These two words represent something I knew once, for half a second, a brief revelation which I owe entirely to a friend. I will try to explain.
It happened in 1986, when I was living in the Sussex countryside. He almost fell through the gate, dashing and stumbling from a taxicab, and cowering from a thunderstorm. It was toward the middle of winter. I had been looking forward to his visit so much that I was at my front door as soon as the cab pulled up. It was late, because the trains had been chaos, and the skies had got darker than I was ever used to because the night was somehow moonless. There were flickers of lightning, from between sooty clouds; the electrical heart of the storm must have been miles distant, but the rain was so heavy and relentless that you could only laugh at it. The raindrops felt incredibly young, somehow: vigorous, triumphant, and as fat as grapes.
My friend held a soaking wet newspaper above his head, ridiculously, in the absence of an umbrella, as he hauled his overnight bag and I scurried down the path to meet him. He looked superbly handsome by the light of my torch, which rattled. The power had been out for a few hours. I shouted—‘Look at you!’ I think it was—and then gabbled that he looked like he’d swum ‘down’ two seas, whatever that meant. Something transmitted between us faster even than the flickers in the sky confirmed that our friendship, after so many years, was still intact and ineffable, and his splendid face, dripping with rain, joined mine in a broad, happy grin.
I pushed him inside, and the tiles on the floor were immediately drenched. We embraced gorgeously. I scurried to find some towels, hopefully they would be warm, I said, and I pointed him to where he would be sleeping, and started talking about dry clothes he could put on. Oh and there’s an enormous dressing gown on the door, I said. It’s like a great grizzly bear! He ignored the mention of dry clothes, but was immediately excited about the dressing gown, and tumbled upstairs to find it.
I peered out through the open door. The grumbling air pulsed and twitched brightly in the distance, like the wingtip of a snapped bird. I shut it out. My friend got himself warm and dry. I knocked over and re-lit a candle, one of eleven I’d dotted about the living room. One had dropped and rolled underneath something before I’d managed to place it anywhere. I poured each of us an extravagant measure of my most expensive brandy, which was not very expensive.
It was a wonderful, reassuring evening. We enjoyed each other’s company joyfully and fluently, as if it was the very thing at which we were both most expert, just as we had years ago. I tried to speak French, but I was hopeless; his English was as perfect as it always had been. Long before I had known him, before our paths crossed, he had travelled a great deal, and had sharpened early an instinct for languages of which I was intensely jealous. Ten months, usually, it took him to get solidly comfortable in some new tongue, however hard it was reputed to be, so long as he actually lived among its speakers. I have no language but this one, the one I grew up in.
It took us three hours to notice the significant fact that our preferences for facial hair, since the last time we had met, had swapped over exactly. We were so happy that we found this funnier than it really was, and we knew that we did, which in turn we found funnier than it really was, and this subsided into a hectic period of about three minutes in which absolutely everything was funny; we were all hiccups and donkeyish noises, and actual physical pain.
For most of the night, nothing we spoke about had anything to do with why I have decided to set this down—so I will skip ahead, until just before three in the morning. Whenever (and whatever) is the witching hour, we chatted, drank, and smoked through it, content enough to be completely oblivious to any ghouls or ghosts, any emissaries from the whipping weather which might have wanted to get in. It began when my friend poured himself a fifth or sixth whisky, sat back with his arms folded without touching it, paused, and simply said my name.
He called me ‘Tim’, not ‘Timothy’, which was unusual for him. I looked back, friendly and expectant. Even through a fug of alcohol I was aware that he was being careful about something, suddenly recalibrating alone the mood of the room; it had, til then, been such a collaborative thing. I went with it. He asked if he could tell me something. Something that had been bothering him. Naturally I said, Of course, go on. It might be difficult to explain, he said.
