‘Trigeminial neuralgia’ (a strange, unpronounceable neurological event)

For several days I’ve been trying to pronounce this phrase. I cannot hear where the stress falls. I’ve lost my capacity to hear words as they arrive in my head. I’ve lost my aural compass, or part of that compass is broken.

Tri-geh-muh-nuhl.

Tri-geh-muh-nul

This is how you pronounce the word. I listen to it several times pronounced by others. I ask my friends to pronounce it for me, but I cannot store away the complete sound. The sound-event does not arrive; it does not survive the bumpy journey through my brain.

I know what neuralgia is: it is nerve pain. Trigeminal is the main sensory nerve in the face and the motor nerve for chewing. I can find this out by looking up an anatomical drawing of the nervous system, the head.

But I cannot hear where the stress falls, which is how I see and hear words: the sound arrives first, then the image. Sound arrives in syllabic packages, like people bustling through train carriages. Who gets to the empty carriage first – there, ahead -- who gets the best window seat? The syllable that arrives first, the syllable we rest upon, grants me a view of the word with its connotations, its close connections, and then its associations, its more distant relatives to my imagination.

It is the second syllable I cannot hear, that ‘geh’. I go to grasp it and it falls away, slips out of reach. I can’t read the word; it remains obtuse. Nothing rises to the surface. I cannot hear her speak.  

Perhaps because it relates to so much strong pain? Perhaps because I’ve learned to associate words with such clear graphic movement: sounds surging up towards me, moving through the air, rising up and creating images inside my head. Language is always visceral. She moves with life-force towards me.

‘Now I break up in pieces and fly about,’ declares the speaker of Sylvia Plath’s poem, ‘Elm’. This is how I think of sound, as syllabic movement; small pieces of rock or flint or clay or marble flying around in space; linguistic energy moving towards a shape or form that produces a plastic whole, an entire piece, an event. But the event is missing. Something has broken down: the sound-system.