I’ve been grading papers, although not enough to make more than a scratch in the backlog, giving a large public talk where I teach, in which I “came out” as a science fictionwriter, working on a new version of a course that involves field trips, a very strange and fascinating experience for this theoretical physics person, wading through acres of legal papers for other stuff, and attending to child, dog and household in general.  Not necessarily in that order.  In fact, definitely not in that order.

So, random thought #1: I really want to go visit Occupy Boston and support them, but can only do so if I warp spacetime, which does not seem feasible at present.  My institution held a teach-in that was atended  by at least a hundred students and was very inspiring.  I am wondering if I dare to hope (since environmentalists have also joined the bandwagon) that ultimately this movement will take up climate change as well.

An interesting critique that came up was that the movement was too unfocused and didn’t have a few main issues to fight for.  I don’t know if this is a valid criticism but I do know that when you are fighting against an entire system and not just a certain manifestation of it, you might have to be multi-pronged.  If the mini-movements that constitute Occupy feed off and reinforce each other with positive feedback loops, we may yet get a tipping point toward the future we want.  The complex, multifaceted and systemic problems we face are very modern problems and I doubt that we can confront them with the old, tired, linear mindsets.  Or so it seems to me at this juncture.

Randon thought #2: I’m thinking of Ettore Majorana’s disappearance and wonder what really happened to him.  I hope that he stayed alive and ended up living the way he wanted to, as elusive as the neutrinos he studied.  Somebody needs to write a play about him.

So much for a short post!  This is at least short-ish.  Let’s see if I can write something soon.

My record for stories is 4 a year, which is pathetic and only happened once about 7 years ago.  I can’t believe that at a time like this I am able to break that record!  The Muse is back!  And whatever has been holding back my creativity over the years has been swept away.  I don’t know how long this will last but I am more grateful than I can say.

Of the five stories I expect to complete this year, three are old pieces I’d written some 2-3 years ago but couldn’t complete.  They were not only incomplete but fragmented, messy, stuck, and I had no idea how to fix them.  Suddenly this summer they’ve come to reveal themselves in ways that are mostly satisfactory.

Apart from the short piece Yakshantariksh for the Bestiary anthology, I have the following:

1.  A global warming story that I’ve submitted but haven’t heard back from the editor for a while

2. My first alternate history story.  I read from it at Readercon this year.  At that point it was not really complete but it is as of a couple of weeks ago.

3. A very strange story about an old woman scientist-musician reflecting and waiting on the eve (sort of) of her death

4.  My fifth story, still working on it: A story about a woman who leaves her village to find her child, and discovers surprising truths about the place she lives; the geography of this culture is something I’m very thrilled about.

So now, on to more mundane stuff, like laundry.

So I’ve been reading, among other things.  What I’m reading could affect what and how I teach next semester, the essays and other non-fiction I write, and of course my fiction.  No real distinction between work and play for me.  Not being one of those whose life can be divided into neat, waterproof compartments, I rejoice in leaping over divisions, boundaries and walls.

Apparently, so do plants.

Not necessarily literally, although I’ve known plants to do those things.  But the naive view we have of plants — exemplified for instance by a child’s drawing of a stem, leaves, a flower or two, a living thing that cannot move, feel or think, moored to its surroundings, isolated in a physical form that can only sense light and air and water in the soil — that view may be about to change. 

We use perjorative plant-related terms to describe, for instance, a person in a coma (vegetative state), lazing in front of the TV (vegging out), a dumb, peasant of a person (cabbage head and variations thereof).  But what is a vegetative state, really?  When I was a child I learned that plants don’t have a nervous system.  But long before my time a scientist and polymath, Jagdish Chandra Bose, began to suspect that in fact plants had some kind of equivalent of the nervous system of an animal. 

Jagdish Chandra Bose beat Marconi to the wireless, and made some important discoveries about plants, but he was forgotten by history (although not by us in India) for a long time.  It is only recently that the record has been corrected and long-overdue recognition been given to a man who was not only a brilliant multidisciplinary scientist but a human being of rare principle who rejected, among other things, caste and class differences, British colonial racist policies, and the patent system.  Working in poor conditions with grudging or no assistance from the British-run Presidency College in Calcutta, he came up with some delicate and elegant inventions, such as the crescograph, for measuring plant growth.  He came up with an alternative theory of how plants draw water up from the roots (via electromagnetic impulses in cells), performed experiments that led him to deduce that conduction of stimuli was electrical in nature, and ultimately to hypothesize a kind of ‘nervous system’ in plants analogous to that in animals.  Some of his ideas might seem outlandish to us (such as his belief that plants responded to affection) but the conceptual audacity of his beliefs is refreshing in an age where scientists are culturally proscribed from thinking outside the box. 

As it turns out, some recent discoveries about plants are enabling us to at last revise the passive, inaccurate conception that most people have about them.  Plants communicate, not just within themselves, but with each other.  They may not be able to solve calculus problems or meditate on the nature of reality but they apparently respond ‘intelligently’ to stimuli and are aware of their surroundings in various ways.  Some recent experiments by Stanislaw Karpinski in Warsaw reveal that plants can store information from light and use it (for instance to shore up their immunity).  Another recent report from Ren Sen Zeng and others at South China Agricultural University brings to light a possible way that plants in a forest, for instance, might communicate with each other through a fungal network in the soil.  These exhilarating possibilities underline once more that the passive, mechanistic view of the world where the forces of inorganic nature and the will of humankind are the only real actors — that this view is at best simplistic and very likely simply wrong. 

