A woman who…

A very rainy day today, which is just what the doctor proverbially ordered!  I slept quite late, so I had more energy than yesterday.  This photo is from the Queen’s Park Savannah in Trinidad, sent on to me to add to my homesickness— I love this time of year at home, when the poui is in full bloom.  The hills are all gold and pink with the poui, and scarlet from the immortelles.  Utterly beautiful (as long as there aren’t any wildfires, which happens with the dry season.) My cousin tells me that the hurricane season has already started, which is early!  I hope that it’s not too severe. My tiny monster puppy has been getting attacks of the zoomies, followed by moments of scratching me on the leg to get more space on my lap!  He got evicted this morning because we had a disagreement on when playtime starts (not at 6am!). Don didn’t sleep too well last night; it’s the result of taking his pain meds too late at night combined with doing too many things.  He finally fell asleep about the same time that Jerry got evicted, but he decided that it would be wiser to stay awake during the day and try sleeping tonight.  He’s been glued to the baseball all afternoon, while I’ve been watching movies.  He also dug out some of his old family photos, and we had some fun looking at him as a toddler.

I feel better today than yesterday, which is good.  Yesterday I’d have been happy to sleep for hours.  Today is day 8 — so a full week — on these meds.  I’ve found that the effects I had are once again a loss of taste (food has a metallic tang), my voice is hoarse, I’ve had some cramps and exhaustion.  So nothing (thankfully) on the “call your doctor immediately” list.  My new blood pressure monitor arrived this afternoon and is currently charging so I can monitor between nurse visits.  

As I said, I was watching movies today.  I watched the 1984 version of Dune (I haven’t got to the 2021 version yet.)  For the record, that’s one of my favourite books, and like all my favourites, I can quote lines from it, even though I haven’t read it in years.  As I watched it (and considered watching Labyrinth) it occurred to me that every single story that has ever been imagined or told is based entirely on our human experiences.  It may seem blindingly obvious, but we’ve created amazing tales of bravery, adventure, magic, fantasy, romance… and imagined all sorts of creatures to people them. The really good stories build realistic worlds and fill them with interesting characters — like Dune, which managed to combine some very dense politics, ecology, religion and several cultures into a book that’s been popular for decades.  Go back a little further and you have books like Gulliver’s Travels, which also manages to combine politics and real world issues into a story that’s ostensibly a traveller’s tale; further back are Shakespeare’s plays, Chaucer (even earlier); and going back even further there’s the Mahabharata, Iliad, Odessy, Aesop’s Fables, 1001 Nights… not to mention the Orestes, Utopia, Pilgrim’s Progress, Ramayana, Gilgamesh… really, even reading the very old manuscripts provide a wealth of themes and tales that we’ve retold a hundred different ways over the millennia.  I appreciate those persons with the gift to imagine things that aren’t and speak them into existence.  Like the descriptions in ancient texts of invisible people who acted as servants; or of spirits like the djinn who had almost infinite power (there were limits on what they could do, but seemingly few) or tales like The 10 suns which tell of struggles between the heavenly inhabitants and humans.  I’ve often wondered how much of those old stories were based on fact, even if the facts were hard to comprehend and explain.  Arthur C Clarke said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” so if you didn’t have a frame of reference for the technology, it became magical/godlike.  With no concept of a telephone, how do you explain 2 people who communicate by a small handheld box?  Anyway, that aside, we can collectively imagine other worlds that vary from ours in perhaps small ways.  What if life was based on silicon instead of carbon?  It combines just as easily and is also widely available.  Or if haemoglobin was cuproglobin, and based on copper instead of iron?  What if we breathed nitrogen instead of oxygen?  How would our bodies look?  I’m fascinated by the medieval bestiaries which contained drawings of all sorts of animals, including chimera.  There’s even one that purports to show the skeletal anatomy of angels — seraphim, cherubim — with their multiple wings and arms.  They’re probably more closely related to insects than primates, as they have 3, 4, 6 or more pairs of limbs.

Sorry, that’s a lot of rambling.  I am really awed at the imaginations that create those kinds of creatures and who can carry out — and illustrate — the thought experiments that go with them.   I think it’s probably very likely that when we meet extraterrestrial beings, they will be so very different that we’d have no common frame or reference; or else they’d be so similar to us that we’d realize that space is a foreign country, where they do everything differently 😃  On that, my tiny overlord needs my attention, so Good night!