…
There’s an extreme close up of someone’s mouth - a man with a 5-o’clock shadow, pronouncing the “ü” sound, in different words in different languages.
Now another person, an attractive woman’s jaw and mouth with pale lipstick, also saying similar “ü” sounding words like “moose”, “brooding”, “bündesliga”, “unidos”, “bündner kunstmuseum”, or “Chur”.
Faster… different people saying this “ü” sound… all kinds of mouths at different speeds… cutting from one person to the next but never showing more than the nose, mouth, and chin.
Suddenly the scene is pulled back, and I am somehow a judge, sitting along a table of other judges, like something from the olympics. We are all watching and listening as a person speaks these words while standing at a low diving platform, above a huge swimming pool. Our judges table is also along the side of this pool. The pool is not calm, and its jostling surface seems to be emitting a bright glow from under the water, as if the floor of the pool is fitted with fluorescent tube lights. It’s the only light in the space, and casts an ominous flickering tint on everyone’s faces from below.
It’s in this cool diffuse light that I start to notice the rest of the room. It’s a cavern, a grand concrete hall with a ceiling so high that the pool’s animated glow doesn’t reach it. The surface is old and weathered, and long white streaks of efflorescence paint the in situ concrete down from the darkness. The stoic traces of board formwork seem so heavy and still as a backdrop for the energetic motion of the bluish light from the pool.
As I look around the room I hear an echo, and suddenly realize that I am supposed to be listening to this person pronounce these words, and judge him on his accuracy and tone. All of a sudden I focus in again on the mouths, the hundreds of strange faces and mouths reciting these phrases out of context.
Trying to hear them, I’m immediately frustrated by the echo in the huge space. I am intensely aware of the size of the room as I listen to the sound come off the tongue, hit the water, and bounce into an endless concrete ricochet all around us.
My mind races, trying desperately to listen to the impossibly inaudible words. I seem somehow alone my exasperation. The other judges watch calmly and write notes here and there, while the speaker seems even calmer and more calculated in the delivery of each phrase, as if to tease me with the slow yet indistinct speech.
It becomes unbearable, the endless reflection of sound… it become a din of “s” and “ü” sounds that I can’t take anymore. I jump over the table and into the pool, and the huge splash is drowned out by the echos. Underwater I hear nothing but that calm heavy sound of my own blood in my ears. Relief.
As I open my eyes underwater, I feel an acidic sting of chlorine. I see that the orator has jumped in also, and continues to speak to me though the water’s muffled thickness.
…
