Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel

by Hortense Calisher

  “Yes,” it said, to itself now. “On.”

  Part II

  1. Say Au Revoir

  ON, ON, ON AND on, on; and on, and on, on. The paradox about distance is that quite as much philosophy adheres to a short piece of it as to a long. A being capable of setting theoretical limits to its universe has already been caught in the act of extending it. The merest cherub in the streets here, provided he has a thumbnail—and he usually has ten does this every day. He may grow up to be one of their fuzzicists, able to conceive that space is curved, but essentially that is, elliptically—he does nothing about it. He lives on, in his rare, rectilinear world of north-south gardens, east-west religions, up-and-down monuments and explosions, plus a blindly variable sort of shifting about which he claims to have perfected through his centuries, thinks very highly of, and, is rather pretty in its way and even its name: free wall—a kind of generalized travel-bureaudom of “across.” It follows that most of his troubles are those of a partially yet imperfectly curved being who is still trying to keep to the straight-and-narrow—and most of his fantasies also. His highest aspiration is, quite naturally, “to get a-Round”; his newest, to get Out.

  And he will too, though in his current researches he may have reached only so far as the Omega particle. In the phenomenology of all peoples, the mind slowly becomes curved.

  At least that is what Ours are matriculated to, and I had seen nothing to contradict this, during my all-to-brief sojourn in Bucks. Ah, what a mentor was there, was mine, though except for once, I never saw—as she taught me to say—Her!

  As I taxied once again along the upper solitudes, trying not to arrive instantaneously at destination—which is of course Our main problem here—I thought of Her with considerable leaning. Leaning is to Us what yearning is to You—but that story will emerge later. The hardest thing to learn here—and still not mastered—is how to get about pornographically.

  Meanwhile—and what a concept that is to a being accustomed to Ever—like standing á point as the meteors of thought surge by! This place is simply teeming with time. Excuse me. It is scarcely my fault if everything you do here is so attractive. Meanwhile, I was having my own practical problems, as I elided in and out, intent on not overshooting the mountains of the Ramapo. Omega particles indeed, to say nothing of such heavinesses as the baryons, neutrons and protons into which they here have finally divided that grossity of theirs, the atom. Let them try irising in, as I had done the first trip, from slightly more than thirteen billion light-years away, while receding therefore at more than the speed of light and hence invisible, on radio-telephonic sources purporting to emanate from a nubbin of matter still acting flatly against its own spherical. On the darker side of which, for this my second trip, moonwise at their eleven o’clock (what a statement!), amid a smear of foothills, these directional signals would just probably be sending again, if She was able to arrange it, from apparatus just like that in Bucks—in an environ likewise named monosyllabically. (They yearn for our One-ness constantly. They are indeed a touching people.) Hobbs.

  At the point where I reentered their ionosphere, the dear curves of Our being—which they term “body,” and I must not forget to call “my”—nearly reversed themselves, but thanks to the extreme elasticity of our mental curvature, these held. Shortly after, I entered that condition, common enough among us, which however sounds so regrettably silly in their language—and is indeed almost impossible to gauge in one where the amount of things so consistently takes precedence over their unanimity. There’s no help for it. I became more Here than There. From then on it was easier; they tell me that things done for the second time here usually are. A “second time” is one facet of their concept of two-ness that I had no trouble with, a kindly sign that the curves of our not quite cognate worlds do somewhere intersect. As I crossed, the far, reddish spectrum of Out There faded, gradually receded, whelmed by the increasing blue ozone of Right Here. From twenty thousand up, the daily height of their own traffic, once again their planet looked as extraordinary as any planet of a universe must look to the resident of another, up that close. Yes, I had done this before, experiencing no difficulty with their numerical progressions, and almost none with their time-sequences. It is only the two-ness of people that still gives me unutterable pause. In Bucks, I was told that monotheists here suffer almost the same tension over the many-goddedness which with us is so restful, all Our people being One.

