A Little Like Heaven
Ryan Paulison and his exploration of the nuances of language
Professor Ryan Paulison sat pensively in his office at Cornell University, listening to what appeared to be nonsense words playing from an antique reel to reel player sitting on his desktop. Daniel Feuerbach, one of his graduate students, came into the office as Dr. Paulison rewound the tape and began to listen to it a second time. At first, Daniel was reluctant to say anything about it, but he watched his mentor sitting, mesmerized by the demonstration, he finally felt compelled to ask, “What are you doing, Professor? What is this you are listening to?”
“I’m listening to a selection of a speech played backward to see if I can recognize any of the words.”
“That seems like a rather odd exercise. Why would you be doing this?”
“I am a linguist, Daniel. I’ve been studying human speech for most of my adult life and something so obvious staring me in the face, I couldn’t see.”
“This is not because of that trip to New York a few weeks ago to see the boy, is it?” He posited. “He really speaks backward. It’s hard to believe.”
“Spoke backward, apparently he speaks normally now.” He paused. “Listen to this. Tell me if you can recognize what it says.”
“I hope you are not giving these demonstrations for other people. They might think you’re going…”
“Crazy,” Dr. Paulison interrupted. “That’s the word we use to close down the investigation. Just listen a moment and tell me if you recognize anything.”
Dr. Paulison rewound the tape and played it again. A five-minute string of unrecognizable syllables followed and Daniel did not recognize anything.
“It just sounds like gibberish to me. What is it?”
“It’s a passage from one of my favorite books, A Little Like Heaven, A memoir written over 100 years ago about a journey to the mountains of Tibet.” Dr. Paulison handed Daniel a copy of a yellow paperback. He read the cover, “A little like Heaven by Agnes du Poissant, Translated from the French by Jean Chevalier.” He paused. “That boy has caused me to question everything I thought I understood.”
“What exactly happened with the boy? You have been acting strange ever since then.”
“I made a promise not to talk about him. I’ve already told you more than I should have. But I had to share this with someone.”
“So what have you learned, professor, from all this backward talking?”
“Just listen to it. I think you understand more than you are willing to allow yourself to see.”
Daniel sat down in the chair and relaxing began to listen more intensely. He recognized a few English words like “solitude’, “hopeful“ and “harmony”, but he dismissed these ideas immediately. The five minutes seemed forever and then the noise finally stopped.
“Any thoughts?” Dr. Paulison asked.
Daniel put his left hand on his forehead.
“I did not decide to study linguistics to listen to backward speech,” then he complained.
“Perhaps you should expand your horizons, Daniel. Did you hear anything familiar?”
“Three words and possibly a fourth,” Daniel reluctantly responded.
“So what are they?”
“Solitude, harmony, and hopeful.”
“I heard more. But I am familiar with the tape.” He paused. “What was the fourth word?”
“It’s not English. Maybe Greek, Oiktirmos.”
“Mercy,” Dr. Paulison translated. “That’s very strange. I think there is a psychological component to what people are willing to hear.”
“I don’t for a minute believe that these were any real words I was hearing. It was my own brain that was trying to give meaning to the sounds. These were not real memes in the linguistic sense.” Daniel explained.
“How can you know that?”
“It just doesn’t make any sense.”
“Why? Because we are fixed on the idea of a linear timeline flowing in one direction?” Dr. Paulison observed.
“What you are proposing would turn everything we’ve been taught on its head,” Daniel objected.
“Also one more thing about the boy. He did verifiability speak backward. He demonstrates something we have been missing about human communication.”
“No one in this field is going to seriously consider what you’re suggesting. That there is communication going both directions simultaneously!”
“The implications are evolutionary, aren’t they?” He paused.” I’m not saying I know this conclusively at this point. But I am willing to consider the possibility. Would you like to hear what the text actually says?”
“Where did you get this old reel to reel player?”
“I found it in the basement of the library.”
“You know we have computers now. There is a little program in accessories called sound recorder and you can use that to play things backward.”
“There is really something elegant about this old technology.”
“I’d say it’s slow and unruly. Alright, five minutes, and then I have work to do.”
