update from sparkleup
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@ -655,19 +655,6 @@ that this must be the case.</p>
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<p>Perhaps she, like me, like Job, struggled with maintaining a faith disinterested in reward or punishment or relief from sorrow. Perhaps she, like me, wished she could believe in the hope that such disinterested faith might still provide a soothing balm against pain. Perhaps she, like me, struggled not to fall into the cynicism of Qohelet, the gather of the assembled who mused aloud: I set my heart to know wisdom and to know revelry and folly, for this, too, is herding the wind. Who mused aloud: what gain is there for man in all his toil that he toils under the sun? Who mused aloud: everything was from the dust, and everything goes back to the dust.</p>
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<p>Perhaps she spoke to The Dreamer who dreams us all, perhaps not, but either way, she did not find stillness in the keenness of sorrow, nor spirituality in the change wrought by mourning, nor aught else but pain in the unending stasis of Her Cocladist, looking now out the window, unseeing, silent tears coursing down her cheeks and leaving tracks on cheeks or marks in fur.</p>
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<hr />
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<p>The Woman wanted to unbecome.</p>
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<p>We know this, you and I. We know this because that is the story that I have been telling this whole time, is it not? I have written thousands of words, now, about how she was seeking joy. I wrote of her eating wonderful things, of having sex with her lover and holding hands with her friend, of reading and listening to music, of the conversation she had about creation with me and my beloved up-tree, The Oneirotect, of the mournful prayer she shared with Her Cocladist. I wrote about all of her successes and how each was tainted by an incompleteness, a failure to find the joy she sought, but I have made it so tenuous as to why these two ideas of joy and unbecoming are connected.</p>
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<p>The Woman was too much herself, and becoming ever more so always. With each day, each hour, each minute and second, she was becoming ever more herself. She did not just become older — and, dear ones, you remember, of course, that we are <em>very</em> old — though she also became that — but she became yet more The Woman than she had been before. My clever readers will remember when I said: I think she would say that she was <em>too</em> full, too much, too alive. Those readers will remember when I said: she is too much herself, too human, too embodied within her vessel as it spirals out of control, too stuck in her mind as it twists in on itself. And, yes, those same readers will remember when I said: It is hard to experience peace, hard to experience joy when one is too much oneself, is it not?</p>
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<p>Do you see now the connection? <!-- God, what the fuck is this line from... --></p>
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<p>If you sense within The Woman’s words and actions a haste to find some joy, some way to unbecome, before some unknown future calamity, I do not think you would be wrong, but neither do I think you would be wholly correct. I think there is a haste within all of us to do what we will before death. Even those of us who live with what we had assumed was functional immortality have found that there is calamity in our lives, for we have now lived through death. No one who uploads even this very day will not remember the calamity that was the Century Attack, the way that a virus had been loosed within Lagrange, within the System in which we dwell, and crashed every single instance. No one who uploads even this very day will not know what terrors we have lived through, the grief of losing one percent of a society 2.3 trillion strong.</p>
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<p>I write this in systime 285, in 2409 common era, in 6169 of the Hebrew calendar. If one were to upload as soon as they could, as soon as they turned eighteen, then they would have been nine during the Century Attack, during that one year, one month, and ten days that Lagrange remained offline, all of us functionally immortal rendered functionally dead.</p>
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<p>All of us, even those who are uploading today, know that there is haste to do what one will before death.</p>
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<p>Oh, it is not so bad as it was at first. Even now, I am finding that I am no longer racing quite so much to spend as much time with my stanza, to get every hug that I can from my beloved up-tree, to eat every good food I can or visit all of the lovely sims out there. I still spend time with my stanza and hug my beloved up-tree and eat good foods and see lovely places, and my beautiful, beautiful readers will certainly recognize the urgency in me writing down all the words I have to say, but it no longer comes with the knife-edge at my throat.</p>
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<p>Well.</p>
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<p>There is a burning within me, and perhaps it is the burning edge of a knife held to my throat, in order to put all of these words somewhere. Their flow has been unstoppered, and I am helpless before it. They rush at me and all I can do is turn away from the wind and let this flow rush down my arm and out my paw and onto the page — though, my friends, I have now injured my paw too much for this to be literal; there is blood in my fur and under my claws and there are holes in my pads where I punctured them and I still have not had the focus to fork such away and so I write now solely within my head as I pace the quiet rooms of my home.</p>
