7 and edits

idumea/content/005.tex

@@ -75,39 +75,46 @@ She smiled --- another blessing! --- and nodded to me.
 ``She has, at that,'' I said.
 
 ``We sat in the solarium and spoke about what reading \emph{is.} She spoke of taking a story or a poem and wrapping oneself up in it. She gave me an example. She recited a poem:
+\newpage
 
 \begin{verse}
-Too many suits move in too many lines.\\
+``Too many suits move in too many lines.\\
 They circle banquet tables, hawk-eyed,\\
-hunting crudites, canapés, bruscheta.\\
+hunting crudites, canapés, bruschetta.\\
 Fingers ferry food — fish, perhaps — finding\\
 slack-jawed mouths already open,\\
 squawking at wayward children\\
 or bemoaning The Market,\\
-whatever that may be.\\
-At some point, who cares how long ago,\\
+whatever that may be.
+
+``At some point, who cares how long ago,\\
 death surfaced, claimed one, submerged again.\\
 Who knows how well they knew him,\\
 their backs turned, studiously\\
-deciding that he is no longer of them?\\
-One could never guess.\\
-We can say his suit was very fine, perhaps,\\
+deciding that he is no longer of them?
+
+``One could never guess.
+
+``We can say his suit was very fine, perhaps,\\
 that the room is tastefully furnished,\\
-the coffin silver, the bar, open,\\
+the casket silver, the bar, open,\\
 quite good, and none of them are drunk yet,\\
-or at least none look it.\\
-"Good man, good man," they mutter,\\
+or at least none look it.
+
+``\,``Good man, good man,'' they mutter,\\
 doing all they can to convince each other\\
 through well-rehearsed performances,\\
-that this must be the case.\\
-The silently bereaved already sit graveside."
+that this must be the case.
+
+The silently bereaved already sit graveside.''
 \end{verse}
 
-I turned those words over and over in my head for a minute, since The Woman had seemed quite comfortable sitting in silence with me. She used that time to drink her water while I played back the words again and again, looking down at my paws, and then returned my gaze to hers. ``There is a difference between the performance of grief and grieving, is there not?''
+\newpage
+\noindent I turned those words over and over in my head for a minute, since The Woman had seemed quite comfortable sitting in silence with me. She used that time to drink her water while I played back the words again and again, looking down at my paws, and then returned my gaze to hers. ``There is a difference between the performance of grief and grieving, is there not?''
 
 ``It is as you say. There is performed grief and performative grief. We of the tenth stanza were quite sad when Lagrange came back with us but not Should We Forget. We received condolences from many, some flowers and many kind words. Ever Dream came over and spoke with me about grief as we sat out on the field, where she said,''It is quite sad, is it not? To lose someone you have known for so long is quite sad.'' I agreed, and then drew a line around the topic.'' She performed such a motion now, describing an arc before her with one of her well kept claws, before dismissing it with a wave. ``This was grief performed.''
 
-I nodded, and in my heart, I think I knew what was coming next, for I found my muscles bunching up as in in preparation for something --- flight, perhaps? I do not know, my friends.
+I nodded, and in my heart, I think I knew what was coming next, for I found my muscles bunching up as if in preparation for something --- flight, perhaps? I do not know, my friends.
 
 ``And Warmth In Fire came over, too, so that it could sit at our table and weep rather than eat. Ey wept, and then asked to retreat, and we guided her up to Should We Forget's room so that they could lay in her bed for a while in silence. When it came back downstairs, ey thanked us kindly and left, and when we went back upstairs to look, there was a flower wrought out of some subtly glowing metal left on Should We Forget's pillow. It lays there still.''
 

idumea/content/006.tex

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 The Woman has always been The Woman. This is the way of the world.
 
-The Woman was born Michelle Rachel Hadje in 2086. On a January night, she was born. Anna Judith Hadje screamed and screamed and breathed and breathed and breathed and, with a gasp or sigh or groan or moan, Michelle took a breath and, after a scant few seconds, wailed.
+The Woman was born Michelle Rachel Hadje in 2086. On a March night, she was born. Anna Judith Hadje screamed and screamed and breathed and breathed and breathed and, with a gasp or sigh or groan or moan, Michelle took a breath and, after a scant few seconds, wailed.
 
 The Woman does not remember this, for how many of us remember our first breath, our first wail? She does not remember, but the fact is unassailable. From that point, she \emph{was}.
 
