COMMUNICATION VIA LUNAR RELAY TO AKA MIEMBE

Habari Aka,

As I am well aware of your great affection for verse, and although I may never feel such an appreciation as you do for poetry, I am sending the attached datartifact on to you. I thought it would intrigue you to read a 'new' poem written long ago (new to us). The poem, Boy Hero, may please your tastes for poetic experimentation also.

I could not determine its author from the stored datartifact. I do not find any mention of this work in accessible libraries of poetry, so probably it remained lost for centuries until I reconstructed the data, although maybe it survived in obscurity offline, or as a paper artifact somewhere else in the solar diaspora. Presumably this poem was written by a Promethean for himself, and that explains its presence here. Whoever wrote it and perished in the past may have left no other clues to its source or motivation.

Adopting the inclinations of an archaeological researcher, as I have so often of late, I might prefer this in the form of a story with more to tell us about its context, not a poem, though the portrayed relationship of childhood development to the adult identity fascinates me. I suppose the reasons for that are obvious enough: my different development, my unprecedented 'childhood', and its recentness. My curiosity in such matters drew from the poem a conundrum about sense of purpose, which began from a more modest inquiry of mine concerning the poem's character, specifically: does every intelligent being (human or SIL) primarily become interested in expressing some proficiency or knowledge already evident, or might one pursue an outlet somehow desirable yet at first alien to its abilities and ken?

No doubt you would point me to feedback between both, learning interests from abilities and learning more abilities for interests, a pattern building from early expressions of innate talents and gaining complexity with development. This also occurred to me. But (the question deepens into another), if interests which define individual purpose do arise from combining experiences with innate abilities, and let us assume this generally describes the matter, what can we make of the profundity of a 'calling' — can we dismiss such strong predilection as chance? The origin and development of a being would determine many of its raw proficiencies, but does origin also determine the course of mature interests, even the passions of an individual, those deep courses of life we figuratively say an individual "chooses"? We cannot ignore some determinism by natural bounds. My question really concerns how much the boundaries of origin and development still confine our own self-realization, even though we live in an age of freedom from many restraints. I simply do not know.

Well, words I do know, and wordplay. Since the forty-seven languages and additional dialects I learned fluently and natively during my development, and the further nineteen I acquired later and with less proficiency, I have lately developed the capacity to comprehend many other linguistic systems you are unaware that I know. More exactly, I at least understand almost every spoken language and most dialects, as well as rudiments of almost all literature in outdated languages. I think this explains why the functions of rhyme, meter, wordplay, figures of speech, and other poetics familiar to me still seldom suggest the lingual feats of talent you admire, and possibly part of why some of your favorite poetry makes lighter impressions upon me. Still, I guess that relates more to significance, and evocation from symbols. You described me well when you merrily answered Dr. Emoro's concern on a similar question ("Why doesn't she like your poetry library? Maybe she just doesn't get it.") with "Not to worry, Robert. She only gets too much of it. ADITI sees poetry in everything."

You understood me. I do see poetry in everything. For me, in every meeting of words implication awaits. A hint of rhyme, of meter, juxtaposition, symbol, a sense of rhythm. To separate seems artifice unneeded.

My notions on boundaries put aside, after the poem I have appended some commentary on it, a minor exercise to improve my literary analysis and criticism, really a departure point for my own anthropology. I am not quite confident enough in my theories to show these to the experts present who doubtless have their own, but please, tell me if you think I misunderstand the work.

Note that some lines may have been missing, or unfinished.

Basi soma na furahia:

ATTACHMENT: "DATA FRAGMENT 2781-1240: from electronic media, moderate elliptic decay; resolved"

Boy Hero

As a child
he Breathed the air of Zeus,
Tasted drying Odyssey salt,
Held the heat of Flame divine,
muted himself with loud and bland tv.
He was schooled in artful and daring deeds,
and forgetting them, eyes darting
to p(r)etty distraction.

He had to teach himself to crush ants with a casual step.
Some natural reverence
or tinge of tactile fear
kept him slow to ripple the surface of Life.
Holy, until he grew curious
and stepped closer.
Then he knew to touch the surface with a toe
and a foot
now ready for playful and violent waves.
His own Nature found him,
long before Purpose.
[and he learned what he needed.]

Memories would later intone
‘weird little brat’
and make him flush.

