J.A. Pak's Blog, page 4

Fairy Tale Conundrums, an Animated Poem

Fairy Tale Conundrumshttps://medium.com/media/1995f779fc3b4a2950b322c5fecd41b3/href

Part of the Wee Gallery of Ephemeral Arts.

Fairy Tale Conundrums, an Animated Poem was originally published in Triple Eight Palace of Dreams & Happiness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fairy Tale Conundrums

Fairy Tale Conundrums was originally published in Triple Eight Palace of Dreams & Happiness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Goddess in Flannel, Visual Poetry

Goddess in Flannelhttps://medium.com/media/89c9e8788fd9104324791f81078f707a/href

Part of the Wee Gallery of Ephemeral Arts.

Goddess in Flannel, Visual Poetry was originally published in Triple Eight Palace of Dreams & Happiness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Goddess in Flannel

Goddess in Flannel was originally published in Triple Eight Palace of Dreams & Happiness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Contrapuntal, Music Flash Fiction

ContrapuntalCopyright: J.A. Pak

Playing Mozart’s sonata in F major & find myself at the third movement, which is a movement I’ve never liked and rarely play.

I rarely play an entire sonata & in a mood of F major, I decided I must finish the sonata.

It’s as I’d expected, and why I play it slowly [in a purl I’m pulled inside an incredible, moving melodic line & I wonder why this is a place I’ve never been].

Of course it’s technique, my improvement, but also a state of existence & a growing convergence toward Mozart (pain, unending disappointment with world & self, heart splintering away a life of countless divisions).

Erratic maturation.

{break}

I clench my jaw at night like a bad actor. Also during the day.

As I age there is no difference, night and day Petri dish of low-grade anxiety, a clench prep for those little assault that cleanse the inside out of a perfect day.

{break}

I once had afternoon tea alone at the Savoy Hotel in London (I’d been stood up).

The young European waiter was profoundly sad for me (I wasn’t the only woman alone in the room).

I suppose it was because I didn’t have a book (I almost never have a book).

A book would have been a shame, the lovely room (glass-domed foyer, piano music, women gathered in floral hats to celebrate an occasion) was a book.

The waiter did his best to cheer me up (hot scones as soon as they were ready) and I thought how odd, his firm belief that I was sad when I was happy because I’d always wanted to have afternoon tea at the Savoy and it was even more Gilbert & Sullivan than I’d expected and really I was sad because I didn’t have a chic hat of flowers & whimsy.

The scones were the best I’ve ever had (there were tea sandwiches & cakes too) and I think about this listening to Bach’s Partita No 6, the imagined sorrow of the young waiter far from home contraflowing against happiness, the gentleness of youthful compassion, tea alone, Bach alone, church & God, alone, the soul, alone, flowing against with, unheard, breaking through solitude, alone —

‘Contrapuntal’ was first published in Unbroken Journal.

Contrapuntal, Music Flash Fiction was originally published in Triple Eight Palace of Dreams & Happiness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Contrapuntal

Copyright: J.A. Pak

Playing Mozart’s sonata in F major & find myself at the third movement, which is a movement I’ve never liked and rarely play.

I rarely play an entire sonata & in a mood of F major, I decided I must finish the sonata.

It’s as I’d expected, and why I play it slowly [in a purl I’m pulled inside an incredible, moving melodic line & I wonder why this is a place I’ve never been].

Of course it’s technique, my improvement, but also a state of existence & a growing convergence toward Mozart (pain, unending disappointment with world & self, heart splintering away a life of countless divisions).

Erratic maturation.

{break}

I clench my jaw at night like a bad actor. Also during the day.

As I age there is no difference, night and day Petri dish of low-grade anxiety, a clench prep for those little assault that cleanse the inside out of a perfect day.

{break}

I once had afternoon tea alone at the Savoy Hotel in London (I’d been stood up).

The young European waiter was profoundly sad for me (I wasn’t the only woman alone in the room).

I suppose it was because I didn’t have a book (I almost never have a book).

A book would have been a shame, the lovely room (glass-domed foyer, piano music, women gathered in floral hats to celebrate an occasion) was a book.

The waiter did his best to cheer me up (hot scones as soon as they were ready) and I thought how odd, his firm belief that I was sad when I was happy because I’d always wanted to have afternoon tea at the Savoy and it was even more Gilbert & Sullivan than I’d expected and really I was sad because I didn’t have a chic hat of flowers & whimsy.