Sometimes when I am out for a walk and very much aware of sunlight pouring down, of the breeze disturbing the trees, of sounds as varied and textured as cars passing by, leaves swishing, bird calls, it seems to me that the universe is indulging in an endless conversation to which we are mostly deaf and blind, like purely-English speakers in the tower of Babel.  If we open our senses to this constant storytelling that goes on around us, who knows what we might see and hear?

For instance while wrestling with the major issues of life, mundane and otherwise, I find myself fascinated by a wildflower in my crazily verdant back yard.  It is so small that I can barely see it, a pinprick of bluish-purple amidst a roseate of green leaves, suggesting intricate structure that my mere human eyes cannot resolve.  It makes me wonder what kind of creature might drink of the nectar inside this minute cup — or whether it is wind-pollinated, which I somehow doubt.  But mostly I just like to look for the tiny constellations and fuzzy galaxies of this wildflower amidst the tall grass when I take my dog out in the back.

It has been raining forever and ever, or so it seems.  The sound is immensely friendly and familiar, one that I learned to love as a child, but I am not used to cold rain.  Still, there is a ceremonious quality to it, like a grand purification ritual, which is beyond metaphors for those of us who suffer from pollen allergies.  I have been trying to befriend the oak tree whose pollen causes me such anguish every springtime, in a whimsical attempt to convince my body that it is not an enemy.  Washing dishes at the window in the kitchen I compose litanies of praise to the tree and its offspring.  Call it what you will but this late into the allergy season I’ve not had to as yet resort to anything more hard-core than over-the-counter antihistamines, a record of sorts for me.  My body’s defence mechanism knew friend from foe much better when I lived in India — when I came here in my twenties, something came amiss and it started to lash out at harmless innocents.  We’ll see how long the current situation lasts.

The rain is best heard when one is eating in the kitchen.  We love eating in the kitchen although it is always cramped and often messy.  Most days the radio is on, which lulls the dog to near dreaming, and we might talk of anything and everything, from the inhabitants of distant planets to the political situation in Egypt.  Then the rain is almost part of the conversation, drumming away on the other side of the window, dripping from the trees. 

Somehow I have also become fond of driving in the rain, at least when the rain is slow.  This may simply be due to necessity, because it has been raining so much.  But I’ve come to appreciate how the raindrops move on the windshield, sometimes apparently defying gravity, and the way the whole warm, sheltered coccoon of the car reverberates with the music of it.  It is best when the dog is also with us, riding in his soft crate on the back seat, because there is a sense of completeness, of all of us together in this strange little spaceship, sheltered from the elements but not divorced from them.  We often have the radio on, mostly public radio talk shows but often music, from classical to jazz.  Western, of course, because my CD player is broken and three of my favorite Hindi music CDs are stuck in the innards.  It is cozy in here like it is in the kitchen, and the mess — whether of car or kitchen — is far less important than the sense of contentment. 

As the rain falls, dancing on the grave of this semester, I still haven’t registered that it is over.  I have to reflect on the semester, to derive lessons from it, to work on the ideas I’ve got from the experience of it, but also I have to open up in my mind the notion that now I have time to write.  All semester I have been hoarding writing ideas like a miser collecting and counting precious stones, unable to do more than look at them once in a while, and that has become a habit.  Those characters talking in my head, the scenes and situations playing out as though on film that keeps subtly changing, all those things have to be given the freedom to run out of the prison and play.  Or if you prefer another metaphor, the seeds have to be allowed to fall on readied ground so that I’ll have something to harvest before the next period of extreme busy-ness begins.  I am like the farmer who keeps holding the seeds in her hand, counting them, clutching them, making sure they are there.  Time to toss them to the winds.

You can never tell where a seed might plant itself or what will grow from it.  I’ve been telling my daughter a series of long and increasingly complex adventure stories about the space pirate Vira who, it turns out, first made an appearance as a character in a favorite book of a character in one of my stories.  I keep thinking I should write these stories down, and maybe I will one day.  They’ve taken on a life of their own to the point where the people in them seem quite tangible to both of us.

The rain has stopped and I suppose I must as well.  More anon.

Talking about writing, I am lamenting the fact that I only published two stories this year, which means I only wrote two stories last year.  This year I’ve written one YA story coming out in an anthology in India, and that’s it.  It has been one of those years where Life has intervened, so although I have about twenty story ideas (at last count) some of them semi-begun, they have not matured to actual, complete stories.  Whenever this happens I wonder whether I’ve lost the ability to write.  We’ll see, I suppose.

