Ben Lerner discusses high school debate and the demise of public speech in Content of Words, which appears in the October issue of Harper’s Magazine. In this short excerpt, Lerner describes the ephemeral threshold he would pass through when speaking in a debate. His words beautifully express the way a presentation or speech can overcome the person speaking in a way that leads to an almost out-of-body experience that is at once mystifying and extraordinary.
“I might be in Olathe [Kansas] on a December afternoon enumerating in accelerating succession the various ways implementation of my opponent’s health-care plan would lead to holocaust when I would pass a mysterious threshold. I would begin to feel less like I was delivering a speech and more that a speech was delivering me, that the rhythm and intonation of my presentation were beginning to dictate its content, that I no longer had to organize my arguments so much as let them flow through me. Suddenly the physical tension was all focused energy, a transformation that made the event vaguely erotic. I became in these moments an acned rhapsode, and if the song that was coursing through me was about the supposedly catastrophic risks of a single-payer health-care system or the affirmative speaker’s failure to prove solvency, I was nevertheless more in the realm of poetry than of prose, my speech stretched by speed and intensity until I felt its referential meaning dissolve into pure form, until I was singing the oldest song, singing the very possibility of language. In a public school closed to the public, in a suit that felt like a costume, while pretending to argue about policy, I, in all my adolescing awkwardness, would be seized, however briefly, by an experience of prosody.”
Have you ever felt this kind of overwhelming inspiration while giving a presentation?
