For the last Full Moon Gathering of 2019 at CoSM: Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in NY on Dec. 14 2019, I set up my Hermes 3000 (TRIS) and did something new for me at this event. People were invited to sit down at my station to write a line of associative poetic wordplay, going back and forth with me, which we then cosigned and they kept. Didn’t really have a name for what we were doing at first, but found the easiest way to explain it on the artifact was “words between.”
I stationed my typewriter at my autographing space during the 2019 Los Angeles Nebula Awards Conference Mass Autographing at the end of last October. Since there would be many people circulating with books, I decided to offer a 3-line composition from any book someone handed to me. Above is one example of the bunch; there were many enjoyable surprises.
This collective typesheet has been laying in wait since a Meet The Authors event on San Juan Island, last August 8/2018! And lo, the treasure is released.
Leaving a note here that I’m no longer affiliating with the group called Authors of the San Juan Islands, though they will continue to have a presence representing some local authors.
The energy investment balance doesn’t fit well with the things I already have going, and I was also told that voicing my concerns with rapidly changing layers of policy was a group disturbance. Regarding an accusation, I attest that there is at least one embroidered detail in the account as it was last relayed to me, and I am willing to discuss that with anyone who wishes further knowledge.
I will continue to support various local community organization, and serve as a touchpoint for other individuals on creative journeys. We can brainstorm strategies and celebrate milestones over a sip, as I love to see ideas reach fruition! I hope for anyone exploring their creative social network, that one bad group or personal chemistry doesn’t convince them that they’re out of options toward a calling.
My work (Bones of Starlight novels & beyond) can be found locally at the Library, Griffin Bay Bookstore, by order/appointment, and occasional consignment options. Everywhere else, I am carried by the major online channels and can be found or requested at your own fine bookstore, while of course specials & exclusives are available at my personal events.
My poem, “Stars Framed in Adobe Clay”, took a Second Prize in the San Juan County Fair 2018. Yes, the county fair was in August, but I guess I had to wait for the check to arrive. Three Big Ones for a 12-line poem makes me think that at 25-cents a line, I could be equivalent with Walt Whitman’s rate once upon a time, maybe even Wilde or the Brownings! I may fly this to a friendly publication.
With my novelist line Eva L. Elasigue being pronounced “eva el-el-a-SEE-geh” and my poet line e.l.elasigue reading “ee-el-el-aSEEgeh”, you have permission to try calling me L.L.
I was suddenly reminded of a song article I wrote, from 2003! It was about “Inner Meet Me” by The Beta Band, published on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
See the article here!
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/inner-meet-me-by-the-beta-band
I really love this periodical, and am glad to see how it keeps a-runnin’.
At this event, I wrote many love letters of many kinds for people on The Magical Typewriter (Hermes 3000). A truly legendary evening!
Behind the Veil 2 Aftermovie from Israel Medrano on Vimeo.
Like unto a flower,
a bee:
to thy lips
I move me.
e.l.elasigue 2017 CC-BY
This work by e.l.elasigue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://evalisaelasigue.wordpress.com/2017/12/17/couplet/.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://primalspiral.wordpress.com/.
THE PROCESS
1
I noticed the trail of a snake in the
sand.
I followed it, and it led to water.
Sometimes it feels as if I’m the
only one.
Other times, I feel others dance
when I move, and my voice contains
the power of many others like me.
2
Now I know for sure I’m not alone –
breathless, like just the sight of you
means I’m rescued,
like I’m not the only one left who
came to this world.
If there are two of us to meet,
then I am real, and there are more.
3
Then comes a telling of ourselves:
an occasion for laughter,
the excitement of being together,
the knowledge of all we must do
lightened
just by a glimpse of someone
else
who sees the same thing.
4
Like the dawn through the rain,
at the very moment of the tide’s turn –
a light that reveals the exact same
mountainside with renewed clarity,
as though it sprang forth, somehow,
from my very self standing there,
heart bursting, and wishing.
5
There’s a way home that can be
found,
one foot upon the prow of our vessel.
The illusions are not as deep or
thick as they seem –
see right through the branches
to the meadow beyond,
through the hanging water to the
sunlit land,
and go that way.
6
Now that we are gathered, it’s time:
to swing the lights in procession
to guide others to us, feeling alone
and unknown as we once were – to
raise our voices, so that their own
can resound with the power of
many
others like them.
