The Art of Talking to Yourselves

The morning is soft, the edge hazy and blurred. The house inside and outside is quiet. In the world, the sound of cars and traffic rumble into a flurry of activity that won’t stop until late tonight.

However, inside, in Emmengard, there is just the quiet song of birds and the low creeping fog that ambles along the grass at ankle height. In the night we dreamt of classes being held in one of the hidden rooms in the big house, the library house. Someone showed the kids old videos on old giant spools, the ones that were apt to catch fire and burn down the entire theatre.  I think it shows the deep unconsciousness’s desire to do its part to “deprogram us.”  We call the deep subconscious "she". It humanizes her, but she is not really a human at all. She is the drifting ankle high fog, and the song of the birds. She is the quiet stillness and the shapes of our dreams. She is everything else in the mind that is not us. She is, in a way, the very mind and brain we all live in. 

The library house, is the first dream house and the main one. It always existed. As children, we would hold meetings in the library, meetings that Ariadne would chair. We returned to the rambling infinite hallways of this house countless times in dreams, and then sometimes in waking. When we found it again last year it felt old and familiar, with its dark wood beams and every changing corridors.

Only the library and the green house are set, always right where they were supposed to be. The library itself spirals upward infinitely. If we wanted to have a meeting with all 22 corporeal members, even if Migi chose to come in his giant form, the library would hold us all. Conversely, if only one person were to sit in the chairs and look through a book, it would nestle around them, cozy and comforting.

Ariadne hardly ever leaves the library. It is hers, in a way. She is the head librarian, and that is the only title that she is truly, attached to.  She has alternately been called our host, our chief, or mob-boss, our leader, our heavy, but she shrugs those all off. “I am the librarian,” she says.

This morning she is not in the library. Only Migi is there, sitting high on one of the shelves, swinging his legs. We don’t exactly talk. It is hard to put into words out conversations, as they are mostly done in pure thought exchange, and when we translate them to words there is always something lost. When there is nothing missing, then the writing is often confusingly detailed and crowded with seemingly tangential and unrelated things, like snapshots of a feeling, or the texture of a word.  Small pieces of our conversations make much better poetry than they do dialogue.

Migi has a kind of malaise, that is stemming from and tangled up with an uncertainty. A sort of gray blue haze of sorrow shot through with yellow threads. He is unhappy and nervous.  I bring up the shape of the coming storm and he and I both know somehow that the plans have shifted overnight. Instead of the smallest children embarking on an adventure to avoid the storm, they will be staying at Elowen and Conrad’s house, called the glass house, for the storm. It will be a big exciting sleep over for all the kids. Conrad will probably not be home, but here, at the library house.  Elowen will be fine on her own. The others will gather in the library for the storm. Migi is not sure which house he belongs at, the library house or the glass house.

That is the beginning of the yellow thread, but it is wrapped up in a larger sorrow of Migi’s. He doesn’t know where he belongs, or what his purpose is. He is adrift.

I conjure the shape of a tree, the light playing through the leaves, and the smell of bark. It is a question and an answer. The question is “which branch is the most important?” The answer is “What a ridiculous question!” This tree is the final image in a much longer thought that everyone in Emmengard knows. The final image is a kind of telepathic shorthand. The larger thought is about not being broken, not being some shattered inorganic thing like a mirror. We are alive, we are growing, like a tree, and even a tree that is struck by lightening or forced to grow around some obstacle is still a tree, is still alive and beautiful, because it is growing, and every direction it grows in is important. Each branch that climbs heavenwards is important, no one is extra, everyone matters.

Migi swings his feet over the edge. The yellow threads are unraveling, not all at once, and not completely, but he is listening.

“I’m not a kid,” he says, “not really.” The truth is none of the kids are precisely kids. They have access to a vast amount of information and knowledge, which is well beyond their stated astral ages.  Yet somehow, it is different for Migi. He is brand new, and in some ways the very youngest of us, younger than Finn who is both the youngest in astral age, and one of the oldest in time. Yet, Migi is not a child, nor even precisely a human, and wrapped up in his statement is something more. He is saying that he was not traumatized. All the other children are anchored and held to their age by some unfortunate event; held by the lightning strike they are still learning to grow around. 

“No Migi, you are not.” I tell him, except not in words. I tell him in a wave of confirmation and validation, along with a reminder of his position as assistant librarian, and his closeness with Phillis, who calls herself the engineer. It is not clear how long Migi has truly existed, because until Phillis reengineered his thought patterns, he never saved memories. He was a little automaton that did things, compelled by a sense of worthlessness and inadequacy. Finn has told us that Migi always existed as the little robot.

Migi doesn’t identify with that. Migi only became conscious nine months ago. He only started having his only memories for himself, and enjoying things for himself after Phillis reengineered him. She didn’t really expect her engineering project to result in Migi, but it did. Migi chose his own name even. Something even I didn’t do. Bran chose my name for me, Sylvia.  I thought he had picked well, and so I didn’t change it. Migi was tired of being called the little robot and took on a name from a cartoon he liked at the time, and it just sort of stuck.

