Walker Percy: The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other

For another thing, it wasn’t the case that Helen had received the word water , which had then directed her attention or behavior toward the water. That wasn’t what happened. What happened was that she received both , both the sensory message from the hand Miss Sullivan was spelling in and that from the other hand, which the water was flowing over. The direction of one arrow should be reversed, as in Figure 2.

Then what happened inside Helen’s head? Clearly, even if I were a neuroanatomist I would hardly be in a position to say, because for one thing not even a neuroanatomist can look. But I was asking myself, rather, what sort of thing happened? The old model had broken down. I needed a new one, however crude. After all, modern medicine began with Harvey making the crudest sort of guess about the heart and the blood: Maybe the latter works like a unidirectional pump and the blood goes round and round.

Accordingly, I kept thinking about Helen’s breakthrough and drew dozens of diagrams, triangles, arrows, dotted lines, nerve nets linking portions of the sensory cortex.

Unquestionably Helen’s breakthrough was critical and went to the very heart of the terra incognita. Before, Helen had behaved like a good responding organism. Afterward, she acted like a rejoicing symbol-mongering human. Before, she was little more than an animal. Afterward, she became wholly human. Within the few minutes of the breakthrough and the several hours of exploiting it Helen had concentrated the months of the naming phase that most children go through somewhere around their second birthday.

It was like holding a test tube of pure uranium which had been smelted from thousands of tons of ore-bearing rock. I was looking straight at it, but what to make of it?

Not only that, not only did Helen’s experience distill the essence of the two-year-old’s language learning, but also — and this was enough to quicken your pulse and keep you drawing diagrams by the hour — if the biologist’s motto were true and ontogeny does recapitulate phylogeny, then Helen’s breakthrough must bear some relation to the breakthrough of the species itself, at that faraway time when our ancestor, having harnessed fire, for the first time found himself seated by the flickering embers, looking into the eyes of his comrades and thinking (not really thinking, of course) about the vivid events of the day’s hunt and “knowing” that the others must be “thinking” about the same thing: One of them tries to recapture it, to savor it, and so repeats the crude hunting cry meaning Bison here!; another, hearing it, knows somehow that the one doesn’t mean get up and hunt now or do this or do anything, but means something else, means Remember him, remember the bison, and as the other waits and sees it, sees the bison, savors the seeing it, something happens, a spark jumps…

What happened?

The arrows tell part of the story but not the breakthrough. What seems to have lain at the heart of the breakthrough, what in fact was the breakthrough, was the fact that somehow the old arrow route, the six-billion-year-old chain of causal relations, the energy exchanges which had held good from the earliest collision of hydrogen atoms to the responses of amoeba and dogs and chimps, that ancient circuit of causes, my troop of arrows, had been shortcircuited.

Then it was that I made my own Helen Keller breakthrough, a “discovery” which I was later to learn that Charles Peirce had hit on a hundred years earlier and from a different direction and to which no one had paid much attention, not even Peirce’s greatest admirers. Peirce’s “triad” or “thirdness” was rather part and parcel of a heavy metaphysic and so could hardly be seen as something that happened among persons, words, and things.

What dawned on me was that what happened between Helen and Miss Sullivan and water and the word was “real” enough all right, no matter what Ogden and Richards said, as real as any S-R sequence, as real as H 2SO 4reacting to NaOH, but that what happened could not be drawn with arrows.

In short, it could not be set forth as a series of energy exchanges or causal relations.

It was something new under the sun, evolutionarily speaking.

It was a natural phenomenon but a nonlinear and nonenergic one.*

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A NONLINEAR NONENERGIC NATURAL PHENOMENON

(that is to say, a natural phenomenon in which energy exchanges account for some but not all of what happens)

If the event which occurred in the well-house in Tuscumbia in 1887 was not primarily a linear energy exchange, what was it? I stopped drawing arrows and saw that I had a triangle (Figure 3).

Undoubtedly there were three elements somehow involved in the event — Helen, the water, and the word water. But how? What was the base of the triangle? What is the nature of the mysterious event in which one perceives that this (stuff) “is” water? What is the natural phenomenon signified by the simplest yet most opaque of all symbols, the little copula “is”?

My breakthrough was the sudden inkling that the triangle was absolutely irreducible. Here indeed was nothing less, I suspected, than the ultimate and elemental unit not only of language but of the very condition of the awakening of human intelligence and consciousness.

What to call it? “Triad”? “Triangle”? “Thirdness”? Perhaps “Delta phenomenon,” the Greek letter Δ signifying irreducibility.

Alpha was the beginning, omega will be the end, but somewhere in between, some five billion years after alpha, and x years before omega, there first occurred delta, Δ.

The Delta phenomenon lies at the heart of every event that has ever occurred in which a sentence is uttered or understood, a name is given or received, a painting painted and viewed.

What Helen had discovered, broken through to, was the Delta phenomenon.

I sat there looking at this queer triangle, drawing it over and over again (Figure 4). Even though I did not have the words to name it or think about it, I suspected that Delta Δ might somehow prove to be the key, not perhaps for unlocking the mysteries of language and the human condition, but at least for opening a new way of thinking about them.

Using the concept of the Delta phenomenon, mightn’t one set out to understand man as the languaged animal? Mightn’t one even begin to understand the manifold woes, predicaments, and estrangements of man — and the delights and savorings and homecomings — as nothing more nor less than the variables of the Delta phenomenon, just as responses, reinforcements, rewards, and such are the variables of stimulus-response phenomena?

Mightn’t one even speak of such a thing as the Helen Keller phenomenon, which everyone experiences at the oddest and most unlikely times? Prince Andrei lying wounded on the field of Borodino and discovering clouds for the first time. Or the Larchmont commuter whose heart attack allows him to see his own hand for the first time.

Or the reverse Helen Keller phenomenon: the couple who build the perfect house with the perfect view in the perfect neighborhood and who after living in the house five years can’t stand the house or the view or each other.

Accordingly, I was wondering in Louisiana in the 1950’s: Is it possible that Delta Δ might provide the key to understanding not only what happened to Helen in the well-house but also how Americans who have everything are bored and French existentialists who write about boredom and despair are happy?