Alma/Personal Logs
This article has a lot in it that resonates with me and my character. (All emphases are mine)
The Miracle of the Mundane - "what Selin wants from the world is a divine and magical kind of connection between disparate souls"
Alma thinks magic permeates all of existence and what people think of as mundane actions are actually not mundane. Those actions are interacting with the magic that permeates all of existence, and contributing to ripples and changes in it, but the interaction is so small that it is beyond her ability to perceive. She has faith that one day she will be able to.
"We are to view ourselves as unique snowflakes only as it facilitates more efficiently melting ourselves into bottled spring water. Our ultimate value is always quantifiable. All magic is lost to our sad economies of survival. Competition always supersedes connection."
Again and again my character and I return to a hope for an alternate ending to the tragedy of the commons.
That loss of magic could be the forced consensus of the technocracy. That loss of magic is not just a loss in magic but is a loss in the ability to form significant connections. Those can't happen without trust. The interdependency of life is destroyed.
They say to each other, “Whatever is here, even when it feels little dark, even when it confuses me, I have chosen to view it as divine.” Their connection is a kind of a miracle, against a landscape dominated by people more like the therapist— people with good intentions who nonetheless tell stories that lead in circles, further and further away from the truth.
Being able to maintain uncertainty and confusion is a miracle. Is a source of possible understanding. Doubt is a powerful foundation. I like how this post explores negative capacity and the comfort of tolerating discomfort.
"We must reconnect with what it means to be human: fragile, intensely fallible, and constantly humbled. We must believe in and embrace the conflicted nature of humankind. That means that even as we stop trying to live our imaginary, glorious “best lives,” we still have the audacity to believe in our own brilliance and talent and vision — even if that sometimes sounds grandiose, delusional, or unjust."
Maintaining humbleness and an awareness of intense fallibility despite competency is important to my character and me. It is interesting to watch other characters interact with her because I think her attempts at presenting appropriate fallibility get received as weakness and incoherent derangement. and incompetency.
Alma is forlorn that she doesn't get to talk to James to share with him the joy of the idea that you can talk to things in the world and then hear what they have to say if you listen really hard (dramatic irony) Alma met James while she was communing with the universe and sending love out to the trees and the ground and everything. And then this person is walking around and says Sycamore.
and she's high on life and thinking, if only everyone knew! and then this person sort of knows and she wishes she could let him really know. I mean, really. really really know." and then they say the most amazing cool thing. and it's even a lesson to her.
She's noisy, and they say listen.
Alma is very noisy and babbles to the world; James listens
(Raven gallery: Jim listens. The problem is he repeats what he hears.)
"I know my tools. I know theirs. I can see decades in time. I just made it harder." She bursts in to tears because she knows how much she can't do right now. "What if they blame you? You're not the seed. I /am/. I don't fucking need you to push me anywhere. No one can fucking push me anywhere. I don't always know why I push back--it's taken me a long time to understand why I pushed back on them so much. fuck them. I love them, but fuck them anyway. They better fucking believe me. The better fucking beleive me when I say what I think is stronger than any fucking promise. The promise is an accident. it is a fucking coincidence! If I don't do what I tell them then I'm not me and I'm dead!"
"We--They...No, me. I feel a calling that is part of my being to guard the world and all people in it. I feel a calling to witness the world and all people in it because if I don't see things as they are then I cannot understand them. Worse, I won't be able to understand consequences. Ultimately, I feel a calling to make those in authority /understand/ consequences. truly understand. Mistakes at this scale--Mistakes would be horrible. Horror. They would lead to Horror. All of this goes beyond any oath. If this calling ever changes then you should consider destroying whatever thing is walking around in this shell because it won't be me." She soften a moment, "Or, at least talk to them first, see if they are a person. and they don't have to be saints or anything. No one does." She looks at him, in all earnest. Perhaps even more earnest than Jim.
illusion of explanatory depth
"The ecosystem itself is not just a landscape full of plant and animal species; it’s an intricate network of relationships, including those between predators and their prey, between flowering plants and their pollinators, between fruiting plants and the animals that disperse their seeds. Each such relationship constitutes a link between trophic levels."
Hardin's First Law of Human Ecology: "We can never do merely one thing. Any intrusion into nature has numerous effects, many of which are unpredictable."
"I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." J. B. S. Haldane
An alternate ending to the tragedy of the commons: "My big takeaway from the patterns Ostrom identified is that sustainably managing the commons requires a high degree of context among participants. Most failure outcomes can be traced back to context collapse."
Meet The Invasive Insect That Is Changing An Entire Forest Bird Community: "With anything related to ecology, you don’t really understand the potentially far-reaching effects of taking pieces out of the system," Mr. Toenies explained. "The interactions between species and their environments is so complex that you can’t take something out, like an entire species, and fully understand the effects of it."
