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Rudyard and Rabinowitz

This is my first go at blogging, so if I don't seem to know what I'm doing, please either ignore me forgive me or suggest a better way. I have been listening again and again to the opening lines of Man and Beast, today's class assignment. I have written down the phonetic translation but now realize that many of the symbols and diacritical marks aren't going to be available on my keyboard. I was curious about Dr. Rabinowitz' comment regarding Hard Contacts, so I looked it up. Hard contacts are hypertensed fixed articulatory postures assumd by stutterers in attempting feared words. HIs opening sentence begins, "I was five years old (exhale through the nose, mouth closed), standing in the old great cat house at the Bronx Zoo...staring in the face of an old female jaguar..(Inhale) I remember..." In this opening the word I sets the sentence into motion, then followed with the (i) in five, the (o) in old and the (e) in great. Following an inhalation, he starts again with the tensed vowel I (i). Perhaps these are the tools of fluency he was taught in Geneseo.
What drew me into the sentence to a greater extent is the presence and use of glides and liquid consonants, that created a sibilant quality to the words. The vowels also draw me in as they begin to loosen up and soften. If what we discussed last week is true, then the emotional content begins to show itself quite early in this narrative. For those who care to remember, I was reminded of the voice of Kaa, the snake in Disney's The Jungle Book. His intent was to hypnotize Mowgli in order to eat him. I found these first sentences to be hypotic in a similar fashion. I was drawn in, not only to the scene itself but to the emotional state of a young boy unable to express himself to the world around him...then I wondered...could the narrator have been influenced by Kipling? So I went wandering-and I found this quote by Kipling, "Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told anyone how I was being treated, Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established." Could our narrator have found Kipling at an early age? Did Kipling's own pain resonate through the telling of the Just So Stories and The Jungle Book? Perhaps in a similar fashion, Rabinowitz learns that his wounds are also his greatest gifts and so fashions a life that results in a way of speaking for and about the animals...