Interview with Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled#Pollux
On the reasons for vesting entirely in the launch
Codrin Bălan#Pollux
-Systime: 200+22 1014
Codrin Bălan#Pollux: Before we get into the heavy stuff, how are you feeling?
Dear, Also, The Tree That Was Felled#Pollux: [laughter] You are going to have to be more specific, my dear. Do you mean my general disposition?
@@ -31,7 +31,7 @@ Systime: 200+22 1014Codrin: I know that May Then My Name has some stats on that. It might be interesting to see.
Dear: [nodding] That would be interesting, yes. You had a goal for this interview, though, so shall we get to that?
Codrin: Yes, might as well. I am curious, first, why you decided to travel on the launch. Was there anything in particular that drew you to the idea?
-Dear: Other than the fact that I am a hopeless romantic? [laughter] There were a few, I think. I am a hopeless romantic, yes, and — I will not actually be able to see them — I want to see the stars. I want to be one of the lucky few, or few billion, who get to travel between them. Another is that, when one is functionally immortal, boredom is a very real problem. I do not like being bored, and after more than two hundred years sys-side, I was getting perilously close.
+Dear: Other than the fact that I am a hopeless romantic? [laughter] There were a few. I am a hopeless romantic, yes, and — I will not actually be able to see them — I want to see the stars. I want to be one of the lucky few, or few billion, who get to travel between them. Another is that, when one is functionally immortal, boredom is a very real problem. I do not like being bored, and after something like two hundred years sys-side, I was getting perilously close.
Codrin: So it’s a sense of adventure?
Dear: I suppose, thought that brings to mind something more active than this is, to me. I hear adventure and I think sneaking behind enemy lines or guns at dawn. It is a desire for the new and interesting. Not just that there be new and interesting things going on around me, but that those new and interesting things change me in some deep way. I like stasis even less than boredom, and uploads are at risk of falling into patterns familiar enough to be considered stasis.
Codrin: Is there an aspect of being the first to do something involved?
@@ -63,7 +63,7 @@ Systime: 200+22 1014Codrin: I’m sorry, Dear. Do you want to stop?
Dear: No, no. That is my choice usage of ‘fuck’ for the interview. [laughter, short break in interview] Okay. Early on in the system, some wag, when pressed to build a library, uploaded every single book they could get their hands on, legally or otherwise, into the perisystem architecture, going all the way back to the Epic of Gilgamesh. When I was forked and still trying to figure out ways to play with instances, I went on a tear of reading biographical works, going through dozens of books at a time, hunting for little moments that could be used, somehow, in an exhibition.
Dear: I came across a book of essays from goodness knows how long ago, and I was so taken aback by one part in particular that I snipped it out and stored it in an exo. Ah, let me find the correct part [pause] Okay. “Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness ---- a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest self, which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib comic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract, however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day”.
-Dear: I suppose I worry sometimes that, as a public personality, first as Michelle Hadje, then as an Odist, and now as an artist with an ebullient personality and the aforementioned “verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer” et cetera, et cetera, that I… [pause] Okay. [pause] Okay. I sometimes worry that I, as those things, fall into the category of “beloved by all yet loved by none”.
+Dear: I worry sometimes that, as a public personality, first as Michelle Hadje, then as an Odist, and now as an artist with an ebullient personality and the aforementioned “verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer” et cetera, et cetera, that I… [pause] Okay. [pause] Okay. I sometimes worry that I, as those things, fall into the category of “beloved by all yet loved by none”.
Codrin: I love you, Dear.
Dear: [waving paw, tears] This was not supposed to be the personal part of the interview. Codrin, Ioan, please just say that I want someone to miss me, that I want to haunt the L5 system as some quiet ghost who communicates in words from light-years away and memories that you will never forget. I want to haunt you because that is one thing I cannot do without merging into oblivion. I want to be missed.
Codrin: Perhaps here is a good place to stop.
@@ -79,7 +79,7 @@ Systime: 200+22 1014Transcript ends, no closing remarks