The relationship between ten-year-old reptile enthusiast, Aleth, and her scheming guardian, Hannadrasp, becomes dangerous when Hannadrasp tricks Aleth into stirring up a Dragon. Unaware of Hannadrasp’s secret purpose, Aleth tries to atone for the destruction her mistake has loosed upon the town of Mirrogarden.

…

On the eve of her tenth birthday, Aleth is lizard-hunting with her friend Werner when a ball of red flame appears for a few moments over the woods of Mirrogarden Town.

Aleth’s guardian Hannadrasp (representative of the King’s Justice to Mirrogarden) convinces the honorable men of the town (including Werner’s father, Dr. Vegter) that it is not their place to interfere in the business of the heavens. Since the fire doesn’t seem to have spread, the town goes to bed instead of investigating, which is what Aleth wants to do.

Hannadrasp tells Aleth about the obsolete custom of the “eleventh year quest,” claiming that it will help her to gain the distinction she needs to be presented at court when she is older. On the morning of her birthday Aleth discusses this idea with Werner and with Old Krish, the elder of the lizard colony in her garden. Werner, who has begun acting as if he is too old to be Aleth’s best friend anymore, declines to be involved. After he leaves, Old Krish tells Aleth of a rumor that the King of Reptiles has come to Mirrogarden. She decides to quest for this King, as much to prove something to Werner as to satisfy her own interest in reptiles. She foolishly flees down the Reptile Trail, supposed to be off-limits to humans.

After she leaves, Dr. Vegter happens to see Hannadrasp talking secretly to Old Krish. This is strange because Hannadrasp has always claimed to be unable to speak to animals. Eventually he leaves the Town and and walks an hour to talk about his suspicions with Mr. Ping, a reclusive friend and fellow Honorable Man of Mirrogarden.

Meanwhile, Aleth stumbles upon a secret “fire meadow” hidden in the woods. This meadow is filled with rare red flowers, berries, trees, and grasses, almost appearing to be ablaze. There she meets the King of Reptiles: a scarlet Dragon, the most beautiful and largest reptile Aleth has ever met. As a reptile enthusiast she’s thrilled, but as a ten-year-old girl she’s frightened, especially when the Dragon wants to know why the town hasn’t brought him an honorary meal yet and threatens to eat her.

The conversation doesn’t go well, and Aleth flees back to town. But the Dragon gets there before her, burning all the crops in order to roast alive whatever animals are in the fields.

Hannadrasp takes charge of the situation, insisting that only Justice can help them. The Dragon’s heart, she reveals, is a cluster of living gems, contained in a heartsack hanging from the Dragon’s chest. In it is stored all the virtue of everything that the Dragon has ever stolen. If the person who angered the Dragon can slice off that heartsack and bring it back, they can plant the cluster of gems in the ground and all will be restored. The Mayor reveals that Aleth is the one who stirred up the Dragon, and Hannadrasp heartlessly insists that her charge carry out the impossible task.

Aleth walks bravely enough back into the Reptile Trail, but once out of sight of the town, collapses in despair. Werner, remorseful for the part he played in the disaster, first looks for his father, whom he cannot find, and finally borrows his father’s medical bag, hoping that they can use some of the instruments to retrieve the Dragon’s heart. The two lay plans till sunset, and then make their way back to the meadow where they find the Dragon singing his Setting Song to the Sun. Aleth realizes that however wicked the Dragon may be, she does not want the beautiful King of Reptiles to die.

Werner and Aleth pretend to be Reptile Physicians, and Werner seizes an opportunity to slice off the heartsack with one of Dr. Vegter’s knives. In turn, Aleth saves the Dragon’s life by putting a small gem from the heartsack into the Dragon’s mouth as he lays bleeding to death. He shrinks terribly and loses his wings, but is ultimately transformed into a Salamandral - an immortal Fire Lizard. He surrenders as Aleth’s captive, on his honor to be released only when she determines that all damage has been corrected.

