Bilingual Being (37 page)

Yet through all those years in between, in fact, I
had
forgotten it. The covers, projectiles, reflections, twins, maps, girl-hunters. The archive had vanished, lost to me and lost in me. Throughout my twenties, thirties, and forties, I'd been buying old issues of
National Geographic
to use at school and home, for cutting up as second-hand goods, cheap. Through all those decades, I cared nothing either for the collection acquired by my father – the one who'd inadvertently taught me how to “read,” inspecting every issue himself like a message from the front lines. So my mother gave them all away a few years ago – before my “revelation” and the flood of memories that returned their images to me. Neatly bound in leather and chronologically arranged, they went to a perfect stranger's house. A fitting end for them, I guess. Or, at least, one without a shred of meaning for me at the time.

But I get it now, my accidental reading. I see how materiality and fantasy combined, fused thought and image. Not in some muddling confusion, but in an all-sustaining symbiosis. Made it possible for a child to stare at pictures at eye-level and secure clarity and comfort. I read somewhere that this early habit of mine is a “delusion of reference” – finding meaning in everything around you. If that's so, I suggest the condition where people walk down the street with music or
phone receivers in their ears, reading tiny screens as life, people, nature pass them by, be named a “delusion of occlusion” – finding meaning in nothing around you. It's like a new illness I recently read about, “white psychosis.” Psychosis without symptoms. Seriously? Then, does the person who walks away from a terrifying car crash with only a scratch have “white paralysis”? Absurd. Every act of survival, however peculiar, shouldn't be named as an illness so easily. Some strange and wonderful human behaviours aren't just strange – they're also wonderful and human. In fact, I believe I owe much of my sanity, my quirky confidence, and my optimistic spirituality to the fluent symbolic language of those
National Geographic
covers. I'm grateful. In a childhood plagued by random pain and fear, at least hope and guidance showed up once a month.

These covers put bilingualism in a whole new light, too. I wasn't working with words, not yet, but my second language was already becoming a channel for information, an opening. And each issue of
National Geographic
was an emissary along this new trade route – a packaged set of objects from another mindscape and an entirely different frame of reference. Ideas that testified to an
Other
place – an elsewhere with realities I could join and share. Just the pictures from this other world were enough. And the images were rich, glorious, magnificent. So though I couldn't sound out a single word in English on those first covers, the mere arrival of that other language and its products triggered new possibilities. It invited my journey.

ALICE & CO.

From this point in my psychological history, it was a cinch to believe in the whole fantastic realm of fairy tales as fact. A simple matter of connecting the dots between what I heard and saw all around me, and what I felt and experienced inside myself. For starters, storybook characters were everywhere. Of course, there was my own brother, the miniature. Next, as a case in point, I performed as Bashful in the
Snow White
story in a school ballet when I was six. I was supposed to be Grumpy, but apparently I couldn't pull it off, so the class bully and I were switched at the last minute. And right around the same time, or a year or two before, I'm ashamed to say that provincial organizers put
human dwarves on display at Expo Québec. The exhibit drew huge, enthusiastic crowds and their cameras.

The supposed “family” of dwarves was placed in a long hall-shaped house along the edge of a hill, one side wall made of glass flanked by a cordoned-off pathway. Visitors could snake by and gawk at a “typical day” in their lives, as three or four sat on miniature chairs eating at a miniature table from miniature cups and saucers. A miniature mother cooked food on a too-big stove and served it to her miniature children. I remember noticing how gigantic the daily paper,
Le Soleil
, looked in the father's hands as he sat in his miniature armchair by his miniature fireplace smoking a too-big pipe.
Poor toy people
, I thought at the time.
They can't just get on with their story. They're stuck inside this silly glass house
.

Meanwhile, Robin Hood was the emblem on the flour we bought for my mother's baking, and also on my archery set. Pinocchio was in a puppet show I saw one Saturday, and in the Eaton's Christmas window in Montreal. And Puss in Boots was on dozens of cans of pet food in our kitchen, for we had fourteen pet cats by then, courtesy of our highly fertile angora feline. These were well-oiled stories I lived in both my tongues. They offered characters that didn't necessarily become my imaginary companions, at least not consistently (though I do remember Maid Marian for a while). But they were all a big help because they gave me the key I'd need to survive, though I couldn't know it then. They presented me with a means of decryption, a gift of immeasurable worth.

And it was this: that the boundary between fantasy and reality was, is, permeable. It didn't matter whether I came away thinking that reality was as wild and exciting as a story. Or that fictional stories were actually biographies of unusual-looking beings. No doubt I believed both at once, or alternately, through the course of my early childhood – and beyond. The delightful truth was that there was no clear line between what was in my head, in my books, and in my world. So I could go from one to the other without worry, without difficulty, and without getting lost. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, then, I
could
have a wide space of safety, a sense of my own creation, some kind of control. Of course, I already knew that from
National Geographic
. But
the fact that storybook characters popped up in real life confirmed it perfectly. It was a marvellous lesson.

The same was true for whales, those beloved boundary swimmers. I already knew about Jonah and the Whale from some weird bedtime readings – scary stuff from the Bible read to me in the shadows of a smelly old coal stove and oppressive guilt. But when we moved to the suburbs, I found I could walk to the aquarium to see real whales. Actually, they were probably porpoises, but it was close enough for a young Linnean. I went again and again, alone or with friends, over the years. I stared at their pool from beyond the property gate, and made my way inside to press my nose against their big window.