Dr Paulison pressed a button on the machine and played the tape in the other direction. Daniel was surprised to hear a woman’s voice. The woman spoke English with a slight French accent. I stood on a plateau looking at the sea of spring flowers of colours, hues of red and blue, yellow and orange, stretching out before my eyes in all directions, with patches of snow still on the ground, I was grateful that we had come to a place which few Europeans had ever seen. I was disappointed because my brother Richard had turned back because he said the climb was too difficult on horseback and he was not there to share this moment of solitude and peaceful harmony with me. I turned to Henri who was my companion and we both smiled. I could see a stream of tears flowing from his left eye. The 3 Tibetans who had led us there also seemed overcome, I knew this must have been a common sight for them. At that moment I couldn’t help but think what a beautiful world God made for us, and then the oddest memory burst into my awareness. I was no more than six years old and I had come into my mother’s study to see the watercolours that she painted at her leisure and I touched the table where she kept open jars of paint. A leg of the table slipped free and the jar spilt onto the floor, blending into a patchwork of colour. I was afraid my mother would be angry when she heard the crash, but she came into her study and saw what I had done and embraced me. She smiled. ‘Look how beautiful the colours are’ she told me. ‘As beautiful as wildflowers blooming on a mountain plateau. God created colour so the world would be a little like heaven.’”
“I stood 4900 meters above sea level and saw the mercy of God spread out like colors on the ground and I could not be anything but hopeful. Then the oddest word came into my awareness after this, from all the lessons in ancient Greek that my mother patiently and compassionately taught me One word came, “oiktirmos’. God is merciful she would say and because of his mercy I will remember forever my beautiful days in Tibet.”
Daniel was stunned. “That was beautiful,” he remarked.
“Four words you recognized. Four very important words.” Dr. Paulison paused. “You see why this book is one of my favorites.”
“I still have trouble believing it, Professor,” Daniel told him. “I will see you after office hours this afternoon.”
That afternoon, while he waited in his office for anyone to come and speak to him, Dr Paulison was playing a cassette of Jonathan’s backward speaking, which Dr Carmichael had sent to him. His assistant, Agatha, came into his office carrying his mail. As she was listening, she could hear the succession of incoherent phrases in the sound of a boy’s voice.
“What is that you’re listening to, professor?” she asked him.
“This is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Although I witnessed it with my own eyes and ears and I know it was real, I still can’t figure out what it means and how it is even possible. It presents so many questions. I can’t even begin to unravel them.”
“Are these words playing backward?” She asked him.
“Yes. They tell me he is not doing it anymore. I don’t know how he could’ve done it in the first place.”
He seemed distracted.
“I have studied for over 20 years and I can’t find a reasonable explanation.” He turned off the player. “This obsession has taken over my life.”
He removed three cassettes from his desk drawer and set them on his table. , “The Beatles ‘Abbey Road,’ Pink Floyd’s ‘The dark side of the Moon,’ I’ve been listening to everything backward now. I began to read quantum physics to contemplate the meaning of time. I’m reading neurophysiology to instruct me to understand the nature of consciousness, all because of a trip to New York to meet a little boy.”
“I wouldn’t be so hard on yourself, Professor.”
“I don’t think I’ve been hard enough. I’ve lived in a comfortable somnambulant haze for too long. Robotically going through routines and patterns of behavior, not really conscious.” He paused. “The boy spoke backward and he began speaking forward. Something happened, that changed that and it couldn’t have just been a seizure.” He paused again. “You see what I mean, it has become an obsession.”
“Not all obsessions are bad. My dad is obsessed with gardening. We have the most beautiful flowers surrounding our house.”
“My father was obsessed with birds, he wanted to know how they could fly. I understand obsessions. I’m going to be out of here in about 10 minutes and then I’m back to my studies of human speech.” He hesitated. “I’ve learned more about human speech in the past few weeks than in 20 years of study.”
“It sounds exciting,” Agatha told him.
“It is. That’s the perfect word. I’ve been so excited that I can’t even sleep. Tonight I’m listening to toddlers speak, to watch small children as they begin to understand the rudiments of language. I’m going with my sister to a mall to watch children in the playground. I feel like I’m on the threshold of a revelation.”
He felt a little awkward that he had spoken on this occasion this way, but he had to speak to someone about what he was thinking. After this, she left him and returned to the main department office at the other end of the corridor.
He took the cassette player in his right hand and put it back into his drawer, then put the cassettes in the same drawer with it. In the weeks since he had come back from his trip to New York to see Jonathan, he had spent over 200 hours on this special project, and he had learned things he didn’t know about human speech, things that he thought a linguist should have known before his visit to New York. He was beginning to rethink his position on whether in fact human speech was indeed wired in the human brain.
