Or to Begin Again (8 page)

Why don't they connect these two facts? she wondered. What the birds knew was of
another conceptual order, one in which her intentions and her actions were forever
severed; she could not argue or protest; she could simply remain trapped in the
difference between what she was and what they were.

 

 

I am real but unknowable, which means I cannot be actual and the ways in which I
am real are confusing; perhaps, she thought, I am merely a memory or a dream.
What if the birds are actual and I am not?

 

 

The wind made a hollow whistling sound; the trees swayed.

 

 

I am insufficiently present, Alice moaned, and began again to weep. She was
beginning to suspect that she was not really alive. She was beginning to suspect that
she had no parents but that instead she was a kind of mutant guise or emanation
with a proper name, itself quite common, that had innumerable places of conception.
There was Alice James, sister to William and Henry, and there was Alice B. Toklas,
friend and lover of Gertrude Stein. There was, of course, the Alice who wandered
around in Wonderland, for whom she had been named, the creation of Lewis Carroll
who wasn't really named Lewis Carroll, and he had named his Alice after a real
little girl named Alice. I am an effect, she thought. I am a mere motif at the mercy of
someone else's pleasure, someone who thinks by pretending that I am alive she can
make the birds comprehend something beyond their existence, but she is wrong.

 

 

Even if you are not real, said the Voice, you can be true.
Alice started.
I don't want to talk to you, she said sulkily.
You may have no choice.
Maybe your battery will give out.
Maybe, but that will be only a temporary cessation, like a cup of tea or a trip to the
bathroom to pee.
The snow is melting.
Don't change the subject.
What is the subject?
Your truth as opposed to your reality.
O really, she said, and slipped into a nearby wood.
Following her, an incomprehensible jargon of something found in the jumble sale of
Language.

 

 

The next morning, when Alice woke up, it was spring. She could tell not only
because the snow had melted away, but because there were alterations everywhere;
under the sodden leaves of fall, minute beginnings: dark reddish nubs and bright
green kernels just above the surface of the softening earth and, on the thorny rose
stalks, tiny furled nodes; the squirrels were chasing each other, performing
impossibly acrobatic swirls in the tawny grass, and the mostly silent birds had
begun to sing.

 

 

It must be April, she thought.
Aye,

 

 

 

 

What language are you speaking? Alice asked.
English.
But I don't understand most of the words.
Aye. Language changes. Words morph and disappear into the mire.
Mire
is an example. What is a
mire
? It rhymes with some sad words, like
liar
and
dire
and
ire
.
The mire is the wet ground, swampy, like a bog. It came to mean
to be in difficulties
.
Like getting bogged down? Alice said.
Exactly.

 

 

Sometimes I think language is as beautiful and mysterious as nature, and no matter
how much we learn, it never gives up all its secrets and surprises.
To this sudden appraisal there was no response.
Hello? Hello?
Two boys rode by on bicycles, calling to each other in loud boy voices.

Alice was sitting in the grass. Around her there was a scattering of small
buttonlike yellow heads on slender stalks, nodding slightly above the grass.
Dandelions, said the Voice.
I know, Alice said.

 

 

How did they get this strange name?

 

 

Etymology can help you there; you can trace a word from its origins. It isn't a dandy,
not like Fred Astaire, but the teeth of a lion, from the French
dent
de lion,
and before that, from Latin.
Alice was silent for some minutes.
She was trying to make a connection between a lion's tooth and the soft yellow heads
of the flowers.

 

 

She found no link at all.
It isn't the head of the flower, Alice, but the shape of the leaf, which is serrated like
a tooth.
The Voice roared with self-congratulation.
Alice felt equally edified and annoyed and changed the subject to something the
Voice couldn't look up with such alacrity.
Is a dandelion a fact?
No, it is an object.
Objects are not facts?
That there are objects called dandelions is a fact.
I see. And their color, yellow, is that a fact?

