Tag Archives: family

Greyscale photo of a pointing finger.

The origin of all destruction

Greyscale image of a pointing finger.
Photo by Cosmin Mîndru

‘Is it true that it’s rude to point?’ Little Tucker asked his Auntie Sam, who was cuddling him after Nana had told him off.

‘It’s more than rude,’ was her soothing reply. ‘It’s the origin of all destruction.’

Auntie Sam was famous for her crazy ideas. Tucker settled into the nest of her lap and waited for the rest of the story.

‘When the first person pointed, he cast a web out from his finger,’ she began.

‘Like Spiderman?’

‘Exactly.’ 

‘What did he point at?’

‘Anything. It doesn’t matter. A rabbit,’ his aunt decided.

‘And the rabbit got trapped?’

‘Yes. And the man sucked all the life force out of his prey, like a spider, and the rabbit became a Name. The Name lived inside the man and became a word in his language.’

‘So the rabbit was gone?’ The boy’s lower lip quivered. 

‘The rabbit still existed,’ Auntie Sam reassured him. ‘But the man couldn’t see it anymore. He could only see the image the word made in his head. Pointing made the whole world disappear, until there was nothing left to point at but language. So people pointed with words, not with fingers.’

Tucker’s mum decided enough was enough. She marched up to the pair, her lips pressed white together, and pulled Tucker out of Sam’s lap.

‘A bit touched, that one,’ Tucker heard his mum say in the kitchen later.

He heard how the words pointed to his beloved Auntie, how they made her disappear, and he cried inconsolably until bedtime.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 111 of Structured Visions, The linguistics of tapping. You can also sign up to the Grammar for Dreamers newsletter to get monthly updates on the ideas that inspire my work.

No and the ark

Round gold icon painted with a scene from the Biblical story of Noah's Ark
Photo of Noah’s Ark icon by Jim Forest

Who are all these people, and why are they all here?

Belinda has not responded to her three-year-old daughter’s repeated questions, though the answers are easily available.

The beach house seems ready to burst at the seams, either from the heaving throngs of family sprawled about in various stages of multi-family chaos within, or from the howling gales that hammer against the paper-thin walls without.

These are my cousins, and they’re here for your great-grandmother’s funeral.

They’ve reached that drunken stage of family gathering where everyone tries to remember Nan’s stories.

Bill, once the thick-headed bullying eldest cousin, now professor of comparative literature at Boston University, tries to convince everyone their grandmother’s vast collection of stories consisted solely of variations on Bible themes.

Carly, who runs a tattoo salon in Brooklyn says he’s reading way too much into it.

Gina, the Montessori peacekeeper, is praising the artichoke dip.

Who are all these people, and why are they all here?

Belinda has breathed barely a word since they congregated at the family vacation home, not even to her daughter – just enough to manage the logistics of getting Ella fed and tucked into the cot in their shared room. She’d like to be in bed herself, but can’t risk it yet. Ella sleeps lightly and might hear her crying.

Bill reminds Carly that Nan was once a nun, and professes his belief that the endless stories were her rebellion against the church and its narratives. 

If she was that pissed off about the church, why are we burying her in one, Carly wants to know, and Gina pipes up that there was one story in particular that reminded her of Noah’s ark.

‘The story Nan told was about a man named No.’

The words have escaped Belinda’s lips as a breathy whisper, but the wind has just ceased, and everyone’s heard her. The cousins and their partners stay silent, waiting for more.

Who are all these people, and why are they all here?

‘No was the only person on the Earth. He lived among all the animals, who named him “No” because he had no speech. No matter how much they simplified their language, he could never make sense of what the animals were saying. He just kept shaking his head, “no”.’

They’re your family, and they’re here because my Nan died.

What would Ella know of people gathering when someone died? Greg died suddenly, in the middle of the pandemic, and they weren’t allowed a funeral. What Ella knows of her own daddy’s death is loneliness and silence, not this expansive hearthside festival of laughter and story.

Belinda shakes her own head, ‘no’, at her cousins’ clear desire to hear the rest of the tale. Still, the words tumble out, as relentlessly as the newly revived winds.

