Asakiyume mita

I'm nearly done with The Mountain in the Sea, by Ray Nayler, which I picked up hoping and expecting a cool nonhuman intelligence first-contact situation (with octopuses), and which has that, sort of, but is mainly about the nature of consciousness and the mind, human loneliness, and How Bad We Humans Are For This World Of Ours. To my amusement and chagrin, the plotline that pulled me in is the corporate scheming one--more so than the octopus researcher + lonely android, and definitely more than the slave fishing vessel. (Favorite characters so far: Rustem the hacker and Altantsetseg the security person.) But they've all been gripping enough to keep me reading and thinking.

I'll do a proper review later, but what I want to talk about here is the concept of "Point Fives" (.5). In the novel, a character remarks that many people don't really want to interact with a whole, complete other person (1.0)--too much friction! They want someone who's always interested in what they're doing--not just as a yes-man, but with genuine interest, asking appropriate questions, etc.--someone who has enough of a personality to have their own interesting quirks and unexpected conversational gambits, but who will never grandstand, never make emotional demands, will always take second place to the "full" person. (As I type this, it occurs to me that basically the character is saying that people want the stereotyped 1950s male ideal of a wife.) In the story, these exist! AI virtual companions. (Not physically, I don't think: just as like a hologram.)

Maybe needless to say, the narrative thrust of the story disapproves of this philosophically, while acknowledging its seductiveness. And I'm here to underline both parts of that! Both the disapproval, but also the seductiveness--speaking as someone who has essentially built up Point Fives in my head from time to time.

Example: When I was eight, friends of my parents came over from England, bringing two of their kids, one of whom, a girl, was my age. She read the same stories I did! Even the weird ones! I had a great time playing with her, and after she left, I decided she was my True Best Friend, my one and only. She wrote me letters in which she drew pictures of horses--and she could draw them so they looked real! I fantasized about her coming back to visit. I fantasized about her coming to school with me. I fantasized about drawing pictures together, going on adventures together, reading stories together, etc.

I did have some real input for these fantasies--she was really writing letters--but for the most part I was creating her to suit me. But it caused eventual disappointment because guess what! She was her own real person, with her own real interests, not ones scripted by me! I've done similar with other people. It always requires that the person be conveniently unavailable in some way: real, present people are not so amenable to this treatment. After years of experience, I now can recognize the danger signs of this behavior and (try to) nip it in the bud.

Meanwhile, I'm happy to say I've had real friendships, with people who are really present--not necessarily physically present in my house or neighborhood (though yes, in my house and neighborhood too)--but present in the sense that I'm interacting with them in multiple ways, and frequently, so we're seeing multiple aspects of each other. We have a sense of obligation or responsibility for one another--probably not an equal sense: for one thing, people are rarely exactly balanced in their degree of interest in or commitment to one another, but also, people need and want different amounts of commitment, and people have differing abilities to give. So it's not a balanced thing, and it's not without friction, stress, and disappointment. But it's also very rewarding, very beautiful, in moments.

In The Mountain in the Sea, one character reflects on not really seeing the people he's around. A traumatic thing has just happened, and it awakens in him a desire to have his eyes open from now on, to see and pay attention to the people (and one can extend this beyond just people, though probably we do own an extra something to our species siblings). It's the first step away from the solipsism represented by Point Fives.

The two berries I used to pick and eat as a kid were mulberries and black raspberries (a different fruit from blackberries--we had no blackberries where I grew up but plenty of black raspberries). Black raspberries grow on prickly canes, and you can find them in abandoned lots and beside railroad tracks. I was a pro at finding places to pick them.

Mulberries grow on trees. When I was a kid, there was a copse of three or so sapling-sized mulberry trees on my street, at the edge of someone's property, and we used to walk by them and pick the berries off. Not as flavorful as black raspberries, but pleasantly sweet.

