Crocuses Know Things

Or, Defend the Imaginary; Protect the Mythical

It's been a bit since I posted. Things have been busy. Mostly good. Though thrown in the mix I had a vasectomy. There's been a spike in conversation and requests for that lately with the Supreme Court's reversal of Roe v. Wade, but my timing is coincidental. I was so excited to get one, in fact, I had it done twice. It seems my anatomy was difficult, so my surgeon had to abort the initial, in-office, local anesthetic (conscious) attempt unfinished--though with the usual soreness and recovery from trying--so he could put me under three days later to try again with a proper surgery. So I was out of commission longer than expected. The kids have been busy with summer activities and we made a half-week trip to visit extended family we hadn't seen in a while, due to distance, busyness, and Covid. So those are reasons, on top of the normal ones, for not writing or sharing much lately.

Part of our trip last week included a visit to my hometown. Since young memories are short, I was giving the kids a bit of a driving tour before we arrived at our destination: "That's the house I grew up in, my cousins lived here, there's my church, etc." In the middle of one block I stopped to spontaneously recount a sudden memory I had never shared with anyone before:

"Here's where I was racing my brother on our bikes and I darted out into the street without checking for traffic right in front of a car that was driving. The car gently hit me and I rolled up onto the hood. It just so happened the driver was my Grampa, and he nearly had a heart attack thinking he'd killed his grandson. (I was unharmed.)"

I'm more horrified now than I was at the time, so it's still a fond memory since I was more delighted at the time by my uninjured status than I was scared by the potential for injury I'd escaped.

Speaking of memories of my youth, for some reason I was recently thinking about another one. Growing up in small-town Kansas, I was basically oblivious to LGBTQ-ness. I knew it existed, but don't remember ever having personal awareness or contact with anyone out of the closet. It didn't directly impact me, so I never gave it much thought and didn't really form opinions on the matter.

It wasn't until college that I really knew I had a stance. First, in junior college in my small town, an out-of-town friend came out to me. I don't know that he planned it as such and I was so completely awkward it took a while to sink in. "So . . . did he think you were gay when you did this?" "I thought I was gay when I did that." "Huh. Oh. Oooohhhh." After a bit, I became aware that it hadn't changed my opinion of him in any way; he was still the same friend, I just knew more about him than I had. (Even later, when I was helping him drunkenly climb into bed one night and he asked me to, "F*** my brains out," I never felt threatened, just understood his loneliness a bit better.) Then I waited tables with someone who was open, flamboyant, and, at other times, a drag queen. But I was new to the job that he was good at and he was a trainer, so from that work perspective he was simply a role model to learn from. They weren't "an issue" to debate, they were individuals I knew.

Then I moved to a slightly bigger small Kansas town to live in the dorms at a state college. There was a Gay & Lesbian Alliance group on campus and LGBTQ-ness wasn't just individual people, it was an issue to debate and develop opinions, values, and beliefs around. I hadn't really thought of it in a global, moral sense before. As I looked at the chatter in that setting, I saw a small minority simply asking to be accepted for who they were and a large majority vocally sharing judgment, bile, and hatred. I didn't have to turn to religious texts, philosophical arguments, or anything else so abstract; I was decided by the behavioral dynamics. I was going to oppose the hatred. I knew that was the right thing to do. And suddenly I found myself as an ally even though I didn't know any of the individual LGBTQ students on campus. Since I was an English major, I went to a viewing of a gay Shakespeare film and a few other public events to show support. I've never been particularly outspoken or strident, but I haven't looked back since.

I think that memory came to mind the other night when my wife and I watched an episode of the British historical series Grantchester that included a heavy dose of homophobic vitriol in its 1950s setting. Though perhaps I was primed by two things recently on my Facebook feed:

From author George Lakoff on Facebook:

And a meme that I re-shared from here:

For explanation, I shared a link to an introduction to Liberation Theology in the comments, along with this excerpt:

Liberation theology is a Christian theological approach emphasizing the liberation of the oppressed. In certain contexts, it engages socio-economic analyses, with "social concern for the poor and political liberation for oppressed peoples". In other contexts, it addresses other forms of inequality, such as race or caste.