@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ The Woman's superlative friend followed with her and then soon surpassed her. Ey
 
 The Woman and her superlative friend moved together as one. They were the same person twice over, they would say. Michelle who was Sasha --- a name chosen for who knows what reason --- and RJ who was AwDae --- a name that was a corruption of eir name --- a name I feel no shame now in sharing. They were the pair who loved each other in their own way and who surrounded themselves with others. They were the pair who found each other and, when the world deemed them in some way unworthy of consideration, got lost together, for they fell among a crowd of politically active friends, as they were active themselves, and how inconvenient! Inconvenient people should be set aside, some bureaucrat thought. They should be put up high on a shelf in some forgotten storage. And so they were.
 
-The Woman and her superlative friend, when next they clicked their implants into place and delved into the familiar second home that was the 'net, they were shunted away into dreams and left there to wilt, to languish, to dessicate and wither and be blown away by who cared what wind. They were both torn asunder in some ineffable way. For Michelle who was Sasha, those two identities were carved apart, though only halfway, and, when her superlative friend, her beloved RJ, gave of emself to create the world that was Lagrange, a System for those minds who chose to upload, she dove in as soon as she could afford.
+The Woman and her superlative friend, when next they clicked their implants into place and delved into the familiar second home that was the 'net, they were shunted away into dreams and left there to wilt, to languish, to desiccate and wither and be blown away by who cared what wind. They were both torn asunder in some ineffable way. For Michelle who was Sasha, those two identities were carved apart, though only halfway, and, when her superlative friend, her beloved RJ, gave of emself to create the world that was Lagrange, a System for those minds who chose to upload, she dove in as soon as she could afford.
 
 The Woman and her superlative friend were ever bound up in each other, for they were the same person twice over, and since this world was in some ineffable way made \emph{of} em, Michelle who was Sasha and The Woman who was Michelle felt she had no other choice, even if the unique trauma of getting lost meant that she ever felt that split that inextricable Sasha-ness and Michelle-ness that someone, some bureaucrat that wanted her lost, inadvertently tried to extricate, and it was not until the ability to fork was added to the System that she was able to alleviate herself of such. Or, if not herself, at least those new copies of herself, the Ode clade, would be without such pain.
 
@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ But I digress.
 
 The Woman wandered far from home. She picked a direction --- east, if the entrance to that Gothic house on the field was due north --- and began to walk. She walked for an hour. Then she walked for two, for four, for eight. She walked until the sun set and then she lay down in the grass and looked up to the stars and remembered all of these things and wept and smiled and laughed and sobbed.
 
-She remembered these things, and I remember these things, just as I, in dreams, remember the sands beneath my fight and the rattle of dry grass in the wind and the names of all things and forget them only when I wake. She wandered the field and lay down and looked at the stars and bathed in memories and I pace the empty rooms of my home, listening to nothing, looking at nothing, clenching and unclenching my fists as I struggle not to reach for my pen, my paper, and instead write in my head.
+She remembered these things, and I remember these things, just as I, in dreams, remember the sands beneath my feet and the rattle of dry grass in the wind and the names of all things and forget them only when I wake. She wandered the field and lay down and looked at the stars and bathed in memories and I pace the empty rooms of my home, listening to nothing, looking at nothing, clenching and unclenching my fists as I struggle not to reach for my pen, my paper, and instead write in my head.
 
 Why do we so often do this? Why are there times when, overflowing or not, we wrap ourselves up in our memories like the most comforting blanket in the world, and yet still cry? Why do we cry after loved ones? Why do we cry after ourselves? Why do we look up to the stars --- stars we made! --- and cry so bitterly? Why do the tears leave tracks in the fur on our cheeks or down over the skin of our faces? Why do birds, as the poet says, suddenly appear every time we feel such nearness as is left of our superlative friend?
 

idumea/content/007.tex

@@ -1,6 +1,3 @@
-\hypertarget{end-of-endings-2403-rye-2409}{%
-\subsection{\texorpdfstring{End Of Endings --- 2403×Rye --- 2409}{End Of Endings --- 2403 × Rye --- 2409}}\label{end-of-endings-2403-rye-2409}}
-
 When at last The Woman returned home, left my home and returned to her own, her mind was aswirl with possibilities and all the various endlessnesses thereof. She felt full. She felt \emph{overfull.} She felt as though she had had poured into her several depths, oceans of possibilities and each as deep or deeper than the last. She was vast. She was limitless. She was these things, and yet she was infinitely smaller than the limitless endlessness of the void which still lay within and without.
 