Now all but one of those mulberry trees is gone, but that one tree! It's huge. The berries are waaaay up high, out of reach, but I saw a mourning dove enjoying them. And they fall from those high, high branches down to the street.

grand mulberry tree



mulberries



These berries, though, come from a different tree, across the way. You can see below that the berries on this tree are more in reach ;-) (I don't recall this tree from when I was a kid--I think we just preferred being on the other side of the street for our collecting.)

the tree across the way

When we were in Letícia, I bought a bar of soap (and a beautiful green plastic bucket) to wash out socks and underwear and things. The soap was just a bar of Dove soap, but it's not soap I buy at home, so the scent was new to me, and so it became the scent of vacation, a scent of Letícia. We brought it home with us (along with the bucket), and every time I use it, the scent takes me back there.

Now, though, it's mooshed together with some fragments of old soap. Familiar everyday soap fragrance and faraway holiday soap fragrance, mixed together. It feels like the perfect symbol for how all the intense, striking, unique experiences of the trip smoosh together with the rest of my past experiences, and with what I'm thinking and feeling and doing right now.

So for example I brought home roasted, coarsely ground cassava (Manihot esculenta, aka manioc, aka, in Spanish, yuca, sometimes spelled yucca, but not to be confused with this plant, which is not cassava)...



because we had had some in a Tikuna/Magüta meal, and it was very tasty...



And now I cook it like couscous or with rice and serve it with stir fry or omelets. I haven't found a way to cook it that preserves its crunch and yet doesn't threaten to break our teeth (the meal we were served managed that trick).

(A little extra about the ground, roasted cassava: it's sold in plastic bags thicker than my arm. In this picture you can see piles of the plastic bags stacked on a wooden crate, and you can see raw cassava stacked like kindling by the blue striped bag. There are two sorts of cassava: sweet, which you can just cook and eat, and bitter, which needs lots of processing to get out the cyanide. All cassava has cyanide in it--sorry, I should say "cyanogenic glycosides"--but the sweet cassava has less and it disappears with cooking. The bitter needs more processing, and that's what they grow in the Amazon. You soak it and dry it and roast it and grind it. It can take days. I love that it's grown locally, processed locally, and sold and bought locally--except when someone like me buys a bag and carries it home.)



(Here's a photo from my guides' website, showing it being roasted.)

I promised wayfaringwordhack some pictures of the giant water lilies. My husband-and-wife guide team told me they are bigger during the rainy season, but they were fine and big! They were originally called Victoria regia but apparently now are called Victoria amazonica:



Unfortunately there's nothing for scale, but this one, from my guides' website, shows their son supported by one (he seems like he's ready to be done with the experience at this point).

ETA: How much weight can a leaf hold? About 30 kg, if it's well distributed! And in comments I thought of other things I wanted to share (read here)

I read a play, Our Lady of Kibeho, by Katori Hall. It's about three girls in a Catholic secondary school in Kibeho, Rwanda, in 1981, who have visions of the Virgin Mary. The play is beautiful--sharp and funny and light and deep and sad and true and profound, but not at all pretentious, if you can believe it. Here's just one quote, from one of the visionaries:

I saw a girl. Running down a hill. She had legs so long they could take her into tomorrow. She had feet so quick they could cut down blades of grass.

The girl is herself, but the vision gets grim, as she sees her own death. That was one of the striking things about the visions of Kibeho for the rest of the world--that they predicted the genocide of 1995. But even though the play does go there--not to the genocide, but to that prophecy--it's not an oh-my-gosh-they-predicted-the-future thing, not at all. It's more about what the intrusion of something as big and strange and extradimensional as a vision does for everyone in the circle of the visionaries. It made me think about how hard it is, actually, to accommodate that intrusion. Krishna may be able to fit the whole universe in his throat but we mortal types have a harder time with that stuff.

ETA: I forgot to mention that the play is based on historical fact. Our Lady of Kibeho is an approved Marian apparition.

* * *

In totally other news, my dad sometimes reminisces, when we're on the phone together, and some of those reminiscences can be wonderful. Even really brief ones. He was talking about a friend of his from high school: the friend lived in East Lexington and my dad lived more in the center of Lexington. They would bike to meet each other at some middle spot... "We'd sit there, smoking Parliaments," he said. That detail. My dad as a teenager, smoking Parliament cigarettes.

