Yet another cave

The ***** must coax, trick, tear you away from your fears, loves and hates. No one can accomplish this for oneself, and all must desperately resist until the operation is complete.

The god game

What is a god but e who always sees the best move, and plays it?

Two brothers fell madly in love with freedom and would not rest until they had explored its furthest reaches. They swore to a game for the rest of their lives: each would manipulate the other in ever more subtle and invisible ways, forcing his brother to delve even deeper into the darkest sources of his actions and desires, extending his knowledge and self to the infinity beyond which his opponent might not reach. The sport had no end, but soon the two brothers had become gods among men, and the world’s only defense to join their play.

Do not chide men for being selfish, but blind.

A brave new word

George was a thoughtful man, and for years had devoted himself to the little known art of neologism. This activity of his did not pay — truly creative work rarely does; it was a hobby. He would spend weeks’ evenings on a single word, carefully crafting its syllables to echo the very things he was conjuring. Some words spanned impossible sets of incongruous objects, all lassoed into one generous term; others designated almost nothing or just about everything. Some words were beautiful and hung in gilded frames around his house; most, however, had likely never been uttered by anyone besides the man himself.

Yet one day, probably out of sheer luck, George invented an important word. As usual, he carefully spelled it out and posted his minutely crafted definition on the internet where everyone could, but so few would, see it. This time, however, the new word took on a life of its own. Somehow, George had gotten it right and come up with something truly useful. Soon, his new creation was to appear here and there, quoted by curious parties, early adopters, linguists and daring students of philosophy.

Many before him had made similar attempts, and their terminologies were strewn, half-discarded across the English language, but unlike theirs, George’s creation got it just right: whatever it was George had defined, his word had come alive, irreversibly printing itself upon its users by creating in their minds the very thing to which it referred. And this thing, George thought, has now begun to think.

Divine mistakes

The first man Ninmah fashioned with clay from the abzu waters could not bend his outstretched hands. So Enki decreed his fate as a servant to the king. Then Ninmah fashioned one with weak eyes, a man with broken feet, a woman who could not give birth, and one with neither penis nor vagina. Enki allotted their fates, too:  the musical arts, silversmith, a weaver in the queen’s household. The sixth creature Enki named ‘enuch’.

Then Enki desired to fashion a creature of his own devising. This was Umul: so weak and shapeless, es hand could not even put bread to es mouth. Ninmah could give it no fate, and Enki threw the clay to the ground. But Ninmah hid it between her legs.

Umul had no speech; e could not work with es hands, and could not lie with men or women. So they cast Umul out of the city. Enki said to Ninmah: “I will cut Umul in two that e might no longer be alone.” But Umul had no eyes and could not find es other half.

The people complained to the king: “We cannot draw water to drink because the monster Umul lies by the cistern and our hearts are filled with fear.” So the king sent out a harlot to find Umul. When Shamhat beholds e she utters an incantation and hardens his body. She spreads out her robe and lies with him. Six days and seven nights she lies with Umul, and at dawn she pierces seven holes in his head.

Right Speech

An eager peasant journeyed from a distant land to hear the Buddha speak, but when e arrived 10,000 Bodhisattvas were already sitting at the Master’s feet, so e crouched down behind the last of the disciples, almost out of earshot. When the Buddha said “There is no self” the peasant heard “Know thyself!” and immediately left for the forest where e meditated 10 years long on every subtle movement within es soul.

When e returned, 100,000 Bodhisattvas had assembled around the Enlightened One and e could hear even less. So as the Buddha expounded on the causes of suffering, the peasant understood one ought to study the nature of causes, and returning to the forest, for 10 more years e examined the minutest transformations of es soul.

The third time e sought the Buddha, 1,000,000 Bodhisattvas surrounded the Teacher of Dharma, and so the peasant made out but two words: “loving kindness”, yet left in despair not knowing to which of es 100 different loves and 1000 forms of kindness the Buddha referred.

Many years later a travelling monk brought back news of a distant land where everyone from the youngest babe to the most hardened criminal had become perfectly happy saints because a simple peasant upon returning from a long trip had spoken a single word to one of the guards at the border.

Kind aliens

The prophet sat under a tree in the park with a dog’s collar strapped around es neck, watching people stroll by as they walked their pets. If someone was curious enough to question e, the prophet would reply:

When aliens land on earth, they will be the kindest of beings. Infinitely smarter than any creature on our planet, they nevertheless at times will take a liking to some of us humans — though the objects of their attentions will have not the ghost of a fighting chance. The aliens will be gigantic. Not one, but many ancient species long ago intertwined into symbiotic conglomorates of unimaginable intellectual and sensory abilities. So many brains, limbs, skins, eyes and tubes working together. When an alien settles upon someone it fancies, it will deploy an innumerable array of seductions, adjusting every detail of its interactions to appeal to that person’s feelings, emotions, smell, touch, vision or intellect. Each alien will carefully provide just enough information to steer the human’s thoughts, say exactly the right thing to swell es desire, preemt new decisions long before they rise to consciousness. No human being will avoid falling madly and irreversibly in love with es alien suitor, desiring and willing nothing else than to make it — and hence eself — happy. And so, these few humans will gladly leave their peers behind, and run off to the stars after their superior lovers.

