The reading of signs on the kaleidoscopey thing is a lot like Tarot, yes, but the thing that makes the inhabitants of Little Belaire genuinely psychologically different from here/now people even before one gets into the being stoned all the time is the truthful speaking. I think the phrase Rush uses is 'say what you really mean and mean what you really say'. Due to a combination of meditation, biofeedback, and we-don't-know-what-all, every person in Little Belaire is genuinely physically incapable of deliberately lying, or of not communicating what they are actually thinking in their body language. This is why it's so rare and difficult when they have communication difficulties, which they still do have-- Rush gets into one with his sort-of father, a 'knot', where the father is saying that he wants to go see the outside world and Rush isn't old enough to recognize that as bitter self-mockery so takes it literally. And Rush also never has enough context and awareness to understand Once a Day, although to be fair she doesn't help him-- she may be a truthful speaker but I am reasonably certain she never actually wanted to be and resents the lack of privacy it creates. I would call truthful speaking technology, I am not sure what else to call it as it has clearly been intentionally developed in a scientific fashion despite not being in a direction that here/now can do much in with science. It's the thing that made Belaire hold together as a commune before the apocalypse, they mention it in the history of their travels as the thing they hold onto.
There's actually a bit when Rush is going to harvest bubbles for smoke where he talks about how at some point before the apocalypse a lot of ships got sent into space looking for, well, whatever might be out there, and one came back a long time later and crashed and the bubble-plant grows out of it. If you look at the stories of the early saints of Little Belaire you can see that they were wandering around looking for a home and they found this alien bubble-plant thing and they did all sorts of tests on it and one of them (I think Saint Bea? it's been a while) ate some and completely lost her brain. But then they found out it could be smoked and the effects were nifty, so they settled there.
... Dr. Boots' List is absolutely not a cargo cult, if you're using the phrase in the way I'm used to it. It's one of the things I have always thought was most neat about this book, actually, it's a very real thing they have there. There's the mystery of the four dead men, right, that Rush hears about growing up for most of his life, and has no idea what anybody is talking about? He eventually pieces together that actually it was three men and a cat, and that they are dead and alive at the same time: they've been recorded in the way Rush is eventually recorded himself, so that you can put on the object they're in and experience being them, their entire lives. Dr. Boots' List has the recording of the cat. A letter from Dr. Boots is that you go and you be a cat for a while, you put on this object and you experience being a cat. Everything about their society is designed to facilitate, understand, adapt to, and work towards processing in human terms that nonhuman experience, which they all repeat at intervals over the course of their lives. And they know they aren't cats, but they know they aren't necessarily human anymore either. Once a Day finds, in being a cat, the experience she has always needed of having something which she cannot, no matter what, communicate to anyone else even though she is a truthful speaker. It is her only privacy, having something which it is impossible to say and which, even if she is saying it with her body language and so on, it is impossible for anyone to hear. Rush took the letter in order to understand her that way, but of course since he is a different person it did not work, and it sets up serious problems for him because it conflicts so much with his truthful speaking. He spends a lot of the rest of the book trying to psychologically reconcile the two things, and I think he does manage, mostly by going nuts for a while.
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regna
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Date: 2013-07-16 07:04 am (UTC)There's actually a bit when Rush is going to harvest bubbles for smoke where he talks about how at some point before the apocalypse a lot of ships got sent into space looking for, well, whatever might be out there, and one came back a long time later and crashed and the bubble-plant grows out of it. If you look at the stories of the early saints of Little Belaire you can see that they were wandering around looking for a home and they found this alien bubble-plant thing and they did all sorts of tests on it and one of them (I think Saint Bea? it's been a while) ate some and completely lost her brain. But then they found out it could be smoked and the effects were nifty, so they settled there.
... Dr. Boots' List is absolutely not a cargo cult, if you're using the phrase in the way I'm used to it. It's one of the things I have always thought was most neat about this book, actually, it's a very real thing they have there. There's the mystery of the four dead men, right, that Rush hears about growing up for most of his life, and has no idea what anybody is talking about? He eventually pieces together that actually it was three men and a cat, and that they are dead and alive at the same time: they've been recorded in the way Rush is eventually recorded himself, so that you can put on the object they're in and experience being them, their entire lives. Dr. Boots' List has the recording of the cat. A letter from Dr. Boots is that you go and you be a cat for a while, you put on this object and you experience being a cat. Everything about their society is designed to facilitate, understand, adapt to, and work towards processing in human terms that nonhuman experience, which they all repeat at intervals over the course of their lives. And they know they aren't cats, but they know they aren't necessarily human anymore either. Once a Day finds, in being a cat, the experience she has always needed of having something which she cannot, no matter what, communicate to anyone else even though she is a truthful speaker. It is her only privacy, having something which it is impossible to say and which, even if she is saying it with her body language and so on, it is impossible for anyone to hear. Rush took the letter in order to understand her that way, but of course since he is a different person it did not work, and it sets up serious problems for him because it conflicts so much with his truthful speaking. He spends a lot of the rest of the book trying to psychologically reconcile the two things, and I think he does manage, mostly by going nuts for a while.