  I was told this by Marie, the mentor I found the less interesting, certainly not dear. Under less compelling circumstances, I should almost have dis-esteemed her, which with us is almost the end of negative emotion, opposite to the “leaning” which is all but forbidden, and at about the same distance from the norm, which is “to alike.” But here, it was their very difference—that word, that word—which excited me: two of them, two She’s, and already so unalike. And as I was soon to know, this was nothing to another difference still to come. Which difference, they assure me, is to blame for all the others. Be that as it may, as I came in closer, almost to cloud, sure enough, I smelled it for the second time. Miles out to star, you can smell it, the sharp tang of the variability here.

  I hope I am allotting the sense data correctly, that is, each to its proper organ. One of the purposes of the preliminary teaching session at Bucks was to instruct me in the art of doing this. To visit here, to sightsee as it were, would be impossible under any continuous fusion of the senses such as we have; luckily we do have, unified but not inextricably, all your five. Sight and hearing are with us of an acuity and extension which to you would be!—and smell also. How indicate this, the way we function, to the uncurved! Suffice to say that, by means of an unbroken concatenation, we hear space, see time, and smell thought, the whole process being a warning one, directed not outward toward enjoyment, but inward against change—any tendency toward this being immediately corrected centerwards. As for the sense of taste, due to the nature of our sustenance (do I not do your technical language rather well?) this is necessarily de-emphasized. But as we airfeed, which is as close as I can get to what we do do, we are often suffused with a generalized but delicate carbonation. There remains—the sense of touch.

  And here, since both Ours and the beings here are creatures of flesh, not only of the same plasms but almost of the same cellular structure, the natures of both do, in one respect, very affectingly resemble one another. Our flesh, within its integument, is said to be of the tenuosity of veils, capable of supporting the insupportable; an ichor—to your pork. But let there be humility on both sides. Because of Our lack of protuberance without, and Our imponderability within—in fact because of that very serenity of curve which suits us to distances of a continuum which to your asymmetry would not be habitable—we are under repulsion to surround Ourselves, each of Us, at least for domestic purposes, with an electrical field which bars us from any intimacy with objects, and—in theory—between Ourselves. Whereas you, by reason of the extraordinary conglomeration of extruded shapes, organs, compounds and ligatures, and above all weights common to every one of you—are deliriously bashable! According to my mentor, by almost anything or anyone, anywhere.

  And is it not then remarkable, that under such separate states of affairs, across all the galaxies of consciousness, You and We should both suffer from an almost identical … spiritual shame? In the final sense, then, do we not beautifully, elliptically—touch?

  Which is what so excited both me and my dear mentor, and from the moment of my arrival in Bucks was the constant roundelay of all our conversation, this, because of the still fragile state of my sensibility, conducted entirely by intercom. (Until that fairly frightening adieu.)

  “Whereas—” said She, in the language agreed upon for Monday, Tuesday and Friday. Wednesdays and Saturdays she taught me to converse in her native one—too volatile by far. As beings of negative gravity or mass-gravity relation, we understandably ground better in the heavier languages, Sunday, her day off, she practiced her own Elsewhere. So it was,
by such routines, they taught me a number of things at once—from Days of the Week to all the primary facts of Differential Experience: National, Linguistic and Individual—just as you teach your young to color-count-read. I was even learning to daydream qualitatively, in tints and adjectives, and even with what I fancied might be heroines, though as yet I had never seen one. Sunday is white, gloomy, rich, British, and Protestant. Sunday is Marie.

  “Whereas—” said my dear mentor. Though as yet I had not seen any of them of either kind, I imagined Her. Longitudinally oval, like myself—and pinkish too. But. But with a spot of difference somewhere. Where should it be—where? This was as far as I could go. I could never decide.

  “Whereas—” She said, “the Ones in Ellipsia can only lean together, in sad-sweet contemplation of their Sameness—”

  Ah, their She’s, what teachers they are! Tongueless as I am, I found a vibration to answer her. “Where-ere-as!”