Ant science

A famous myrmecologist was presenting a paper on new developments in his study of leaf-cutter ants to a large audience at some annual scientific convention:

A few years ago, one of my good friends re-directed my attention toward large colonies of leaf-cutter ants. He had heard that at least one such colony had recently developed a more complex means of chemical communication and wanted to understand exactly what purpose it served. Upon investigation, we discovered that the youngest ants, those just emerging out of larval stage, were apparently being trained by their elders to recognize certain sets of new pheromones and to produce others in return. It was, frankly, as if they were learning some new kind of primitive language. But to what end?

As we started to examine this novel behavior more closely, we noticed the ants were beginning to experiment with various types of leaves for their fungi farms; they were also attempting new architectural forms and even modifying their social structures, etc. It appeared as if they were thinking! Of course, no individual ant was really thinking — or at least that was not the most interesting kind of thinking going on. More importantly, it seemed the colony as a whole had somehow acquired this ability.

We believe three essential ingredients made this new development possible: First, through sheer evolutionary luck the ants had developed a slightly more complex means of communication. Then they systematically inculcated this new “languaging” to their young, forcefully “injecting” the new skill into passive but receptive “brains”. And finally, each individual functioned as a mere gateway, receiving chemical communications from other ants, processing them according to basic formicine logic, and responding as that logic required.

It is important again to recognize that no ant had any control over any of these stages: each individual ant could only “think” in the “language” it had been taught, could only use the “logic” it had assimilated, and could only process whatever information other ants passed on to it. If any ant had felt it was free to think as it wished, it was profoundly mistaken: another intelligence far superior to its own was (merely) “using” this ant to think for itself — admirably and creatively so at that.

Here the scientist paused to reshuffle his papers. He then concluded his talk without further glancing at them:

It is a great pity this new myrmecine intelligence has not yet come to self-awareness. Individual human beings like us might have been able to communicate with it. What feats it would then accomplish! How much more quickly it could evolve! But such a leap would require the colony to start thinking about itself, that is, individual ants would have to become capable of “comprehending” (passively processing) the idea of an infinitely more intelligent and powerful being that nevertheless encompassed them. Sadly, we shall now simply have to wait until some few lucky individuals blindly stumble upon this very idea.

On numerology

The monkey was the smartest of all the animals. One day, dividing up a bunch of bananas amongst es friends, e noticed there were as many bananas as fingers on a hand and as friends around him. And so e counted: one, two, three, four, five…! So enamoured was the monkey with es new ability, that e began counting whatever was at hand: trees, eggs, ants, other monkeys, crocodile teeth (carefully), etc.

When the toucan found a whole bush of berries, the monkey insisted on counting them first before anyone ate them, but there were so many that by the time e was done, the berries were all smushed and rotting. However, such minor setbacks disturbed the monkey not at all.

For the most part, the monkey’s counting prowess was quite welcome and helpful, whether in distributing bananas, counting the number of paces to the next watering hole or playing hide and seek. That the monkey now staunchly refused to do or eat anything that couldn’t be methodically counted was simply dismissed as the whimsical habit of a superior mind.

One day the eagle swooped down from the sky to raise the alarm: a great wind could be seen in the east blowing towards them! Everyone must find a hole to take shelter in! But the proud monkey refused to climb down from the tree top, proclaiming that the wind didn’t really exist because it couldn’t be counted! Sadly, whether the storm was real or not, when the animals finally climbed out from the safety of their holes, none was ever able to find even one monkey.

A learning process

One afternoon Prof. Kant was at his regular walk through the city of Königsberg, when he heard children playing behind a hedge: “I’ll tell if you do that.” As a matter of course, he continued on, but the next day the same children were apparently at it again: “If you don’t stop moving them, I’ll quit playing with you!” And so it went on each day, and each day the enlightened sage nodded reasonably at the evolving banter.
“That’s wrong. Try to play like i do.”
“That’s against the rules!”
“You agreed to play fair!”
By the sixth day, the great philosopher had no doubt what the critical young voice would say: “You have to follow rules.” And that, he told himself, should be the end of it.

So on the seventh day, certain he would pass by a harmonious and silent game, Kant was shocked (!) to hear a second voice pipe in: “Now let’s change the rules as we play, that’ll be even more fun…” Quite out of sorts, the old man broke off his stroll to rest against the shrubs, and peering over them, saw a little boy running around with his stuffed animal.