The Tower of Babel
Or, The Many Languages of Love
By Reid Kalaw
Edited by Jessica Yi and Liam Mason
In biblical literature, the story of the Tower of Babel describes the supposed origin of language. In Genesis 11, God sees his humans begin to construct a great tower with the goal of reaching him in the heavens. Upon seeing this, the Lord said: “This is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one [another]1.
And so language was born.
Immediately, the project is reduced to chaos. Once friends turned to each other only to be met with incomprehensible babbling, their relationships extinguished in a moment by the hand of the Lord they’d wished to meet.
The Tower’s construction is over, half-finished and left behind. The people of Babylon leave the city, never to see any of the other workers again.
The downfall of my last relationship followed a similar pattern.
My relationship with my ex-girlfriend peaked in the summer of our last year of high-school. We had no classes, no responsibilities, just all the time in the world to be together. I think I took the GO train a record number of times that July, scurrying from her house to mine, with a bag that stayed packed, ready to go at a moment’s notice.
At the end of that month, the two of us took a three-and-a-half hour drive to a friends’ cottage. We left in the late afternoon, timing our drive such that the sun was setting as we drove through the rock faces.
She was driving, bathed in orange light, and though her eyes were trained on the road, she’d occasionally glance toward me as we talked. When our eyes met, I didn’t need words to understand her.
We spoke a silent language, then. A language where verbs were squeezed hands and adjectives were crinkled eyes. Where poems were a finger dragged across bare skin and confessions were pressed lips against a temple.
It’s hard to say when I forgot how to speak it.
Maybe it was instantaneous; escaping my mind the moment I stepped out of her arms and onto the plane that’d take me a lifetime away. Maybe it was progressive; a slow degradation as it sat in my mind unusable at the distance that stood between us.
I don’t know which version is worse.
When we got to university, our language changed. God had flipped the switch.
Gone were silent stares and knowing breaths, and in came text messages and phone calls. Sometimes they were one-word replies, other times they were paragraph-long soliloquies, but always different than they were before.
I will admit to you now what I couldn’t admit to myself at the time: it wasn’t enough for me.
At some point over the course of our first few months of university, I stopped responding to her texts right away.
It started in class. Despite going on my phone during every lecture, I told myself it was irresponsible to text her, that I couldn’t afford to let her distract me.
Then it spread to the library, where I told myself that texting her would break me out of my studying flow.
Then it spread to my bed, where I told myself I was winding down for the night.
When we did talk, it was stunted.
Over text, I often found myself staring at the keyboard, with no clue how to respond. Other times, I typed on auto-pilot, sending and resending the same few phrases over and over again, feeling more like a chat-bot than a girlfriend.
When it came to our calls, it was almost worse. Without the barrier of iMessage, the new pauses and hesitations in our conversations felt longer and louder than ever before. After we got through twenty minutes of surface level conversation, our voices slowed to a stop, all of our past fluency gone.
On one such futile FaceTime, I remember us sitting there in near silence when she suddenly got a call from one of her new friends. She picked up and talked for a bit as I sat on the line. Silently, I watched her face slowly change from blankness to something resembling the way she would’ve looked at me in the summer. When she hung up, she informed me that he was coming up to her room and that she had to go. When the FaceTime window closed, I remember not blaming her for cutting the call short.
I felt like one of the victims of Babel, coming home from the tower only to hear my wife say something incomprehensible when she opened the door to greet me. It felt like going insane, seeing expressions I used to know but unable to link them to the new words implanted in my mind.
Like them, I was at the mercy of something indescribable, intangible, and maybe most terribly, uncontrollable.
In the last breaths of our relationship, I wrote and (perhaps ill-advisedly) gave her a letter detailing my thoughts on the demise of our ability to truly speak to each other.
My speakers aren’t a substitute for your voice, I told her, The screen isn’t really your face and there is nothing that is even comparable to the feeling of your skin on mine.
I go on.
I told her that I fear I don’t know you anymore, admitting that I thought that the few weeks it’s been since I have seen you have transformed the two of us into versions of ourselves that won’t quite fit together the way they used to.
I would later prove myself right.
A few weeks after we broke up, she asked to call me again, saying that we didn’t really get to say anything to each other in our previous call. I eventually agreed.
I remember coming onto the call, trying to speak clearly, using specific words, really attempting to avoid any and all possible misinterpretation in our final words to each other.
Months later, when mutual friends of ours came to visit, I would learn that there’d been miscommunication anyway.
It felt like a scene in a movie, when some dumb American tourist is speaking English in a foreign country expecting to be understood; saying things loudly and slowly as if that will help the local they’re harassing who doesn’t speak a lick of English.
Despite everything I’d tried—my big words, my specifics, my careful speech—she and I no longer spoke the same language. It was pointless.
In the story of Babylon, the linguistically cursed workers dispersed across the globe, founding languages and cultures of their own, eventually finding others who’d been given the same tongue. They discovered, eventually, that even if God had forced them away from others, he’d blessed them with the assurance that they wouldn’t be alone forever.
Falling in love again felt somewhat similar.
It starts in text messages, where I learn that pictures of sloths mean goodnight, that cats are flirtations and that infatuation is a notification always answered. It continues in phone calls, where the ring of a phone becomes a moment to share instead of one to dread, where our pauses are comfortable and his friends join our conversation instead of ending it.
Slowly, I realized that alone my language had existed only in prose, and that with him I’d finally discovered poetry.
And as I relearn how to use my language to love, it feels like I am relearning how to connect my brain to my mouth. It’s as if I am finally myself in this new language that’d been thrust upon me.
When our language expands to touch, I learn that his chin resting on my head is a prayer. I find the touch of our knees under a table to be a reassurance and that songs are written by hands placed on waists.
In the midst of it all—the messages, the words, the touches—I find the best part to be when I look in his eyes and know that I am understood.
Finally, I am coherent again.
Interpretations of the story of Babel vary amongst theologists and scholars. Some believe the version I’ve described to you so far: that God’s act was meant to be a curse. That his acts at Babylon were a true punishment for the humans’ crime of hubris, and that the resulting diversity was merely a side effect.
Others believe something a little more hopeful. These scholars preach that the new cultures the Tower introduced were the ultimate goal in the first place. They’d say it’s all part of God’s plan, that Babel’s native tongue was a necessary sacrifice in order to benefit humans in the long run.
While I’ve never been one for preordained destiny, I still prefer the latter interpretation.
I will rarely think of the language I used to know.
When I do, it’s because I see her on my timeline. I’ll be going through Instagram stories and suddenly she’ll be there, smiling through the screen in the arms of people I don’t know, posing in places I’ve never been.
Maybe I’ll pause, maybe I won’t, but eventually I scroll past; past her, her new life, her new language, and get back to speaking mine.
- Genesis 11:1-9, NRSV ↩︎