For some reason I feel like talking about those two stories I did write.  Authors are not the best people to comment on their own stories, I think, but I am not going to commit literary criticism, only reflect a bit on how they came to be.  This is because in a way both are departures from what I’ve written before.  The first one, Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra, came about because of a story I’d written long ago, Three Tales from Sky River, about new myths that arise when humanity has spread to the stars.  For a long time I wondered about who would tell those stories, who would go from planet to planet collecting such tales.  Then I read Arshia Sattar’s Tales from the Kathasaritsagara, and I knew.  I’d come across the original 18-volume compendium before, in the dusty shelves of a university library, and was fascinated by the title: The Ocean of Streams of Story.  I knew that these stories had been collected and woven into a complex tapestry by a wandering poet called Somadeva in the 11^th century, but this book, written by a scholar, made them come alive for me.  Of particular interest was the story of Somadeva himself.  So I found my storyteller.  

So A Sky River Sutra came to be.  I see it as a stand-alone story as well as a beginning to a compendium of tales (first pointed out to me by Anil Menon — thanks, Anil!).  It does not have a traditional story structure — beginning and end are all mixed up — but to me that is irrelevant.  What is a story, after all, but a device to transport you to some other place, some other way of being?  All other definitions are artificial.  This is perhaps the first time I have broken free of the usual story constraints, and that is partly because of the way the Kathasaritsagara influenced me.  Arshia Sattar’s reminder that legendary storytellers such as Valmiki write themselves into their stories, and that Somadeva does not do so, except perhaps in disguise, made me think a bit.  Thus this is the first story into which I have written myself, although in a very modest way.  To think of oneself, a storyteller who is not at a remove from the story, is something fresh in our modern times where alienation seems to be the name of the game.  The observer is not separate from the events unfolding before her!  In many ways the story is one in which I am speaking to my own tradition, my own ancestral past, but in a new way.  Science fiction lets you do that.  Science fiction has the potential for exploring a multitude of freedoms (a potential that is quite underutilized, but still) — not least among which is the means for decolonizing one’s mind, of throwing off the confines of dominant ways of thinking.  Writing this story made me feel like I could breathe again.   

The second story I wrote stands out for me because it is the most uncomfortable story I’ve had to write.  Yes, I had to write it.  I didn’t want to at various points but the compulsion was too strong.  “Are You Sannata3159?” came out in PS Publishing’s anthology, The Company He Keeps this fall.  The seed of the story was something I read about in Jane Goodall’s book Harvest of Hope, in which she mentions an amazing story about an Indian bison hunt somewhere in the prairies of North America.  Then somehow a young man called Jhingur came into my head, and I saw him very clearly and felt I had to write about his experience.  The poor guy was trying to tell people in the story something very important, and nobody was listening to him, so I had to.  Jhingur’s name means grasshopper, and there is a character in a Premchand story I read long ago (wish I could remember which one) who has that name as well.  So the Munshi was looking over my shoulder as I wrote this story, although his influence was gentle, subtle.  I don’t think he ever felt the need to put gore into his stories, and generally I abhor that myself.  But in this story some gore was essential.  I am squeamish about such things so it was tough writing it.  Much later, after writing and submitting it, I realized that this story, too, blurred boundaries between writer and character and reader.  The title says it all. 

Enough about stories set down on paper or screen.  There are stories in my head, and stories in the cold world outside.  I saw flocks of birds on wires yesterday, all conferring very excitedly.  Were they talking about migration routes?  Declaring ownership of their inch or two of wire?  I really wish I knew.  People drove by in their cars, phones to ears or with the usual glazed looks on their eyes, apparently oblivious.  Sometimes I feel like an interloper among the human race.  I drove by the wetland that I still hope to save from the indifference and stupidity of people around it, and there was ice at the edges, and a great, clear circle of liquid water.  The cattails were grey and forlorn under a grey sky.  I want to know about the stories there, whether the grumpy beaver is still around and still (hopefully) grumpy, whether the hidden inner pond hides otters, one of whom visited me some years ago.  There is a man I pass on the sidewalk every morning, who always has a grin on his face.  Is he simple?  Does he know something you and I don’t?  He’s dressed somewhat raggedly, and carries a bunch of mysterious plastic bags.  Perhaps he carries the deepest secrets of the universe in his head, or maybe he’s thinking about lunch.  Who knows?

Back in India the family is eating chocolate cake.  I can just about taste it.  My niece informs me over the phone that it is really good.  I want chocolate cake and samosas and tea, but the pile of papers glowers at me.  So I’ll have to settle for tea and wandering about alien universes.  Sometimes the alien universes give me stories too.  One time a student wrote something ridiculously incorrect about the age of the Earth (it happened to be older than the universe by orders of magnitude).  That immediately led to a fable called The Registrar’s Yawn.  I haven’t sent it anywhere yet, partly because I see it as a start to many stories about the said registrar, who is an entirely fictional character, of course, and partly because it is very short.  Sometimes, writing a story is the only defence against insanity.

So the short answer is that when I was a hesitant young would-be writer, grown up on SF in which I’d never found people like me or ideas different from the Western Canon, reading Ursula Le Guin’s works at the advanced age of 32 blew my mind.  It was as though she, a person I’d never met, was telling me, a person she didn’t know existed, that there was a place in SF for the likes of me.  I hadn’t yet come across Indian SF, which was being quietly written in various Indian languages, with the exception of some short stories by Jayant Narlikar.   Besides, the woman could write!  So, rather like Eklavya in the Mahabharata, I decided to adopt her as a literary auntie. 

