“When you live in the shadow of insanity, the appearance of another mind that thinks and talks as yours does is something close to a blessed event.”
― Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Gunden died quietly in their sleep, so when they awoke (as everyone does) in a world that was very similar but for certain key details, they didn’t remember dying. So they distrusted their memories of things like which cabinet the coffee beans were in or the color of the sky. “I could swear I had ten fingers, not twelve,” Gunden muttered, but kept most of it to themselves because they didn’t want to be labeled crazy or get diagnosed with some sort of psychosis or, worse, worse, dementia. Nearly everyone else had no memories of where Gunden had existed before dying, and since they had come into existence — along with their consistent memories — at the very same instant Gunden’s as whole new world, there were none to say “yes, I remember that too; you died Gunden, and you’ve been recreated in this new place.”

It wasn’t entirely true, of course, that everyone had been created anew along with the world; the universe hated to waste any effort, and since worlds are large and people are small, each new world was the place quite a few dead souls were spun back into service. So there were people Gunden could have consulted, who would have reassured them that their memories weren’t fabricated. But unfortunately those people were randomly distributed throughout a very large and very populous plane of existence, and Gunden was unlikely to ever meet any of them.

Nevertheless, this particular world included a communication system enabling individuals to contact others of like mind and matching opinion — or, as they desired, of different mind and conflicting opinion. So when Gunden placed an open message confessing his strange memories, or dreams, or whatever they were — and relating his fear that he must be losing something, whether his mind or his grip or his sanity, it just randomly happened that some of the right people saw the message. Gunden began to receive some private messages of reassurance. Yes, they said, you’re right in recalling a sky that was blue, and five-fingered hands, and all the rest. You’ve just come to a different place. Remember, they said, you died. This is what’s next.

It was the references to dying that took Gunden aback. He had died? How can something like that happen and then slip your mind? How can you not notice something like that? He remembered everything else — well, at least a lot of it. Why not that? It seemed pretty central.

One of his new correspondents, Brattinger, was the first to suggest that it was possible that Gunden hadn’t noticed because he’d been asleep or sedated at the time. So there wasn’t any rapidly approaching bus and large bang to remember, nor was there an illness or injury. “hmm,” mused Gunden, “that old story about dying in your sleep being something to hope for might have been a bit off.” Gunden was able to think that because Brattinger’s suggestion immediately rang true. It explained everything. Or at least it explained a lot. Orloff, another correspondent of Gunden’s, had added that only a relative few of the people in this new place had died (or at least lacked any recollections of things being different); everybody else seemed to have originated right here. Possibly, speculated Orloff, those folks would die and wake up somewhere else again. After, of course, a long life of 300 or 400 years.

Gunden took notice of that comment as well. “People live for centuries here?” he posted. “In the place I remember, you’d be lucky to last more than 90 years. Are the years different?” Brattinger answered that. “No,” they said, “the years here are longer, as far as I can tell.”

“That seems right,” agreed Orloff. “So really we’re talking about a life span of more like 500 of the years in the old place.”

“Even for the natives?” asked Gunden. He’d already noticed that the children didn’t seem to be growing up as fast as he would have expected.

Feeling like they were on a stronger psychological footing, Gunden tried to pay more attention to their immediate surroundings. The house seemed the same, and their family, including Gunden’s partner Rem, their friends, and their children seemed to be the same, except for the difference in some memories. Rem even seemed to remember everything about when and where they’d all met, and everything they’d been through. Even the bed where Gunden had supposedly died (which made them feel quite strange about lying in it) was the same. And yet, thought Gunden, these were not the same people.

Or were they? How reliable, after all, were these distant correspondents Orloff and Brattinger? And a few others who had joined their informal sessions. Maybe they were just enablers, confirming and boosting what were just psychoses. Some sort of hallucinations. Had any of them offered anything original that Gunden also remembered, or were all the details coming only from Gunden?

As a test, Gunden sent the following message: “what else does everyone remember about the other place? So much of everything around me seems exactly the way it used to be that I sometimes lose track.”

Orloff was first to reply. “The thing I remember most often is the taste of chocolate. It was my favorite. But I’ve never found anything close to it here.”

Brattinger said that they had been a musician, and pianos here had 89 keys, but in the other place they had just 88.

Malin, who had explained their death from bullet wounds in stomach-churning detail, mentioned a kind of butterfly with wings colored in a pattern not found here, but then Lenidibis pointed out that it sounded like Malin was describing a Ceylon Rose butterfly that certainly was found here, but it was just quite rare. That sparked an argument that continued for several days until Lenidibis posted a photo and Malin agreed that indeed, the Ceylon Rose was the one, and that in the other place, they had lived in Sri Lanka, where the Ceylon Rose can be found.

Gunden sent a message intended to represent laughing, and said “look, we have our own butterfly effect.” The comment didn’t produce the amusement Gunden had intended. Instead, Brattinger responded “have you ever considered that we were not supposed to find each other, and maybe we shouldn’t be talking about all this? Maybe we’ll just get separated. Maybe that’s even what happened in the other place.”

