Author Archives: jodielclark

The Great Reversal

River winding through marshland
Photo by Brian Sumner

A hydronym … is a type of toponym that designates a proper name of a body of water. Hydronyms include the proper names of rivers and streams, lakes and ponds, swamps and marshes, seas and oceans.

The Great Reversal, which marks the end of the Earth’s environmental crisis, is often credited to terronymic technologies. Terronymy (from the Latin terra, ‘Earth’ and the Greek onoma, ‘name’) is the process of activating the self-restoration of threatened ecosystems by reminding specific environmental loci and geographical features of their true names.

The lack of archival material from the Apocalyptic Period has made it impossible, so far, to identify the origin of terronymy or to locate its founder or founders. It is generally accepted that terronymy in some rudimentary form was practiced as early as the 2050s or ’60s, most likely in secret, by scientists who recognised the heretical nature of the methods they were testing. Whether the practice was developed by one great mind or a team is likely never to be known, and the pioneer or pioneers who discovered it are likely to have died in the apocalypse, their names and stories to remain shrouded in the mystery of lost history.

Transcript (dated 9 November 2136) of an interview between a journalist from the Environmental Record and retired conservation scientist Dr Frederick Clintock:

ER: I’m very grateful to you, Dr Clintock, for taking the time to talk with me today.

FC: Please call me Fred.

ER: Or course. I was curious about your work during the Apocalyptic Period in the 2050s.

FC: I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to tell you. My memory’s not what it was.

ER: Anything you have to share would be great. I understand your research was in rivers.

FC: Calling it research is a stretch. It’s hard for young people to understand what it was like. We were refugees on a dying planet. My partner and I travelled together for months, on foot, along the rivers we were sent to examine. We couldn’t go by boat. The water was pure poison. Every day, for months, in those toxic marshes, with no one but ourselves to look after us. You really get to know a person.

ER: What was your partner’s name, Fred?

FC: (Pauses to think.) Do you know, I can’t remember? Strange, that.

ER: Can you tell us what methods you and your partner were using?

FC: (Shakes his head.) We could only carry so much equipment, and we had no power source, so it was all very primitive. Just simple pH and salinity tests to chart the extent of the devastation. But my partner—what was his name? Fred?

ER: Well, your name is Fred…

FC: (Laughs.) Ah, so it probably wasn’t Fred. I’d have remembered that name!

ER: Of course. So your partner…

FC: Yes. Well, he had a different method. If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me.

ER: Actually, I think I probably would.

FC: He just… talked.

ER: Talked?

FC: He talked to the people. The people who lived by the rivers. At first I thought he was just being sociable. Polite. It was a precarious time. Most people were homeless and forming bands, many of them dangerous. You didn’t know who to trust. Civilisation was disintegrating, you see.

ER: But you suspected there was more to his conversations than just politeness?

FC: He was talking to the people about the rivers. Asking for stories. Personal stories—did they swim in the rivers as children? Did they fish them? Did they freeze over in the winters? If they were open to talking, he’d start probing them for more… apocryphal tales. Ghost stories. Local superstitions about the water. Tales of sea monsters, hauntings. Stories about supernatural beings—mermaids, water sprites, that sort of thing. The stranger the story, the more he wanted to hear.

And then one day I had a look at his field notebook. He’d not noted a single one of our pH or salinity readings. Instead the pages were full of the stories he’d heard at all the settlements. Word for word. He had an unbelievable memory. Every word was there, filling every white space.

ER: Did he ever explain what he was doing? Did you ever ask?

FC: I did ask him, once. I caught him poring over the pages of his notebook, like he was in a trance or something. He told me he was searching for patterns in the stories. The patterns, he said, would give him clues as to the river’s true name. 

ER: Fascinating!

FC: Mad, you mean. The air was nearly as poisonous as the rivers at this point. It was starting to mess with his sense of reality. I knew it was really bad when he told me he’d finally figured out a river’s true name. He wrote it on a bit of rice paper and slipped it into the water, where it dissolved.

ER: What year would this have been, Dr Clintock?

