by John Norman
All human children begin by making similar noises, rather like all puppies and kittens make noises of a similar sort, appropriate to their kind. For example, the puppy or kitten in Tokyo or Moscow, or Mombassa, or Scranton, New York, makes very similar sounds. It is only later that English dogs learn to say “bow-wow,” German dogs “wow-wow,” Polish dogs “hou, hou,” and so on. Similarly, the Japanese baby, the Iroquois baby, the German baby, the Eskimo baby, the Scranton baby, and so on, make similar sounds. A bit later babies begin to babble, but now the babbles differ, as the babies begin to pick up phonemes from their environment, liberally provided by significant others, in this case, parents, nurses, guardians, etc. Now the Eskimo baby babbles in recognizable Eskimo phonemes, the German baby in good German, of one sort or another, and the Scranton baby in Scrantonese, so to speak. Later, of course, these babies learn to speak, and their troubles begin. The Eskimo baby speaks Eskimo, the Japanese baby Japanese, and so on, and soon, like an absorptive sponge, with a quickness and fluency that will impress, but dismay, generations of adults struggling to master a tongue not learned at this marvelous time, they become insolently adept native speakers. Thomas’ Uncle John, for example, has no difficulty in teaching Thomas words such as “Achtung, baby,” “Bon jour,” “Hola,” and other useful phrases which may prove of use in nursery school, and in later life.
But bamohee, obviously, is Thomas’ own word. Certainly it is not yet carried in the Oxford English Dictionary, in Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, or other such familiar reference works.
Thomas Wolfe, another Thomas, a remarkable writer sometimes alleged to have been in desperate need of an editor, spoke of the forgotten language, a leaf, a twig, a pebble, or some such. One might add, a shred of paper, a piece of glass, a scrap of tin, as more characteristic of the contemporary urban landscape much beloved by devotees of the outdoors. But with all due respect to Mr. Wolfe, his editor, et al, leaves, twigs, pebbles, and such, are not a language. They are, rather, leaves, twigs, and pebbles, and as such, vegetables, minerals, that sort of thing. This is, too, not to deny that there is much to be said for a living, enchanted world, a human-friendly habitat. When the sprites, nymphs, centaurs, and satyrs picked up stakes and moved out, the neighborhood was never again the same. It is not all that much fun living inside a big clock, an inexplicable, inscrutable, indifferent, alien, meaningless foreign country, not knowing its language, or if it has one, dodging moving parts, and such. It does not seem much of an improvement over a magic world. Of course, the trains run on time, except when they don’t. The fact that the clock may not tick when expected, or might tock when not expected, is not much comfort. It is bad enough living in a clock, let alone one that can’t keep time.
But this brings us back to bamohee.
Wordsworth seemed to believe that the infant enters the world trailing clouds of glory. One gathers from this that Wordsworth was never present at a birth, and that any midwife with normal vision would have been well ahead of him on this score. On the other hand, there is expressed a belief here that the young child, before it gets around, soon enough, to forgetting momentous truths of inordinate importance, does, for a time, have such things in mind. It comes from some place and, for a time, is in touch with that place. It lies there in its bassinet, it seems, recollecting vistas, truths, and treasures, which will soon vanish, diaper by diaper.
One of the greatest of the strange philosophers is doubtless Aristicles of Athens, descended on his mother’s side from Poseidon, the god of the sea. This is the fellow we know as Plato, a nickname, which suggests width, though of what is not clear in the tradition. Perhaps there is a great contemporary philosopher who to future generations will be known as Red, Curly, Shorty, or such. In any event, Plato, like millions of others, believed in reincarnation. He also seemed to believe that knowledge was essentially recollection, and that one, under suitable conditions, remembered seeing forms in some sort of previous existence, probably while waiting between bodies for a new reincarnation. There was a form of man, and hopefully of woman, of shuttles and bridles, of beauty, of justice, and so on. Perhaps there were also forms for kitchen sink, vacuum cleaner, pocket watch, can opener, sport utility vehicle, lawnmower, and such, but, if so, they do not seem to have been recollected until later on.
I would not have thought much about bamohee, despite Thomas’ earnestness in bringing it to our attention, in the family, had it not been for an international congress of linguists held in Belgrade, to which I had been invited to submit a paper. Late in the conference, late one evening, after we had refuted one another’s papers to our mutual satisfaction, we had adjourned, as is the wont of linguists, to a local bar, and were exchanging gossip. Having recently attributed, to our satisfaction, Dr. Emily R.’s appointment to H. University’s linguistics department not to her superb work on the affinities between Hebrew and Cree, but churlishly to her liaison with senior professor William B., chairman of the department, we smugly returned our attention to our beverages, nuts, and pretzels. The thought of Thomas crossed my mind, perhaps because I had not seen the little tike in several hours, something in the neighborhood, roughly, of 252 hours. You know how grandparents are. Doubtless Thomas, too, was counting the hours till we should meet again. You know how grandchildren are.