I'm not sharing that anecdote to impress or feel self-congratulatory, but to demonstrate the value; I know it doesn't make me special, yet I don't see it practiced enough. Empathy and siding with the oppressed. Those two ideas, as much as anything, capture my social and political values. If I see hatred and misuse of power, I will side against them. Love people and treat them with kindness. That's what matters.

I am a self-professed lover of nonsense. I declared this most recently, I think, in Existential Bewilderment. An excerpt:

The best stories accomplish both tasks: help make sense of the world and provide enjoyable nonsense. Because life is inherently bewildering, so engaging with bewildering nonsense in fun ways is healthy grappling with that existential bewilderment. Life is confusing and silly, so we should embrace that by being the same.

One little game I like to play is popping into Project Gutenberg, quickly picking something I'm not familiar with, and grabbing some intriguing bit of text to share without context. The other day I jumped into The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Prince, by Nicolo Machiavelli. Though I've never read it, I know of it; basically, that it is a manual for getting and maintaining power. I have a tickle that someone once shared the opinion with me that, though its advice often seems manipulative and cutthroat, it comes from a core of good values. I need to read the whole thing to be able to say for myself, but I was so impressed by what I started reading that I picked a larger chunk to share sincerely instead of bewilderingly.

From Chapter IX. Concering a Civil Principality

Where a leading citizen becomes the prince of his country, not by wickedness or any intolerable violence, but by the favour of his fellow citizens—this may be called a civil principality: nor is genius or fortune altogether necessary to attain to it, but rather a happy shrewdness. I say then that such a principality is obtained either by the favour of the people or by the favour of the nobles. Because in all cities these two distinct parties are found, and from this it arises that the people do not wish to be ruled nor oppressed by the nobles, and the nobles wish to rule and oppress the people; and from these two opposite desires there arises in cities one of three results, either a principality, self-government, or anarchy. . . .

One cannot by fair dealing, and without injury to others, satisfy the nobles, but you can satisfy the people, for their object is more righteous than that of the nobles, the latter wishing to oppress, while the former only desire not to be oppressed. . . .

Therefore, one who becomes a prince through the favour of the people ought to keep them friendly, and this he can easily do seeing they only ask not to be oppressed by him. But one who, in opposition to the people, becomes a prince by the favour of the nobles, ought, above everything, to seek to win the people over to himself, and this he may easily do if he takes them under his protection. Because men, when they receive good from him of whom they were expecting evil, are bound more closely to their benefactor; thus the people quickly become more devoted to him than if he had been raised to the principality by their favours; and the prince can win their affections in many ways.

Even if he was writing merely about controlling power dynamics for a self-serving purpose, his practical advice amounts to do good, be nice, and side with the oppressed. I'm fascinated.

Here's the bit I found that day to offer as a snippet of random, poetic text:

Interestingly the flaky skin of the crown had blue-green algae growing on it. These birds were heard calling many times on the reef and in the mangroves; the call is much like the deep growl of a dog.

It's from The Project Gutenberg eBook, Birds from North Borneo, by Max C. Thompson, a book I'd never heard of that is currently the most downloaded book on the website. I wonder why.

[Older] had been excited to visit the library this summer because [Spouse] said he could get his own library card, and a couple weeks ago they made it in a few minutes before I was done with work at 5:00. I made him his card, then agreed to stay with him so [Spouse] could take [Younger] home. After he got his Summer Reading stuff and took his thematic picture, he wanted to use his card to get on the computer. He enjoyed the freedom to surf the web all evening, even though the only games he found were free ones that weren't very good and he had to watch his YouTube videos without sound since we didn't have headphones. We closed the place down at 8:00.

"Getting a library card is a big deal, Dad. I have to stay for a long time to indicate it."

I helped get that quote added to our wall during our recent renovation.