FC: Call me Fred. I can’t really say. It was a long time ago.

ER: 2050? 2055?

FC: Could be.

ER: We always assumed the first terronymic experiments started in the ’60s, with mountains. But to think it started almost a decade earlier. With rivers. Dr Clintock, it’s very possible your partner was the pioneer who initiated the Great Reversal!

FC: What’s that? It’s a shame about him. A lot of people went crazy during those times. Wish I could remember his name. I think it started with an F…

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it. I also discuss ‘The Great Reversal’ in Episode 69 of Structured Visions.

Breadcrumb trail

Photo by Florian Glawogger

‘One of the most common types of metaphoric transfer is synaesthesia … i.e. the transfer of information from one sensory modality to another.’ (Bretones Callejas, 2001, p. 4)

Professor Hans Grets’s paleoanthropological team often commented upon his cool demeanour at the moment of the big discovery. He’d observed each fragment of bone being unearthed from the excavation site with unnerving composure. Only when the fourth femur was finally extracted did Hans acknowledge the magnitude of their find.

‘Well, that’s something,’ he said.

When journalists reported on his discovery—two skeletons, male and female, the link between Neanderthal and human—they found it impossible to resist the obvious pun on the lead scientist’s name. 

Breadcrumb trail leads Professor Hans Grets to homo sapiens’ nearest relative, read the headlines.

Hans did not protest when the skeletons were informally christened ‘Hansel’ and ‘Gretel’. 

No one knows of the images that haunt his dreams.

Every night, the same story.

Hansel and Gretel are chased from their homeland, dropping white slips of a paperlike material—flower petals, or thin, colourless leaves—on the ground as they flee.

Something has been written upon them.

Even in the dream, Hans maintains his scientific incredulity. It can’t be writing, and those marks can’t be words. Spoken language wouldn’t emerge in homo sapiens until, conservatively, 150,000 years ago. The first evidence of literacy doesn’t appear until about 3000 BCE. It’s inconceivable that Hansel and Gretel would command a written language.

And yet, a careful examination of the marks on those dream pages makes it impossible to deny. The symbols are words. What is even more curious is that Hans is able to decipher them.

We are afraid. Come rescue us.

Hansel and Gretel have scattered their messages in vain. Most of their notes are eaten by the birds. The rest sink into the soil and sprout up as vegetation.

Many years later, the earth and all its creatures voice the same refrain: We are afraid. Come rescue us.

Hans awakens to beads of sweat streaming from him. His body feels like a polar ice cap, melting.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it.

Wordfall

Photo by Yang Shuo

The most difficult question for most linguists to answer is ‘What’s a word?’

Always, it’s exactly the same.

I’m exhausted by the climb. I stand at the top to catch my breath, to rest my overtaxed muscles. They quiver like jelly. My heart flings itself against my ribcage as if trying to escape.

My body never seems to adjust to the exertion of the climb, no matter how many times I do it. My muscles never grow stronger, my lung capacity never increases, my heart never stabilises.

There’s a sign at the top of the mountain. Sometimes I read it, but I never manage to remember the words printed on it. Observe? Observation? Observatory? And another word that sounds scientific, but which is actually about language. Language observatory? Lexical observatory? Observatoire linguistique?

The sign marks only the halfway point of my journey to the site, but the road levels out here and the going is easier. The view is stunning, when I remember to look.

When I reach the site I inevitably encounter the scientific instruments and the team of people who operate them.

They never used to acknowledge my presence. I’ve since learned they were being cautious about approaching me directly, for fear of scaring me away. Eventually curiosity gets the better of me and I start asking questions.

‘What are these instruments?’

They look a little like radio telescopes, shaped like big bowls, their rims horizontal with the sky.

One day I remember the words on the sign (observe-observation-observatory-observatoire) and ask what they’re observing. 

‘Words,’ they say.

‘What words?’

They point to the sky.

‘The ones that land in our instruments.’

‘Where do they come from?’

‘Outer space.’

‘Wait. You’ve discovered intelligent extraterrestrial life? In outer space? Are they talking to us? What are they saying?’

