In Renaissance art, angels and other spiritual emissaries were painted with haloes. Sir Oliver Iveson now knew why.
The one he fashioned for himself out of tin foil was crude but effective. When he wore it, he could communicate with extraterrestrial intelligence.
‘You’re highly respected by the scientific community,’ said the psychiatrist they’d hired to perform his evaluation. Her name was Dr Mary Bryan.
He had no need of reassurance. It had been only six months since Stockholm.
‘For as long as I can remember,’ he’d said in his acceptance speech, ‘I’ve looked with longing to the stars, to communicate with the intelligent beings I was certain were there.’ He squinted into the dazzling lights.
‘I’ve read your Nobel address,’ Dr Bryan said. She pulled a printed sheet from among the papers on her desk. ‘You write, several times, of failure.’
She read the passages back to him. He’d failed in his childhood dreams of communicating with the people in the stars. But it was his dogged pursuit of this unlikely mission that had produced theoretical discoveries that innovated communication systems on earth.
‘Do you still feel that you’ve failed, even after all the recognition you’ve received for your work?’
‘I haven’t failed.’
‘You were dishonest in your speech?’
‘No. I’ve succeeded since then.’
‘You’ve succeeded at locating extraterrestrial life? And communicating with them? How is that possible?’
Sir Oliver leaned forward in his seat. He rested his elbows on his thighs. ‘If I were a three-year-old boy, and I asked you where the stars were, what would you say?’
‘I would tell a three-year-old boy that the stars are up there,’ she said, pointing to the ceiling. ‘Up there in the sky.’
‘And if I were to ask you, What is up? What is there? What would you say then?’
‘They’re words that are relative to the position of the speaker, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Up is above me. Here is where I am. There is where I am not.’
Sir Oliver nodded excitedly. ‘And if you did not have these words? Without language, there would be no speaker, no me, and thus no position relative to me. There would be no up, no there.’
He watched her scribble something on her notepad. He waited for her to look up again.
‘I have come to an understanding,’ he said, ‘of why the technologies I developed in the lab could never succeed at discovering and communicating with extraterrestrial life. They were being blocked by another, more primitive technology.’
‘What technology is that?’
‘Speech. Human language. The stuff that positions the stars as up, as far away, as out there, out of reach.’
‘That the stars are far away from us is an empirical, measurable fact, Sir Oliver. It’s true regardless of the language we use to describe it.’
Sir Oliver shook his head. ‘Linguistic expressions,’ he explained, ‘require an originating source, a zero point, which places the self at the centre, relegating the rest of the universe’—he swept his arms above his head, grandly—‘to somewhere out there.’
The doctor was no longer bothering to mask her disapproval. Sir Oliver noticed the force with which she pressed her pen into the page, underlining something she’d written previously, then repeating the gesture with even more urgency.
He respected her skepticism. He’d have to offer proof.
He removed a folded silver sheet from his shirt pocket. It rustled in his hands like distant, high-pitched thunder.
Dr Bryan looked at the tin foil with alarm. ‘Sir Oliver,’ she warned.
He saw her eyes dart behind him, toward the door.
He worked quickly, shaping the foil into a snake, which quickly transformed to ouroboros, an empty-centred halo which would free its wearer of the deictic positioning of language, from the tyrannical constraints of up and down, I and you, here and there.
He rose slowly so as not to spook her further. He eased toward her, making senseless soothing sounds, as if she were a frightened deer stuck in a barbed wire fence.
Carefully he centred the halo on the crown of her head.
He stood back to witness the transfiguration, the erasure of distance, the blissful annihilation of the self, and the miraculous opening of her portal to the stars.
Grammar for Dreamers 