Asakiyume mita

Maybe you've seen the trailer for this wordless animated film about a black cat in a post-human world. (If not, here's a link.) The visuals were so evocative and beautiful--and the cat so like my own cat--that I was very excited to see it.

Yesterday I did see it, and it was indeed beautiful to look at ...

( but... )

This was my microfiction for yesterday (prompt was "by," of all words)

"How will you triumph?" the old man asked the opponents.

"By feats of arms," said the knight.
"By hook or by crook," said the con artist.
"By the grace of God," said the cleric.
"By logic," said the philosopher.
"By luck," said the gambler.
"By sleight of hand," said the stage magician.
"By attrition," said the field marshal.
"By default," said the loan shark.
"By consensus," said the negotiator.
"By acclamation," said the populist.

Wakanomori found a battered aluminum tuning fork in the road, not any old tuning fork: a police speed gun radar tuning fork, with 40 m.p.h. stamped on it.

Stationary speed radars work by shooting radio waves out at cars and then noting the frequency at which they bounce back. So this is the sound that equates to the frequency produced by waves traveling back after hitting a vehicle going 40 miles per hour.


It's the tune of a speed.

Movement sings.

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.

I haven't been into the nearby convenience store in what feels like years. It felt very different inside, though it's the same space and selling the same stuff, so it's not *that* different. But the scratch cards behind the counter were displayed differently--they were in a waterfall, just pouring down from the back wall. Part of this impression may have been because they were mainly of just two or three types (?) and those were colored in greens and blues (?) Seems like when I go to the customer service counter at the supermarket, where scratch cards are also sold, it's more of an iridescent rainbow affair, like scales of different colored fishes have been made into gambling opportunities. But here it was blues and greens. American money colors, I suppose.

When I say "scratch cards," I mean those instant-play lottery tickets where you scratch off a silver covering and you maybe win some money. They're an addiction opportunity that doesn't entice me at all, but I know lots of people do buy them. And buy lots of them.

Do you ever buy scratch cards? If so, have you ever one a good amount? And if so, what (if you feel like sharing) did you use it for?

amaebi has been posting extremely entertaining excerpts from Garden Birds of Britain and North-West Europe, by Dominic Couzens and Carl Bovis--fun in the way the descriptions of the various birds makes you think about people (but at the same time is very illuminating about the birds).

It got me thinking about the brown-headed cowbird. I spent a pleasant afternoon with a female brown-headed cowbird a few years back. She was hunting around in the grass for seeds and insects, and I was mowing the grass, but I stopped, because she was paying so very little attention to my advances. So I sat down very close and watched her, and she was fine with that. She had a pretty face (here's someone else's photo).

( cowbirds are nest parasites )

I could comment on the dangers of anthropomorphism, but I mean, **I'm** anthropomorphizing here, myself, so that would be kind of hypocritical. And I think some amount of anthropomorphism is inevitable, and I feel like it's where empathy starts (and/but also judgmental thoughts). And history is full of instances where the scientific community tells us not to anthropomorphize about, say, animal grief, and then some decades later has to eat their words.

¹ Ronald L. Mumme and Claire Lignac, "Living with Cowbird Nest Parasitism--and Thriving," American Ornithological Society, November 30, 2022.

I read a novella and a short story recently, and I've been thinking about them and about stories and how we tell them, what we tell, etc. The novella was Iona Datt Sharma's Division Bells; super highly recommended. Love develops between two bureaucrats who are working for a minister in the UK's House of Lords. They're working on legislation, and the minutiae of that and of trying to work for good things in real life, within flawed systems, weaves together perfectly with their personal stories. It's sharply funny but also powerfully moving; it had me in tears a couple of times. But it's never lugubrious or self indulgent--it's never milking the moment. And the humor always comes in when you need it.

Most amazing of all for me, the story had what in my family we always called the Hollywood Betrayal, but what in romance fiction I've come to realize is called the dark moment, that was the complete opposite of what that plot twist usually is for me. Usually, for me, dark moments are an awful experience on a spectrum from frustrating to infuriating, a waste of time, manufactured tension to delay the inevitable. I really dislike dark moments.

But in this story, the dark moment was the culmination of one character achieving true growth, and it led the other character to see how shut down he's become through exhaustion and grief. It was remarkable. It made both characters better, it was dramatic, and it moved the story along in a believable and necessary way.

Truly floored me.

The other thing I read was "Falling Action in Hoboken," a short story by Lucy Tan in the Sun, which a friend got me a subscription to this Christmas. I wanted an excuse to try literary short stories someplace that wasn't the New Yorker, so the subscription is great. And the story was good: it wasn't as world-weary and unpleasant as some of the New Yorker stories I've tried have been. The writing was good, the characters interesting... It's what critics like to call "finely observed."

However (however however however): it was set in New York. *sigh* Okay. Fine. The viewpoint character is something of a cynic, relationship phobic, sure she's going to live alone all her life and basically fine with that. She picks up a guy she and a friend have been mocking at a distance, the sort of guy who reads Rumi at a bar. They think he's a poseur, but it turns out he's genuine. His family has a farm in Michigan. [This set-up seems a little trite. Wholesome farm boy? Really?] So they get involved for-real for-real, and then stuff happens. Every step of the way feels predictable in its generalities without being predictable in the specifics. It ends in a manner that's true to the story.

And I thought to myself, this is an all-right, not-bad story. I read it with interest; I admired the writing.