Okay folks, that's it for tonight. I just wanted to post *something* because it's been more than a week.

This week just past, the week between the two semesters of my jail job, we visited the Robert E. Barrett fishway again, to show the healing angel the fish elevator, and this year there was a marvelous docent there, Walter, a retired professor who grew up around here and leapt and jumped his way from rock to rock across the shallows below the dam when he was young.

He told the story of fishing for a lemon shark when he was a young man--he had wanted the jaw of the shark as a souvenir. But when he did finally catch a lemon shark, it was so beautiful that he was ashamed of having wanted to display its jaw, and he let it go. Then, some years later, he was snorkeling in the Caribbean, swimming near a pod of dolphins who suddenly took off when he got near. He returned to the boat only to be told that a giant shark had been dogging him--but not attacking him, he felt, because he had let the lemon shark go.

He loves fish, you could tell. It was mainly lampreys and shad being transported in the elevator that day (see murky pictures below), and he had a phone video of a lamprey that attached itself hopefully to the glass wall of the elevator, revealing its terrifying mouth--like the sandworm mouth on some paperback editions of Dune.

I was happy to meet and talk with him.

lampreys


shad

In Japan, today through January 24 is the microseason called "butterburs bud"

One fond memory I have of living in Japan as a family was the 60-plus-year-old director of the daycare where my kids went teaching me how to prepare fuki. In spring you could buy it in markets, but it's also a wild herb that you can forage. I remember where we foraged ours: there was this cut-through with a little bridge, and then you came up behind/beside the Watanabes' shop, which was a sort of convenience store in their house. We bought our kerosine there. I think I still have the director's hard-to-read instructions somewhere--maybe stuck inside a Japanese cookbook. I hope so, anyway.

I've seen butterbur here and thought of picking it, but I've never done it because I'm afraid it might not be exactly the same plant. It also gets translated into English as "coltsfoot."

Here it is--not a bud, but vigorous leaves:


(source)

And here it is, prepared:


(source)

Wow, I guess when you cultivate it, it can get quite large! The stuff we picked is much, much smaller.


(source)

Wikipedia tells me that the plant known as butterbur in Massachusetts, Petasites hybridus, is also called "bog rhubarb, Devil's hat, and pestilence wort." Gotta love folk names.

sartorias's really moving entry on places she's lived and what became of them reminded me of a conversation I had yesterday when I went out looking for an iron. I'd been ironing, and mine had given up the ghost, just one sleeve short of a finished shirt. (You know what that means! I finished ironing that sleeve by heating up my cast-iron skillet on the stove. We need full use of all our limbs in this household.)

There were no irons at the supermarket and no irons at the CVS, but at the Dollar Store I hit the jackpot. The cashier, a woman maybe in her forties, was chatty, so I told her the story of ironing the remaining sleeve, and she expressed delight at meeting someone else who used a cast iron skillet and said it was good thinking. I said, "Well, it's what the old irons were made of, after all. My grandmother had a couple of them--she used them as doorstops."

"My great grandmother had some of those, and she used them as doorstops too! She used them to keep us out of her bedroom," the cashier exclaimed. "But I can't picture using one as an actual iron."

"You know those old cast-iron stoves? They used to put the iron right on that, and then when it was hot, you could use it."

"My great-grandmother had one of those stoves!" the cashier said, eyes shining.

"So she could have used the irons as actual irons," I said. "Where did she live?"

"Oh, over in Bondsville. You know where 'the grog shop' is? Across the street from that. It's totally different now though. After she died no one wanted the house--except me; I wanted it, but I couldn't afford it--so they sold it. The new owners totally changed it. I look at it, and it's not--it's just not the same house."

--All that's left are memories and shared stories. But sometimes those can be so vivid, like sartorias's, or the cashier's, and when you share them, they live in someone else's mind, too.

Here's a tailor's stove with an iron on it, courtesy of --Kuerschner 17:20, 1 March 2008 (UTC) - own work, own possession, Public Domain, Link

Deer have been wandering through the woods/swamp behind my house in the mornings, it's on their route from one place to another. I love how they're both present and invisible. You have to wait for them to move to see them, just ripples in the air, they blend in so well, but with watching eyes and their white-flag tails if they're startled.

