Journal From Ellipsia: A Novel

by Hortense Calisher

  And a letter. Off to one side, not in her aura nor in its own, a blue letter.

  “Some of her nasty ditty books, no doubt,” said Marie.

  I turned, more slowly than I had ever yet turned in all my duration. How this mean little creature ever once had encompassed all your splendid variations still passed my understanding—it not yet having grasped the essence of variation, that she be one of them. Slower yet I turned, filled with such a belching against-ness that I feared the worst without exactly knowing what that would be—which is of course what the worst is. Certainly my feelings were becoming far too fining for one who as yet had no outlets. I tried good-godding but that pinhole was simply not up to my mountainous needs. I wanted to push Marie off the planet altogether, or better yet, misdirect her to some horrible elsewhere quite other than the one which had been mine.

  Just then, in the wall which now looked at me, a jigzag of lights frantically signaled for my attention. It was now harder for me to read such large-scale script, once having mastered the small—one pays for every talent here in the coin of its opposite—but finally I deciphered the message, a single word only but what a big one! Tentatively, I pronounced it, whereupon the wall immediately flickered, in much more modest script: Too Broad an “A,” but then gave me the corrected phonetic—causing me to think that if my own comprattle-trap had been half as cooperative, my vowels would by now be perfection. Then I said the word. Then I said it. If all the violences here have such immediate modes of relief, people here must exist under a continual blessure. Turning to befront Marie, I delivered it in a voice summoned from the depths the word itself might have been conceived in. “DAMN!”

  Was it always this effective? For she was gone. Of course, she had already been about to. There was no telling. Experience might show, though I was beginning to have doubts on my ability to sort out the typical here. “Damn you!” I said hopefully, but, the you of Marie already being somewhere in outer space—to less satisfaction. One wanted a general statement, broaching all gaps, and individuations. I considered. “God Damn,” I said. “In fact, a good God Damn.” There is certainly some value in being original.

  Then, full of the energy which accomplishment always brings, I could turn, first to my grieving, then to the hunt for my instructions—this paperchase between honoring the bygone and pursuing the foregone being the standard procedure for any emigrant.

  Grieving with you and us is almost cognate; after a while—for us almost a full day—the empty space closes over the one who has stepped out of line. It is said that you, improving on this from your point of view, often manage somehow to preserve that bit of space as a memorial—by incorporating it in yourselves. If so, you have more room in your crowded withinwards than we in all our vastness of vibration. And if so, you do it, I saw now, with the aid of those objects to which you give so much dangerous function—which accounts in part for your trusting tenderness toward them. You use them to hold yourselves down in rooms when you are in them, to hold you there even when you yourselves are gone. Dear foolish ones, dear rich ones, though you must know as well as we do that the inanimate can have no permanent allegiance, you will even give to it your individuation. And grieving may therefore quite honorably attach itself to the dear one’s objects, this being the responsibility which after all, if long after, you do take.

  But I was a One—from an Order wherein the day which accomplished no more than yesterday was deemed the best one—though there were those who held that a day which managed to do less was of an even higher security. Solid beings though we were geometrically, we had taught ourselves a bas-relief serenity, domesticating our much larger section of the immense inane by drawing together into the sameful, while you could keep your little dot important only by creating such forests of particularity, such fluxes of intermediacy as might tease you into forgetting that, coming or going, you met only yourselves.

  So, here it was on the floor, her little collection, these surrogates of herself which, to hear her tell it, were merely some of many others she might have left to stand in place of her. Looking round, I was surprised by the strays allowed to clutter, in such a mess of mass, what should be such a strict arena. In my own quarters here, no doubt in deference to our known habit of non-having, there had been nothing but the room-window surfaces, plus those training books which came under what we call objects-of-intent. But here in a place so holy that at home its very construction would itself follow the curve of the infinite ellipse or elliptois, here there was such a mixture—ah, it was always such a mixture here; why would I never learn that this was the mixture! In the windows there were pots of geranium, from one of whom had perhaps escaped that bright impudence, later reported over the intercom, which several dawns back had climbed up to peep into my own. Near it, a sec-looking bit of business surrounded an artistically hewn subconic marked ketchup, and above both this and window ledge there was now being allowed to intrude a ketchup-geranium sunset—as if a one of you were trying over and over to remember the simple property: red. Could you never learn a thing once and for all, here?