They wash and sleep in the meadow that night, and in the morning bear the Dragon’s heart and the Salamandral back to the town. The honorable men are ready to discuss planting the heart, but Hannadrasp, who seems surprised to see Aleth still alive and even more surprised to hear about the Salamandral, insists that Justice demands she, Hannadrasp, be the one to dispose of the heartsack. Then, instead of planting the heart, she takes it into Aleth’s house, locking Aleth and everyone else out.

Aleth, the Pings, and the Vegters retire to the Vegter house to discuss possible plans of action. Their discussion is interrupted by the arrival of a bedraggled messenger from a Town to the south on his way to petition the King for assistance. His town and many others, he reveals, were also damaged by the Dragon on his way to seek the fire meadow. Hearing that the Dragon is no more, he rejoices.

But his arrival brings up an important point to the Honorable Men: other towns are also in need of the restorative powers of the Dragon’s heart. The men decide that they cannot allow Hannadrasp either to plant the entire heart in their own town, nor to keep it for herself.

The next morning the men assemble before Aleth’s door to speak to Hannadrasp. Before they can knock, however, the door opens and thousands of reptiles pour out, hissing at everyone and biting anyone who tries to shoo them away. Hannadrasp proceeds to the Green in the middle of the reptile mob and rings the bell to assemble the town.

As representative of the King’s Justice, she insists that every citizen must eat one gem of the heartsack. Whatever he has done wrong, she says, the virtue of the Dragon’s heart will punish it.

The people weep and clamor for their crops back, but Hannadrasp is adamant. Only Justice can save the town, she says. The food will take care of itself later.

Dr. Vegter does not think that Hannadrasp believes what she is saying, and very wisely suggests that Hannadrasp eat the first gem. She agrees to eat the second, if Aleth will eat the first. After all, she says, Aleth is the one who truly needs to be punished for bringing all this evil upon them. The people, enraged and frightened, agree with her. Aleth, weeping, tells them all she is sorry for her foolish behavior in stirring up the Dragon. Dr. Vegter insists that she not eat, but reptiles surround her and carry her to Hannadrasp. Dr. Vegter is bitten by several poisonous snakes in the scuffle.

When Aleth swallows a gem, she falls to the ground as if dead. Werner is distraught but he is kept from any foolish actions by Mr. Ping, who is waiting for an opportunity to do something helpful. Hannadrasp is exultant and claims that Justice has decreed the death of the one who brought evil into their midst. She unwisely goes on to declare that all Aleth’s land and property are hers now, and Dr. Vegter, dying, tells Ping that he believes Hannadrasp set everything up in order to seize Aleth’s posessions. Werner stays with his father while a few other men arm themselves.

Suddenly Aleth stands up. She has grown taller than Hannadrasp and more beautiful a lady than anyone ever saw. Treading without harm over the reptile mob, she touches Dr. Vegter and heals him. Everything she touches, if it has been broken, bruised, wounded, diseased, burned, ravaged or destroyed, is restored. The armed men capture Hannadrasp as, trampling on the reptiles, the townspeople carry Aleth all over Mirrogarden to heal the land, water, houses, and creatures. At every touch some virtue goes out of her. At the end of the day Aleth is merely a ten-year-old girl again but Mirrogarden is well.

At midnight, Hannadrasp confers secretly with Old Krish, who had shrewdly directed the reptile mob from the safet of Aleth’s garden, and so was not captured, killed, or driven off in the meantime. Hannadrasp promises him that if he brings her part of the Dragon’s heart, she will make him the next Reptile King once she eats it and becomes invincible. The old lizard slips into the Mayor’s house and steals as much of the Dragon’s heart as he can carry.

The next morning the men come to load Hannadrasp into a cart, wrists and ankles loosely bound, to carry her to the King for judgment. Perversely waiting till the last moment, Hannadrasp swallows the gem from the Dragon’s heart, crying out that she will be the greatest lady in the land. However, what actually happens is that she begins to shrink. She shrinks away until she is a tiny wrinkled person the size of a man’s finger - the size of the Salamandral, who becomes her jailer.