  “And we,” She said. It was still strange to hear her say “we” in the sense of a two-ness or more-than-one, in contrast to the elliptic We—our only equivalent to her “I.” In the very first lessons, when we could communicate in little more than signals, she had told me that I would graduate into comprehension here only when I fully understood the pronouns. As, in all their magnificent hierarchy, I now do.

  “And we—” I answered. “No, no,” I corrected myself—at the time, I could give the responses only by rote. “One begs pardon. And You—”

  It was hard. At home of course, collectively we referred to ourselves as Ours, not too far afield from the practice here. But if One of us encounters One of us, the form of mutual address remains One. There is no transmogrification into “You-ness.” The rule to remember for Us—She commented later that the very sound of it soothed the irritations of this world—is that One and One are One. We have Our plural, but singly we are the same. Never, never, does One and One make Two.

  “Oh, la, la!” She said. “One begs pardon?” Over the intercom there came a mutter: Comme c’est chic, ça, perhaps not intended to be heard.

  “We beg pardon,” was my limp answer. Oh, it’s all very laughable, once one has the language of any Elsewhere as completely as you will have noted yours is now mine; how I can skip flealy from uppercase to lower, in the pronoundest sense of any occasion. But memory still pains. Those first tingles of the singular!

  “Come, come,” said the intercom, but softly. She was ever kindly. “N’ayez peur, mon vieux … mon fils … ma soeur …?” There was even a giggle. After all, there were certain perplexities on her side—what, after all, was my gender? And I could not help her. If we in Ellipsia have gender, or once had—there is a myth to the effect that we once had, and that it still may be recovered—it lies deep to-down the inconscious. I know that there is hope—that just as the crustaceans regenerate limbs lost to the sharks of time, so we—But I could not help her then. I did not know.

  “Come now.”

  To say what was next expected of me took more than a moment, in which the very veils of my finer flesh rent themselves … or congealed? Then, our rote habits and disciplines being very useful here, as they knew, I was able to say it: “I”

  This was the crux of it. Even now I sometimes lose the ego-ness that is needed to make that feeling—that moment when the One rouses from the everslump of curve—and stands up straight. When the One becomes: a one. Even now, I am prone to give the old, collective answer.

  “I beg pardon,” I said dutifully.

  “Bon,” She said. “So far, so good. But it would be even more perfect if you say, ‘I beg your—’ Eh?”

  As I had soon learned, She is never quite satisfied—this is why they make good teachers. Though this may give them trouble when they visit us, much as they may think from here that they will want to move forevermore only in the Circles of Satisfaction. Once, when I had questioned her very seriously, She had answered: No, to be fair, not to be satisfied was a characteristic of both halves of Them. Though it would not have been polite to tell her so, I was glad to have some slight fears allayed. For consider: even at home I had after all been One not content with Our circle—and if that should by any chance be an indication of gender, then—No, I did not wish it, somehow. And somehow, I did not think—No. I couldn’t be. Good God—Marie had taught me that phrase. Good God—suppose I should be a Marie!

  “Oh, sorry!” I said now, absently. “That’s what I should have said of course. ‘I beg your—But I’m afraid I rather lost the train of thought. Please remind I. What was I begging pardon for?”

