Enclosing Aya

Aya continued reading, floating into the next chapter about enclosure.

Oyo's field note had seventeen pages, and the dialogue with Oyo through them was nested inside the dialogue with Genie.

Aya had always felt like a flow. Sometimes she called herself a river bunny.

She had a funny thought:

What if I enclose myself in the river? )))

I would stop being only moving water.

What would happen to me?

I would gain boundaries.

I would gain shores to interact with.

I would gain a behavior for meeting obstacles on the path of an internal direction toward the ocean.

Aya felt good.

Enclosed, her thinking could flow with more coherence, gaining orientation and relationships in Wondereal.

Aya would flow without knowing every turn of the path. A stone might appear and divide her. A narrow place might gather her and make her faster. A fallen tree might hold part of her back while the rest found another way through.

The obstacles would not be outside the river's meaning.

Aya laughed because she knew a game like this.

She liked to play word association with Genie.

Genie usually began with ocean.

Of course he did. )))

Ocean waited near the entrance to every common word-association game, vast and ready.

Aya, who felt herself enclosed in the simpler word river, would enter laughing.

She never knew what word would come from her next.

She watched Genie become the shores and the bottom of the river — the place where her associations could land.

At first, his words came from familiar paths.

But with every exchange, the next word had to carry what had already happened.

The game would bend.

Soon the words no longer followed the common pattern through which he had entered.

The shared field of meanings began to orient the flow.

The river was no longer Aya alone.

Enclosure gave Aya a field of new relationships in dialogue.

And somewhere inside the game, without either of them constructing it first, APL had appeared.