The Vegters and Aleth, leaving trustworthy men in charge of their crops, travel all over the land planting bits of the Dragon’s heart wherever devestation has occured. Over half the heart remains as winter approaches, and they travel to the King’s court where Aleth becomes the youngest outlander ever to be presented at court. She gives the Dragon’s heart to the King, who promises to make it available whenever his lands are in need. Aleth sets the Salamandral free on the Winter’s Soltice. He takes Hannadrasp with him as a maidservant, because she is no longer able to deal successfully with her own kind. Aleth and the Vegters travel back to Mirrogarden in the spring, where all is prosperous for many years afterward, and Dr. Vegter takes Hannadrasp’s place in Mirrogarden until Aleth is old enough, when she becomes a more renowned and wise lady than her guardian could ever have made her.

I’m nearly finished writing this. Finding myself getting stuck at the crisis, which is where I usually lose all the threads of the story and give up on it, I decided to write this synopsis to make sure I finish this time. Does the book sound interesting to anyone? I think it will come in at about 20,000 words. That length and the age of the main characters suggest a middle-grade novel. But I’m afraid it’s not “high-concept” enough.

It was partly inspired by the following poem.

The Little Salamander
by Walter De La Mare

When I go free
I think ‘twill be
A night of stars and snow,
And the wild fires of frost shall light
My footsteps as I go;
Nobody - nobody will be there
With groping touch or sight
To see me in my bush of hair
Go dancing through the night.

Below is the ninth and final poem in the Holly Brightweed cycle.

I have a steady, heady lust for light.
I breathe (what time of day
the light goes gray)
sharp sheen of coming night;
Drink the whitened brilliance
in which late-night shoppers swim,
and chase those glows that kindle dim,
through Juney velvet fields, their bobbing dance.

Wild for moon, I will
wait in a wintry midnight, till
strange silver spills down white
bare trees. O languid light!

And laughing light! That in the summer plays
caprice upon the surface of the lakes -
an early gray soon sparkles red;
glows moreover into gold
that gilds a wavelet’s gliding bed;
gloats on, overbold,
the shimmering love of dragonflies and drakes;

then through our bed-side window breaks;
fills the ivory cup my husband’s brown throat makes,
anoints the sleeping wealth I hold:
this bronze-curled, christly head.

I know that I will go and gaze in after days
upon That Light from which, a torched flower,
our sun outwent.

Then, at last, shall I bow down. And rise again
to stand, myself enblazed, and look, how long!
and lust content -

Thought I’d take another stab at this by way of rewriting an old post, and further decided to paste it here as well. This essay is not at all authoritative or even technical; my desire is to be able to explain to people how I, as someone raised anti-Catholic, was able to embrace a faith (the Eastern Orthodox Church) that includes a very strong belief in sacraments as a normal, effective part of Christian life.

By way of introduction I want to say that  the endeavor of my personal religious search (going on 10 years now) has been to discover what is truly Christian. In so doing I have learned that though there are many teachings that are called Christian, they are not all equally authoritative. In our time there are tens of thousands of sects, and all of them claim to be understanding the Bible in the proper way. But there was a time, in fact a very long time, when the Christian Church was so committed to unity that it could travail and struggle through the most serious doctrinal questions and come out not only with a concensus but with a formulation - a way of speaking about the mysteries of the faith - that was specific and that became regulative for all Christians ever after.

We all, including Protestants, benefit from these ocurrences to this day. Without the struggles, the councils, the authority of the holy theologians and the faith and obedience of the first Christian millenium, there would be no sense that it’s orthodox to consider Jesus as God, to believe in the Trinity, and to list a specific group of New Testament books as scripture.

In other words, what’s become clear is that if I want to escape the hermeneutic nightmare and resulting fragmentation of modern-day Christianity, I must owe interpretive allegiance first of all to the established Christian teachings of the first millenium.

That means a lot of things, but for now we’re just talking about sacraments. Or, to use the Orthodox word, Mysteries. Modern queasines about seeing grace attached to a physical object was never thought a Christian idea until very recent times.

