{"id":148092,"date":"2020-10-05T09:00:28","date_gmt":"2020-10-05T13:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=148092"},"modified":"2020-10-06T19:44:55","modified_gmt":"2020-10-06T23:44:55","slug":"the-eleventh-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2020\/10\/05\/the-eleventh-word\/","title":{"rendered":"The Eleventh Word"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The sky was a slate of electric indigo. We were sitting in the bath, my year-and-a-half-old son and I. My wife popped her head in the door. He looked at her, giving her a smile I will never get, and then pointed to the painting of a magenta fish on the wall.<\/p>\n

\u201cSheesh,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cFish?\u201d She said.<\/p>\n

\u201cSheesh!\u201d He said.<\/p>\n

It was, perhaps, his eleventh word. He had dog<\/em> and ball<\/em> and duck<\/em> and bubble<\/em> and mama<\/em> and (mysteriously in our lesbian household) dada<\/em> and nana<\/em> (for banana) and vroom vroom<\/em> (for cars) and hah-hah<\/em> (for hot) and (the root of so many of our evils) what\u2019s dat?<\/em> What\u2019s dat?<\/em> What\u2019s dat<\/em>?<\/p>\n

And then, there it was: fish<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It should have been a tragic moment for me. I, of all people, should have sensed the danger in it. I had just spent the last ten years of my life working on a book called Why Fish Don\u2019t Exist<\/em>, arguing that the word \u201cfish\u201d is symptomatic of our human inability to see the world as expansively as it is. In short, scientists recently discovered that many of the creatures we typically think of as \u201cfish\u201d are in fact more closely related to us than to each other. And when you accept this fact you will see that the category of \u201cfish\u201d is a bum category\u2014an act of gerrymandering we perform over nature to make it line up with our intuition. But it\u2019s a lie, this category of \u201cfish,\u201d a mistake, a meaningless group that hides incredible nuance and complexity.<\/p>\n

And \u201cfish\u201d is just one glaring example of this thing we do all the time\u2014group things together that do not belong under one label in the name of maintaining our convenience, comfort, power. My book, in large part, is a plea to approach the world with more doubt\u2014more doubt in our categories, more doubt in our words, more curiosity about the organisms pinned beneath our language. The reward, as I promise in the book, is a more expansive world, \u201ca wilder place,\u201d where nothing is what it seems, where \u201ceach and every dandelion is reverberating with possibility.\u201d<\/p>\n

And so, as the word \u201cfish\u201d rolled off my son\u2019s tongue for the very first time, I should have felt that hot burst of fricative air as a puncturing of his innocence\u2014sheeesh<\/em>. His fall from grace in real time, his ejection from a Garden of Eden I had just spent a decade trying to hack a path back into. I should have squeezed my palm to his lips and pressed hard so no more words could spill out.<\/p>\n

Instead, I tested him. I pulled up a photograph of a goldfish on my phone. \u201cSheesh.\u201d A salmon. \u201cSheesh.\u201d A mottled blue coelacanth, fleshy and finned. \u201cSheesh.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYes!\u201d I squealed in the highest octave I could reach, cementing the mistake with my glee.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Over the next few weeks, he revealed to me that fish were everywhere in the city of Chicago. Fish along the mosaicked wall of the pedestrian underpass to Lake Shore Drive, now barricaded with yellow tape to prevent the spread of COVID<\/small>-19. Fish inside the library books we could no longer return. Fish in the windows of the shuttered nursery school on Clark. Sheesh<\/em>, sheesh<\/em>, sheesh<\/em>, he would point his little scepter-finger, stunning the former confusion into mastery. In his care, a snake was also a fish; a turtle, a fish; and one morning as we opened the window to let an April breeze roll through the apartment, the potted banana palm became a fish, her fins suddenly paddling the air.<\/p>\n

As our world was closing in, his seemed to be exploding. The word \u201cfish\u201d turned out to be a sacred key, one that granted him access to the entire animal kingdom. Suddenly, no creature was unknown to him. If a dog walked by, it was \u201cdog.\u201d If a bunny hopped by, it was also \u201cdog.\u201d The cows, bears, zebras, kangaroos, giraffes, and elephants stuffed inside our children\u2019s books\u2014all \u201cdog\u201d to him. As for birds\u2014the robin roosting on our porch rafter, the cardinal in the bush, the pigeons flying with a new woodblock elegance across the quieted sky\u2014all \u201cduck.\u201d Everything else was \u201cfish.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was Aristotle\u2019s same system of classifying animals into three groups\u2014land, sea, or air. One morning, he called an ant a dog. His chest began to puff just a little bit. Mine did, too. I did not yet sense the threat.<\/p>\n