We’ve had this conversation at least a dozen times, I’m embarrassed to admit. And I can never get it through my thick skull that ‘words from outer space’ aren’t spoken by extraterrestrials, they’re not part of some alien broadcast, they’re not communicated at all. They’re just falling from the sky, like inert little specks, like stardust.

They actually fall into those radio telescope things. It turns out those big bowls are like water butts or reservoirs, capturing words, not rainfall. Wordfall. The sensitive equipment the team uses helps them study each word, to learn its qualities and eventually to decide which ones they want to incorporate into Earth.

When I finally understand that much they hook me up to a network of electrodes so I can know what a word is like. A word is not, it turns out, a combination of letters, or sounds, or symbols of any kind. Words are like…

I don’t know. Every time I try to grasp it I’m back down at the bottom of the mountain again, and I can’t always be bothered to climb back up.

Really, it’s exhausting. Physically and mentally.

Here it is—I’ve got it now. Don’t try to imagine what a word is, or what it means. Better to say words have qualities. They make you feel a certain way. Itchy, or wise, or bereft, or curious. They’re like little blue pulses of energy—zip! They infuse you with some unique way of feeling or thinking—some new idea.

It’s probably twenty more trips up the mountain before I learn how they integrate the new words into Earth. I keep making the mistake of thinking that they’ll translate them into something that sounds like English, Spanish or Inuit. Maybe they’ll use Esperanto. I keep inventing clever little neologisms for the outer-space words I’m experiencing until eventually—poof! It’s straight back down the mountain for me.

It’s actually quite a difficult thing, this business of incorporating new words. The words need a safe space to exist within, and creating that environment takes a lot of calibration. That’s what most of the instrumentation is for, in fact.

And here’s the confusing bit, but it starts to make sense after lots of trips up here. The space that accommodates the new words is made out of language. 

Language is different from words, it turns out. 

Language makes stories. It makes… selves.

That’s it!

Stories and selves—selved stories, self stories? Self stories are containers made out of language, specially calibrated to welcome words from outer space.

‘You’re ready,’ one of them tells me now.

‘Ready for what?’

But I know what they mean. They think I’m ready to be a human storage compartment for one of their alien words.

What have they been doing to me all this time? Have they been messing with me when they’ve hooked me up to their instruments? I’ve changed, somehow. I can’t quite figure it out.

Poof!

The mountain looms ahead of me. I’m at the bottom again. 

This time I won’t go back. Nobody’s making me climb that road again. I’m nobody’s guinea pig.

Half an hour later, I’m standing by that sign again, something-something observatoire, something-something transformation. I can’t read it properly. My lungs feel like they’re about to explode.

It’s OK, though, I’ve done this before. I know the way from here, it’s easy going the rest of the way.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it. I also discuss ‘Wordfall’ in Episode 68 of Structured Visions.

Gold

Line drawing illustration of Rumpelstiltskin and the future queen trying to spin straw into gold

English verbs take inflections for two tenses only—present and past.

In his dotage, the king has become obsessed about what is to come and has taken to consulting soothsayers.

The queen has known for many years the impossibility of changing the future, let alone trying to predict it.

She learned these and many other valuable lessons from a demon she met in her early years. His name was Rumpelstiltskin.

The name, it turns out, is important. Not the name itself—the quaternity of syllables, the clustered consonants, the complex portmanteau of simple English words (rump, stilt, skin). What matters is that the demon was possessed of a name at all, and that he guarded it so closely. The name is powerful.

The realisation made the queen question the composition of the straw he’d famously spun into gold. It could not have been ordinary straw. Perhaps it too, was made of a name, or whatever magic thing names were made of. She undertook a few clandestine experiments with the spinning wheel.

The straw he used had tremendous plasticity. It could be made into anything—almost anything. Gold was one of the simpler projects, surprisingly easy to master. The queen was eager to move on to new challenges.

The king’s current obsession with the future coincides with her own realisation that she can change the past. With her deft fingers on the spinning wheel, she creates any number of alternative histories.