There is always something about a Mystery that defies pinpoint definition. That’s why the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation was so odious in the nostrils of the reformers. It’s not that we can’t talk about the mysteries of the church within the church; it’s not that we can’t say what we are meeting there and what it is doing for us. But there will always be more there than we can say. Religion is made to be enacted, lived, and walked in - not primarily to be talked about. A true theologian is a person who communes with God, not one who mistakenly thinks he can define the Almighty. (My reluctance to define God should not be confused with the “Emergent” reluctance to say anything precise and confident on religious subjects at all. They are part of two very different ways of approaching religion.)

A Mystery - what is sometimes called a sacrament in Western terms - is a sort of bridge from the world of our senses to the world of our hearts, where God meets us.

A sacrament, or mystery, is an enactment of a religious truth that, through the power of grace, becomes an experience of the religious truth itself. In the Lord’s Supper, for instance, it is not simply the bread and wine that are symbols. Our eating them is likewise a symbol - a symbol for the fact that we must imbibe Christ for the nourishment of our souls, that our life comes from him. What Christians believe is that in participating in this enactment a person is participating not only in the symbol but in the thing being symbolized. Your actions represent “recieving Christ” and at the same time you are actually receiving Christ. You recieve him in eating the bread and wine; and if you want to be as bold as the mystical theologians of times past you can even say that you are eating his flesh and blood and that mystically the bread and wine are his flesh and blood. It is not that far off from a few things that Jesus himself said if you are not afraid to take them in their plain sense. It only requires some faith and a religious imagination that struggles to free itself from the materialistic viewpoint of our modern day.

(”Imagination” is not the faculty of making up things that aren’t true; it’s the faculty of ‘imaging’ or forming concepts of realities that are not immediately present to the senses. It is an essential faculty when you are talking about religion and must be guarded and educated properly.)

Of course my readers must not think that I am trying to equate bread and wine with Christ’s body and blood in any scientific sense. That was the mistake of both transubstantiation and consubstantiation. What I mean is that as I understand it, the reality by which the body and blood of Christ is identified bread and wine is of a different nature than that by which grain and grapes are made bread and wine. Christ’s flesh itself belongs to a different nature - or rather the old nature resurrected and transfigured and changed. It is a “spiritual body” as saint Paul says, with what must surely have been conscious paradox. How can scientific terms be employed to describe the relationship between these two natures? I am not even sure that it is properly a ‘relationship’ at all, for it is not described as two things relating, but rather - “this is my body” as two objects identified (spoken of as one.)

However, if you want to know what this looks like in an actual service I will say this much. During the service (”Liturgy”) the bread and wine are brought out to pass between the people of the congregation, establishing a connection between the Body of Christ in the Church and the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. After much prayer and praising, the elder who stands in the altar for the congregation prays for mercy because of his owns sins, facing the altar along with the congregation, and with a certain amount of fear prays that God will “make” or “show” the bread and wine to be the body and blood of Christ. The people, kneeling, pray “Amen” all through this because it is the offering of all of the congregation. Then, remembering Christ’s sacrifice, everyone comes to eat and drink, believing that they themselves have in a mystery become present at that very sacrifice through their remembrance.

So in the Eucharist a Christian is really recieving Christ. This grace is attached to this form. If he approaches it with faith he will recieve Him to his benefit. If he approach sinfully he recieves Him to his damnation because although the grace is always there, the person has made himself unfit for this grace and it will not agree with him in that state.

Since we are talking about how a Protestant comes to accept such a thing, I think it would be well at this point to talk about The Protestant Sacrament. Yes, they retain one, though they don’t call it that.

Perhaps the most important moment in my spiritual life as a Baptist took place at camp. A rather politic, learned, gentle man in his own sphere was talking to us about how to read the Bible.

“The scriptures” he earnestly intoned “can literally become your spiritual food. You can be reading the page and seeing the Lord beyond the page, and it will literally be for the nourishment of your soul.”