He had, he said, been disturbed by a kind of persistent hallucination. It was, and this was the trouble he had in explaining it, not a hallucination of anything. It was an absence, rather than a presence. The problem, the idea, the initial spark, had not been his own. It had come from a dream, a dream which a colleague, or perhaps a student, had shared with him, an incredibly long time ago—a dream which all these years later he had had for himself. Both the dream and its repetition were of the nature of a revelation, one which threatened to become a waking obsession. The dream, both dreams, were about, or, no, perhaps were, themselves, the discovery of a secret. He repeated himself like this more and more as he went on. Perhaps the secret belonged to nature, or perhaps it belonged to humans. No, he corrected himself impatiently, it definitely belonged to humans. He had been right. It certainly was difficult to explain.
My friend struggled, and it took him several attempts, or perhaps I should call it one long attempt, with rare patches of clarity in which I felt I almost understood. In brief: the secret of the dream, which he carried around with him now, was that certain words have an extra element to them. This extra element is, perversely, missing. Absent.
It is not gone, because it was never there; it cannot have been somehow eroded, or omitted, or amputated, from the word, because it never existed in the first place. To be more specific, certain words—and we are not restricted to any one language—certain words, not all words, but many words, and all of them words of one single syllable, have another syllable preceding them. This preceding syllable is empty. It does not exist and never did. It is silent, though not like a ‘silent letter’, because those are written. It is not written, and it is not sounded. It is a pulse or a pause of zero duration; it occupies, lasts for, exactly no time. This strange, absent moiety is fully half of the word, yet it is absent… It does precede the syllable we hear, the word we see, written, and it is empty, absent, missing, but the word is not complete without it. If there was not a missing part of the word, coming before it, undetectably, then there would be something missing from the word.
With this tangle I remember him looking at me. It was my turn. Indeed, I did have questions. Which words, for a start? And how could he possibly be aware of something which refused to evidence itself in any way? I tried a gentle joke, but he was not finding things funny. When my friend experienced these syllables, he saw and heard nothing: his imagination refused to conjure false sights or sounds for something which was, as he said a hundred thousand times, not there. But at some level he felt them, was aware of them.
He found that he responded to them as if they were a geology, or perhaps a kind of music: sometimes they felt incredibly vast, they were imaginary filaments of invisible cosmos, the great ridges and walls of gravity which shape the layout of galaxies; sometimes they were tiny, felt in his chest, or behind his back, the way he felt silences or rubato while playing (he was a fine pianist), or in the sudden changes to the tempo of reality while walking beside trees or near a body of still water. Despite the grand similes these hollow but resistant absences, behind or before words he had used his whole life, suddenly and apocalyptically present, were as real to him as bus stops, cats, or the cigarette he was smoking, which at this point he held up before me as if it was proof of its own reality. (I suppose it probably was.) I will stress this point, that this was real to him, not some writerly fancy or academic game: he was upset and frustrated when he could not explain it, or aspects of it, and I felt unkind for initially receiving it all a little flippantly.
We were drunk. He was keen to convey that the manner in which the first, missing halves of these one-syllable words were missing was even harder to explain, or describe, was even more of a problem than the basics of the explanation. The absences were not all alike. They wanted a taxonomy, and, whether he liked it or not, it had fallen to him to imagine his way toward creating one. He compared one such absent foresyllable—the first example he thought of, the nothingness which forms the missing first half of the English word tilt—to the inner shape of a rockpool at high tide, under twelve feet of ocean. Its concavity was not in question; it was the fact that it was unlike the truncated pool which usually fills it: underwater, it had no immediate meniscus, no tangible surface or edge in the reality, or in the substance, in which we might swim around it. He compared another—the absent pulse which precedes and completes the word long—to the shock of walking into a room and looking at a blank wall from which a large mirror has just been removed. The shape of that absent hollow space, which was not gone, because it had never been there.
