The Headmistress’s conception of the relationship of the living to the dead and both to language, formed in her youth, remained markedly consistent in its broad outlines until her death. However, its details, and even more the principles of action derived from it, changed dramatically at times. For instance, before my arrival, and for a short time after it, she habitually spoke of language in startlingly concrete terms, describing it, variously, as a viscous emission (thus, “gunk,” “glue,” “grout,” a “roux,” “ointment,” “spackle,” and “mortar”), as a powder (“spores,” “pollen,” “flour”), or a collection of curious little articles (“bric-a-brac,” “trinkets,” and more disparagingly, “clutter” or “junk”). I suppose this is not surprising, since she did regularly receive communications in material form from the dead, if she was right that the ectoplasmoglyphs were indeed words. But before long, a new sort of metaphor began to turn up, aerating the weightier figures: she might describe language as a gas (“mist,” “fog,” “smoke,” “cloud”); then as a faint odor carried on the air, but with no visible body of its own; for a week or two she might even propose that language was made up of sound—and so much had her views influenced mine that I was struck by the originality of this view and took several pages of notes before it occurred to me that this was in fact the conventional view.
Never mind, because by then her metaphors had changed again; sound was now still too definite, too positive an entity for her, a distasteful imposition of form upon the formless. She had always described human beings as mere containers for holes. Now she described words as another kind of hole, breaking off from the primary hole of the mouth as if that more lasting absence had calved like a glacier. (Or, indeed, like a cow!—for I perceive that I have committed the solecism of mounting one metaphor atop another.) Words took on the semblance of form only insofar as they differed from the more definite substances that make up the rest of our world. It was in one of these phases that she called a hasty faculty meeting (to which I was invited, though only after dropping a pointed hint!) to announce that she had discovered a gross offense against the limpid Not: the alphabet. “I am ashamed to say that it had not previously occurred to me that we are harboring vipers in our mouths, but the scales have fallen from my eyes.” (She did not ordinarily employ such conventionally florid expressions, but was speaking under the pressure of strong emotion, as was apparent from the punitive vigor with which she repeatedly polished her lorgnette.)
That some form of writing was still required, she recognized; however, she decreed that from that day forth, the written language would no longer “stuff the mouth of the void with trumpery,” would no longer allow a few little squiggles to obtrude between the hole of the individual and the hole of the word. She would not eliminate the alphabet entirely, but would employ it exclusively in issuing instructions for speech, describing the positions that the mouth must take in order to produce the desired word, rather than writing that word itself.
As you may imagine, this was extremely inefficient; the production of even a single sentence required many pages of detailed instructions. Reading these texts was equally difficult; the library and study hall were now filled with strange groans, rattles, and caws that only occasionally resolved into spoken English. The inefficacy of this method would have been apparent to anyone but the Headmistress, who on the contrary seemed to relish the cacophony and to find it uncommonly edifying, as that much closer to the windy speech of the dead.
Despite this, she briefly pondered instating a new policy: that speech, too, should consist only of instructions or recipes for words, rather than the words themselves. To understand it, the listener would have to follow the instructions herself, if possible; thus the intended words would actually be pronounced by the listener, rather than the speaker. This did not deter her, in fact I believe she saw it as a positive advantage, in displacing the word further from the illusory source in the “self” of the “speaker.” What did deter her from both her previous solution to the problem of writing and this subsequent development was the unavoidable fact that in trusting language to accurately convey a series of instructions for producing speech, she was retaining a primary if more delimited role of the alphabet in mediating between the individual and the word.
She retreated in some disgruntlement to her study, but several days later emerged with a solution in the form of a new alphabet, one that would undercut any illusion of the independent existence of the word, because its characters were not arbitrary symbols but, again, instructions for speech, this time conveyed through simple diagrams of the positions the mouth must assume to form the sounds that made up the word.
I believe the Hangul script of the Korean people employs a related principle, though if the Headmistress enjoyed a consultation with the deceased King Sejong, she has not said so, nor does it seem likely that she would understand him unless he has picked up a deal of English over the last few centuries. I am inclined to think that she worked alone.
The script was adopted, and the school had just about got used to employing it in all their official texts (I continued taking notes in the Roman alphabet, as I am sure the Headmistress was aware, but I took care to shield my work with my hand, so as not to offend, and indeed—such is the power of convention—began to feel ashamed and even a little squeamish whenever I opened my little book and saw my words, at once so naked, since I could read them at a glance, and so overdressed) when the Headmistress changed her mind. The characters of the new alphabet, which initially had the frankly disturbing appearance of anatomical sketches taken from a cross-section of the human mouth, were already changing. With repetition, the most recognizable of the features that made each sign unique were simplified and exaggerated, while supplemental features and those shared by other letters fell away. Reduced to a few quick lines, the characters increasingly resembled letters in an ordinary alphabet, albeit an unfamiliar one. Oh, for a time one could still perceive, with a little imagination, that this curve represented the tongue, humped at the back, depressed in front, while this other was the palate, and these short straight strokes the teeth, and one could arrange one’s mouth accordingly, and thus come to the word mouth-first, as it were, but most students had long since ceased to do so. It simply took too long. Far easier to simply accept, with the elasticity of the young, that this sign was an a, that a z, and proceed directly to meaning, leaving the mouth alone. This being so, it was not necessary that any character resemble the mouth, just that it resemble no other character, and soon I who, alone perhaps among the population of the school, was still laboriously sounding out words, could no longer recognize anything bodily in those jots, loops, and dashes. The Headmistress, in other words, had removed twenty-six arbitrary symbols only to see them replaced by twenty-six different ones.