I recently shared the audiobook of Lemony Snicket's Poison for Breakfast with [Older] and he loved it (see Existential Bewilderment for more on that book). He's younger than the intended audience, but I'm not surprised he loved it. He's always had an philosophical bent. Here's a recent bedtime conversation:

"Dad, do you think there are planets out there that have actual dragons living on them?"

"I think that's possible."

"Possible? There has to be. The universe is infinite, so that means they have to be out there somewhere."

"I just meant we don't know for sure since no one has seen them. We have no proof."

"But we do know for sure. Everything is infinite, so that means everything we can imagine exists out there somewhere. I mean that guy on the wall (pointing to Where the Wild Things Are painting) is out there somewhere too. Everything we can think of exists because that's what it means to be infinite."

"And I'm sure there are things out there we've never even imagined."

Which led to me sharing this quote from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (Wonderland, part II):

"I'm just one hundred and one, five months and a day."

"I can't believe that!" said Alice.

"Can't you?" the Queen said in a pitying tone. "Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes."

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

(I resisted the temptation to mention the Fermi Paradox or multiverse theory.)

Engage with bewildering nonsense.

[Younger] refused to go to his bed for sleep the other night, insisting this was more comfortable.

(I tried to wake him after the picture to get him to move, but he was out too hard to wake.)

More recently, he fell asleep keeping contact with two of our three cats.

As we listened to a morning rain start while waking recently, I reacted with a melodramatic, "Oh, no! I'm melting, I'm melting! (Because I'm a witch.)"

He responded thoughtfully, "Dad, how did the witch terrorize on rainy days?"

I, of course, love my boys dearly and am delighted to see who they are growing up to be. However, they create more noise, mess, and chaos than I ever expected. So I appreciated this bit from The Wolf Wilder by Katherine Rundell when I came upon it:

But a wolf cannot be tamed in the way a dog can be tamed, and it cannot be kept indoors. Wolves, like children, are not born to lead calm lives. Always the wolf goes mad at the imprisonment, and eventually it bites off and eats a little piece of someone who was not expecting to be eaten. The question then arises: What to do with the wolf?

Our children do not lead calm lives.

And though they don't particularly relate to anything else in this post, I want to share a couple of bits from The Robber Girl by Franny Billingsley simply because I like them:

I knew that tune, but I couldn't remember it. It hovered on the edge of my mind. I tried to grab it, but you can't just grab your memories. You have to pretend not to pay attention to them, which makes them mad. You have to trick them into sneaking up on you from behind.

-----

You'd think you could count on your feelings, but no: they scurry around like mice, leaving horrid droppings wherever they go. You're always having to clean up behind them.

Just wonderfully apt descriptions for slippery experiences.

Also, I don't pick what books I read by theme or topic, just grab new and recommended things that catch my attention, so it's an unexpected coincidence that two of the last three titles I've read have been about--and inspired by actual--California wildfires.

For teens: Lies Like Wildfire by Jennifer Lynn Alvarez

For middle-grades: Paradise on Fire by Jewell Parker Rhodes

So that's this post's nod to the ever-present worry about global warming.

Speaking of books, here's another thought from George Lakoff about the importance of stories.

So, uh, yeah. I didn't plan it this way going in, but the thoughts I've collected to share in this post all seem to fall right in line: family and morality, myth and metaphor, and emotional identification.

Of myth and metaphor: this post's subtitle comes from a book series by Adam Gidwitz (and others), The Unicorn Rescue Society. I read the first book, The Creature of the Pines, when it was new, and we listened to books one and two while we drove around for our recent trip. The society's motto:

Defende Fabulosa; Protege Mythica

Defend the Imaginary; Protect the Mythical.

I'm thinking about adopting that as my personal motto.

I do have a few less personal items I read and saved for sharing before the last month got so busy. They fall right in line thematically. From Aeon; we need to develop an entirely new way of understanding learning that embraces the true engine of the mind – imagination:

Imaginology

One way of thinking tends to be viewed as more capable of producing meaning: the scientific mind. But the literal, logical, scientific mind is the outlier – the weird, exceptional mode of cognition. It is not, I would argue, the dominant paradigm of human sense-making activity and yet it remains the exemplar of cognition itself and finds pride of place in our educational systems. . . . 