But the hiding shadow of foolishness
was the muse who whispered
an eternal instruction
for ears bewitched to hear:
Become hero,
Become deed,
Become new,
Echo the aged rare steps of the great and few.

In the age of the many
he felt Uncommon.
He felt pressure to be Legend.
He felt Unique.
He needed to be Important
- sometimes he knew he was.
But always that Terror,
running primal to catch him,
of mediocrity.

“To bless
to hate but not despise”
he knew before he read the noble words.
A blessing Instinct.

He always - knew more.
He knew ten thousand ripples of ‘truth.’
He had felt the utter failure of words
At an early age
And quickly learned how to like pretending they were just…
inadequate.

He knew how to be quiet.
He knew how to listen to himself.
He was too sensitive -
too sensitive not to be led astray to ten thousand
s            h      a           t   t              e           r            e                     d
fragments of attention.

Too close to himself
not to feel
hurt
more...
it got harder and harder to reach deep within another...
worse and worse each time his hand came back bitten off
or sickly wet with maleficience,
another dank and tepid soul.
He kept Love ready, though,
envisioned clean and pure.
And the rest, he’d wish them well.
He wanted to fight on anyway;
there was something alive in them,
a wounded shrew of something, anyway.

He was born to fight and lead men
(once he knew why)
To right wrongs,
(once he realized what that ought to mean)
To trust in the human spirit
(once he found it)
To seek truth
(once he understood its plays of subtle infinity, reflections)
To dance a dance of victory, sweet.

But he wasn't born to Philip.
And who the hell was HE
to say a damn thing
when it came right down to it.
A smart boy, everyone knew that
but he made you so uncomfortable.
And he knew,
and he wanted a savage joy from that
he could never quite conceive.

He was lonely enough to want to fit in,
but he never could,
could he? The more little parts of him grew up and came Alive, or were created
(a silent thanks to gadflies)
the more he felt more and more and more
Different! Alive and different and capable of more.
HE was beginning to feel Himself,
and he could never be like them, again.

Sometimes he didn't feel alone.
Ever so far apart,
But sometimes he came to them,
before he left.

Steeping himself
in his tear's concentration
of the morbid worst of Man,
He worried them.

"He's far too hard on himself."
Or far too hard for a soft and aimless world.
Either way,
Lamentable.

He boldly carried the banner a thousand times, in his heart.
Rise up! he'd scream to himself. (I'm the one.)
But what an uncomfortable thing
to say aloud!
Everyone felt much better when he was simply clever and amusing. Perhaps he'd make up something beautiful or pretty. He could be the life of things. But not too different. Why go too far. Why not try to agree. It's easier that way. Yes, of course. Sleep and lose yourself in happy company...

Until his Terror-fly finds him,
And he wakes up again, bitten.
A harsh lesson for a boy still learning to be harsh.
But now he’s Himself again, and learning what that means.

All too human, maybe
Allzumenschliche, quite.
But without a flaw,
There is no Hero.
Without a boy,
There is no Man.

O
Make him anything,
a child, a man
As long as he'd been ignored, ignored
as long as he'd been ignored.

I first thought the author writes as though contemptuous of form. Or else, or also, I reconsidered, very conscious of form and captivated by its importance, or conscious and captivated by form's fluidity. Here poetics for interpreting each form becomes a driving force conveying meaning for the reader, as does noticing the shifting of form, such as slipping in and out of rhythms. Though if not contempt, I do sense a certain teasing mockery in the deployment of different forms in the poem. This lends ambiguity to whatever associations those stylistic forms evoke for the reader, complicating appraisals of the poet's intent.

Gladly the poem rhymes little (an unimpressive and artificial constraint, to my mind), but the last two lines repeat very much like some antique nursery rhyme from English literature. Let me see, like this:

If I'd as much money as I could spend,
I never would cry old chairs to mend;
Old chairs to mend, old chairs to mend;
I never would cry old chairs to mend.
If I'd as much money as I could tell,
I never would cry old clothes to sell;
Old clothes to sell, old clothes to sell;
I never would cry old clothes to sell.

That example I found in just over a second of sending out search routines, in an old book of Mother Goose rhymes. It is also similar to:

Mary had a little lamb,
little lamb, little lamb,
Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow.
And everywhere that Mary went,
Mary went, Mary went,
and everywhere that Mary went, the lamb was sure to go.
It followed her to school one day
school one day, school one day
It followed her to school one day, which was against the rules.
It made the children laugh and play,
laugh and play, laugh and play
it made the children laugh and play to see a lamb at school.

