public speaking and death

I taught public speaking at the college level intermittently from 2004 until 2010. A common and unsubstantiated statistic regarding public speaking was that it was second to only death in being the most feared event in a person's life. That's an odd statistic to report in a public speaking book if only because it seems to nail home a fear perhaps lurking in the seats of a public speaking classroom that must be surmounted during the course of the semester.

I had a rather nonchalant approach to this fear. I let students arrive drunk to deliver their speeches. I tried to ease them into the process of standing before the class to deliver remarks. I didn't spend a lot of time staring at them while they delivered their speech because they interminably would be staring back with a look befitting a street urchin drawn from the quill of Charles Dickens. That fear was often palpable in their quavering voices and in that glassy stare. But the speaking events to which students were exposed in the classroom were an inevitable formality of the course. All lived through the ordeal no matter how harrowing it was to the individual flanked by a now-obsolete blackboard.

Yet why? Why was public speaking so feared? Why did it find companionship with death itself?

My mother was diagnosed with cancer. Upon further analysis of biopsied lung tissue doctors determined that she had stage four lung cancer with evidence of its spread into the peritoneum. She was sent home with hospice care to wait for that fateful moment.

And so in the structure of the two events one finds oneself drawn ever nearer to an inevitable event and that is one's turn to stand before the classroom or to cross the threshold of eternity into death. She was given 4 to 6 months to live. Her cancer is untreatable in her current, wan condition. And now she waits for the cancer to steal her last vital essence at some point within the proceeding days, weeks, months. And like the student before a public speaking classroom on that fateful day of its delivery she waits in dread and mortal fear of that precise moment.

I suppose those in my former profession could restructure public speaking classrooms to be less like the waiting, in hospice, for death to rap upon the door. And there is an afterward to public speaking that is wholly different than waiting to speak before God. But the two find a kinship in how they are structured around a dreaded and fateful future moment inscribed in time to which the student and the patient organize their waning moments and their attention.

This moment, as it structures the preceding preparatory activity, is called a deadline. The name is at once both an appropriate and a very ominous name. I used to find wisdom in the words chosen to describe the world and the affairs of people, as if the answers was there all along, hidden in some arcane usage of the words around us. But the kinship that one finds between the structure of events is simply the deeper structure shared by the analogical connections, the umbilical tracings, of the words we choose.

What is a word spoken but the rattle of a muscle in the throat, catching the lungs' exhalation like a ship's sail, turning vaporous breath into a sonic extension of the mind in hiding.