All edges erased

Stories are as slippery as seasons; it's beyond my power to make either stand still. I try to tell them the same way, but each telling leads to small changes; something added to the structure, a change of pace, a tweak of testimonies, all of them make circles in our minds.

This is kind of wow. Creepy, elegant, thoughtful, feminist, weird. Unsettling.

The Beauty. Think collective noun, hive mind, like The Silence, or Borg.

The Beauty, by Aliya Whiteley, is the book I want to give all my friends for Christmas. (Except it may put a slight damper on the holiday spirit.) (But isn't that cover gorgeous?)

It starts off with a postapocalyptic scenario — a bunch of people have fled the city to return to Nature. They live communally, live off the land. Only, all the women are dying off. They are dying of the yellow fungus that grows out of them. And when they die, the same fungus grows out of their graves. Things get a bit weird from there. The Beauty arrive.

When he told me about his journey, that was how he finished it — he fitted there. I find this to be the strangest of expressions — how does one fit in to other people, all edges erased, making a seamless life from the sharp corners of discontent I don't find anything that fits in such a way. Certainly not in nature. Nothing real is meant to tessellate like a triangle, top-bottom bottom-top. The sheep will never munch the grass in straight lines.

This book is short and compelling. The sound of it is mythic and important. And it sounds gorgeous.

It's about beauty, to an extent, and what we find beautiful. And how that changes according to experience. And what we do to what we find beautiful, how we take it for our own. It's about gender roles, and how we fall into them. Also, an individual's place and role within a society. Nevermind the function that society serves. And also it's about the nature and power of storytelling.

Did my mother hum to me when I was little? Did she touch me, hold me, fill me with her noise and her thoughts? This loneliness I feel is of the womb, born by women. I was sixteen when they all died and I thought I understood this loss, but it comes to me that I didn't know what women gave to the world. It wasn't about their lips, their eyes or the gentle quality of their voices. It was about the way that all men are a part of them. And now we are part of nothing.

The Beauty do all the hard work for the men, so the men become reliant and weak. Who controls whom?

Does it depict change, or is it the same old? Is it bleak or hopeful? Feminist? Cynical? Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Reviews
BookCunt
By Lulu with Love

See also
The Story Behind The Beauty

For the first few thousand words I worried that I couldn’t write persuasively in a male voice, but then the story kicked in and I realised that Nathan isn’t exactly a man.

Egg, bacon, thing

I'm at my mom's. Here's an old school assignment we dug up.

*************

Egg Man
- from aged, yellowed lava — when world created & volcanoes erupted
- yellow slime slithered, hardened with white foam covering on outside
- form of egg — were coloured white, yellow, beige, brown
- rolled about, wobbled
- few were cracked on rock — died
- most had 8-10 distinctly brow cuts used as mouths
- became very sacred — worshipped
- held ceremonies each night around fire
- first people ever created

Bacon Man
- third people to survive
- were created later than Egg Man
- live volcanic lava came together
- lava stuck and became Bacon Man
- sizzled, slithered around ground
- worshiped sun greatly — not fire, idol of Egg Man
- had not but 1 mouth
- communicate with bubbles
- were killed once all bubbles were scraped

Thing Man
- were created shortly after Egg Man far, far away — on a different planet out of our universe
- nobody knows of its background before they came to planet of Egg & Bacon
- head resembled bird, body of human, limbs & tail of pig
- worshiped dark — were blinded by any type of light except their own light
- light was of gloomy-oomy glow
- Thing Man was noisy — squawked & squealed at all times
- hated the quiet

LEGEND
Once a long time ago, Egg Man wandered the earth. He came upon Bacon Man and they travelled together. Their ways disagreed with each other — so they fought. The fighting was rough. Many peoples were killed. Strangely enough, no sound came of the fighting. Thing Man (which had come to "Planet of Bacon & Egg" by strange means) had roamed half way across the earth & dirt to the sight of the battle. The quiet of the fighting killed half of the tribe of Thing Men. The others decided to do something about this lack of noise. The Thing Men squawked & screamed and made the Egg & Bacon Men suffer, for they hated noise. But Egg & Bacon Men fought on. Thing Men decided that the only way to get rid of the quiet was to get rid of the other peoples. So the Thing Men pounced upon the others, ate them, and then there was noise. So the Thing Men travelled back to their own planet in their own universe.

This planet came to be known as "Earth." Thing Man evolved into 3 different things: the heads into chickens, the limbs & tail into pigs, and the body into a human (strange, isn't it). The humans still eat dead Bacon & Eggs. The Eggs come from the chickens. The Bacon comes from dead pigs. Few people know of Egg, Bacon & Thing Man and if you don't believe they ever lived, go ahead and think so. If you think they didn't 'live' in the sense that would most properly be understood today, you're right. Egg, Bacon & Thing Man live in imagination and mind.

