Caught In The Act Of Soliloquy

By LANCE MORROW

I am as sane as you are.

On the other hand, I know it looks a little off when I walk down Sixth Avenue talking to myself or stop, gesticulating, for the light at 48th Street, and make a scathing, irrefutable point to, um, myself. It could be worse--Tourette's syndrome, for example. Tourette's sounds awful; this just looks crazy--or maybe a third of the way there. People in the street flick me a glance: "Uh-oh."

A friend of mine has a sister who is deaf and talks to herself in sign language, which takes the behavior into a new dimension. When I heard this, I thought, "Aha, there's proof of what I have been saying: talking to yourself is just a way of thinking things over, of processing ideas through articulation, a sort of audible shadowboxing. The deaf woman turns her brain waves into fast-forward hand dancing. Same thing." As a writer, I talk to myself in order to try out ideas--a rough draft recited to the pigeons--before writing them down. A playwright must speak the lines aloud. What's crazy about that?

Of course, that is putting a high-minded gloss on the behavior, as if the auditorium of one's mind were always resounding to symposiums on Wittgenstein or on human rights in Myanmar. Caught me talking to myself? Just another oral presentation of apodictic obiter dicta on the solo stage! Thomas Jefferson dines alone! Shakespeare's soliloquies elevated talking to oneself to the highest art; on the other hand, Hamlet may not have been traveling with a full seabag either.

In fact, most talking to oneself involves a low order of business--pettiness, self-justification, improvised rants or what the French call l'esprit d'escalier, the things that you should have said a moment ago, lines you think of while coming down the stairs. (The British call it "taxi wit," which may prove that the French think faster than the Brits.) This debased muttering is directed at salesclerks, ticket-writing cops and even would-be muggers: "You know, son, when I was in Nam .." Talking to oneself is inherently a private act, not meant to be shared, and as such it may be a safety valve for venting the mind's little gases and toxins. Best done silently and/or alone, Emily Post would advise.

Long ago, the humorist Finley Peter Dunne ("Mr. Dooley") described being Vice President of the U.S. as "a sort of disgrace, like writing anonymous letters." Talking to oneself is cousin to that. It seems a Richard Nixon sort of thing to do. If Nixon did not actually talk to himself, he gave the impression that he did. For all his reputation for covertness, Nixon's real problem was his inability to conceal the darkly busy workings of his mind--the wheels turning, the eyes darting. You could almost hear him talking--a subliminal tape--even if the words were not audible. Nixon also had the alarming habit of talking about himself in the third person, which is an inverted variation on talking to oneself. In talking to oneself, one invents an interlocutor; Nixon, speaking of himself in the third person, in effect erased an interlocutor--himself! Consider another variation: Joan of Arc. It was not so much that she talked out loud to herself as that she listened intently to the voices in her head.

Some entrepreneur should organize a service that would pair off people talking to themselves, a buddy system that would allow them to go on with their soliloquies but would let them appear, as they walk down the street, to be conversing with each other. Many marriages go on for years along these lines.

Of course, it is embarrassing to be caught orating to yourself. Here are a few ideas on how to handle it:

--Slide, without transition, into singing softly or humming, as if the soliloquy were simply the spoken part of a musical performance, like an opera. In this way, you give the performance an obscurely higher purpose, as if it were a rehearsal that the bystander was fortunate to overhear.

--Go on talking so volubly to your invisible friend that the overhearer begins thinking he may be the one who is nuts; this works only if you and your nonexistent friend vanish quickly around a corner.

--A tough but effective trick: make yourself dematerialize, or make the talking-to-yourself moment vanish, in the way that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis used to disappear psychically, even when people were looking directly at her. The overhearer should think that somehow he hallucinated the moment. Remember that in the age of television, reality dissolves, moment to moment, into thin air.

--Carry a cell phone in hand at all times, or a pocket tape recorder, and lift it quickly to your mouth at the embarrassing moment.

--Have a dog with you on a leash. Always address your remarks to the dog. (This, of course, raises a different set of questions about your intellectual relationship with the dog.)

Good point, Mr. Morrow!

Thank you, Four-Eyes.