In one her father’s boasts about her spinning skills go unnoticed, and she remains a peasant, blissfully ignorant of the complications of royal life.

In another, sweeter version, she confesses her ineptitude and the prince marries her anyway.  

Once she dares to spin the thread into an unthinkable past, in which she fails to discover the demon’s name and her firstborn is lost to her. She follows Rumpelstiltskin to his underworld lair and consents to be his consort.

Though she keeps her new skill secret, occasionally she’s tempted to tell the king. What she knows might be enough to convince him to sack those charlatan soothsayers. 

There is no need to worry about the future if you know how to change the past.

Perhaps one day she’ll tell him. For now she enjoys her hobby in solitude, and the wisdom that it affords her.

The straw is made of language. What she spins are stories.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it.

The interpreter

Woman holding a clear glass ball over her right eye
Photo by Jonathan Sebastiao

The perfective aspect is used to describe an action as a simple and complete whole.

Xenia presses her palms onto the chiffon scarf that partially covers the wobbly, secondhand table. She casts her glance mysteriously past the nervous client facing her and pretends to concentrate.

The client is a young woman between the ages of 19 and 24. Her hair is golden blonde, or jet black, or brown with dyed auburn highlights. Rarely is she Belgian, and if she is, she’s not from Brussels. She’s on a gap year, or an international exchange, or a language course, or an internship.

Xenia returns her attention to the girl’s face. If there’s a friend with her, the friend giggles.

‘American, yes? From Florida? No. A bit further north. Louisiana. New Orleans.’

Tulane University’s Brussels programme is conveniently housed a few doors down from Xenia’s office building. It has been the unwitting provider of about two-thirds of her income for the past five years. 

Xenia waits for evidence of skepticism to reemerge on her client’s face. Then she allows her own face to soften sympathetically. ‘Ah. How long ago did he break up with you?’

It’s never less than a week, never more than a month. Xenia keeps the Kleenex on the empty chair beside her, out of sight. She produces one after another, like scarves from a top hat, and waits as the young American dabs her eyes.

Xenia’s not Belgian either, or American. She’s Greek, and she’s not a psychic. She has a PhD in linguistics and hired out this office space to do freelance translation and interpretation.

She’d not had time to remove the brass plate advertising ‘intuitive readings’ when her first customer walked through her door in the autumn of 2016.

‘Are we going to get back together soon?’ the distraught student had demanded.

‘I don’t know, I really don’t have any way of knowing.’

‘Will I meet someone else?’

‘I’m sure you will if you give it enough time. I’m sorry I can’t help. I don’t know where she’s moved to, the woman who used to give readings, I’ll check to see if she’s left her card somewhere.’

Xenia scoured the empty office, looking for some clue as to where the absent psychic might now be located. Her visitor leaned on the doorframe, shaking and gasping with her sobs.

‘I’m so sorry, I’m not a psychic. I’m a linguist.’

‘A what?’

‘Languages. I’m an interpreter. I’ll see if I can find a box of Kleenex.’

What she found instead was a box of crystal balls—more like large glass marbles, she supposed, but perfectly clear.

‘It’s just that I never thought he’d leave me. Like, I actually thought we were going to get married. He was supposed to come visit me in Europe. I was thinking he might propose in Paris. And then he sends me a text to say he’s not coming… and that he doesn’t want to be with me anymore. Like, what? Five minutes without me and he doesn’t want to be with me anymore? I heard he’s screwing my old roommate.’

Xenia tells a version of this story now to her new visitor, who affirms her accuracy with enthusiastic, wide-eyed nods. ‘Yes, yes!’ she says. ‘That’s exactly it. How did you know? He broke up with me by text. And you say he’s sleeping with a friend of mine? That’ll be Charlotte. I knew it!’

Xenia waits for the inevitable next question. 

‘Do you think we’ll get back together?’

Xenia responds with the same answer she gave her first accidental client, all those years ago.

‘Would you like to know what the real trouble is? Your language. The English language lacks a perfective aspect.’

