The other night I attended an ‘event’ or what you might call a ‘happening’ which is really the only way to describe the crowded room of fifteen tables, each seating a team of six people, who came together to listen to story-tellers, sculpt items such as ‘slang dictionaries’ out of plasticine and identify disturbing old patents for items such as the bizarre indescribable instrument designed to inject ‘evil-minded’ individuals on planes with a tranquillising substance. And that’s not to speak of the bikini-wear with storage compartments.

The ‘event’ was Chaos Thaoghaire (theory), a kind of pub quiz with a twist. We paid our entrance fee and were supplied with chaos bucks, a ball of plasticine, copious arbitrary rules and regulations, an envelope full of things to model and then came the patents. We were treated to tales of heretics at baptisms, the joys of wearing socks in the bath, outing uncles, a lover emerging from her blindness, a strange sense of space in the London Underground and biker men bellowing in France.

So, stuck with this image of a large man wearing leathers and chains roaring out his grief in the desolation of a by-road near a dual carriageway, I naturally started wondering about the power of the spoken word. It didn’t seem to matter how tall the tales, or true or real, it was the telling that really mattered. It makes me think back to Patrick Chamoiseau’s memory from childhood in his autobiography Une Enfance Créole: Chemin d’Ecole (1996)  that for his mother a story is only a lie if you tell it badly (‘on ne ment que quand on raconte mal’, p.149). That’s also the principle that Chaos Thaoghaire seems to operate by, as well as encouraging carnivalesque forms of petty criminality.

It’s funny how in a world full of virtual communication, we sometimes hark back to the days of face-to-face communication, days of story-telling and real life conversation, perhaps because all the paraverbals, the body language, intonation, facial expression etc. are supposed to lend the speech more authenticity and maybe even empathy. You can supposedly tell if a person is lying simply by looking into their eyes, watching their body language, did they touch their nose? In fact, this simply isn’t true. Ex-FBI Agent, Joe Navarro in his book on body language (2008) notes how people are notoriously bad at detecting when people are lying. He still struggles, even after decades of experience. But maybe he’s not telling the truth…

I’m not saying it’s any easier to evaluate truth from fiction through the written word, but at least you can evaluate the words on their own terms, without worrying about their connection to ‘reality’ – you can evaluate them as just an interpretation, a portrayal of what might be, without all the emotional baggage that might sway you in the wrong direction.  The real truth is that body language can mislead as much as it can communicate real facts and perceptions.  According to various and marginally differing statistics it makes up by far and above the majority of what we ‘hear’ in what someone says, certainly representing at least over 50% of the overall communication. Persuasive speakers and politicians know this only too well. Adolf Hitler’s speeches being a classic example. And so, when the pleasant tall fellow ambled over to our table from a neighbouring one at an early stage in the proceedings with a clipboard and a Chaos Thaoghaire badge, saying that he needed to collect all the Chaos bucks from every table and could we sign a disclaimer to say that this wasn’t cheating, we echoed his demeanor and calmly complied. He bled the whole room dry.

If he’d asked us in print, perhaps we would have thought twice.