aliaspseudonym | Recent Entries

I have mentioned a few times (albeit mostly on tumblr) being an alien, but it's occurred to me that 'alien' does call to mind images of things like spaceships and laser guns and little green or grey guys with big heads, and a lot of that is misleading. When i say 'alien' i just mean 'i'm not from around here.' So here is a story. Please note that this story is not meant to reflect actual facts so much as feelings of bigness and coldness and farness and emptiness; it's true in essence even if not strictly factual, because it describes me.

imagine a big round piece of rock and ice.

imagine it hurtling through deep space, light-years from everything.

imagine clinging to it, wrapping around it like the merest wisp of smoke, watching the stars go by. cold, but the cold is part of you, & alone, but that aloneness, singularity is at the core of you.

that's me.

then there's something bright from a very great distance

a little planet around a little star but

covered in tiny flames. warm & bright & so many

so i took very careful aim and,

i jumped.

fast and far as i could, skimming through nothing at the speed of thought

it took a long time & i started to miss my cold rock a bit but, eventually

i landed.

I wrapped myself around the whole blazing blue-green planet & for an instant i could feel see hear know every twitch every hair every blade of grass --

was too much, spread too thin, i had to jump again to the big, cold, empty rock in orbit -- it was comforting, reminded me of home.

i looked down & watched the little flames walk around on little legs & do things & say things but

none of it meant anything to me, & for the first time i felt not just alone but

lonely. &

i wanted to know what it meant.

i picked a big empty place & i made one last jump

i compressed myself down, down to almost nothing, down to to the size of a single cell. _became_ a single cell.

Later, i felt cramped and crowded and wasn't sure how to relate to anyone around me. I kept to myself and soaked up information about the physical world as quickly as i could, particularly information related to space and the stars. I avoided most social interactions because they felt uncomfortable and i didn't understand what the point was. Eventually, though (starting in late high school and continuing through university), i came to realize that the people around me were by far the most interesting things to study. Hence, i'm studying literature and biology to learn about people on a physical and mental level.

i guess that's about it?

So, i was thinking earlier today (and i can't take all the credit for this, cause jewelfox and her series on otherkin were a big part of what got me thinking about this kinda thing) about belief, and otherkin, and spirituality and all that kinda stuff.

This is going to get kind of controversial right off the bat, i guess, but i'm going to come right out and say that the phrase 'i don't believe in _______' is an assumption, and furthermore a bad, hurtful assumption in many cases.

The obvious example is the atheist's 'i don't believe in god', but 'i don't believe in dragons' and 'i don't believe in fairies' and 'i don't believe in aliens' all fall into the same category of assertion. The problem is that a statement of disbelief based on lack of evidence unpacks to a baseless assertion that the thing being disbelieved cannot exist. i.e.

I don't believe in aliens.

is essentially the same statement as

I believe that aliens do not exist.

Now, the sole article of evidence that can be offered for this statement is a personal lack of experience with extraterrestrials, so the whole logical statement is

I have never encountered an alien, therefore aliens do not exist.

Which is not so much a logical argument as an excellent demonstration of egocentric fallacy.

Now, to be completely fair, in the case of aliens most people actually mean

I believe that humanity has never encountered aliens.

which is based on the much less dodgy premise that such contact would probably have left behind some level of concrete evidence. Still, underlying that premise are a lot of assumptions about the nature of alien existence and the way in which they operate. Likewise, the atheist's argument against god is generally aimed at a specific god and often has significant logical weight behind it. Unfortunately, atheists almost never restrict their claims of disbelief to the god with which they have a bone to pick, or for that matter even to beings which are commonly defined as gods. Thus, the skeptical atheist's worldview rests on the notion that

I have never encountered the supernatural, therefore the supernatural does not exist.

which cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered logical or rational.

That said, i must admit that i cannot actually fault this sort of disbelief purely on grounds of being an assumption. Logic is a neutral beast that yields results based on the assumptions that we feed it, and you've got to feed it something or you'll get nothing out. My actual purpose here is to examine (and question) the grounds under which assumptions like 'the supernatural does not exist' are made.

