the Great’s megalomaniacal infanticide or nod through Australian ethicists’ case for why after-birth abortion should be permissible (from an ethical stand point, not a legal one).

There’s a neuroscientist-cum-ventriloquist named Michael Graziano who puts it like this: “Many people think [ventriloquism] is a visual-auditory illusion—your voice sounds as if it’s coming from the puppet’s lips. But the real illusion is social.” He demonstrates our desensitization to visual-auditory illusions by pointing out the flimsy magic of microphones. We see the voice, time-locked in speech, but it’s been thrown to a distant corner speaker. Nobody gets excited about that. By this same logic, it would be blasé to watch a puppet flap its lips in tandem with my own. Audiences barely pay attention to phonation. Instead, what excites us about ventriloquism is the “feeling that there is another mind in that body.”

I am staring at the ferret’s black-bean eyes in the mirror, trying to interpret it faithfully—to hear, comprehend, and translate its notes through waves of middle-night silence. Even an artificial language like Yerkish would do. Composed of a few hundred lexigrams, non-human primates were able to pick it up to communicate with researchers at Georgia State University. There is a general dearth of dissertations on signal analysis of endangered mustelids, though. I briefly fantasize about enrolling in a PhD program to become an adequate ventriloquist for my son. I dream up an Ark whose decks are stacked Babel-like to the heavens.

My cat opens the bathroom door with her forehead, and I nearly tell her about my plans. She gawks at the ferret on my arm. Maybe anthropomorphism is more than just pragmatism, though; maybe, in an era of mass extinction, it’s a way of coping with our impending species loneliness. It’s last-minute empathy, a way of saying, “We hardly knew you.” We cultivate the gift of tongues just in time to behold multitudinous swan songs.

There’s a napkin in my wallet with a dozen blue autographs on it. I read these baby names at a local open-mic just to see how the crowd cooed or cawed. I read them to worry the names aloud. “If you don’t like the name,” I said, “then bully it.”

“River,” I said.
“Cry me a river, pussy,” someone taunted.

“Hugh” was another.
“Boo!” They hectored my unborn son. They were really getting into it.

“Hall,” I said.
“What the fuck?” It was my favorite reply of the night. Whereas my wife had been nonplussed by that name, this response was immediate, sharp.

As the next reader slammed poetry, I stared at the napkin, upset that the ad hoc focus group didn’t help to whittle down, but instead just ramped the worry up. I ordered another whisky sour and turned bioethicist Travis Rieder’s paradoxical words over in my head: “Maybe we should protect our kids by not having them.”

What would a ferret even say? I imagine its message would be faint. What are endangered species if not whispers of their former stock? Though once, while transporting a trapped black-footed ferret in the hatchback of my SUV—driving over the rutted ranch roads of northern Arizona, delivering it to the wildlife specialists in the trailer for anesthesia and inoculation—it chittered as loud as a motion-detected Halloween ornament. It was witchy and squirrely. Savage and jocular. The sound snapped like a sprinkler at the end of its rotation as it recoiled for another oscillation. A ferret can be more than a whisper. It can be shrill menace.

Now that the semester is over, I’ve been driving to parks around Flagstaff, sizing up the fields where I’ll coach soccer, argue with umpires, and finally learn to stab the Capri Sun pouch with the spear-end of the straw. One such park about a half hour east of town is called Peaks View County Park. I go there on a blustery day, sit in my car and feel nauseous from the wind rocking the parked car’s carriage. There are empty ramadas constructed along the foul lines of the baseball field. Mount Elden is to the northwest. Women are riding horses in left field. Solar panels line right field. And in center, children climb playground equipment, yelping and laughing like the opening seconds to MGMT’s “Kids.” Only the synth never comes.

Developers are keen on extirpating keystone species from Doney Park, which was once home to a million prairie dogs. Take this astroturf field for example. When a handful of kids rolled their ankles on the pocked field (prairie dog towns sometimes have up to 30 entrance mounds), the county decided to do away with grass. According to local conservationist, Kelly Burke, until then, the field was “a prairie dog heaven. You would drive past, and it looked like a miniature view of buffalo on the prairie. They were all so fat.” But then the park was excavated with no effort to relocate the prairie dogs. They were buried in layers of gravel. Those that survived the gravel were slammed by horizontal hurricane fencing. It was all designed to keep the prairie dogs from ever poking their heads into our lives again. If any one of them survived the assault, it was sealed in by a layer of astroturf. Looking at the turf, I think I see a small section undulating, as if a paw is knocking the underside of the synthetic field, trying to escape the mass grave of its kith. But these underdogs stay under.   When my future son hops up and down on this field after scoring a goal, I’m ready to temper his celebration: “Don’t you see that this goal was made possible by the massacring of thousands of prairie dogs?” I am trying not to be so joyless.

