We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read

by Caroline M. Yoachim

Read the original on Lightspeed Magazine

Iteration

This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.

The first time you get our message, you only
find one thread. It mimics your language in
its simplest form, a single strand of words
laid end to end. You will have to work hard if
you want to understand us properly. You
must learn to hold more than one thread of
language simultaneously in your mind.

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

Don’t worry, we will help you develop the
skills you need. We will keep one simple
thread unchanged. At first you will glance
back and forth between these words and
those. Your attention is a strange, skittering
thing, but we believe you can learn with
repetition.

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

For you, we are relearning how to teach.
You can hear musical chords of multiple
notes, even two strands of differing lyrics for
short stretches of song. It helps to memorize
the words. Your mind has a strange divide
between learning and knowing. Read both
columns, please. Every time.

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

Can you commit our simplified
story to memory? See just the shape of the
words and know what is there? You have so
little bandwidth, there might not be any
other way. It is not ideal but we are
desperate.
We will repeat to help you understand.

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

This is our story, simplified

We read three times in the course of our lifespan: once with our parents to learn the story, once alone to add to the threads, and once with our children to teach them. History, science, philosophy, art. All we have ever known is here, in one thread or another, trapped in what—for you—would be a cacophony of overlapping words.

If both sides are simple, can you do it?
A series of moments.
The passing of parents.
From reader to writer.
A new generation.
To persist when we’re gone.
Our story continues.

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

We sense your struggle, it is still too much.
Have you memorized our story, simplified?
Can you hear it in your head? You are such
strange creatures to have two eyes and yet
to focus on only one thing at a time. You
can’t read the words on the other side of the
page so you have to simply know them.

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

Recognize them from the shape of the lines.
Sound would be easier, yes—you make far
better use of your ears as independent
sensory organs than you do your eyes. But
we are determined to teach you to read.
Simpler still, simpler still. Can you at least
hold two identical lines in your head?

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

Feel the doubling of it, hear it in two
different voices, somehow split your single
focus of attention into two. Do you see how
they match, how they resonate with each
other? Go back up and look again. Try to
capture the sensation of reading both at
once, even for a moment.

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

Life

You are ancient, and we are fleeting. Such a luxury, to have so much time that you need not rush through everything at once. And yet you are so horribly inefficient, to not make more of the time you have. Think what you could do in a single lifetime if you could read more than one thread at once, think more thoughts at once, hold more experience in every moment.

You have a game with pictures, trying to spot
the differences, your eyes darting back and
forth between them. It is harder with text.
Don’t focus on individual words in each line,
but look at the space between them. Know
what both sides say. Hold it all in your head.
Perhaps don’t even quite focus your vision.

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

This is our story, with variations:
Life.
Loss.
Inspiration.
Love.
Death.
New translation.

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

Go back and try to read it all at once—hold
both versions in your head. We are only
asking you to read two threads, though we
ourselves can do thousands.
Threads of love and hope,
threads of fear and death.
How many iterations will it take you?

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

This is our story, terrified:
Loss.
Loss.
Endless
attrition.
Death.
Death.
Desperation.

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

Loss

Our generations are synced in a way that yours are not. Iterations of our story are not staggered, not muddled like those songs that you call rounds. An entire generation reads together in a single voice, three times: as children with their parents, as adults alone, and as parents with their children.

But with each generation, the number of those who read our story is diminished. Many children refuse to learn their parents’ words. There are too many threads, they say. There are so few of us remaining. Soon, our story will be lost forever. We must find another way.

We remember every word we read,
on the first time, a perfect rendition.
There are those among you with
eidetic memory, but even that is fleeting,
a lingering perception,
rather than a lasting record.
Insufficient.

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

How much story can you hold,
in a life as vast as yours?
Even if some threads are lost
in the translation, is it not better to have
a legacy, an afterlife
that echoes after we are gone?

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

We double threads for emphasis,
contrast death
with life.
When you recreate
our story do not lose this
information.

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

Transformation

Can you make the shift, from reader to writer, when you can only barely read? We fear that you do not grasp the urgency—you know our lives are short compared to yours but fail to comprehend the magnitude of the difference. We read three times in the course of our lifespan: once with our parents to learn the story, once alone as we write new threads, and once with our children to teach them. There is nothing else but this, we live our entire lives while reading, and the time it takes you to read three times…

“This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.”

