(urth) Short Story 121: Alphabet

[Marc Aramini]

 “Alphabet” first appeared in *Fiction International* in 1988 and is
collected in *Storeys from the Old Hotel.*

SUMMARY:

The story begins, “The pet held up a dead snake, then laid it on the stony
hillside belly down, carefully arranging it in a full sine curve while
making a noise like a leaky valve.” The being to which it offers the snake
praises the beauty of the reptile and the bravery of the “pet”, though once
again, the pet responds by making the “S” sound.

The point of view character, identified as “he”, once again praises the pet
for bringing the snake and a “flap-winged flier” (which no doubt formed a
“V”, or less likely, a “Y” shape), begging, “Now be still, if you will not
learn. I want to write,” though he really doesn’t feel like writing.

“When he closed all his eyes, he saw the flaw that had brought him to this
insane world where life ran riot, saw the flaw hanging like a pink haze in
space.” When he opens his eyes, the pet is reaching for his “pen”. He
”thinks” a large, horned beast at the pet, which recoils, “its face losing
its hairy brownness for the hue of dried mud.” He instructs it to never
touch the pen, using it to scrawl “many-colored wingless reptile” on a
boulder, which makes the stone run in smoking streams.

He turns away and, “without in the least willing it, sought the cliff of
the message,” where he had left the words meant to describe who he is and
what has happened to him in his exile, asking the pet if it even begins to
understand reading. The pet scrawls an “S” on the boulder as it hisses.

“No, that is not a word, that little drawing of yours. That is a picture, a
picture of a reptile.” He once again sends his thoughts to the pet in the
form of a herd of the horned beasts below. He realizes he should eat, and
looks over the multicolored fruits, the animals the pet had brought, as
well as a root “the pet had bitten to show that it was good.”

The exiled being realizes there is little point in eating now as he
succumbs to despair, thinking that his pet has become better trained, but
that it only resulted in “the perfection of the means … the decay of the
end.” He studies the cliff again, which contains his “name-colony-name” and
details of the “pink flaw” which he equates to the “hand of the god” in his
mind, which separated him from the communion he shared with his
“brother-sisters” and their “circular marching of joy”. He reflects that in
his language isolated and fool where the same character reversed, and that
looking at his message, others would see “fool” to describe his condition.
“The millions of minds his own mind had once touched, the countless
intelligences he had nearly though his own, were gone.” He succumbs to
despair and writes no more.

The pet brings a red and a green fruit to the being with daylight, and he
choses the red one and takes a bite, at which the pet rejoices. To him, it
lacks all taste. The pet continues to scratch at his boulder, and the exile
thinks sarcastically, “You will communicate with me yet. Of course you
will,” though of course this is what the pet is actually trying to do. He
looks at the “A” figure which the pet has scratched, saying “Aaaah!”.

“Now what do you think you are doing?” The pet capers and dances, and shows
that he is trying to represent the bulls down below. When the exile
realizes that the pet is seeking to represent the bulls below, he indicates
that it is upside down. The pet turns over to show that he is representing
a dead bull.

“Dead. Yes, I understand now – the horned beasts are dead. Your god will
not make them anymore. … You are right, and wiser than I.” The being
realizes it has been trying to write in the wrong place: “He had known if
for so long, but now it could not be pushed away. He put the point of his
pen to his head and began the first character.”

The pet does not notice his fall or “the silver rattle of his pen on the
stones” because “it was drawing the dead bull, and drawing it made the pet
feel strong … it imagined itself a great bull, a bull strong enough to push
down the whole cliff, the cliff topped with the strange, angular lines that
had once been of fire.”

COMMENTARY:

One the surface level Wolfe's story explores the manner in which an
alphabet might come to exist in the mind of a primitive: inspired to
communicate something, he reaches towards representation of real events,
using actual dead animals to represent individual ideas or even sounds. The
two individuals here even have a different idea about what reading and
writing entails, and the more sophisticated, possibly many-eyed exile does
not apprehend at first what the simpler being, which he believes is a pet,
is doing – they use different means of communicating. However, it is never
that simple in Wolfe and we have to ask ourselves, besides the obvious,
which mythic sources he is using in this tale. In his introduction to *Storeys
from the Old Hotel, *Wolfe indicates that he wrote “Alphabet” when he
helped teach a science fiction and fantasy writing course at Portland State
University in 1982 when students were given the assignment to write an SF
story about a blocked writer.

