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With them he felt at home; talking to them he did not have to adapt himself or assume a protective personality. If he did not always use their words he spoke their language — the language of a shared experience.
L. P. Hartley, from The Hireling
Yes I AM going to rewatch each little domestic scene like 5 times in a row, why do you ask?
The Sign of a Healer
This one is for Kyle, who asked for more of 'Unspoken Words' (currently in Uncollected Fantasy, but will be updated with the series tag soon). Thank you so much for your support, darling. I hope you like it!
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Edion watched as the strange woman, still clad in what could only be night-clothes, stood and washed her hands. His ribs ached, all of him ached, but it was all considerably better than it had been before. Whoever she was, and his money was on a mastermage or a goddess for the grandeur of her glass-walled summer palace, she was a deft touch at the healing arts.
“You’re very good at this,” he told her, although it was clear that the language barrier between them would have to wait for time and patience to wear it away. Hopefully they could manage along with gestures and smiles to ease the way. “Thank you.”
Her cheeks were still colored from his kiss to her hand, and Edion wondered if it was the custom to greet a lady that way in her land. There was no question that he was Elsewhere. The castle around them, built like a summer palace all of wood and plaster, was like nothing he had ever seen before. Wide glass windows were everywhere, and the lights above them, the product of a casual hand-wave over a white panel, spoke of more magic than he could imagine in a single place. The air was warm and comfortably humid in this spectacular glass-house room.
“Will you help with my armor?” he tried, and gestured to the pates that still covered his shoulders and legs. Fortunately, his gambeson laced together at the chest, or they would have had to take all of it off just for her to see to his ribs. All the same, it was heavy and he wanted to be rid of it. “I cannot twist to untie it.”
He accompanied the request with a telling yank at the laces holding his shoulder armor on, and she brightened with understanding. It was clear that, although she knew what armor was, she had never handled it before. Her hands were quick and clever, but unsure.
It made sense, if she was a mastermage, or even a mage-student. Magic-users rarely bothered with armor of any kind.
And she looked delicate, only as tall as his shoulder, and built lightly. Still, there was real muscle in her legs, and calluses across her hands. She walked like someone who rode well, which reassured him. Anyone who liked horses was someone he could stand to be around.
She said something he didn’t understand when they finally got his armor off. He promised himself that he would go over it when it was dry. The breastplate was halfway caved in from that last blow before the portal opened under him, but the rest was salvageable. It wouldn’t do to let it rust.
“I wish I understood you,” Edion told her when she stood and gestured for him to follow her. “I don’t know where this is. I don’t even know how I got here. I was drowning, and then there was a portal.”
She looked over her shoulder, long dark braid messy and nearly to the back of her knees. Her eyes were dark as well, he noticed, but her skin was light. Unlike the women of his own court, this lady did not shun the light, and her skin was tanned from hours outside. Her garb was scandalously revealing, only a long shirt, with trews that cut off well above the knee under it.
He couldn’t deny that the appearance of a beautiful, half-naked woman really did help to ease the battle-frenzy back from his mind. Also, it was extremely unlikely that she had a weapon hidden under so little fabric. That helped too.
The room she took him to was a marvel of tile and glass, but it was unmistakably a bathing chamber. An empty bath dominated one side of the room. The system of pipes was not unlike the Dwarvish contraptions of home, and Edion watched intently as she slowly demonstrated how they worked. He mimicked her and was delighted to discover the water to be both fresh, and so hot it almost burned to the touch. A second knob cooled it somewhat, but she laughed when he turned that one back down.
“I’ll need to wrap my ribs again if I bathe,” he told her, and pointed at his ribs when she cocked her head at him curiously, bright intelligence in her eyes. “You will help?”
She paused, trying to understand, and then went for a washing basin, and the cabinet under it. From there, she produced a long roll of fine-woven gauze, and a bag with a bright red cross on it. She pointed at the bath, and then at him, and then at the bag. The message was clear enough. When he was clean, she could help him better.
Her bag downstairs had the same marking. He assumed it was a Healer’s sign, and nodded. She understood. He waited when she held up a single finger, and made a gesture that seemed to mean ‘stay’.
Obedient, although curious, he waited as she stepped out of the room again.
The bathtub was almost full, and he turned it off while he waited, impressed by the smooth mechanics, and the dawning sunrise outside the magnificent windows. Outside had the look of a farm. He could see several sprawling barns, and an orchard beyond them. A rich, green garden surrounded the building he was in, but it had the look of a kitchen garden, all vegetables and herbs.
“I wonder if this is the realm of the gods,’ he said into the steaming air. “I might be dead.”
He hoped he wasn’t dead, but it was possible. The rebellion, particularly messy and entirely his mad grandfather’s fault, had been dragging on for three years now. Edion only wished he had a way to check on his mother, who was heavily pregnant. His father was an early casualty of the rebellion, and he wished he regretted that death more than he did. But his mother, his kind, gentle mother who refused to kill a single spider, deserved safety.
The woman, her name was Reinette if he understood right, returned. There was a pile of soft fabric in her arms, and Edion sighed in true appreciation. Clothing. Clean, dry clothing that looked like it might even fit him. It was an odd fabric, and an unusual cut, but at least it was clean.
“Thank you,” he said sincerely, and kissed her hand again after she set the fabric aside where he could reach it easily. “I don’t know who you are, or where this is, but thank you. Perhaps we can find a few words between us, after this.”
Smiling now, she patted his shoulder, pointed at the bath, and exited, closing the door behind her with a click that seemed almost prim.