 

 

Yellow is a color, an attribute, not a fact; but that dandelions are yellow, at least
until they turn gray and lose all their hair, is a fact.
Alice took this in. It seems to have to do with sentences.
And things that happen, are they facts?

 

 

Not exactly. Events find their bearings by a kind of extrapolation; out of all the
possible relationships between and among the particulars of the perceptible world—
the dandelions—we construct events—they are hinges between the immediacy of the
present and what went before and what comes after.

 

 

But that isn't quite accurate, Alice said, knowing that by contradicting the Voice she
was asking for trouble and, indeed, the wind began to pick up.

 

 

Events are in time. But the way you said it, it sounds as if we make events up,
whereas events happen that we have no control over. Earthquakes and storms and
terrible accidents on roads, for example.

 

 

As Alice made this observation, the crowd of dandelions nodded and swayed
excitedly.

 

 

You are talking about stories, I think, Alice went on, getting up from the grass and
walking quite quickly up the hill. She thought a storm was in the offing. But an
event isn't a story; stories add event to event, as if stitching them to each other, or
putting beads on a string.

 

 

Event horizon! the Voice shouted.

 

 

What?

 

 

Event horizon! The edge of space-time! The great maw of the universe!

 

 

There was thunder to accompany these bald statements.

 

 

I am not looking through anything, Alice said disconsolately, and
whatever I say is not seen, except in the mind's eye, whatever that is.
So far, nothing is as it seems or seems as it is. Really, I would prefer to be a cat and
trot along with a bird in my mouth, its head hanging limp, feathers listless.

 

 

Being a cat is nice, said the nearby Cat.
I grant you that. Being a cat means you can go from violence to affection without any
discernible transition.
I kill, I purr, I eat, I sleep.
These are excellent variations on a theme of being alive, if not exactly sentient, and I
recommend them to you as a
cure for your humanness.
But I like being human, Alice said, and then added, sort of.
And besides, I haven't any choice in the matter.
But of course I am not exactly human, she added, I am a fiction, which makes things
more
complicated on the one hand and a lot simpler on the other.
However, said the Cat, you are the emanation of a human, so that makes you more
human than not.
No, Alice said, once again feeling disconsolate, I am only words.
This is a bare fact and there is nothing to be done about it.
But Alice, said the Cat, are facts not also a matter of interpretation?
Perhaps you are not mere words.
Alice was silent for a long time, long enough for the Cat to clean its face by licking
its paws and then wiping them across, first one side, then the other.
O I don't know what facts are, Alice said at last.
Once I thought a fact was a thing, substantial and irrefutable, like a table or a
penny, but now I am not so sure.
I know facts have something to do with evidence, she added,
since the Cat had said nothing in response to her outburst.
When people say what the facts are they seem to be saying something about reality.
The Cat wandered away into the shade of a rosebush. It had lost interest. The Cat
was not interested in either facts or reality.
Alice went back to her book. She wished there were someone wise and informed
enough to help her with facts and reality. If that person appeared, then, and only
then, she might be helped with the more awful problem of truth.

One day, Alice was leaving CityCity on a train.
As the train pulled away from under the tunnel of misgivings
it passed a message on a building:
IT IS NOTHING TO YOU, ALL WHO PASS BY
What a strange thing to say
to the passengers, Alice thought,
It is nothing to you.
What is nothing to me, to us?
On the way back into CityCity, she saw the sign again.
Is it nothing to you, all who pass by?

 

 

—
to Willa

—WALLACE STEVENS, “ADULT EPIGRAM”

Lest, forgetting, the branch-maiden lopped off.
Lest, forgetting, the branch-maiden lopped off.

 

 

Lest the rotund silk, flickering on a wall,
Lest the rotund silk, flickering on a wall,

 

 

Nagged by wind. Prose
Nagged by wind. Succulent prose.

 

 

Swift enough to roll downhill into the stream
Awake enough to roll downhill into the stream

 

 

(Violent, or gentle, naturalism). To claim
(Violent, or gentle, naturalism). To claim