[We need to] develop an entirely new way of understanding learning that embraces the true engine of the mind – imagination.

It is time to initiate Imagination Studies at every level of education, primary school through university. Studying the imagination – its creations, its processes (creativity), and its underlying cognitive structures – is the most exciting and accurate way to heal the terminal divide between the sciences and the humanities. But, more importantly, Imagination Studies, or imaginology, also promises to reunite the body and the mind, reintegrate emotion and reason, and tesselate facts and values. . . . 

What is needed is a way to integrate our biological roots and our cultural fruits. Scholars in the humanities would benefit from study of our shared human mind-brain inheritance. Researchers in STEM need to make room for arational forms of exploration and creativity.

In the same way that the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky revealed the hidden unconscious biases of our minds, and indirectly ushered in the entirely new field of bias studies, it is time to acknowledge the vast mythopoetic or imaginative aspects of mind that shape our thinking and sense-making processes. Like Kahneman and other researchers interested in decision-making and judgment, we imaginologists seek the arational or prerational dimensions of mind that constantly contribute to human cognition. However, unlike bias studies, which focuses on errors and glitches in rational thinking, Imagination Studies can reveal the adaptive ways that our virtual headspace helps us navigate real life. . . . 

From birth, our minds are awash in stories and images, but we also view ‘real life’ largely through imaginative constructions that are rarely acknowledged. Imaginative cognitions can happen in parallel with real-time perception (forming a co-present) or they can decouple and run offline before and after real-time perception. This mean that humans simultaneously experience a real ‘now’ and an imaginal ‘second universe’ but, phenomenologically, they are combined in present experience. Occasionally, this leads to epistemic slippage and confusion, like conspiracy thinking, but usually imagination makes humans more awake to the potentials in lived experience. Popular culture recognises only the fantasy version of artistic imagination and fails to appreciate that everyday conversation, daydreaming, map navigation, political strategising, scientific hypothesising, moral reflection, field surgery, cooking, reading and lovemaking are all imaginative activities, too. . . . 

Art is one productive branch of the imaginative mind, science being another, politics another. . . . 

In my view, this is also the core of sense-making or meaning-making activity and, once recognised, we can see that imaginative work such as storytelling, image-making, song, dance and so on are some of the earliest and continually powerful forms of knowledge. An epistemology that cannot recognise this and pushes imagination to the peripheral territory of aesthetics has failed to understand the biological mind. . . . 

Humans shape reality through image and story schemas, but I have argued that these schemas are so deeply embodied that they cannot be derived from literal descriptive sense-making. . . . 

Imaginology must cultivate a certain tolerance for ambiguity. Sense-making emerges out of nonsense, to be blunt. We need to accept stages of confusion as potentially enjoyable, playful, resources.

To repeat as summary:

It is time to acknowledge the vast mythopoetic or imaginative aspects of mind that shape our thinking and sense-making processes. . . . imaginologists seek the arational or prerational dimensions of mind that constantly contribute to human cognition. . . . 

Humans simultaneously experience a real ‘now’ and an imaginal ‘second universe’ but, phenomenologically, they are combined in present experience. . . . everyday conversation, daydreaming, map navigation, political strategising, scientific hypothesising, moral reflection, field surgery, cooking, reading and lovemaking are all imaginative activities, too.

Imaginative work such as storytelling, image-making, song, dance and so on are some of the earliest and continually powerful forms of knowledge. . . . 

Imaginology must cultivate a certain tolerance for ambiguity. Sense-making emerges out of nonsense, to be blunt. We need to accept stages of confusion as potentially enjoyable, playful, resources.

Engage with bewildering nonsense. Defend the Imaginary; Protect the Mythical.

My parenting style tends toward the "free range" end of the spectrum, but we ware still definitely part of the neontocracy. I appreciate this article.