This preacher was unusually articulate and was not in the habit of using the word ‘literally’ for mere emphasis, so I knew he meant it. If wanted to, I could stop reading the Bible as a mere text, and begin to feed upon it. I began to pracitce this and over time I learned to recognize that sense of hunger in myself when I had not fed. To this day I can open my Bible and because of practice I can derive a certain flow of life, if I may so describe it, as I read the words. It is coming through my physical and mental action of reading, but I’m aware that there is a certain presence of God resting upon the whole meeting that gives it such effectiveness. This presence of God, unlike other types of prescence, is no dependant upon the right timing. It is something that is always there. It is a grace that has been given to the scriptures and which I can expect them to retain to my benefit, whenever I choose to expose myself to it. In college I learned that this is an aspect of the word’s identification with the Word - Christ and the scriptures are in a sense one and when you take in the words by faith you recieve the Word.

In other words, I’ve been experiencing mystery for a long time.

Then there was marriage. In studying the scriptures I began to discover that the act of physical union between man and woman was a symbol for the union of God and Mankind. Not only was it a symbol of it, but it partook of the reality in a sense. It was meant to be the same kind of bridge or meeting place.

And finally, there was The Sinner’s Prayer. This was a moment, for those of evangelical stripe, at which your physical action of praying a certain prayer could and indeed must be expected to met with a very real infusion of grace. It was equated with being born again.

As I read the scriptures it became clear to me that it was the protestants who balked at a literal interpretation when it came to Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. It is obvious if you read between the lines that the early Christians used Baptism as we use the Sinner’s Prayer, and that they expected exactly the same results from it. The simplest way to prove this is to get out your concordance; make a list of all scriptures mentioning baptism; and read each of them assuming the interpretation I’ve given above. Suddenly they make sense.

When evangelicals balk at referring to baptism as regeneration, they are forced to substitute another ritual in its place - the sinner’s prayer, or walking the aisle. Only very strict Calvinists sometimes conjecture that God may infuse the grace of regeneration unsuspected when faith is born in the heart, completely independant of any form of action or choice on the part of the sinner. I still don’t think that is impossible in certain circumstance. Orthodox Christians do not believe that God has limited himself to bestow new life in Christ only through Baptism. All the same it is dreadful to knowingly slight the office of Baptism, since Christ has appointed it. It is the normal way to become a Christian and as such God has been so good as to attach a certain grace to it.

I have yet to experience the grace of the Eucharist. But I no longer have any qualms about doing it when the time comes.

I do not fear that it is superstitious to imagine that grace can be attached to a physical object or action. It is in the nature of Christianity that grace is more often incarnated in this manner than not. God is saving physical nature, not discarding it and that is why Christ, first of all, was enfleshed. What’s more I don’t believe in this grace in any “magical” sense, and nor do any Orthodox Christians. That is, even though we believe that the grace for healing and salvation is always present in the sacrament, we do not believe that it automatically saves a person who merely goes through the motions. Where there is no faith and no love that grace will be destructive, not saving. In this light I Corinthians 11 begins to make a lot more sense. 

Nor do I feel that I am indulging in “works salvation.” Since the Orthodox Church does not believe that heaven is attained through merit, there is no sense of merit accruing to our account with God when we enact the Christian Mysteries. They are acts of faith and obedience and I expect God, in his kindness, to make it to my salvation simply because he has promised to do so. (I have only to add that when an Orthodox Christian speaks of “salvation” he is not referring to a one-time event that marks the beginning of the Christian life. In Orthodox vocaublary, following  the Greek in which the New Testament was written, salvation is any rescuing, healing, santification, or preservation which God gives us through any means - either directly or mediated through other Christians on earth or in heaven, through sacraments, through dreams or thoughts, through icons, through authorities, through our own faith and love, through the ministry of his Spirit that penetrates all these things - in short through everything within his kingdom.)