In late April, we learned of one of the few nature preserves still recklessly open and we plunged in. We walked through archways of naked underbrush, brambles holding in their buds, carpets of moss stealing the show. \u201cDirt,\u201d our son said. \u201cYeah! Dirt!\u201d We said, pointing to the infinitely complex swirl of mineral, mycological, entomological, and electrical matter beneath our feet. That very same day came \u201cwawa,\u201d for the small creek at the end of the hike and, later, for rain and baths and thirst. Next was \u201cstick.\u201d \u201cYellow\u201d bloomed for one day, then left us. The tiny black dogs that crawled along the cracks in our porch became \u201cbug,\u201d then \u201cant.\u201d We cheered with every word\u2014two women waiting upon the doorstep, giddy to welcome him into our world of language.<\/p>\n

And then, five weeks after he first said the word \u201cfish,\u201d it happened.<\/p>\n

We shouldn\u2019t have gone to see my in-laws. But \u2026 they\u2019re young. Not even sixty. They don\u2019t play tennis, but they could.<\/p>\n

We wore our masks and sat at the other end of a long rectangular table. They served mushroom risotto, cooked in an instant pot. Mango and strawberry and yogurt in tiny crystal glasses, because why not. We put our son to bed in their guest room.<\/p>\n

Around 10 P.M.<\/small>, we were all still up, still chatting, when our son started screaming. Not crying. Screaming. It was a sound we\u2019d never heard. My wife went up, but after a few minutes, the volume had not lowered. I leaped up the carpeted stairs, worried he was sick, worried he had a fever, worried he had\u2014but my wife shook her head, puzzled, \u201cHe isn\u2019t hot,\u201d she whispered. I tried to take him into my arms, sure I could settle him, but he recoiled. He looked up at me with no recognition.<\/p>\n

We tried everything. Rocking him, showing him a book, the one with the penguins who like each other so much. We tried warmed milk. Nothing. Finally my wife took him over to a framed photograph of Coptic tapestries. Various trees birthing goat-like creatures with curling horns, and snail-like creatures with spiraling shells, and maybe snakes and definitely vines all coiling into one another in such a hallucinatory way that it would have caused me to have a psychotic break if I\u2019d been as disoriented as my son. My wife got him up close to the glass and started whispering the names of what she thought she saw. \u201cGoat,\u201d she said, tapping the glass. \u201cFlower. Snail. Duck.\u201d Thud. Thud. Thud. And slowly, through shaking inhalations, he settled enough for us to pack him up and drive home.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Once upon a time there was a German psychologist whose name I am forgetting\u2014which will, itself, become relevant in just a moment\u2014who argued that when you don\u2019t name a thing it stays more active in your mind. Specifically, he found that you have better recall for the details of an unsolved task, an unfinished puzzle, an unnamed psychological phenomenon, than a solved or labeled thing. \u201cLoose ends prevail\u201d could have been the name of his law, but it was\u2014I\u2019m checking my notes\u2014the Zeigarnik effect. The man\u2019s name was Zeigarnik and she was a woman not a man and she was Russian, not German. But still. It has stayed with me, this idea with a hard-to-remember name about how unnamed ideas are easier to remember. This rabid little law that suggests that unlabeled things gnaw and tug at you with more vigor, their parts and powers somehow more alive when they are left to roam wild, outside of the confines of our words.<\/p>\n

With the name comes a kind of dormancy. The name, in this metaphor, is a trap. It\u2019s the lid on the jar that extinguishes the firefly.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

The next morning, our son was fine.<\/p>\n

My wife and I weren\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat was<\/em> that?\u201d We said to each other, shaking our heads over coffee prep and neglected dishes, glancing back at him, merry in his high chair.<\/p>\n

My wife went into work that morning at the hospital where she is a psychologist to kids who have come into contact with Chaos\u2019s whims\u2014amputations and paralyses and premature birth. She took her supervisor aside and asked if she had any thoughts on a night terror like the one we\u2019d seen. Her supervisor told her not to worry, said it was a common occurrence around eighteen months, a by-product of all the neurological growth that happens around that time. I pictured a lightning bolt discharging from the growing ion storm of his mind.<\/p>\n

I had done my own half-hearted investigating. Some fruitless googling and a serendipitous phone call with a colleague who mentioned that his toddler had had her<\/em> first night terror the very same night. We joked that there must have been something in the air. \u201cThat\u2019s reassuring!\u201d I heard myself saying, un-reassured.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

I left them for five days. My book tour had been canceled. I needed nature. I needed something. I drove to West Virginia. I hiked on a ridge trail and saw a lady\u2019s slipper orchid, whose name I only learned weeks after I saw her. This, well, vagina on a pedestal that lives on mountaintops. She was covered in dewdrops, she had pastel veins. I thought I was hallucinating. I missed my wife.<\/p>\n

