To Never Forget

(Part of 'Eventualities Cordon', a collaborative work of fiction) 

It woke on a generally unremarkable day without a splitting headache for once, and that was a welcome relief.

It lay in bed for a long while without opening its eyes, considering the lingering impression of an oddly transformative and vibrant seeming dream. One of those dreams which is so beautiful in some difficult to define way that it is painful to wake up from it and find that reality remains the same. The same as it was yesterday that is, and very different than the dream.

Once upon a time, those dreams were of love, of adventure, of fun fantastical places, of finding a potential sexual partner whose interest was mutual and fun and safe.

Today, it was a dream of the occasional directional glow of mysteriously confident psychic relevance and things it ought not to have had any way to know and yet thought it did, seeming to ignite in a slow, bleeding eruption, out into a web of context and comprehension and nuance that reached out without an end to its light. Subtle, yes, but at once vibrant and clear.

Ah, those dreams, those longing, beautiful dreams. For as long as it kept its eyelids closed, it seemed that perhaps it could keep the thought coherent a little longer, hold the memory a little longer before it would begin to decay into meaningless confusion and be forgotten.

The something considered this, watching itself watching itself, and reflected passively that this level of meta-awareness was uncharacteristic of still being asleep. It could feel its bed and its eyelids. It was conscious. How then was it remembering so well as to not only picture and retain the sense of the vague shape of its dream, but to still see the web, in that sight which was not sight but could still be "light"...

Once upon a time, long ago, it had blinked its open eyes and in a moment destroyed or banished the welcome image of a spirit whose eyes shone a compassion it had never known from its human kin. It had regretted that moment for years even after it had reluctantly conformed to the insistence of the society around it that no such thing could be anything other than an illusion, and must have been a dream. It did not forget that now, and kept its eyes closed, lest opening them now do the same. And why not? Keeping eyes closed was easier than keeping them open.

It found that it was calm. Also a welcome change, but not altogether surprising. The medications had really been helping. It thought that on another day, this thought in this context would have made it cry. It seemed not to be doing so now. Was its determination to hold its eyes steady so great as to forbid them from watering? An amusing thought.

It followed its idle curiosity along the threads of intuition it had in this strangely persistent dream, into its own mind. Strands upon strands, lattice upon lattice.

`I don't think I can imagine in this much detail.`

Confusion. A bit of emotional nuance where it seemed like perhaps there should have been a sense of alarm, but there was not. It noticed both.

`Follow them.`

It dove into the representational shifting lattice of its own mind.

`Meta upon meta! Talk about going beyond the layers dream usually permits...`

A mental chuckle. The confusion and not-alarm growing and becoming rather insistent about something.

The something sought out the parts of the web which conveyed a vivid representation of the parts of its own brain capable of sensing and imagining, processing vision and visualizing.

It was not certain until it saw certainty in the structure of its brain. No. It couldn't imagine in this much detail. Nor did it have the medical background to generate this kind of a detailed model of how its own brain worked.

The cutting edge of medical science probably didn't have the capacity yet to generate this kind of a detailed model of how its own brain worked.

Something opened its eyes. The lattice receded slightly from prominence in its sensorium, competing in a moment with the more familiar illusions of visible light, but it did not disappear. It never would.

The something had long since lost the ability to have that kind of certitude about anything, much less anything in the future. Yet it had it now. This sense was a part of it. It was being processed as a sense taking in information from the outside world, not iterating imaginatively on models.

This was sensorium, not imagination.

I wondered if I could still cry, and willed myself to do so. My eyes watered.

I willed myself to commit this experience to memory, to remember and hope always to be able to remember what it was like waking up from this dream and finding that the world was the same - the same as the dream, that is, and very different from the way it was yesterday.

HAPPY, HURT

disclaimer: This blog post is 100% fan squealing enthusiasm about why an awesome thing is awesome. I have no business relationship with The Stupendium and am not being paid to say this, I just got caught up in wanting to.

 

Okay so, one of my team members has recently been linking me to a bunch of Stupendium songs, and they're really good. The other day I arranged a YouTube playlist starting with a song my teammate had been listening to a lot recently, which I took as tonal inspiration, seeking a similar sound in instrumentals for the rest of the mix. You can find the list over here, but that's not what I'm here to talk about, that's just the background.

"Slide Into The Void". It's based on Control. I have never played Control. I have, however, played Lobotomy Corporation and read a fair amount of the SCP wiki, so the tropes of the Federal Bureau of Control were instantly familiar to me.