While it explores the representational value of language and sometimes its
failures to communicate (showing that an “A” represents a dead animal, the
trapped being decides to “write” on his own forehead in a fatal form of
self-expression, quite contrary to the result which the primitive writer
intended). Even though the “he” of the text is able to project images into
the mind of the “pet”, it does not recognize that the pet has internalized
his instructions and adapted a representative alphabet and is in turn
trying to either illustrate its own system (or that it already understood
the concepts of representation the alien writer was trying to convey). The
story is not only in the metaphorical exploration of representation through
a linguistic system composed of smaller units (letters evoke images in the
minds of those who read them, and their own images might not exactly match
that of the author) but in the nature of these two beings. It seems to be a
science fiction story with the mythic strains of the Genesis tale running
through it. The very first image is of the “pet” presenting a snake to the
being who suffers from writers block in his isolation (in other words, the
“he” of our story has fallen to a place where further creation no longer
seems possible, for he has lost communion with his fellows.) Fruits, roots,
serpents, an attempt to name things, lining up representations with
concurrent sound – these artifacts all resonate with the biblical story of
the serpent and the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, though in this
case it seems that language itself is that fruit, as the ability to
transmit thoughts from one individual to another and truly encapsulate
good, evil, and all of creation in representation. The letters empower the
“pet”, and perhaps the gift of the exiled visitor will actually blossom
into the achievements of humanity to assert meaning and society on a
hostile world.

The alien visitor has taken a bite of the fruit and then died, but its
attempt to teach the pet will result in something quite miraculous: human
civilization and thought as we know it. It seems that the exile lacks the
Roman alphabet or individual letters/phonemes that the “pet” is trying to
illustrate, and clearly, the “pet” is using an alphabet very similar to
ours, which employs the sine curve of the snake as an “S”. The symbolist in
Wolfe must adore the idea that letters themselves in certain languages were
meant to be representative of an artifact found in reality, though the
suicidal master seems incapable of grasping the idea. To some degree this
is the story of “writing” to influence reality and the power of
representation to actually affect the world. When the exile from Koneel,
appositively described as “the circular marching of joy”, decides to
“write” himself, he dies, but the communion of communication will follow in
his wake, enabling the primitive pet and his fellow creatures to experience
that joy in a different form, The “pet” has viewed the alien as a God and
taken his lessons to a different place than intended.

The creatures association with an angel fallen from the sky like Lucifer
has other biblical similarities: an examination of the Book of Ezekiel
Chapter 1 shows many faced and many eyed creatures who appear like burning
coals of fire or torches, surrounded by that fire with lightning flashes.
This being also has many eyes, and while there is no description of his
wings, he seems to be clearly different than the bipedal creature with its
hairy face he comes to consider a a pet. In Genesis, the Cherub who keeps
out mankind from Eden is shown with a flaming sword, and the being in
Wolfe's story seems to have the power to scare his pet away from the
flaming silver pen (using the idea of the stampeding herds of bulls, whose
metaphorical strength the pet comes to feel at the end of the story).

With these symbols in place, we might come to believe that this story is a
kind of science fictional retelling of the biblical story of Adam (a
strange ambiguous being brings knowledge and, perhaps with a fiery pen,
ends the communion with the creature’s “god” and thus the instruction that
follows after eating a fruit – a story which we could imagine transforming
into one of a serpent, the fruit that brings knowledge and death, and the
fiery sword of the cherub that keeps man out of paradise – for after the
being eats the offered fruit, it soon dies and deprives the man of
communion with its god – the alphabet of the pet in its very nature seems
to inherently describe death, as both the “S” and the “A” are images of
dead animals, and the price of knowledge according to most Judeo-Christian
theologians is actually eventual death). While Wolfe's story does not
resonate on a literal level with Genesis, it does so on a large symbolic
level: serpents, fruit, the coming of death, naming animals with a sound,
self-knowledge, exile, a fall from grace – these are all included in both
stories. Clearly our “pet” uses a similar alphabet to ours, and the
conceivably many-eyed being does not comprehend that alphabet, associating
the pet much more with primitive humanity.

Working against this idea is the absolute lack of any garden imagery and
the very secular impression we are left with – the extraterrestrial nature
of the visitor, who is superior but clearly no longer divine, if he ever
even approximated divinity, seems more like something out of Moorcock’s *Behold
the Man* or, less cynically, Clarke's *2001* than a story which would come
from Wolfe’s pen (though Wolfe is definitely capable of a variety of themes
and should not be pigeonholed as a fundamental Christian writer). The very
theme of the story of Adam and Eve would here be distorted: primitive
humanity worships an unworthy god who, in a fit of depression, kills
himself after planting the seeds of a flawed civilization and giving the
creature the ability to communicate with others of its kind. It also shows
the creature how to leave a message for posterity after it is gone, though
of course the creature believes that it will have left nothing behind after
its suicidal gesture.

THE ORIGIN OF S AND A

[image: Inline image 1] Clearly our “pet” is using identifiable cognates of
the roman letters “S” and “A” … and certainly it could be possible that the
“A” from he is using is the ‘aleph of early Phoenician or the alpha of
Cumaean Greek, from which the Roman Alphabet is descended. The earliest
letters and written ideas were probably in the form of hieroglyphics which
marginally represented the objects they sought to represent, and ‘aleph,
which eventually became our “A” actually did begin as a picture of an ox
head, which would be consistent with the story. However, the Greek sigma,
which was derived from the Pheonician shin, was probably derived from a bow
rather than a snake, and was not usually rounded until Roman use, though
there are a few Greek style alphabets which presents Sigma as a much closer
to our modern S (such as that of the perviously mentioned ancient Cumaean,
though it does not follow the sine-wave described in the story). However,
the letter Nun, which came to represent “fish” and become the letter “N”,
was originally used to connote a snake, and its earliest representations
definitely resemble a serpent:

Many of these letters have their origin thousands of years before Christ.
(If Wolfe knew of the story of the evolution of N from a snake to a fish
representation, I am sure it is something which would greatly interest him
as a religious symbolist, though of course the symbolic weight would be
anachronistic).

