‘Nothing fascinates for long,’ my Nonna used to say, sometimes as a commentary upon her granddaughter’s short attention span, sometimes to dismiss the latest headline-making scientific discovery.
Her wisdom would not hit home until three decades into the next millennium, about four weeks after we first made contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.
I was appointed to the communication team for my training as a field linguist, but it was my work in artificial intelligence that proved instrumental in setting up exchange channels. It turned out that we didn’t need to learn the aliens’ languages. Instead we wrote software that mined their equivalent of our internet and created a two-way translation device. Before long, conversation with our distant neighbours was as mundane as using the ‘chat’ function on a customer service site.
I was bored. And it bothered me that no matter how much we ‘talked’ with our extraterrestrial interlocutors, we weren’t learning anything about their languages.
‘Why would you need to learn their languages?’ my husband Gary asked. ‘Language is for communication, right? You’re already communicating with them.’
His question tripped an inexplicable sadness in me, a longing that could never be translated into the limited lexicon of our lingua franca.
Our son was watching an online video about mycelium. ‘Language isn’t for communication,’ he said. ‘It’s how things are structured.’
His words riveted my attention to his screen, which showed a time-lapse sequence of a white fungal net stretching out over a vast forest. I felt my breath catch. I too was caught, captivated by this silent, linguistically rich ecosystem, a structure so compelling that, despite Nonna’s prophecy, its fascination might endure.
What we were told about the project was little enough to be written on a napkin.
I can say this with some confidence because I did write it on a napkin.
I got the call in a Starbucks, and scrawled some barely discernible notes from my barely discernible conversation with my deep-voiced, disembodied interlocutor.
An extraterrestrial species (humanoid, intelligent) had been discovered on Earth. The agency (governmental, top secret) was looking for adoptive carers.
‘You want me to adopt an alien?’ I looked up from my phone to raise my eyebrows at my fellow Starbucks regulars, who smiled sympathetically.
‘The preferred term is Guests.’
It wasn’t a joke. They were choosing potential Guest-adopters from a bank of experts (biochemists, neuroscientists, psychologists). My area is linguistic anthropology. They wanted to know about Guest languages.
They’d named my Guest Ella. I put her in my daughter’s room. (She lived with her father now and never came home.)
I wished I’d adopted more than one Guest. I couldn’t learn anything about Ella’s language because she didn’t have anyone to talk to. Also, she’d achieved native-level proficiency of English within several weeks, which made it harder to make hypotheses based on her acquisition patterns.
One anomaly gave me a clue, though—her use of pronouns. She acquired the first-person singular (I, me, my) without any trouble, but she never used second, third or first-person plural.
The implications of this hit me one night after dinner. Ella had just polished off a generous bowl of ice cream (Madagascan vanilla with dark chocolate chunks).
‘I’m hungry,’ she said.
She didn’t eat the second helping I gave her. Instead she held the bowl out to me.
‘That’s for you, Ella,’ I reminded her. I don’t eat ice cream. (I stopped eating sweets when Pieter left.)
She placed the bowl in front of me with uncharacteristic stubbornness.
It was then that I noticed how malleable her facial features were.
‘That’s for me,’ she repeated. ‘I want it so much.’
I tried not to stare as her face morphed. She was starting to look like someone I knew.
‘It looks so delicious,’ she said, and her longing nearly broke my heart. ‘I’m empty inside. Maybe ice cream would help.’
I stared longingly at the decadent chunks of chocolate speckling the soft cream. (My weight was one of the reasons Pieter left.)
‘I miss ice cream,’ she said.
It was not until the first spoonful passed my eager lips that I understood.
Guest language had no second person pronoun.
‘I miss myself,’ she continued, ruthlessly. ‘I don’t know who I am, now that I’m all alone.’
Ella had no way of saying ‘you’.
Which meant she probably didn’t even have a concept of ‘you’.
‘You’re not alone,’ I said.
Her uncannily familiar face made it clear that she was not reassured.
I tried again. ‘I’m not alone,’ I said.
Her eyes glowed with warmth, like light in a guest house. (Inviting. Welcoming.)
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.
Grammar for Dreamers 