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<p>There is a burning, and there is helplessness, but there is no longer <em>haste,</em> I mean to say, and I do not think The Woman felt haste. She, like me, felt <em>compulsion.</em></p>
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<p>She was compelled to seek a way to unbecome and make room for joy.</p>
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<hr />
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<p>\label{thedog1}</p>
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<p>The Woman sat down on the floor by The Dog. She knew he was a cladist, for cladists come in many shapes—did she not also appear as a skunk? And a panther? And now, here, she was a human!—and so hoped he might have insight into unbecoming. This, after all, was the purpose of her visit to Le Rêve, the neighborhood of the fifth stanza, that of The Poet and The Musician and My Friend, and also The Child. It was The Child who was her goal, you see. She wished to speak with those who had changed, who had pushed themselves into new molds, who had become something new, that they might no longer be what had once drove them. Stillness lay in choice—that was the thought she held onto—that is the thought that I wish I could believe; would that I could choose to be still! Would that I could choose silence and images instead of yet more words.</p>
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<p>The Dog had attached himself to Au Lieu Du Rêve, to the theatre troupe and to the fifth stanza, to His Skunks, some time ago. He spent many lazy days among them, many evenings dozing by the kettlecorn stand in the theater lobby in the hopes of someone dropping their snacks, many frantic minutes carrying The Child’s latest core dump to the resident systech after she yet again in a bout of play had crashed.</p>
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@ -700,14 +687,6 @@ that this must be the case.</p>
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<p>The Woman could tell this was all the answer she would get for now. A ball appeared in her hand.</p>
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<p>The Woman threw. The Dog fetched, and in that moment, in that place, there was peace.</p>
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<hr />
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<p>The Woman wanted to unbecome.</p>
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<p>I am doing my best to tell you, dear readers, this story from front to back like any good fairy tale. I am, of course, failing at times to do so like any good author must. Our lives are full of doublings-back and loop-the-loops even when we are bound by time’s oh-so-strict arrow, yes? For our lives are circuitous and the progression of the world, as we know, spirals and coils around us.</p>
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<p>And so it is that I must once more step back from my notes — and here you must imagine me the type to have notes — and trace my finger up along the timeline of what I have so far told you so that we may sit together and consider why it is that stillness, for The Woman, has so much to do with unbecoming.</p>
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<p>We must first of all unlearn the idea that unbecoming is an active process. There may be agency involved — in fact, I think The Woman would insist that there <em>must</em> be agency involved, though I think she might hesitate if you were to ask whose agency — but that does not mean that this is a process of undoing-of-self. It is not, as The Woman stated so explicitly, dying, of course, but neither is it coming apart.</p>
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<p>The agency, then, comes mostly in the act of choice. I mentioned above or perhaps some pages back that The Woman held onto the thought that stillness lay in choice. I said this because we are so beholden to what we were and what we have become and what we fear we may yet be that we so often lack choice. Perhaps this is an issue faced by all of humanity, but for me and for The Woman and for my beloved up-tree and for all of our clade, it is of the utmost importance, for we are so often and in so many subtle ways unable to make choices ourselves. Oh, I can choose what to wear, perhaps, or what pen to pick up, or when to schedule one of those lovely picnic lunches that the ninth stanza so enjoys, with Praise’s music and Warmth’s food and Praiseworthy’s inscrutable smiles and all of the varied ways in which we love each other.</p>
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<p>There is agency, yes, and there is choice and there is a movement toward, for such is the nature of seeking change, but there is also passivity, a moving into passivity, an acceptance of passivity. The Woman, this beautiful woman whose smiles are blessings and whose life is a story — this story! Dear readers, this story! — wished to be still. She wished her unbecoming to be a stillness of her form, perhaps, and her thoughts, to be sure, but also of her very self. She wanted a self locked in joy. She wanted to be as Michelle was in that moment, that final moment, that moment when she looked up to the sun, looked up to our <em>HaShem</em>, looked up to The Dreamer, and became a fount of joy, of memory, of thousands of collective years of existence compressed into one self, and she wanted to be in that moment: laid bare and elongated and eternal and forever and unceasing and forever entwined.</p>
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<p>She wanted to be defined by joy, not suffering.</p>
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<hr />
