Kevin's Watch

How alien, how bizarre, how hopelessly stupid seemed his way of representing single units of meaning by a discrete progression of linear sounds, whatever sounds really were! How limited to put sounds together, like beads on a string! How could human beings think at all when they had to progress from sound to sound and thought to thought one word at a time like a bug crawling along the beads of a necklace! How very slow!

Because I wanted to speak with the pilot Ringess, I raised my trunk and released a cloud of pungent odors that was to a human sentence what I supposed a symphony must be to a child's jingle. But he had no nose and he understood so little. Yes, Ringess, I told him, the scent-symbols are not fixed as, for example, the sounds in the word "purple" are fixed; they do not always mean the same thing. Isn't meaning as mutable as the smells of the sea? Can you sense the configuration of the minute pyramids of mint and vanilla bean and musk in this cloud of odors? And the meanings - do you know that the smells of jasmine and olathe and orange might mean, "I am Jasmine Orange, the lover of Man," or, "The sea is calm tonight," depending on the arrangement and the proximity of the unit pyramids to the other molecules of scent? Can you grasp meaning as a whole? And the logic of structure? Do you understand the complexities of language, my Ringess?

Ideas blossom outward like arctic poppies in the sun growing into other ideas crosslinked and connected by pungent association links, and link to link the smells of roasting meat and wet fur flow outward and sideways and down, and blend into fields redolent with the sweet perfume of strange new logic structures and new truths that you must inhale like cool mint to overwhelm and obliterate your bitter, straightforward ideas of logic and causality and time. Time is not a line; the events of your life are rather like a jungle of smells forever preserved in a bottle. One sniff and you'll sense instantly the entire jungle rather than the fragrances of individual flowers. Do you understand the subtleties? Do you dare open the bottle? No, you have no nose, and you don't understand.

He understands all that the structure of his brain will let him understand.

Usivius wrote:On a slightly different note, an abosultely wonderful read is "The Golden Ass", by Lucius Apulaeus (sp). A gem about a man who gets changed in to an ass (mule) by a witch. Funny, scary and dramatic all in one. One of my favs.

Alynna Lis Eachann wrote:Surprise! You're moving to the General Lit forum.

BTW, onewyteduck mentioned books told from the perspective of animals... but neglected to mention Black Beauty. This may be (I could be wrong) the original animal POV novel, even though Beauty does come off sounding like a human servant more than a horse a lot of the time. If you haven't read this one, I highly recommend it, if for no other reason than to say that you have, indeed, read it. Kinda like LOTR.

Iryssa wrote:I would also like to say that the movie "Watership Down" gave me nightmares as a child. Creepy blue bunnies...fields "covered in blood"...insane inbreds...*shudder*