kiya

Around
Around
Around
Around
Over
And under
And through!
- Grover the Muppet


Yesterday, I met RB Lemberg in person. I had not been planning to go to Readercon, but then I saw that they were planning on being there and....

... people talk a lot about the importance of representation, and I agreed with it, of course, and could even point, occasionally, at places that I felt it had been done. And then I read RB's "Geometries of Belonging", and encountered a character the insides of whose head were so much like mine I sobbed from the experience of being seen, for the first time, by a narrative someone else wrote. And not only did that story have Parét, but his partner, a nonbinary man with (at one point at least) his hair braided in the ichidi (nonbinary, in RB's Birdverse) fashion of five braids, and a stubborn, resolutely self-aware autistic teenager who had chosen to embrace their quirkiness deliberately in the shape of the magic they claimed, in their deep understanding of magical names.

After reading Geometries, I said to RB on the tweeters, "I want to braid my hair five ways and listen to the names sing, quietly in the dark." And we have been friendly since then. They edited the book in which I became a published poet, the Le Guin memorial anthology that has my "Of Winter and Other Seasons", a poem which begins with the line "Somewhere in the ice is a man with a woman's face", a poem which is about how Le Guin's work enabled me to be as myself.

RB is an autistic, bigender, Jewish multiply-diasporic migrant, and their work perceives me as someone who exists and makes me feel more real. This is a touchstone, a focal point.

In one of RB's panels they talked about how some people's stories are not easily publishable, because our stories are not the stories that people recognize as stories. I brought up "We Are The Mountain", an essay from 2021 about that very topic. We spoke, while I was getting KJ some ice cream, about how I have been burned out on submissions, and having a hard time collecting rejections that boil down to "your story is too autistic, I don't understand how it's a story", and they want to help, to put me in a place where I can stop feeling like I'm being ground to nothing by the industry. I said their spouse gave me the best rejection letter of my life; they relayed that to em and Bogi also sent eir support to me on continuing to try.

At their panel about the Birdverse they talked about how, as a migrant, they found stories that circled around, to return to a beginning but further on, a spiraling gyre of talespinning. I traced the circle in the air with my fingers, and thought about Yeats, and about the opposite of Yeats, the gyre that might widen without ending the world.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...
- William Butler Yeats

RB talked about being driven to become a translator by the war in Ukraine, to try to bring out what could be brought out from there, that place, that trauma. And they talked about their literary influence, an author from Crimea, and that just underscores the circles of it, larger and larger, encompassing more and more community— and then about Le Guin, about The Left Hand of Darkness, of the story where people like us can exist, but one of them has to die, and what it means for those to be the stories we have.

The circle widens.

And someone asked about the ace representation in The Unbalancing, which includes a sex-repulsed ace ghost, a demi protagonist wrestling with many aspects of their identity and the ways they were being dragged out of their autistic routines. And I brought up the other ace character, whose ace-ness was clearly tightly bound with his autism, whose attitude to sex and relationships was very "why would I want to waste time on that, I have my charts!" A deeply relatable man, really.

I did not manage to remember that I wanted to talk about the rugár character in The Unbalancing, because in particular I appreciated how the "I am both bears" gender was expressed there, so clearly delineated, and sometimes I, too, am both bears. Mostly when I'm thinking about the queer kids I am fierce about. I am both bears.

I had my hair braided five ways, of course, when I came, and RB asked me if I knew my variation. Usually I am agár, all the snakes, and I'd picked out my snake t-shirt for that reason to wear to the con. But sometimes... sometimes I am rugár.

(There is a tangent to be had, here, in a perhaps-autistic tendency to come to understand the self through the vehicle of stories, which I saw articulated beautifully by Jay Edidin in his TED talk - who talked about his autism as expressing through villain stories in comics, because villains were allowed to be emotionally unexpressive, to be intellectual and remote, to be complex and flawed in ways he could relate to - and him realizing he was trans because of encountering Parker from Leverage, a clearly autistic character with the traits he related to, but who he did not relate to in that way because Parker is a woman. "Oh", he said. But I will not take this tangent further; the margin is insufficiently large, etc.)

There are any number of small other things there. KJ has their first fountain pen from RB, and has doodled with it. We talked about the importance of seeing each other, the implausibility of one queer character in a cast of many, of one autistic character in a cast of many, of the way we find each other even when we don't know ourselves. It was good, it was connective, the circles grew larger.

Then I went home. When I got home, I heard that the former guy had been shot at.

When in danger
Or in doubt
Run in circles
Scream and shout.
- Robert Heinlein

It's hard to know what to do about that. To say a prayer for the dead (a thousand of bread, a thousand of beer, a thousand of every good thing, may they ascend) is a given, and a small balm, but not large enough to bear what the implications are.

I come home and find tumblr (the social media I am actually competent to follow these days, though at least I have a Masto client that works on the laptop now) with a few comments in among the stuff that I read there, most particularly someone screenshotting the twitter trending notes which include things like "HOW CAN YOU MISS" and "ONE JOB" and "the incident", and I don't know what to do about that.

I see any number of takes from people I know. Some of them more reasonable than others. I am personally consumed by a sort of dark irony that the man who has been promoting and encouraging violence had it appear for him this way, and not from one of his own people aiming it outwards. I do not believe that he has a capacity to recognize irony, or appreciate a comeuppance, or anything like the whispered "Memento mori" of Roman times.

I don't know what tomorrows hold, aside from making sure the children get to summer camp, a prosaic thing that consumes a remarkable amount of brain, reminding me of that other tumblr post, the one who said something to the effect of, "I wondered how people living through major historical events conducted their lives, and now I know that the answer is 'try to figure out what to eat, try to get the laundry done'." I started composing this post in my head while I was driving to the store to buy a combination lock for KJ's summer camp. These are the circles in which I orbit.

"We Are The Mountain" talks about the protagonist whose story is about endurance, about the waves of events that come across them, about survival. A man spoke to me after I brought it up, about how when he writes, he wants to write that sort of protagonist, the 'inactive' protagonist, because even the people who are supposedly in charge are merely the cresting foam of waves of events. I remember that conversation now, as I think about the other yesterday; I had forgotten it. (But also: Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.)

I open up Discord to see someone I love like a brother (a thing recently more explicitly acknowledged, a broader circle) saying that he is afraid. And all I have is circles, the widening of circles, the knowing that these are things that can hold all of us, as best we can, so that the most of us can make it through whatever will come.

RB read a version of their Birdverse creation myth, in which a star made of souls survived the bleakness of space, carried on the tail of a goddess, but some of the souls of the outer shell did not survive the harms of it. They tried to bring things in, to take turns, to allow for recovery, but not everyone made it. And I know that not everyone will make it, and that haunts me, and I also know that the more of us there are taking turns, the wider the circle, the better chance we all have.

I find it hard to tell you
'cos I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It's a very very
Mad world....
- Tears for Fears



[eyes how much of that is looping through referentiality] Hi I am very autistic today, my echolalia let me show you it.