As we develop (and 'we' here refers to all thinking beings) we form a rough framework of how the universe operates. We then use this framework to judge all incoming information. We do this because it is generally the most useful way of dealing with what our senses tell us about the world, and indeed it allows us to rapidly generate useful assumptions like 'things fall when you drop them' and 'touching hot things is bad for you' and 'glue is delicious' (ok, maybe that was just me.) As we develop further, though, we start to encounter ideas that clash with our established image of the universe, and so we reject them out of hand. This process can be useful for making rough but often accurate guesses about truth of things without having to do a great deal of research, but it is also the basis for all forms of fundamentalism and a great deal of simple intolerance.

Generally, our system of rejecting things that clash with our private universes becomes a problem when it is applied to other people, particularly other people's beliefs about themselves, because it leads us to deny the identities of others on grounds of personal incredulity.

Take as an example the assertion

I am an alien.

There are a great number of immediate objections most people will have to an apparent human making this claim. Objections like

You have a human body.
You have never physically been to space.
You were born on earth.

And so on and so forth. These objections are, however, knee-jerk incredulity reactions and not actually the base of the skeptic's doubt. After all, it is entirely possible that a person could be, or appear to be, completely human and yet still be alien in nature or spirit (haven't you watched any sci-fi?) The skeptic's real problem is that they have applied the self-proclaimed alien's claim to their personal framework of reality, rejected it, and based on a set of assumptions logically decided that the 'alien' is either a. lying or b. crazy. If they settle on the first they will accuse the 'alien' of escapism, of wanting to be 'special.' If the second or a combination of the two they may offer undesired help with resolving the 'alien's obvious psychological problems.

Now, these frameworks are not logical constructions of any sort. They are simply useful mechanisms for processing incoming data, and in the case described above the process causes the skeptic to attack another person's identity for no personal gain due to a personal incredulity reaction. This is a bug, not a feature.

You can probably see where this applies to other unverifiable personal beliefs, like those in deities and spirits and the supernatural, as well.

As an alternative, i would suggest returning to the logical processes i discussed near the beginning of this entry. Rather than 'I don't believe in aliens', stick with the much more logical statement

I haven't met any aliens yet, but if I do I'll keep an open mind.

And guess what? Now you have.

Nice to meet you too.

gasp, apparently she has, like, fingers! and legs!

( Cut for big picture! )

( Read more... )

Drat.

I read my last entry over again and i'm not sure how happy i am with it. I didn't quite say as much as i wanted to or in as much detail as i wanted to. This is kind of hard. Not only is it a bit embarrassingly personal, it's a secret and it feels wrong on a number of levels to just give a secret away. Plus i'm not sure how interesting this stuff actually is >.> Also, i haven't thought about this much simply because i haven't had a whole lot of need to. I think it matters, though, so...

So what am i then?

I said 'mooncat' before, which i still like as a sort of imaginary species name. I think, less specifically, though, i'm a shadow. A sort of elemental form of mystery or something like that. As i said before though, shape doesn't really matter to me.

I said i'm concerned with secrets, mysteries and hidden things before. Basically that means that my driving concern is and always has been to accumulate knowledge. As a moonkitten (shadowling?) i focused heavily the physical world. Did fairly well in school, learned a fair bit about how the physical world works. As i grew up i started to narrow my focus a bit. Living things are more interesting for me, particularly thinking people. I'm currently double majoring in biology and literature in hopes of understanding people (and i use that word in the most inclusive possible sense) both in terms of what makes them tick and of how they think.

The problem with doing this while in a human body is that people expect reciprocity from me. I see them, they see me. For me to get to know them they want to get to know me. I've heard of something called 'autistic invisibility' where people overlook you because you're not sending the right body language signals or something. I've always kind of wished i could figure out how to do that, or to do that thing they do in novels where they blend in perfectly with a crowd so nobody can pick you out. Or anything, really, that takes me a step closer to invisible, undetectable. Sometimes i like to just sit on my own in coffee shops and listen to the stranger's conversations happening all around me. Obviously, i won't learn anything useful since i'll never recognize those people even if i do see them again, but secrets have value of their own. They're a source of energy for me, i guess, particularly creative energy.