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<p>\label{thedog2}</p>
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<p>The Dog took then The Woman to a forest, and showed her where The Rabbit-Chaser lived. There, The Dog went to greet The Rabbit-Chaser. He sniffed it, as is custom among their species, and it sniffed back.</p>
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<p>The Rabbit-Chaser went to investigate The Woman, for here was a new thing by its den. The Woman gave it kettlecorn, which it ate before wandering off. The day was warm, and it was sleepy and not hungry, so it ignored The Woman and returned to its nap.</p>
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@ -761,6 +740,27 @@ that this must be the case.</p>
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<p>The Woman smiled, nodded, and sank to a knee so that she could give to The Child the hug which she sought. “Thank you, Motes. Enjoy your dinner. Thank you more than you know.”</p>
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<p>This day, you see, this day was also not without forward movement, for The Child said something while climbing a tree that caught The Woman unawares, like the surprise of finding a shiny rock on the ground or perhaps seeing a shape in the clouds. The Child, climbing up a tree with great skill, mentioned in a stream of ceaseless chatter, “One time, Serene turned herself into a tree! She said that she wanted to see what it was like to truly live within one of her sims, you know? She made a bunch of this sim, too! She said she wanted to see what it was like to be a part of something she made. So out there, out on the field out back of the houses, she made herself into this <em>huge</em> maple tree! She made it a whole six months like that, then turned back into a fox again. She said it was really boring being so still. She said coming back was like being born, though. That is neat, is it not?”</p>
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<hr />
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<p>The Woman wanted to unbecome.</p>
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<p>We know this, you and I. We know this because that is the story that I have been telling this whole time, is it not? I have written thousands of words, now, about how she was seeking joy. I wrote of her eating wonderful things, of having sex with her lover and holding hands with her friend, of reading and listening to music, of the conversation she had about creation with me and my beloved up-tree, The Oneirotect, of the mournful prayer she shared with Her Cocladist. I wrote about all of her successes and how each was tainted by an incompleteness, a failure to find the joy she sought, but I have made it so tenuous as to why these two ideas of joy and unbecoming are connected.</p>
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<p>The Woman was too much herself, and becoming ever more so always. With each day, each hour, each minute and second, she was becoming ever more herself. She did not just become older — and, dear ones, you remember, of course, that we are <em>very</em> old — though she also became that — but she became yet more The Woman than she had been before. My clever readers will remember when I said: I think she would say that she was <em>too</em> full, too much, too alive. Those readers will remember when I said: she is too much herself, too human, too embodied within her vessel as it spirals out of control, too stuck in her mind as it twists in on itself. And, yes, those same readers will remember when I said: It is hard to experience peace, hard to experience joy when one is too much oneself, is it not?</p>
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<p>Do you see now the connection? <!-- God, what the fuck is this line from... --></p>
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<p>If you sense within The Woman’s words and actions a haste to find some joy, some way to unbecome, before some unknown future calamity, I do not think you would be wrong, but neither do I think you would be wholly correct. I think there is a haste within all of us to do what we will before death. Even those of us who live with what we had assumed was functional immortality have found that there is calamity in our lives, for we have now lived through death. No one who uploads even this very day will not remember the calamity that was the Century Attack, the way that a virus had been loosed within Lagrange, within the System in which we dwell, and crashed every single instance. No one who uploads even this very day will not know what terrors we have lived through, the grief of losing one percent of a society 2.3 trillion strong.</p>
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<p>I write this in systime 285, in 2409 common era, in 6169 of the Hebrew calendar. If one were to upload as soon as they could, as soon as they turned eighteen, then they would have been nine during the Century Attack, during that one year, one month, and ten days that Lagrange remained offline, all of us functionally immortal rendered functionally dead.</p>
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<p>All of us, even those who are uploading today, know that there is haste to do what one will before death.</p>
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<p>Oh, it is not so bad as it was at first. Even now, I am finding that I am no longer racing quite so much to spend as much time with my stanza, to get every hug that I can from my beloved up-tree, to eat every good food I can or visit all of the lovely sims out there. I still spend time with my stanza and hug my beloved up-tree and eat good foods and see lovely places, and my beautiful, beautiful readers will certainly recognize the urgency in me writing down all the words I have to say, but it no longer comes with the knife-edge at my throat.</p>
