Thomas Mann’s ‹Magic Mountain› (1924) was written partly in response to his experience as a guest at the Waldsanatorium in Davos, while his wife was receiving treatment there for a lung illness. Among several recurring themes in the book, one involves a series of meditations on the nature of time, another registers the emergence of psychoanalysis. Aspects of both are absorbed into the reme-dial day-to-day lives of the sanatorium patients. Days are apportioned to a strict schedule, «the regimen of the cure», with consultations structured into the routine. But in the book’s central chapter, titled «Snow», Hans Castorp decides to break out of the time frame of the sanatorium, in favour of the silent solitude of its alpine setting. People were constantly debating or complaining about something, «right now it was the weather», he thought, «But if they had no sun, they had snow…» Immeasurable snow, in fact, falling silently, day in, day out, and all through the night. Roads were now tunnels with towering walls, crystal and alabaster surfaces on which the guests scribbled all kinds of messages. The entire landscape hidden beneath a cloud of snow was now a lost world inhabited only by invisible flocks of snow bunting. Embracing his symptoms, as the sanatorium staff constantly encouraged, Castorp heads into the snow to be finally alone, to join the mountains in their snowy desolation. Setting off into the solitude on skis, stopping every now and then only to quell the sound of his own movement and to allow «the silence about him to be absolute, complete, a wadded soundlessness.» No stir of air, no rustle of trees, no birds singing, only a primeval silence over which it continued to snow. Linear time was suspended, but the soundless flakes seemed to fall faster the longer he paused to apprehend them. Holding out his arm for the snow to collect, the misty grains of frozen moisture are something Castorp has looked at more closely under a microscopic lens: «The exquisite precision of form displayed by these little jewels, insignia, orders, agraffes – no jeweller, however skilled, could do finer, tinier work.» Individual snow crystals are formed with both the frosty precision of writing and the warmer breathed impermanence of spoken language. Suddenly the snowstorm breaks, enveloping Hans Castorp in blind white «whirling night», his heart «clutched by an icy hand», and though his facial muscles feel locked he becomes aware that his thoughts are being spoken aloud, that he was talking to himself through lips «so stiff that he could not shape the labials». Slurred speech is a symptom of hypothermia, when body temperature drops to a low level of 10°C (50°F), but the physical act of speaking is keeping his body temperature up. Hans Castorp’s body had responded with a talking cure that rallied its own neurons to his rescue. Tibetan nuns are able to control their core body temperature using different forms of meditation. They can stay warm or boost their immune systems by practicing «g-tummo», a spiritual meditation practice, named for the fierce goddess of heat and passion in Tibetan Buddhist tradition, harnessing inner energy through breathing techniques and visualization – in this case, of flames near the spine – to stimulate heat production. But I once saw the Norwegian artist Toril Johannessen present a single word that is capable of warming the body. The word is not a spell, she explained. It does not work by magic. It is a word that stops you being cold through the physical movements involved in saying it. AA-MHUMA-AITI-KITTEKITII is a warming word that performs its task through being uttered. It does not belong to any particular language and is a combination of phonemes absent of symbolic content; replacing the semantic dimension with a physiological function, to set off a chain of sensations in the body by being spoken. The physical movements of its enunciation, the precise combination of muscle contractions while breathing in and exhaling out, can mobilize key mechanisms of the inner body, transmitting their signals along the spinal cord and triggering neurons in the brain that help to recalibrate the body’s now rising temperature.
Henri Bergson, whose interest in the human body’s relation to both time and language will have interested Thomas Mann, considered memory and perception as functions of the body. In his book ‹Matter and Memory› (1896), Bergson describes perception happening throughout the body, and memory as an editorialized stage of that function, at best heavily compromised by the idealised imagery of language. Toril Johannessen suggests through her own work, her own words, how language can impact us in many different ways. We may be emotionally affected to the extent that even hearing or reading words is an entirely physical experience. But the kind of word Johannessen offered works in a specifically different way, affecting the body in the process of being produced.