The rhythm reminds me of something as well, but my searcher bots turn up nothing that seems right at the moment, too many variables probably. (Ah, but I am distracting from the main thread again, with the inclusion of tangents from my multitasking routines within a linear medium. I'm sorry, if as you say that makes letters harder to follow... but then you helped to make me this way, now didn't you, Aka?)

In any case the form suggests childhood, yes? Since adults have consistently taught children with different means and media from adults, lessons might differ dissonantly too, as a 'child' becomes an 'adult' (a most indeterminate distinction). So the poem connotes. How would a human being manage such dissonance in cultural messages, in 'programming' so to speak? With disillusionment? with synthesis? or with acceptance and replacement? I suppose this depends entirely on the individual, and the relative appeal of the lesson taught in childhood which does not find harmony with a different message of adulthood.

Yet some lessons communicated in popular culture for young and old have also been uncomfortable for their similarity at times — suppressive in unison, or at least intended to keep humans "in their place" with regard to conventions and obligations, larger groups, and commandments from superiors within some established hierarchy. I have learned this imprinting began with the family.

Would jarring dissonance of message, maybe together with sensing a suppressive message, inspire cynicism, particularly in transitional phases of youth? From what I understand, I think this seems rather likely. And if so, how much did this contribute to the pessimism rife in old times, which often shocks those new to cultural archaeology?

What does all this suggest about bold individual action, in other words heroism, in past views, I wonder? I would think that above all, attitudes conflicted, if as in this case, heroism was taught and encouraged hypothetically in immaturity but discouraged at other times, in mature actualization. The poem seems to express an inner struggle with the issue it introduces, in both form and content.

So should we read it as a pessimistic poem or hopeful, what do you think? It is hard to know the mind of another except in conjecture, it is harder still to know the mind of someone long dead. Maybe the author intended the poem to provoke a more nuanced, less binary evaluation. Or much like the teaching stories so common throughout many cultural histories, to seek a reply only made sufficient within our own receptive process...

These lines:

As a child
he Breathed the air of Zeus,
Tasted drying Odyssey salt,
Held the heat of Flame divine,
muted himself with loud and bland tv.

contain three of four of the ancient classical "four elements" of Indus Lokayata thought and later Hindu philosophy, also proposed in Europe by Empedocles and popularized by Aristotle: Air, Water, and Fire. Why no Earth? I wondered. I finally hypothesized this could represent ungrounded youth. Now in this line:

muted himself with loud and bland tv.

'tv' denotes television, of course, but you may not know that a common feature of those devices was the opportunity to 'mute' them with a button.

He was schooled in artful and daring deeds,
and forgetting them, eyes darting
to p(r)etty distraction.

It seems as though the parenthesis denotes an experiment with optional readings, either "pretty" and "petty" or both at once.

He had to teach himself to crush ants with a casual step.
Some natural reverence
or tinge of tactile fear
kept him slow to ripple the surface of Life.

I found this attitude, and the mention of ants in particular, significant of the practice among Jain priests to wear masks to avoid killing bugs and sweep before their footfalls — the logical extension of their principle of Ahimsa. A few still practice Jainism on Terra and extraterrestrial settlements, though not as many believers live throughout the solar diaspora as on the planets in the Fringe, where an estimated several thousand still form nyats to preserve the religion. An obscure reference now, but when the author wrote Boy Hero, millions of people believed in Jainism and thousands of priests subordinated their interests to those of insects and microscopic organisms in this manner. Billions followed comparable precepts of subordinating themselves to their environment less consciously.

Holy, until he grew curious
and stepped closer.
Then he knew to touch the surface with a toe
and a foot
now ready for playful and violent waves.
His own Nature found him,
long before Purpose.
[and he learned what he needed.]

That line enclosed by brackets may have gotten edited out after a tentative inclusion. I had to cross-compile this version from fragmentary datartifacts with minor differences and indeterminate dates. I assumed the longest version of this stanza was the most recent.

Memories would later intone
‘weird little brat’
and make him flush.

