Ken’s Blog

This weekend I read an article in the NY Times entitled A Vegetarian Reporter Explores a Hunting Dilemma. In order to get the story, the reporter went along on the hunt, but didn’t reveal that he was a vegetarian.

Which means, of course, that in order to blend in, he needed to eat meat while on the hunt. To help make sense of this, the reporter defines “vegetarian” as follows:

“I’ve been a vegetarian since college in what started as an experiment in healthier eating and morphed into concerns about the environmental impacts of a non-plant-based diet and a vague discomfort with killing animals. Mostly, this dietary habit stuck though I never lost my taste for meat; I succumb to the occasional pork chop and sometimes steal nibbles from my son’s morning bacon.”

To me this is a very interesting definition of the word “vegetarian”. It raises all sorts of fascinating questions.

For example, if you usually don’t eat people, but do indulge in the occasional meal of human flesh (say, in response to social pressure within your local cannibal community), can you legitimately claim that you are not a cannibal? According to this NY Times article, I think the answer would be yes.

Similarly, if you generally prefer to have sexual relations with adults, but do, when no grownups are available, indulge in the occasional act of fornication with small children, can you legitimately claim that you are not a pedophile? Again, according to the NY Times, the answer would be yes.

Who would have guessed that you could learn such fascinating and surprising things from the Newspaper of Record?

A friend and I recently went to see Bohemian Rhapsody. Since neither of us had ever seen a film in 4DX, we decided to try it.

I won’t talk too much about the movie itself, because that topic is way too complicated to fit into a single blog post. Although you might try to imagine someone honoring Steven Spielberg by making a very entertaining movie that is also highly antisemitic.

But the 4DX. Ohhh, that 4DX. It was so amazingly wrongheaded, it was truly epic. Every time there was a camera move with a dutch angle — even on intimate interior shots — our chairs tilted and swooped as though we were being chased by ravenous velociraptors.

We came to dread any camera move on screen, because the bumping and rumbling and shaking would take the whole audience right out of the movie. Air would blow pffft into our faces any time somebody opened a door, and for long stretches it was nearly impossible to pay attention to what was happening on screen.

But the piece de resistance was a touching scene in the rain between Rami Malek and Lucy Boynton. The scene, taken on its own, is tragic and lovely, and is meant to relate a wonderfully intimate moment of quiet acceptance.

But it takes place in the rain, you see. So when the first squirt of water spritzed into our faces, we started to giggle. Then the water kept coming, and coming. Several times I had to wipe off my glasses just to be able to see the screen.

There were these two actors, emoting their heads off in a tender bittersweet moment, and the whole audience was getting drenched and laughing uncontrollably.

I feel bad for not just for the actors, but for everyone who worked on that movie before the 4DX people got their hands on the experience. Yet I have to admit that it was one of the funniest things I’ve ever experienced in a movie theater.

Even if the humor was entirely unintentional.

I am fascinated by the idea of visual languages that arise as generative grammars from an initial set of visual icons. There is a rough analogy to the way that natural languages can be described as generative grammars according to Chompskyan theory.

 

To give a simple example, here is the visual symbol for Mars:
This is can be used to represent “male”.

 

And here is the visual symbol for Venus:
This is can be used to represent “female”.

 

We can generatively combine these, to obtain a visual symbol containing both “male” and “female” parts:
This can be used to represent “hermaphrodite”.

 

Finally, we can create a grammatical construct that consists of two males dominating a single female, to form a “devil’s triangle”:
This can be used to represent Brett Kavanaugh.

I wrote this little story as an homage to Mary Shelley. As I noted in my post of Nov 1, this year marks the 200th anniversary of science fiction, a genre that she kicked off in spectacular style when Frankenstein was published anonymously in London in 1818.

In a spirit of fun, I tried to work lots of SciFi subgenres into the story, while employing a vaguely gothic style reminiscent of Shelley’s masterpiece, or Polidori’s The Vampyre, or pretty much anything by Poe.

I managed to cram quite a few science fiction themes into one little story. There are elements in there of time travel, telepathy and mind melds, alien visitors, robots, alternate realities and several others besides.

In keeping with my long-running White Mirror theme, I even threw in a happy ending. In these dark times we need as many happy endings as we can get.

For those of you who celebrate it, Happy Thanksgiving!

Delicately I lifted the little box, and held it out with the open end upwards. At once the tiny metallic creature flew inside. With a smile, I put the box gently down in the place where I had found it.

How marvelous, I found myself pondering, that a sentient being may be in two places at once, with the ability to inhabit multiple identities. This is perhaps the greatest of the gifts bestowed upon us by Nature, a consequence of our capacity for sentient thought.

For what is our memory of those we love, but a repository for their very soul? If we are truly loved, our essence continues onward, residing within the souls of those who have loved us.

But enough of philosophical musings. It was time, and I was ready.

I stood up and turned toward the house. I noted with little surprise that the shutters were once again drawn and closed to the world, as they had been when I had first arrived at this place.

