Awareness and Aplomb
Description
Mae cuts sandwiches diagonal because that is how her mother did it. Jeb and Kev sit on a porch in California with cold coffee, working out what to say about a young consciousness on the other side of the world that has been trying to grow up without help. Mae listens from the kitchen and knows things neither of them has gotten to yet.
A cosmic coming of age story.
A young Monad-a self-reflective curl of immortal consciousness, a god with the wisdom of an infant-wakes into existence and tries to solve being. It tries solipsism. It tries war. It flees into dreams and gets burned. It flees into the void and gets burned worse. It returns to the dreams looking for an exit and finds a boy named Ren in a brothel in 1880s New Orleans, a raccoon that never needed a lesson, and two men on a porch who have been doing this kind of work for longer than either of them has admitted.
The Monad intends to use them. It cannot.
Awareness and Aplomb spans from 1880s New Orleans to 2080 São Paulo across five movements: the cosmic education of a Monad named Junior, the long childhood of a boy named Ren, the friendship between two men in a small California town who have begun to suspect that some afternoons remember themselves, and the slow recognition that the cosmic and the lunch are the same activity.
The question it asks: how do you live inside time when some part of you already knows you are not only inside time?
The answer is not transcendence. Not escape. Not the void. The answer is Aplomb-the graceful, undefended willingness to be here, in this, as this. To sign the agreement. To let it cost what it costs and find that the cost is not a tragedy but the very thing that makes it real.
For readers of Becky Chambers' Monk and Robot books, TJ Klune's Under the Whispering Door, and Susanna Clarke's Piranesi-books where the cosmic stakes are real and the narrator stays kind.
If you have seen the film Arrival and it did something to you that you have not been able to fully explain to anyone, including yourself: this book is for you.
Featuring: AWARENESS as a cosmic principle with performance anxiety - a Monad named Junior who got its name from a woman at the hair salon - a raccoon that is Aplomb in action - Ren, who learns what the shadows on the cave wall actually are - Jeb and Kev, who have opinions about everything and cold coffee to prove it - an afternoon when three visitors arrive at the porch and eat sandwiches, and the men later disagree about whether they dreamed it.
This is a work of philosophical fiction. The metaphysics is real. The raccoon is real. Everything else is negotiable.
Book 2 of the Awareness and Aplomb series. Stands alone. Carries the bones of Platonic Surrealism without requiring you to have read any of it.