In other words, it is all (or mostly) her fault that I’m a writer of SF.  Readers may celebrate or decry that as they wish.  

The kinds of stories I really like are written well, have unforgettably vivid characters who are not all heroes but often quite ordinary, in which there is a strong sense of place, and where ideas are important.  Additionally I like the kinds of stories that speak to you in two voices — the voice of the text, and the non-verbal speech between the lines, the kind that goes deep and keeps talking long after the last page has been turned.  Ursula K. Le Guin’s works are all that. 

My brother was the first person to recommend her work to me, many years ago now.  He was active in the civil rights movement in India and the book of hers he kept trying to get me to read was The Dispossessed.  Among his friends it was an inspiration.  I’d become alienated from SF in my late teens, a distancing that lasted a decade, so I didn’t really listen to him until I had been living in the US for a while as an accidental immigrant.  I wanted to go back to reading SF, and I did, but I hadn’t found anything that spoke to me and my experience as a non-white, non-male stranger in a strange land.  So when I finally read her it was like coming home.  

And that’s just about her writing.  Since those first heady days of reading The Dispossessed, and The Left Hand of Darkness, and the Earthsea books, when I learned that you could actually invent cultures and mythologies and customs as busy and varied and interesting as those in our own world — a knowledge that helped the process of decolonizing the mind that I’ve written about earlier— since then I’ve had the privilege of meeting Ursula in a couple of writers’ conferences and of corresponding with her a few times over the years.  She has given a Raw (No Longer) Young Writer much-needed encouragement and support.  It’s helped me get through some tough times as a writer, particularly when I was a vulnerable beginner.  I remember an early story of mine she’d liked being later torn apart by a group of writers, and sitting back a bit smugly (I was young, relatively speaking) and thinking “Ha!  But Ursula Le Guin thought it was good, so there!” 

I could go on and on, but I suspect my limited eloquence will not be able to keep up with all I have to say, so I’ll stop with a quote from my friend Anil Menon. 

“Perhaps all writers have this invisible council of writers in their heads that they cannot disappoint. I know I do. Ursula Le Guin is one of them. Ever since I first read The Dispossessed as a teenager, she’s been both standard and inspiration. But it’s not just about her work; hers is an example of what a writing life could be: incredibly generous, kind and passionate. As we say in India: here’s to a thousand more birthdays for Ursula-ji.”

So here it is, from some of the people who come from other places and speak other tongues and have different ways of looking at the world: Happy Birthday, Ursula!  जन्मदिन की शुभकामनाएं!

What is ordinary?  That which is routine, usual, normal, according to the dictionary.  Of course this is context-dependent.  A coke can tossed in the bushes by the sidewalk is a not unusual sight in the streets near my house.  Ordinary litter.  But imagine a coke can on Mars….

We tend not to notice ordinary things but sometimes an artist (of the verbal or visual kind) can frame things so that the extraordinariness of the ordinary stands out.  I’m thinking about the worlds of Hayao Miyazaki, where despite the prevalence of such wonders as dirigibles and floating castles, one is struck by the beauty of a door, or a wooden wall, or a bowl on a table.  It is as though he enables you to see again.  This is one of many reasons why I love Miyazaki’s movies. 

A lot of what is ordinary is determined by cultural context.  Perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to say that domestic life, traditionally the woman’s sphere, is considered ordinary, boring, not worth writing home about, not worth writing about at all.  Domestic life is the humdrum canvas against which greater adventures play out, against which the rebellious must rebel.  And yet…  the artist I am thinking of now is Kim Stanley Robinson, writing about a small community in his extraordinary book Pacific Edge.  I’ve been re-reading it between tackling monumental piles of student papers and other tasks.  The book is, on the surface, about ordinary things.  A utopia that is not particularly utopic, the struggle to save a hill from development, but the hill isn’t particularly wonderful, or scenic, nor is it crawling with endangered species.  The stakes are not that high.  There are long town council discussions on the problem of water.  People grow things, cook, play games of softball.  Very domestic, ho-hum, one might think, but the novel is extraordinary. 

There has been quite a bit of discussion in the past few years about women’s writing in science fiction.  Although overt prejudice is not as prevalent or as overt as it was, science fiction as an institution has been accused of perpetuating prejudice in other ways.  One of the most insidious possibilities is that there are  unacknowledged, male-determined standards as to what makes good science fiction, and that if a story is too “domestic” (as are the works of many women writers as well as some men) it is just not good enough. 

I once went to an all-women writers’ workshop where some eighty women descended on a place in the middle of the Oregon forest to write and to talk about writing.  There were young women and old, and fat ones and thin ones, and people with smooth, beautiful faces and people with wrinkles and acne.  I’ve never thought of myself as one who particularly notices looks or categorizes people according to culturally determined standards of beauty.  But after about three days there I began to sense something rather strange.  The women around me were beautiful in a way I hadn’t realized before, wrinkles and all.  In fact the wrinkles were beautiful, crows’ feet like river deltas.  Ordinary faces, and yet they seemed to glow with something I’d never noticed before.  It was as though, removed from “normal” society, I could actually see these people in a new way.  And I also realized to what extent I had internalized societal standards of beauty. 