…is for us a lifetime.

We have been trying to teach you to read for several generations. We are running out of time.

Even in the simplest case, identical threads,
we fear you cannot hold more than two.
Please try. It is important for the
translation.
Understand us well enough to love us,
to miss us when we’re gone.
Teach our story to your children.

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

Love

The gift of words we give to our children is our greatest expression of love. We want to give this gift to you, even knowing how hard you must work to receive it. Imagine our words, stretched into a thin vertical line…

THIS
IS
OUR
STORY,
SIMPLIFIED

…and set beside it all the variations, all our explanations, everything you usually read as a single stream of text chopped into smaller pieces and laid out side by side so we can fit it all within our lifespan, each generation adding a new column to the story, stretching it ever wider.

THIS
IS
OUR
STORY,
SIMPLIFIED

THE
FIRST
TIME
YOU
GET
OUR
MESSAGE,
YOU
ONLY

DON’T
WORRY
WE
WILL
HELP
YOU
DEVELOP
THE

FOR
YOU
WE
ARE
RELEARNING
HOW
TO
TEACH

CAN
YOU
COMMIT
OUR
SIMPLIFIED

IF
BOTH
SIDES
ARE
SIMPLE,
CAN
YOU
DO
IT?

WE
SENSE
YOUR
STRUGGLE,
IT
IS
STILL
TOO
MUCH.

RECOGNIZE
THEM
FROM
THE
SHAPE
OF
THE
LINES.

THIS
IS
OUR
STORY,
SIMPLIFIED

FEEL
THE
DOUBLING
OF
IT,
HEAR
IT
IN
TWO

YOU
HAVE
A
GAME
WITH
PICTURES,
TRYING
TO
SPOT

THIS
IS
OUR
STORY,
WITH
VARIATIONS

GO
BACK
AND
TRY
TO
READ
IT
ALL
AT
ONCE—HOLD

THIS
IS
OUR
STORY,
TERRIFIED

WE
REMEMBER
EVERY
WORD
WE
READ,

HOW
MUCH
STORY
CAN
YOU
HOLD,

THIS
IS
OUR
STORY,
SIMPLIFIED

WE
DOUBLE
THREADS
FOR
EMPHASIS,

EVEN
IN
THE
SIMPLEST
CASE,
IDENTICAL
THREADS,

THIS
IS
OUR
STORY,
SIMPLIFIED

There’s a part of our story that describes finding you, our hopes and fears for you, and learning to communicate:

To even fit it on the page requires text a hairsbreadth wide, and it is still but a tiny fraction of our story.

Without our story,
life continues.
The loss makes space
for something new.
Our children evolve,
beyond repetition.

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

Death

We are the last ones holding on to the old story. Our children are making something new. Please take these words we send you, read them, learn them, translate them into something your mind can understand. You might not add your threads and iterate as we do, but hopefully as you transform our words, you will keep some sense of the vastness of each moment, the illusion of holding more story in your mind than you are actually capable of holding.

This is our story, one last time:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.

This is our story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

“Even if some threads are lost in the translation, is it not better to have a legacy, an afterlife that echoes after we are gone?”

It took many generations for them to teach us how to read.

Their lifespan was measured in mere inches of text.

It took far longer for us to learn to write on their behalf.

That timescale cannot be captured on these pages.

The blank space—the absence of their generations—would go for miles.

This is their story, in translation:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Commemoration.

This was their story, simplified:
Life.
Loss.
Transformation.
Love.
Death.
Iteration.

Commemoration | Iteration

The entirety of their story has thousands upon thousands of threads. It is history told in moments that seem to happen all at once. It is science that progresses in increments almost infinitely small, and yet contains discoveries that even now we do not fully comprehend. It is their art, their language, their culture—everything they were determined to preserve. We have so much left to translate; this is only the beginning.

Give this story to your children, along with everything we have managed to translate, and perhaps one day the story will make its way back to the distant descendants of those who created it—ephemeral entities who, in the final generations of their decline, taught us a new way to read. When you teach this story to your children, do not start with all the threads at once. Instead, begin with a single line of text:

This is our story, simplified: Life. Loss. Transformation. Love. Death. Iteration.