Friday, July 13th, 2007

Time	Event
7:36a	Sf poetry being made; third round (final); "No Covenant" I am astonished by -- and very grateful for -- the many suggestions you sent me for fixing the line that was giving me so much trouble. It wasn't easy to choose among all those alternatives, and I didn't do it in a hurry; I thought long and hard before deciding. I think that the version below is now final; if you disagree, just let me know. [Note: I will be posting a separate response to the two lengthy comments from dteleki, who does indeed disagree.] I've made only one change other than the "communicate"-line change. Instead of... "We should be thankful. Grateful. We do know that. We could all be dead, wiped out like the dinosaurs the way most of humankind died in the Great Flood." I've made that... "We should be thankful. Grateful. We do know that we could all be dead, wiped out like the dinosaurs the way most of humankind died in the Great Flood." I made that change to echo the "we do know"/"we don't know" motifs that come along in the two final stanzas of the poem. Thank you again for all your help. No Covenant It's being without a body that's the hard part... And that surprised me. No hunger or thirst; no lust. No pain. No urinating or defecating or menstruating or any-other-ating. No brushing your teeth; no washing your hair. So far as we know right now, no illness, although some of us wonder if we should count on that. [I mean, even when we still had bodies people talked, sometimes, about "spiritual illnesses."] But no colds, no cancers, no AIDS, no TB, no heart attacks; none of that kind of illness, ever any more. In the abstract this sounds like perfection. In the real world [or whatever this is we're inhabiting], it turns out to be hard to bear. For instance, you never really know where you are. Not that there's anywhere left to be, exactly -- but we used to know where we were because we could feel our bodies touching a chair or a bed or a path. Even when we were falling through air, we were feeling the pull of whatever we were falling toward. We knew where our head was and where our feet were; we knew where up and down were, and where the center was. Not any more. We should be thankful. Grateful. We do know that we could all be dead, wiped out like the dinosaurs the way most of humankind died in the Great Flood. [We find the story of the Great Flood more believable now.] Worse, we could be part of a handful who survived, struggling to go on living, on a devastated planet, in misery. Instead, here -- well, there's no "here," really, but the word still needs to be there with what follows -- here I am. Here I am in some where. And I am suffering. Not in pain, no ... but I am suffering. I know the difference now. It took us so long just to learn mindspeech. If we hadn't been so desperate to find one another -- if we hadn't just been screaming the names of those we loved at the top of our minds -- we might never have learned. The message the Holy One sent us was more than clear. There it was, posted on the sky, and in Universal-Translator-fashion we each saw it [perhaps some people heard it rather than saw it] in our own native language. This is what it said: "I'm disgusted. I'm entirely out of patience. You've wrecked one world, I'm not going to waste another world on you! Get ready for a change of status." And that was it. It was a briefer warning than babies got when they left the world of the womb for the world beyond it. [Some of us think that may have been a mercy.] One minute we were humankind, embodied, living on Earth; one breath later we were bodiless, living none of us knows where. We didn't even feel our selves being shucked, it happened so fast. We do know it's not heaven -- because of the suffering. We do know it's not hell -- because there's no pain. We're wondering now if there are things the bodiless can do, to make the time go by. Think about it; at first we didn't know we could "talk" to one another. And then we learned that we could. Is there more we could do? We don't know. What we do now... Is it flying? Is it floating? We don't know. Is it forever? We don't know. (9 Comments | Comment on this)
8:05a	Sf poetry being made; questions about "No Covenant"... What follows here is a set of questions from dteleki; the first one is left over from a separate comment. 1. "What is the exact nature of the 'suffering'? Fear or anxiety re the future? Fear or anxiety re the fate of loved ones? Or what? I would have assumed that after some indefinite but fairly seemingly long period, during which absolutely NOTHING of great significance was perceived to happen, any fear or anxiety would have burned itself out, and been replaced by sheer boredom. Boredom can certainly be suffering, especially if it's extreme, but I would expect it to be called 'boredom' instead of 'suffering'. " === "Unanswered questions, where answers might enrich things, instead of closing off questions that are more interestingly left undiscussed: 2. What language are people thinking at each other in? Can everybody think at everybody else now, with either exact translations going on automatically or else with everybody thinking exactly in the same way? Or do the pre-'status-change' language divisions still hold? 3. Are some people more skilled or more eloquent or more persuasive at thinking-at-each-other than others? Or is everybody exactly equal now? 4. Does poetry still exist? Do the tonal and rhythmic and phonemic aspects of it still exist, or have they all been eliminated together with physical vocal tracts? 5. Does music still exist? Can people think singing at each other? Can people think wordless melodies at each other? Can people think drum-like rhythms at each other? 6. How was the Holy One's message perceived by atheists? by deaf-and-blind people? by babies without language? If a person has more than one language, or more than one native language, which one was it in? 7. What happened to artificial intelligences? (if technology had advanced enough to create genuine ones.) Did artificial intelligences also get the change-of-status? 8. Do people who formerly had mental illnesses caused by bodily chemical imbalances still have those mental illnesses now? e.g. schizophrenia, major clinical depression, bipolar disorder? (assuming that they really did have bodily chemical causes)." I'm not willing to answer these questions; if I'd wanted to answer them I would have put the information that answers them into the poem in the first place. I've posted them because it might could be that some of you would be interested in writing some fanfic that answers one or more of them -- either as poems or as prose -- and because I would be pleased to read what you write. (10 Comments | Comment on this)