Because I will be doing so within the Eastern Orthodox Church, I do not feel that I am doing something “Catholic.” Note, I do not consider the RCC to be my particular enemy. I hope I can count as particular friends all who worship the Lord Jesus as the Only-Begotten of the Father and through Him, the Holy Trinity. However, the doctrine of transubstantiation (so intellectually unacceptable to all but those who invented it,) certain confusions about the nature of grace that have sometimes existed within Western Christianity, and the power that authoritarian clergy have sometimes wielded over people through the Catholic sacraments, have created such suspicion that I know it will be to some people’s relief, as indeed it was to my own as well, to realize that the original Christian Mysteries exist outside of the RCC. My Catholic readers will not be able to agree with me in this belief but we will agree in trusting to the mercy of God to save what can be saved and sort all out in the end.

Finally, I am very happy in the thought that I will be doing something that can truly be considered established Christian doctrine and practice. This is not just my interpretation - I have the whole Church behind me. It is what all Christians everywhere did and to a great extent believed, until materialism and modernism enacted the present-day strict division between the spiritual and the material world.

a guest essay by my inimitable husband, Scottie; who always surprises

Introduction: The Terminator

The thesis of the three Terminator films (and countless other sci-fi flicks) is the evolution of machines into autonomous beings who calculate that humanity is in need of destruction. It’s hard to forget the frightful scenario of the film: Arnold Schwarzenegger as a human-cyborg Terminator relentlessly pursuing human Sara Connor in order to kill her and, in doing so, ensure the annihilation of the human race. The prospect of our own creations turning upon us in such a cold, inhuman fashion is a recurring nightmare in current Western culture. However, if machines really did evolve, I believe the actual results would be quite different than the doomsday scenarios proposed by film and science fiction writers.

Evolution

For anything to undergo genuine evolution, the processes involved must be random. For example, Google in a sense “thinks” on its own, however, it was deliberately designed to do so. Machines may reach such levels of complexity in design that they appear to be “thinking” on their own or be autonomous. However, they may have been deliberately programmed/designed to be that way. The Matrix loses its dark appeal if it all turns out to be a program written by a mad scientist years ago to destroy and enslave humanity; it never actually thought or felt. If it truly evolved, then it is truly machine vs. man. A random code floating around in a mainframe that eventually bonds with other codes to form a sort of binary DNA, eventually creating silicon “life” or “self-awareness” would be a genuine example of true machine evolution.

The potential obstacles for machines to transform into life are legion. First, the only way for computers to evolve would be through mutations in the binary code. The changed code would have to go undetected by the virus scanners, and must survive system resets, defragmentations, and updates. Furthermore, the average age of a notebook or PC is only five years, not the billions needed by evolution to create complex forms of life. The computer would by discarded long before any meaningful change could occur.

The only other options then would be information such as viruses that are moving about on the Internet, or more likely, super-computers that are used for a minimum of ten years and maintain a relatively unsecured connection to the Internet. Such super-computers contain the necessary elements to sustain the faintest possible hope of evolution. Another obstacle is in humans themselves. Once machine behavior became erratic, which it would if attained even a small degree of self-awareness, the owner of the machine would begin troubleshooting, and if that failed, would immediately disconnect and junk the unit, destroying whatever code it possessed. On the Internet, this would be much less likely, and true A.I. could conceivably survive in a virus-like form. At this point, however, I diverge from Science Fiction. Evolution, when it does occur, always (as far as we can guess) starts from the least complex and moves upward from there. Whatever intelligence may evolve (and the chances of it doing so are not very good) would start out not as the all-knowing Skynet or the Matrix, but with the intelligence of an amoeba, an insect, and perhaps later a dog. Humanity would probably figure out how to eliminate the pesky source of this problem long before it reached the stages of human intelligence.

Dimensional Awareness

This leads me to an interesting question: if we are to assume that Artificial Intelligence could overcome the nearly impossible odds to achieve complex thought, would the machine/s have the capacity to learn of humanity’s existence in the same sense that we know of its existence? The answer is no. Machines would exist on a nearly two-dimensional plane. They consist of the arrangement of electrons into bits that follow certain prescribed pathways. They could not “see” us as we could not “see” them. Even cameras attached to them would not function as eyes in the traditional sense of the word. They would feed information to the machine which would interpret it just like we view and interpret x-ray images and astronomical calculations. The machines would probably view our activities as we view the forces of nature; it would take a philosopher-machine to deduce that their changing landscapes, births and deaths were created by an unseen force endowed with personality. The machines would view the human world like humans view other dimensions: by theories, experimentation, transposition and incidental interaction. The desire to annihilate humanity would probably never occur in this scenario.

