Longing

Line drawing from Grimm Brothers' Rapunzel story. The king's son climbs Rapunzel's hair to reach her in the tower.

Your mother was the Earth herself. She loved you fiercely, but was required to release you to the sorceress, Language, who once had filled the void of her longing.

Language built you a tower and pressed patterned strands through your smooth scalp into the hollow spaces of your mind. When these would hold no more, unspoken sentences sprouted like early eager grasses, then like singing reeds, and eventually like willow wands weeping at unimaginable lengths.

‘Rapunzel, Rapunzel,’ cried the Sorceress—she’d named you after your mother’s ancient longing—‘throw down your hair.’

You obeyed. In your loneliness a ladder appeared. At its base stood the wondering Other, gazing upward, ever hopeful.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 74 of Structured Visions.

Guest

Close up of two women's faces, each showing one blue eye — Photo by Sharon McCutcheon

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.)

The relief in her smile mirrored my own.

Would you like to know more about this story? Check out my behind-the-scenes post on Patreon.

A remarkable outcome

Your first experiment rarely works. You shouldn’t expect it to. You’re supposed to see it as an apprenticeship project, a learning opportunity. You’ve only failed if you’ve failed to learn, etc.

My first experiment was Earth.

Sorry, Project 649BQ8. (They don’t like it when you use the local names. It usually means you’ve gone native.)

I’ll admit a certain fondness for the place.

I still think of it as a phenomenal planet, one that, quite frankly, should never have been assigned to a newbie.

Did I learn anything from my failure?

Of course I did. The protocol was the same as with any of the intelligent planets. Connect it to the network. Calibrate the existing information systems so they resonate with network frequencies. If the planet resists connection, abort the project and move on to the next.

Should I have followed protocol?

Look, I know I’m supposed to say yes here, but can we please stop ignoring the genius of what I achieved? When the planet resisted connection, I didn’t abort. I designed a new species.

Human beings, they called themselves.

I made them out of local components, then attuned their nervous systems to be conducive to network frequencies.

And damned if it didn’t work!

I nearly wept for joy when they started developing their own communication frameworks, extra-local ones, using what they’d later refer to as their language.

Once they had language, all that was left to do was to calibrate it to the network system, and we’d have the link we were looking for.

It would have been a phenomenal achievement.

What went wrong?

I’m supposed to cite the protocol breach and leave it at that. The higher ups have neither the time nor the imagination for more nuanced analysis.

But I’ve developed my own theory.

These ‘human beings’ are so attached to their ‘Earth’ that they keep trying to use their language to describe their world. It has become an obsession for them.

They cloy to their material environment so resolutely that they have forced their rarefied language upon it. It causes them great suffering. Still, they persist.

It fascinates me.

The idea that you’d link language to base matter!

And that I created a whole species devoted to that endeavour!

What a remarkable outcome!

like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 72 of Structured Visions.

Finite

Silhouette of people standing on a rock at sunset, their hands in the air — Photo by Natalie Pedigo

Sentences losing binding power.

Verbs shaking loose from subjects.

Clauses dropping phrasal components.

Words falling away, like pearls untethered from strings.

The mass extinction eventually happened, yes, but it was not human lives that were lost. It was human language. It had occurred to no one that syntax was a non-renewable resource.

Humans populated the planet as widely as before, but now they remained speechless. Textless.

A collective human silence rose to the starry heavens, bearing strange melodies on its wings, songs that may have always existed, but that no one before ever could hear.

The planet was at peace. Its people were finally happy.

The stores of language replenished, very gradually at first.

Once every decade or so a child would be born who was notably different from the others.

Agitated, problem children, they seethed with an inner, unexpressed flare of fury. Their families feared them.

These were the children to whom language had returned.

Would you like to know more about this story? I discuss it in Episode 72 of Structured Visions and in my behind-the-scenes post on Patreon.

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.

Whale song

Greyscale photo of a humpback whale leaping from the ocean — Photo by Mike Doherty

‘You’re frigid, you’re rigid and you have no soul.’

Jack’s break up words played in Evie’s head like a haunting melody on repeat.

These were not his exact words. What he’d actually said was something like, ‘I dunno, babe. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s like it’s impossible to loosen you up. Sometimes I look at you and it’s like, you’re not even there. Nobody home.’

He was a little stoned when he said all this, but she knew he didn’t regret it, because he got together with Cassandra Carrington the next day. They were relentless in their mutual affection. They both signed up to do a summer semester at sea so they wouldn’t have to spend their vacation apart.

Against her better judgment, Evie signed up to the same program. She’d imprinted on Jack like a duckling on a pitbull. She couldn’t keep herself away from him, no matter how cruel he was to her.

