Hross

"...Ransom discovered how to deal with these sudden losses of confidence. They arose when the rationality of the hross tempted you to think of it as a man. Then it became abominable--a man seven feet high, with a snaky body, covered, face and all, with thick black animal hair, and whiskered like a cat. But starting from the other end you had an animal with everything an animal ought to have--glossy coat, liquid eye, sweet breath and whitest teeth--and added to all these, as though Paradise had never been lost and earliest dreams were true, the charm of speech and reason. Nothing could be more disgusting than the one impression; nothing more delightful than the other. It all depended on the point of view."

-- C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

--

So the hross is basically a limber seal with the mind of primordial man. The main character, a philologist, takes interest in the creature when he deciphers its vocalizations as a rough kind of language. They introduce themselves as hross and man (which the hross pronounces like "hman") in a standoff at a river. Then they get into a boat.

The linguistics in this book have already clenched me. As Ransom and the hross converse, the human learns about the structure of the vocab--masculine and feminine nouns, prefixes, suffixes, compound words, and plural forms--and brings to mind the stories of Lewis and Clark in the West, self-translating, self-defining as they explore.

--

But this business about the hross, it has me thinking about perspective, how a thing changes without changing. I think about a puppet whose face never changes structurally--I mean, everything stays fixed, the eyes and nose and stuff never moves. The mouth hinges and the hand inside the head can twist and bob to suggest different emotions, but the thing itself doesn't really change its shape, nor do its features change their spatial relationships. Yet when we watch a puppet in action, we imagine that all these things do change, that they change constantly, because we see the fixed features from different perspectives. Our brain translates these movements as, The puppet smiled, or, The puppet is making a shy face.

The same thing happens with masks. And lots of other things as well.

Like a city.

--

I have to drive fifteen minutes west to get to my second job, teaching an after-school acting class for youngish kids. Enjoyable drive--with its hills and dips, it feels like a roller coaster. The reason for the elevation dance is the road snakes over, through and under Cincinnati's viaduct, which is almost a century old. Recently there's been talk of transforming part of the viaduct into a monorail or subway system. The city sure could use one, a public transit system that can't get stuck in rush-hour traffic (i.e., buses). Locals tell me these plans may be scrapped in favor of a trolley system (a la San Francisco).

There's evidence that plans have begun only to be abandoned: cavish openings that mark the ends of tunnels dug out of the city's massive hills; rusted rails on rusted pillars; old graffiti embracing or denouncing the subway. Every once in a while, there's a local news bit about the possibility, but even the reporters seem skeptical that anything will actually happen.

--

When the idea was first pitched, people said it was going to top New York and Chicago. Innovation. Ingenuity. Other words, tossed around by architects and urban planners. But a decade has passed (maybe more--no one seems to know the idea's actual origins, as if some sage or prophet started the rumor and then skipped town) and still, no passenger trains shuttling people to and from work.

The closest thing to it is the empty squeal/screech you hear in the west side of town, usually at night. It's a wrenching sound, like metal being torn and pressed against metal. An empty noise, like a machine calling for help. When you ask what that sound was, people shrug and say, vaguely, "It's the trains."

They mean the trains carrying freight and such through the Ohio River Valley. Still, it might be more precise to say, "It's the ghost of the subway trains."

--

And so now there's the question of perspective.

When I think about this city as "where I've lived for a year and a half," I consider issues like the abandoned subway--or sanitation, homelessness, economic disparity along racial lines--to be examples of how pathetic the place is. I think, See, this is a city that doesn't know what to do with itself. It only knows what to say.

But when I'm driving back from Price Hill, approaching the skyline from the west, I realize that I won't be here much longer. I start thinking about my future destinations and it casts a sort of past-shadow on the present...if that makes sense.

And I see those holes in the hills and think, These are holes I should remember.

So when people ask me later, "What was Cincinnati like," I'll have something to say that isn't vague and travel-bookish and pretentious. I'll tell them about the holes in the hills and the squeals of ghost trains. Barges in the river, pushing along silently like they're trying not to be seen. Masses of yuppies trudging across the bridges on foot in the early mornings and late afternoons because they live on the south bank but work on the north.

--

"Nothing could be more disgusting than the one impression; nothing more delightful than the other."