In many ways, Gabriel, it’s a gift to master words and their meanings individually and in context the way you do. It’s a gift that has also brought me great pleasure. I, who for many years have earned a living working with language and thought I knew a good deal about it, have learned more about the value and need for precision and nuance by following your process of linguistic maturation than from most of the books I have read. Because you never content yourself with an approximate answer, you won’t put up with sentences that are merely there or thereabouts, that are not the exact, optimal, and literal expression of what you want to say.
But unfortunately language isn’t always literal, no more than words are always faithful to the context in which you first encountered them. Language cannot always be literal, because then we wouldn’t be able to develop and change and enrich it by forming new words and adjusting the meaning of the old ones. Language is, moreover, a toy as well as a tool. Will you ever be able to accommodate that? Will you manage to come to terms with the fact that language can be used for more than giving things the right name in the right contexts, that it can also be used to play with the things and the contexts, to joke and to fool about with? That it is quite possible to say something in a way that turns its meaning into the opposite of what one is actually saying? That words can be lifted from their contexts and placed in others, thus acquiring new, unexpected, and amusing meanings? That it is possible to make pictures with words just as one does with colours and pencils, and that the finest pictures are often the result of mixing words to make new ones, just as you mix colours? That it’s okay to experiment, and that a failed word image can be thrown away just like a drawing you haven’t got right?
Now and then you tell us jokes that you’ve heard at school and expect us to laugh at them, but you do not laugh yourself. Or you laugh without laughing, because you’ve understood that jokes are to be laughed at. Nor do you laugh at word games, although you sometimes play them yourself, innocently, and unintentionally, as when Victoria told you she was going to the kiosk to buy a ticket for the Viking lottery, and asked if you wanted to go with her. You didn’t reply at once; first you had to know:
— Does that mean I can win coins from the Viking Age?
Will you learn to play and joke with words? The landscape plays with us all the time. The clouds are faces and scary animals, but they don’t stop being clouds. The sea is glittering gold in the sunset, but it doesn’t stop being the sea. The tree in the garden has gnarled witch’s claws and an eagle has landed on the outermost islet, but you know that what you see are dry branches and a pointed rock. Words aren’t dangerous to play with, Gabriel; they retain their usual meanings even though from time to time we lend them other new and strange meanings. It doesn’t matter if you sometimes want to drink a horse or a sweater of orange juice — that doesn’t stop the glass from being a glass.
THE LANDSCAPE OUT HERE talks to us, but it can also be read, almost like our palms. Wherever you look, memories are etched into it like writing. You read a minor clause in the landscape’s diary when you turn over a stone on the ground and the exposed pallor tells you how long it has been lying there, and you gulp down entire chapters each time you let your gaze sweep over the skerries’ polished grey-black tide line. Moment by moment the wind spells the weather in water and grass, and the sun never stops counting the days. The landscape keeps a careful log in its elegant hand, so that we can read about what has been and prepare ourselves for what is to come, so that we may know where we are and determine whether we have any reason to be here. Sometimes I picture the landscape as a written warning.
You who talk and talk, why have you hesitated so long to read and write? The letters, which are so orderly, which each have their own sound, unlike all other sounds, and which in all conceivable contexts — in every word — have their fixed, unchanging places. For a long time you’ve known all the letters, you’ve know the sounds they stand for, and you’ve been aware that when you put one sound after another they turn into words and sentences. Is it because you couldn’t believe it was that easy? That there had to be some aspect of the art of reading and writing you hadn’t understood? Is that why you insisted for so long that you couldn’t do it? Even though you sometimes, at moments when you’d forgotten that you couldn’t, actually read — a sign, a newspaper headline, an advertising bill. Given your keenness to learn, and your infinite curiosity, and all the questions you knew there were answers to in books, your reluctance was a mystery. Yet another mystery.
But it turned out it was just me who didn’t understand, or who forgot that you always need your own time to formulate your own justifications, that they must be irrefutable and that you must believe in them before you set about anything new. Eventually your curious aversion to fish proved to be of some use, for one day at the dinner table you brightly delivered a classic and unassailable piece of Gabriel-reasoning:
— Mom, now I understand it, now I know why I have to learn to read. Because if I’m sitting in a restaurant with my girlfriend and the waiter comes with the menu — if I can’t read it then I’ll just have to point, and what if he brings me fish soup!
And with that, almost overnight, you began reading everything you came across, be it in Norwegian, English, Spanish, or sloppy handwriting. And you took to writing — letters, notes, e-mails and messages. You discovered that writing could replace action, as on the day you came home from school and would neither say hello nor anything else but simply pressed a piece of paper into my hand and disappeared up into your room. Ay-yam-so — angry-that — ay’m-steaming, it said. When you came down a little later, you only needed to assure yourself that I’d read and understood the message for your good humour to be restored. And you write stories, sometimes from Indian mythology, which you find it easier to relate to than the abstractions of Christianity. I kept one of them, because it would hardly be possible to tell any story more concisely:
Ganesh is a god in India.