I listened to Alan Watts\u2019s The Wisdom of Insecurity <\/em>on tape while I hiked. He told me that the root of all our problems is the desire to hold onto anything. Life is inherently flowing and our grasp to possess it makes us sick. I nodded and tried desperately to capture each beautiful thing I saw: I took a picture of the mist, of a toad, of a cairn; I took a time-lapse of a sunset, an audio recording of a grouse bleating for her chicks, six photos of the lady\u2019s slipper orchid; I ripped up a tiny bouquet of meadow flowers\u2014purple, yellow, and white\u2014and stuffed them in an envelope to mail home.<\/p>\n

I returned home to new words: apple<\/em> and help<\/em>. To the killing of George Floyd. To a city-wide curfew. I awoke one night to my wife saying, \u201cLulu. Out. Now<\/em>.\u201d She beelined down the hall to get our son. Our bathroom window was sunset-orange with fire outside.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a communication,\u201d I thought as I wondered what to take. I chose our laptops. And the scrapbook I have been making of my son\u2019s life\u2014his inky footprints, his finger paintings, his words.<\/p>\n

The garage one plot over from us was razed. It was declared arson. No one was hurt. My son\u2019s eyes gleamed at the fire trucks, five of them, the best night of his life. I thought about everything he didn\u2019t yet know. I wondered how on earth we could raise him to be a good white man, to not think of himself as sitting on top of the hierarchy society continues to maintain for him.<\/p>\n

In June, he began saying the word \u201cup.\u201d He began rejecting his beloved blueberries, throwing them on the floor. And I would\u2014what would I do?\u2014pick them up.<\/p>\n

In July, we visited our sperm donor, a close friend who we\u2019ve decided to call \u201cuncle.\u201d Our son\u2019s face is his face but he has no word for him yet. His new word that month was \u201cbus.\u201d<\/p>\n

In August, a tornado pushed through Chicago. Flying saucers of roots rose from the cement as the tree trunks fell. I sat in the bath with my son. The thunder was so loud it shook the car alarms awake. My son looked at me with \u201cWTF?\u201d eyes. I said, \u201cThunder.\u201d \u201cHummer!\u201d He said. And, I said, \u201cYeah. Hummer.\u201d<\/p>\n

In September, the wind rolled through, bearing cicadas and a chill. He turned two. His hot<\/em> grew its t<\/em>, his banana<\/em> its b<\/em>. He spoke his name out loud for the very first time. And no<\/em>\u00a0and corona<\/em>.<\/p>\n

And now it is October. The mysterious white creature I hung from the porch, my son quickly learned to call \u201cske-le-tah.\u201d He calls the giant orange orb sitting below it \u201capple\u201d and tries, in vain, to bite into it. Over the ridge of this month lies a greater unknown than we\u2019ve seen in a while. How will the votes get counted, will<\/i> the votes get counted, and if the president loses, will he stay? Will he even be there to refuse to step down? Will the social order hold, and wouldn\u2019t that actually be the worse fate of all\u2014if it did? Will there even be a month called November?<\/p>\n

I am alone again. My wife and son are both asleep. I slip out onto the balcony. I can\u2019t see the stars between the breaks in the clouds but I trust that they are there, because I have been told they are there. In honor of a more expansive world, in paving the path to progress through doubt, I let myself consider, for a moment, that there are no stars. I try to slip the word \u201cstar\u201d off the stars, or to unscrew it, leaving just the sockets somewhere above me. I try to take down the word \u201cabove,\u201d and consider that the stars might be below, or inside me. I roll my eyes at myself, while trying not to all the same.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, the words of this essay melt into paint. Or maybe to felt. To wooden waves of green and blue. The colors are muted but deep. The fish curl into the stars, which curl into the wind, which forms a kind of tornado, at the center of which, you can see, is the soul, engulfing the earth, re-engulfing the soul. There is the sound of laughter. Which is rendered as a tiny bouquet of droplets off the tip of Antarctica. The word \u201cAntarctica\u201d is crossed out. The word \u201cAntarctica\u201d was never there. Ice melts from the brass pole around which the globe spins, then freezes. Then sublimates.<\/p>\n

I would like to stay here. In the wordless place. After all these years looking closely at words, I have come to mistrust them. So often they are used as the sober blades to scale selves away from the group\u2014its protection, its warmth, its assurances of justice. But something desperate in me still wants to hurl a handful of them out into the air, still believing that they could catch and tame a terrible thing.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith a rising sense of mastery comes the fear of the unknown\u201d is the pompous phrase I want to toss out into the night.<\/p>\n

That night, back in April, when my son screamed out in terror, one might theorize that the reason for his fear was that he had awoken to an unfamiliar room, my in-laws\u2019 guest room, and had become disoriented and afraid.<\/p>\n