One of the things I learned from that experience is to view people — to view anything, really, with that different gaze.  I have to deliberately switch it on, but it is getting easier.  This different gaze, oddly enough, is consistent with my training in physics.  Or rather, while I wasn’t trained as a student to notice the beauty of the ordinary or to find the remarkable in the mundane, I’ve somehow ended up that way.   I think this also has to do with writing science fiction, and with teaching.  Teaching students who are not into the sciences, or even science students whose souls have suffered through too much stress, exams, learning toward jobs and tests, and an educational system that chops the universe up into disconnected little bits — I’ve had to think up creative ways in which to make the universe come alive to them. 

So it is one thing to tell students that physics is all around them, but quite another for them to experience that for themselves.  For this reason I reserve time in most classes for stories — physics stories, rewarded with candy.  (Yes, I am shameless).  This occurred to me when one of my students came up to me at the beginning of class some years ago, and said that he had been out drag-racing the previous weekend and he really felt everything that we’d discussed banking of roads and frictional and normal forces.  He didn’t just know it, he felt it, he told me, with great feeling, as though he had discovered something extraordinary!  This struck me as important because in physics the emphasis has been on knowing things through mathematics and scientific reasoning, as it should be, but there is also experiential knowing.  It can mislead us, it can bring us to incorrect conclusions about the world, which is why we use logic, mathematics and reason in the first place, but it can also be a place to start asking questions, and a place to relate what is generally viewed as pointless and remote, to one’s everyday, ordinary experience.

This year my students tell me some extraordinary stories about ordinary things that have suddenly stopped being ordinary to them because they’ve come to see how physical laws undergird everything.  So they notice that doors bang shut mysteriously on windy days (even when they are not in the path of the wind), and to some of them, at least, sunlight is not just sunlight, but the result of a highly melodramatic, cataclysmic process in the sun’s heart — and to top it all, it was once matter!  Now they notice things they tell me they never really paid much attention to before: static shock, the way the water swirls in the toilet, the parabolic curve of a ball tossed into the air.  I think I am succeeding (to some extent) in communicating to them what I’ve felt for a long time: that natural processes are stories in their own right, that the behaviors of protons and neutrons can be as interesting and beautiful as the behavior of people. 

I remember several years ago this became clear to me while walking through gently falling snow.  My mind was empty and idle, which seems to be a necessary condition for opening up that special sight, and I was thinking in a meditative way about snowflakes and water molecules and hydrogen bonds, and trying to see if I could tell whether the snowflakes were falling at constant velocity, and I saw how the snow had left its signature on one side of the trunks of trees, so even after the snow was over you could tell which way the wind had been blowing.  Walking, aware of the crunch-crunch rhythm of my feet, I felt part of some great composition, a symphony perhaps, so that even a twig fallen from a tree appeared extraordinary.

I once had the privilege of many conversations with the physicist George Sudarshan, who said something that has stayed with me.  He said that the job of the scientist is not to make discoveries but to do science, to think about the world in a certain way.  He said that the discoveries are, in a way, a side-effect of this way of being in the world.  He made an analogy with musicians, whose job is to play music, to be in the world as musical entities, rather than exclusively to produce something new.  To him simply being in the world and seeing it with a scientist’s eye, being aware of it in an open, non-confrontational way that he likened to the attitudes of ancient Indian sages, was enough.  This attitude led to the world itself offering answers to the curious, open, friendly mind.  At that time he was in his seventies and still prolific, publishing in several fields of theoretical physics, so this evidently worked very well for him.  I found this attitude very different, very liberating from the publish-or-perish mentality of the research world I had left only a few years before.  It has led me to ponder how and whether science would be different if un-yoked from the great capitalist-industrialist machine in which we are all, in some manner or another, cogs.

The question of framing, or changing context so that what is considered ordinary reveals itself as something worthy of attention, goes deeper and broader than I’ve let on.  A scholar I’ve read goes so far as to argue that context — or what she calls apparatus — determines meaning. 

A couple of years ago an archeologist-sociologist colleague at the institution where I teach began a faculty teaching circle on a book called Meeting the Universe Halfway, by Karen Barad.  At first I was wary because the book purported to derive deep truths about ethics and social justice issues from quantum physics.  There has been so much crap written and “justified” in the name of quantum physics that I have become allergic to such exercises.  However this book turned out to be different.  Barad is a former physicist, coincidentally a lattice gauge theorist, as I was, now in the department of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz.  She is also a scholar of the physicist Niels Bohr and the book is based largely on what she discovered about his interpretation of quantum physics.  Unlike what we were taught in graduate school, Bohr went much further in his speculations than the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics.  Barad extends Bohr’s insights to the realm of human interaction through a means that she insists is not analogical, developing a philosophical approach to the world called agential realism.  Apart from the physics chapters, which are wonderfully lucid, the rest of the book is really difficult for someone not trained in the social sciences, especially philosophy.  It is jargon-heavy and sometimes bewildering — I couldn’t have understood half of it without the help of colleagues in those areas, and I am convinced I haven’t understood all of it by a long stretch.  And yet several of these half-understood things resonated with me in ways that I can’t fully understand.  It is one of those books that needs a second or third reading, and is something I had planned for this summer before providence intervened with other issues. 