It's so distanced, though. Is that part of what makes something feel lit-fic-y instead of genre-y? Is lit-fic these days relationship phobic? Is it afraid of being mistaken as a poseur who wants to be seen reading Rumi in a bar?

In the story, the narrator thinks,

I don't trust Matt's easy, expectant attitude. To live like he does is begging for disaster. It's disconnected from reality. But there is also a part of me that wants to see what he sees, that believes a life with him could make me, if not wholesome, then some other kind of whole.

I feel like that fear and wish applies to a lot of lit fic. It craves grandeur but mistrusts it.

LOL, but what do I really know?! Not much!

In Ann Leckie's Translation State, Presger Translator society thinks of itself in terms of clades--like lineages among plain old non-Presger Translator humans, but clade also has an everyday, this-world meaning, which is a taxonomical group that shares a common ancestor.

Humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and gibbons are in the hominoid clade. They share with Old- and New-World monkeys the clade of anthropoids. Anthropoids and prosimians (a group that includes lemurs and tarsiers) comprise the primate clade. Primates are part of the clade euarchontoglires, along with rodents and rabbits, and then comes the clade eurtheria, which are placental mammals... and eventually if you keep going, we all--and now I'm including plants, slime molds, and fungi--are in the clade eukaryota, and you have to go even further back to get a connection with bacteria and archaea.

Still, we're all family. Do you feel heartwarmed? I feel heartwarmed.

Paul Salopek, this morning, talking about traveling in rural Yunnan Province, China:

Almost without being aware of it, [we] are losing touch with the human hand itself, what the human hand can make ... This realization paradoxically gelled when I stepped over the Myanmar border into China, possibly because I had these conceptions that I'd be walking into the most industrialized country in the world. And I didn't. Instead ... not only [are] the houses all handmade, but the roads to reach them were conformed to the human foot. People were still moving between them on foot or on bicycles or, on occasions, by pack horses. And even the tools to make this environment, I noticed, were handmade.
Source: "Writer Paul Salopek started a global journey ten years ago. Where is he now?" NPR Morning Edition.

The human hand and foot. I'm not holding this up as a way everyone should live--not at all. (I want there always to be thousands of different ways to live.) I just really appreciate how this show what people can do. We're not merely catalysts for automated processes.

A kid came up to me in the early evening of my first full day in Leticia as I was going into an eatery. She was skinny, with hair going every which-way and dark patches on her face that might have been bruising or dirt or a birth mark. She said something to me that I didn't quite understand--but I suspected that she was asking for money, so I opened my purse to get out some money.

"No, no," she said. And then something else ending in "sopa" (soup).

"You want me to buy you a soup?" I asked.

She nodded.

So we sat down at a table, and when one of kitchen staff came over, I ordered fish for me and a soup for her--and with my eyes I tried to ask silently for indulgence/forgiveness/understanding because I know that one person's idea of a good deed can cause trouble for other people, but the woman just nodded, like she did understand and wasn't troubled.

I asked the kid how old she was, and she said eighteen. I highly, highly doubt this, not just from her size, but from the way she acted. But maybe she truly was: not getting enough to eat can stunt your growth. Or maybe she had reasons for claiming to be not-a-minor. I asked her what her name was, and she said "Jennifer," pronouncing it like an American. I asked her if she had any brothers or sisters, and she said she had older brothers.

The woman brought out a soup.

"And can I have a soda?" Jennifer asked. So I got her a soda.

"Boy they sure are slow here bringing you your fish!" Jennifer said in a loud voice. The women at the next table, who were wearing uniforms for the Claro mobile phone company, looked over, frowning.

"It's fine. The fish takes time to cook," I said.

"I think they're just SLOW" she said. And then, brightly, "Hey, when it comes, you'll share your rice, won't you?"

"Sure, okay," I said. And I asked the woman from the kitchen if we could have two plates.

Eventually the fish came, and I put half the rice on the second plate.

"And can I have some of the fish, too?" Jennifer asked.

"Okay," I said, and gave her half the fish. This was fine: I couldn't have finished the whole thing anyway.

She ate with food-flying gusto, sometimes shooting rude remarks to the kitchen staff, who replied that she'd better behave herself or they'd call the police, whereupon she offered her thoughts on snitches who call the police.

At other moments she seemed about to fall asleep into the plate, her eyelids half closing. I suspected narcotics rather than exhaustion, and the fact that she put a teeny-tiny twisted plastic bag of something on the table strengthened my suspicion. But she always roused herself.

After she finished eating, her remarks to the staff got more provocative, and they repeated their threats. I felt anxious and sorry--anxious that we were well past wearing out our welcome, sorry for the employees, sorry for the other customers, and extremely sorry for Jennifer and her situation.

"Jennifer, you've had something to eat. Maybe now would be a good time to leave?" --I said this knowing full well that she likely had no place to go to.

"Okay," she said equably, and sauntered out. One of the Claro employees offered her a half-empty bottle of soda, and Jennifer took it.

After she left, I apologized to the Claro women and the kitchen staff, and everyone said no, no, it wasn't a problem at all. I asked the kitchen staff what Jennifer's story was, and they said that her parents were likely drug addicts and that she lived on the streets.

I didn't ask about social services. I know there are some around--I looked, later on. But there are always reasons why, and times when, what's available doesn't help, as I know only too well from how things work here in the United States.

I can imagine Jennifer's story any way I want. I can imagine that she finds her way to people who help her out. That she's able to escape the road that seems mapped out for her. But my imaginings are only that: imaginings. In the end all I actually did for Jennifer was provide one meal.