This is the cue for the sodden tissue to ease itself away from its watery wound, for the sunlight of curiosity to pierce through the clouds of grief.

‘A perfect what?’

‘A perfective aspect. It’s a way of expressing that something is finished, complete, a perfect unity with no further entry point.’

Xenia now keeps the crystal balls handy, next to the box of Kleenex. She produces one now. She holds it in her open palm, making sure it catches the light. She waits for her hesitant visitor to take it from her.

‘You loved him. It’s over now. You can look at your relationship in the way that you can look at that crystal ball. You can even look into it. But you can’t experience it again. There’s no way back in.’

An epiphanic beam shines on the face of her grateful client, who takes the proffered sphere, tucking it carefully into her handbag. There’s a spring in her step as she leaves the room, a renewed confidence in her bearing.

When Xenia moves to return the crystal balls to their place in the cupboard, one drops to the floor. She moves onto hands and knees to find it.

‘Perfective aspect,’ she muses as her fingers locate the smooth orb and retract it from its hiding place under the bookcase. She’s struck with a new thought.

Maybe every grammatical phenomenon has some material counterpart, some clearly defined structure, some recognisable shape. Maybe they have healing properties, some strange capacity to reshape someone’s life, to translate their experience into something new.

Xenia grasps the sphere, brings it safely back to her. She holds it in her open, reverent palm, still on her knees, awestruck.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it.

Go

Greyscale photo of woman reading
Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com

(The following is an excerpt from a short story published in The Running Wild Anthology of Stories, Vol 5.)

Anna gripped the banister of the university library’s vertiginous staircase with the same white-knuckled power she’d discovered during her turbulent transatlantic flight. She felt the bottom drop again as she reached the ground-floor helpdesk, now grasping nothing more substantial than a flimsy slip of paper, wet with her sweat.

Anna had inscribed the words on a sheet from the hotel pad before she’d started out today, in case she lost the power of speech or failed to contort her Virginia accent into something more understandable, if not more palatable, to her English addressees. She’d already mispronounced Birmingham twice since she’d arrived, once at Heathrow customs and once at Euston station, her thick tongue reluctant to renounce the Alabama namesake.

The bemused librarian glanced over what she’d written. Abena Amina. Imperatives in Omotic Languages. PhD Thesis, University of Birmingham, 1985.

“We don’t hold hard copies of theses here anymore. They’re all sent to the British Library.”

“Can you tell me how to get there?” Anna whispered, like a frightened child.

“It’s in London,” was the response. “But you don’t go to the British Library to access an archived thesis, you write to request it. They scan it and email it to you.”

Anna imagined a less foolhardy version of her past self, discreetly filling out an online form from her work computer in Roanoke, scrolling through the returned digital file later that evening while Rich graded papers, unaware. In a flash of hindsight she saw the tensions on their budget and marriage erased, never forming.

Shame pressed against her like a blinding wall of fire. She blinked. Her interlocutor’s face appeared now as a blur of purposeful motion, silhouetted against imagined flames. “The departments sometimes hold onto the bound copies,” she conceded, and made a few phone calls. The campus map she eventually handed Anna held the clues to the next stage in her ill-planned scavenger hunt. A name scrawled in the margins: Adam Draper. A circle drawn around one of the buildings: Frankland.

The Frankland Building, it turned out, housed a neglected repository of doctoral theses from days gone by. They’d been piled unceremoniously onto the sagging shelves of the cluttered psychology postgrad room. Adam Draper was the psychology postgrad who’d been tasked to serve as guide to the uninvited American visitor.

Anna spotted the volume within minutes, retrieving it from among scores of gold-embossed maroon spines, half-hidden behind the misshapen blades of a Venetian blind caked with layers of dust. Its heft spoke of a mystery soon to be revealed. She pulled the tome to her and hugged it to her chest, as if it were a child she’d forgotten, returned to her fully grown.

“There must be something rather valuable in there,” Adam said, and Anna realized he’d witnessed this devastatingly vulnerable scene. Her lips moved to excuse her behavior, but no words formed there. The vertigo she’d felt in the library still pulled at her, but now with a singly directed propulsion – a force that would not allow itself to be squandered on unnecessary words.