  Would never I? I stared at the three thin-square books of similar shape and size for some moments of comfort before realizing why this had stolen over me; then things did sometimes go samefully here. All three had been let fall with their ambiguous faces up, so that, farsighted as I still was, I might read them without bending. Well then, as long as I didn’t need to bend, or rather, admit to myself the near-frightening condition I had got into—that I could. The three said respectively, De la Grippe, Toujours de la Grippe, and Encore de la Grippe: then they were not the same literally, though having all the same imprimatur of author and the same subject. They were about disease. On the ellipse, we knew about diseases, in the way of people who have never had them. I was not eager to have this one, or any. Had she dropped these books to warn me that, on Here I might—or even, must? For, you see, the life of unreason being so hard to understand to a practitioner of the opposite (how much easier when the case is the other way round!), it had not yet occurred to me that everything in a world I found so powerfully instructive might not have been placed here solely to instruct me. Though accident was known to me, I had not yet acquired the least sense of that much subtler division of it, the casual. An even boggier periphery, the purposeless, still provides amusement. As for throwing anything away, of course We cannot, and neither really can you—every throw anywhere is a toward.

  So when I came to the silver-and-glass lorgnette, which couldn’t be looked through since it was folded, I decided that it must be there to puzzle me, and was performing this reproof well. For there was no doubt that up to now I had been incontinently knowing here, one of the many new colorations of your personality which were beginning to please me. Nevertheless, a compliment lay beside the lorgnette. The long-thin book entitled was not only about Us, but also by a Harry. I was tempted to stop to read about ourselves as you saw us, but overcame it. So far, there had been no criticism of my educational pace. But grieving was indeed a slow process here, with as many byways for meditation as we provide for our picnics. Luckily, gravitation, that sticky stuff which keeps a body on the spot here, gives it also a constant prickly heat to get off it.

  I regarded the U-shaped objects—more symbols? I had about given up the idea of pornography, on the surmise that, shames being so out-in-the-oval here, so had you. Just then, my computer came briefly to life again, perhaps stirred, in the presence of those rival walls of light, to show off its own circuitry.

  “Fur pins!” it snorted. “For pinning up fur.”

  Then, except for another quote, again from Milton: John: “—with pins of adamant, and chains they made all fast—” it lapsed again, leaving me to wonder whether it suffered from too few diodes in its literary coverage or merely strove to serve my special tastes. Well, in any case, if I had to say one thing and one alone to describe the world of the qualitative it was that it lived by promises. Your world seemed to me most and above all a positive chain of them, a
nd still does—could I, can I live that way, from link to link? Could I, can I—accept this universe? For I was by now already so qualitative that it scared me. In fact, at my present rate of becoming, it seemed to me that I was probably the most promising thing that had been around Here for a long time. Yet I didn’t in the least know just what it was I had in me. Not unlike—O intelligence, keep this from me! Oh why must One be so perceptive! Or was all the you-ness in the room pushing me to see it? Not unlike—a you.

  But such is the nature of the brinks here, that it wasn’t until I edged toward the last item in the collection: item: one blue letter, not merely instructive but necessary—that I really saw the true nature of an abyss. You understand, of course, that owing to my former lack of weight and rate of speed on There, my experiences of abysses outside myself was nil. I had none of your talent for falling into them. Rather loftily, I had viewed my adventure here as a matter of adjusting myself to your calisthenic, plus learning to think in gender—all this to lead, as in the evolutional history of any species, to equipment I’d get by wanting it. What was evolution but getting what one asked for, provided one was willing to work for it? And according to your own information, cheerfully supplied to us, those conditions here which are commonly called “human” are indeed extremely stable—i.e. unlikely to produce for eons yet anything very different from what you are.