He had not yet written any of this down, or tried to tabulate any possible threads or likenesses between what he was encountering. Deliberately. I would not be the first person, he said, who got obsessed with finding a pattern which maybe can never be found. And here I have a pattern indicated only by things which don’t even exist! Yet in his head he had, obviously to me, to both of us, begun to form an irresistible but hopeless schema for his rockpools. Rockpools, and I think it happened that night as we spoke, became his word for them. Many single-syllable words which had an ‘ee’ vowel sound (however it was notated, and in whatever language and script) had a rockpool which reminded him of the negative space of a seahorse, or perhaps of a Romanesco broccoli bent like it was a small Julia set. In any other circumstance I might have smiled at the description of certain Julia sets as ‘small’. I asked about homophones. Their rockpools are different: of course they are, he said, as if it was obvious. Where’s rockpool, if anything, seemed to him to be what a moth must imagine to be behind an illuminated bulb; wear’s was more like a hollow chamber imagined to sit precisely underneath a kettle. Whole has a rockpool akin to a single diamond gap in a chicken-wire fence, once the fence has been removed, but still able to sway in the breeze as if the fence remained. Hole, on the other hand, is a complete word, he said. It does not have a rockpool. Nothing is missing. I asked if ‘complete’ single-syllable words were rare. Yes, they are rare, he said. There are many of them, but they are rare.
I was disturbed by this conversation, especially since I clearly did not and could not share his experience. I asked him to list a few ‘complete’ words. I felt it might be grounding, somehow. His face was blank, to begin with. Rare is one, for a start, he said. Lamp. Lime. Lint. Front. Rook. (A sudden realization.) Rock! Rock, of course. Pool is not. Wreck is one, but not wrack. Nor is rack with just an ‘r’. Well is not complete. Size—with a z, not the other one. (A long pause.) Beach. Côte. Uh, rune. Sown. Ox.
He had slowed down. He smiled at me, as if he had found a good ending, and said, smiling at last, with quiet, lethargic relief: fox. Every one of these ‘complete’ monosyllables had been delivered full of tender care, as if he were sliding them all out at an angle and lovingly re- potting them. Four more times he repeated ‘fox’, only warped through a yawn, and a visibly good stretch, which I envied and copied.
The drinking, and the extraordinary conversation, had got the better of us. Our speech was hard work, and we were by now barely interrupting a treacle of alternating yawns. The wildly late hour was oscillating through us: he was tired, I was tired, he was tired, I was tired, he was tired. In wobbly concert, as if we were both very, very old, we blew out the remaining five candles before, at last, and it was very, very late, retiring for the night.
The dreadful tide of alcohol did not pull me under right away. I lay in bed, cold, hugging the bedding tightly, and more aware that night than ever that I thought in words. I counted my exhalations on the way to sleep, a relic from the worst years of insomnia. I got to five, I felt the completed pulse of that word, that single-syllable number, and noticed that every number prior to it was the same. Just one syllable. What if it had a rockpool: what if they all did. How would I know, I thought. How had it not occurred to me to ask about numbers. I imagined writing about what had happened—I imagined telling this story, and even as I thought of the words as I lay in bed last night, words of a single syllable felt like straps, or a cage, like ants, or like rain; like situations I could not escape. They were no more just what they were, these words: they ached now with what was, or might be, lost from them, with what I could not see. And the night, not just the night, the whole world was strewn with them, made from them, these strange half things.
Briefly, very briefly, I glimpsed it. What my friend was able to feel, his rockpools, these unreal absences borne by so many words, they suddenly were tangible to me in this moment too. It was scarcely half a second it lasted, but I knew, I absolutely knew, that it was not arbitrary. What I was aware of, in this sliver of the pre-dawn morning, was exactly the same as what my friend now carried around with him all the time. Language laid itself out in grand nets and branches, the tendrils off a reef of coral, the concavities and convexities hidden behind words all real to me now, pulsing and vivifying every thought I had, and every word which came to mind. I tried to visualise them, hoping they would pad the threads in the mesh of language like paired lenses, or bead them like clams’ eyes, but they refused to be seen. Of course not, I thought. It’s as he said: they are not there.
Opening my own eyes, at the shock of this, dispelling the whole grandeur of it immediately and completely, what I saw then was nothing. Absolute darkness. I do not know whether I had been dreaming. Perhaps I had: perhaps it was the same dream. I must ask my friend, I thought. Tomorrow. I became aware of my breathing, and irritated myself by wondering about the power-cut and its consequences. For some reason I moved my hand in front of my face, experimenting with the dark. I saw nothing. I shut my eyes again and tried to swim among what I had just seen. Perhaps I would not be able to access it again without hearing someone exhaust themselves trying to describe it for three hours. Opening and closing my eyes once more, I wondered whether a word was, to its oak, what an object is to its shadow, in a pitch-dark room.
