E. Lily Yu @elilyyu@mastodon.social

Belated #introductions:

Does what it says on the label. I write things like
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/yu_04_11/
and
https://hazlitt.net/longreads/view-top-stair
and sometimes things like
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaP6uJ4yJLI

What's on tap here: bad dad jokes, slow posts, fiction like knives, and the occasional mushroom

Just got home from the opening night of Worlds Without End at the Wing Luke. I had the privilege and honor of helping with early planning for that exhibit, and was astonished to see floorplans and layouts come to life. It's a beautiful experience and something I wish I had as a kid. The crowd tonight, even the strangers, felt like family.

The exhibit includes a small VR game created by Kelly Campelia and a fabulous team, based on "The Wretched and the Beautiful," which was a joy to play.

Was reminded today that rain, too, can bring beauty, and not only when it passes.

I have three horse chestnuts in my pocket and I'm not afraid to use them

To be sane in America today is to stand apart and alone, for the most part, a pebble in the rushing stream of insanity. To be battered on all sides by advertising that creates desire and destroys contentment; fast-food reactions of self-righteousness and judgment; artificial contingencies that create false competition between demographics. To be worn down and still separate. Perhaps it has always been this way.

But I would like to see what a handful of pebbles, cemented together, could do.

Binge-drinking is normal, sexual assault is normal, disbelieving women and people of color is normal, lying and evasion of and resistance to the truth is normal, men's anger and entitlement is normal, punishment for women's anger and entitlement is normal. But absolutely none of the above is sane.

I come back over and over to the distinction between normalcy and sanity, and the striking incompatibility of the two in present-day (and past) America. "Normal" is Gaussian, is the behavior of the majority, is socially prescriptive through conscious and unconscious social learning; one is punished for not conforming to "normal."

At this time, in this world, all I can offer you is a walk in the woods

Move slowly and gently and with respect for all beings and things.

Chocolate popcorn, $3 truffle chips, black figs, damsons off someone else's tree, and the sound and smell and pewter light of the first rains of autumn.

Can finally say that N.K. Jemisin and John Joseph Adams have selected "The Wretched and the Beautiful" for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018.

http://www.johnjosephadams.com/best-american/projects/basff2018/2018-table-of-contents/

And that's all the consolation I get, on this blisteringly hot night with no breeze and no air.

And yet today there are millions seeking truth and learning to discern truth to the best of their ability; learning to be comfortable with discomfort, accepting of pain, and present, open, and curious; learning above all to listen to new stories, while putting down the poisoned narratives that each of us were given as children and taught to use against others and ourselves.

Millions. More than at any other time, though proportionately the change may be less.

With such a heart, and particularly with such a gathering of hearts, the presence of a liar is sometimes not necessary; nor is the explicit expression of the lie; it is understood intuitively, as birds learn to flock, what unspeakable, unbearable damage a truth-teller might do to that shoddy blanket fort of a story that such hearts hide under, and depending on what is permitted in that society, the penalty ranges from insult and ostracism to death.

This has always been so.

Considering the long sweep of history, it seems to me that the greatest enemy of the truth is not the lie but the compromised and infantile heart that longs to be lied to, that will do violence to truth-tellers in order to preserve its own comfort, that desires ignorance, that sells its freedom to the liar for the cheapest of stories. Rarely does the liar himself carry out the bulk of the violence, after all. Rather, it's accomplished by those who embrace his lies.

Arendt traces it back to the development of the advertising industry as a major economic and rhetorical force, but before that, in 1892, Ida B. Wells was exposing "the old threadbare lie", for which she was hounded out of Memphis; and several thousand years before that, in the heart-truths of myth, Cassandra tried to save her city by speaking the truth, and was imprisoned, then brutalized and murdered, for her pains.

Insofar as we have a national sin, it is the preference of comfort, often padded by self-righteousness, over truth.

In our infantile clutching at those narratives that flatter, swaddle, and comfort us, an observer might feel both compassion for the universal childlike longing for consolation and the horror of seeing such a gesture indulged in by an adult, whose clutching, kicking, and defending of said narrative blanket entails real harm and violence to other humans, unlike an infant's.