063: A Mind is a Star-Chart in Reverse
Arkady Martine's "A Memory Called Empire;" communication & culture; and finding the other barbarians + Doodle Dispatches, McMansion Hell, & gothic typography via The Drip
A MIND is a sort of star-chart in reverse: an assembly of memory, conditioned response, and past action held together in a network of electricity and endocrine signaling, rendered down to a single moving point of consciousness.
—Arkady Martine, from A Memory Called Empire
For two and a half years now, I have been able to monitor my facial expressions in most of my work meetings. I have real-time feedback on whether or not I have called up the right version of my smile toward creating the right tone—from professional, to approving, to apologetic, to authentic. It’s not that nonverbal communication is new. It’s that I can watch myself and calibrate in seconds. For someone who shows everything she’s thinking on her face, it’s a godsend.
I am so used to this now, that I think I’ve become more awkward when interacting in face to face meetings. I notice, too late, that I am grinning instead of politely smiling. Or, that I am frowning, when I should be nodding. I fidget and multitask in ways that are possible off-screen, but are awkward in person. Modulating the volume of my voice in an in-person office environment feels harder than it used to. Calibrating my social behavior based on what I sense is harder to do, because I’ve gotten used to basing it on what what I see.
One of the running motifs in Arkady Martine’s Hugo Award winning speculative fiction novel, A Memory Called Empire, is the importance of nonverbal cues in cross-cultural communication. Mahit Dzmare, a “Stationer” from the mining planet Lsel, is the newly assigned ambassador to the “heart-planet” and capital city of the Teizcallanli Empire. As a diplomat, she has been given the intelligence of her predecessor, Yskandr, in the form of an imago, or neurological implant, and in the opening scene, we are shown the deftness with which this technology works:
She let him have charge of how long she maintained eye contact and with whom, the degree to which her head was inclined in greeting, all the little ways of signaling that she was less of an alien, less of a barbarian, something that might belong in the City. Protective coloration. Going native without ever having to be a native.
Soon, however, the imago stops working which sets up the core conflict of the story: how do you signal the right things to the right people in a foreign culture?
In Teixcalaanli technology has become bed-fellows with poetry, and the colonization of the human mind is complete: the City is a glittering, techno-utopia, well-curated by a complex algorithm and smoothly narrated in ekphrastic quatrains. Courtiers wear silk clothing and signal factional loyalties with flowers and scented cocktails and the Emperor is addressed as “your Brilliance.” Meanwhile, Mahit, even though she’s studied Teizcalaanli culture all of her life, is still an irredeemable outsider: she’s too tall, her hair is too short, her clothes are the wrong cut, and she speaks with an accent. Which is an issue, given that she’s got a murder to solve and needs to prevent the Empire from annexing Lsel on its next colonizing mission. She need to find high-placed allies to do her job well and, because she is human, she also dreams of finding friends.
*
When I travel overseas, I make all kinds of adjustments toward making myself seem slightly less American. I speak much more quietly and much less often. I don’t ask questions about prices in stores or about food that is unfamiliar to me. I learn the most informal, local phrases for ‘thanks’ and ‘excuse me’ and say them quietly wherever necessary so that I’m neither rude, nor overly solicitous. I know whether I should ask for bubbles or gas when I order water and to not ask for ice. I wait for the light to turn before I cross the street. I try not to have opinions, much less say them. None of this stuff comes naturally to me, but in July, in Amsterdam, I sat in a cafe listening to an Australian man ask, loudly, in his rural Australian twang, what is a Bitterballen? and silently promised myself to keep trying.
I travel between cultures at work, too. When I work with other writers and communicators, I write long emails and use words like concomitant and nuance. My marketing colleagues write back with similarly long emails, building on my ideas with smooth transitions, and then I reply back in the same way. Soon, there is a working document that is the basis for a plan and everyone knows what to do next.
When I work with engineers, I also write long emails, because I can’t stop myself, but I know they won’t be read, so I also write Jira tickets and set ‘stand-up’ meetings using words like align and requirements. If there’s a scrum master on the team, that person goes and does their magical thing and everyone knows what to do next. If there’s not, then I lose hours and days of my life drowning in software acronyms and ticket numbers.
A couple of weeks ago, in a marketing meeting, I accidentally used the word grooming to refer to the process of organizing a group of tasks into a smoothly sequenced list and everyone giggled. It took me a minute to realize that I had forgotten to culture switch. Using the Agile meaning of the word grooming while talking to a group who is used to hearing it in the context of tabloid stories about Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein was a mistake roughly equivalent to telling an Australian who has asked you which team you support that you root for the Broncos.