“Alright,” Edion said into the empty room as he began to shed his wet, filthy clothing. He could feel the panic still chewing at the edges of his mind, and crushed it down ruthlessly. He might not know where here was, but anywhere that greeted him with a healer’s care, a bath, and clean clothing couldn’t be all bad. “Bath, clothes, and then, perhaps, we can find a few words in common.”
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Sent Beyond:
Her farm is at stake His country is at war. Their worlds couldn’t be more different, until a mysterious portal drops him into her bedroom, and changes their lives for good.
Unspoken Words
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More Stories!
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My list of pet peeves is pretty short. I can’t stand things that are misspelled intentionally (nothing should ever be “kwik” or “lite”). I don’t like rude people. And I can’t stand it when people talk about science communication as “dumbing it down.” Ugh.
People usually use the phrase “dumbing it down” to refer to instances when someone who is writing or talking about science refrains from using jargon. As if the absence of jargon somehow changes the work that’s being discussed. Guess what? It doesn’t.
To be clear, I have nothing against jargon. Jargon is, in fact, enormously useful. It allows people with shared expertise to communicate complex ideas and concepts using specific terms. That’s great. By all means, feel free to include plenty of jargon in your journal articles. But jargon becomes an obstacle when you want to discuss the work with someone who does not share that expertise. And that, very often, is a goal of science communication efforts.
The problem is that someone who studies, say, viral proteins, knows lots of specialized words that have very specific meanings in the world of viral protein research. But geneticists, statisticians, or other researchers with expertise in areas other than viral proteins may not know what those specialized words mean. Or, even worse, they may think they know what those words mean, but the words actually mean something completely different (a reminder that context is important).
This can mean not only a lack of communication, but the possibility of miscommunication. (Continues... )
On Emergence & Resistance re: Intentionality
I'll open with a story: Once I had a boyfriend. He wasn't a very good boyfriend, but I learned a lot from dating him. One issue we constantly had was that I wanted us to clearly articulate our needs, and he didn't. I've never been the best at reading social cues, so I've learned ways to adapt. I try to be clear with people about this, and invite them to be more blunt than they might otherwise be with other people. That means it's my responsibility to a.) hold open a space for them to be blunt and b.) trust them to be honest in that space.
For example: I can have a hard time telling when my conversation is welcome. So I'd prefer that someone just say "sorry, I don't want to talk about this right now" or even "you are bothering me, please stop" rather than hope I'm picking up on subtler clues, because I'm not. But that means I have to be chill about hearing it, act on the information, and not make it personal. It also means I have to trust people's intentions, and not be constantly second-guessing whether they're secretly annoyed with me if they're not saying so.
Enter Boyfriend. He didn't like this. He felt hurt or insulted that I couldn't pick up on his subtle cues. If he seemed unhappy, I'd ask, "is everything okay?" and he'd reply in the affirmative. Having no better information to go on, I'd proceed as if everything was okay. Later he'd tell me that he was actually not okay, which should have been obvious, and he was angry that I was unable to realize what was going on. But I felt like he'd been dishonest with me: why tell me "everything is okay" but then be upset when I acted on what he said? He hated that I even had to ask, assuming that if I "really cared," I'd be able to intuit the issue, despite me being clear about my poor intuition. It drove me nuts.
We eventually broke up, but I pocketed a crucial lesson: any assumption that things like healthy communication, intimacy, and positive practices should emerge 100% organically is naive. Devaluing something because it needs to be experimented with, built on, examined, or consciously altered is self-defeating. I think it's tempting to romanticize things like community and relationships as things that "can't be forced" and feel like any attempt to intentionally shape them risks undoing some delicate balance, but that's just not true. Eugene Eric Kim says it takes about three days to establish good collaborative and communicative practices. Audre Lorde says we must "consciously study" tenderness. In all the literature about healthy communities, we see these ideas in the language: conscious, mindful, intentional, experimental, collaborative, guide, build, create.
We see the benefits of these ways-of-being, and yet sometimes, we resist them if it feels like we're being too arbitrary or authoritarian about things we want to believe are organic. Of course, resistance to arbitrariness and authoritarianism is a good thing! "That's just the way we do things here" is a far cry from "this is the way we do things here." It would do no good to start every relationship by handing my partner a script of phrases to say to each other. There is a place for the passively-emergent and a place for the actively-built. Every community needs Tillichian "broken myths," which requires us to first develop myths and then make sure they break. Both processes are equally important. The key - as in all things - is to find a balance between prescriptive and descriptive, to identify and meet needs as they arise, to codify and ratify practices within a larger context of dynamic collaboration.
How we find that balance - how we tell when to passively observe what has emerged from our ways-of-being-together, and how we decide when to start actively building and practicing new ways-of-being-together, so that we avoid both the romantic's trap of fetishizing "organicness" (like the boyfriend) and the zealot's trap of pushing top-down methods for their own sake (the direction I lean) - is something I'm still working out. I think the best practices are often begun as emergent-organic and then made actionable or shared by some active-building process - but this doesn't always work, so what do we do when it doesn't? The question is its own answer, too, which takes us down something of a spiral: -Descriptively observe a community's organically-emergent methods of determining when to let something be organically-emergent vs. make something actively-built -Decide whether those descriptively-observed methods are meeting the community's needs - if so, consider codifying them; if not, work on developing actively-built ones But it's methods and practices and balances all the way down: the key is that it's all dynamic & collaborative.
"O süße Stimme! Viel Willkommener Ton der Muttersprache in einem fremden Lande!" (O sweet voice! Much more welcome sound of the native language in a foreign land.)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
I remember seeing this quote at the Chicago Cultural Center, and it's become very pertinent to my current situation.
'A' for apple.
the mind-map that started with the guttenberg press and took us through paradoxes that led us to where we are in the digital age, empathy, beyond good and evil, duality, paradox, evolution, shared language
