She talks at the windswept leaves, but they “wouldn’t even stay still to listen.” She questions the tree, but the tree stays silent. She tries to talk to the bunnies, who most look like her, but they wouldn’t talk back. A strange sweet creature has landed on Earth, where no one seems to understand her. “Beegu was not supposed to be here,” the story begins. “Self-discovery,” Octavio Paz wrote in his superb meditation on otherness, “is above all the realization that we are alone: it is the opening of an impalpable, transparent wall - that of our consciousness - between the world and ourselves.”Įnglish artist and author Alexis Deacon explores this elemental reality with uncommon tenderness in Beegu ( public library), originally published in 2003 - the year I began my alien life in America, when Deacon himself was only just entering the disorienting universe of adulthood after finishing college.

This awareness is what Nina Simone channeled when she sang, “I wish you could know what it means to be me.” On it Thomas Nagel anchored his iconic unanswerable question of what it is like to be a bat.

There are a thousand and one ways to feel alien in this world - some of them blatant (my legal status in the country to which I have devoted my entire adult life is “resident alien”) and some subtle (who hasn’t known those days when everything appears to be alright, but the sky of the mind feels profoundly askew?) Mostly, we go through this world alien to each other - even with our maximal empathic understanding, the abyss between any two consciousnesses is so immense that it can fit a universe.

Book beegu