*
The Teixcalaanlitzlim are all poets in the same way that we are all writers of Word Documents, which is to say that the technology is such that everyone can deliver something that looks like poetry even though it is not.
The structures and forms of poetry in the Empire are endemic. There are poem forms for municipal governance, war-making, and science and research, in addition to the usual ones that we might think of, such as for historical narrative, lamenting the dead, falling in love, or celebration. Governmental announcements are masterpieces of rhetorical verse. Even family life is engineered to forms: children are cloned, or created through DNA surrogates, or sometimes womb-birthed—and the choices signal your class position, wealth, and personal style preference. Food is also highly produced; Mahit is never really sure what she is eating or drinking.
Because everything is coded twice—within the algorithm and in a poem form—it is a culture in which every aspect of existence is coordinated, elegant, and seamless. Teixcalaanli is, by any definition, a fascist, imperial state, but everything is just so lovely that it’s hard to make yourself care. There is a scene in which Mahit’s cultural liaison, Three Seagrass, participates in an elaborate game that is right out of my most insane clown daydream of a perfect Saturday night:
It had begun as a sort of game: one of Three Seagrass’s evanescently clever friends took up the last line of Fourteen Spire’s dull and prize-winning poem, said “Let’s play, shall we?” and proceeded to use that last line as her first one, composing a quatrain that shifted the rhythm from the standard fifteen-syllable political verse form to something that was absolutely stuffed full of dactyls. Then, she’d pointed her chin at another one of Three Seagrass’s friends, in challenge—and he took her last line, and apparently came up with a perfectly acceptable quatrain on his own, with no preparatory time…and then it was back to the initial challenger—who changed the game again, adding another element: now each quatrain had to start with the last line of the previous one, be in dactylic verse with a vowel-repeated caesura, and be on the subject of repairs made to City infrastructure.
Three Seagrass was annoyingly good at describing repairs to City infrastructure. She was lucid even through many glasses of ahachotiya, laughing, saying lines like the grout seal around the reflecting pool / lapped smooth and clear-white by the tongues of a thousand Teixcalaanli feet / nevertheless frays granular and impermanent / and will be spoken again, remade in the image / of one department or another / clamoring
Reading this scene, I realized two things. One, that my knowledge of poem forms has grown rusty from disuse. I couldn’t remember what kind of a metric foot a dactyl was and had to look up caesura just now, which, fine, I spent most of my teaching career conveying to young people that knowing the exact esoterica of poem forms is not required for its appreciation. (Fun fact though: the word poetry is a dactyl.)
Two, that it would be really really fun to live in a world where everyone did know all the poem forms and played a game like that for fun. I would love that world. I would belong in that world. I wouldn’t have to sit around making sure that I modulate and re-modulate my vocabulary and my gestures and the size of my smile in that world.
*
In my job, since I am not fluent in the dominant form of communication, which is Engineering, I operate much like I do when I am traveling in another country, which is much like how Mahit operates in the City: I use basic knowledge of how the system works, watch for patterns and disruptions in patterns, and keep an eye out for anything that stands out as unique. I can tell from how people speak about their work whether things are on track and if not, what needs to happen—even if I don’t always know the denotative meaning of the words that they are using. I cannot explain what a Kubernetes Cluster is, for example, but what matters is that I know enough about automation via pods to understand the kinds of things that might be needed and whether or not I can help.
Being able to do this has meant that I can assume a kind of ambassador role within my company more broadly, helping the world that speaks Engineering to communicate with the worlds who speak in Marketing. I have a kind of anthology fluency, I guess.
Except that I keep coming up against the idea that my imago-guide—my metaphorical diplomacy implant—isn’t working so well anymore. I keep having these . . . situations. I keep having to write about losing my shit, one way or another. I don’t have time for this, I keep hearing myself say at work, as if a house is on fire, or I have a deadly disease. Which is a strange thing to say since my job is more or less that of an ambassador from a small mining outpost to a large, colonizing planet. The one thing I really should be doing is taking the time to make sure that the communication has, indeed, happened.
I keep trying, and I keep failing. I am starting to worry that some part of me is ungovernable.
*
Every good story is a love story, as we all know, and so of course Mahit and Three Seagrass have a vibe. Who among us does not want to meet a woman who can recite a seventeen thousand line poem about architecture called, “The Buildings”?