They were learning about marine mammals. Evie couldn’t concentrate. She wasn’t good at environmental science or biology. These subjects were too messy, fraught with error and doubt. She preferred math. Computer science. Linguistics.

A specialist on whale songs joined their boat when they reached Maui. She taught them that male humpbacks sing to each other in low frequencies that can span up to 10,000 miles of ocean. She played them some of their melodic sequences, and pointed out how the whales changed them slightly over time. The students listened to her recordings with appropriate awe.

‘That’s a beautiful song,’ Jack crooned, his hand stroking the back of Cassandra’s neck.

A beautiful song.

The phrase jolted through Evie like an electric current. It was decidedly not a beautiful song. It was absurd to say such a thing. It was—what was the term?

Ill formed.

The term they used in linguistics to label an expression that a native speaker would never utter.

The whales would never say it was a beautiful song.

They’d say—they were saying—singing—that it was a gathering song.

The humpback songs were not just melodies, they were strings of syntax—a series of noun phrases, with the noun and indefinite article remaining ever constant: a song, a song, a song. What varied was the adjective that preceded the noun. It never-failingly referred to the song’s purpose.

A gathering song.

A loving song.

A healing song.

A journeying song.

Sometimes, in the response times, the whales would insert an evaluative adjective, but this new addition never occurred alone in the phrase. It always accompanied, and preceded the purpose adjective.

A beautiful gathering song.

A raucous loving song.

A helpful healing song.

A circuitous journeying song.

The whales would never utter ‘a beautiful song’. A phrase without a purpose adjective would always be ill formed.

Evie listened to recording after recording to validate her findings. A new tune formed in her own mind, a response to the whale melodies. A discovery song.

Would you like to know more about this story? Check out my behind-the-scenes post on Patreon.

The Mosaic Makers

Blue, orange and white floral mosaic — Photo by Raimond Klavins

In linguistics, periphrasis is the usage of multiple separate words to carry the meaning of prefixes, suffixes or verbs, among other things, where either would be possible.

The species once known as the Atlanteans were the Galaxy’s great curators. They visited the artisanal planets to observe and appreciate their masterpieces.

The great masterpiece of planet Earth was its language. The Atlanteans admired its manifold morphemes, suspended like raindrops in sunlight, producing perfect prisms of meaning with each shifting syllabic breeze. So great was their awe, the Atlanteans stayed longer than was their custom, each day noticing anew the delicate balance of conceptual contrast and the subtle harmonies at the core of each spiralling staircase of syntax.

Then one day the balance was destroyed. The Atlanteans discovered that the most remarkable pieces from the Earth’s linguistic repertoire had been plucked from their displays and smashed to bits. Their astonishment intensified when they learned that this damage had been wrought by the leaders of their own company.

‘The Earth is inviting new guests to arrive after we depart,’ they explained to their bemused companions. ‘Their task will be to create a new language out of these broken pieces.’

‘Ah,’ chorused the Atlanteans, reassured. They recognised the prophecy. ‘The Mosaic Makers are coming.’

Would you like to know more about this story? Watch the video I made about it. I also discuss ‘The Mosaic Makers’ in Episode 70 of Structured Visions.

Maize

Close up of colourful corncobs — Photo by Alexander Schimmeck

All languages have expressions to indicate causation, whereby a process is depicted as having been set in motion by some external actor. In some languages, causation is expressed morphologically, through inflections that change verbs into their causative forms.

What happens when you change your name?

Barbara was once Eleanor.

Was she always both names? When she became Barbara, did the Eleanor part of her simply switch off, like suppressed genetic information?

Nobody believes her discoveries. Her fellow scientists have no precedent for her independence of thought. It’s confusing to them, how she revels in working alone.

She does not work alone. She works with Eleanor.

Barbara studies gene sequences in Indian corn.

Eleanor studies morpheme sequences in Indian languages.

At the end of each working day, they share a cigarette and discuss their findings.

One evening Eleanor describes the causative morpheme in Navajo. It consists of one phoneme only; it would be easy to miss. A linguistic element smaller than a syllable can change a verb from ‘it’s moving’ to ‘he’s making it move’.

Barbara describes her revelations about the variegated patterns on the maize kernels she’s cultivated. The microscope has revealed to her highly-tuned vision the regulator genes that move about on chromosomes, activating or suppressing certain sequences.

‘Bits of information that activate the expression of a new meaning,’ Eleanor says. ‘A causative.’

The weight of their parallel discoveries lands on them simultaneously, like a crow settling on a snow-covered branch.

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

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

‘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.