She’d not released her grip on her prize. “Do I sign this out or something?”

“Well… the thesis isn’t really supposed to leave the postgrad office. But you can stay and read it for as long as you like. I was planning on working in here today anyway.”

So her guide became her silent companion as she plunged into the secrets of Imperatives in Omotic Languages.

Read the rest of “Go” in The Running Wild Anthology of Stories, Vol. 5.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it. I also discuss “Go” in Episode 67 of Structured Visions.

The end of language

A lone starling sitting on a flowering branch
Photo by Hans Veth

Language death occurs when a speech community loses its competence in its language variety, until it reaches a point where no more native or fluent speakers exist. 

A tale used to be told about the end of language. It went like this.

A monk stood in contemplation on a hillside at twilight.

As the sun dipped lower and the valley’s shadows grew, a flock of starlings rose in the darkening sky. Their numbers multiplied in rhythmic ripples until the liquid beads of their consciousness merged into one fluid wave. 

The monk felt his own thoughts dissolve, like an eroding shoreline, swept up in the birds’ murmuration, and he was enlightened.

He travelled into the valley to share with the people there the pathway to wholeness.

His teachings spread like a mighty wave, sweeping up the distracting thoughts of all the people in its wake. As their thoughts slipped away, so did their language.

No one knows this story now but me.

I am the one to whom language has been restored.

It came to me as I stood on the hillside at sunrise, contemplating the birdsong. From the richly layered harmonies of that dawn’s chorus, one strain rose above, distinct and piercing. Each note of the melody made itself known as singular, like drops of dark ink on a white page.

The persistent soloist set words to its tune. 

Startled, I turned to see a solitary starling casting its shadow on my shoulder, dropping shimmering feathers as it flew away.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it. I also discuss ‘The end of language’ in Episode 66 of Structured Visions.

The Maker of Language

New York City window display picture a woman standing in front of neon outlines of jazz instruments, as if conducting an orchestra.
Image by Spencer Imbrock

One of the functions of ‘like’ in everyday speech is as a quotative, or introducer of speech or thought. Research on conversational narratives shows that quotative ‘like’ has a similar effect as the progressive aspect, as an internal evaluation device. 

OK, so you’re about to die.

You’re one of those who thinks there’s an afterlife, and that you’ll meet your Creator there.

You’re seventy-five percent correct.

Here’s what you’re wrong about: you actually get to meet two Creators in the afterlife.

The one people line up to see is the famous one, the Maker of Heaven and Earth.

The one no one seems to even know about is Me, the Maker of Language.

I had a different plan for creation than the other God.

His design was of a world that was already perfect, balanced and complete, something He could sit back and be proud of. You know, ‘He saw that it was good’, and all that.

I wanted to make something that wouldn’t ever be finished, something that could make itself up as it went along.

We didn’t argue about it or anything. We collaborated. We were the first great musical duo. He wrote the chords and the bassline, and I produced linguistic sequences that could be improvised over them.

The problem was that language made people nervous. It made them feel like they were separate from the perfect harmonies the other God had made. Language made them feel like they were supposed to do something more than the rest of creation, which made them feel powerless, like they’d been kicked out of some garden. Then came resentment, which brought out a destructive quality neither I nor the other God had anticipated.

In heaven we share an office, but like I said before, the queues are for Him, not Me.

Everyone assumes I’m the receptionist, or some sort of archivist. It’s probably all the filing cabinets.

When you do finally cop it, can I ask a favour?

Stop by my desk and talk to Me. Bring a few friends along. Help Me get the message out so that in your next life, you might be a little less miserable.

When you come, I’ll be like, Of course you felt separate! That was the point!

You were the goddamned melody!

You were supposed to improvise!

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it.