Looking cautiously into my rupture, such delicate surgery, I learn that one particular dream became repetitive, installed. It was of a blue world where only whales existed. In one view, I was a whale myself, a free body on the surface of the sea, alone and searching for another whale that made a faint and distant cry, calling me. In another view, I was inside a whale, travelling like Jonah, with room enough for standing, ribs my bony floor, aware of sounds within my whale host's body. I could hear it speak to me, but I couldn't speak back to it. In one view and then the other, I rode on the oceans of the unconscious. I could flip from one whale to the other – be inside, or outside, my own big blue body. But then I already knew I could do that, look at things in two different ways – have two versions of my self.
National Geographic
had provided extensive coverage of twinning.

But in terms of sustained daydreams and useful imaginings, nothing surpassed the relationship I had with Alice. I don't remember how I first came upon her. My best guess is that Granny had the book in her collection and read it to me – but I'm not sure. It might have been at school, but that seems wrong because I feel as though I knew her long before kindergarten. Her story seemed to be inside me from the very start. So if it came from outside (and I understand rationally that it must have), I don't remember how.

Like the whale, Alice was both my imaginary companion and my self, through all of her adventures in Wonderland and through the looking glass. Going from fantasy to reality – story to life – Alice's stories embodied all of my most critical symbols: mirrors, inverted worlds,
strange potions, distorted body imagery, suspensions of time, and deep holes where you could lose contact with the surface. And she looked so much like me, even – shoulder-length blond hair, my age – that my paternal artist-uncle had me pose as Alice to illustrate a new American edition of the book.

Alice was my twin in print, bringing me more messages to decipher the madness. She informed my entire conception of my self: a girl who kept her head, literally; exercised critical judgment and reflective, objective thinking; and came out at the end of a tough journey, sane and safe. I can't imagine how I would have managed without Alice's courage and intelligence. So I have Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, to thank for my survival, too. He created my perfect hero. And moving from the pages into my psyche, my internalized Alice became more than the optimal model: she provided proof that my troubles were survivable.

The people in Alice's world were always trying to play tricks on her, saying or asking things that made no sense. Carroll managed to share a paramount secret of language here: that we need to “feel” what someone says. That's because the words on the surface are often a deception of intention, and our survival may hinge on what we understand and do next as a result. That's why the Cheshire Cat's poem really stuck: “'Twas brillig and ye slithy toves did gyre and gimble in ye wade.” I could smell the evil of those toves as they waited in the wade, gyring and gimbling. I hated their slithiness as much as that ominous grin of the Cat, still glowing even in the dark.

But I loved Alice so much for being the girl who worked so hard to figure out what in the world was going on beneath and between the languages she heard, like me. Even unadorned phrases like «Viens-donc ici ma belle» [Come here, dear/my pretty] had a tricky meaning deep down. And the male voice that said it, a broad grin of his own that lingered in the dark.

Alice was my linguistic and psychoanalytic inspiration. From her I learned when I started to read that wisdom would still come from books. That beyond my pre-reading library of flippy blocks and
National Geographic
covers, there was a world of literature where the information I'd need might not be on the covers at all but
inside
, in and in-between the words and lines.

ONE FISH TWO FISH

I took my next expert, Dr Seuss, aka Theo Geissel, as an authority on Carroll's recommendation. I would not be disappointed. I had first met him thanks to the door-to-door salesman who left a sample copy of
The Cat in the Hat
all those years ago – the first book I remember owning so aptly being a serendipitous gift. But I soon found his work all over the library in my new English school.

I can easily understand why titles like
One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
were popular with teachers and librarians in the decades of phonics-as-programming that encompassed my primary school life. What the adults didn't know, though, was that Dr Seuss actually loved children and loved life – and wove joy, courage, and hope into his silly stories. Disguised his food inside his linguistic pedagogy. Healed me, let me live. For unlike the so-called «Docteur» who used real words that made no sense – lies, pleasantries, and facts all scrambled together (the one who delivered me and performed a few restorative services besides) – Dr Seuss used imaginary words that did make sense. I realized early on, then, that Dr Seuss was a real doctor, not just playing doctor like the rest.

His books of made-up words and nonsense rhymes were a school for thought par excellence. From this esteemed teacher, I learned that I could use both my languages, French and English, pretty much however I wanted. Language was something you could twist and turn, make your own. Seuss also taught me that the connection of thought and word was relative. I already knew that real words could signify fantasy – like «Viens ici … j'te f'rai pas mal» [Come here … I won't hurt you] – which turned out not to be true at all. But he showed me the reverse, too, that fantasy words could signify reality: the weirdness on Mulberry Street that really did happen; the incessant inner echoes of the Who, who turned out to exist; the Grinch, who actually did wreck the parties; and the hint that it was possible to have control over my life –
If I Ran the Circus
– even though my confidence was often about as hard to find as Solla Sollew.

So I lived with a rotating entourage that appeared whenever I felt those all-too familiar symptoms: ear clicks, racing heart, dizziness, muted hearing, pressed-in chest. And in the fine company of Sneetches,
Ooblecks, Zinn-a-zu birds, Things One and Two, and both the North-going and South-going Zaxes, I went to the land of green eggs and blue fish. What happened after that was irrelevant, because I was safe inside a story. Meanwhile, at school, things got even better. In the library, shelves of clues and new companions; in the classroom, precious Sally and her trusted pal, Spot. They spoke the language of my thoughts in open daylight – reality and fantasy, face-to-face, working together –
See Sally run! See Spot hide!

But I can travel backwards even further in this regression – in this reverse chronology of my personal history of reading. Before Sally, Dr Seuss, and Alice – though after flippy blocks, covers, and fairy tales – there was Beatrix. I can't share this without shivering, actually, for I lived
entirely
in the world of Beatrix Potter for years – two? three? four? five? six? My granny must have read these to me, but I don't remember, because the world of Beatrix Potter was
always
mine. As if I wrote it, owned it, made it. Dear Peter Rabbit and his garden, innocence everywhere. And the two for whom my heart still endures: Town Mouse and Country Mouse.