Kid Culture

The idea of the neontocracy: a type of society, unique to WEIRD countries (Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic), in which children are the most valued members. In a neontocracy, the bathtub fills up with toy ducks, the living room is slowly smothered in gadgets, and there is no upper limit on the amount of time and energy adults must pour into the project of childhood. . . . 

I began to notice that, as kid culture filled up most of my days, I had been exiled from adult culture. Or rather, I began to notice that parents in the US lived in a strange, lonely and depressing gulf between two opposing cultures: one designed entirely around the fantasies not necessarily of children but of parents imagining the kind of uber-stimulation and play their children might need; the other designed almost entirely for single people or couples without children. Mixing these cultures is taboo. It was utterly surreal and hilarious to take my little brother, a single, 29-year-old musician living in Sweden, to the Children’s Museum – ‘What is this place?’ he kept repeating. It was also surreal and slightly stressful to take our daughter to certain restaurants and, once, to a bar in Portland at midnight, or out for the evening with adult friends, and it was off-limits to take her to many shows and performances. . . . 

The boundaries between the worlds of families and everyone else in society seem to be getting more and more entrenched, and transgressing them is frowned upon. People rant about kids in fancy restaurants behaving badly, or wonder why on Earth anyone would bring a kid to a show, a brunch, an event, a bar or whatever. And it is true that, because kid culture is so ubiquitous and capable of swallowing up all of adult life, some parents assume everything revolves around their children; they become so absorbed in the child-centred fantasy world of constant play, attention, development and stimulation that they forget children are members of a society and not priestlings inhabiting their own sacred realm. They give up on integration; they cross over wholly to kid culture. This is why many people – three acquaintances in the past year alone – have taken to stipulating that their weddings are kid-free. It’s always gently phrased – ‘No little ones, please! We want you to enjoy the evening!’ – but the message is clear. . . . 

Kid culture fully subscribes to the idea that children need to inhabit a world unto themselves that has been carefully organised and constructed by adults; that their childhood must be meticulously cultivated in a Petri dish of intentional experiences; that their growth into healthy and happy human beings is contingent upon the number of hours they spend navigating climbing walls or scooping trays of ice into buckets; that ‘good’ parents will rearrange their entire lives to create opportunities for their kids to sit on the grass and watch a librarian act out the story of Hansel and Gretel with finger puppets; that ‘family life’ means doing something targeted specifically or exclusively toward children. It’s the idea that to become a parent is to forfeit citizenship of a larger culture, reinforced by the sly, ubiquitous US capitalist pressure to consume and experience one’s way through a competitive childhood. . . . 

It’s not weird to bring your kid to a bar in Mexico. To have her at a concert, or out at 11pm at a parade where the Virgin Mary lobs spicy lollipops at everyone’s heads and teenagers give shots of mezcal to passersby. Kids are just there in the fray. It’s not expected that they’ll need their own separate entertainment, stimulation and culture. . . . 

Maybe if we weren’t so obsessed with catering to kids as a special type of consumer, with assuming that people who have children want nothing more than to sit around watching them experience delight at some form of engineered entertainment, then there would be more space for community. For mixing with others whose age, background or life situation might be different. For spontaneity.

Maybe if kid culture wasn’t synonymous with family life, parents could be both parents and adults, and kids could be something other than kids – they could be citizens, participants in the public sphere. It is without a doubt essential to ‘let kids be kids’, but that assertion has been warped and exaggerated into the idea of an uber-kid immersed in a kids-only sphere conceived of by entrepreneurial or worried or guilt-ridden adults, and by the belief that childhood is inherently at odds with, and should always supersede, adulthood.

How to accomplish that, though, when so immersed in a culture where children are "priestlings inhabiting their own sacred realm" is always a challenge.

This essay is on the periphery of today's themes, but I find it a fascinating bit of historical awareness to have.