The new alphabet was not just retired but banned (although I have found graffiti written in it that I believe to be of recent vintage, so it may be that the students keep it going among themselves), and the old Roman alphabet reinstated . . . And now her metaphors were putting on weight, turning mineral: words were “magma,” “mica,” “schist,” or “gneiss,” speech “pyroclastic” or “sedimentary” . . .
Letters to Dead Authors, #13
Dear Ishmael,
I have grown gaunt—no one knows how gaunt, I think, since my frame is broad, and I wear a union suit over my corset. Several petticoats over that. And still I am cold. I am always cold now.
So little of me left, and still I stand in my way.
The sun, a cherry-red spot, is slipping down behind the fringed hills, withdrawing its affections swiftly now. Already the roots of the grass are in gelid darkness though their delicate tips are bright, each separately striving for the light against the blue tide rising, already the eastern hills are gray, only their tops aglow, though up in the sky it is still day, day whose long hours I squandered. (Here I must force down the usual clamor of “Failed! Failed again!”—to do what? Reach, grasp, find, learn . . . so
mething worth . . . all this . . . )
I always try to toss my spirit up into that warmth, rest in it, a little longer, but it is out of reach and already fading. Now there is nothing in the immense, immobile, transparent sky to hold the light, only a few bright wisps of cloud; these spoil into gray smuts, everything is spoiled, but I rise and close the shutters with a rattle that feels like an offense against the solemnities concluding behind them, and sit back down and dip my pen in night.
I don’t know why I still cling to existence. I did not always require it; for aeons I was not, and no one sought me. The world breathed in and out without my help. The potato bug did not require my advertisement to seem lovely to her suitor, the cutworm found its way in the dark, the bat identified the moth without referring to my descriptions. Even I could have done without me evermore, for I was not inconvenienced by my absence. Indeed there has been nothing so convenient since. Life could be described without exaggeration as a series of inconveniences, more or less grave, but never unmarked by frustration. Starting with the lifelong frustration of the plan to die. For what is the first thing born in us, the one thing that separates us from nonbeing? It is the capacity to die. But too, despite the body’s headlong rush to consummation, a certain reluctance to do so. Yes! I admit it.
I know, I have said it enough: Death is not dreadful—it is not anything.
Does that comfort me?
It does not.
You will excuse, I know, these drops—my blood. How bright they seem against the gathering dark! Like embers in the eye.
At first I sought influence from the dead—influence over the living, I mean. Then I sought knowledge. Then I sought death itself, my own death above all, and this before dying. Sought to lie against my own corpse, to press my hot mouth against my cold one. To die living. To live dying.
You might think I had already achieved this. If not I, who? But as I advance toward death it retreats into itself. My fingertips brush its skirts, but I come no closer.
Now I think that to really understand death, I’d have to die, and die more completely than anyone has ever died before. I couldn’t hang around in out-of-date fashions, rapping on tables and decorating slates with trite advice. I would have to die with more dignity than that, but less reserve—I’d have to give everything I had to death, leaving nothing to dole out in spots of phosphorescence or a cold breath on the back of the neck. I’d have to give up even the idea of knowing death, for how can I know absence when knowing requires my presence? I’d have to throw myself away, then throw the throwing-away away; lose myself, then lose even the loss. Even riddance would have to go.
To understand death I’ll have to not understand it. But not in the cozy-dreadful way that holds sway in funeral parlors. Save me from a domesticated death—beaks and tentacles under the living room sofa!
And yet probably, no, certainly, I have been vainglorious in imagining that I, I alone can turn my face away from human beings and doings to see the nothing-that-is. There is no death in general, there are only billions upon billions of deaths in particular. Death is always of somebody in particular. And there is no way to get from that particular to the general.
In other words, to try to leave my parents out of it was probably a mistake.
Oh, I was right, I’m sure, that death is not essentially their bellowing absence. That is just the hole they made in life. Death is some wholly other thing. But I begin to think I cannot touch upon that other thing without entering the bellowing hole they left. It is not a happy thought.
What if there were a world in which we were extinguished as lightly and as absolutely as soap bubbles, leaving nothing behind? In which our dead never returned to remind us that they too were once alive? What a forgiving place that would be, without memory. What grace.
Wistfully,
Headmistress Joines
14. The Final Dispatch, contd.
Well, here we are again in my office. It looks real—I get up close to the wood paneling to check the grain and there is no blurring or repetition. An exclamation mark of bird muck streaks one windowpane, dotted by a blob on the sill. Bottle of paregoric, stuffed gray parrot, ventriloquist’s dummy.
