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56. One of the great difficulties of formal grammars is that they are
all
grammars of
written
language, including the attempts at “transformational” grammars (
Syntactic Structures:
“. . . we will not consider, for our purposes, vocal inflections . . .”). For insight into how verbal signals will produce information once they fall into an interpretive field, it is a good idea to return to the mechanics of those signals' generation.

Speech signals, or sentences, are formed from two simultaneous information (or signal) streams: Speech is an interface of these two streams.

The voiced breath-line is a perfectly coherent information stream, all by itself. It varies in pitch and volume and shrillness. It is perfectly possible (as I have done and watched done in some encounter groups) for two or more people to have an astonishingly satisfying
conversation, consisting of recognizable questions, answers, assurances, hesitations, pooh-poohings, affirmations, scepticisms, and insistences—a whole range of emotional information, as well as the range Quine refers to as “propositional attitudes”—purely with a series of unstopped, voiced breaths. (Consider the information communicated by the sudden devoicing of all the phonemes in an utterance, i.e., whispering.)

The various stops and momentary devoicings imposed by the tongue, teeth, lips, and vocal chords on top of this breath-line is another coherent information string that, interfaced with the breath-line information, produces “speech.” But by and large this second string is the only part that is ever written down. This is the only part that any “grammar” we have had till now deals with. But it is arguable that this information-string, when taken without the breath-line, is as vastly impoverished as the breath-line eventually seems, after ten or fifteen minutes, when taken by itself.

The way written speech gets by is by positing a “standard breath-line,” the most common breath-line employed with a given set of vowels and stops. (The only breath-line indicators we have are the six ordinary marks of punctuation, plus quotation marks [which mean, literally, pay closer attention to the breath-line for the enclosed stretch of words], plus dashes, ellipses, and italic type. One thing that makes writing in general, and poetry in particular, an art is the implying of nonstandard breath-lines by the strong association of vocal sounds—
pace
Charles Olson.) But since the vast majority of writing uses only this standard breath-line (and
all
writing uses an artificial one), producing a grammar of a spoken language from written examples is rather like trying to produce a formal grammar of, say, Latin when the only available texts have had all the ablative endings, dative endings, accusative- plural endings, and second-person-singular verb endings in future, imperfect, and preterite whited out; and you have agreed, for your purpose, not to consider them anyway.

What is fascinating about language is not that it criticizes, as well as contributes to, the growth of the empirical world, but that it can criticize its relation to that world, treating itself, for the duration, empirically. The same self-reflective property is what writers use to make beautiful, resonant verbal objects, however referential or abstract. But by the same argument, it is the writers' responsibility to utilize this reflective property to show, again and again, that easy language—whether it is the short, punchy banality or the rolling jargonistic period—lies.

The lie is not a property of easy words. It is a property of how the words are used, the context that generates, and the context that interprets.

57. I have the artist's traditional distrust of separating facts too far from the landscape that generated them. (And I have the science-fiction writer's delight over inserting new facts into unfamiliar landscapes. “Do I contradict myself? Very well . . .”)

Language, Myth, Science Fiction:

First contacts:

I did not have a happy childhood.

Nobody does.

I did, however, have a privileged one.

I discovered myths with a set of beautifully produced and illustrated books called
My Book House
, edited by Olive Burpré Miller and illustrated, for the most part, by Donald P. Crane. An older cousin of mine had owned them as a child. My aunt passed them on to me when her daughter went off to Vassar. The volumes bound in gray and mottled green dealt with history, starting with cavemen and working, lushly illustrated volume after lushly illustrated volume, through the Renaissance. Those bound in maroon and gold recounted, for children, great works of literature, fairy tales, and myths—Greek, Egyptian, Norse . . .

At five, I left kindergarten (the building, its bricks red as the
Book House
volumes, under a spray of city grime, is today a public school in the midst of a city housing project just above Columbia University) for a private, progressive, and extremely eccentric elementary school. I have one memory of my first day there, fragmented and incomplete:

Along one side of our room were tall, wide windows covered with wire grills. A window seat ran the length of the wall; the seat back went up and joined the wide windowsill—a squared grate, brown and painted, chipped here and there to the metal, through which you could see, checked with light, the dusty, iron radiators, and hear brass valves jiggle and hiss.