So at some point I am going to have a post exclusively on this book, but for the moment I just want to note in passing its relevance to the matter at hand.  One of the consequences of Barad’s work is the impossibility of isolating individuals from other beings and from their surroundings.  So for instance she talks about intra-actions between people and objects rather than interactions — a refreshing antidote to the excessive individualism that marks the standard Western view of the world.  So in the context of my subject today, nothing is really ordinary because so-called mundane objects or phenomena are part of an intra-acting whole.  (This of course does no justice at all to Barad’s work, but I hope to remedy that later on). 

I’m going to end by quoting a poem by Wendell Berry, written for his wife, about how that special sight can flare up and illuminate the familiar.

The Wild Rose
By Wendell Berry

Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart.

Suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,

and once again I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.

My reading has been somewhat haphazard, although I have deliberately sought out some books such as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Galileo’s Dream.  Others fell into my lap — a friend stopped by with Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock, for instance, and one time when I was in the library, walking out from the rather poorly stocked SF section, I just happened to see Fiction before me, and Barbara Kingsolver, whom I’ve been meaning to read, was right there — not in person but in the form of her books, which is what counts for me at the moment.

Galileo’s Dream was wonderful on so many levels I hardly know where to begin.  The sympathetic yet realistic-feeling portrait of Galileo, the historical details that anchor such a piece of fiction, the conversations with the Europans of the future… Also I happen to be particularly fond of Galileo, having studied him and taught him since I was this high, in a manner of speaking.  So — such a fictional portrayal that feels so real, where one can immediately relate to his need to understand the workings of the physical universe and the sense of wonder that accompanies a new discovery — what can I say but thank you?  I do think the book is flawed; some of the scenes and the people of the future do not feel quite real, although there are memorable exceptions.  But you know, I would much rather read a great flawed book than a mediocre book that risks nothing.  Plus in general I really enjoy Kim Stanley Robinson’s works, and I can hardly wait for the collection that is coming out later this fall.

The other wonderful book I read was N. K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.  Nora Jemisin happened to be on a panel I was on at Readercon this year (just one panel and two short visits to the con, since I had to get back to my dog) and while I had met her before and knew her as Nora, I didn’t realize she was that N.K. Jemisin, the one there was all the fuss about.  When my daughter asked her where in the con we could find her book (we’d read the first three chapters on her website the night before and were rather desperate) she very kindly gave my daughter a copy.  I only got to read the book after the offspring had devoured it, and I found it utterly, refreshingly wonderful.  Original, inventive in a way I hadn’t seen before, and with a realistic and likeable protagonist.  I can hardly wait for the next one.

Alice Munro is of course not a SF writer but a literary hotshot who has been nominated for the Nobel prize and has won many others.  I found the stories in A View from Castle Rock to be observant, moving, and wonderful studies of character.  There were parts I couldn’t relate to at all, because when there are narratives about colonialism that are limited to the colonizers, well, it just takes me out of the stories.  The stories set in the earliest and the most recent times, which sandwiched the era of the pioneers coming and taking over the place, were, to me, the most interesting.  In general, though, they served as a reminder to me that nothing much needs to happen in a story to make it memorable, or remarkable, or moving.  That everyday details of lives and the intricate dances of relationships through time are inherently interesting.  The stories are drawn heavily from family history and autobiography, to an extent I found somewhat revelatory (you mean one can do this?) and that is something to think about.  (Of course I’ve drawn from some personal history for some parts of some of my stories but I have a tendency to want to turn them into something so radically different from how it actually turned out that I don’t know if I can do a Munro).

Just to show you what a philistine I actually am, I did not enjoy Alice Munro’s other collection of stories so much, which I got eagerly from the library: the wonderfully titled Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage.  For one thing, I wanted to whack half the protagonists.  (For the record I have nothing against unsympathetic protagonists, but for some reason I found these people annoying — this may only be a result of my being over-tired these days, but still).  For another, I started to feel a bit suffocated after the first few stories.  How many variations on extramarital affairs or peculiar marriages can one deal with in a short time?  And surely there are other relationships just as interesting as the romantic kind?  (Actually there is one other kind explored in one story, but most of the rest are of the usual variety).  By the end of the book I was determined that someday I would write a story called Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Friendship, Spaceship!   (Note added later: I’ve begun it!)

Because, you know, much as I appreciate the realist genre, the reason why I read SF (and write it) is because of its largeness, its generosity of vision (at least in the best works) and the fact that it explores so much more than the human-on-human relationship.  Reading the realists of the day you would think there were no other sentient beings in the world than humans, most of them white, and most of them indulging in behavior that after the first three thousand times gets a bit boring.  So I will read Alice Munro because I think she’s really good at some things, but I will intersperse that with generous helpings of SF or other stuff.  In fact I could only get through the stories because I was reading a physics textbook as part of the preparation for my fall classes at the same time. 

