The Cough
There is something so sonorous in a cough. Just imagine — you are sitting in a large auditorium or an assembly hall or a church. The speaker, teacher, preacher, and pedagogue orates vociferously concerning his or her own creed. The sentences come out, and, sometimes, they strike on something that is challenging. Sometimes, the words that are spoken resonate with a sort of dissonance. And then, it arrives — one raspy, unmistakable vocal derangement. A cough pierces through the evanescent words on the stage. It splits apart infinitives in the vocabulary emanating behind the podium.
Maybe this can’t be helped. It is true that a croup or flu can cause somebody to involuntarily hack up mucus and saliva at inopportune moments. Dry air or a morning jog or a swallowed potato chip that went down the wrong pipe — these can all be culprits to the felonious audible staccato.
But, then again, maybe it isn’t that cut and dry. Why do we cough? That is an ostensibly obvious question but one that has a multiplicity of answers. In cartoons, books, movies, and plays, a cough can be a covert signal. It can convey information unspoken that the clued-in listener may remark as pertinent or important. It is in this theatrical sense that I like to imagine coughing.
Recently, I watched two very different speeches online given by Billy Graham — the famous evangelist — and Dan Dennett — noted atheist and philosopher. During these talks, I was utterly distracted. The crowd was comprised of a cacophonous coughing choir. Both of their speeches, adamant and bellicose, were met with an almost cruel display of coughing and throat-clearing.
It may well be that I am reading too much into this. But there is something, in a way, pleasing about this. A cough is polite dissent. It is a socially acceptable if frowned upon action on par with having a loud shirt on. The cough is a way we remind any iconoclastic or, on the other end of the spectrum, hidebound speaker that we are our own agents. Ultimately, we are not the sheep to be guided into pasture but the individual snowflakes which just happen to coalesce into ivory homogeneity. Any idea expressed by another person is not our idea. It belongs to him or her and he or she alone. We can share beliefs, more or less, but we are always a different voice.
As much as we can agree or disagree on things, there is always a dialogue. As the speaker speaks of a blazing idea, there is always the shadow of a cough.