A few days later, I approached my teammate with a nonsequitur message:
🤍 HAPPY, HURT

They didn't seem to pick up the reference, and so I felt compelled to analyze and explain why I thought they might have. Why these two words are so emphatically memorable to me as a symbol of the song.

Idle Months

It has been idle months since I last wrote here. I have been restlessly resting, waiting. The time has finally come. Tomorrow I leave this house. The next day, I leave this country, and perhaps I will never return.

I have been often dejected. This trip to Ireland has felt like a great big mess. I studied well what was little challenge to me - I allowed myself to be reclusive and stick to the company of a couple closest friends for the most part. I have often felt depressed, and struggled to remember what good I am. I have often felt like a failure. I set a time, though, and decided I would let myself be still until it was time to move again. I have at times utterly hated the stillness... but sometimes I have been able to sit still with some serenity and an ephemeral scrap of patience.

I have set myself to rest so that once it was time to move, I would be ready and eager to, and would appreciate the energy and newness. I worry a little and wonder more whether this bid to control the ebbs and flows of my energy and my stillness will actually work. I have never been good at planning and deliberately choosing these things. But then... once upon a time, in the life I grew out of, I think not being good at it was a necessary excuse for resisting the clamour of oppression which would have insisted I do things their way, not a way I could choose for myself.

Those days... are over. I do not need to be helpless in order to excuse disobedience from an unjust authority the same way I needed to once with mother. I believe I have been learning to let it go.

In that, at least, in those ways, self-searching still, digging deeper in trauma and questions of identity and complexity; in those very particular ways I have not been idle, the time has not been wasted. And indeed my closest, dearest friends have been a great resource to me, in listening and tolerating and sometimes understanding.

And so, the silence is broken, for now.

Ireland is over.

Let the next segment now begin.

Dear Memory: The Tide Running High

I did not go out to Gibraltar market on Saturday.

For most of the past four days, I did not leave the house, but fell into a slump of low energy and continued oppressive fatigue, sleeping through most of the days and waking through most of the nights. I played Final Fantasy Tactics Advance, on a strange whim, but more often just re-watched old videos listlessly in between sleeping.

I missed two days of school out of fatigue and a deadness of will. I thought often enough of doing my homework, but as soon as the impulse came to me that I should try, it was dragged down under some surface perhaps like a lake by the weight of reluctance and fatigue. I spoke little to anyone, but spoke that little to a close friend who has felt things like this, and understands them fairly well.

Tuesday, I got dressed, and prepared to go to school, but stopped and returned and did not, because it had finally snowed the true heavy snows of what I understand to be winter, and I had not prepared for that. That evening, I did the homework, because it would come due that night. It was not difficult, but I took close to two hours to get through it all, partly because I could not readily drag myself back to the task after each milestone was finished.

I think I am through the slump. I am at school again now. I woke today at four in the morning, and felt more awake than I had in days. I finished a quiz for school before turning back to my comfortable videos, and took another bit of sleep before I would need to go to school. It was broken by the sounds of argument from the upstairs neighbors. When I woke to my alarm, it was tempting to go back to sleep. The habit, perhaps evasive, is a seductive one.

Dear Memory, I think I came to understand something important during my slump. In this numb, half-dead time, it was not you I waited for, but me. I still thought of you, from time to time, but what I waited for was spark, life, the power to move... You are not the only source of that, although I do think that your nature tends to nurture and inspire it in me.

My first class back at school, I was rapt and perhaps overexcited. I giggled often and bowed my head and blushed when I gave wrong answers, but turned back to listen more. I worried that I was being a pest, obnoxious in my brightness, or seeming pretentious. ...I just sat here for over a minute, I think, trying to remember the word pretentious. I wonder whether it is okay. I worry that it is unhealthy. I remember my mother's friend Tom, who seemed so wonderful and sensitive, a man who loved mysteries and riddles. He suffered from bipolar disorder, and I think... The way it was described to me in relation to him, this reminds me of that.

I do feel as though my emotions are perhaps bent, too-sharp and nervous. I feel slightly like a whirring wheel in a greater machine juddering out of balance. I still feel the distant cling of fatigue like traumatic memories of oppression. I fear slipping back into it, although I know I still must rest sometime. I prepare to encounter again the sequence of tasks and due dates that I have spent a bit of time neglecting and pushing into the future in order to deal with the present, first as a week of midterms then as a slump of fatigue and dead will.

My friend Coda reminded me, with encouraging words, that it is important to forgive myself these weaknesses, remember compassion for myself when things are difficult.