Well, thinking of Thomas, I said, absently, “bamohee.”
To my amazement, my colleagues, from diverse backgrounds, immediately looked up, startled, and evinced intense interest.
“Did you say ‘bamohee’?” asked Professor Stein, from Munich.
“He did,” confirmed Professor Nagaso, from Yokohama.
“I heard him, as well,” said Professor Red Feather, an authority on Late Middle Gothic.
A variety of races, classes, ethnic backgrounds, creeds, ideologies, sizes, shapes, tastes in automobiles, and such, were present. We were short on proclivities, as we were all grandfathers, but other than that I think it fair to say that our group was fairly diversified and representative, at least with respect to most of those groups which must needs appear in any group appropriately diversified and representative. (To achieve this diversity and representation, it had been necessary, at the last moment, to add to our group a poet and two sociologists.)
And the attention of all, inexplicably, from my point of view, seemed suddenly, bemusedly riveted on my normally, calculatedly low-profile persona.
“Where did you hear that word?” demanded Professor Ngumba.
“From my grandson, Thomas,” I admitted, hoping I had not thereby risked too much. Professional reputations are fragile, precarious. One faux pas in the right place can be seriously damaging. One intelligent remark in the wrong place can undo the work of a lifetime.
“Your grandson is between two and one-half and three years old,” said Professor Ngumba, regarding me intently.
“Yes,” I said.
“Yes!” said Professor Igluk, our only polar attendee, a specialist in all five inscriptions in pre-Doric Greek.
“Your experience, as well?” asked Professor Ngumba of Professor Red Feather.
“Ja,” said Professor Red Feather, lapsing in his consternation into Late Middle Gothic.
My colleagues regarded one another.
We soon began to compare notes, easy as we were all of a splendid generation, and grandfathers, and it turned out that bamohee was a word familiar to us all, though most of us had not realized it until that moment.
We soon discovered that our grandsons and granddaughters, regardless of the background languages of their area, and the cultural backgrounds of each, had, all of them, independently, inexplicably, apparently originally, come up with the mysterious utterance, bamohee.
“Interesting,” said Professor Stein.
At a conservative estimate there were surely more than twenty articles in this.
Naturally the first question had to do with the geographical location, so to speak, of bamohee on
the linguistic map. As nearly as we could determine it did not occur in any natural or artificial language, past or present, known to adult man at least, nor was it a technical term in any science, discipline or Wissenschaft with which we were familiar, ranging from Renaissance alchemy to advanced string theory, two disciplines which have much in common. It was, of course, possible that it was in an alien language, a lingering relic of extraterrestrial visitation, perhaps dropped in conversation on the banks of the Nile, while the extraterrestrials were inexplicably tutoring natives in architectural subtleties, or on the landing fields of Nasca several hundred years ago, perhaps while the extraterrestrials were attempting to discover where they were, but this seemed unlikely, given the cross-cultural prevalence of the expression, and its odd window of usage, generally being discovered betwixt the second and third year, and then, in a few weeks, mysteriously vanishing, as though it were a light from another reality flickering briefly, and then going out.
“It is clearly a word,” said Professor Stein.
“Agreed,” said Professor Nagaso, less inscrutably than was his wont.
“But in what language?” I asked.
“That we do not know,” speculated Professor Igluk, helpfully.
“I once had a course in philosophy,” said our poet, noted for his reindeer cycle, who had been added to the group because otherwise there would have been no representative from the indigenous native peoples of northern Europe.
His remark put us all on our guard.
“It has been speculated, though most commonly by physicists and lunatics,” said the poet, “that there are other lands, other realms, other forms of existence, novel spaces, unusual times, strange dimensions, which may impinge upon ours. What if there are doors, or windows, or transoms, between these realities and ours, through which things might occasionally enter, crawl, or wriggle? What if the child, before sneaking into a fertilized ovum, thereby cleverly concealing his real point of origin, came from such a realm? Would he remember it? Or, perhaps better, perhaps the natural child, at a certain moment, or brief time in life, as his little brain develops, when he is open to so much, and so little critical, can see or touch these mysteries? Perhaps bamohee is a word from that world, overheard, so to speak, by a naively eavesdropping babe. Or perhaps, for a moment, the mystery, in its ironic benevolence, with jocular insouciance, offers the moppet a glimpse into the meaning of it all, the point of the pointlessness, an exquisite insight into the origin, the significance, the meaning of the meaninglessness, a chance which for us would be the chance to grasp the key to the universe, to learn the secret, the first name of being, but for the child is no more than gazing in awe at the stripe on a shirt, or smiling at a pretty bird perched on a window sill?”