POSSIBLE RELIGIOUS ALLUSIONS:
To the hairy faced pet, the banished writer might actually resemble some of
the images associated with biblical angels. It closes its eyes in a way
that suggests it contains a multitude of them, and its pen appears to be
something like an instrument of might with the power to enflame and
destroy, making quite literal the old saying, “the pen is mightier than the
sword” - though in this case perhaps the pet comes to remember the pen AS a
flaming sword, the one which cast him out from being able to commune with
his god.

More confusing is the “pink flaw” which separates the exiled being from his
“brother-sisters”, and his plan to write on the cliff “his love for the
myriad others … his thoughts of Koneel, the circular marching of joy.” He
thinks, “I have been lifted up by the pink flaw … the hand of the god. And
set down the god knows where. Never, never to see you again, you beautiful
ones.” The name Koneel is mysterious, and given that this being does not
share our alphabet, may not be attributed to any meaning on our Earth
besides the one the text describes, as a circular march of joy which goes
nowhere (as the angels are believed perhaps to adore and worship God,
eternally). However, in the Finnish language, it does mean “mechanization”.
(Whether relevant or not, Finnish myth involves the idea that the world is
supported under the North Star by support column around which it turns, and
that the movement around this creates a whirl through which souls can
access the land of the dead through the northern sky, beyond the normal
world).

Clearly, while the “pet” regards the exile as a god, the visitor sees
something else as “the god” - whether this be the hand of fate or a
conscious being is unclear. He speculates that the representation for
“isolated” and “fool” in his linguistic system are the same, though
reversed. (Also, on a possibly unrelated and irrelevant note, while the
Fool tarot card reversed does not seem to directly invoke isolation, the
card itself does imply new beginnings – something which would be apt if the
basic story Wolfe is mutating is a distortion of the Genesis story, sans
garden). The root being bitten by the pet “to show that it was good” also
mirrors the language of Genesis, where God looked upon his work repeatedly
“and saw that it was good”. As was already said, however, equating the
visitor to both the Cherub, fallen Lucifer, and granting his pen the
eye-opening quality of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil is a
massively secular distortion of the original story which almost changes its
theme beyond recognition. Yet the echo of Genesis still pervades Wolfe's
tale, somehow. It could be that Wolfe has decided to “mechanize” the story
to make it one closer to the evolution of mankind and the inception of
writing in general, and that instead of an androgynous, many-eyed, flame
wielding angel of power, we have an androgynous, many-eyed, flame wielding
alien of powerlessness.

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS:

Is the serpent meant to represent this many-eyed being from another place
which fails to understand the nature of the creature it view as a pet? Is
the story a metaphor for fallen Lucifer in the act of producing in man
language and knowledge before destroying himself?

Often the idea of the Demiurge is as someone who “writes” creation – should
we view this story as a secularization of divine ideas?

Is it SF? Persian or Greek Myth? Judeo-Christian? An allegory for the
bringing of thought and the promethean fire of creativity and progress to
primitive man? Maybe all of these, for it is clear that whatever change has
been engendered in the “pet” who performs the bull dance for its god, it
has been empowered and has actually learned how to communicate and
represent the world around it, perhaps to achieve civilization (or true
humanity). Its use of our alphabet and the presence of snakes and oxen
tends to promote the idea that indeed we are looking at something which is
a primitive human on Earth.

Should we assume that the “pink flaw” is a space anomaly rather than some
more religious or biological concept? The exile attempts to record “sordid”
details of the flaw on the cliff face.

CONNECTION WITH OTHER WORKS:

Just as in “Lukora”, there are simple, easy to explain events going on at
the surface level that hint at the mythic and religious, but concretely
pinning down the consequence of the story with absolute certainty is
difficult. We are left with the feeling that it resembles myths rather than
absolutely knowing that a particular allusion or event is being re-enacted.
The attitude of the pet at the conclusion of the tale, that of feeling as
strong as a bull, might have some symbolic affinity with bull-like
figurehead present in the imagery of “To the Dark Tower Came”. In addition,
Wolfe's treatment of pagan gods and angels in other works such as *Urth of
the New Sun *can also show them as remote and distant from God, and there
is the sense in the Latro books that the pagan gods form a kind of strange
psuedo-divine conglomeration where identities blur together and lose their
distinctness over time, which might resemble the alien telepathic community
from which our exile in this story has been forever isolated.
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