On that first morning, our teacher had to leave the shy dozen of us alone for some few minutes.

What occurs now, exactly, I'm not sure. But the memory clears when she comes rushing back, stops short and, fists clutching her blue smock (below which I can see the hem of her navy jumper), shrieks: “Stop it! Oh, my God!
Stop
it!”

One blond boy stood on the radiator grate, gripping the window grill, flattened against it, staring back at us, mouth wide and drooling, eyes closed and streaming.

We crowded the window seat, jeering and railing up at him: “Jump! Go ahead, jump!” I was holding the shoulder of the person in front of me, pressed forward by the person behind. “Jump!” I shouted, looked back at the teacher and laughed (you've seen how much fun five-year-olds
have when they laugh), then shouted again: “Jump out! Jump out!” and could hear neither my own shouts nor my own laughter for the laughter and shouting of the other ten.

We were eight stories up.

The teacher yanked us, still jeering, one after another, away, lifted down the hysterical boy, and comforted him. His name was Robert. He was stocky, nervous, shrill. He had some slight motor difficulty. (I can still remember him, sitting at a green nursery table, holding his pencil in both hands to draw his letters, while the rest of us, who could, of course, hold
our
pencils in one, exchanged looks, glanced at him, glanced away, and giggled.) He was a stammerer, an appalling nail biter, very bright; and, by Christmas vacation, my best friend.

With occasional lapses, sometimes a few months long, Robert remained my best friend till we left for other schools after the eighth grade. Some of those lapses, however, I engineered quite blatantly—when I was tired of having the class odd-ball as constant companion. I would steal things from him, pencils, protractors, small toys—I remember pilfering a Donald Duck ring he had sent away for from a cereal box-top offer. With a small magnet (decaled to look like a tiny corn-flakes box), you could make the yellow plastic beak open and close, the blue plastic eye roll up and down. My parents caught me on that one, made me promise to return it, and tell him I'd stolen it. I did, quite convinced it would be the end of our friendship—apprehensive, but a bit relieved.

Robert took the ring back and stammered that it was all right if
I
had stolen it, because, after all (his expression was that of someone totally betrayed) I was his friend. That was when I realized he had no others.

During my attendance at Dalton, I lived one street from what, in the 1953 City Census, was declared the most populous tenement block in New York: It housed over eighteen thousand people, in buildings all under six stories. A block away, my sister and I had three floors and sixteen rooms, over my father's Harlem funeral parlor, in which to lose ourselves from our parents and the maid. But the buildings on both sides of us were a cluster of tiny two- and three-room apartments, housing five, seven, sometimes over ten people each. The friends I played with in the afternoon in front of the iron gates of Mr. Lockely's
Hosiery and Housepaint Store
to our left, or the sagging green vegetable boxes in front of the red-framed plate-glass window of Mr. Onley's
Groceries
to our right, were the son of a widowed hospital orderly on welfare, the daughter and two sons of a frequently laid-off maintenance man who worked in the New York subway system, the two sons of a New York taxi driver, the niece of the woman who ran the funeral parlor at the corner of the same block.

And in the morning, my father—or, occasionally, one of his employees—would drive me, in my father's very large, very black Cadillac, down to the ten-story, red and white brick building on Eighty-ninth Street off Park Avenue: I would line up with all the other children in the gray-tiled lobby, waiting to march around, next to the wall, and show my tongue to the school nurse, Miss Hedges, who, for the first years, in her white uniform with a gray sweater around her shoulders, would actually make an attempt to peer into each five-to-twelve-year-old mouth, but, as I grew older, simply stood, at last, in the corner by the gooseneck lamp as we filed by (perhaps one in five of us actually even bothered to look up) staring at a vague spot on the far wall, somewhere between the twenties- style, uplifting mural of Mothers Working in the Fields and the display cabinets where student sculpture was exhibited by our various art teachers. In class (ten students was considered the ideal number; should we somehow reach fourteen, Something Was Done to Relieve the Impossible Teaching Load), my friends were the son of a vice president of CBS Television, the daughter of a large New York publisher, the son of a small New York publisher, the grandson of the governor of the state, the son of the drama critic for
Time
magazine, the daughter of a psychiatrist and philanthropist, the son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist.