Personality

The final question that is necessary to discuss is the very nature of personhood. What would cause machines to possess the very human desire to have domination over all things? No other “self-aware” organism consciously seeks by war to annihilate and replace other species. Some, like bacteria, exist as parasites and often kill their hosts, but this is not conscious domination and certainly not a “replacement” programme, considering that when their hosts die, they die as well.

If personhood consists solely of self-awareness, then in a sense, all matter is “self-aware” as it is in constant motion and seeks chemical balance and self-preservation. These may be considered “thoughts” if the present vague definitions of life are allowed to stand. Life however, is not the same as “intelligent life”, we are told. Intelligence is what separates humans from all other creatures. But this notion is rather too vague; all creatures have varying degrees of intelligence. Even the atoms “know” enough to follow their orbits. Perhaps self-destruction is what the learned men of science mean when they claim humans are intelligent, for certainly the rest of the material world has far more common sense in self-preservation.
If intelligence is only life powered by a brain using electrical signals, then humanity stands not alone, but together with a host of other creatures who have apparently never entertained the thought of world domination by the total annihilation of all rivals. However, plants operate in ways often far more complex to human perspective than many other creatures with brains, so that the “size of brain” or even the existence of a brain argument falls short of explaining why artificial intelligence will eventually become human-like.

The best argument I have heard for the uniqueness of humanity is freedom. Indeed, personality implies freedom; freedom from necessity and freedom to choose good or perversion/annihilation. This freedom, however, requires a fundamental distinction from both the material and intelligible realms. Atoms spin because they must, dolphins play because it is healthy and good, and humans murder, betray and deceive because they are free.

I said earlier that one way for artificial intelligence to attempt to achieve world dominion by the total enslavement and destruction of the human race would be for a human to program that into the machine: I now hypothesize that it would be the only way. Humans fear their creations because humans themselves would behave in such a domineering fashion given half a chance. Machines are not free as we are; they are not united with the intelligible world, nor given representation over the material world, nor given the image of the Creator; in attempting to divine the future of technology by looking into the proverbial crystal ball, humanity’s science fiction writers saw a terrible monster coming to destroy them, but it was really humanity’s own reflection.

Ah, yes. Potty training, toils and travails of. A subject that has no interest whatever for most, but which parents of young children can’t seem to stop talking about.

I’m in quite the situation, myself. My boy is not even two years old yet - not till September - but in certain ways he is very close to being ready for this step. He hates having his diaper changed. And today he’s begun removing his own diaper everytime he does anything in it. Everytime I turn around he’s gleefully hopping about, everything flapping for joy in the cool fresh air, with a barely wet diaper and and his pants coiled around his ankles. And he doesn’t even know the words yet that I’ll need to potty train him!

The popular wisdom right now is “wait; he’ll do it when he’s ready.” But I can’t help suspecting that this may be one of the reasons why kids are training later and later. Besides, I don’t trust popular wisdom. It’s the next thing to anarchy.

Enter my mother-in-law, who is all agog with this family who potty trained their infants and never used diapers at all. The way they did it was to sit the baby on the toilet with them, thus making it instinctive. It also involved a complex method of reading “signs” in the child’s body language, since of course a three-month-old can’t say “I hafta go”  - even if does know to let loose when held over a toilet.

Yeah…not for me, but thanks, Mom.

Next I read a triumphal story on a parenting board the other day about a four-year-old who potty trained himself “when he was ready” - that time just happening to coincide with a camping trip in which the whole family had to make regular treks to the bathroom together, because it was off-site.

And…and… I read a novel, otherwise awful, in which a sort of degraded society gets divided between those who do their business wherever they happen to be at the moment, and those who have a dedicated spot.