I keep going off on tangents and looking back and realizing i didn't _really_ say quite what i intended to. I meant to talk about social stuff there, but i didn't so i'll do it now. I'm autistic, but i can converse and interact fairly normally when it's about stuff. I can talk through a school project, say, with another person no problem, i can talk about movies and anime and give opinions on things and make jokes and stuff just fine.

I have a terrible time telling secrets, though, even with people i actually trust (and especially in a medium like this.) I keep secrets reflexively, rarely tell people more than the minimum i think they need to know about me. I'm saying 'secrets' but 'important things' might be a better word. It's a category that covers anything that's important to me that will come as any sort of a surprise to the person in question. It gets easier to tell secrets to people i trust, but inversely, it gets harder to tell them to people who are important to me because their reactions also become more important (which is why i end up hardly telling my mom anything. <.<) And when i say i have trouble telling them i mean first i will avoid any situation where i have to do it like the plague, second if i'm forced into such a situation i freeze up and can't look at the other person (or sometimes keep my eyes open at all, so i don't have to see them seeing me.)

I'm not really shy though. Actually i don't really mind being the center of attention sometimes; i can do public speaking or anything like that where i'm putting on a one way performance for people easily. Because i'm when i'm doing that, i'm acting, and acting really just another sort of lying/secret keeping. I'm showing one face to the audience, even if it's a fairly real face, while keeping most of myself hidden behind the role.

Ok, where was i? Hmmm. More stuff about why secrets are important to me, i guess. When i was younger i used to wander around the walls of buildings, poking at odd bits of pipe and things like that in hopes of finding some sort of secret passage. I came up with elaborate routines of rapping at bricks and rubbing pipes and taking a certain number of steps to the left, which obviously never opened anything but i did them anyway cause they felt sort of special.

More recently, i've taken to exploring the neighborhoods around me quite thoroughly on rollerblades (though i've been lax about this recently, i ought to try to go out again more when it gets warm again.) I'd literally go down every street and every cul-de-sac. I tried to go at different times of the day, too, because there are some places that look very different at dusk and at night. (Near my school, there's a patch of bushes in the middle of a parking lot where the leaves turn to pure gold at night, because of the way the streetlights have been set up above them. It's beautiful. (And that didn't really count as telling a secret because i didn't tell you where or how to find them :P))

That's a woefully unorganized block of text up there and i probably missed a pile of stuff, but i feel a bit more like there's actual content in this post this time, so i'll post it and see if i can't take another run at being clearer some other time.

..actually, i guess i can try to clarify not being a cat while i'm at it. I like cats a lot. They're mysterious and graceful naturally. But while i feel like i have a bit of an affinity with them, i don't think i _am_ one. imagining myself in a cat shape doesn't seem a great deal more natural than my human shape. An 'ideal' shape for me would, i think, be a mishmash of a cat's eyes and maybe tail and ears with a lot of cool stuff from a bunch of other animals and maybe some things that don't even exist. But even then, that wouldn't be a true form; it'd be more analogous to a dream car or a really stylish suit of clothing i guess. Shadow-me is liquid and takes on the shape of it's container. If i was the final multi-stage boss in a RPG, i wouldn't revert to my true form after you beat me, i'd just melt or something. (and like i said before, if i DID have a true form, i think it might be somehow wrong to give away what it is. <.< at least in a public journal like this. that'd be an important secret.)

It was snowing outside at work today, snowing quite hard although there was no wind and it wasn't very cold. You could just see the fuzzy outline of the moon through the clouds overhead. It felt special, really special. Maybe sacred, maybe something else, i'm not completely sure. I kinda started thinking about why it felt special though and i think i figured out some stuff about me. What i am, i mean.