Since 2009, the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) has distributed over 500,000 endangered species condoms. The center advocates for wildlife ecology by calling attention to the link between human population growth and the current (sixth) mass extinction. I often daydream about the golden toad. Notable because it is the first species said to have been lost to the effects of global warming, it was last seen the year I was born. This conflation is perfectly dramatized by the CBD’s condom whose wrappers feature an illustration of an endangered species along with a catchy contraception-as-conservation couplet. Rather than educate would-be fornicators about the same-old (“proper use of this condom may help prevent the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases and pregnancy”), the memo transforms the prophylactic into an ecological tool for protecting rare and endangered species.

       DON’T GO BARE… PANTHERS ARE RARE.
       WHEN YOU’RE FEELING TENDER… THINK ABOUT THE

                       HELLBENDER.
       BE A SAVVY LOVER… PROTECT THE SNOWY PLOVER.
       COVER YOUR TWEEDLE… SAVE THE BURYING BEETLE.
       HUMP SMARTER… SAVE THE SNAIL DARTER.
       FUMBLING IN THE DARK? THINK OF THE MONARCH.
       BEFORE IT GETS ANY HOTTER… REMEMBER THE SEA OTTER.

And my favorite (for its slight condescension):
        FOR THE SAKE OF THE HORN LIZARD… SLOW DOWN, LOVE

                      WIZARD.

When I first saw the catalog of endangered species condoms, I was a little peeved that there was no BFF condom. I imagine the center’s condom poet laureate, stumped and slouching at their desk to this day, their index finger rubbing through a rhyming dictionary, unable to conjure a perfect rhyme for the ferret.

The ferret puppet’s velvetine nose is its softest part. It’s there to caress the child, nose-to-nose, to make contact in the softest and most telepathic of moments. Maybe the ferret says most when it says nothing at all. To make its jaw move, I must wag my middle finger. From the outside it looks like a tongue is trying to sprout through the palate. When ferret talks to baby, I am covertly flipping myself off. When ferret talks to me, I am covertly flipping baby off.  No matter what ferret is saying, I am saying, “fuck you.”

It seems like now—at a time of unprecedented zoological impoverishment—we should find a new way to pacify children. In parents’ absence, why substitute emotional encounters with animals whose existence on earth is as tenuous as it gets? Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson has dubbed the human longing for commune with other species “biophilia.” This urge will become increasingly implacable in the Anthropocene. In fact, this implacability is why Wilson would prefer it if we called this human-induced epoch Eremocene, not Anthropocene. As in: the age of loneliness. Maybe in the age of loneliness, it is wiser to cultivate separation anxiety, not to eliminate it.      

When I return to Peaks View County Park, I peek to the sagebrush periphery for prairie dog survivors. I think I hear one yipping into the wind, but it’s a child lingering on the playground. Leaning into the wind, I wobble once or twice. I am nearly toppled on the trail. In the distance, I see the horse riders swiveling on their saddles. The horses themselves seem out of sorts, imbalanced, as they trot ovals in the dirt. I hear more yipping. This time, I know the sound—like the arrhythmic squeaker of a domestic dog’s toy—is definitively prairie dog.

A colleague of mine, professor emeritus of biology, Dr. Con Slobodchikoff, has spent three decades analyzing prairie dog signals, trying to translate them into a language system. A self-ascribed Dr. Doolittle, Con’s conclusion is that prairie dog vocabularies are so differentiated and complex that their sounds can be nothing short of language. Biologists and linguists are generally outraged by his claims. Ferris Jabr of the The New York Times puts it like this: “[Con’s] would be an audacious claim to make about even the most overtly intelligent species—say, a chimpanzee or a dolphin—let alone some kind of dirt hamster with a brain that barely weighs more than a grape.”