This new word, from nowhere. Oak. It took a few seconds, but my memory retraced its steps without much conscious effort. My friend, at some point, had said something which I have now looked up and is spelled, in French, aucune. Perhaps he was trying it out as a replacement noun for rockpool; perhaps his frustration had become so pure at one point that it splintered out through his first language. It is a word, I now know, to do with absence, or nothing. I remembered that I had needed to unpeg it, at the time, from the memory of a place I had visited as a very young man, since that was clearly not what he had meant.
Now, as I lay in bed, this word, though drastically eroded, was a new name for the secret, for these absent syllables. Any word which previously had a rockpool now just as well had an oak. It meant the exact same thing: an empty syllable, neither heard nor written, and somehow prior to the word as we understand it. I had the image of them growing out of words as if they were invisible leaves, curled at the edges and fronding away into the same nothing they were made of.
The question of whether something was a rockpool or an oak was the same question as whether the absent syllable, as far as the present syllable was concerned, had occurred, or not occurred, recently or lately. It was the same question, but the answer made no sense. (At the time, I genuinely believed the question made sense.) Rockpools were both lately and recently, oaks were both recently and lately; lately described both oaks and rockpools, and recently described both rockpools and oaks.
I was, definitely, almost asleep. The storm reminded me just how intensely it could wrap the house, how violently it could rattle the windows in its gusts, and I asked—it was reality itself I asked, as if in accidental prayer—whether a drop of rain was a single syllable. Whether if I re-lit the candle and drew back the curtain I would be able to see the oaks of any of the raindrops on the window, as if each one were a word, and as if oaks, or rockpools, were visible. As if oaks, or rockpools, could be lit by a pulse of distant lightning.
The following morning, my friend was gone. An ebullient note left on the kitchen table, with more than one triple-underline, told me how lovely it had been to see me, and insisted that we should not wait so long before the next time. I would forgive him, he said, for leaving without saying goodbye, in order to make a particular train, or to avoid a particularly long wait, I forget, and for helping himself to a frantic pot of coffee. He was right, but I noticed in my brittleness that he had used a lot of coffee. For a few seconds I stared across the room, at nothing in particular. My hangover had entered the nerve centre of my entire operation, and I was anxious about what it might do next.
There were a few oaks, actual oak trees, beautiful old oak trees, somewhere a few hundred yards beyond the wall I was staring at. It occurred to me what a strange pair of accidents it was that my friend had described to me these empty syllables, these gaps, pocks, caverns, and had named them in that spirit, yet I had stumbled into naming them after something so present, such a grand and exemplary instance of organic growth. I thought of their heaviness, their unambiguous presence, and could almost see them, as if I was staring through and beyond the wall—but I was staring through and beyond them too, unimaginable distances. Something or nothing shivered through me. I shook these confused thoughts out of my head, I folded the letter in half, I put it in my breast pocket, I turned on the tap, and I rinsed out the coffee pot. Later that day I wrote to my friend, to tell him about my hallucination, or maybe I called it a dream, or maybe I equivocated; and also to tell him about my discovery, that they were called oaks, for me. Perhaps anyone who has the dream will find their very own name for them, sooner or later: rockpools, or oaks, or whatever you find out they are called. Three more times I wrote, but I did not hear from or see my friend again.
Timothy Thornton is a writer and musician. His work was in Volume 2 of the new Penguin Modern Poets series, and he has published eleven books of poetry with small presses. He organised two series of reading and performance nights in Brighton: ‘evenly and perversely’ and ‘WHAT YOU NEED’. He has composed and performed scores for productions at Battersea Arts Centre and The Yard Theatre. “Rockpools, Oaks” is excerpted from his queer pillow book Candles and Water, published by Pilot Press.
minor literature[s] 