9
Linguistics is the most advanced science on the island. For generations scholars and researchers have worked on a project to develop a dictionary that would include future variations of known words. They would need to establish a bilingual lexicon that would allow for the comparison of one language with another. Imagine (Boas’s report says) an English traveler who arrives in a new country. In the hall of the train station, lost in the middle of a foreign crowd, he stops to check a small pocket dictionary for the right phrase. But translation is impossible, because the only thing that defines meaning is usage, and on the island they never know more than one language at a time. By now, those who still persist in trying to develop the dictionary think of it as a divination manual. A new Book of Mutations, Boas explained, conceived as an etymological dictionary containing the history of the future of the language.
There is only one known case in the history of the island of a man who knew two languages at the same time. His name was Bob Mulligan, and he claimed that he dreamt incomprehensible words whose meanings were transparent to him. He spoke like a mystic and wrote foreign phrases and said that those were the words of the future. A few fragments of his texts have survived in the Archives of the Academy, and one can even listen to a recording of Mulligan’s high-pitched, mad voice as he tells a story that begins like this: “Oh New York city, yes, yes, the city of New York, the whole family has gone there. The boat was full of lice so they had to burn the sheets and bathe the children in water mixed with acaricide. The babies had to be separated from each other, because the smell made them cry if they smelled it on each other. The women wore silk handkerchiefs over their faces, just like Bedouins, although they were all redheads. The grandfather of the grandfather was a policeman in Brooklyn who had once shot and killed a gimp who was about to slice the throat of a supermarket cashier.” No one understood what he was saying. Mulligan wrote the story down, as well as several others, in that unknown language, but then one day he announced that he could not hear anymore. He would come to the bar and sit there, at that end of the counter, drinking beer, deaf as a post, and he would get drunk slowly, with the facial expression of someone who is embarrassed to have made himself noticed. Never again did he want to talk about what he had said. He lived the rest of his life somewhat removed, until he died of cancer at the age of fifty. Poor Bob Mulligan, Berenson said, when he was young he was a sociable guy, and very popular. He married Belle Blue Boylan, and a year later she died, drowned in the river. Her naked body showed up on the east bank of the Liffey, on the other shore. Mulligan never recovered, nor married again. He lived the rest of his life alone. He worked as a linotypist at the Congressional presses, and he would come with us to the bar, and he liked betting on horses, and then one afternoon he started telling those stories that no one understood. I believe, Old-Man Berenson said, that Belle Blue Boylan was the most beautiful woman in all of Dublin.
All attempts to create an artificial language have been derailed by the temporality of the structure of experience. They have been unable to construct a language that is outside the island, because they cannot imagine a system of signs that could survive through time without undergoing any mutations. The statement a + b equals c is only valid for a certain amount of time, because in the irregular space of just two seconds a becomes — a and the equation changes. Evidence is only good for the length of time it takes to formulate a proposition. On the island, being fast is a category of truth. Under these conditions, the linguists of the Area-Beta of Trinity College have achieved something that should have been all but impossible: they have almost been able to root the uncertain form of reality within a logical paradigm. They have defined a system of signs whose notation changes with time. That is to say, they have invented a language that expresses what the world is like, but is unable to name it. We have been able to establish a unified field, they told Boas, now all we need is for reality to incorporate some of our hypotheses into the language.
They know that there have been seventeen cycles to date, but they believe that potentially there must be a nearly infinite number, calculated at eight hundred and three (because eight hundred and three is the number of known languages in the world). If in almost a hundred years, since the changes began to be recorded in 1939, seventeen different forms have been identified, then the most optimistic believe that the full circle could be completed in as little as twelve more years. No calculation is certain, however, because the irregular duration of the cycles is part of the structure of the language. There are slow times and fast times, just like the different stretches of the Liffey. As the saying goes, the lucky ones sail in calm waters, and the best ones live in fast times, where meaning lasts as long as a rooster’s bad mood. But the more radical youth of the Trickster group at the Area-Beta of Trinity College laugh at these silly old sayings. They think that as long as language does not find the borders that contain it, the world will be nothing more than a set of ruins, and the truth is like fish gasping for air as they die in the mud when the level of the Liffey recedes in the summer droughts, when the river becomes nothing more than a small, dark-watered rivulet.
10
I said earlier that tradition has it that the ancestors speak of a time in which language was an open field, where one could walk without finding any surprises. The different generations, the elders argue, used to inherit the same names for the same things, and they could leave written documents behind with the certainty that everything they wrote would be legible in times to come. Some repeat (without understanding it) a fragment of that original language that has survived through the years. Boas says that he heard the text recited as if it were a series of drunkards’ jokes, the pronunciation thick and pasty, the words broken up by laughter and other sounds that no one knew any longer if they formed part of the original meaning or not. Boas says that the fragment called Regarding the serpent went like this: “The season of the strong winds has arrived. She feels that her brain is torn out of her and that her body is made out of tubes and electrical connections. She talks nonstop and sometimes sings and says she can read my mind and asks only that I be near her and not abandon her on the sand. She says that she is Eve and that the serpent is Eve and that no one in all these centuries and centuries has dared to utter this pure truth and that the only one who said it was Mary Magdalene to Christ before she washed his feet. Eve is the serpent, the endless mutation, and Adam is alone, he has always been alone. She says that God is the woman and that Eve is the serpent. That the tree of knowledge is the tree of language. They only start talking once they eat the apple. That is what she says when she is not singing.” For many this is a religious text, a fragment from Genesis. For others it is only a prayer that has survived the permutations of language in people’s memory, and has been remembered as a game of divination. (The historians assert that it is a paragraph from the letter that Nolan left before killing himself.)