I think with their camouflage they could wander across worlds and dimensions and centuries. It makes me understand why the shishigami, the forest spirit, in Princess Mononoke, is a deerlike creature.


He grants both life and death; maybe he moves between those worlds or states.

And it gives me new insights into the end of Chekhov's short story "Ward No. Six," where the main character, just before dying, has a vision of deer:

There was a greenness before his eyes. Andrey Yefimitch understood that his end had come, and remembered that Ivan Dmitritch, Mihail Averyanitch, and millions of people believed in immortality. And what if it really existed? But he did not want immortality—and he thought of it only for one instant. A herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him; then a peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter . . . . Mihail Averyanitch said something, then it all vanished, and Andrey Yefimitch sank into oblivion for ever.

(The collection of Chekhov short stories from which this is taken is available to read for free on Project Gutenberg).

I remember almost nothing about that story, except that image. ... I might reread the story. I took three books with me to England when we lived there as a family; a collection of Chekhov short stories was one, and I read and loved most of them. My memory isn't what it might be, but I know what roads to walk down to recover things.

And deer know all the roads, and how to be a part of the landscape and yet not of it. That's their magic.

Today in church one of the altar servers was wearing red ballet-slipper-style shoes with sparkles.



They were beautiful, and I was thinking, wow, church has come a long way since Hans Christian Andersen's time (different denomination, too, but let's sail by that issue), when the poor protagonist of "The Red Shoes" eventually HAS TO HAVE HER FEET CHOPPED OFF for the sin of indulging in vanity by wearing her red shoes to church. And then, even after she's repented and had her feet cut off, her bloody feet, dancing in the shoes, keep her from entering the church!

I have vivid memories of the illustrations accompanying this story from the version of HCA's fairy tales that we had when I was a kid--particularly the one of Karen, the protagonist, her hair a wild golden tangle, pleading with the executioner to cut off her feet. With much searching (a zillion people have illustrated HCA, including famous people like Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham), I found that the edition we had was called Stories from Hans Christian Andersen, illustrated by twin sisters, Anne and Janet Grahame Johnstone. They had an overly pretty, slim, stylized way of drawing people that I was fascinated by. I couldn't find the one illustration online, but I did find the one of her going into church all in white... but with the offending red shoes on. Unfortunately the person who took the photo cut off the feet (LOL), so you can't see the shoes, but you can see the glow from them:


(source)

If you click on the source link, you can get more of a sense of the illustrators' style. They had a great illustration for "The Wild Swans" of the prince who ends up still with one arm a wing, but I thought you might like this fairly hot (in an overly pretty way) picture from Tales of Greeks and Trojans:


(source)

Wakanomori was given a t-shirt when he was last in England. It came wrapped around this album cover:



I have not ever heard this album, but when I was a little kid, I know my parents had a Jethro Tull album. My parents had quite the record collection. I remember once being babysat, and the babysitter brought her boyfriend over, and they proceeded to go through the record collection. I was Discomfited.

When I got a little older, I used to like looking through the various Beatles albums: Sargent Pepper, Rubber Soul, Revolver, the White Album, even Magical Mystery Tour.** There always seemed to be ones I wasn't expecting--which led to a recurring dream that I was looking through the records and came across that one album that I was always forgetting about, that had all those cool songs, not the ones everyone knows, but those other ones. I would be so excited to find this album... but in the morning it always turned out not to exist.

I used to have, and sometimes still have, similar dreams about, of all things, clothes. When I was little and wore more dresses than I do now, I used to have dreams of looking in my closet and discovering that there were all these dresses in there that I didn't know I had. Beautiful ones! I was going to look beautiful! Alas, these dreams, too, were never true, and my closet always had only the same old clothes in it.

In this post I'm really living up to my LJ moniker, Asakiyume, shallow dreams. They were fun, though, those dreams, both sorts.

**Also, let's see: Abbey Road and Let It Be. And maybe one of the early ones--but maybe not: maybe that was one of the dream albums.