That made sense. I supposed that was indeed how the powers that be chose our targets.
“But how do you know all of this?” I asked.
“They let me use their research to help my own research into the grammar of genocide. The lines that connected one point to another. The nodes and edges. Digraphs that incorporated directional markers showing the trends of information flow. Add a little bit of SNDGA, and it’s easy to work out where the most important sources of communication are. You don’t always need access to a president or a general. In fact, in one country I chose to play the role of a priest, and in another I was part of an influential NGO. More chance to propagate the genocidal grammar that way—a more extensive network, you see? Of course, the specifics vary from country to country.”
This man was calmly describing the results of a series of experiments to me as if they were entirely theoretical. It was as if he had conveniently forgotten that his research into genocide was built on top of a mountain of human misery.
“I don’t believe it,” I said. “I don’t believe that language has the ability to influence our subconscious in such a way. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has already been comprehensively discredited. Human thought isn’t regulated by language. Are you seriously trying to say that this weird function has been left in our brains as a result of evolution? Impossible!”
For some reason this made John Paul laugh out loud. It wasn’t a villain’s laugh, but a healthy, hearty, normal laugh. And that made it all the more freakish.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“Nothing, nothing. I just never expected to come across a spy who was so up to date on linguistic theory, that’s all.”
I sneered at him. “Spending time with the lovely Ms. Lucia has been very educational.”
“Yes, it seems the two of you have been spending a fair bit of time together,” John Paul said. His voice was that of supreme indifference. Damn. I’d hoped that would have affected him at least a little bit. But it seemed there was nothing I could do or say that would have any effect on this man.
John Paul started speaking again. “Do you ever think to yourself that perhaps words have no meaning?”
I said nothing. I had no idea where he was trying to go with this.
“I wonder who it was who first said that they liked something,” John Paul continued. “Or that they didn’t like something. Such simple expressions. Compare those with the conversation that the two of us are having now. Aren’t we basically saying the same thing, just in a much more long-winded and circumlocutory way? We’re basically just expressing primitive emotions, no different from saying that something tastes good or that we feel bad.”
I squirmed in embarrassment as I thought of the long conversation I had had with Lucia about my mother’s death, when I poured my heart out to her. Maybe John Paul was right. Was that not just a roundabout way of telling her that I liked her?
“Whenever I’ve studied a country undergoing a period of militarization, I entertained this charming little theory. It’s occurred to me that the slogans that inevitably end up being scrawled on the street corners aren’t really about the words at all. They’re more primitive than that. The slogans are just manifestations of a deep, primeval resonance. ‘Hate enemy.’ ‘Protect self.’ I like to think of them as little fragments of music in an underlying symphony of primeval urges.”
“People aren’t animals,” I said. “Human language is different from the howling of wild beasts.”
“Do you really believe that? I’m not sure that I do,” John Paul said. “Goethe himself admitted that something as simple as a military march could cause him to feel his spine tingling to attention. And it’s not just airports and cafés that have background music playing. Auschwitz had a soundtrack too. The sound of the wake-up bell in the morning, the drums to make the prisoners march. However exhausted and utterly despondent the Jewish inmates were, as soon as the drums broke out in rhythm they found their bodies moving along with the beat whether they wanted them to or not. Unlike what we see, what we hear has the capacity to touch our souls directly. Music rapes our senses. Meaning? What meaning? Pure sound can and will bypass all that noble-sounding guff.”
The thing that lurks under the words we use.
Meaning is just skin deep.
That’s what John Paul was trying to say. When we speak, it’s not just the contents of our words that matter. The “meaning” of the words is only ever a small part of the equation. That’s what John Paul meant: there was also music, rhythm, hidden esoteric layers that I couldn’t hope to grasp or notice or understand.
“People can close their eyes, but they can never completely block off their ears. No one is immune to my words,” John Paul explained.
I forced myself to look into the moonlight and at John Paul’s eyes. I was expecting, hoping that I would see madness there, that I would find a lunatic bathed in a lunar glow. But I was granted no such satisfaction. All I could see was a perfectly rational and calm pair of eyes, staring down at me. If anything, they were twinged with melancholy, not madness.
“You’re insane.”
I didn’t believe it, but I had to say it anyway.
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