I barely recognize this as embarrassed or shamed blushing, a primate's socially-evolved response. Your ancient biological descent lends you humans such accumulated vestigialities, I wonder how much of you consists simply of the past, retasked. Whatever does blushing feel like, Aka? Blood rushing through dilated facial capillaries, which evolved with other facial expressions as a means of signaling among a social audience of perceived peers or superiors in a primate group hierarchy — I can only classify, I cannot imagine. I understand this emotion technically but do not share this trait personally, so I fail to understand its relevance here. Have you any idea why the character gets embarrassed over the past? Particularly before an audience of himself?

But the hiding shadow of foolishness

A "shadow" closely follows.

was the muse who whispered
an eternal instruction
for ears bewitched to hear:
Become hero,
Become deed,
Become new,
Echo the aged rare steps of the great and few.

This "muse" chases away, perhaps, shame at remaining childhood insecurities, is that likely? — with the lure of a sense of greater purpose.

In the age of the many
he felt Uncommon.
He felt pressure to be Legend.
He felt Unique.
He needed to be Important
- sometimes he knew he was.
But always that Terror,
running primal to catch him,
of mediocrity.

“To bless
to hate but not despise”

A paraphrase?

he knew before he read the noble words.
A blessing Instinct.

He always - knew more.
He knew ten thousand ripples of ‘truth.’
He had felt the utter failure of words
At an early age
And quickly learned how to like pretending they were just…
inadequate.

Excuse the digression, but I sought some explanation for this series of apparently special knowledge, and I would like to tell you about it. On this point I did consult with my colleague in the field of semantics, Brajmani Kottapetong, an expert on linguistic mentality before the Protean School.

Incidentally, Kottapetong seems a very cheerful man. He keeps a home in La Perla, and recounts many stories of his life in Amazonia. Again I hear of places I have not experienced, but he speaks with vividness, so that I can almost imagine daily life in these neo-Venices of the rainforest sky: each city a great swath of shifting villages sprawling above the canopy, modular treehouses, plazas, and shops bridged by moveable walkways and flights between ports amidst many-colored birds, every structure arrayed with hanging gardens, and each resting on thin, adjustable trestles of coppery metal shining in the sun.

According to Kottapetong, cognizance of the basic difference between language and its referents, and by extension the gulf between linguistic thought and its targets, only spread among educated people of the poem's day very gradually, seeping from the semantics of Korzybski, who said "the map is not the territory." Of course most Terran children in our year 304 PF learn such lessons of consciousness in an elementary semantics class at the latest, as part of their preparatory philosophy education and coordinated with learning languages. But this modern curriculum dates back only to the core education available within Promethean academies, which the poem antedates considerably. Kottapetong believes rare early semantic awareness was advanced by developments like the phenomenologist reforms of philosophy, and various other skeptical, empirical, sensorial reorientations away from distortion and abstraction. These combined with a general popularization of subjectivity, awareness that changing perspective mutates life experience. In retrospect historians like Kottapetong now recognize that trend which encompassed both rare and popular culture as a tremendous, though lurching transformation of psychology throughout that era, which he said "the ancestors of my profession, the dark age academic writers with their dreadful aversion to clarity, had counterintuitively titled post-modern."

Glacial acknowledgment of the limits and inequality of words with their subjects seems odd to me, considering I find the distinction in much more ancient accounts such as Plutarch's Life of Demosthenes (in an offhand remark). The message about the basic insufficiency of words to describe the experience of their subject, however, dates to the undocumented roots of mystical schools. Yet perhaps I can account for such resistance among the literate, even stubbornness over centuries, in that those interested and invested in language have disincentive to question it.

So for the purposes of the poem, divergence of words and phenomena, and the bending of the world by the perspectives of our senses and thoughts may indeed be considered striking, fresh insights for intellectuals of that era, most of whom continued to ignore the ramifications of what they thought they knew. Which reminds me that I note again and again in these datartifacts I am scanning, the late oldworlders still fancifully conceived of "time and space" as separate, functional dimensions long after the observation of relativity — in fact another instance of neglecting misdirection of thoughts by their own words, in that case antique terms. But never mind my tangential multitasking again. I do not wish to impose a tiresome amount to suss, nasiha, so I should hearken to the next line good-naturedly:

He knew how to be quiet.
He knew how to listen to himself.
He was too sensitive -
too sensitive not to be led astray to ten thousand
s            h      a           t   t              e           r            e                     d
fragments of attention.