Shiva chopped off ganesh’s head.
His mother was out of her mind with grief.
The cervants had to travel the world and chop the head off the first animal thay found.
The first animal thay found was an elefent.
Thay chopped off its head and put the head on ganesh.
All things have a beginning and an end. All things lead in the end to something other than themselves. Not even the words we use when we talk together can remain wholly and completely themselves when they leave one person’s thoughts and enter into another’s. We can never know, Gabriel, if we refer to the same thing when we say that a flower is “pretty” or that Mom is “kind.” Maybe I mean that the flower’s form is beautiful, and that Mom is generous, while you’re thinking of the colour of the petals and are glad because Mom has given you permission to stay up late. That is why we now and then misunderstand one another; not because we don’t understand, but because we understand in different ways.
This you find difficult. You find it difficult to think that it’s possible to understand and not understand at the same time. It seems to defy common sense. You find it terrible whenever it dawns on you that you’ve misunderstood something we have said, and you find it intolerable when we misunderstand something you’ve said to us. Then you might get angry and depressed and give up, and not calm down until we finally, after repeated attempts, hit upon the exact meaning you intended us to understand. It’s like when you in your haste can’t find the one word you want to use — not one that’s similar and means almost the same, but that precise one word — and become furious with yourself and with the language that lets you down. In such moments I want so much to tell you that misunderstandings aren’t dangerous, that on the contrary they can be quite funny, that they can teach us new things, give us thoughts we wouldn’t otherwise have.
But to you misunderstandings are dangerous. They create disorder and breaches in lines of thought you’ve l
aboriously linked into a precise utterance. Just as the landscape around you is only rain when it rains, and only sunshine in fair weather, you are wholly and completely present in each of your individual thoughts, consumed exclusively by each one and unwilling to mix them with others, to mess them up and invite misunderstanding. Then they crash, as you put it, and nothing good comes of it, just confusion and rage. Because then that which you probably depend on above all is threatened: logic.
All people depend on logic, on the belief that one thing has to happen before another can, that something comes first and something else comes next, and that everything follows from something else. Without logic we wouldn’t be able to do even the most ordinary things, like putting on our shirt before our pullover, or taking the cork out of the bottle before pouring, and neither would we be able to understand the simplest things, such as other people feeling pain if we hit them. But there is a big and decisive difference between yours and other people’s logic that often makes yours problematic, while for others it’s only beneficial. It is a difficult difference, but an important one.
For Mom and I and most other people, logic is a way of thinking we use to create and maintain order in things, to avoid doing things in the wrong order, to understand how things are connected. But for you it’s different. For you, logic is not just a way of thinking; it’s a kind of quality inherent in all things, regardless of how we otherwise think of them. You regard logical structures as a necessity, but because you perceive them as an unavoidable part of the nature of all things, not because they’re tools you feel necessary to make use of. That’s why your respect for logic is so limitless and compulsive — because it’s coincident with your understanding of the world. That’s also why logical breaches, transgressions of the laws of logic, appear so terrible and intolerable to you — because they seem like breaches in the very order that, in your eyes, sustains the world and makes it comprehensible. A wise Danish man of science once said to a student something he might as well have said to you: You don’t think, you’re just logical.
There is only one exception: no matter how logical you are in all your considerations, you seem unwilling or unable to see that there exists a chain of cause and effect between your own actions and the reactions they can provoke in others, whether they be strangers, friends, or family. When you do something that makes others angry or sad, you choose — in defiance of the instincts that otherwise rule you — to be illogically injured and lay the blame unilaterally on others. As soon as the question of blame has been resolved, always in your favour, you begin justifying your sense of injury, only this time with customary logical thoroughness. Like that time at school when you weren’t having “a good day” and in the end the teacher had to hold you to prevent more kicking and punching and biting:
— Why did they have to hold me? Don’t they understand that it was the other kids that made me angry? If they’d understood that then they would’ve done something about them and not needed to hold me, because then I wouldn’t have been angry.
Often I have to admire your ability to think logically. When I’m tired and worn out or busy with something else and you ask some difficult question that would take a long time to give a proper answer to, I sometimes take the risk of provoking you with a quick, short version. When I do, you often remain there standing, your gaze utterly empty, while I return to whatever I was doing. You stand there so silent and absent that I forget you, forget your question, and am completely bowled over (yes, you can say that, even though you’re nowhere near a bowling alley) when you start up:
— Right, now I understand. Because if . . .
And then you erect, carefully and patiently, a gigantic and complicated structure of logical inferences that, link by link, lead you to conclude that my quick and apparently strange answer must have been right.
