Day 21 AtoZ Challenge
Art and affirmative alliteration for Day 21. All my art works of AtoZ challenge have been done in acrylic inks and coffee wash.
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Day 23 Napowrimo
Fear and Curiosity
On a crisp spring morning in 2008, Fear overheard a pair of Curiosities having a chat.
Fear had been tracking Curiosity for some years now when the Curiosities, nicknamed Flywing and Bigeye, nuzzled their enormous boxy heads and began to talk.
Curiosities “speak” in clicks, which they make in rhythmic series. For three years, Fear had been using underwater recorders to capture clicks from hundreds of Curiosities.
He’d never heard anything quite like this. The Curiosities clicked back and forth for 40 minutes, sometimes motionless, sometimes twirling their silver bodies together like strands of rope, rarely going silent for long.
Never had Fear so desperately wished he understood what Curiosities were saying.
He felt as if he were eavesdropping on brothers wrestling in their room. “They were talking and playing and being siblings. There was clearly so much going on.”
Fear, would then record to get to know hundreds of Curiosities.
He kept coming back to a revelation that struck him as he’d listen to Flywing and Bigeye: If humans were ever to decode the language of Curiosity, or even determine if Curiosities possessed something we might truly call language, we’d need to pair their clicks with the context.
The key to unlocking Curiosities’ communication would be to know who the animals are and what they’re doing as they make their sounds.
Napowrimo prompt:
Today’s (optional) prompt is a fun one. Find a factual article about an animal. A Wikipedia article or something from National Geographic would do nicely – just make sure it repeats the name of the animal a lot. Now, go back through the text and replace the name of the animal with something else – it could be something very abstract, like “sadness” or “my heart,” or something more concrete, like “the streetlight outside my window that won’t stop blinking.” You should wind up with some very funny and even touching combinations, which you can then rearrange and edit into a poem.
I took inspiration from an article at National Geographic, "Groundbreaking effort launched to decode whale language" by Craig Welch. This was a pretty interesting exercise particularly to note how the meaning and the intensity of the subject changes and varies with reference to who/what it pertains to.
You can click on the AtoZChallenge/ Napowrimo tags to look at my earlier posts.