8:45a	Sf poetry being made; comments about "No Covenant"... dteleki posted the following (excerpted from a longer comment) in response to the second draft of "No Covenant": "I'm not sure that this should be a poem, specifically. I'm not hearing much in the way of 'poetic' features, beyond what I would normally expect from ordinary spoken rhetoric. I think that with some line breaks removed, and others turned into paragraph breaks, this 'poem' would make a very nice short-short." This hurts. Not because dteleki had any intention to hurt me -- I am absolutely certain that was not the case -- but it hurts all the same. For two reasons. First reason: Two years now I've been trying unsuccessfully to write this narrative as a story, of whatever length, with no success. And now I'm being told that doing that would just be a simple matter of taking out a few line breaks and turning a few others into paragraph breaks. Ouch. Second reason: If I enjoyed tormenting and haranguing my readers, I could provide you with a very long list of the "poetic" features I deliberately put into "No Covenant"; I worked hard to construct them, and it was anything but easy. It hurts, therefore, to read that they're both invisible and inaudible. Ouch. Now I want to make it clear that I'm not complaining about what dteleki has said. Not at all. On the contrary; I approve. And the simplest way I know to provide that clarity is with this quote from the July/August issue of my Linguistics & Science Fiction Newsletter: "Drew Morse not only edited The 2007 Rhysling Anthology: The Best Science Fiction, Fantasy, & Horror Poetry of 2006 for the Science Fiction Poetry Association, he wrote a preface. A very courageous preface. On page 9, he quotes James Blish (back in 1952) saying that for sf to 'really grow, it is going to need a lot more criticism.' This, Morse says, applies even more to SF/F/H poetry today. 'What we need,' he goes on, is what Blish refers to as 'a critical examination on the same order of severity as that applied to other mature works of literature.' ... I agree with Morse completely that we have to stop coddling our science fiction poets about their work; we have to stop writing them Gricean Reviews. That's not going to be easy, because the dominant critical tradition goes in the direction of 'If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all.' I absolutely do not mean to suggest that our reviewers and critics should try to out-vicious one another, in the fashion so popular with many of their peers. But sf poetry criticism has to be brought out of the nursery, so the work itself can be demonstrated to have the ability to stand on its own two feet like any other body of work. It's time." dteleki also said, in the comment: "I'm seconding somebody else's suggestion that this story can't really be expanded into a full short story; on the grounds that a story, even a short story, needs something happening in order to give it a plot and a story arc, and the whole point of this story is that nothing of great significance is happening and nothing appears likely to. Ever. But that simple point, even if it can't sustain an entire short story, can certainly sustain a short-short." This time, although I still welcome and approve the critical examination that's being provided, I'm a bit puzzled. It seems to me that "No Covenant" has an explicit plot and story arc. Like this: === Humankind, given a wonderful planet on which to live, proceeds to wreck the place. The Giver in question decides that humankind no longer deserves the privilege of living on that planet; further, the Giver decides humankind can't be trusted with any other planet. The Giver announces these decisions to humankind by posting a message to that effect in the sky in a form that every human being past early infancy will be able to understand. And then, almost instantly, those human beings find themselves still alive but bodiless, and in an environment about which they have no information and with which they have no way to interact. Desperate and terrified, they scream at each other soundlessly, and discover that communication is still possible. And they begin to converse, and to wonder -- and at least one of them begins to suffer. === I respectfully disagree with dteleki that nothing is happening; rather, the story arc seems to me to be contained in flashbacks, which are a venerable narrative device. I am, however, willing to be persuaded that I am wrong about this. [To read the complete comment from deteleki, scroll down at http://ozarque.livejournal.com/424705.html .] [For more information about the SFPA's Rhysling Anthologies, go to http://www.sfpoetry.com .] (27 Comments | Comment on this)
11:59a	Personal note; clarification about "hurt".... I had a comment from teapot_farm containing some excellent and helpful analysis and criticism -- and a sentence saying "I hope ... that this hasn't made you feel more hurt." Which tells me -- thank you, teapot_farm -- that I've made a mistake and need to clarify it. I don't feel hurt at all, and haven't been feeling hurt; I've just stumbled over the cottonpicking English language. I quoted a statement from dteleki and said "This hurts" and "Ouch." I didn't mean that other than in the way I would have said "Ouch" if somebody had stuck me with a pin. I read the statement, and it hurt, the way being stuck with a pin hurts. Just for an instant. It didn't cause me to start suffering from an Ongoing Emotional State Of Being Hurt, not even for an instant. I'm sorry to have given that impression, and I sincerely hope that I've cleared it up now. Constructive criticism is a good thing. (1 Comment | Comment on this)

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