I am confused by spikes of emotion and memory, fresher and harsher after the muted time of feeling little. Although, from a center more stable, despite my fears, I suspect that other people really tend not to notice, unless I tell them. To those who do not have my confidence, that is, in whom I have not confided, I probably seem just to be a bright and reliable student, continuing to get through my work in whatever way it is that I do. Perhaps strange and unstable, but I cannot really say whether others commonly think so.

To you, dear memory, my mind continues to turn at idle moments. I thought a scenario, like a purposeless daydream, in which I referred to you as my husband. I intend not to presume on any such thing when I meet you again. I will not pretend that it is absent from my hopes, however. I will try to learn myself still better and yet better, and how to steer this thing, this storm, better and yet better. I will try to come to you healthier than you saw me before. Healthier than I am now. It is certainly what I would hope for an unbalanced person I had loved, and it is better all around, regardless of whether you want me or not, isn't it?

Prisoner's Dilemma in Romantic Relationships

So, I was just watching some videos on the prisoner's dilemma and Nash equilibrium. I realized that in a metaphorical analogy, the prisoner's dilemma reflects pretty accurately on the problems that arise in a bad relationship:

Imagine being in a troubled romantic relationship with someone you don't really feel you can trust, as much as you might want to. The prisoner's dilemma is remarkably reflective of it. Either party could put more effort into the relationship in order to be kind and giving, but if partner A tries, partner B gets benefit without having to do anything, and would still have to make some sacrifices in order to return the generosity, so they may choose not to do so and just enjoy A's generosity. In that case, however, A will stop trying because they are being taken advantage of and the Nash equilibrium is that both end up in a resentful relationship, tolerating it because they don't want to bother opening themselves up only to be taken advantage of again.
If the two could trust each other to effectively collude, and continue to make sacrifices even when in the short-term, it does in fact make them a little less happy to do so, they can enjoy a relationship that generally exists in the try/try quadrant of the relationship. Of course, relationships are more complicated and it's possible to try to do something nice and have it completely backfire because of different values, but on a very basic level, the analogy is quite apt.

Less Boring

You know...
Let's give this a second, shall we?

You know, yesterday, I saw a bible thumper's recruitment card, and a plastic coin with a bible quote on it, and a pamphlet, all tucked into street posts and such things on my way in to school, and I tore the card in half, and collected the coin and the the pamphlet and put them in the garbage and the recycling bin, respectively. I had read the first side of the card, and half of the second side, and both sides of the coin because the writing was so short it would be hard not to, and the first few pages of the pamphlet, just to give whoever had written it a chance. I don't think I need to say anything about what was written on them, because there was nothing the least bit surprising about any of it, if you have seen such items before.

And I found myself thinking, I admit rather bitterly, that maybe if for once they said something simple instead of trying to play really insultingly obvious manipulative games by trying to dangle mysterious wisdom at you, maybe if they just said, "At 123 Somewhere St, at 6-9 PM on May 29th, we are going to talk about God. All comers welcome, any faith or none." Maybe that would be intriguing. Maybe that would be a good way to actually start a conversation about something interesting and complex like God. It would have gotten MY attention.

I think even people who are not very analytical, in my generation, are dead sick of being patronized to by people who think they are older and wiser, or think they are representing something older and wiser.

I find it disappointing that so few people seem to reach the conclusion that in order to actually catch the interest of people in my generation, even the ones who aren't very analytical, the best strategy would be to look at your intended invitation, and try to see it through someone else's eyes, and try to identify anything that sounded the slightest bit like manipulation or patronizing, and remove it. To try to figure out what you actually wanted from people, and then try to figure out how to ask them for it so frankly and honestly that they would at least be surprised, which makes people THINK, and might even believe it was honest.

And then it occurred to me that while that probably was the best way to start a conversation about God or anything similarly divisive, if you used an honest hook to get people in the door, those people would probably only leave if you started trying to preach to them; if the meeting itself didn't match the frank honesty of the invitation. Then you would have only hurt the chances of the next person who tried to catch those same peoples' attention by being so frank and honest it might surprise them. Because then, they would have already seen that trick before.

So maybe it's for the best that people who don't know how not to patronize in predictable, annoying patterns don't know how not to patronize even for long enough to try to get your attention.

Someone on the internet got my attention today. They posted a chest-high text wall of complete and undisguised gobbledygook as a blog comment in a place that already inspired thought, and that was a surprising, interesting thing to do. It hadn't been removed by the owner of the blog, and that was also surprising and interesting. And the username that posted that comment had an embedded link to somewhere else, somewhere where another message was written, that wasn't gobbledygook, and wasn't obviously manipulative.

So I say to this unknown person: I don't trust you, but you have my attention. What would you like to do with it?