When he was in graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, his interest in linguistics was sparked by a theoretical question concerning the origin of ideas or memes as those in linguistics had agreed to call them. He was interested in the mechanics of speech production and novel theories about the catalysts of sound changes in languages. His faculty advisor, Abigail Primakov, had devoted her entire career to an exhaustive study on the Indo-European Proto-language among the hunter-gatherers in the steppes of the Caucasus mountains. These different theoretical musings had held interest to him. He had focused on how ideas were transmitted and altered by the passage of time. He was also curious as to how sounds got attached to certain ideas, And he believed, in an almost expectant way they were tied to the manner in which infants learn to speak. In the case of Jonathan, he was wondering if he was seeing a glimpse into the way children learn to perceive time. The big question for him in the last 10 years, concerned whether there was uniformity or diversity in the way individuals perceive time. It had undertones of a quasi-spiritual enquiry. Because he was beginning to question the positivist, materialist paradigms, which had dominated linguistics since the 1920s, with the widespread acceptance of Charles Darwin’s theories about natural selection. He was then taught all language was simply the result of random variation in sound changes that came from the widespread laziness among speakers of various dialects. Jonathan’s circumstances were beginning to cause him to question everything he had been taught. Once he began to question it, he realised he had already stepped away from it. Like a sailboat tossed by both the waves beneath and the wind above, he was moving in whatever direction the changes in pressure were taking him.
As he sat waiting for the last few minutes of his office hours to run out, suddenly at three minutes before the hour, there was someone standing in his doorway.
“Professor Paulison.” He heard a female voice. He shuddered a moment as he came into focus.
“I’m sorry to come at the last minute. I need to talk to you for a few minutes.”
He turned his face and saw a young woman in her early 30s with brown hair and Spanish features.
“My name is Sophia Starr Primangela,” she told him. “ I have a story to tell you that I am sure you won’t believe.“ She appeared at the moment as though she was reluctant to tell him. “I have an eight-year-old daughter named Carmella who was mute. She never spoke a word. Then two weeks ago we went to visit a friend in Pennsylvania and she began to speak for the first time. But it is not in any language I recognize. I have taped some of it for you to listen to.”
“Where is your daughter now?”
“She is with her father. He does not approve of me coming to see you.”
She reached into her purse and removed a cassette.
“I was sent here to have you listen to it.”
“Who sent you to me?” he asked her.
“It was a postcard,” Sophia removed the postcard from her bag and handed it to Dr Paulison. It read, “Here is a man who can help you with your daughter, Carmella. Professor of linguistics Ryan Paulison at Cornell University, Ithaca New York. Sincerely, a friend.”
“You must know how crazy this all sounds.”
“Entiendo,” she responded in Spanish. “Me puede agudar, por favor?”
“Seguramente” he responded. “Puedo tener el casete?”
“Si muchas gracias.”
She handed him the cassette. He removed the cassette player from his drawer and put the cassette inside the machine and then pressed play. They both could hear a small girl’s voice that went on for about three minutes but the words were completely unintelligible.
“Que Idioma es?”
“No se. Suena nada como cualquiet idioma de la que estoy familiarizada.” (I don’t know. It is not like any language of which I am familiar.)
He removed the cassette and prepared to play it again.
“Donde lo grabaste?”
“En Nuestra casa.”
He pressed the play button and listened again. He didn’t comment.
“What languages do you speak in your house, English or Spanish?”
“We speak both. My husband speaks English.”
He pondered it a moment, and then he told her, “As crazy as this might sound, I have to play this backward. This machine can do that.”
“Como podria hablar al reves?”
He pressed the play button and they could both hear her speaking in Spanish.
“Mama, habla conmigo por favor. por fin puedo hablar contigo.”
Two streams of tears were running down Sophia’s cheeks.
“I need to see your daughter. You can either bring her here or I can go where she is.”
“My husband will not let her come here.”
“Then I will go. Where do you live?”
“Columbus Ohio,” she answered.
“That’s about a seven-hour drive. If we leave now we will be in Columbus by midnight.”
“Ciertamente?”
“Tan serio como un ataque del corazon.” He answered.
“Si,” she shuddered. “Mi marido puede ser dificil. Mi marido se va enojar.”
“Y puedo manejar su marido.” (I can manage your husband)”
“Muchas gracias, Senora.” He paused. “Espero una aventura!”