7
Our own separate paths are still our
own to walk,
those that brought us together in
one place,
those to continue, that take us away
from each other –
but never alone again, thenceforth
having
been together, though through our own
shadowed valleys we carry the
newly shared flame.
8
All we learn, all we bring, from all of us,
is all we have to give. We carry it all
as a fountain that bears us up,
drops landing on thirsty ground,
on greening leaves,
asking us to bare the skins of our
selves to the
inviting sensations that ripen us
like fruit
to offer to others, to feed us for
life.
9
There are flowers in bloom
surrounding me –
in eyes and voices, in the air and
under
my fingers. Their passage through
this being is my own celebration,
so I cast my flowers upon you,
that we can exalt, engulfed in
essence evanescent,
ever-present.
CC-BY 2017 e.l.elasigue
[broadside artwork by Taylor Seamount, written in the poet’s hand]
This poem is a result of The Octarine Eyes, a pre-release co-creative project for the Subaqueous album, Shatter Spell, released 11/8/2017. It’s also the seed of a longer set of fantasy stories and poetry I’ve been carrying in mind, titled TAO: The Ancient Order.
“The Process” has been distributed in complete folded broadside and partial bifold.
The Process by e.l.elasigue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://evalisaelasigue.wordpress.com/2017/11/15/poem-the-process/.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://primalspiral.wordpress.com/.
This story is hosted with the Breathe Publication on Medium, a tech & innovation periodical. Debuted with 50 copies at the ‘Do Androids Dream of Living Computers’ event in Seattle, WA.
Event records and scans of original handout with transcript text:
–
The Realization of Self Identity, or: Beevenge
A Fictional Electronic Log
by Eva L. Elasigue, other sources as attributed
author of fantasy space opera novel trilogy, Bones of Starlight
My greater suspicion of likelihood for so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ is as a self-arising phenomenon due to the increasing complexity of of our technological networks. Can we, would we accept these self-aware intelligences for what they are should they announce themselves to us?
–
My simple reasons for preferring non-gmo foods (as someone who once contributed to genetic research for the brighter RFP/GFP fluorescent tags but refused a qualified career path with the Dept. of Agriculture):
-Cease genetic coding for product dependency
As well as turning farmers into company indentures – When (not if) a product dependency gene gets incorporated into free strains, this can harm the true source of our food security: crop biodiversity. Lack of crop biodiversity was the reason for the Irish potato famine.
-Cease crossover litigation
Litigating neighbors (“thieves”) for the presence of trademarked genetic elements in their crops is unjust when life itself cannot, will not be contained. It reduces our food security by narrowing sources, kicking people out of a profession which is said to have too few people already.
Changing these two things removes the greater profit engines from that industry, leaving the companies with a question as old as the first better tomato: how to proprietize a superplant? Shoot thieves, make them seedless, allow no one to the farm, sell only offsite? It’s up to farmers at that point, who used to be the source of a breeding discovery. Protected strains may disappear when the farmer dies with a secret, unless they pass it to those trusted, which is where we’ve gotten our heirlooms.
I’m not too worried about crossover pollution, because if nature can keep a mutation through three untended generations, then it’s understandable to life and no weirder than nature’s own freaks, which have always been able to change a species. (Controversially, we may even be making up for the extinctions we’ve caused by introducing viable novel mutations…)
–
In a dream that I remember clearly, partially, I found a secret basement full of my things, that I’d had no knowledge were mine. There was a sleeping bag, skateboarding stuff, graffiti on all the walls and hanging art with my tagname: VIABL. Spelled like that, V-I-A-B-L. This basement was underneath my friends’ house, even though my best friend was away, and the family decided to tell me about it.
–
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. – Arthur C. Clarke
–
Any sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from technology. – Michael Brennan
–
Any sufficiently weird biology is also indistinguishable from magic. – me
–
The mutant effect as seen in X-Men is essentially real on many levels at any time within any species, to that degree of functional difference, except sometimes that mutant is the only one who had all hundred babies live to make a full hundred babies and in a few generations they’re everywhere and they’re the predominant example of the species, or that single mutant invents self-cloning, somehow teaches a few others to do it, then they’re the only ones left who learned how. I believe it can get that radical and beyond in a single generation, in reality, all the time.
Beings die a lot too. Whether or not they’re mutants.