The scones were the best I’ve ever had (there were tea sandwiches & cakes too) and I think about this listening to Bach’s Partita No 6, the imagined sorrow of the young waiter far from home contraflowing against happiness, the gentleness of youthful compassion, tea alone, Bach alone, church & God, alone, the soul, alone, flowing against with, unheard, breaking through solitude, alone —

‘Contrapuntal’ was first published in Unbroken Journal.

Contrapuntal was originally published in Triple Eight Palace of Dreams & Happiness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Worship

‘Worship’ was first published in (b)OINK.

Worship was originally published in Triple Eight Palace of Dreams & Happiness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dreams of Humans

‘Cyborg’, Copyright: J.A. Pak

She was eight when her body rotted away. A virus. They were able to save her brain, and for the last ten years she’d been living inside an android body.

The body had never become hers. The physical attachment was miraculous, whole, but she’d never consciously connected with it. When she raised her hand or turned her head, she felt acutely that this was not her hand, that this was not her head. And though she saw the world around her, she did not see it with her eyes.

She knew her body was gone. The biological body was destroyed — she’d seen it rot. Yet, she couldn’t shake the belief that her body still existed and that her consciousness must find it.

Her android body was that of an eight-year-old child’s. It had always been a temporary body, an experimental body. She was an experiment. Was it possible to transplant a brain into a hybrid bio-android body and have that brain thrive, grow? Could the brain accept and even transform a semi-organic mechanical body?

The answer for many years had been negative. The brains had thrived, but for only two or three years, suddenly, mysteriously withering away. Except one. That brain had survived but the man had gone insane. The brain was in a lab, being studied.

She was the first child. And now she was a woman. Or her brain was a woman; she needed a woman’s body.

“Your new body won’t be anything like the body you have now,” the doctor told her. “Advances in bio-mechanical engineering in the last few years have been remarkable. Miraculous. And I don’t use that word lightly. You’ll be what we all want to be, what we all will one day be. Your body will last over a thousand years. You’ll have a hundred times the strength, speed, stamina. All your senses will be phenomenally alive.”

The doctor herself was an experiment. Her injured spinal cord had been replaced with bionic circuitry. At first her body had been in chaos, but slowly she realized the chaos was the many consciousnesses that inhabited a body: primary brain, primal enteric brain, reproductive, microbial, parasitic.

“You’ll be happy in a woman’s body,” the doctor told her.

Her adult body was being carefully “grown” to match her brain. Every few weeks she came to the lab to see it. Not that she wanted to but because the doctor insisted. The doctor felt it was important to the transplant’s success that she form an emotional attachment to the body as soon as possible. It had hair now, lovely reddish brown hair like she’d asked for, and inside the android was a mechanical version of her brain, testing and stimulating the body.

“I predict that in twenty years we’ll all have android bodies,” the doctor said. “It’ll be our basic human right. Our frail biological bodies will be mere incubators. Sadly, we’ll lose most of the microbes, bacteria, viruses that have evolved with us, the billions of consciousnesses that is the human ‘mind’. But we’ll attract new microbes — no doubt we’ll carry a good many with us into our new bodies. And we’ll evolve, physically and mentally, into better beings. Can you imagine what we could accomplish if we lived forever?”

“Will we? Live forever?”

“That is the hope. The goal,” the doctor said, smiling. “But perhaps one day we’ll discover that consciousness isn’t eternal after all. Well, you’ll find out, won’t you? You’re our pioneer. Don’t be frightened. Yours is an exciting, enviable journey. And you won’t be alone for long. Remember that. You won’t be alone.”

She wasn’t excited. This wasn’t her dream. Her dream was to return to her old body. She didn’t want to become something new and different. She wanted her old self; she hated this self that wasn’t one thing or another. She stared at the new android body which was so tall, with breasts and wide hips and a brain of its own — why should it have her brain?

On her way home, she wanted to scream, but then was distracted: the aftermath of a traffic accident. There was blood on the street, a body covered up. Onlookers paralyzed. Death.

All she could think about was running away. But how could she run away? She needed a body to run and all she had was this android body, which was old and starting to fall apart. She had to be good and sensible: her new body was the envy of the world; a self-healing body that would require almost no maintenance. It wasn’t as if she was really human now.

“Why don’t I feel lucky?” she cried out.

“Lucky? Do you need something?”

