“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”
We’d been up late the night before watching SpaceX satellites make their way across the darkness of the Earth’s lower atmosphere at eleven thousand kilometres per hour. Sixty beads of terrestrial technology beyond our comprehension had entranced our imagination.
“Are they stars, Daddy?” Alice said as we gazed up at the soon to be night sky. “Or are they Venus?”
“They look like stars, don’t they?” I said. “But not everything that twinkles in the sky is a star. They’re satellites.”
She asked what a satellite was.
And because she was four I would still be considered an oracle, no matter how limited my knowledge of astrophysics.
“It’s a machine we send into space to orbit the Earth,” I said. “So we can watch Paw Patrol on TV and talk with Granny and Grandad and friends and have Zoom drinking competitions.”
“We made the things which look like stars?”
“Not we as a family,” I said. “We as humankind. People. All the people.”
“Everybody works for SpaceX, Daddy?”
I told her the bad news.
Disappointed by my lack of satellite construction, Alice said, “One day, I’m going to work for SpaceX.”
Our new normal was the New World: Esoteric and confusing. But beautiful. Like a satellite.
Amazon had finally delivered the encyclopedia. I asked Alice to choose a page at random. She flicked through the knowledge, stopping temporarily at Alice in Wonderland, Alfred Hitchcock, Hunter S Thompson, Shakespeare and Buddha, before finally settling on flowers.
“Botany,” Alice said, dividing the word in two. “That’s funny.”
Silent vibrations came from the centre of the Earth, from the centre of our hearts.
We went into the garden for a lesson on botany.
Luca sat in the corner of the lawn eating dandelions. Alice did her morning work out. Three laps around the garden, each faster than the previous. I had taught her it was important to end the race strong, most slow, eyeing the finish line too soon. This is when you must strike. Accelerate when the field is slowing down.
Back in the early days of home-teaching Alice had refined her mantra for the day: Be strong, be funny, be courageous, be kind. Things had moved on like an old flame at the Apocalypse Daddy Home of Advanced Learning™ since then. Our learnings had expanded, our thoughts polished: Be ruthless, be like water, be adventurous, be curious, be interested, be powerful, be first, be you.
Alice screamed as she powered to the line. “I’m bigger than yesterday. I’m faster. Fast fast fast fast fast fast. Fast like a proton. Fast like you Daddy.”
I said I wasn’t as fast a proton and after thirty days of physical frugality my body was on the verge of seizing up, as if my core was like deep space, minus 270.
“You should put oil on it Daddy,” Alice said as she joined me at the pine tree in the corner of the garden. “This tree is big. You’re big Daddy. Like a cloud.”
“Today,” I said. “We’re going to learn the names of the trees and plants and flowers that surround us. Did you know,” I said, sounding less like David Attenborough every second, “that everything you see before you has a regular name and a Latin name.”
“They have two names?” Alice said.
“Yes,” I said. “So they can be categorised by botanists. “We are standing under a pine tree.”
Alice repeated the words, stretching out the ‘i’ of pine. “Pine tree,” she said, remunerating over them like ice cubes at the bottom of a gin and tonic.
Somewhere a child saw a fairy and a glorious murmuring of imagination glittered across their fleeting consciousness.
“Latin name, Pinus Uncinata.”
Children don’t learn language by writing verb conjugations in a book, they don’t learn by dictation or filling in the blanks; they learn by imitation and repetition. They mimic, copy and impersonate the humans around them. They are direct linguistic replicas of us. It’s quite the responsibility. If you think about it.
“Unclata,” Alice said. “What’s your second name Daddy?”
The idea here was not to teach Alice the Latin names of plants and animals. She’s four. And I didn’t know many. The idea was to teach her the idea of complexity, that there are layers to the universe, to the systems and names that surround us. That a spade is a spade but not just a spade. That there is always another world surrounding what you see and hear and the only way to circumvent that is by questioning the underlying principles of it.
You know, because she’s four.
Est quattuor.
It was 9.26 a.m.
“Daddy, can we talk to the dandelions?”
“Definitely not that one,” I said, pointing at the half eaten stem hanging like a forlorn monkey tail from Luca’s mouth.
Alice asked if they understood.
“The dandelions?”
“Yes,” she said, crawling on her hands and knees, trying to coax a response. “I talk with the dandelion and it just stands there. The dandelion is very rude.”
Latin name Taraxacum erythrospermum. Alice plucked from amongst its grassy friends and blew it into the wind. “Maybe the answer is there,” she said.
Luca ate some kind of insect. Crunchy exoskeleton
“Dandelions are rude. Two faced,” I replied, wondering if every Apocalypse Parent was having the same conversation. “The trees are allowed to be rude. They give us oxygen. What do you think the tree would say, if it could talk?”
“It would say,” Alice said, thinking hard as she picked another dandelion and blew its head off. “Are there bears here?”
I looked up the scientific name for bear on my phone because Alice was now using the encyclopaedia to make a bridge for a nest of ants.
The internet said, “Do you mean Coronavirus?” and I said No.
The scientific name for a Grizzly bear was Ursus actus horribilis. Latin is unfair.
“There are no bears here, you need to go to Canada for that.”
“I know where Canada is,” Alice said, jumping to her feet, afraid of the ants and their inexplicable change of direction. “You showed me on the world map. Bears have a mouth. Can I talk to bears?”
“Of course you can.”
“How do ants speak?”
“They can’t speak.”
“But,” Alice said, upset. “You said the universe talks to you.
“Yes, but quietly. More like a whisper.”
“Do bears whisper? They have big mouths. You have to listen very very very carefully.”
Luca picked up a stone. I told him he couldn’t eat it. He looked at it reflectively, internally questioning existence. “But Daddy,” his eyes said, “It looks so nice.” But he put it down and ate some ants instead.
I lost a memory.
Alice asked me if flowers could speak.
“Didn’t you just ask me that?”
“No,” she said, hugging the pine tree and whispering into the bark.
“What’s the difference between a plant and flower
“You tell me.”
“A pot,” she giggled.
I asked her what colour plants were.
“All the colours. Blue. and orange.”
I gave up teaching the Latin names.
Hortus.