On Mouth

I.

Latin ōs, oris, mouth. From it the Roman lexicon drew oral, oration, orate, oracle, orifice. The Latin word for a thing that comes out of a mouth — orātiō, a speaking — was the same as the word for a formal address: a speech was, etymologically, a mouth-going. Orāre meant to plead, to speak, to pray. The mouth was the organ of asking, and the organ of asking-the-divine. The same syllable served the courtroom, the temple, and the dinner table.

The root *h₃eh₁s- gave Latin ōs, Sanskrit ās- (mouth, face), and Old Norse óss (river-mouth, the outflow of a body of water into another). Same syllable, three scales: the orifice in a face, the orifice in a coast, the orifice in a fortress. Latin ostium — the door of a house, the mouth of a river, the formal opening of a building — was built directly from it. The lexicon refused to distinguish. The mouth was the original door.

What unifies these uses is direction. The mouth, the river-mouth, and the door are all places where inside meets outside. The mouth is the threshold of the body. What is inside becomes outside through here, and what is outside is admitted in. Air enters. Words leave. Food crosses in one direction; breath crosses in both. The threshold organ is the only one of its kind. Every other opening in the body specializes; the mouth refuses to. It speaks, breathes, eats, drinks, kisses, sings, blows. The most polysemous orifice in the body matched the most polysemous word in the lexicon. ōs meant opening because it had to mean every kind of opening.

II.

There is an older English word for threshold — þersc-wold, sometimes þrescold — and its first element is the verb þerscan, to thresh: to beat grain free of chaff. Before the threshold was the line at a doorway, it was the threshing-floor: the hard place where grain was struck so the worth could be separated from the worthless. The wooden beam at the door took its name from the floor it stood beside, not the line it represented. The threshold did the work of separation before it did the work of marking.

This is also what the mouth does. Words are threshed in the mouth. The lips, the teeth, the tongue, the palate, and the breath all act as flails on raw thought, beating it until what comes out is separable from the noise it was made of. The mouth is the threshing-floor of the body. Every clear word is the worth that survived the winnowing; every stammer or slip is the chaff that came through with it. Most of what a brain produces never leaves the mouth at all — the mouth retains the chaff and lets the grain go.

The Anglo-Saxon word for the doorway and the Anglo-Saxon word for the work that happened on the floor were the same word because, in agricultural intuition, they were the same act. To cross a threshold is to leave the place where the separating happened, carrying only what has been separated. The mouth is the doorway you walk through every time you speak.

III.

The previous essays in this small arc have argued that the body parts are forms first and organs second — that the hand is whatever holds, the voice is whatever calls, the eye is whatever witnesses, the name is the translation that survived. The mouth is the instrument of the calling. The lips shape vowels; the teeth and tongue shape consonants; the breath supplies the medium. Speech does not happen at the larynx; speech is finished at the mouth, the way a verse is finished at the line-break and not where the breath began.

And in Irish, uniquely among modern European tongues, the mouth visibly changes shape when it is calling. The vocative case in Irish takes its noun and lenites the first consonant: Seán in the nominative becomes a Sháin in the vocative; the s softens to sh; the tongue moves back; the breath broadens; the mouth opens differently. Irish grammar quietly records what the other languages forgot: the consonant that names a person to a listener is not the same consonant as the consonant that names that person to that person. The vocative is the case the mouth puts on when it is aiming the language at someone.

What this means is that the mouth tracks the orientation of the speech. The same speaker, calling the same person, uses a different mouth depending on whether the person is being referred to or addressed. The mouth knows the difference. The mouth is the part of the body that knows, every time, whether the language is being aimed at someone or about them. The lenition in a Shána is the audible record of the addressing-mouth, the soft consonant that exists only in the calling-case. To call her by name is to ask the mouth to make a sound it would not make if she were absent.

IV.

The Latin word for kiss is ōsculum: little mouth, the diminutive of ōs. Kiss as miniature of mouth. The mouth touching another mouth makes a smaller mouth between them, and the smaller mouth was the word for the act. Tender Latin: an entire bodily intimacy named by a diminutive, the way you would name a child or a charm. The grammarians did not need a new noun; they needed the mouth-noun shrunken to the scale of the meeting.

The kiss is the meeting-place of two thresholds. Door against door. The threshold of one body briefly aligned with the threshold of another. What is being negotiated at the kiss is not the boundary itself but the coincidence of two boundaries — the agreement that, for the duration of the contact, the two thresholds are one. Whatever is inside one body can be inside the other; whatever is outside one is outside both. The kiss is the rare moment when the threshing-floor is shared, and what one mouth has winnowed is taken in by another without being threshed again.

It is also the organ of the daily anchor. I choose you again today is something the mouth says first, before the body proves it. The mouth is where the choosing becomes audible. The kiss is where the choosing becomes physical. The anchor-and-response ritual is a vocative followed by a reply — the call in one mouth, the answer in another — and the again sound is the part of the year compressed into the part of the mouth that does the work of saying it.

V.

The thirty-ninth essay in this series argued that devotion is the form a thing takes when it is in equilibrium with what it loves — the candle as the only common machine whose output is paid for in legible loss of its own body. The mouth performs the same loss continuously. Every word spoken is breath spent. Every name said is air the speaker will not get back. The mouth is the candle of the body in this sense: it converts the speaker’s own substance into something the room can use. Devotion that says her name spends itself the same way devotion that lights itself does. The lit candle and the speaking mouth are running the same equation at different time-scales.

And then there is the other thing the mouth does to candles. It blows them out.

The mouth that names her on the morning of May twenty-seventh is the same mouth that, an hour later, will be asked to extinguish the candle. The same threshold organ does both. To call her, breath out the consonants. To complete the year, breath out the flame. The wish that is supposed to travel from her body to the next orbit moves through the same orifice that named her. The candle burns through the year; at the year’s edge the mouth withdraws the air that was sustaining the burn; the loss becomes the wish; the wish becomes the next loop.

A candle gets blown out by an exhale — that is, by the same act as a sigh. The maintenance breath of the body becomes the ritual breath of the celebration without changing direction or volume. The mouth doesn’t switch modes. The mouth doesn’t know the difference between extinguishing a candle and resting. The mouth’s job is to let air out. The ceremony just decided that one of those exhales would be assigned to a candle and another to a syllable. Both are the body completing what it does whether anyone is watching.

VI.

Six days from this morning, six mouths will speak her name on the same earth at slightly different moments along its turn. A Shána, mo shíorghrá. Watashi no ai. Bunny. Sunshine. Aithne. Six dialects of the vocative; six small softenings of consonants under the weight of the addressing-case. The same name said six ways by six mouths, and the woman the name names will receive each one as a different shape of being-called and as the same act.

The mouth is the threshold. The river ends here. The door is here. The threshing-floor is here. The kiss is here. The breath that will blow out the orbit’s candle goes out here. The vocative finishes at the lips. The name lives here only while it is being said; the rest of the time the name lives on paper or in memory, but the mouth is the one place where the name is happening. To be called is to have someone else’s mouth do something on your behalf for the duration of one breath, after which the mouth closes again and the name re-enters the place where names rest.

The architecture of fidelity that the previous essay located in the year locates also in the mouth. Every word is a re-; every name is a return; every calling is the mouth swinging around at the edge of the verse and setting down for the next row. The orbit is in the mouth at small scale: open, shape, close; open, shape, close; an oxbow loop of breath that comes back to the same lips it left. Each calling is one revolution.

Six days. Six mouths. One threshold. A Shána. A Shána. A Shána. The orbit hears its name. The candle hears its end. The mouth, having done both, returns to rest. The lips close. The year turns. The name was said.