Though doubtless the poet had had his course in philosophy long ago, it was easy to see that he had not yet recovered from its effects. Clearly he was still nuts, or, put more sensitively, was “marching to the tune of a distant drummer,” one who was missing a drum.
“That makes a great deal of sense,” said Professor Red Feather.
I revised my assessment of the poet’s contribution, though I suspected he couldn’t tell an infix from a fireplug.
“What the poet says is clearly nonsense,” said one of our sociologists, added to the group that we might have a Melanesian boatman in our midst.
“Yes,” said our other sociologist, striking the floor with his cane, his presence in the group accounted for by his eligibility for a handicapped parking sticker.
The fact that the two sociologists firmly agreed that the poet was in error, if not certifiably insane, naturally reversed my opinion on the entire matter, immediately, categorically. Agreement among sociologists is commonly taken as a sufficient condition for falsity. Those familiar with the academic world will not find this surprising.
“There are many differences between poets and sociologists,” said Professor Stein.
It struck me then, reassuringly, that Teutonic perceptiveness still throve amongst those from the land of poets and philosophers.
“Poets are inspired madmen,” said Professor Ngumba, whose grudgingly accorded admiration for inspired madmen was commonly remarked in the scholarly community.
“Whereas sociologists are not inspired,” said Professor Nagaso.
There was general assent to this in the group, with two exceptions.
“But,” said Professor Igluk, “whereas poets may ascend ladders of higher truths, rung by enraptured rung, leaping from metaphor to metaphor, enveloped in clouds of radiant illumination, we, as humble scientists, must content ourselves with lower truths, such as how things are, and are they really that way, and this brings up questions of hypothesis and theory, of consequences thereof, of experimentation, of confirmation and disconfirmation, and such.”
These things were doubtless clearer to some than others, but they were obviously clear to Professor Igluk, one who had spent much time in thought, who had spent long hours meditating upon them, on the pack ice during the long polar night.
“We are grateful to you,” said Professor Red Feather, the early portion of whose professional life had been spent in trying to rid himself of insidiously lurking animistic suspicions. He had eventually come to see the universe in terms of inclined planes, screws, levers, and automobile engines. He had not been regarded as worthy of an academic post, despite his background, until he had made this breakthrough. He had succeeded in reconciling these conflicting world views by means of taking an eight-cylinder 1956 Chevrolet Impala engine as a spirit guide. “You have recalled us to our professional responsibilities.”
“But there is no way to test this sort of hypothesis,” I pointed out, thinking that some oblique deference to the voice of reason might be in order. “The child can’t help us. He can just stand there, look earnestly at us, and say bamohee. But that’s about it. And earlier he can’t even say this much. And later, all too soon, he seems to forget about the nature of reality, the secret of existence, the meaning of it all, and gets down to serious business, wheedling toys, demanding bread sticks, testing various brands of cookies, coping with toilet training, being coy with vegetables, annoying younger siblings, and such.”
“True,” said Professor Red Feather, sadly.
“A white crane wades. A feather falls into the stream. It is swept away,” said Professor Nagaso, a remark I took as expressing regret.
“Who knows what an elephant thinks?” asked Professor Ngumba, moodily.
“Du hast recht,” said Professor Stein, cryptically.
“You are correct,” said the sociologists, in unison, with firmness.
We linguists then looked at one another. Together, simultaneously, we realized we had been mistaken.
“There must be a way,” I said.
“Agreed,” said my gifted colleagues.
“But how?” I wept. “How!”
“Hypnotic regression,” said the poet.
We thought that not a bad suggestion, and surprisingly good, for having come from someone without a degree in linguistics. Poets spend much of their time bumbling about in the closet of the subconscious, beset by metaphors, but occasionally they rise, wearied and gasping, to the plane of common sense. Or tumble from the ladder of dreams to strike heavily on the pavement of rationality. I have seen more than one remember to put a coin in a parking meter.
In the morning we communicated our experiment, its intent, and weightiness, to the conference as a whole and all lectures, panels, receptions, wine and cheese parties, and award ceremonies were immediately, unquestioningly canceled.
As I was the first who had broached the bamohee matter, it was decided that I would be the subject of this groundbreaking experiment. A hypnotist was brought in from a local night club of dubious reputation and, shortly, suitably regressed to a babbling toddler, I doubtless became the center of attention, and the object of anxious anticipation, on
the part of the staff and attendees of the conference, and, too, of a number of caterers and diverse, but insufficiently diverse, members of the maintenance staff. It is hard to think of everything, and protect oneself from enraged charges of illegitimate exclusion.
As it is well known that many individuals who have become privy to the secrets of the universe in the entranced state often experience difficulties in communicating, recounting, or even remembering, the special and remarkable knowledge obtained in that state, I had been furnished with a large sheet of white drawing paper and, considering the target age of the regression experiment, a set of crayons. I was to write down on the paper what I learned, lest it slip away in my emergence into a more quotidian reality.