Tag: space

578: “Sensory Hairs” (Ed Yong)

                “Sensory hairs are versatile structures. They can be actively pressed against surfaces to produce tactile sensations, as whisking rats and oripulating manatees do. But they can also be passively bent and deflected by flowing air or water. By responding to that pressure, an animal can detect the flows created by distant objects, touching things from afar without needing to make direct contact.” -Ed Yong, An Immense World, page 172

                Sometimes I play a game with myself: I look up at the sky and imagine a vaulted veiling, sometimes above the treetops, above the bird’s flight paths, above the clouds. I’m trying to take a sip of just how much open space I’m seeing. Something similar has happened when I stood high on a mountain ridge, looking across a valley to another peak: all that expanse, as far as a long day’s hike, as close (it seems) as cold lakewater cupped in my two hands. It can be hard for me to see how much this how much is, how deep, how wondrous. And so I practice.
                And I practice with what I can’t see. Yong goes on to describe an experiment in which two manatees could clearly feel the slight vibrations—movements of less than a millionth of a meter—of a submerged sphere a meter away from their flanks. What would that be like, to be so in touch with the flow of the water you swim in? I don’t know. I imagine it. Just as delightedly, I remember that I don’t know. I imagine how little I see: how narrow a face of the world my eyes give me (wondrous as they are). I look at my skin, my arm hairs, sensitive in so many ways. I feel how much I have to learn from a manatee about being touched.

by Azlan

483: “And Watched The Heart” (Aliette de Bodard)

                “Thuỷ stood in her cabin in The Goby in the Well, her bots arrayed on her shoulders and clinging to her wrists, and watched the heart of the nebula.”
                -Aliette de Bodard, “Mulberry and Owl,” We’re Here (and also here in Uncanny Magazine)

                I almost always write about a quote from something I’ve finished reading. Or at least, I often think of it that way, which is weird, because I’ve never actually finished reading any of the stories that I love most. They swirl and come back, less single events and more waves & eddies & seaspray & quick sips & long drinks. In any case, tonight, I’m thinking about de Bodard’s line because I’m just starting to read “Mulberry and the Owl.” Half a page in something pulled me away. And there’s something lovely about story beginnings, something that connects to why I like fiction and speculative fiction in particular.
                Years ago I heard Stanford neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky lecture about human interest in “newness.” One of his suggestions was that an individual’s interest in newness tends to wear out overtime— if an American hadn’t tried sushi by their early twenties, his research found, the odds were they never would. If they didn’t have a piercing by their early twenties the odds were they never would. Similarly his research indicated that Americans tend to set their taste in music by their teens or weary twenties. One interesting nuance: Zapolsky said that if you set out to be a beginner in anything—pick up the harp, which you have no idea how to play, and deeply start learning—your interest in newness across the board tends to go up. A regular, purposeful practice of being a beginner brings you back to new beginnings.
                Like short story opening lines. Like all opening lines, maybe, if you read them that way. I start reading and I’m a beginner in this world, because Thuỷ has bots arrayed on her arm. (What kind of bots, I wonder?). Because I’ve never looked at the heart of any nebula. (What does Thuỷ see?). Because reading this I’m listening, wondering: who is this? What community web do they live in? What matters to them, and as we gaze into this nebula, what’s possible?

by Azlan