Halloween has always been a favorite time of year for me, not just for the actual time on October 31, but for the time before then, in preparing a costume (homemade for me). This year, appearing as Blajeny from Madeleine l'Engle's A Wind in the Door, I decided to add another dimension to the costume: acting.
I thought of, and worked out, notes on several topics. In thinking about Blajeny's culture, I wrote about that culture's aesthetic and humor, compiled lines (from the book when I could), and thought about body language, ways that I could reveal myself through the character of Blajeny, and subjects for discussion, keeping things in a notes file until they were big enough to put in their own files. To those who know me, for me to appear as Blajeny is not entirely fantasy. There is a spark of Blajeny in my heart.
And coming back, I've started to move beyond Blajeny to embracing the here and now. Blajeny almost shocks Charles Wallace and the other characters by coming from another world, announcing that they will be his students and then answering their questions by saying, "Where is my school? Here, there, everywhere. In the schoolyard during first-grade recess. With the cherubim and seraphim. Among the farandolae." The shock comes not with this, but when he says that Charles will go to his ordinary school as usual. Blajeny's schoolroom is very otherworldly and incorporates the here and now into the otherworldly. And I am starting to make a shift from Blajeny, to move beyond finding the otherworldly in the here and now to embracing the here and now as the here and now. A basic lesson, perhaps... but I am learning to move from being like Blajeny, who is a significant milestone in my growth and who it is very easy for me to connect with, to grow into being an "ordinary" teacher.
I had two props for this costume: a model of the tesseract:
As my lines explained:
That is a model of the tesseract. It is how I came to your planet.
I did not travel at any speed. I did not travel at all. Perhaps a way to explain it is this:
Start with a point. It is in zero dimensions.
Now, pull that point out. You have a line segment. It is in one dimension.
Now, pull that line segment out. You have a square. It is in two dimensions.
Now, pull that square out. You have a cube. It is in three dimensions.
Now, pull that cube out, like you have in the three dimensional picture I hold. You have a tesseract. It is in four dimensions. There are more dimensions than three.
Or another way to explain it is this:
Suppose that there is an ant on my skirt, and it must go from this point to this point. It could travel along a straight path, and take very long, or I can fold my skirt like so, and it is there immediately. That is how I arrived. I did not move through space at any speed, because I did not move through space. It is called tessering.
and a kairometer,
There is no exact word for it in your language. Some possible translations include 'book', 'watch', and 'computer', but I am not satisfied with any of them. Information technology is different on my planet than on yours; we do not always use symbols, or create artifacts that change state. They tell us different things at different times, but it is according to what we are able to receive at the moment, not according to its own changing state. Our technology is different, although I have not come to talk about technology, there are greater things in life.
Neither of these are explicitly mentioned in A Wind in the Door (though the tesseract plays a prominent role in A Wrinkle in Time, to which A Wind in the Door is a companion volume), but both of which fit into the feel of Madeleine'e and especially Blajeny's world. (Readers interested in that world may wish to read 100 ways of kything, after, of course, A Wind in the Door.)
I would like to thank Innes Sheridan for help with the costume and pictures. Normally, I make my own costumes; this year, because my Mom's sewing machine is broken, I came to her to ask if she could give me fifteen minutes sage advice about cutting the cloth, five minutes' introduction to her sewing machine, and then leave me to put the costume together. She very generously helped me cut the cloth, did most of the sewing, and took the pictures. I would also like to thank Nova Production for surprising me by creating the "Blajeny Enters" picture.