And yet, prior to lockdown, we had dragged that child all over the place. In his short life, he\u2019d lived in three different homes, two different states. He\u2019d awoken to countless unfamiliar rooms, inside friend\u2019s homes and hotels (remember those?) and cars and bars and tents, and never before had it frightened him.<\/p>\n

So what was different about that night? It was the first time he had awoken to an unfamiliar setting after <\/em>the advent of words. For 569 days before that, he had lain with the unknown each night and it had never bothered or frightened him. Instead he had curled into her, this hulking, formless shoal of uncertainty and confusion, because it was all he knew.<\/p>\n

It was only with the advent of words, with the illusion that he could name the whole world, every last corner of it labeled and known, that the unknown became an enemy, became a threat.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s flexing her wings this year, the unknown; she\u2019s showboating around. She\u2019s waving from the horizon in a coat of flames, she\u2019s lingering on metal surfaces. There\u2019s the same amount of her there always is, of course, but she\u2019s making herself felt. Her presence can be seen in the whittling down of our teeth, the spikes in suicides, the surge in demand for therapists. Uncertainty, it has been shown, is more painful than certain physical pain. For some reason, the neurologists say, we are wired to fear the unknown. There is a thumbnail-size soldier in the brain, they explain, who they\u2019ve named the Locus Coeruleus<\/em>, who is charged with tracking uncertainty. He\u2019s useful for a bit, they say; when faced with uncertainty, he puts the brain into a fluid state so it can better run through strategies to keep you safe. But when the uncertainty won\u2019t let up, that fluid state starts to wear on the body; such extended vigilance leads to exhaustion, to a measurable increase in stress. \u201cThe strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown,\u201d declared H.\u2009P. Lovecraft, nearly a century earlier.<\/p>\n

But what if they\u2019re all wrong? What if we are not, in fact, fated to fear the unknown? What if that fear only starts with the advent of words, with the false belief that a named thing is a known thing? Perhaps it is our words that transform the hulking unknown from friend to foe.<\/p>\n

It is a tidy theory.<\/p>\n

It allows me to explain away the fear that something\u2019s wrong with my child, that his anguish is unsolvable, unknowable. If I can name it, I can swat that haunting look in his eyes\u2014when he no longer knew who I was\u2014away forever.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

With fish<\/em> came every last creature on earth. The ducks are still ducks<\/em>, but now owls are hoo-hoos<\/em>. Both curbs and boulders are stone<\/em>. He\u2019s got fern<\/em> and mushroom<\/em> and umbrella<\/em> and bus-truck<\/em>. His chalk is c<\/em>ock<\/em>, and the neighbors can\u2019t stop laughing. The porpoises of the sea have all sprouted ruffled collars. \u201cDoll-fish,\u201d he says, animating the world with his wrongness, shaking them all temporarily awake.<\/p>\n

A few weeks ago, I sat in the park, under a heavy beam of wood that could kill me in an instant. But I trusted it wouldn\u2019t, because I had named that thing branch<\/em>. In that same park, I watched a man, face twisted, run hard in my direction. But I trusted he would not kill me, was not running from a thing that might kill me, because I named him jogger<\/em>. In that same park, dozens of ten-ton death machines whizzed by. I named them truck<\/em>. I named the flat ribbon of asphalt road<\/em>, and in road I trusted. With each word comes a false set of assurances. That now you know how it will behave.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have [the coronavirus] totally under control,\u201d said the president the day after the first case was discovered in the U.S.<\/p>\n

My friends, who are nurses, and married to each other, once told me a story about a woman who lay down in a hammock and felt the cinder block into which the hammock hook had been drilled slip out from its wall and land on her face and kill her.<\/p>\n

With fish came the entire animal kingdom.<\/em> Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there are a few left. He\u2019s still got no word for cicada. He\u2019s never named a firefly.<\/p>\n

That night in the bath, so many moons ago\u2014the same moon ago\u2014the light gave off its last sparks of day, and he spoke his eleventh word. I heard it only as a mother. I clapped at all the finned creatures he had just caught in one syllable. I believed that he was drawing closer, each word a stepping stone thrown to walk him nearer, nearer to me. And yet the truth I knew even then, maybe, is that each word was another brick in the wall being erected between us. An experience named instead of shared.<\/p>\n

I pulled the plug and watched as he watched, delighted, the water drain away. By the time it was gone, it was night. I wish, now, that I had lingered just a little longer, in the warmth of the water, in the waning days of wordlessness, when confusion was still everywhere, when confusion was still nothing to fear.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lulu Miller is the co-host of\u00a0<\/em>Radiolab,\u00a0the co-founder of NPR\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>Invisibilia, and author of the book,\u00a0<\/em>Why Fish Don\u2019t Exist.\u00a0Her writing has appearing in <\/em>The New Yorker, <\/em>VQR, <\/em>Orion, <\/em>Catapult, and beyond.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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