The Theft of the Commons

The pilgrims who sailed on the Mayflower were not property owners but economic migrants financed by property owners. They were also communists, in that they agreed to work communally and share the profits of their labor for the first seven years of their settlement, though that agreement did not last beyond the first year. They settled on land held by the Wampanoag people, who did not practice the absolute ownership of land. Among the Wampanoag, rights to use the same plot of land could overlap, so that one family might hold the right to fish in a stream and another might hold the right to farm the banks of that stream. Usage rights could be passed down from mothers to daughters, but the land itself could not be possessed. . . . 

Laxton is the one remaining village in England that was never enclosed, and where tenant farmers still work the land coöperatively, as they have for at least the past seven hundred years. They use the open-field system, cultivating crops on narrow strips of land that follow the curvature of the hills. There are no hedges or fences between these strips, and working them requires collaboration among the farmers.

In the time before enclosure, shared pastures where landless villagers could graze their animals were common. Laxton had two, the Town Moor Common and the much larger Westwood Common, which together supported a hundred and four rights to common use, with each of these rights attached to a cottage or a toft of land in the village. In Laxton, the commons were a resource reserved for those with the least: both the commons and the open fields were owned by the lord of the manor, and only villagers with little more than a cottage held rights to the commons.

As a visitor from the age of private property, it seems remarkable to me that commoners held rights to land they did not own or rent, but, at the time, it was commonplace. In addition to common pasture, commoners were granted rights of pannage, of turbary, of estovers, and of piscary—rights to run their pigs in the woods, to cut peat for fuel, to gather wood from the forests, and to fish. These were rights to subsistence, rights to live on what they could glean from the land. In the course of enclosure, as written law superseded customary law, commoners lost those rights. Parliament made property rights absolute, and the traditional practice of living off the land was redefined as theft. Gleaning became trespassing, and fishing became poaching. Commoners who continued to common were now criminals. . . . 

This is what the French peasants in Millet’s painting “The Gleaners” were gathering into their aprons. Painted on a large canvas of dimensions usually reserved for religious subjects, “The Gleaners” is a reminder that gleaning was authorized by scripture. . . . 

Gleaning rights were the subject of hot debate in France at that time. The right to glean the remains of the harvest had traditionally been reserved for the poor, as in England. But opening harvested fields to gleaners, which was once an obligation of the landowners, had recently been redefined in France as an act of charity and was now seen as an infringement on private property. New bourgeois landowners complained that “gangs of women” were “pilfering” their crops.

In Agnès Varda’s 2000 film, “The Gleaners and I,” made in her old age, she finds the gleaners of our time still scavenging in fields and orchards, in urban markets and curbside dumpsters. Gleaners carry away the too-small or too-large potatoes that farmers have dumped in piles by the side of the road. At low tide, gleaners collect the oysters that storms have torn from commercial oyster beds. In the city, a man walks through an outdoor market after all the venders have left, picking up discarded vegetables and eating bits of lettuce as he goes. A salvage artist combs the curbsides and makes sculptures out of broken windshield wipers. Gleaning and art-making, Varda suggests, are in the same venerable tradition as trash-picking and the refusal to throw old things away just because they are old. . . . 

Everyone agreed that commoners were independent, in that they did not have to work for wages. And everyone understood that the enclosure of the commons would force commoners to become wage workers, and that this would cost them their independence. . . . 

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the poor and the landless of England were often talked about in the same terms as those used to describe Native Americans and Africans. Commoners were a “mischievous race,” “a sordid race,” and an “idle, useless and disorderly set of people.” They were “barbarians.” Their industry was a “lazy industry,” and their independence a “beggarly independence.” Commoners were loathed, as Neeson notes, “with a xenophobic intensity.” . . . 

Before enclosure, common lands were the livelihood of common women. Women gleaned in the fields, and from the wastes they brought in nuts and berries for food, herbs for medicine, rushes for baskets and hats, and wood and furze for fuel. After enclosure, Neeson writes, women became more dependent on men’s wages. The loss of the commons was, for women, a loss of independence. . . . 