‘The animals got together and decided No was too distracted by all the beautiful things on the land, so they called down the rain to wash it away. They built a boat and drifted away on the monotonous sea. For forty days and forty nights they taught him their language.

‘No remained silent, confused.’

Her family had tried various ways to contact her, to keep her company during her grief, to occupy Ella, to encourage Belinda to go out for a walk at least to clear her head. Belinda turned off her phone and retreated inside herself, silent. Ella stopped crying, and Belinda’s own tears remained voiceless, wracking, heaving. 

‘When the rains stopped and the waters finally abated, the animals gave up hope. They moved back to the dry land in the springtime and made their dens there. No did not follow them.’

It’s a strange place for the story to end, but Belinda cannot remember any more.

No must have died alone on the boat, starved by his own silence.

Perhaps he found peace at the end.

‘In the silent nights, No’s ears were opened,’ she’s saying now, finishing the tale. She can hear her crazy grandmother’s soothing tones of her voice in her own voice. She puts her arms around herself and keens slowly, more than a little crazy herself by now, she imagines. 

‘No’s ears were opened to the whistling tunes of the wind. His heart beat to the staccato rhythms of the waves drumming the boat’s resonant hull. He swallowed the wind and the waves, and at once he had language.’

But it was not a language the animals knew, and No remained alone.

The tragic ending of her grandmother’s tale remains unvoiced, except by the wind that still beats insistently against their mourning house.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 73 of Structured Visions.

A day at the lake

Multicoloured rocks
Image by Oliver Paaske

On Saturday I drove the kids to the lake. They were grumbling because I made them leave their phones at home. 

Mom would’ve let us, and all that.

But I’d decided that all their various devices were robbing them of their imagination. 

Then, in a flash of inspiration, I made each of them go to the lake shore and select a rock.

I held each one of their specimens in my outstretched hand and made the same proclamation for each one. 

‘This is not a rock!’ I bellowed. I made a big ceremony of it.

‘What is it, then?’ they muttered, petulant. 

‘Whatever you want it to be. Use your imaginations, for fuck’s sake.’

Ariana took her rock back and launched it at my face. I swerved just in time.

‘This is not a rock,’ I repeated, unscathed, scrambling up to recover the projectile. ‘This is a weapon.’

‘Cool,’ said Ariana. ‘What’s yours?’ she asked Finn.

‘A princess,’ he said, unapologetically. He was painting a smile on it with a stick of lipstick he’d been hiding in his pocket.

Did his mother know about this? I wondered. Did she encourage it?

‘You have to say the whole thing,’ Ariana said, finally getting into the spirit. ‘This is not a rock, it’s a…’

‘This is not a rock, it’s a princess,’ Finn murmured dutifully, adorning it now with a wig made from the wet remains of a plastic bag he’d dug out from beneath a pile of pebbles. 

‘What’s yours, Clive?’ Ariana asked. Clive was hiding among the branches of a fallen beech.

I watched as he tried to shield himself from her approach, hunching his bony shoulders, his quivering lip jutting out.

‘Come on, it’s easy.’ Ariana was jumping on the tree, as if to shake her brother out of his driftwood fortress. ‘This is not a rock, it’s a… You just say whatever it is you want it to be.’

‘I don’t want it to be anything but what it is,’ he said, his voice pleading, his eyes blinking back tears.

‘Don’t be absurd, Clive,’ I chastised him. ‘It’s just a game.’

Solemnly my youngest child extracted himself from the beech branches and walked to the exact spot from which his rock had been extracted. It took him forever to get it balanced in what he must have decided was its original position.

The weakness of his imagination unnerved me to the point of rage. 

‘You do realise,’ I seethed, ‘that the rock wasn’t always a rock? Once it might have been a mountain. And one day it will be dust, scattered across the earth.’

‘It’s not a rock now,’ said Clive. ‘It doesn’t want to be a rock. It wants to be what it is.’

But what is it? I wanted to scream, but refrained, faced with the silencing force of my own lack of imagination, stretched out before me, threatening, an abyss.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 71 of Structured Visions.