Big Talkers, Butt-Ins, And Bores - The Curse Of The Vaporous And The Charm Of The Politician

Lena Barton was a big talker - an incessant, unstoppable, determined and woman who lurked, waited and pounced. She did not discuss or listen.  There was a djinn inside her which demanded exit.  Whether her hydrangeas, her health, or her boys, they needed out. Tapped within they did not exist; but when voiced whether to interested or uninterested listeners, they lived. 

 

The origins of this talkativeness - or rather this need to talk - were vague - Lena could only remember as a young child feeling the need to talk and to talk a lot.  Speech was a gift not to be wasted. It existed solely as a part of her whether or not it was listened to.  It was her own shamanic ritual, a purging of feelings which had built up in the night.  She told about her dreams and her nightmares, expanded and elaborated them the more she told about them until they had a life of their own and were no longer a part of her. 

 

At Sunday Mass she thanked God for giving her such eloquence - a kind of second, separate but equally important nature.  She could create worlds with her voice, translate imaginings into physical shapes, sounds and smells.  God had been particularly generous when it came to creating her out of a lump of clay. 

In adolescence it - her volubility - turned into gossip.  She couldn't help herself when she heard a rumor - like her speech, a foundationless thing which sprang up without reason or warning - and carried it, embellished it, and spread it.  Rather than isolated as the source of unattributed, unsubstantiated claims, she became a kind of Cumaean Sibyl - a prophetess, a seer - all of which gave her an unusual ascribed agency.  She became the arbiter of all things social - which boys were interested in which girls, who was anointed and who was left out.  Girls came to her for advice, for prophecy, and for guidance. 

Her college years began badly.  No one, it seemed, was that interested in what she had to say - a girl who rattled on was the take - but soon enough she found her voice and her calling. Although campus radicalism was of no interest - a desperate flogging of others on a grand scale for recognition - she was sought after for her by then marvelous prolixity.  Not only could Lena talk and be listened to, she could inspire and motivate.  It mattered little whether or not she believed in what she spoke, it was the articulation which counted - the cadence, the rhythm, the tonality, and the passion. 

Lena was a vaporous person - a woman without substance, principle, or purpose whose voice carried weight; and she used it to her advantage. If people listened, nodded, agreed or not, it made little difference. It was the swaying that gave her credibility and worth. 

It was magic, this ability to turn heads, to turn skeptics into believers, the indifferent into the committed. She had passed on not one iota of wisdom or good sense. It was her words, her gift of gab, her carefully crafted prolixity which did the job. People who heard her were delighted and convinced; and she, having found her calling, was satisfied. 

Opposites attract goes the old adage, and in a way it was true for Lena although with some codicils.  Brent Mayberry was also a big talker which if the old saw were true, she would have stayed clear; but Brent was a different kind of talker.  A bulldozing, voice-over talker.  Hearing a discussion on Joyce, he interrupted with reminiscences of County Cork, the six-pack of Guinness he had downed on the moors, and the lovely dark-haired blue-eyed maidens on his watch. 

He was a man who could not tolerate anyone else's voice. It was not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing but one of center stage.  He could not stand to be left out, a trait he inherited from his mother who no matter what the subject offered either confabulated history, statistics, citations or something from her own store of personal trivia.  

The woman was a tedious bore, demanding attention, claiming against all reason that she was right and it happened the way she said, and Brent got the picture.  He couldn't help himself when it came to discussion.  Drawing on fiction, imagination, and presumption he like his mother kept up the front and added pain to misery as they dominated and bullied their way into every conversation. 

 

So the relationship between Lena and Brent turned out to be a vaudevillian pas de deux.  She began with some impossible confabulation, and he interrupted with more of his own.  Before you knew it the conversation had become theirs and theirs alone, a world apart, disconnected from reason, rationality, and reality. 

One can only imagine their pillow talk, unless freed from the strictures of polite society, they were able to get to the heart of the matter; but the greater likelihood was that they stepped on each other's overtures and turned foreplay into a whodunnit of sexual conundrums. 

Lena waited for the opportunity to talk about Ralph at Wayne State, Bobbie at Ole Miss, and Ferdinand still at home, an assumption of interest that went far beyond neighborliness.  I was supposed to care until after many months of these hijackings I realized that nothing she said mattered to her either.  It was the telling that was important, not the import or the reception.  I could have been a block of granite for all it mattered to her. 

Big Talkers - The Psychosocial Dimensions Of A Compulsive Disorder was a monograph published by Duke University Press by Harold Underwood, PhD, Chairman of the Psycho-Psychiatric Department of the Medical School in which he chronicled the life of what he called 'the needy prolix'

The Needy Prolix needs no introduction, for she has been all our tables, interrupting, diverting, a virtual baboon hungry for attention.  She is obtuse, obvious, and niggardly but cannot stop talking. Somewhere in childhood her personality was distorted and reconfigured into that of an incessant, intolerable bore.  That of course is the popular appraisal. Professionally she is a sick puppy, in need of a reality check and brought back to the here and now. 

For that introduction Underwood was questioned by the editorial review board for what might be considered inflammatory speech but he convinced them that such a preamble was necessary to put the illness in relief.  He didn't condemn these Needy Prolix individuals. Others did, and that was the point.  

Lena was not hauled off in a straightjacket - not that kind of mental illness - although I avoided her like the plague when I saw her coming.  Other than that devilish prolixity, she was not a bad sort, but that is not the point either. I pitied her husband and had no sympathy for her until I read the Underwood sequel which delved further into the painful 'miasma of doubt' that people like her suffered. 

I was still not convinced, but chastened for my summary dismissal of a disturbed woman. I didn't run away when I saw her coming.