Migi and I are not traditionally that close. He mostly spends his time with the kids and Ariadne. He is silly, obsessed with sushi and has a similarly unique outlook on life as Ariadne, but without her history of experiences to cloud his observations. In many ways Migi has been able to bring a fresh perspective to old patterns.

For example, it took Migi to realize our mother is constantly engaged in a negative self-monologue. The rest of us had become so inured to it, we did not even notice. He did notice, then he told her to knock it off, and that she should be nicer to herself. He pointed out that we learned that negative internal monologue from her, and while only a handful of us internalized it (such as my wife, Eiolana), just knowing that has helped them to deconstruct that constant negative internal chatter. 

There is internal chatter that happens between us, and there is internal chatter that happens within the mind of a single member, just as it happens for singletons; group chatter and solitary chatter. When Phillis reengineered Migi, she was reengineering his solitary chatter, the things he was saying to himself, and it made such an incredible difference. He isn’t the same person at all. In fact I am not sure he was a personal at all before, or if he was, he was one with no memory at all, short or long.

Migi’s story has been a kind of inspiration for the others. His journey has helped show us all a way forward, if we wish to change. Every branch, that grows towards the heavens, matters. Every direction the tree grows in is important.

All of this unfolds between Migi and I, in a moment, a layered complex understanding. I show him to himself as we see him, as I see him, and everything shifts. The dark blue gray becomes the cobalt blue of the sky’s apex, and there is the image of him standing with a red cape. He is a hero with a brave and burning heart.

It is decided. He will stay for the storm. He won’t go with the children to Elowen’s house. He may be of use here. He will assist Ariadne with her observations and record keeping.

This conversation has been playing out between us for the past couple days, this matter of where everyone ought to be for the storm. We always talk, but before a big event, it really becomes important to get organized.  The storm that is coming is a particularly nasty anniversary. It has been 13 years since it happened, but the one that was carrying the bulk of the memory of the event was in a sort of dream dimension, a sort of dormancy and also a kind of prison until about six months ago. For her, and thereby also for us, it is the first anniversary.  Migi will help look for the patterns that if found, can be changed. It is something we do together, something we do for each other.

It is called a system, and that seems to imply a kind of order, but there are many kinds for systems: ecosystems, vascular systems, star systems. The organizational structure underpinning a system is not always immediately apparent. Finding the underlying patterns that govern a system is how you go about changing them, if that is what you want to do. To find those patterns you have to really know and support each other. You have to love and understand one another. You have to talk.

And when you talk it might not always be about something heavy, like an approaching storm and how you will all handle it as a team. 

Last week, a couple days were devoted to arguing about the downstairs of the library house. The house belongs to everyone, but only some people live there. The permanent residents of the library house include myself, Eiolana, Migi and Ariadne. There are shifting apartments upstairs, which are inhabited by a rotating crew of people as they choose. Right now, Makani and Weasel live upstairs in an apartment that is based on the memory of our flat in college.

In any event, the argument was not done in words, we just went back and forth rearranging the main floor of library house. I want the main floor to be the common room from a Chinese inn we stayed at in Moganshan with our husband. Ariadne wants it to be a carbon copy of our current dining room and kitchen. The discussion played out in the Sims. Every person in the system has a Sim version of themselves. Furthermore, every residential house in Emmengard has been meticulously built in the Sims. The only house that is constantly giving us trouble is library house, and only because of its constantly shifting nature.

When we argue about the shape of the mindscape we just play the Sims, and change the houses back and forth until we can all agree. It is an argument, in a way, but one without words. It may seem silly, but it is important, because when it is over everything feels clearer, the mindscape is crisper, unclouded by petty disputes.

When you share a mind, there are so many different ways to talk to each other.  Even now as I look into the library house, from my living room in the real world, I can hear the others moving around upstairs and in the kitchen. The creeping fog has burned off and the wind has picked up. There is the sound of children’s voices echoing up from the valley where the glass house sits. The storm, is likely still coming, but right now it feels unimportant, and far enough away. We will be ready when it comes. The feel of the day itself tells me so.

So no matter what, keep calm, and talk to yourselves, in whatever fashion you all talk.

 

“To Migi, with Love”

The hush of waking, blurred,

The color of sorrow and the tangled yellow of dread

“Who am I?”

The unfurled green of life outstretched to the light;

Growing and bold and unashamed;

The clear knelling bell that cuts through the buzzing hum,

Fresh and startling, like the first stroke of pink on a gray landscape.

“Do you see you as I see you?” the green eyes ask laughing.

That sharp unexpected pain,

Tears leaping to your eyes:

To be seen, truly seen,

After being so invisible.

Outside the birds sing the song they are always singing,

That song with only one line

“I love you, I love you, I love you all.”

 

-Sylvia (In the icon picture I am the one with dreadlocks. I know I am a dirty hippy. Miles, a systemmate and dear friend, keeps telling me so.)