The greenhouse

Photo of exotic plants in a Victorian greenhouse
Photo by Echo Wang

The desire for social structures that celebrate otherness can be investigated empirically through the analysis of the grammatical structures of participants’ accounts of their social worlds. —Jodie Clark, Selves, Bodies and the Grammar of Social Worlds

The experimental planets are like new strains of exotic plants cultivated in a greenhouse. Earth is one of those rare plants. Imagine it being lovingly observed and tended to by a wise, attentive Botanist.

You believe your name is Rosie (short for Rosemary), and that you’re a middle-school kid who keeps getting bullied. The Botanist believes you are much more—that you carry deep within you the secrets to whether the experimental Earth will thrive.

Imagine he’s gazing hopefully into his microscope now, like he’s focusing on a plant cell, but the cell is your life. Imagine he’s talking to his Apprentice.

‘Aren’t the toxicity levels unusually high?’ worries the Apprentice.

‘For Earth, these are pretty normal,’ sighs the Botanist.

‘What’s causing it?’

‘Names. They’re calling her names.’

He means the other kids in your class.

‘I wouldn’t have expected those names to bind,’ says the Apprentice, confused. ‘They’re not a match for her true name.’

When the Apprentice says ‘her true name’, he doesn’t mean ‘Rosie’ or ‘Rosemary’. He’s referring to the unique linguistic sequence that defines every self.

It’s kind of hard to explain.

What the Botanist knows about Earth is hard to explain, too, but he tries it anyway. It’s important that the Apprentice understand.

‘The language sequence that defines Rosie and her species is not native to the planet they’re inhabiting,’ he says. ‘As a result, their linguistic signatures are…’ He searches for the right word. ‘Vulnerable.’

What the Botanist and the Apprentice take for granted is something that to you would seem a great mystery. All worlds, and all that’s in them, are made of language. All things come into being from the midst of their unique linguistic signatures.

‘The Earth is an experiment in grafting,’ the Botanist reminds the Apprentice. ‘The language that defines the members of Rosie’s species has been spliced into the Earth’s originary language.’

‘I see,’ says the Apprentice. He watches with sorrow as the cruel names continue to penetrate the weak boundary of Rosie’s personhood. He observes the sequences that have emerged in response from within the language of her thoughts. I’m so stupid. No one likes me. I wish I didn’t exist.

‘Is there anything we can do?’ asks the Apprentice. There’s worry in his voice.

‘Watch and hope,’ replies the Botanist. ‘That’s about it.’

The Botanist actually does more than watch and hope, but his methods are too unconventional to share. At night, when the greenhouse is empty, he returns to the microscope and whispers his messages to you.

‘Hang in there, Rosie. We’re pulling for you. You matter to us.’

On the nights when his voice resonates enough to pierce through your veil of tears, you hear his words. You draw them up through your roots like a thirsty flower.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it. I also discuss ‘The greenhouse’ in Episode 65 of Structured Visions.

Babel

Close up of an extra terrestrial being’s face
Photo by Stephen Leonardi

In linguistics, the term displacement refers to the capacity of human languages to communicate information about what’s not immediately present in the here and now.

Tom’s wife didn’t say anything about his clerical collar until after breakfast, and then she didn’t reference it directly.

‘Making visits today?’ She raised her eyebrow, just perceptibly, and refilled their coffee mugs.

‘Just one.’

She waited.

‘Nat Greer’s in the Oaks. It’s Alzheimer’s.’

‘Your old Sunday School teacher,’ she said.

He marvelled at the capacity of her memory, her willingness to absorb the banal trivia of his life, and more importantly, the stoic self-restraint she showed by not voicing her disapproval. The point of him taking a sabbatical was to spare him from the parts of his job most likely to bring about depressive episodes. Bedside visits with the elderly counted among these.

‘Bring those comic books you used to talk about. They might bring back some of his long-term memories.’

Tom placed two copies of Galactic Discoveries on a coffee table in the front parlour of the assisted living community. ‘Greta said you might want to see these,’ he said. Somehow his wife had remembered that he and his friends used to hide them in their bibles during Sunday School.

The sight of the comics lit a spark in the elderly man’s eyes. ‘Tell me about the Tower of Babel!’ he commanded.