  But why hadn’t you warned us that your what-you-are was so slinky and mercurial that all its lexicographers could go on for ages—and still didn’t know? Why hadn’t you informed us that two-ness of gender, for all it might be a first cause of conditions here, was only the beginning? That there were other dualities here—and worse—through which one must slide-glide, snap-crash, one’s outline meanwhile being plucked like elastic, as if one were swimming through hoops themselves interlocked and in turn lined with hooks which were hung with—hoops! That … hoops. Or didn’t you know—that you didn’t know? Dear twos—why had you not made it plainer to us that you were not our exact opposites!

  To be fair, I suppose a genus can never be trusted in its view of its own genius. That is what other planets are for. Especially it can’t when it speaks of itself humbly. Arrogance can be weighed, even by the weightless, and we had, but what is one to do with humility except believe it, particularly when it coincides with one’s view of oneself? For we had heard You-yourselves, you see, soft-soft above the intercom not of course one of the little jobs here, but the inter-intercom-com—there being perhaps a few little abilities of ours we hadn’t told you about either. Decoding of interplanetary radio noise is perhaps not quite so difficult as you imagine; in fact, we could at times audit your private conversations at, in fact, all times. In fact, we had you bugged. And what else was one to think when one heard You mutter faithfully to yourselves over and over: “We have been excelled.” I suppose one shouldn’t believe all the interplanetary gossip one hears, either.

  And now—back to me where I stand, an interplanetary runt, not formidable but still hopeful, though I am in the posture of perhaps all beings who think they know where they are going. I am gazing down.

  Do all here know the abyss of a blue letter? I suppose so. So far, I knew only what I could read without bending—par avion, aerogramme. I didn’t even know that the blue makes it go faster. But, I saw the abyss, which on Hereto be as simple as I can—tends to be whatever-comes-next. (We have “nexts” of course, but since these are so much the same, the space between is negligible.) Yours, however—I not only saw the abyss; I saw what was waiting inside it. And all this before I had read what was inside the letter. For, you may recall that in my first virginal days here, fresh from One, I could only read instantly, the whole book being available to me at once. Even then, merely seeing through a book was slower than I could manage, my tendency being to arrive at the back cover before I had left the front one and of course not stop anywhere. Later on, I had slowed admirably, able to smear along almost as snail-like as any of your best readers. But naturally, to do this, in accordance with your usual compensations here, I had had to give up seeing-through.

  But now. Oh, I tried bending, and succeeded, in the process suspecting that trying to see through solids—to say nothing of tepids, gravids, liquids and perhaps even empties—was the way you yourselves learned to bend. After some moments of this exercise, I found myself supple enough now for any of your postures yet seen, and some I was on the brink of imagining. But my seeing-through days were apparently over. And meanwhile, you will have guessed the number two hook of my dilemma.

  Oh, I had wanted to be a conscious mutant, had I! It seemed to me now that there must never have been a one of them here, no Paramecium on the bulge with his first nucleole, no amoeba skipping up the ladder of binary fission … none of them—from platypus to primate, none of them ever in such a pickle as I. There was the letter, still folded, still opaque and still unread—which was to tell me not only how I was to go, but to whom. It could be slit or steamed, smoothed and read in a trice by any a one of you. Ah, you versatiles. And here was I. As any a one of you might say in the airiest fooling (as so often you were to be heard saying it, careless of what poor envious runt of an intermediary-on-his-way-to-become-voluptuary might be listening from within library carrel or window)—how painfully often I was to have to hear you say it: Look—no hands.