I'd call myself a mooncat, i guess, since if i'm going to be a thing the thing probably ought to have a name and that's as good a one as any. That doesn't really tell you what a mooncat is, though, so...

I was thinking about why i like the falling snow so much. I already know i'm attached to the moon, and i like this time of year because the nights are long and the days are short, but i wasn't sure about the snow. I like rain too, and storms but those are quite different. Eventually what i realized was that the quickly-falling snow blankets everything and covers tracks. Similar to how the night makes it harder to see and rain and wind can make tracking harder, and how the moon only shows it's whole face once a month. Mooncats are sort of... shape-fluid, i think; how we (assuming i am not the only one of me, which is a completely baseless assumption of course XP) look is less important than how me move. So, i'm fairly fond of this body but i feel like if i had a different one i'd be fine with that too. I feel pretty much the same way about gender, i'm happy with the one i'd have but if i was the other i don't think i'd care.

Ok, i went off on a bit of a tangent there. What i was getting at with the whole snow and hidden stuff thing was that i think mooncats are supposed to be invisible, or at least able to turn invisible at will.

Also, i'm not actually a cat. Not in the therian/otherkin sense. Cat is a fursona for me, and i suppose maybe the form i would have chosen if i'd been given free choice in the matter, but it's not my 'true form'. I'm not exactly sure what my 'true form' actually would be... and even if i was, i'm not sure i would tell you. :P because i think secrets and mysteries and hidden things are kind of the whole point of being what i am. Mooncat i guess X3

Well, that didn't take as long as i thought it would to explain in text >.>; but i guess that's all i've got for now...

Current Mood: loony

i hate feelings.

They get inside you somehow

& make everything wet & dirty

where it ought to be shiny clean.

Rust your heartgears so they grind, & slide

oiley and viscous, discolouration

down the inner wall of the chest;

they splash & flail & muddy the water

till grit clogs the tubes & pressure builds

& hairline cracks burst so everything leaks & mixes

& turns to a sludge of passion that settles heavy

just behind your stomach,

where you think your heart probably ought to be

but it isn't.

I haven't stopped doing this or anything!( Big pictures! )

I finally got the kitty cat's design to a point where i actually like it, i think! Sketches of Maddy and Ozz included for size reference, he's pretty teeny down there.

( You know the deal, multiple large images ahead! )

Cherish? My, um, video logs show you haven't slept or left your room in 48 hours.

Uuuugh shut uuup! Busy cracking open the secrets of the universe, gimme another hour.

I thought you were hacking into the port departure/arrival records or something? We don't actually need that for another week.

I said SHUT UP you're distracting me gimme ONE MORE HOUR I CAN DOOO THIS.

You said that six hours ago.

I MEAN IT THIS TIME.

I've been authorized to flood your room with sedative. *hissss* You may experience some light-headedness.

bwah? eeeeeuugh @_@ *zzzzzz*

Woo, that went fairly well! i need to come up with a better way to shade the backgrounds though, the squigglies are a bit tooo distracting.

Cherish's room is the logical result of a naturally disorganized person who rarely actually touches the ground XP there is basically no room to walk.

Ozz, Maddy and Iffy were all missing up-to-date properly shaded drawings, so i fixed that!( multiple images! )

did some more today!

( multiple images below! )

this turned out so awesome :D i think i got her outfit down pat now. it'll be a challenge to make the pirate dude turn out half this good XP

still haven't named her though v.v open to suggestions if anyone has cool ones.

i have decided start just tossing all the random stuff i draw in preparation for this comic up here! sooo, here you go!
( So many pictures! )

Ok, so, somehow I got suckered into the boring pointless writing chore. Maddy can be surprisingly persuasive! She tells you do do something and you're like, no! but then she just stares at you with those glowy green eyes and you suddenly decide that maybe writing up little profiles on some of the other crew members wouldn't be so boring after all.

Oh yeah! I am Cherish by the way. Communications Officer and hacker extraodinare. Encrypted secrets pretty much line up for my inspection and doors hold themselves open for me.

[INCOMING TRANSMISSION FROM STARSHIP INFRARED VELOCITY]

[TRANSMISSION BEGINS]

Um, hello I guess. I'm Maddy. Maddy - x√2, technically. You say that Maddy minus-x-root-two. Nobody ever knows how to say it, but I told you now so try to get it right. I'm the captain of the Infrared Velocity. It's a small Monarch class freighter, but with some heavy modifications. My engineer tells me I shouldn't publish the nature of most of the modifications to avoid giving away our ship specs to our competitors. He thinks I don't know most of the stuff he's put on is illegal in most ports. I know, of course; I'm a lot cleverer than he thinks. I just don't care enough to bring it up. Maybe if we were operating mostly out of a particular port, I'd follow its rules, but we're drifters. Deep space is our home port, and the only law in deep space is the Spacer Code. Anyway, everyone has illegal modifications. It's the only way you can compete with the Corp ships. You want something done by the rules, you hire one of them. You want something done faster for cheaper, you hire us and you don't ask too closely about exactly how we did it

Ok, crew, I guess. I'm the captain, obviously. There's four others. They're not the crew I'd have chosen, but they're ok. Better than I expected. They haven't let me down yet, at least, and nobody's tried to kill anyone else very seriously.

Cherish is the communications office (who is pretty much the BEST EVER) officially, and technically she does do that job, but she's really a hacker. She comes from some isolationist society of crystal nutters with tech that looks like magic to most of us. She's wanted back there for reasons I don't fully understand or care about, but it doesn't matter because hardly anyone ever leaves. Apparently she was a Witch back there, with like a capital 'w', which was an actual job of some sort. Her whole floating tthing is part of that, as is her ability to dance around encryption that would take years for the best codebreaker AIs years to break. Unfortunately, she's also a loose cannon, and her unparallelled ability to find out things she shouldn't makes her a very dangerous loose cannon. Her heart's in the right place, I guess, but she just doesn't think ahead, and sometimes not even her exception abilities can deal with the trouble she causes.

Oh, apparently Ozz needs my help with something down in hydroponics. Sigh. Alright, I guess I'll get to the rest of the crew some other time. Let me know if you have any questions for me, or for Cherish I guess. In fact, I might just get her to write the rest of these. She is communication's officer and all. Actually never mind I think I will do ALL the boring pointless writing chores MYSELF and stop trying to sucker crew members into them!

Captain Maddy, signing off.

[TRANSMISSION ENDS]

I did a presentation in Women's Lit class recently on creativity, talking mostly about Cixous's idea of ecriture feminine, or female writing. My argument was that ecriture feminine is a manifestation of what I called yin, or shaded, or have-not writing. Yin for the part of the taijitu that represents it, shaded as a translation of the idea of yin and have-not as what is in my opinion the essential part of the idea of yin. There are some quirks in the idea -- many of the traits we associate with yin (passivity, for example) are rare in shaded writing, but I would argue that the only truely essential trait of yin is scarcity as opposed to yang abundance. Other than that, shade tends to take on whatever traits are devalued by the light, either of its own volition or by imposition.

In writing, light refers both strength and richness of literary tradition and opportunity to write and have that writing read. Lighted traditions are rich and complex with strong intertexual links; creating a new text in a lighted tradition means building a new level on a large, well-established body of works. The problem with lighted traditions is that each work is seen in the light of every other work, and is compared to them. Pressure to write like Homer or Milton grows, and the more intense the light, the more washed-out and uniform new texts become. Eventually everything becomes either too complex and obscure to understand or too timid and derivative to possess meaning.

Creative writers, and artists in general, are poor conformists. As lighted traditions grow overly complex and esoteric, new ideas tend to spring up in direct opposition to them, forming shaded traditions that usually set themselves up directly opposed to the ruling lighted tradition. These shaded writers challenge and subvert the lighted assumptions and bright to the fore values that the light ignores or devalues. For example, Romanticism challenged victorian neo-classicism by mixing genres, focusing on the self in nature and refusing to simply emulate the great writers of the past. As individual shaded writers begin to form a tradition, their works begin to inform one another and the whole literary movement moves in the lighted direction. Eventually the tradition will become too strongly lighted and will need to have its own assumptions challenged once again by newer, fresher ideas, completing the natural cycle.

This is how it works under ideal conditions, of course. The dominant literature of the most privileged classes has indeed followed this sort of wave pattern. When we talk about female writing, though, we are talking about a group that has been thrust deep into the shade for pretty much all of time. The resulting shade is so strong that the writers that do emerge are too far and few between to establish a strong, lighted tradition, so women's writing remains dark. This has been changing, recently, in some contexts, but the more elitist circles (particularly those concerned with 'serious writing' and the canon) are still strongly male-dominated. Women's writing is breaking in, but women writers in this context have to deal with a literary canon that is horribly scewed in its portrayal of their gender (representing them almost exclusively in broad, generalized strokes as active monsters or passive angels.)

That said, similar rules of shaded writing apply to all oppressed or silenced groups. Racial minorities, third world countries, queer groups, disabled people, etc. In all cases the shaded writing with varying success to subvert and overcome the lighted writing it opposes.

a fairy story

    All along the highway the streetlights light the way, bathing the path ahead in warm yellow light. In every streetlight, in the incandescent heart of every lamp, sleeps a baby sprite. They are born with the evening, they feed on the gratitude of travellers, and by morning they fade to nothing under the harsh light of the sun. Most of these infant spirits of light will never wake. Most.

    It was a blurry, rainslick evening. Water drifted down from the sky in misty sheets, drenching ground and air alike, turning roads into shallow streams that churned and boiled with the passing of cars. A nearly-full moon blazed futile light high above the dense cloud-cover. The lesser lights lining the streets burned dutifully in its stead, casting eerie halos of orangeish-yellow in the mist.

    An instant later, in less time than it takes to blink, one of the streetlights lay by the side of the road, it's bulb smashed and it's light extinguished. A pair of tiny eyes opened, and a pair of tiny wings stretched as a shapeless thing, rather like a firefly without the fly, rose from the wreckage of its home to stare in wonder at the world.

    Past the fallen streetlight, a car lay turned over by the side of the road. The driver's side was smashed in and loud crying echoed inside. The little sprite did not notice the car, though. It's eyes were drawn to two shadowy figures unseen by the passing traffic. One was a woman, tall and willowy with plain clothes and neat shoulder-length hair. The other was much taller and vast with many dark wings that flapped slowly and feathers that rustled in strange winds.

    The woman cried and pleaded with the thing, saying, please, please, please. Comforting wings wrapped around her, and a voice both soft and infinitely powerful replied, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. You can't go back. Please, please, she said. He still needs me, she said. Who will watch over him now, she said.

    The sprite drifted closer, peering through the waving wings at the woman. She saw it, and said, oh, little spark. Little spark, have I woken you? Little spark, will you watch him for me?

    Spark nodded. It seemed like the right thing to do. The woman said, thank you so much. The voice said, everything will be alright. Then all the wings beat at once, and both figures vanished. Then Spark noticed the car, and when she flew down to peer through the window she saw inside, amid blood and wreckage, a young boy crying in fear and pain. Sirens were growing close. Spark saw her more colourful kin approaching from the distance in flashing, whirling bulbs. She stepped through the glass of the window and spoke to the crying boy saying, shhh. Shhh, it's ok. Your mother's safe. A kind creature with many wings carried her away. Shhh. She asked me to watch over you. It'll be ok.

    The boy did not hear her, or else did not listen. He kept crying and crying until the men in the firetruck came to tear open the car door and take him away.

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shady side of the moon

i'm the mooncat -- this is where the flying saucers stop for tea

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This is Captain Maddy Speaking Please Pay Attention

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