The World is Bigger than an Ell
Phil Strobe
Because Love Resists Narrative
Phil Strobe
Meet Ashley’s Neighbor
Phil Strobe
Copyright 2014 Phil Strobe
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Table of Contents
The World is Bigger than an Ell
Because Love Resists Narrative
Meet Ashley’s Neighbor
About Phil Strobe
Connect with Phil Strobe
The World is Bigger than an Ell
In this moment snow swirls around me, blown off Lake Michigan, over the dunes, and across the frozen surface of Spring Lake. It is carried on winds curved along shores lined with bare trees, ancient cottages, and acres of lawn. Small drifts tumble before my shins as I walk down the roadside path. Snow swirls now, and signs point to change. Things are always changing.
I didn’t really notice the changes at first. Signs would be signs, of course. Stop signs would say, “STOP,” and I would stop, just like always. They were red, just like always. But the quality of the red had changed. It had become bumpy, a bumpy red. Then, some time later, a bumpy and mottled red, like blistered paint. I can’t say if these changes were gradual. It’s not like things became bumpier, or more mottled over time. I can’t say when it happened, just that I’m pretty sure it did happen, and then some time later I noticed.
Anyway, whenever it actually did happen, everything had begun to look like this, more and more the apparent texture of things was becoming subtly mottled, not really darker or wrinkled. Just deeper. Like there was more depth to each color than I had ever seen before. Then, oh, I can’t say, after maybe a few months of this? Several months of this? One February day, three years ago already… at the end of Kelly Street, when I was turning toward the bayou bridge, I noticed that the color red on a stop sign had been overlain by the word “red,” repeated infinitely. Traffic was light. I was driving up the street, up the slight rise to the intersection, when some blowing snow swirled by. The snow devil twisted in front of me, and then it rose weightless up, and the dancing form passed in front of the sign face, and the morphology of flakes twirled white, and the sign was hidden, then unveiled, and then the turbulent formation dissolved, snowflakes gone their innumerable ways. Snow riding an invisible spin of air showed me the sign as if for the first time. Pretty fancy language I didn’t even think at the time. At the time it was just, “hey, that’s weird looking.”
“Red” and “stop” hanging in the sky. That is weird looking. I mean, not really hanging there, of course. The sign was attached to a post stuck into the ground, just like always. Yet it hung there indifferent to the world. Instead of turning left, I got out of my car, walked to the sign, and looked at it up close.
It was red, and the red was made up of the word “red,” made of letters visibly red on a red background. I still perceived the sign as red-the-color, but I also perceived it as the word “red,” wildly repeated “redredredredred” in all angles, and in three dimensions but flattened. The words were not really sticking out from the surface, of course. It was an illusion of dimensionality, like grabbing at things coming at you in a 3D movie, and all contained in an octagonal shape suspended in the sky where the sign should have been. I mean, where the sign was. There is always a sign.
The closer I got to the sign the more I could see those letters. More letters jumbled over each other, barely legible: “redredred.” I leaned close, looking at the sign, my breath bouncing, steaming, off the cold metal. From a distance, there had been one or two instances of the word “redredred” on the sign, but as I walked up, I saw more and more, like one of those fractal images on your computer where the more you zoom in the more you see the same as what you saw before but a little different, a little smaller, but just as detailed, and there’s no end to it. The words were like that.
Then I looked at the black letters for “STOP,” and saw that they were made of fractalated black letters on a black background, but these letters were both the words “stop,” and “black.” If I focused my attention on the “black” then the “stop” would recede a bit, but then I’d blink, and both words would resurface, jiggling like they wanted attention.
The white band around the edge of the sign was “white” in white letters on the white background. A clump of snow fell off my collar and down my neck. I shivered. I went back to my car and sat there while I warmed up, and let the wipers clear the new fallen snow off the windshield. The radio announcer said the time, and I was surprised to notice I had been outside, in a growing snowstorm, for at least fifteen minutes. I shook my head, and drove on to the grocery store, past the stop sign standing “red,” and “black,” and “white,” with a cap of “snow” growing on the top of the post.
That was February. Things were pretty normal for a while after that. I knew the stop sign was there, and respected it, but, like normal, I never paid a lot of attention to it.
In spring it was more words on more things than just stop signs. When the leaves began to bud, I saw green letters popping out of brown limbs and branches. When I looked closely, I saw the word “leaf” in green letters on a green background, wriggling smack up against a brown on brown “branch.” It went on like this, more words showing up on more things every day for weeks. On Summer Solstice, we had dinner with my wife’s family. This was our thing, a thing like clockwork, twice a year, under the turning of the sky.
“You seem distracted, Darrin!” My brother—in-law. The poet. Everything with Juan is for shouting.
“Um. Tell me, Juan.” Fork in hand, I looked at my strawberry chicken salad, and then up at him. “Tell me about where words come from?”
There was a buzz around the table as forks fell to the barn wood tabletop, and people shifted in their seats. I could see the “zzzzzzzz” invisibly wavering like heat wrinkles above their heads. I looked back to my salad.
Trip, Juan’s husband, spoke next. “It’s a great question, Darrin. I don’t think anyone would have expected it from you.” I’m an accountant, a CPA, partner in my firm. I’ve given Juan crap about being a poet for fifteen years. He’s a good guy, and we get along fine when working on our motorcycles. I have too much fun with the poetry thing, though. And now I felt I needed him, and I couldn’t face him with it. I was not even sure what my question really was.
Elena’s mother, a fine arts professor, and a sculptor, piped up. “Words? Piffle, man. Follow your heart.” Special stress on “heart.” Juan gasped dramatically. Mom reached over the table, and grasped my hand. “Don’t worry too much about words, Darrin.”
“Mom!” Juan eventually stopped sputtering, and managed to slug down some of the table red we had to overflowing at these dinners. Mom liked to tweak Juan about words and objects, and immanence. “Darrin! Words,” he managed to pack about seven “o’s” into that word, “are magic! Words make the world for us!”
Words versus numbers is actually an old argument between Juan and me. It’s been going on over 750 cc engines and break pads for years. Juan calls me “Statsenfacts” when we work on the bikes. But in recent weeks I had been wondering more seriously than the years-worn teasing seemed to allow.
“But where do they come from, Juan?” asked Mom. “How do they make the world?”
Elena looked at me, smiling. “Yes, Juan. How do they make the world?” Elena, electrical engineer, vacation watercolorist, my li
ght, liked to poke at her brother.
“I’m going to need some more wine, myself,” said Elena’s dad, who was a retired car salesman. He always needed some more wine, himself, when the conversation turned to the arts.
“It’s magic, of course. But that’s easy to say. Here's how it goes. Words give shape to our thoughts and relationships. Without words, we don’t have, I mean really have, anything.”
“But,” pushing my line a little further, “it’s all really there, right? You? Me? This basket or rolls. I mean, there’s a world without words? A real world, solid?”
“Sure. For insects, and the like, I suppose. It’s an instinctual world, one without meaning. Just stuff, even if it does flit about.”
“And toddlers? Little kids who haven’t acquired language yet?” This was a tough question for me to bring up in this group. Only Elena’s parents actually had kids, and their experience with them was getting pretty rusty. It was no longer a sore point, but still, sometimes we felt diminished. I swirled some wine, took a sip, and continued. “I mean, they smile at their parents, right? I’ve seen it in movies. That's language free meaning, isn't it? And isn’t there something about teaching them sign language? That'd be word