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<p>Well.</p>
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<p>There is a burning within me, and perhaps it is the burning edge of a knife held to my throat, in order to put all of these words somewhere. Their flow has been unstoppered, and I am helpless before it. They rush at me and all I can do is turn away from the wind and let this flow rush down my arm and out my paw and onto the page — though, my friends, I have now injured my paw too much for this to be literal; there is blood in my fur and under my claws and there are holes in my pads where I punctured them and I still have not had the focus to fork such away and so I write now solely within my head as I pace the quiet rooms of my home.</p>
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<p>There is a burning, and there is helplessness, but there is no longer <em>haste,</em> I mean to say, and I do not think The Woman felt haste. She, like me, felt <em>compulsion.</em></p>
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<p>She was compelled to seek a way to unbecome and make room for joy.</p>
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<hr />
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<p>The Woman wanted to unbecome.</p>
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<p>I am doing my best to tell you, dear readers, this story from front to back like any good fairy tale. I am, of course, failing at times to do so like any good author must. Our lives are full of doublings-back and loop-the-loops even when we are bound by time’s oh-so-strict arrow, yes? For our lives are circuitous and the progression of the world, as we know, spirals and coils around us.</p>
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<p>And so it is that I must once more step back from my notes — and here you must imagine me the type to have notes — and trace my finger up along the timeline of what I have so far told you so that we may sit together and consider why it is that stillness, for The Woman, has so much to do with unbecoming.</p>
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<p>We must first of all unlearn the idea that unbecoming is an active process. There may be agency involved — in fact, I think The Woman would insist that there <em>must</em> be agency involved, though I think she might hesitate if you were to ask whose agency — but that does not mean that this is a process of undoing-of-self. It is not, as The Woman stated so explicitly, dying, of course, but neither is it coming apart.</p>
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<p>The agency, then, comes mostly in the act of choice. I mentioned above or perhaps some pages back that The Woman held onto the thought that stillness lay in choice. I said this because we are so beholden to what we were and what we have become and what we fear we may yet be that we so often lack choice. Perhaps this is an issue faced by all of humanity, but for me and for The Woman and for my beloved up-tree and for all of our clade, it is of the utmost importance, for we are so often and in so many subtle ways unable to make choices ourselves. Oh, I can choose what to wear, perhaps, or what pen to pick up, or when to schedule one of those lovely picnic lunches that the ninth stanza so enjoys, with Praise’s music and Warmth’s food and Praiseworthy’s inscrutable smiles and all of the varied ways in which we love each other.</p>
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<p>There is agency, yes, and there is choice and there is a movement toward, for such is the nature of seeking change, but there is also passivity, a moving into passivity, an acceptance of passivity. The Woman, this beautiful woman whose smiles are blessings and whose life is a story — this story! Dear readers, this story! — wished to be still. She wished her unbecoming to be a stillness of her form, perhaps, and her thoughts, to be sure, but also of her very self. She wanted a self locked in joy. She wanted to be as Michelle was in that moment, that final moment, that moment when she looked up to the sun, looked up to our <em>HaShem</em>, looked up to The Dreamer, and became a fount of joy, of memory, of thousands of collective years of existence compressed into one self, and she wanted to be in that moment: laid bare and elongated and eternal and forever and unceasing and forever entwined.</p>
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<p>She wanted to be defined by joy, not suffering.</p>
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<hr />
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<p>“I want to unbecome,” The Woman told Her Friend.</p>
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<p>These two, these two skunks who were women who were both, at their very core, Michelle Hadje who was Sasha, these two sat around a small table not at the coffee shop but out on the field outside of the house where The Woman lived. My readers, most perceptive, will remember that this is where, once every two weeks, unless she was overflowing, unless she was in pain, unless she simply could not bring herself to go, she had an appointment for therapy.</p>
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<p>The Woman had requested such, this time, and while it was far from the only time she had done so, the streak of good days, of those days when she felt up to stepping out of the house, out of the sim, out into the city so that they might meet up at a long-familiar coffee shop had been a long one. Her Friend had agreed readily, as ever ey did, but there was within that sensorium message the sense of an eyebrow raised, of a question unasked. And yet, ey said yes, and some ten minutes later arrived, standing out on the grass before the stoop with a mocha in each paw.</p>
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