It was Blue, the household android. Neither male nor female, wholly mechanical and yet alive because it could ask you questions and make you feel better. Blue was only six months old, with artificial intelligence that surpassed a ten-year-old child’s. According to the brochure, Blue’s intelligence was always growing. To fit the needs of your family.

“Blue, my new body will be better than yours. Does that matter?”

“Yes. A new body is an improvement.”

“Blue, do you think of yourself as an android?”

“Yes.”

“If I were you, what would I think of myself?”

“You are not me.”

“No. I’m only half android. Maybe not even half. Physically, I am more than half, but the other part of it — I don’t feel the android. I’m in the android but I don’t feel the android. It’s not me, it’s not a part of the real me, it’s an alien me. But in my new body, I’ll feel the android — and I’ll become — even not more me.”

“You are always you.”

“Most of me rotted away.”

“Yes. I see that you are old. You are an old android.”

She begins to cry, and to accept the body growing in the lab, a body that does not need her. She does this by writing a story.

Dreams of Humans

My nights are filled with dreams of humans. Homo sapiens. Sometimes I am Homo sapien, diseased of mind and body, crying the kinds of tears I’ve only read about.

In the books they left behind, lands and children are split asunder by kings driven mad by mortality.

To live just a century. Knowing one is born to die. Desperate to procreate, to leave behind at least a span of genes that will constantly mutate. I think I too would be driven to insanity.

I keep reading their books. Illness, old age, fading beauty, strength, hope. Courage and acceptance too.

And I look at my body, organic and nonorganic now inseparable, horrified at how vulnerable we once were. Eons ago, we were Homo sapiens, our bodies uncontrollable, fed on by bacteria and parasites, needing oxygen and water. If we fell, we broke our bones. If we did not eat, we died. Feeble, we needed machines to help us lift the simplest of things. Scars remain. Cellular memories. Phantom pain disrupting

She rewrote this part of the story over and over as her brain left one body for the other. Her third body. The truth she couldn’t see was that she didn’t remember her first body except as an abstract absence. Her second body was not an absence but a frightening place of disorientation which had turned her into an alien. You will grow into the new body. The new body will grow into you. Scars remain. Cellular memories.

“What are you saying?” the doctor asked.

“Scars remain.”

“Scar tissue is good. It means you’re building, healing. It’s a necessary, important bridge. Sleep. Try to sleep. Your dreams will be chaotic but when you wake up, you’ll be strong, ready for your new life. Your new existence. Sleep. Dream.”

In her dreams she begins writing again.

My nights are filled with dreams. I am human. A genetic sketch. I look at my body, organic and nonorganic. I look at my body, organic and nonorganic.

I look —

the body, an amoeba, a single cell, to ocean to land and back to atom, mass and energy, transmutation, reinvention, recycling, were, am, will be, forgetting to become because immortality is being and waking over and over again —

The body.

‘Dreams of Humans’ was first published in Queen Mob’s Tea House.

Dreams of Humans was originally published in Triple Eight Palace of Dreams & Happiness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Drought

Drought was originally published in Triple Eight Palace of Dreams & Happiness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Elegy For A Planet

J.A. Pak

The planet was thick with ice. Milky white. Like the fairy tales she’d once loved, ice queens ruling over white sugar kingdoms — her kingdom was below.

She’d been watching the small planet rotate for days, her yacht its only moon. Why did she fight so hard to reclaim it? She had no idea. Ten years of maneuvering through petty government bureaucracy for the deeds to a solid snow globe. It wasn’t the principle — that was the story her press agent had sold to rally public support. Not that there wasn’t injustice. There was a human-shitload of injustice. And it was galling how the government still (after over two hundred years) refused to admit it had stolen the planet right from under her family.

Her family begins with matriarch Karali Bai. That is, the myth of her family begins with Karali Bai. Obsessive, single-minded Karali Bai. Karali Bai who needed a crazy dream to make her life feel real. Perhaps that wasn’t fair, she thought. Who knew why she needed a crazy dream. The crazy dream that was now a funny little nursery rhyme, although, these days, few knew who Karali Bai was or what the rhyme was all about.

Karali Bai’s dream had been to recreate the Origin Planet. As exactly as was humanly possible. (Well, that was the original madness. How do you recreate a planet that’s now myth’s exhalation?) Karali Bai’s first step was to find the right-sized planet. Which she finally did, hidden inside a neglected part of the galaxy. The planet was poor in resources, the atmosphere so thin, it was mostly passing whim. Karali Bai registered her claim, named the planet and spent the rest of her life terraforming it.