 She returned home after that talk with me and my beloved up-tree, with your humble narrator and The Oneirotect, and she did that which she is good at: she napped.
@@ -25,9 +22,41 @@ And so now we may only guess at the dreams of one such as her, one who lives wit
 
 Here is my supposition:
 
-The Woman went walking.
+The Woman went walking. In her dream, she went walking, though it was not out on her field, the one we have seen so often. No, instead she went walking out her bedroom and through her secret door, out through the door and onto the street of the city that had become so familiar to her over the years, that city with the brick pavers and the fallen leaves which skittered so anxiously around her feet. She went walking in her dream and made her way through the unnervingly empty city streets, walking and walking and walking. She passed the trolley stops. She passed the coffee shops. She passed, perhaps, the setting sun.
 
-\begin{center}\rule{0.5\linewidth}{0.5pt}\end{center}
+And at some final point --- final! --- she came across a square set within the cement of the sidewalk perhaps two meters on a side where the concrete gave way to a metal grate in the form of a sunburst, and in the middle there was a circle of soil, good and clean.
+
+There, within her dream within a dream within a dream, she smiled. She smiled and she sank slowly to her knees in that ritual circle described in steel and dug her fingers down into the soil. Down and down and down she pushed, and as she did, she felt her fingers lengthen, stretching and twisting, seeking nutrients and water, seeking final --- final! --- purchase. They twisted and stretched down as roots and spiraling up her arms was a texture like bark and the bones of her neck and back elongated and her eyes sought \emph{HaShem} or The Dreamer or some greater void and her hair greened to that of leaves and drank thirstily of the sunlight.
+
+Finally --- finally! --- with one orgasmic flush of joy, The Woman became The Tree, and there was a joy everlasting in such stillness.
+
+This is my supposition because this is my dream. This is a world I have seen and a world I have dreamed and it is a world that I have found a way still to love, even after it turned in on itself and ate so many of its own, even as The Dreamer who dreams us all stumbled skinned eir palms and elbows on the brick pavers of this land. Since I have become myself, since your humble narrator was first called Dear The Wheat And Rye Under The Stars, that has been my dream. I have dreamed hundreds of times over the centuries that I have lived that I, too, fell to my knees and dug my fingers into the soil and became, in some pleasure-bound process, something still and sky-reaching, something earth-eating and water-drinking.
+
+This is my supposition for The Woman and her dream after she came home from my house, because I think within her all along was that stillness, that sky-reachingness and earth-eatingness and water-drinkingness.
+
+\secdiv
+
+The longer we live --- and, my dear readers, I will remind you that I am now 333 years old! --- the more evident it becomes to us that there is fractally cyclical nature to life: the years spiral up and the months spiral around and the days spiral forward --- weeks are a construct borne out of our inherited faith --- and so we live within a fractally cyclical tangle of time.
+
+I know this. You know this, I am sure, on however instinctual a level, for you are clever and bright and you see the world with fresher eyes than I have. You are cleverer and brighter and fresher than your humble narrator who paces the empty rooms of her house and fills them with the quiet muttering of the mad.
+
+The Woman knew this as well. When she woke from her nap --- for my astute readers remember that that is how this rambling chapter began! --- she could now --- in a way she could not before --- feel and perhaps even see these spirals. She could see the way that her 227 years had spiraled up around her. She could see the way that time bound her, tied her up in coils and coils and coils and coils and coils. She could see these coils --- however metaphorically --- as they twine around her legs and torso. She can feel these coils --- however metaphorically --- slowing her down, holding her arms to her side and limiting her reach. They --- these coils --- obscure her.
+
+Ah, my friends, I am struggling. I can feel and see these coils, yes, and am obscured.
+
+I am going to lay down, and perhaps I will dream.
+
+\secdiv
+
+I have slept now. I took a cue from The Woman and took a nap, and while it did not come quite so easily to me as it ever did to her, it still offered some rest.
+
+I dreamed, though! I dreamed of words like leaves and sentences like branches and stories like trunks, standing solid, with premises like roots dug into logic like earth and drinking of emotions like water. There was the tree, yes, for there was the green of the words and the brown of the story and the deep darkness of logic and emotion.
+
+And above was the sun which was also The Dreamer who dreams us all.
+
+\secdiv
+
+\secdiv
 
 ``I want to unbecome,'' The Woman told Her Friend.