The others quickly blamed Gunden for starting the whole discussion, and everyone signed off. Gunden, though, had what they had wanted. Confirmation. The others remembered the same things (except for the butterfly). Gunden even began to wish for some chocolate, even though that had never been their favorite. But the rush of confirmation triggered another memory, fainter in some way. Had it just been something they dreamed? But no, it felt real, just very distant. It was, in a way, a memory of a memory. It was from the other place, and from not too long before the “dying in their sleep” episode. In the other place, Gunden had begun to remember other things. Four-fingered hands. A brilliant red sky. A taste of…something they couldn’t quite name, but delicious. It had been a favorite.

The sun was getting low in the lovely green sky. Gunden rubbed their face with their six-fingered hands and looked at the bed. And didn’t feel at all like lying down.

“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.”

― Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The US may be the weirdest country in the world. Objectively measured, we have systems like healthcare and education that function poorly and are overly expensive. Yet many of the people who live here seem to think that those systems are the best. People in the US love to rank things like “the best country” or “the most free” or things like that, but they don’t love actually measuring the things they rank. The US gets a lot of lip service as the leading meritocracy, where “anybody can rise to the top” (usually “the top” refers to either making a lot of money or being electred President), but in objective terms there’s less upward mobility here, economically speaking, than in many other places. It’s a dangerous society where there’s a lot of gun-related violence. Most everyone purports to dislike gun-related violence, but not to the extent of actually doing much of anything about it.

Many, many people in the US love guns. And cars. And, generally speaking, things. And yet over the past decades fewer and fewer things are made here. Even the objects very much desired and perceived as “coming from the US,” like iPhones and the like, are designed here but made elsewhere. At least in media like police dramas and movies, the handgun of choice is often a “Glock,” but those are from Austria. Other weapons, like high-end weapons of war, are of course made in the US and that’s a thing that the US is probably objectively very good at.

Although the US is very image- and graphics-oriented, the best cameras (or for that matter, all the cameras) are made somewhere else. Even most of the cars considered the “best” by various standards, whether reliability, price (low or high), luxury, speed, or looks, aren’t made in the US.

People in the US are politically at each others’ throats lately, maybe more so than since the 1800s. Personally, not so much — if you actually visit people whose politics might differ from yours, it’s still quite possible to be pleasant and civil (maybe don’t talk politics, which is always my preference anyway). The chances for visiting politically different people seem to be diminishing, though, as people seem to be “sorting themselves out” to live among folks they agree with.

I don’t know whether other countries deliver such a diet of jingoistic propaganda to schoolchildren, but I was certainly on the receiving end of that for my whole public education career. For me, that had the opposite of the intended effect; I started doubting most of that stuff and tried to read up on it myself. Of course, you have to be careful what you read — I still remember textbooks containing complete (and obvious) fiction about things like European settlers and the like.

Not every country has been “settled,” at least not recently enough that there are written records of it. At some point, I guess, some sort of tacit agreement must arise and some group just becomes “the first” to live in a place, and sometimes those groups try to assert ownership — or at least a moral right to occupy the place. That seems only a half-step away from a playground claim that “I had it first,” but maybe that’s as far as human morals really go. I don’t know — maybe just saying the US is the weirdest is aiming too small. Maybe we should be talking about the weirdest species.

“We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.”

― Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”

― Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Cacoethes scribendi?

An unpleasant, disharmonious noise is called “cacophony.” Although that’s the only word in its family that most people are familiar with, there exists a whole family of English words that (1) mean something unpleasant, and (2) begin with “cac-“. The prefix is pretty straightforward; it comes from the Greek word “kakos” (bad).

Most, but not all of the words in this family are obsolete terms that used to be used in the medical field. “Cacothymia”, for instance, is a confused or disordered mental condition, and “caconychia” is a disease of the fingernails or toenails. But there are also some family members, like “cacophony”, that are (or were) common terms. “Cacography” is bad handwriting — although now that I think of it, maybe that one is a medical term; the handwriting of doctors is famously cacographic.

There’s even a blanket term for anybody in a bad mood with an overwhelming urge to do something bad: “cacoethes.” This can be something minor — you can blame cacoethes for finishing a second slice of cake — or something more like a temper tantrum where china plates are flung at walls. There also used to be a well-known phrase suggesting that a piece of writing really shouldn’t have been attempted in the first place: “cacoethes scribendi”. It more literally means that someone (unfortunately) suffered from the inescapable urge to write, which they did badly. It was a common enough phrase to be included in a dictionary of quotations in 1808, and it actually comes from a longer quotation by the Roman author Juvenal: “Tenet insanabile multos scribendi cacoethes”. That means “many suffer from the incurable disease of writing”. It probably stayed stuck in its original Latin because after all, if you’re going to sneer at somebody else’s writing, saying so in Latin makes your personal superiority much more obvious. At least it did in the 18th century.

That 1808 dictionary of quotations (written by D. E. Macdonnel) includes a couple of others from the cacoethes family. Maybe these should be revived, since the behaviors they describe are certainly still with us. “Cacoethes loquendi” is the uncontrollable urge to say something (“loquendi” comes from “loqui”, the Latin word for “speak” — it’s also the source of “loquacious”). And “cacoethes carpendi” is the compulsion to collect things. “Carpendi” comes from “carpere”, the Latin word for pick or choose. The “picking” aspect of “cacoethes carpendi” gave the phrase another meaning as well: the overwhelming urge to criticize. It was fault-finding that was inherently worse than mere criticism, though. After all, “criticism” comes from the Greek “kritikos”, which means skilled in judging. Cacoethes carpendi, in comparison, is just a cacophony of carping.

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