Which is why, among the non-SF writers I so enjoy Barbara Kingsolver.  I’ve just read Prodigal Summer and The Bean Trees, and a short story collection, but I love her attention to landscape, geography and other living beings.  Even when the story is primarily about humans and their relationships, the fact that the environment around them is so alive and that the characters interact with it and extract from it not only metaphors but also beauty and spirit and livelihood, brings to her works a largeness that I find absent in what I’ve read so far of Munro.  The two biologists in Prodigal Summer, one a wildlife ranger and the other a somewhat surprised former entomologist who ends up a farm wife — the way they see the world is so interesting, so relational, in a multi-species way.  There are other equally fascinating characters in the book as well.

 Note added later: I just finished reading Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams.  I found it compelling and enjoyable, and the characterization skillful (the portrait of the father was particularly sensitive) but I am beginning to wonder whether the author considers bearing and raising children to be an essential component of a woman’s happiness.  All three books have female protagonists who somehow or other end up attaining a kind of fulfillment raising kids.  Having a kid myself, I can attest to the special joys and pleasures of raising children, but I can also quite unambiguously say that for me (and for a lot of other women, I think) it is certainly not enough.   And there are women who lead quite happy lives without children.  So what’s with that? 

Another Note added later: This third week of August finds us in a charming cottage in Maine for a vacation of about four days.  This is thanks to the generosity of a writer friend of mine and her husband, whose house this is, and whose hospitality is just what we needed after (and during) a difficult time.  My dog is entranced with all the new smells and has decided he owns the place — you should see him tearing about in his little cart.  We have to be careful because the house is on quite a steep slope and he is quite capable of hurtling down and losing control of the wheels.  For us, the peace and verdure, and the view from atop this green hill, are like good medicine.  The ocean is not far off although we haven’t been there yet.  The house is unsurprisingly full of books.  Last night I found to my delight a volume entitled Nebula Award-Winning Novellas, edited by Martin Greenberg, and managed to read one story before falling asleep.  This was The Persistence of Vision by John Varley: great conceptualization and a wonderful read, the kind of SF that extends beyond one’s comfort zone.  I love the novella form, and I think it is perhaps my favorite (I have at least three novellas in first draft form waiting to be finished) — compact enough to hold the kind of intensity that short stories do so well, and expansive enough that you can get some serious world-building done.  I’ve also started reading Matter by Iain Banks but I don’t find it very compelling as yet — perhaps it is the mood I’m in.  So today I plan to dig into more novellas.  There’s not much hope of rest because my dog still needs a lot of attention (last night he couldn’t sleep very well because of all the new noises I suppose, and therefore neither could I) so I might as well read.  And dream, and maybe even write.

So what can you do, beyond contributing to animal rescue organizations?  I have been thinking long and hard about it, and I’ve come to the conclusion that while we must obviously continue to follow the news and push world governments away from fossil fuels (where are the protesters, the artists, the writers?) we cannot let this opportunity pass to do something related but different.  As in local.

What if we ordinary folk who can’t go down to Louisiana to help, and can’t do more than send a few dollars here and there, started to look around in our own backyards?  What if we used the momentum from this horrendous event, the anger and the sorrow, to save the bits of wilderness in our neighborhoods, especially wetlands?  Because wilderness isn’t just what is out there, neatly packaged in sanctuaries and reserves like plastic-wrapped meat in the supermarket — it is outside our windows, whether it is an empty lot here or a local pond, or a cluster of old trees at the end of the street that may fall to the axe.  If we continue to think of nature as something remote and outside of ourselves, if we insist on cementing and urbanizing every inch of space around us and driving out the non-humans, we will kill ourselves just as surely as if we had more giant oil spills in the oceans. 

So.

Here’s my bit of backyard. 

This little piece of wetland is in my neighborhood.  There is at least one beaver lodge, and we disturbed a blue heron just as my daughter snapped the picture.  Beyond the far edge is a hidden pond, surrounded by thick vegetation and swamp, where I think there may be river otters. 

The place is completely surrounded by housing, including a major highway.  Nobody cares about it.  The businesses on one edge dump trash into the pond — so do some residents.  Apparently protected on paper, it is certainly not protected in practice.  And this year the mosquitoes are driving us crazy.

So I have gotten a botanist friend to take a look at it and we think we might be able to do something.  People can restore wetlands — look at the University of Washington’s wetlands restoration project, as reported by Timmi Duchamp on the Aqueduct blog.  And there is the constructed wetlands in Arcata, California, that works as a sewage treatment plant. 

Wetlands provide habitat for a wide variety of wildlife, act as natural filters, and protect groundwater from pollution, among other things.  Louisiana wetlands are particularly unique.  I’ve been there.  I remember being in a canoe many years ago with two other people, both seasoned residents of the area.  We met swamp cypress trees, poison ants, giant spiders, alligators, stately-looking herons, and were chased by a water moccasin.  It was quite amazing!  The beauty of the Louisiana wetlands and the threats to them before BP’s oil spill disaster are gorgeously captured in the award winning movie Hurricane on the Bayou.  The music is awesome too.   