The prairie dog crosses the footpath, diving into its entrance mound, bipedal and squeaking at me. Her language is pure verbal surveillance. According to Con, this one’s telling her neighbors there’s a being of a certain size (6’), shape (mesomorphic), color (my jacket’s red), and velocity (at the moment, I’m stock-still, just listening to what I look like in prairie dog). A second and third prairie dog cross my path. I feel my acute anthropocentrism when I realize Prairie Dog #1 would be indistinguishable in a lineup with the other two.

After my walk, I approach the lone school bus in the parking lot. The bus driver, John, wipes mayonnaise from his lip before tugging the lever. He’s wearing a Super Man hat, Iron Man shirt, and crucifix necklace. “Is it always this windy out here?” I ask, sticking my foot in the door. “Let me put it this way. If you don’t have a tin roof in Doney,” he says, “you don’t have a roof period.” I sit in the first seat, shooting the shit with John, assuming my son’s eventual school bus vantage. “It’s funny,” John says. “Once school’s out, the kids come to the park and they’re so weightless, this wind just bowls them over.”

“I have to see that,” I say. Within minutes, kids are unspooling kites, divvying up into teams on the field, rolling on the infield. Small dust storms accumulate on the horizon as if wildness is preparing a comeback. Maybe the wind will lift and pull the astroturf from under their tiny feet, unveiling this field’s secret history of wildness, the skeletal plot that festers under each and every one of us.

Within a few weeks, I’ve got my handful of catchphrases. I feel like I’m programming a Pixar character’s pull-string toy. Despite the script, I can’t seem to overcome the anatomy of linguistics. I practice with a pencil between my lips, resisting the urge to enunciate the no-no labial consonants. “Eck-ck-ck-ck-ck-ck.” The only true ferret vocalization is easiest, so I do it often. With my jaw fixed in place so as to hide the tongue and the lips just slightly open, the middle tongue rebounds off soft palate. My Adam’s apple jounces a bit in my throat, but even Dunham hasn’t found a workaround for that.

Some words are not suited for ventriloquy. “Black-footed ferret” is a mouthful. Or rather, it’s a lipful. Laced with labials that require one or both lips to actively articulate, I must find a new way to say it or employ substitutes. According to linguist Dr. Marc Ettlinger of UC-Berkeley, ventriloquists “take advantage of top-down processing to make you hear the sounds they’re not making.” Instead of m, I try n. Instead of b, I try d. Instead of f, which would mean teeth to lip (spoiling the illusion that I’m nonverbal), I try th. I say it again and again, the ferret’s jaw overcompensating for my stillness: “I’n Therris, the dlak-thooted-therret.” A friend had suggested the name Ferris the other night at the bar, and despite my resistance then, the ferret seems to autonomously accept it now. Suddenly, I’m less skeptical about Dunham’s claims about the valve of consciousness.

In the third trimester now, we’re down to just three names. The crib is constructed, and I rest the ferret’s chin on the rails. His paws chop through the spindles. He sweetly sings out each name. None begin with the nuisance labials: b, p, m, v, f, and w. There’s G. And R. And L. Each is easier than the last. For a moment, it’s as if their potential for ventriloquism has validated the hard work of nixing the 50,997 others in the naming tome. The ferret cranes its neck toward me as if actively wondering which it will be. “We’ll see,” I assure him. He nods silently. “I’n Therris,” he says, again peeking into the empty crib. I throw my voice as far as I can. The sound resonates in my nasal cavity.

A black-footed ferret really is an ill-advised puppet for a ventriloquist to keep. Because most conversations will revolve around this character’s representation of the entire species, Ferris will naturally be asked to speak about his species, the lovable dlak-thooted therret, often.

My wife keeps insisting that the puppet is for me, not our son. In the Roland Barthes essay, “Toys,” he distinguishes between the child-homunculus who plays with prefigured toys scaled down from the adult world and the child-demiurge who invents his world, creating “forms which walk, which roll, he creates life, not property: objects now act by themselves, they are no longer an inert and complicated material in the palm of his hand.” Every time I submerge my hand, it feels more like a collaboration. It may be that by learning how to “speak ferret,” I am preempting what will one day be the posthumous puppetry of the black-footed ferret. If I speak ferret well enough—if I can radically amplify the social illusion—then maybe Whatshisname’s biophilia will radiate from crib to prairie. Rather than liquidate the species, he might be the one to save it.

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