Black Harlem speech and white Park Avenue speech are very different things. I became aware of language as an intriguing and infinitely malleable modeling tool very early.

I always felt myself to be living in several worlds with rather tenuous connections between them, but I never remember it causing me much anxiety. (Of the, perhaps, ten blacks among the three-hundred-odd students in Dalton's elementary school, five were my relatives.) Rather, it gave me a sense of modest (and sometimes not so modest) superiority.

A few years later, I was given still another world to play in. I spent summer at a new summer camp. I tell only one incident here from that pleasantest of summers in my life: One hot afternoon, I wandered into a neighboring tent where the older boys slept. On the foot of the nearest iron-frame bed lay a large, ragged-edged magazine, with a shiny cover gone matte with handling—I think its muddy, out-of-register colors showed a man and a woman on a hill, gazing in terrified astonishment at a round, metal
thing
swooping through the air. From the lettering on the cover, the lead story in this issue was something called—I picked it up and turned to the first page—
The Man Who Sold the Moon
. My first reaction was: “What an odd combination of words! What do they mean . . .?” While I was puzzling through the opening sentences, one of the bunk- seven twelve-year-olds came in and shooed me out. Back in my own tent, I returned to the book I was reading, Lincoln Barnett's
The Universe
and Dr. Einstein
. And our twenty-three-year-old counsellor, Roy, was reading something called
One, Two, Three . . . Infinity
that I had said looked interesting and he had said I could read when he was finished.

Months later, back on Eighty-ninth Street, after consultation with Robert (and several practice tries from five, six, and then seven steps), I decided to leap down the entire flight between the sixth and seventh floor. At the head of the stairwell—the steps were a dark green that continued up the wall to shoulder level; there, light green took over and went on across the ceiling—sighting on the flaking, gold decalcomania on the far wall (“SIX,” half on dark green, half on light), I got ready, grinned at Robert below, who was leaning against the door and looking nervous, swung my arms back threw them forward, jumped—my foot slipped! I flailed out, suspended a moment, silent, in dead air, trajectory off!

The bottom newel post caught me in the belly, and I passed out—no more than a couple of seconds.

Robert had yanked open the door and was running for a teacher before I hit.

I should have ruptured myself. Apparently all I did, though, was knock all my air out and, temporarily and very slightly, atort my right spermatic. Because I'd gone unconscious, however, and people were wondering whether I'd hit my head, I spent the night in observation at the hospital.

In the patients' lounge were several of those large-sized pulp magazines that I recognized as the type I'd seen (but never read) last summer at camp. I selected the one with the most interesting cover—girl, bikini, bubble-helmet, monster—and took it back to my bed and read my first two science-fiction stories.

One climaxed with a tremendous spaceship battle, the dénouement of which was someone figuring out that the death ray the enemy used was actually nothing more than light, slowed way down, so that its energy potential went way up. I don't remember one character, or one situation besides the battle; I doubt if I would want to. But the idea, connected forever in my memory with a marvelous illustration (I'm sure it was by Virgil Finlay, though I've never run across the magazine again) of bubble-helmeted spacemen entering a chamber of looming vampire monsters, remains.

The other story I read that night leaves me with this recollection: Some Incredibly Ancient Aliens (in the lead illustration, they are all veined heads and bulging eyes) are explaining to someone (the hero? the villain?) that the brain is never used to full capacity by humans, but
they
, you see, have been using
theirs
, which are much larger than humans' anyway, to full capacity now for centuries. And they are
very
tired.