A little test, that, I was just trying to trick myself, to see what I’d swallow. No, there’s no dummy here. Except Miss Exiguous. Mr. Mallow. And Mother Other: Puppets, props, automata, the lot of them. The girl, though, is surely real. She does not, perhaps, look the way I have her looking—part crow, part spider, in her black untidy hitched-up too-short dress, holey black tights, with her skinny legs and arms of which she seems to have a few too many. But inside that form is a living soul. I believe it beyond reason.
Why do I not then seize her and fetch her home? But I myself am seized, the key in my back is turning, click click click, da da da [singing], the scene must take its course. She opens her mouth. I know what I will hear, and yet I tremble.
“Hello again, my dear.”
My father’s voice is strange in such a mouth. One knows instinctively that such a voice, a man’s voice, cannot have its origins in a little girl’s chest cavity. No matter how good a mimic she may be. Not because it is so deep, my father’s voice is actually quite high, one might say feminine. It is something else in it—a flat cold killing rage imperfectly disguised as reason. Only I, when I was a girl, might have had such a voice.
“Why use the girl?” I said.
“Think of her as a telephone.”
“Perhaps she would prefer to be a person.”
“Perhaps I would prefer to be a person as well,” said my father, “but I no longer have that privilege.”
“You forfeited it,” I said, but automatically. For some time I have had the feeling that I had overlooked something, and I had just figured out what it was.
I had always believed that the dead were helpless to shape their world for us, since they do not have the time, literally, to create a temporal fiction. But now it struck me (and here, when a thought strikes you, it can bloody your nose) that if living people who were channeling the voices of the dead came here, those voices could probably speak (continue speaking) just as ours do, and with the same effect. In this way I might find myself in a world that my father, speaking through Finster, had made for me, and not knowing it, never discover the way out, but trudge dutifully after him down this hard dirt road forever.
Ahead of me, polished heels, firmly subduing the dust in monotonous alternation.
Sun stinging my nape.
I am seven and my father is telling me the world. How high his degree; how lower the townsfolk’s; how lower still my mother’s. How she degraded his seed in promoting her own. How I thrust myself upon him through her offices, springing up where unlooked for, spilling toward him out of a dark place, eft, emmet, elver, and reaching for him, despite his very natural feelings of aversion, probably drawn to the Apollonian splendor of his countenance (I can’t say I remember it), as all low things are drawn to the high, moth to the flame, mother to father, Caliban, Icarus, et cetera; how, though one should not expect cuddles from Mithras, I might study to deserve the light of understanding that his presence would shed on the world of phenomena; how if I could overcome my constitutional indolence enough to apply myself to his therapies, I might even contrive to be one day a little less disgusting in his eyes.
He instructs me further and I believe him that chloride of lime combats noxious effluvia and that teak is superior to oak for ship timber, that oxalates have the property of decomposing calcareous silts and the prudent man will not partake of port after a meal of oysters, that fornication is an abomination whose punishment is childbirth, that the character of the yellow man is contemplative, that speaking the French language gives a pleasing shape to the mouth, that on repeated bathing with diluted sulfuric acid the skin will resist the action of fire, that a Monsieur Bon had excellent gloves and stockings made of spider’s silk, that the efficacy of fomentation in promoting the suppuration of boils cannot be doub
ted . . .
He curses, cuffs a horsefly from his neck. I smile into my collar.
His shoes impressing the dust with coffin shapes. My own leaving smaller coffins behind.
How oddly comfortable I feel with you. Is this, dear listener, what you would call a friendship? I wish—
In a certain kind of story, you would turn out to be related to the kindly neighbor who watched over me after my parents died (actually she was a suspicious and penny-pinching widow), or would wind up possessed by my mother’s gentle spirit and spread beneficence over my tortured soul like treacle. In another kind of story, not so different really, you would be my nemesis. But I hope I know better than to fall for such devices.
For that is another influence to watch out for: the literary. One of my pulpitasters (for I am a sort of pulpit)—one of the stamens thrilling in my perianth—one of the freshets freshening in my sails—or, in plain English, one of the ghosts I channel—is the author Jephra Meant. You will not have heard of her, though she would not believe it. Her fame, such as it was, flowered, wilted, and withered at the turn of the last century. It is pressed in a book or two: slim volumes with marbled deckles, containing essays, a few poems, some peculiar stories in which very little happens, very ornately. You can still find them in the odd antiquarian bookshop at prices not exorbitant. A testy, bombastic old bat, half mad, nurtured on the learned wit of the eighteenth century, Jephra spent the latter half of her life planning the novel to end all novels, but fell ill before she could put down more than a few thousand words. Her ghost pesters me (and others through me) to find those papers, surely by now crumbling into curry-colored dust. Lately I have been feeling her buck and bridle when I speak, hurling her weight behind this word or that one, weirding a workaday phrase with a whiff of hippogriff. (Pulpitasters, freshets, hers. Hippogriff, hers.) These writers make the most persistent ghosts! She would like, I know, to write her own too-long-deferred novel through me, and she smells the ink on my breath, hears the rattle of the typewriter in my tonsils.
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