  It was possible, of course, that even the earliest cell creatures knew where they were going—subcutaneously aware even before acquiring a cuticle, as seemed to be the way here—after all, where does consciousness begin? I doubted, though, whether many of them had had my extra burden. I not only knew where I was going; I knew where I was. Had there ever been such a creature here before, one who—give or take a mile or two in the quibbling style you have here, by and large, inch for inch, back and forth and more or less—knew itself to be exactly: half way?

  The midpoint of a journey is exactly that one where one dreams of going back, jolly inconvenient though that may be—or perhaps because. Up to now, the hero I was to be had loomed ahead of me, the gathering sludge of my I-ness merely traveling alongside like dust motes round a cart. Now I saw, with the double vision which is endemic here, that the dazzling, unparalleled journey which still in conception soared ahead of me in the heavens, was also this bumps-a-daisy one I was actually already on, and that the Thing ahead, though still bloated in its great aura, was also me on my way.

  Was it the dilemma of the blue letter alone that had stopped me? I gazed down at what I had acquired here, down into those semi-opaline depths of I-ness I was still empowered to half see through, quite as well aware as any of you that my very I-ness itself was what was giving me the power to despise or reject it. Did I want to go back home? Could I? Or, if I stayed, went on …

  You must know that we do not come uninformed of the separate hazards here, it being only the combinations that were unimaginable—though, under the universal lockstep, even this didn’t mean we didn’t know they were there. Among the repugnancies long since listed by us was clothing. And already, such a host of minutiae were embroidering themselves starchily right on me, so covering over the truer-bluer qualities I thought I had come for, that I was chafing mightily—even before I had a stitch of outer clothing on. Come now; did I hate myself-to-be? Did I already despise the personality you and all that good-goddedness were intent upon? Could I bear to be I?

  I stared down, very far down to qualitatives thus far acquired which I had expected to accept, if not wholehoggedly approve. To enumerate: I had some weightfulness and visibility, both rather precociously acquired. I had areas of vision, these not yet prominent, but I no longer wore it overall—and I had dropped my field. I had tasted gall, if only a tang of it. Not ten minutes after I had begun to feel arsy-versy—I had a behind. I could soften, melting to maybes and much more. I could walk around doors instead of into-through them, and by exercise had parlayed a mere bending-to-consider posture into a real sit-on-a-crack. And attached to all and every one of these were those little growthings o
f pain, streamers of joyness which, if left to populate with one another should develop in me an I which any a One would care to cultivate.

  Against all this, such a terrible silliness, effectation and coyness—bumps-a-daisy!—where had I ever found such a word! There were two-nesses here that made all two-nesses seem trivial. I had already suffered such a rash of them as I could scarcely—

  As I could scarcely bear. Thus, and as always with a double stroke, both your graces and my own dazzlingly near near-humanity were brought home to me. I had remembered much but this quality of yours I had forgotten. And if I could not bear, wouldn’t it be that I would have company in it? Perhaps, in a way strange to me but particular to yourselves, you too were a quadrille.

  I was a pilgrim to all parts of you; that I now understood. Just as you couldn’t throw anything away here, I couldn’t pick and choose what I would have of you. Or, not right away. Meanwhile, the air around me seemed fairly dimpling with rationalities designed to keep me here. Maybe the mixture went so far here as even to cause straights and curves both to be present in the same person. Maybe even your straight individuals were partially curved—though not much, of course … and your curved ones, partly … though in even scantier proportion.

  And maybe, maybe. Best of words, it was thou gavest me the guts to look down again at that letter! I gave the whole collection the old once-more. For whom was I grieving? For her sake of course, but with me a close second. We were such a company of two as did not go a-keeping every day in the week. Maybe one couldn’t go back even if one wanted to—even suppose Hubble’s Law to be correct, then the universe could be imagined to run backward, but who ever heard of it happening to anything so complicated as a person? Why, I wasn’t even sure that under such ticklish chances I even want—