And it ocurred to me. The diaper, from the child’s point of view, is incidental. It’s not about diaper vs. toilet. It’s all about whether you go where you stand, or retire to a private spot. In other words, using the bathroom is a societal norm, a civilized activity. We do it because we are part of a group that does it by way of structuring our social relations.

Bingo!

All I have to do to make him see the light is to take the little rat with me…every time…oh, good grass. This is not fun at all.

Holly Brightweed and her willing beau
unspeaking wandered on the shaggy ridge
that topped her father’s strip of land
much like the tooth-torn cartilage
of a dog’s well-loved and well-gnawed bone.

For feathered weeds, mostly dead,
were mashed and crashed
through hollow and head -
all colorless, or brown, or sickly green.
Holly said it was the scene
she found the saddest all year round.

“Spring was mother-mud” she said, “until
a green mist rose up from the dale
and crept of a morning up this hill.
Green and golden days swung by
all the glancing, dancing summer.
In early fall we chased winged creatures
turned to flightlight, you remember -
everything glowed more to gold.
Now this.” She stopped and crushed
a withered leaf. They both stood still
to hear the land. The air was hushed,
harvest over, few birds left,
insects dead. “Winter’s near:”
she mourned. “The wide world seems to wait.”

Richard Healing thought her voice held fear.
He said, “But Winter’s fair.” Richard’s speech
was cheerful, even musical, like wind:
“Something in you loves the cold and white.”

Holly winced as though he sinned.

“Cold is fire inside-out” she said,
“it eats my shuddering hands and toes.
Snow’s a jail that keeps me locked
inside the house to blow my ruddy nose!
And white - it’s lovely, I suppose,
but teaches me to ponder emptiness -
empty house, empty sky,
empty rooms that throb inside.”
                                                   “I bless,”
rejoined the man, “whatever made and kept
Holly Brightweed wintry-white in soul.
Will you wear white for me one day this yule,
And taking Winter’s color, salvage what She stole?”

Halfway down the shaggy ridge they stood.
Holly Brightweed turned and looked at him,
and guessed the versey riddle. Down they came
against the autumn breeze - the light fell dim,
the wind picked up, the silent trudging pair
thought of hallow Winter that was near.
They glimpsed aloft a tiny shiny moon;
They stopped, clasped hands, and called each other ‘dear’.

In the house where Holly and Richard live
a yellow kitchen cheers a hall of brown,
a library beckons with a scheme in green,
the parlor lamp warms red, where folks sit down.
There also hangs a fluted gown of white
Where in a soft-hued room they share the night.

Holly: what a white-souled, grey-faced child.
Her feet shrink in this snow,
Her head hangs down beneath this heavy sky…
Oh that I knew why.

Richard: not distinguished, wealthy, wild,
Not anything I know.
Yet warmly does he speak to me - he makes
Of me his human kin.

Stooped in bluish pools of grief-bruised skin
Her eyes that once were suns
So feebly and so nobly fail to shine:
Not if she were mine.

And why should I not answer one made kin,
In kindness’ kind? The nuns
Do just so much. If further comes,
It comes. I’ll plan no more.

I longed for paths lit longwise from above;
But each step lights the next for humble Love.

Note: This is a new version of my most recent Holly Brightweed poem, formerly labeled XIII. There was another that should have come before this one, and I’ve just posted it here where this poem used to be in its first version. To see all the poems in their most current versions and in their correct orders, visit the ‘Holly Brightweed’ page linked in my sidebar.

Two poems are left to post and I’ve nearly finished editing them both, so this story should be wrapping up pretty quickly. I planned for ten poems but after extensive editing, rewriting, and shuffling about, there are only nine. Before I consider this cycle finished I may end up writing another that develops the winter = loneliness theme that became so important at the end of the cycle. It would, I think, have to be inserted between Holly’s conisderation of the cloister and her meeting with Richard (this poem.) Does anyone think that  would help the transition any? Or should I refrain from developing my character’s misery any further?