It’s this connection that makes Mahit’s feeling of alienation all the more poignant. She is drawn to Three Seagrass much as she is drawn to the Teixcalaanli culture, but as an outsider with political interests that are not necessarily shared, she knows that she can’t trust anyone. Three Seagrass is drawn to Mahit, too, but in Three Seagrass’s case, the attraction is because Mahit is different, not in spite of it. “I make friends with terribly interesting people with terribly complicated problems,” says Three Seagrass. Mahit, who is struggling to save her home planet, is just drawn to interesting people and would happily do without the complicated problems—but such is the nature of privilege, amirite?
The irony—or, depending on your point of view, the grace—of the situation is that without her imago device, Mahit has to wing it, which means all of her flaws and guesses and insecurities start to show. In a culture in which the perfection of the narrative is highly prized, it’s a tough place to be in. As a diplomat, she is embarrassed about her inability to resolve this tension, but as a patriot she must persevere anyway. This, alongside the longing for connection that she doesn’t try to repress adds up to a messy, stochastic tension through which she stumbles into new diplomatic and interpersonal forms of power. Through her diplomatic ‘failures,’ she is signaling very clearly that there is an alternative metrical system running concurrently alongside the officially recognized scansion.
Even in the scene in which Mahit and Three Seagrass clamber over their professional and cultural boundaries into the kiss that has been inevitable since the beginning, we can see this tension. Mahit is interesting to Three Seagrass for all the right reasons, but also, despite all they’ve been through together, because of her status as an exotic foreigner. Something gets said about this right after they are together for the first time, and it’s painful for Mahit.
All of this is a subtle commentary on colonialism, for sure, but it’s also a commentary on authentic human connection. First times are always awkward. Of course nothing that you are doing works very well; you’re having the first draft version of a completely different kind of conversation. That exquisite, bruised, awkwardness of letting yourself be naked with another person is how you know you’re not just an NCP, sitting around in a game-system created for some other person’s amusement. It’s your story, even if it’s a jumbled mess, and with luck you’ll get to play it enough times to get good at it.
Which is all that any good diplomat or human woman is asking for, when you think about it.
*
Last week, on my last night in Florence, Italy, we had a team dinner at a restaurant overlooking the Piazza della Signoria. On one side of our outdoor seating was the famous and beautiful Fountain of Neptune. On the other side was the even more famous and beautiful Palazzo Vecchio. The worst of the August heat had broken, so the air was clear, and the restaurant was attached to a local winery. It was an objectively lovely evening and setting.
And yet, I was tired and grouchy for a hundred reasons, but mainly because I was mad at myself for being tired and grouchy and for yet again having to remind myself to stop scowling. Finally, I just leaned over to my friend who was sitting next to me and told her that I was sad and tired and that I missed my old team and that I felt stupid for being sad and tired on such a perfect evening. She listened to me and didn’t judge and said sympathetic things. Then, she told me a story about getting called out by a choir director and how it was painful that it happened, but even more painful that it happened inside of a setting that she loved. Then she handed me her husband’s still full wine glass.
It was such a simple thing, each of us just letting ourselves be seen as slightly less than the idealized version of people who dine on the Piazza della Signoria on a Saturday night in August.
But it felt like it reverse coded the star-chart of my mind. Suddenly all of the stupid stuff that was bothering me was gone, and having lost the scowl, I felt able to participate in the broader conversation. I looked across the table at another friend and colleague and asked him something about his kid’s college process—you know, the usual kind of appropriate question you’d ask in a work setting.
But instead of giving the usual kind of work-appropriate answer, my friend said in a quiet, joking way, why is everyone asking me that? which immediately signaled to me that he, too, was probably a barbarian from another planet. So, I quickly said something like let me ask a better question and, in much the same way that my friend had swapped my empty wine glass for her husband’s full one, I swapped the dumb college search question for, tell me something you love about your kid.
And so he did. He unfolded an unusual and endearing story about an elaborate presentation that his son had made to make the case for buying something that was expensive, but also a knock-off, but yet still valuable and essential to sustaining a happy, contemporary teenage existence. It was a story shot through with the creativity that had been encouraged and the comical machinations of teenagers and the helpless way we adore our kids and the comedy of parenting in a time of disrupted supply chains and TikTok. It was one thousand percent more interesting than the story of any college search has ever been or will be, and it broke down another layer of the isolating, exhausting professional veneer.
It was that thing that always happens when you let your guard down enough to find the other barbarians, and it’s maybe the one true, inalienable terra firma.
At least, I hope so, because I was built for dactyls and ekphrasis, but I live in a world of key results and business requirements. The world is really noisy and messy right now; send me some reinforcements.
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I see this as a mr potato head, from which we take out the appropriate bits. Some of the bits, like speaking to engineers, are straight up missing from my repertoire..
Love virtual traveling with you - thank you