I've been giving a lot of thought to why the Arrested Development joke above, where Michael finds a bag in the fridge marked 'DEAD DOVE Do Not Eat!' opens it, looks inside, winces, but then says "I don't know what I expected" is so funny (outside of how well it's played and shot), and I think I've got it: People have an unhelpful amount of difficulty processing unexpected information through any medium other than personal experience.
I've also been considering how much I may have overestimated people's desire to communicate with each other in general – or rather, be communicated to – and underestimated how much they might just rather be left to their own opinions, unruffled by information from other people, aliens, or pets. Here are some photographs of a man trying to teach a horse to count: Wilhelm Van Osten, whose work in the 1890's on or with "Clever Hans" spanned a number of moustaches...
Their story graces the Extra Material of Helen Zaltzman's ever excellent "The Allusionist" podcast, specifically the second of two episodes about science fiction author Mary Robinette Kowal's apparently successful attempts to establish more nuanced communication with her cat, Elsie, through an increasingly large number of "button boards" (as shown below). While aware that no experiment ever showed an animal to be dumber than we thought, I initially approached these episodes with scepticism, but by the time I was hearing about a cat forming compound words – attempting to summon a light's reflection on the ceiling by tapping the buttons for "laser" and "bird", say – I was asking myself, My God, why doesn't every pet owner have one of these?
And it was this question which led me to consider that, maybe, people would just rather not know what other beings are thinking. Does any of this have anything to do with "Jonah Non Grata"? Not really, which is why I'm posting it. You guys deserve a break. For the record though, I feel that that night at Soho turned out to be both beautiful and useful, give hot thanks to everyone who came – including those who had to because they worked there – and am very grateful too to Rich Cline, for his lovely review which you can read HERE, but that's not much of a post, is it.
Poster suggestion subsequently vetoed by PR. "Faces sell more."
I will also just say that in, you know... these times... while I may be writing to my MP quite a bit, and while I wish every friend of mine engaging with the Equality and Human Rights Commission's oppressive, ignorant, and unnecessary instructions on gender conformity every success in their consultation with MPs and hope to my core their consultation helps... that, as Rich writes in his review: "absurdity keeps us on our toes," and that we should, more generally, remember Michael and the dead dove and stop putting so much faith in the idea that, as long as we make sense, we'll be understood. I wish that were true. But, less dispiritingly, I'm also excited to start reaching out again to people through a work they won't have to understand.
Here are tickets for Jonah at Edinburgh.
And here are those episodes:
