an angle i enjoy in cosmic/eldritch horror is when, instead resorting to the old classic "the horrors being so incomprehensible that they break your brain and drive you mad" cliché, the premise is that in comprehending the horrors you are so changed by the experience that your new state is indistinguishable to an outside observer from madness. you comprehend the unknowable just fine, but actually communicating that to anyone else is impossible because they just don't have the mental framework required to understand it. the eldritch horrors don't drive you mad. what does is the ordinary everyday horror of finding yourself isolated, ridiculed and doubted at every turn, no matter how hard you try to make yourself heard and understood.
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crows use tools and like to slide down snowy hills. today we saw a goose with a hurt foot who was kept safe by his flock - before taking off, they waited for him to catch up. there are colors only butterflies see. reindeer are matriarchical. cows have best friends and 4 stomachs and like jazz music. i watched a video recently of an octopus making himself a door out of a coconut shell.
i am a little soft, okay. but sometimes i can't talk either. the world is like fractal light to me, and passes through my skin in tendrils. i feel certain small things like a catapult; i skirt around the big things and somehow arrive in crisis without ever realizing i'm in pain.
in 5th grade we read The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-time, which is about a young autistic boy. it is how they introduced us to empathy about neurotypes, which was well-timed: around 10 years old was when i started having my life fully ruined by symptoms. people started noticing.
i wonder if birds can tell if another bird is odd. like the phrase odd duck. i have to believe that all odd ducks are still very much loved by the other normal ducks. i have to believe that, or i will cry.
i remember my 5th grade teacher holding the curious incident up, dazzled by the language written by someone who is neurotypical. my teacher said: "sometimes i want to cut open their mind to know exactly how autistics are thinking. it's just so different! they must see the world so strangely!" later, at 22, in my education classes, we were taught to say a person with autism or a person on the spectrum or neurodivergent. i actually personally kind of like person-first language - it implies the other person is trying to protect me from myself. i know they had to teach themselves that pattern of speech, is all, and it shows they're at least trying. and i was a person first, even if i wasn't good at it.
plants learn information. they must encode data somehow, but where would they store it? when you cut open a sapling, you cannot find the how they think - if they "think" at all. they learn, but do not think. i want to paint that process - i think it would be mostly purple and blue.
the book was not about me, it was about a young boy. his life was patterned into a different set of categories. he did not cry about the tag on his shirt. i remember reading it and saying to myself: i am wrong, and broken, but it isn't in this way. something else is wrong with me instead. later, in that same person-first education class, my teacher would bring up the curious incident and mention that it is now widely panned as being inaccurate and stereotypical. she frowned and said we might not know how a person with autism thinks, but it is unlikely to be expressed in that way. this book was written with the best intentions by a special-ed teacher, but there's some debate as to if somebody who was on the spectrum would be even able to write something like this.
we might not understand it, but crows and ravens have developed their own language. this is also true of whales, dolphins, and many other species. i do not know how a crow thinks, but we do know they can problem solve. (is "thinking" equal to "problem solving"? or is "thinking" data processing? data management?) i do not know how my dog thinks, either, but we "talk" all the same - i know what he is asking for, even if he only asks once.
i am not a dolphin or reindeer or a dog in the nighttime, but i am an odd duck. in the ugly duckling, she grows up and comes home and is beautiful and finds her soulmate. all that ugliness she experienced lives in downy feathers inside of her, staining everything a muted grey. she is beautiful eventually, though, so she is loved. they do not want to cut her open to see how she thinks.
a while ago i got into an argument with a classmate about that weird sia music video about autism. my classmate said she thought it was good to raise awareness. i told her they should have just hired someone else to do it. she said it's not fair to an autistic person to expect them to be able to handle that kind of a thing.
today i saw a goose, and he was limping. i want to be loved like a flock loves a wounded creature: the phrase taken under a wing. which is to say i have always known i am not normal. desperate, mewling - i want to be loved beyond words.
loved beyond thinking.
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Kaeya, despite being a sickly and gentle child, was his own kind of nightmare for Crepus and the other Dawn Winery staff.
See, Diluc is prone to mischief and chaos, dragging along his younger brother and a couple of other children into his plots and messes.
But Kaeya? Kaeya is the type to end up in the most random, and I do mean most random, of places. He would vanish for several hours, only to be found in an unexpected location such as, oh let's say that one time, he was found eating fruit with some friendly hilichurls...IN LIYUE.
He was such a curious soul that would easily get distracted by the wonders of Teyvat, but since he is so silent in both words and movements, whoever is watching over him would lose sight of him just as quickly.
He has caused several search parties in his youth, only for people to find out he was following a seelie to a treasure chest or napping with a young wolf cub in Wolvendom.
Crepus swears that Kaeya and Diluc are competing on who can give him gray hairs the fastest (so far, Diluc is winning, but Kaeya sure is catching up with every scream of panic from a designated babysitter and Diluc)
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Eddie is forever grumbling about “losing” his shirts, storming out of their room and flopping dramatically on the couch, declaring his favorite shirt is gone forever, it was there one minute and now it’s just gone. Gone gone gone!
And Steve will sigh and say it can’t be lost, shirts don’t just get up and walk out and Eddie will say this one did! all but harrumphing. So Steve will go in their room, look through the same pile of shirts Eddie looked through a moment ago, and come back out, holding it up, saying “this shirt?”
And Eddie will say it wasn’t there when he looked and they’re all black, it was camouflaged, and take the shirt half-annoyed, half-sheepish and murmur something about how there’s definitely a shirt stealing gremlin living in their walls that takes Eddie’s shirts then puts them back for Steve to find and make Eddie look like an idiot
And Steve will roll his eyes and try not to smile knowing it will happen again and again. And some days he finds it amusing, others annoying, but it’s all part of living together
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My best friend and I had a call recently---she’s back with her family for a bit helping out with some hometown stuff. As part of the stuff, she’s been going through a (deceased) relative’s scrapbook, compiled in the American Midwest circa 1870-1900 and featuring mostly cut-out figures from the ads of the day.
She talked about how painstaking this relative’s work was. (Apparently the relative was careful to cut out every finger, every cowlick; this was by no means carelessly or hastily assembled.) But she also she talked about how---the baby on the baking soda ad is ugly, it is so ugly, why anyone would clip this heinously ugly illustrated baby and paste it into a scrapbook? Why would you save the (terribly told, boring) ghost story that came with your box of soap?
(Why include these things in the first place? we asked each other. ”There’s a kind of anti-capitalism to it,” she mused.)
And we discussed that for a bit---how most of the images, stories, artists, and ads were local, not national; they’re pulled from [Midwestern state] companies’ advertisements in [Midwestern state] papers, magazines, and products. As a consequence, you’re not looking at Leyendecker or Norman Rockwell illustrations, but Johann Spatz-Smith from down the road, who took a drawing class at college.
(College is the state college, and he came home on weekends and in the summer to help with the farm or earn some money at the plant.)
But it also inspired a really interesting conversation about how---we have access to so much more art, better and more professional art, than any time in history. As my bff said, all you have to do to find a great, technically proficient and lovely representational image of a baby, is to google the right keywords. But for a girl living in rural [Midwestern state] of the late 1800s, it was the baking soda ad, or literal actual babies. There was no in-between, no heading out to the nearby art museum to study oil paintings of mother and child, no studying photographs and film---such new technologies hadn’t diffused to local newspapers and circulars yet, and were far beyond the average person’s means. But cheap, semi-amateur artists? Those were definitely around, scattered between towns and nearby smallish cities.
It was a good conversation, and made me think about a couple things---the weird entitlement that “professional” and expensive art instills in viewers, how it artificially depresses the appetite for messy unprofessional art, including your own; the way that this makes your tastes narrower, less interesting, less open.
By that I mean---maybe the baby isn’t ugly! Maybe you’ve just seen too many photorealistic babies. Maybe you haven’t really stopped to contemplate that your drawing of a baby (however crude, ugly, or limited) is the best drawing of a baby you can make, and the act of drawing that lumpen, ugly baby is more sacred and profoundly human than even looking at a Mary Cassatt painting.
And even if that isn’t the case....there was this girl in [American Midwestern state] for whom it was very, very important that she capture every finger, curl, and bit of shading for that ugly soap ad baby. And some one hundred years later, her great-something-or-other took pains to preserve her work---because how terribly human it is, to seek out all the art we can find that resonates with us, preserve it, adore it.
It might be the most human impulse we have.
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