Before I can understand something, I have to be able to explain it to myself. In the case of love, the explanation had to be a story. That story was “Singot”.
“Singot” was published in Metaphorosis Magazine today, July 2nd, 2021. You can read and listen to it here.
I wrote a short piece on what inspired “Singot” and what I was hoping to solve in Metaphorosis, but there’s so much that went into the story that I want to expand my post.
As I wrote for Metamorphosis, “Singot” was inspired by the episode “High Voltage (Emotions Part Two)” on the Invisibilia podcast on NPR.
“In 1967, anthropologists Renato Rosaldo and his wife, Shelly, went to live with the llongot, an isolated tribe that lived in the rain forest in the Philippines. It wasn’t exactly an accident that this tribe was unstudied — it was known for beheading people.
[…]
But Renato and Shelly were undeterred. As they immersed themselves in llongot culture, they began to learn the language. Simple words at first, then more nuanced ones that encompassed such things as love and anger. To Renato, all of the words were familiar except one.
Liget.
[…]
[Renato] tried to gain a deeper understanding, but defining liget was like trying to describe the color blue without ever seeing it.”
from the article on NPR.
The idea of discovering a new emotion gripped me. But I didn’t understand why until maybe four drafts into “Singot”. At first, I was just engrossed with the concept. The scenario was inspired by this tumblr screenshot:
It’s a more profound post than the poster intended. Like, true: aliens would need to have their hands held to learn about Earth. Who better to hold a hand than a kindergarten teacher? But I think it’s also saying that we aren’t born knowing how to be human. We learn through curiosity and exploration with the guidance of others.
I had also been reading Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking, by Douglas Hofstadter, a stair-step thick tome about language and cognition. I have a few themes I like to return to in my stories, those of loneliness, curiosity, decency, shame. And of course, as a writer, language is my playground. Language, the way it works, how it’s used, and how might an alien understand differently… it was like a chain-reaction of cool ideas that themselves caused more cool ideas and I was just like, Oh man, oh man, oh man!
I had great fun scribbling on my whiteboard, researching linguistics, drawing word maps, and just thinking about how it all fits together. While revising and thinking, I often thought, “This is what I like about writing.”
As I worked through the drafts, the story still seemed unfinished. The language research and the scenario overwhelmed the point of the story— which I was missing too. I was avoiding saying something. It wasn’t until I admitted it did the story come together: I was asexual, and I didn’t want to be. I had already felt disconnected from other people. If I can’t feel sexual attraction–this thing that 99% of other people feel–will my stories be complete? Don’t even get me started on romantic attraction. I’ve been alone so long I don’t know if I feel that either.
The story was, at first, the quest to discover a new emotion. Singot. It would parallel the protagonist’s determination to discover her definition of love, one that meshed with her asexuality.
BUT. That idea didn’t work. I knew intellectually that asexuality merely means that I don’t experience sexual attraction, and that these worries were just insecurity. It also didn’t make sense with the starting inspirations of language and cognition. The moral of that version of the story, You feel love after all! made me rankle. Bitch, I know it.
What I didn’t know was whether I was actually asexual. What if I had experienced sexual attraction, and I just didn’t pay attention to my reaction enough to identify it? What if I was just super picky? But if I didn’t know what it felt like, didn’t that answer the question? I concluded the only real way to know was to compare what I felt to somebody else. Hence, singot. The complete understanding of someone’s entire life.
But even then, “Singot” didn’t have a thruline, a spine. There were too many threads: asexuality, language, loneliness. Until I came across this article on Aeon.
The Space Between Our Heads
Brain-to-brain interfaces promise to bypass language. But do we really want access to one another’s unmediated thoughts?
https://aeon.co/essays/why-language-remains-the-most-flexible-brain-to-brain-interface
This article blew the top of my skull off. It introduced me to ideas I had perceived vaguely and brought them into focus. The concept of plural subjects. The idea that language gives us selection and negotiation. And the Zulu quote that would become the center of not just “Singot”, but of my life: Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. Or, “We become people through other people.”
To sum, we have a lot to lose if we lose language. Everything that makes us human and what makes life worth living.
The final lines of “Singot” are my answer to the question of how I will live.
You can read it here.