One time, when my daughter Clementine was little, she tried to cut off her own eyelashes with a pair of sewing scissors. I can still clearly remember seeing those sharp, sharp blades rushing toward her eyes, and the awful visions of the future that followed: the blood, the crying, the desperate trip to the emergency room, and then, finally, standing next to her as she picked out her new glass eye. Of course, I didn’t say any of that to her—at that moment it was all I could do to gasp out a tortured, “gah!” while I snatched the scissors out of her hand, so incapable was I of fully articulating the horror of what I was feeling. She, of course, at age two, was also incapable of articulating what she was feeling, and so had to be content with howling her displeasure at me—her own version of “gah!” I suppose.
Now, of course, she’s much more articulate about expressing her displeasure with me, whereas I am even less able than I was before. It’s true: although a dozen or so years have passed since the scissors incident, when confronted with the spectacle of Clementine putting herself in danger I can still say little more than “gah!”
“Gah!” I say when I see her jump out of a truck packed full of teenagers, “gah!” when she posts a questionable picture of herself on Facebook, “gah!” when she brings home a bad grade and dismisses it with, “School is all bullsh*t, anyway.”
Gah.
I was watching an old episode of Star Trek the other day; it was the one where the crew was trapped in a time loop, doomed to make the same bad decision over and over again. And even though they eventually figured out what was happening, they were still unable to send back a message in warning until, finally, in a bit of “Data ex Machina,” Data was able to get the message back through to himself, and they escaped.
If you were to take out the part about Data, and escaping, then that is what it is like to raise a teenager. You can see that you are both trapped in an endlessly repeating time loop; you can see that the same mistakes are being made over and over again, down through the generations, and yet, no matter how desperately you try and shout back a warning through time, it never seems to work. No matter what you say it always just seems to come out as, “gah!”
I wish I had a Data around, someone who was capable of taking the “gahs” and translating them into the words that somehow got through. Words like, “You know, it seems like somebody dies in a car accident in every high school class—please don’t let it be you,” and, “Friends will come and go, but the internet is forever,” and even, “You’re right—school is all bullsh*t, but guess what: so is everything else. Get used to it.”
But I don’t, and I know that my voice, if it comes down the generations at all, comes out all feeble and weak, like the voice of the Incredibly Shrinking Man trapped in the spider web of time.
I’ve heard that there are places on Earth where instead of telescopes gazing deeply into the outer reaches of space, there are ones that are listening intently for the slightest cosmic murmur. Knowing what I know, it won’t surprise me at all if it is actually one of the listening telescopes that picks up on intelligent life long before the seeing ones do. Nor will it surprise me when that first contact sounds an awful lot like a more advanced version of ourselves, and that what they’ll be saying will be suspiciously similar to “gah!”