Aiua

(shortpost)

In Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide and Children of the Mind, there is a concept that the characters internal to the story label “aiúa,” and it’s one I wish more people knew.

I’m going to describe it with mild spoilers for the story, so caveat lector.

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In the story: through some sci-fi shenanigans, one single soul ends up in charge of three bodies.

The bodies are all distinct. They have their own minds, their own personalities, their own agendas. It’s not a hive-mind.

But—as it turns out—the particular soul that ended up in charge of those three bodies isn’t quite capable of running Three Whole People. It’s a little more than that psychic essence is capable of juggling.

Which means that, at any given time, one of the three bodies is rotting. Slowly crumbling, dissolving. Hair falling out, teeth turning to dust.

At one point, the body that’s dissolving goes to talk to the body where the soul first came from—the OG of their little triumvirate.

“Yo, what the fuck,” says the rotting body.

But the other guy basically just … shrugs? “You think I’m in control of this?” they say. “I don’t have a muscle, here. I don’t have control. My soul goes where it’s going to go, and I have no conscious say in it.”

Later, the rotting body makes a tremendous discovery—a brand-new intelligent species that no other human has heard of or made contact with before. And suddenly, that body stops rotting, and one of the other bodies starts.

The soul went where its true interest lay, and that was that.

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In the book, people used the term “aiua” to refer to the soul itself. I tend not to just use it as a synonym for soul, though—I use it specifically when I want to talk about this phenomenon, where you can’t just make yourself want something, love something, care about something.

(Or stop wanting, loving, caring.)

“Aiua,” meaning the way that my soul does what it wants.

“Aiua,” meaning look, I cannot help being queer, and I cannot help being poly.

“Aiua,” meaning yes, I know this work project is actually tremendously important, I get that it’s load-bearing for our entire mission and I get that our mission has rather high stakes for the world at large, but somehow I just … kinda can’t.

I mean, I can. But it’s using some other fuel. It’s dutiful, effortful, draining. There isn’t the key spark, the true enthusiasm, the feeling of falling toward something, accelerating as I go, getting more energy out of working on it, rather than less.

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I think that very, very, very few people do not have this experience. I think that almost everyone I’ve encountered has, at some point or another, wanted/loved/pursued something they didn’t think was right or strategic. And I think that almost everyone I’ve ever encountered has found themselves confused and dismayed by how they don’t want/love/pursue the thing that clearly they should, it makes so much sense on paper, this is right up my alley, this PhD program is a perfect match, this person seems so right for me, why is it that I don’t actually care, I don’t get it.

And I feel like just telling people: yo, this is how it works, for most of us. This is a thing. Aiua—the soul wants what it wants, and goes where it will, and you have (at best) partial and imperfect control over its motion.

I feel like that’s helpful. I benefited, from Orson Scott Card telling me, in middle school, via his books, and I find myself telling other people directly all the time.

Now I’ve told you. Good luck.

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