  I never knew where in that great glass house their side of the intercom was located, being more than content to keep to the room specially prepared in advance for me. This was more on my part than a natural contentedness of disposition. For, until I had undergone the full program, including—besides dispensing entirely with the electrical barrier we switched off only secretly at home—Weightfulness, Visibility, and above all how to reduce Instantaneity—it was dangerous for me not to; language was only the first stop. So I was quite reposed to be where I was, learning their seasonal changes, snow to sprout, as I could view them in the great woodpile that pressed against the glass, accustoming myself to this uneasily irregular countryside, after Our calmly monolisting Ovaloid—I had no idea how half-cognate you and we are, until I saw your Sea. But at the time, I couldn’t get over how stock-still, relatively speaking, everything seemed to be here. In the one non-glass wall, there were shelves holding books of instruction in an electro-braille not unlike records we have preserved, plus some enormous blown-up photostats of the greater carnivores and herbivores, all this to serve until my inner gyrations reduced themselves to the needs of print. Now and then, animals and insects of the minor domestic sort were patrolled across the glass, in a reverse of zoo—or perhaps, in order to show me the causality here, they were let fly to dog me of themselves. For, after Two-ness, there comes the other great thing to learn about a variable world in a state of semi-decontrol—that they here cannot wholly distinguish between the tides of causality and accident. Even when dealing with objects, one has to distinguish between these two hallmarks very carefully, since matter here comes in such an onslaught of forms. So, as yet they have not learned how to so classify events here. That is why, at home, every effort is made to have Events take a circular continuity. For, neither have we.

  At this moment, for instance, there was such absolute silence over the intercom that I even wondered whether, in the daily sessions where my pair of mentors, working together from the office, had me practice how to plod time-space as they do, slowly, courting every possible friction instead of avoiding it—whether, by intent or not, they hadn’t drained so much instantaneity from me that they were already gone.

  “Mentor!” I said. I had never had this feeling before; of course, most that they have here, I had never had. Loss? A kind of fleshly desolation. “Mentor!” I said again, and then, pleading, the word that she had now and then let me use on a Saturday. “Mère!”

  Silence. It hurts—the vacuum’s first, puckering awareness of what it is. I began to understand more of what it would mean for a One to try to become a “one,” or even to live in that world. To grow all the feelings I would need, could I do it; could I bear it? All these to be coursing undictated, tiger after lamb, lamb after tiger, through the beautiful, flickering glades that the beings here must have inside them?—It had not yet been thrust upon me that, according to my needs, these pains would be thrust upon me. According to my needs.

  Then the intercom vibrated, stuttering under the timbre of the message it carried. The walls of the room, being non-conductive glass, held me fast, bordering my instantaneity, else what a vast, electrical spreading might not have occurred? As it was, Her words went right through me.

  “Cheri!” She said. “Cheri.”

  Yes, the words went through me, and dispersed themselves. And somewhere within, a little of their irradiation clung. Little by little, by such exercises, is weightfulnes
s learned.

  “Cheri, I suppose you know what you’ve done?”

  “What?” I could not have phrased it, but I already knew. That too is a feeling!

  “You’ve learned it. You’ve done it. You ’ave said it as we do, without thinking. The ‘I.’”

  Yes, I knew I had learned it, plus something else with it, as yet undefined. For this was the paradox between our worlds, that whereas in my world, where all the Ones of Ours undulate so steadily together, it might be thought that the energy so collected would allow us to learn many things at once, such is not the case. We are too quick for horizons. At home, we can learn only one thing at a time—that being, generation after generation, what we are. But with you, who can both move and stand still just slowly enough to be variable, nothing is ever learned without a little physic of something else clinging to it, perhaps to adjudicate, perhaps to beguile. Oh adaptability! Oh, impossible not to praise each of us, but you, who have been Two and now are “one,” perhaps a little more. For it is my opinion that your complications exist to comfort you in your solitude.

  “Yes, I know,” I answered then, “but please, let’s not think about it just yet. Let’s go back to giving the responses shall we?”

  But sadly, both of us knew that the lesson was over; that almost all of them were, between us. At home, in the curved stream which almost counterfeits Ever, any direction is amiable, but here, in this bigotedly back-and-forth place—got it! This was the extra bit of medicament. In this place, it’s damnably hard, if not impossible, to go back.

  Yet, sadly-angry, I tried. “And whereas,” I said, in the catechism, “whereas the Ones in Ellipsia can only lean together in contemplation of their Sameness. And whereas the Twos here on Hearth have so outbeasted tranquility in their couple-ations—”