Day of Egg Man
Once a year on every March 21st Egg Men would celebrate the beginning of life. That is why to this day the "egg" is thought of as the symbol of life. Well anyway, the Day of Egg Man was to them the most important day of the year. On this day they would paint each other with bright colours to show their happiness and thanks to their gods.

I.A.K.

*************

Things I love about this essay:

• It goes from the first people to the third people. But who were the second? Why not present them chronologically? Suspense!
• "had not but 1 mouth" — Who writes like that? (Yeah, I know, I do.)
• So Bacon Man dies once he loses the ability to communicate...
• "gloomy-oomy"
• The noise. Oh, the noise, noise, noise, noise. I feel somewhat Grinch-like in my aversion to noise. I'm surprised to see it manifested so early. Or maybe the legend's message is anti-quiet, I dunno.
• How the narrator is suddenly inserted into the text (strange, isn't it).
• The Twilight Zone-y ending. I can just hear Rod Serling narrating the last few sentences of the Legend over the fade-out.

There's no date. It's printed, which makes me think it might be earlier, but I sign off using my middle initial, which puts me at grade 6 (a new school, so trying out a new identity), and 11 years old. In grade 7 we read Asimov's I, Robot, which should've influenced me to write something a little more mature. I can't imagine what the assignment actually was.

The abessive

Finnish is weird. It's not related to very many other languages, and it's relatively highly inflected — 15 noun cases and moods that include optative, potential, and eventive — making it pretty interesting linguistically speaking.

New Finnish Grammar, by Diego Marani, is only indirectly about grammar. You need have no knowledge of Finnish in order to appreciate the novel. In fact, the reader makes discoveries about the Finnish language through its protagonist, an amnesiac who has lost the ability to communicate and who, when it's assumed that he's Finnish, sets about learning the language.

The thing he likes most about Finnish is the abessive, "a declension for things we haven't got: koskenkorvsatta, toivatta, no koskenkorva, no hope, both are declined in the abessive. It's beautiful, it's like poetry! And also very useful, because there are more things we haven't got than that we have."

For the man who assumes the name Sampo Karjalainen, because that's what the label in his jacket says, learning Finnish and roaming around Helsinki are the only possible way to stir up some memories, reclaim an identity. Oh, and it's 1943 — war is raging outside.

I don't know much about Finland, so it was a bit of an eye-opener to read about Finland's involvement in World War II, its warring history with Russia in particular, its relationship with Slavic peoples, and its epic tradition.

The Kalevala is Finland's national epic, with a creation myth, magic, and romance. The Sampo is a magical talisman said to bring luck to its holder and consequences on those who come into contact with it.

"When you read the Kalevala you will be a real Finn; when you can feel the rhythm of its songs, your hair will stand on end and you will truly be one of us! Look!" he added, opening the black leatherbound volume on the table. "These are not just words! This is a revealed cosmogony, the mathematics that holds the created world in place! Ours is a logarithmic grammar; the more you chase after it, the more it escapes you down endless corridors of numbers, all alike yet subtly different, like the fugues of Bach! Finnish syntax is thorny but delicate; instead of starting from the centre of things, it surrounds and envelops them from without. As a result, the Finnish sentence is like a cocoon, impenetrable, closed in upon itself; her meaning ripens slowly and then, when ripe, flies off, bright and elusive, leaving those who are not familiar with our language with the feeling that they have failed to understand what has been sad. For this reason, when foreigners listen to a Finn speaking, they always have the sense that something is flying out of his mouth the words fan out and lightly close in again; they hover in the air and then dissolve. It is pointless to try and capture them, because their meaning is in their flight: it is this that you must catch, using your eyes and ears. Hands are no help. This is one of the loveliest things about the Finnish language!"

New Finnish Grammar is a sad book, and quietly beautiful, but not the astoundingly original novel many reviews would have me believe. It's sad, but at a distance.

What Marani captures brilliantly is the experience of living in a foreign language. While my experience of choosing to move to a bilingual city in no way compares to Sampo's sense of isolation and his desperation to claim an identity, I do know what it is to be a linguistic outsider: no matter how well you conjugate your verbs, there will always be people who speak too fast or with a peculiar accent, that you will asking to repeat themselves or reconcile yourself to missing half of what they say; there will always be words whose meaning you have to piece together from context, semantic nuances you won't detect, cultural references that fly right past you. It is near impossible to be fully fluent in a language you learned the hard way.

In 1943 Finland, the present is bleak and the future uncertain; as time goes, it becomes harder to feel sympathetic toward Sampo. This book could have been about its other characters: the doctor who first found Sampo, the pastor who tutors him, the nurse who falls for him. Each of them has their own struggle with the past and their place in the world. I think it might have been a better book if these characters' stories were fuller, to balance Sampo's lack of a story.