The Laughter of Adam and Eve

Brouhaha

8 Brouhaha is the Jew, the dark Jews present in you, in your very mouth unbeknownst. Brouhaha you say after them, long after the despised, and so now in their honor, from the Hebrew of— so scholars say, by way of French— barukh ha-ba, blessed be the one who arrives, said in a tumble of voices, a crowd chorusing the repeated phrase, barukh ha-ba, greeting the one who does enter among them, a caftaned traveler who comes with news for those gathered in the narrow courtyard, spilling into the street, the wave of greeting passing through them in an untidy mix of voices lapping over one another. What sounds like nonsense to the gentile passerby with business in the quarter— everyone speaking at once if not quite together, all that tribe, 9 heard as from a height in clamorous babble, except something emerges, almost a word— garble the stranger overhears as brouhaha, thinks to store for mockery, and passes it along till somehow it becomes the devil’s cry as he arrives on stage circa 1490 in Farce de Martin de Cambray (or rather it is an actor playing the horny priest disguised as the devil sounding like a Jew apparently— who knew? Did the audience know the sound of a Jew when they heard it?). A word from words unmooring from what they meant, drifting to something else, become a word commotion gave itself out of the confusion of the tribes—things to speak of, things to say, however they arrive, say after me: blessed be the arrival of that which brings to the tongue taste, and sustenance to the body of our speech. ...