On the other hand, it’s a little frightening, this unconditional faith of yours that logical chains of cause and effect can and should explain everything. Because it’s a faith that makes you easy to trick. As long as an explanation satisfies your demands for logical consistency, it can in fact easily end in an outright lie or a crude absurdity, for you seem more concerned with the explanation’s inner logic than with the answer it eventually arrives at. I have to confess that I myself have tricked you at times by playing on your blind faith that if A equals B and
B equals C, then A must necessarily also equal C. That isn’t always true in everyday life, outside the universe of pure logic, but I have abused your faith on occasions when I found no other way to get you to accept a decision, a fact, or a point of view.
I admire you, Gabriel, and at the same time I feel sorry for you. You have a great and impressive talent for language and logic, and without it you would have been lost. Yet that same talent is also a major source of much of your confusion and frustration. It brings you happiness and it makes you unhappy, and you can’t have the one without exposing yourself to the other.
FROM THE BED I HEAR your sister’s stiletto heels out in the corridor, and Mom’s voice asking you to bring me a cup of coffee. Then the creaking of the stairs beneath your feet as you take the short steps down to the bedroom, syncopated by the slam of the front door. Mom and Victoria are off to work and to school, and it’s my turn to get up.
This happens every weekday when we have to get up and go out, but today nothing is usual. I see it in your smile even before you’ve put down the coffee cup on the bedside table.
— Good morning, Gabriel.
— Yeah, yeah, good morning, you reply, keen to get these ritual greetings, which you otherwise seem to like, out of the way as quickly as possible. Nor do you have time to creep into bed beside me as you usually do, or perhaps it doesn’t even occur to you that this is what you usually do, every single morning. Instead you trip about on the floor, almost Latin in your gesturing, and explain that some sheep have got into our garden. Shouldn’t I do something? At least go out and take a look?
— They’re standing there pooping!
I lie under the duvet, knowing that the date is April 1. You know it too, but your way of expressing yourself reveals that you also think you’re alone in remembering that today it’s all right “to joke.”
A moment later I’m on my feet, busily indignant and worried, because sheep shit on the lawn is the worst thing there is. After a short tour of inspection around the garden, I turn to you with a questioning look about where all the sheep have gone, and the laughter you’ve been carrying inside comes bursting out as you shout:
— April Fool!
Your face lights up with joy, but I can see, from the way your eyes sort of seek out mine, and the way you suddenly stand stock still, that what you’re looking for most of all is an acknowledgement that you’ve mastered this curious art of foolery. My apparent surprise and smiling annoyance at having fallen for the trick are all you need; now the morning can continue in its usual fashion, with dressing, breakfast, and packing of your satchel.
Still, you now know that I know what day it is, and I have a hunch that you’re expecting a kind of payback. I choose a moment when you’re standing at the top of the staircase, on the way down to fetch your jacket and shoes. With a hint of panic in my voice, I shout:
— Look out, Gabriel! There’s a snake on the stairs!
You stand still with your back to me, as though you need time to digest this piece of information. Then you turn toward me and say, in an indulgent and almost patronizing way:
— But, Dad, surely you know there are no snakes in Norway? Did you perhaps mean an adder?
— Yes, I’m sorry. Of course I meant an adder. But you’d better watch out, it’s lying right next to your feet!
As soon as the linguistic clarification is out of the way, you become terrified and yell Help! and come running toward me while you cast anxious glances at the reptile on the staircase. Not until my “April Fool!�
�� breaks the spell do you calm down: now you’ve shown that you also master the dupe’s role in the foolery.
All the same, what this scene shows me most clearly is your unshakeable faith in words as conveyors of unequivocal knowledge. Even in the middle of an April Fool’s joke, with both of us doing our best to pretend to trick and be tricked, you take time to interrupt the game with a correction: a snake must not be confused with an adder. You won’t even let me joke with the wrong word.
This unconditional faith in the singularity of words, which at times can make you so superior and masterly, is at other times only a limitation and a handicap. Like the time you wanted to go out for a bike ride, and I asked you first, in order to make sure, if you knew which side of the road you had to keep to.
— The right, you answered, as a matter of course.
— Yes, but where is right? I insisted and drew a road on a piece of paper, with our house at one end and the neighbour’s at the other. You indicated with your finger which side was right when you cycled toward the neighbour’s. Then I told you to turn and cycle back toward our house, and asked where right was now.
— There, you answered, cocksure, and pointed to the same side of the road as before.
But there was something that didn’t add up. So far, we’d been sitting looking at the drawing from the side where our house lay. Now we crawled around the paper and looked at the road from the neighbour’s house, and when you cycled home this time, right was on the other side.
You despaired. We repeated the experiment by standing face to face and lifting our right arms, then changed places and did the same. Again it was wrong — right changed sides. You became angry and aggrieved.
— Why can’t things be the same? Why have they taught me that right is on this side when it isn’t true?
Somewhere Over the Sea Page 11