"The Sharing of Some Familiar Song" + "Ash-Shūrā"

June 25, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

In the story "The Sharing of Some Familiar Song," an alien civilization responds to humanity's gift of art—music, illustration, and fiction—by sending back their own creative offering. They acknowledge the profound difficulty of cross-species communication: "We belong to different orders, and this means that our minds are also different." The aliens invoke William Faulkner's idea that art compresses the pain of a life into a finite space, and they use this framework to interpret human stories they cannot fully understand—a man fleeing retribution for stealing food, a child on a river with a runaway, a person transformed into a creature with no voice by a calculating machine. They do not grasp the particulars, but they recognize that these are "representations of conflict within your very selves" and that the pain is compressed for comprehension. In return, they send a myth of their own: an individual enduring disapproval for a sin not yet committed, a ritual that will doom a subpopulation to irrelevance, a trauma expressed in terms they hope might be accessible. They acknowledge the message may arrive garbled through many translations, and that both species may not survive to receive it. But the core remains: "We know you have felt pain. We are alike at least as much as we have as well."

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What you'll learn

1 (00:10) **Episode Introduction** - Host Janina Edwards introduces the episode, which features two stories: "The Sharing of Some Familiar Song" by Adam Troy Castro and "Ash-Shūrā" by Bisan O'Day, narrated by Stefan Rudnicki.
2 (01:16) **"The Sharing of Some Familiar Song" Begins** - An alien civilization responds to human art, explaining the profound translation challenges between species.
3 (04:26) **Faulkner's Formula and Human Pain** - The aliens cite William Faulkner's idea that art compresses the totality of human pain into a finite space.
4 (07:25) **The Alien's Reciprocal Gift** - The aliens offer their own myth, a story of an individual facing a "sin not yet committed" and the failure to reach potential, as their most accessible expression of pain.
5 (10:38) **Closing of the First Story** - The aliens conclude that the intent of communication is evidence of shared pain and hope, even if both species may no longer exist by the time the message is received.
6 (14:58) **"Ash-Shūrā" Begins** - The story of Nasim, a mute, mentally ill young man living under occupation in Jerusalem, who is sent by his grandmother to a fortune teller.
7 (19:06) **Nasim's Condition and History** - Details of Nasim's mutism, his tardive dyskinesia, and his history of hallucinations and electroconvulsive therapy.

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Show Notes

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