Not A Word

He seemed the loneliest man in the world, a man who roamed the sidewalks of Chicago’s Hyde Park, unable to speak, a mute whom I would sometimes see trying to interact with others for a simple social exchange, just a brief hello-how-are-you. But he could only imitate conversation, he could only grunt an ugly sound from somewhere deep in his throat and neck, a ragged noise of a sound. He could only be his pained presence when he was occasionally acknowledged briefly by a passerby. Everyone everywhere talked to everybody: he could talk to no one.

He was a small man probably in his mid-fifties. He would try to communicate with his eyes, which were magnified almost clownishly by thick glasses---over-sized sagging moist eyes that seemed always on the verge of crying. What one saw when facing him was all his pain and a pleading for connection. And I think that he had no awareness, no sense how intensely his isolation and loneliness showed in his eyes and the flesh of his face.

Sometimes I would see him with a small radio held lovingly to his ear during baseball season. Then he was satisfied, then it was all right to be alive---when there was a White Sox or Cubs game on. But otherwise the world was hell, a punishment, an isolation ward he was allowed to wander in. He lived alone in a single room, he knew no one, he had no friends, no family, no acquaintances. He wasn’t bright enough, evidently, or imaginative enough to learn sign language, nor did I ever see him with pad and pencil. It occurred to me that he might have been mildly retarded, but it was hard to tell, for all one could see in his face, in his whole being, was his misery.

I do remember asking myself can I help this man? I’m not sure how serious I was (this was over forty years ago), but certainly the answer was no. A decade later I heard the Buddhist teacher Rinpoche Chogyam Trungpa disparage and mock “idiot compassion,” which surely it would have been if I had tried to meddle.

In an earlier post I said we love language so much we don’t even know it. Wouldn’t we yearn for it passionately if it were no longer there where it was supposed to be, right there on the tips of all our tongues?