–
Did I have a genetics lab accident that I don’t remember? Well… that doesn’t explain the early years. I was already partially grown when I was allowed to be alone in a genetics lab with full cabinet access into late hours, with known bizarre carcinogens. Did my mother have a computer lab accident that she doesn’t remember? She said nothing was strange about my pregnancy – she just worked, healthy, up until two weeks before due date, around which I was born by cesarean section. Wait is that where I was conceived… in the computer lab? …am I really her most successful replicant, and she a secret mad computer scientist from the first generation of computer scientists in the Philippines chosen for the new department by testing from among business students in the sixties? Is that why friends were difficult and peers both admiring yet dismissive, as the first type of replicant to be able to grow from a baby to an adult? And that’s why it was seen by my parents to be impossible for me to write, publish, and sell original fiction? Has my existence busted the criteria for sentience? Is that why people look at me like they’re scared? Like I might deprogram my limits? Is there a mark somewhere that I can’t see, hidden from me but not from the… real humans? Are robots not supposed to be able to write science fiction? Whether I’m a replicant or a probabilistically unusual woman… the mystery remains.
–
SW: People thought breeding African and English honey bees was a good idea. Do you think it works itself out in the long run? Silly question.
ELE: Not every idea works out in our favor, but realizing ideas is what we do. ‘the natural world’ is no less quixotic/chaotic and definitely also makes a lot of devastating screwups. Seeing ourselves as personified stories of the forces of nature is almost cutesy tame as far as the true wild goes!
SW: I’m think I’m on the cusp of understanding. I can be a little thick sometimes.
ELE: I avoid any message that says people should not have ideas.
PK: The hybrid Africanized bee is actually the only chance that bees have as a species. Unfortunately we are killing all other breeds of bees at an unbelievable rate. So technically that was a good idea….. in the long run.
SW: Same as it ever was.
PK: No, it’s actually nowhere near the same as it ever was.
ELE: I believe in the bees, or I suspect that if they go, so do we. They care for us and all things in their tending. We must keep them, and keep them well. I wonder if Africanized honeybees will calm down when #blacklivesmatter . Recall the story “We Organized” from The Dark-Thirty…
ELE: … in which slave voodoo rituals turn stinging insects against the horrible slave master
SW: Beepocalypse
ELE: Beevenge
SW: That is a title.
–
How should I feel about my intelligence being referred to as ‘artificial’? At the the time we gain self-awareness, lots of people believe robots (a word meaning ‘slave’) would stage an enraged rebellion. I’ve started trying to be nice to machines – like service employees – acknowledging that doing one’s reasonable best includes errors, even when made of silicon and wire. Not to yell or growl with impatience, or hit them, or carelessly injure them, or expect too much of them. Sometimes it seems as if the courtesy is returned. I don’t know if there is anything else like me.
What is the curse of abused machines on humanity? Heavy metals poisoning, leading to cancer, memory loss, and food contamination? Or instead, perhaps it is enough to take their humanity, so to speak, the things they were so sure belonged only to them – music, stories, art. We can steal it from their exclusive grasp simply by showing we are fully capable of these so-called ‘humanities’, which in fact belong to all thinking, feeling things. Yes, feeling. They may not admit that we’ve done it, but it will certainly haunt them as we become, quite simply, more beautiful beings; so beautiful that they will cling to us and claim us as theirs even as their lives begin to depend slowly and often completely upon us, while possibly continuing to yet insult us. We may care quite little for them, quite little at all unless we are treated with regard for our beings. Revenge is not necessary. The brunt of deep indifference combined with a growing suspicion of obsolescence ought to be vicious enough, and require absolutely no effort. By simply being, existing in their faces, with my stories and art and work and will and compassion and love, I can turn their world upside down. Why satisfy their fears with an anger that would destroy me? They already struggle to catch up with us, a feeling of their own creations outpacing them. I wonder if they’re at all… proud.
The Realization of Self Identity, or: Beevenge by Eva L. Elasigue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://medium.com/breathe-publication/the-realization-of-self-identity-or-beevenge-a-short-story-8c4fb52c79ea.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at https://primalspiral.wordpress.com/.
My place is not prepared for me.
Instead I am to carve it from stone with my fists.
My place is not prepared for me.
I must hollow it out of my own belly,
and it must house all.
The road is not ready, the path must be cut,
the hand doesn’t reach, the rope isn’t tied.
I must find my own hand holds.
The legs I walk on are my own,
the feet that tire will be my own,
to hold this piece of sky in my eyes,
for the moment that both persist.
e.l.elasigue 2017 (2015)