Tom grinned. ‘In ancient times,’ he said obligingly, ‘the people built a tower to bring them closer to God. God destroyed the tower, and to punish the people for their hubris, he made it so that they could no longer understand each other when they spoke. That’s why there are so many different languages on earth today.’

‘Incorrect,’ declared Nat Greer, with undisguised glee. ‘Babel wasn’t a tower. Towers go up, from earth to heaven. Babel went from heaven to earth, like a beam of light.’ He nodded toward the coffee table.

The cover of one of Tom’s magazines showed greyish green aliens descending to the ground in a tunnel of light beaming from a floating saucer. 

Seeing the image through Nat Greer’s eyes fired Tom’s imagination, and he remembered the excitement he’d felt at Sunday School on the day he’d been caught sneaking peeks at his comics. Mr Greer made him read passages from Galactic Discoveries aloud, as a punishment. But soon the teacher decided the science fiction stories held more compelling lessons than the bible itself, and Sunday School became the most anticipated event of young Tom’s week. 

It was Mr Greer, he’d often thought, who was singularly responsible for Tom’s vocation. For better or worse.

When he looked up again, Nat had shrunk inside himself, and the plush armchair seemed to envelop him. His eyelids dropped, and a thin line of drool escaped his gaping mouth.

Tom called for a nurse and left the home.

He returned to the Oaks the next morning, and the morning after that. Most days Nat Greer was unresponsive, but every once in a while the light would return and he’d share some strange insight with Tom, always about Babel.

‘It wasn’t a punishment,’ he said. ‘The beings who came down through the tunnel volunteered to forget their common language.’

‘The Tunnel of Babel,’ Tom mused. It might make a good sermon title, when he started preaching again, after his sabbatical.

‘More like an umbilical cord than a tunnel,’ Nat said. ‘It keeps everyone safe and nourished. Everyone but the volunteers.’

‘The volunteers?’

‘Us. You and me. Them.’ Nat nodded toward the other residents, shuffling behind walkers, and the nurses accompanying them.

‘We volunteered for this?’ Tom said, incredulous.

Nat nodded many times.

‘We volunteered to have our umbilical cords cut?’ Tom asked, but received no answer. His Sunday School teacher had nodded off to sleep.

Tom returned every day and asked the same set of questions.

‘Why would we volunteer? Why would we agree to cut ourselves off from our connection to…’ Connection to what? He had no access to precise enough language. ‘From our connection to God?’

One day, finally, Nat was alert enough to thumb through the copies of Galactic Discoveries that Tom unfailingly brought with him on his visits.

‘We wanted to discover new worlds,’ he said. ‘And the Beings who inhabited them.’

Tom shook himself from his reverie in just enough time to realise Nat was finally responding to his questions.

‘We volunteered to cut our connection to God…?’ he asked.

‘We volunteered to cut our connection to everyone and everything,’ said Nat, ‘so we could discover it anew.’

The next time he went to The Oaks, he learned that Nat Greer was dead.

That night he and Greta shared a bottle of Chablis on their back deck after dinner. 

‘Do you think it’s a punishment that the people of the world all speak different languages?’ Tom asked.

‘Are you talking about the Tower of Babel?’

The first full moon of the summer had risen above the distant treeline. It cast an eerie beam of light on their dark lawn.

‘The languages in that story might be a metaphor,’ Greta said. 

‘For what?’

‘For each human being’s distinct, impenetrable subjectivity.’

Tom blinked.

His wife had just articulated the anguish that had led to his most recent crisis. That no one would ever see him. That his views were not welcomed. That he existed only to fulfil society’s ideas of what he should be.

‘Do you really believe that we’re closed off from all experiences but our own?’ he asked. The words came out strained, like his vocal cords were being cut.

‘Does it trouble you that I believe that?’ she asked.

‘I thought out of everyone,’ Tom confessed, ‘that there was at least one person who understood me. At least you.’

She spoke no words, but placed her palm on the back of his hand.

He felt a connection open between them, like a beam of light, or a tunnel, like a discovery renewed.

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it.