What we do not still have—what we have lost—is common rights. These rights once limited the reach of private property, and when the balance of rights shifted toward those who owned property, this wrong was felt by both the common people and the land.

Though I do think common rights are based in empathy for oppressed commoners.

Finally, because I appreciate her writing so much (more than the story's plot), I want to share more from Franny Billingsley's The Robber Girl even though the excerpts don't particularly fit with the rest of the post.

My review:

A unique wild west fable with a hint of magic. Told from the perspective of a nameless girl with some kind of traumatic block on her memories of her life before she was adopted by outlaws, most of the story revolves around a town's attempt to integrate her into society after her adored outlaw is arrested, despite her desire to stay "wild" and find a way back to her previous life. Lyrical writing, an extremely limited narrative perspective, and a gradual discovery of secrets make this an enthralling read.

The girl has an active inner life that, readers slowly learn, represents the memories she's repressed and her attempts to process the strangeness of civilized family life she's been suddenly thrust into.

The dolls were sitting on the floor where I'd left them. The mother doll spoke as though no time had passed. "We're going to give you a name. A special name for a girl with piping in her voice."

"Gentleman Jack's going to give me a name," I said, even though a robber girl shouldn't talk to dolls. And anyway, I had no piping.

"Stop talking to nobody!" said the dagger. "You're making my edges go cold!"

"Your voice tells us your name," said the mother doll. "Your voice tells us your name is Starling. Starlings can whistle and warble and make smooth liquid sounds."

I could whistle, but I couldn't warble or make smooth liquid sounds. My voice was as un-bendy as the dagger. And anyway, whistling was bad luck.

"If you talk to nobody," said the dagger, "that means you're going crazy."

"It's a good name," said the mother doll. "Starlings fight for their families. A starling is a warrior bird."

"I am iron, with carbon added," said the dagger. "If I didn't have enough carbon, I would be too soft. Then I might go crazy."

"You brushed the dust from our eyes," said the father doll. The dolls could open and close their eyes. It was good to have eyes that opened and closed.

"You sat us up," said the mother doll.

"If I had too much carbon," said the dagger, "I would be too hard. Then I might go crazy."

"When you're made of china," said the father doll, "your heart is made of china."

"When a person has a china heart," said the mother doll, "it can easily break."

"But I am just right," said the dagger.

"There will be no danger of broken hearts," said the father doll. "Not now that Starling is here to complete the tasks."

"Tasks?" I said. Sometimes Gentleman Jack gave me tasks. It showed him I was useful.

"Tasks," said the father doll. "Like in a fairy tale, you know."

But I didn't know. "If Gentleman Jack asks me to perform a task, I do. I don't listen to anyone else."

"There are three tasks," said the mother doll.

I didn't know about fairy tales, but I knew about tasks, and I knew that two was the right number of tasks. Two was the number of tasks Grandmother gave Gentleman Jack and his no-account brother. Whoever could finish the tasks would get to have her empire. They went like this:

Fetch unto me the mountain's gold,
To build our city fair.
Fetch unto me the wingless bird,
And I will make you my heir.

Of course Gentleman Jack would win. It was nice of him to have put the tasks in a rhyme to help me remember them.

Also:

I knew that tune, but I couldn't remember it. It hovered on the edge of my mind. I tried to grab it, but you can't just grab your memories. You have to pretend not to pay attention to them, which makes them mad. You have to trick them into sneaking up on you from behind.

What if I listened to it sideways?

"You can't listen sideways," said the dagger.

"You said you could listen sideways," I said. "You said it on day ninety-three."

I remembered it very well. I'd been trying to hide my thoughts from the dagger. I'd gotten better at it since then.

I knew the tune, and I knew words went with the tune, just the way I knew the sun was out, even though you couldn't see it through the white eggshell sky. You knew the sun was out because the prairie crocuses were tilting up their faces and opening their mouths to drink in the light. The crocuses knew about the sun, even if they couldn't see it.

"Crocuses don't know things," said the dagger.

An active inner life.

Imaginology.

Defende Fabulosa; Protege Mythica.