So, how about it?  How about adopting the local tree-clump, pond, urban forest, patch of woods, and protecting it in the name of all the animals and other marine life that have been sacrificed on the altar of Big Oil? 

I suggest this not in place of other actions that are necessary for us to push as concerned citizens, but as a necessary addition to them.  Local action is, among other things, a strong antidote to despair.

So this is a post mostly about gratitude. 

Therefore, thanks: to my friend, the vet-around-the-corner, who has stuck by me with daily visits, bladder and dog anatomy lessons, middle-of-the-night emergencies.  To the good folks at the local Unitarian universalist church who called and brought sustaining food and found resources; to the friend who is coming in to mow my lawn and insists that it gives her peace.  To the rehab vet in the next town who lets me bring my dog in once a day for bladder expression and doesn’t charge me.  To the extraordinary people at Eddie’s Wheels for their patience, kindness and generosity.  To the massage therapist I found when I thought I’d fall apart, for not only bringing me back together but also for sharing the story of her own dog, which gave me some hope.  To my daughter for being there, for being steadfastly supportive, and non-squeamish about such things as dog pee. 

The prognosis for my dog is uncertain.  He’s certainly improved since surgery, in terms of bladder function, but there is no sensation in his hind legs yet.  The hospital where we took him did not operate on him until several hours after he was admitted, and only after he’d lost sensation in his legs.  The neurosurgeon tells us that dogs like him sometimes never recover and in other cases recover completely.  So who knows?  Still, if his bladder function normalizes and he has his wheels, he can have a good life.  For him a good life is hanging around in the kitchen for scraps, getting a back-rub,  marking every stationary object within a 2-mile radius of the house, chasing squirrels and putting the fear of Dog in the mailman, random strangers and neighbors.  Things are complicated by the fact that he is a rescue who was almost certainly abused before we got him, and therefore he has a fear-aggression problem.  Thus he still has to wear his plastic Elizabethan collar from surgery because he hates being handled when he is not feeling good, and will let you know it.  Yet when he is not afraid he is a sweet, goofy, charming fellow, a bit of a brat, but with a vast capacity for affection.  If, as in the case of  Nanny Ogg’s cat in the Terry Pratchett books, come magic could transform him into a human, he’d be both difficult and irresistible.  A pirate with a heart of gold, but more complicated than the stock character might suggest.    

So things are very difficult but it helps me to remember to be grateful.  That might sound clichéd to some but really, I could not have done without the support and remarkable generosity of friends and strangers who are no longer strangers. 

It also helps to see the greenery in the tangled back-garden, brought about by copious rain in the last few days — I saw an animal rooting about there recently, either a marten or a fisher, stocky and pale brown and busy-looking, like a Wall Street executive.  Only the day before that I saw an enormous snapping turtle, likely a female looking for a place to lay her eggs, standing on the sidewalk in front of the house, contemplating the road.  She looked like she had emerged from an ancient shelter and a long sleep  — much of her shell was covered with moss.  I’m always polite to visitors, even those that can extend their necks at the speed of lightning to relieve you of a digit or two – so I stood at a safe distance and said hello.  The turtle looked at me through rheumy eyes and said nothing.  I thought of A Tuin (Terry Pratchett again) and was silent.  Certainly the mossy world on her back was a world in its own right. 

When I came out to have a look about a half-hour later, she was gone. 

A couple of months ago when I was taking my dog for his long morning walk, I saw another remarkable sight.  There was some sort of commotion in a tree — I saw a flash of grey, sudden movement from one branch to another.  Then there was a gray squirrel scolding agitatedly over a nest, and a hawk flying out of the tree with empty claws, chased by two crows.  Against a pale morning sky the scene was perfectly choreographed.  Because I am human and a writer, I saw all this as a story, a metaphor, maybe, for help from unexpected quarters.  Because I am only a mote in the universe’s eye, however, I try not to see signs everywhere.  Surely the universe has better things to do! 

And yet. 

I am currently writing in a café, waiting for my car to be repaired nearby.  It is a peaceful island of a moment, but half my mind is with my dog, hoping he is sleeping peacefully in his pen, awaiting my return.  Other ongoing crises, no less important and immediate, occupy most of what mental energy I have left.  But I have not given up hope of doing some fiction writing this summer.  The other day when I was half-falling down from exhaustion I started thinking inevitably about gravity.  And a story idea was born, although it does not yet exist outside of my head.  And as a friend points out, one’s writing cannot be unchanged by the experience of expressing a dog’s bladder. 

The days seem to have the surreal quality (and the lack of controllability) of a bad dream, but these moments of clarity and peace are also part of the experience.  In the mix are also a couple of classic Hindi masala movies that we’ve found time to watch: Kabhi Kabhi and the more modern Dilwale Dulhaniya le jayenge.  So there’s sad-eyed dog, and film songs, and story ideas and strange animals and kind people calling, and new discoveries among car mechanics and writing recos for students and thinking about horrible oil spills and dealing with daily lack of sleep and worry, and the faint yet unmistakable odor of dog pee pervading all things like a sort of ether.  That’s my life at the moment. 

 More anon, hoepfully on other matters.