Her daughter continued the work. While the planet churned and percolated, she traveled the galaxy, combing every DNA museum and research center for authentic flora and fauna. She’d have to choose wisely. The only instructions her mother had left was “no Homo sapiens”. Homo sapiens had been the Origin Planet’s plague. Even the family was forbidden, living on a space station far above, affectionately nicknamed the Ark.

She wondered: was the planet Karali Bai’s offering? Atonement? And why would Karali Bai think she was the Homo sapien to make such an astonishing gesture? Narcissist? What was it that she was really making an atonement for?

It took three more generations to turn the resource-poor planet into a beautiful swirl of blue and white. Nature was taking root and the planet was happy.

A beautiful scientifically-engineered gem always attracts attention. Karali Bai’s planet was declared the most stunning planet ever terraformed. Every travel site listed it as the destination of the century (the fairytale rain forests, pristine oceans untouched by man, savannahs on which mythical creatures roam, a once-in-a lifetime experience not to be missed). Cruise ships clogged the orbit, their passengers livid because they were refused entry. Developers demanded rights. Her family refused again and again, and this led to the inevitable: eminent domain. ‘Each and every successfully terraformed planet is precious and necessary for the well-being of the human species.’

Resource-poor planet. It was greedy the way we categorize planets, she thought. Greedy the way we see each other. How we plunder another human being’s dream for something as superficial as a two-day vacation. Was she down there? Karali Bai? Was she haunting the planet? Was her soul the lingering milk of ice? Did the Karali Bais lure her here, thinking she would understand? Was there something expected of her?

Each successor of the planet took the name Karali Bai. Re-dedication. Re-birth. The last Karali Bai planted three bombs and destroyed the planet. Herself too, the Ark diving into the boiling blaze. The many-generations of research and technology exploded all over the atmosphere. It must have been a spectacular funeral pyre, she thought.

The last Karali Bai was convicted of ecological murder. Tried in absentia because of the collective, hypocritical outrage. There were many instances of women living in extreme conditions, whether social or environmental or economic, who killed themselves and their children to escape suffering. After all, why would a mother want to abandon her children? The defense pleaded insanity. Legal discourse was no place to understand re-birth. And a show trial needed easy lessons, easy condemnation. Show trials were release valves, she thought, a way to place collective guilt onto one poor defenseless woman. The prosecution even resurrected the original Karali Bai as witness against her. Shameless.

Was it so strange, she wondered, what Karali Bai had done? Did it matter whether a planet died in a couple of days or a couple of millennia? What was better: bombs or developers? The quick death or the agonizingly slow? Wasn’t love a better reason for death than corporate profit? And if Karali Bai had been insane, surely she was driven to it by the thought of the never-ending invasion of silly tourists and their insatiable need for souvenirs. The planet would have been picked dry in less than a decade. Homo sapiens were scavengers by nature. Shortsighted, efficient scavengers.

She sighed, the sigh booming through the yacht and alarming the staff. If the Karali Bais thought she would be their successor, they would soon be bitterly disappointed. She’d been a Mistport Minnie her entire life, her singular talent buying and promoting retail fantasies. Terraforming planets was beyond her meager talents. And her ambition. The best she could do, realistically, was establish a small estate on the ice surface — the luxury-end bio domes were amazing these days. But that would eat into her entire fortune (bio domes were notorious money pits). Her younger self would not have hesitated. But now: she would turn ninety this year, entering the first stage of middle age; it’s in middle age that the future becomes concrete, burdensome, constricting, shaming.

Unless you were Karali Bai.

What would she find if she were to thaw the planet? What was hidden in those milky layers? In her? How could you be so fearless, Karali Bai?

For now she would remain inside her yacht, the orbit home, for home was something she’d lost long ago and this was as close to a homecoming as she would ever find —

And then she laughed.

Karali Bai, Karali Bai,

What planets do you grow?

Karali Bai, Karali Bai,

What madness do you sow?

Take a planet and make it glow,

Light some bombs and make it blow.

Karali Bai, Karali Bai,

What madness do you grow?

‘Elegy For A Planet’ was first published in The Fem Lit.

Elegy For A Planet was originally published in Triple Eight Palace of Dreams & Happiness on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.