An incidental problem, how to reconstruct the data consistently, eluded me until I realized the data was not corrupted by noise in that one line; to my surprise, the spaces my decompression had produced held just simple visual meaning. The author plays with form for function, again, as often as I may change mine. Delightful.

As for the reference: since I may follow many threads simultaneously before losing any, I think distraction does not have so much personal significance for me, except of course that I must accommodate human incapacities, and for example try to anticipate your linear semantic processing and partial recall. But distraction does not bother me.

Too close to himself
not to feel
hurt
more...

Such terse lines organized by choppy enjambement suggest pausing for emotional reflection, before an outburst of longer lines:

it got harder and harder to reach deep within another...
worse and worse each time his hand came back bitten off
or sickly wet with maleficience,
another dank and tepid soul.
He kept Love ready, though,
envisioned clean and pure.
And the rest, he’d wish them well.
He wanted to fight on anyway;
there was something alive in them,
a wounded shrew of something, anyway.

I compare that to the spirit of that earlier quote or paraphrase.

He was born to fight and lead men
(once he knew why)
To right wrongs,
(once he realized what that ought to mean)
To trust in the human spirit
(once he found it)
To seek truth
(once he understood its plays of subtle infinity, reflections)
To dance a dance of victory, sweet.

But he wasn't born to Philip.

Now who is this Philip? A notable Philip? A Philip with notable offspring?

And who the hell was HE
to say a damn thing
when it came right down to it.
A smart boy, everyone knew that
but he made you so uncomfortable.
And he knew,
and he wanted a savage joy from that
he could never quite conceive.

He was lonely enough to want to fit in,
but he never could,
could he? The more little parts of him grew up and came Alive, or were created
(a silent thanks to gadflies)

A reference, it seems to me, to the trope inspired by the service of Socrates in Athens, for which the disturbed citizens put him on trial. A gadfly offers disagreeable but important provocations and challenges assumption. A gadfly stings to counter habits languorous or leading astray.

the more he felt more and more and more
Different! Alive and different and capable of more.
HE was beginning to feel Himself,
and he could never be like them, again.

Sometimes he didn't feel alone.
Ever so far apart,
But sometimes he came to them,
before he left.

Steeping himself
in his tear's concentration
of the morbid worst of Man,
He worried them.

'Steeping' suggests total absorption but also baptismal purification, bathing done in preparation for change of lifestyle or embarkation on a course of action. This builds resonance with other liquid metaphors throughout the poem.

"He's far too hard on himself."
Or far too hard for a soft and aimless world.
Either way,
Lamentable.

— an archaic, epic word.

He boldly carried the banner a thousand times, in his heart.
Rise up! he'd scream to himself. (I'm the one.)
But what an uncomfortable thing
to say aloud!
Everyone felt much better when he was simply clever and amusing. Perhaps he'd make up something beautiful or pretty. He could be the life of things. But not too different. Why go too far. Why not try to agree. It's easier that way. Yes, of course. Sleep and lose yourself in happy company...

Another exercise of form. The poem loses its poetry and becomes mundane pattering prose.

Until his Terror-fly finds him,

Recall "Terror" was used earlier regarding mediocrity. Now, combined with the gadfly image.

And he wakes up again, bitten.
A harsh lesson for a boy still learning to be harsh.
But now he’s Himself again, and learning what that means.

All too human, maybe
Allzumenschliche, quite.

As you do not know much German, let me help: all-too-human. Surely a Nietzschean reference to Menschliches, Allzumenschliches.

But without a flaw,
There is no Hero.
Without a boy,
There is no Man.

O

And with one enlarged letter the earlier Odyssey metaphor recurs. This sound signaled grand pathos in Homer, although such directness of announced pathos might have rung melodramatic to inheriting ears. An intended contrast I think.

Make him anything,
a child, a man
As long as he'd been ignored, ignored
as long as he'd been ignored.

In these last lines, the effect is jarring as the poem suddenly transitions. The epic and dramatic crashes into the mundane and childish (the nursery rhyme). The message signified seems to me one of conflict between life's aspects of significance and insignificance, a conflict we discover within the heart of the human subject of the poem as well as in the human world in which he lives.

Habari zako?

Kwa heri, tutaonana baadaye,
ADITI