Idumea

idumea/content/006.tex

@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ The Woman and her superlative friend moved together as one. They were the same p
 
 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 knocked a meter to the right and back in some metaphorical way, their immersive tech refusing to relinquish its grip on their reality so that, from the outside, they only slept, and yet within, they dreamed along the filaments of those implants, trapped within that hardware, for the nature of getting lost was a coma mediated by integrated technology. 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 after em 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 reify, 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 she could ensure that those new copies of herself, the Ode clade, would be without such pain.
+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 reify, and it was not until the ability to fork—to copy oneself and multiply, to let instances merge back down or to continue on and become their own people—was added to the System that she was able to alleviate herself of such. Or, if not herself, at least she could ensure that those new copies of herself, the Ode clade, would be without such pain.
 
 The Woman and her clade were never wholly without, for such is the way of trauma, yes?
 
@@ -44,7 +44,7 @@ But The Woman who was Michelle who was Sasha would not let that happen. She \emp
 
 And then, one day, her superlative friend disappeared. Days went by, and weeks, and then before the month was out, she received a letter detailing the ways in which ey hoped to move forward, how ey would likely die, but at least ey would die in the act of creation, of making a new world of utter freedom, where dreaming together was the warp of the world, and intent the weft, and ey both succeeded and failed, for now the world in which we live is one woven from dreams and intent, but ey is absent. It was in that letter that ey had written the ode that became the source of our names, and so we live out our lives embodying these fragments of em, but even still, ey failed because ey is absent. Ey became the weaver.
 
-And still, ey succeeded. Ey succeeded because ey became the loom. Ey became the fabric. Ey became the shuttle and the pirn and the batten and the comb and the heddle, and the world is the lathe and we are the treadles working and working and working and we feel em beneath our fingertips as they trace along the weave, but ey is not here.
+And still, ey succeeded. Ey succeeded because ey became the loom while we became the fabric. Ey became the shuttle and the pirn and the batten and the comb and the heddle, and the world is the lathe and we are the treadles working and working and working and we feel em beneath our fingertips as they trace along the weave, but ey is not here.
 
 But I digress.
 
@@ -70,7 +70,7 @@ What is one to do when faced with the enormity of love? What subtle powers does
 
 The Woman and I and all of our kin have not always had the best of luck with love, nor with standing up for ourselves. When I say that we have more traumas than simply getting lost, our unluck in love accounts for some sizeable portion of this.
 
-We struggled with the role that our bodies played, yes? For Michelle who was Sasha was short—as we are—and she was fat—as many of us remain—and she was so-called blessed with breasts to match. So-called by those who wished to in some way claim ownership of them. When she pursued a reduction, her back thanked her and those who bestowed such praise wondered why why why she would withhold that goodness from them.
+We struggled with the role that our bodies played, yes? For Michelle who was Sasha was short—as we are—and she was fat—as many of us remain—and she was so-called blessed with breasts to match; so called by those who wished to in some way claim ownership of them. When she pursued a reduction, her back thanked her and those who bestowed such praise wondered why why why she would withhold that goodness from them.
 
 And yet even that did not stop such attention, for we were, it seems, worth a certain set of things to others—to those beyond our friends and our superlative friend with whom we remain in love—and so why would they hunt for aught else?
 
@@ -116,7 +116,7 @@ She returned home after that talk with me and my beloved up-tree, with your humb
 
 My dear, dear friends, the longer I go on, the more I pace around through quiet rooms the more these words swirl around me in some quiet maelstrom, the more I wish that I could do the same. Sleep brings no relief. Within my dreams there are yet more words. The boundary between waking and sleeping is so faint, now—I write even in my sleep! My dreams are of The Woman! My dreams are of me sitting at my desk with my pen in my paw and paper before me, of ink on page and words flowing after like an eager puppy!—the boundary is so faint now that I have more than once awoken from uneasy sleep to found that I had indeed at some point sat down at my desk and written word after word after word, after word and word and word. I have found pages of endlessly repeating phrases. I have found scribbles that are doubtless words and yet which I cannot decipher, and I cannot remember my dreams well enough to say what they may have been.
 
-Did The Woman dream, we may wonder? Did she lay down and sleep after that conversation and look up to the constellations in the fabric of the sky, close her eyes, and then let play within her head some scene, some dream within a dream within a dream within a dream, some stream of meaning that the subconscious mind as dreamed by The Dreamer of the world dreamed forth?
+Did The Woman dream, we may wonder? Did she lay down and sleep after that conversation and look up to the constellations in the fabric of the sky, close her eyes, and then let play within her head some scene, some dream within a dream within a dream within a dream,\label{to-} some stream of meaning that the subconscious mind as dreamed by The Dreamer of the world dreamed forth?
 
 I do not know.
 
@@ -128,13 +128,13 @@ For she is our Pinocchio, is she not? She is our Pinocchio in reverse. She is th
 
 The Woman then had her inciting incident, did she not? She had that moment when she met with Her Friend and felt after some form of joy that she could not quite put into words, and with that joy, against that joy, she felt the loss of joy over time, the way it was secreted within the treats that she delivered quietly to her cocladists and the way it seemed to trickle out of her life. And the second part of this incitation was the way that this fading of joy was cast against the stasis of her stanza, the suffering supposedly bestowed upon them. It showed to her plainly the impermanence of such joys, and thus, by omission, the possibility of a permanent pleasure.
 
-She is and we are of a neurodivergent type, and so her approach to hunting for such joy as she imagined was of such a type as that: thorough and curious, methodical and whimsical. She set before herself by rule of fives five investigations: food, sex, entertainment, creation, and change. The first four of these brought joy, and even superlative joy, but not the joy she sought, and before her lay the prospect of change, and yet such a prospect was exhausting before she had even begun.
+She is and we are of a neurodivergent type, and so her approach to hunting for such joy as she imagined was of such a type as that: thorough and curious, methodical and whimsical. She set before herself by rule of fives five investigations: food, sex, entertainment, creation, and change. The first four of these brought joy, and even superlative joy, but not the joy she sought, not the stillness she sought, and before her lay the prospect of change, and yet such a prospect was exhausting before she had even begun.
 
 And so now we may only guess at the dreams of one such as her, one who lives within our consensual dream, one who is dreamed by The Dreamer who was at one point our superlative friend.
 
 Here is my supposition:
 
-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 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.
+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 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.\emph{stop-for-death}
 
 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.
 
@@ -148,7 +148,7 @@ This is my supposition for The Woman and her dream after she came home from my h
 
 \secdiv
 
-The longer we live—and, my dear readers, I will remind you that I am now 323 years old!—the more evident it becomes to us that there is a 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 but perhaps they too spiral—and so we live within a fractally cyclical tangle of time.
+The longer we live—and, my dear readers, I will remind you that I am now 323 years old!—the more evident it becomes to us that there is a 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 but perhaps they too spiral—and so we live within a fractally cyclical tangle of time.\label{florilegium}
 
 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.