Walking with resolute yet oddly light steps, I ascended the short stairway to the unopened door. I turned the doorknob and pulled. This time the door swung open easily.

There was my beloved, waiting for me, in the soft amber glow of the lamplight. We embraced, and shared a knowing smile, for we had conquered death itself.

With a little help from a friend.

fini

Gradually I managed to quiet my mind, with an aim to focus only upon the thoughts that seemed to be emanating from this tiny being hovering in the air before me. It was a strange sensation, I must say, to listen not with my ears but rather with my mind.

Slowly but surely, the thoughts from the strange little being began to form themselves in my head. At first I sensed only sadness — no, not sadness — loneliness. There had been a long journey, traveled over an unfathomably large distance, with terrible losses suffered along the way.

I came to understand that the creature I beheld was a voyage, but not just any voyager. The journey it had undertaken was unlike any known to humankind. My mind had difficulty encompassing the vastness of its odyssey. I simply had no point of reference for such a thing.

Yet there was more. There had been another, very much beloved, now lost to time. I was beginning to understand — there was a pattern here.

I cannot say for certain whether the creature was learning to understand the workings of my human mind, or whether my mind was managing to learn an alien way of thinking.

Yet in the end it did not matter at all. I saw now that my path was clear.

We stared at each other, the strange little flying creature and I, for how long I cannot say. Time began to drift, as though reality itself had entered another dimension.

At some point I began to become consciously aware of another sensation entirely. I realized that my unconscious mind had been trying to inform me of this new sensation for quite some time. This knowledge had in fact been hovering just out of the range of my awareness.

Gradually the sensation began to change, to evolve, acquiring a new level of vividness and urgency. It was almost as though a voice was speaking to me.

I felt the presence of this uncanny voice not from without, but from within, inside of my own mind, although I knew such a thing to be impossible. Yet what is the impossible, but a possibility that has yet to be encountered?

I cannot pinpoint the precise moment when I realized that the little creature was trying to speak to me. The communication in question was not in words precisely, but in some form of expression that was far deeper and more primal, yet not any the less articulate for that.

But what was it trying to say?

Whatever the small flying thing was, it was clearly metallic in nature, and it seemed to be emitting a faint high pitched buzzing sound. I conjectured that perhaps I was gazing upon a machine of some sort.

Yet if the thing was indeed of mechanical construction, it was unlike any mechanism I had ever seen or heard of. Assuming such hypothesis to be correct, either I was witnessing the fruit of an experiment out of some clandestine laboratory, or else this was a mechanism heretofore unknown to humankind.

It came to me that if I could only catch and somehow confine the strange little apparition, I would then be able to further examine it at leisure. I swatted at the thing, trying to grab it with my free hand, but it easily darted out of the way.

At that point, I expected it to fly away, but that is not at all what happened. In fact, it did the one thing I would have least expected — it came right up to me, hovering in the air before my eyes, whereupon it appeared to be looking at me in the face.

It came to me in that moment that the two of us were engaged in highly symmetrical activities: I was earnestly examining the strange little flying apparition, and simultaneously the little apparition was earnestly examining me.

We had seemingly arrived at a standoff. Yet how, if at all, did any of this relate to the strange events of the proceeding hours? Surely the juxtaposition of two such improbable happenings could not be explained by coincidence alone. And what, I wondered, would happen next?

As it turned out, I was shortly to find out.

I picked up the tiny object, and examined it closely. In general proportion it was, to my surprise, rather similar to the house behind me, although of course on a greatly smaller scale. Why my mind would so leap toward an association between two objects so vastly disparate in size and purpose was a mystery even to myself.

Turning the object gently between my fingers, I saw that there was something odd about the surface material of the object. On the one hand, it appeared vaguely pearlescent in nature. Yet as I rotated the strange little object between my thumb and forefinger, the colors upon its surface appeared to move and shimmer in a way that seemed to defy the laws of optics, almost as though the surface itself were somehow alive.

As my fingers continued to rotate the curious little box — for I soon realized that its likely purpose was to serve as a container of some kind — I espied a small cavity on one side. Before I had had a proper chance to examine this cavity, I was startled by the unexpected apparition of some — thing — flying out.

The interior of the house was empty. Not merely empty, but barren of all furniture, or any evidence of inhabitation for that matter. It was a dark and empty cadaver of an interior, devoid of any sign of life.

What I saw before me was merely a hollow and empty shell, as though the house had never been inhabited at all. Long I remained there, gazing with wondering eyes, trying to reconcile the sight before me with my still vivid memories of the last several hours.

At last, having satisfied myself that there was nothing here to see, I relaxed my grip upon the window sill, and allowed myself to drop unto the ground below. To my great relief, I found the earth to be soft beneath my feet, a quality which served well to cushion my fall.

In a daze, I staggered away from the house, my mind filled with a tangle of contradictory thoughts. I knew in that moment that this mysterious dwelling held no more fascination for me, and my only clear desire was to escape this place of madness.

I managed to walk twenty paces from the house, when I espied a small object upon the ground. Curious, I knelt down to gain a closer vantage point.