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neuxue · 4 years

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Wheel of Time liveblogging: Towers of Midnight ch 8

Mat goes bar-hopping and contemplates obligations

Chapter 8: The Seven-Striped Lass

Oh it’s Mat. Well, enough people have told me Mat is better in this book than last, so if nothing else, confirmation bias alone should see me through.

(Though my indifference towards Mat extends further back than just last book, so… who knows).

He’s in a tavern, which should surprise absolutely no one, and thinking about how Aes Sedai are the bane of his existence, which… also should surprise absolutely no one.

Hey, now he and Thom can fidget with their Aes Sedai letters together. Safer than juggling knives in a world that doesn’t seem to have invented stress balls yet.

‘Master Crimson’? What is this, Cluedo?

And of course he’s not looking at women any more, definitely not noticing any of their, ahem, assets or anything, at least not for himself, you know, just keeping an eye out for his friends of course.

He’s also asking tavernkeepers for advice, because sometimes you just need a sounding board to convince yourself of what you already know. In this case, what to do about Verin’s letter and the conditions set on it. Which, to be fair, is a rather infuriating dilemma. When Verin plays games, she doesn’t fuck around.

“I could open it,” she continued to Mat, “and could tell you what’s inside.”

Bloody ashes! If she did that, he would have to do what it said. Whatever it bloody said. All he had to do was wait a few weeks, and he would be free. He could wait that long. Really, he could.

“It wouldn’t do,” Mat said

Aw, but wouldn’t it? I mean, Verin of all people would appreciate that kind of loophole.

“The woman who gave it to me was Aes Sedai, Melli. You don’t want to anger an Aes Sedai, do you?”

“Aes Sedai?” Melli suddenly looked eager. “I’ve always fancied going to Tar Valon, to see if they’ll let me join them.” She looked at the letter, as if more curious about its contents.

Light! The woman was daft.

Nah, she’s one of the rare sensible ones! Seriously, if I lived in a world with magic, in which there was a chance I could learn to do it, I would give approximately zero fucks about the reputation of the organisation that would enable me to learn it. (Yes, I know, it makes sense in this world that people are wary of Aes Sedai, but to me it’s one of those things like… oh, I don’t know, characters who decide they’re not actually interested in immortality because it would mean outliving their loved ones. Like okay, yeah, there’s a price, but magic. Immortality. I will never understand some fictional characters. Or maybe this just says something about me and which side I’d be on in these fictional worlds… but then, are we really surprised?)

“Can I trust you to keep your word?”

He gave her an exasperated look. “What was this whole bloody conversation about, Melli?”

‘Can I trust you to keep your word’ is kind of a… tautological question, though. And one that always amuses me, along with variations like ‘how can I trust you’ ‘I give you my word’. Because ultimately you’re still just left with the decision of whether or not you trust that person’s word. And no real way of knowing whether or not you should. Once again, I am perhaps exposing myself as not ideal hero material here.

I will say I’m impressed by Mat’s ability to not open the letter. Though I hope at some point we get to see what it says; Verin’s so good at this kind of thing it would be a shame not to see what game she set up here.

The bouncer doesn’t like Mat, which is kind of not surprising given that a bouncer’s job is to stop shit and the purpose of Mat’s entire existence is to start shit.

The paving stones were damp from a recent shower, though those clouds had passed by and—remarkably—left the sky open to the air.

I see what you did there.

Also I’m now trying to place this against everyone else’s timeline and it’s hurting my brain a little. The weather would suggest this is post-Dragonmount but I feel like Mat still had a bit of catch-up to do… ah well, I’m sure we’ll find out. For whatever reason timelines are something of an exception to my usual ability to retain details, probably because, weirdly enough, I often just… don’t care that much? In the sense that usually, when you actually need to know (or when it would be interesting or add something to the story to know), you’ll know.

Mat was not about any specific task tonight

Oh, wandering about at random are we? Which, if you’re Mat, means that regardless of how you started the night, you’ll almost certainly be about a certain task before you finish it. The Pattern has plans, after all.

Getting a feel for Caemlyn. A lot had changed since he had been here last.

Wow, okay, yeah, as the reader we’ve been in Caemlyn plenty over the past several books, but Mat was last here in book three. Damn.

A lot has changed since then. In Caemlyn, yes, but also Mat has changed quite a lot since then. It’s interesting, even in real life, going back to a place you either visited or knew well in the past. The sense of familiarity but at a slight distance, along with the memory of when you were there last, which can then serve to highlight how you’ve changed. And then all the things that aren’t familiar, though you can’t always be certain if that’s just because you’re seeing them differently…

Light, he had heard of paving stones attacking people.

What is this, the French Revolution?

Mat’s found a better tavern, by which I mean a worse tavern, but it’s all a matter of perspective and perspective is a funny thing at the tail end of a pub crawl, so let’s just not think too hard about it.

I’m suddenly very interested in the story of this woman with breeches and short hair dicing in a dodgy tavern with three dudes and not responding to any of Mat’s smiles, ahem. Yes I’m being pandered to, no I don’t care.

But Mat did not smile at girls that way anymore. Besides, she had not responded to any of his smiles anyway.

Alright, that’s much closer to Jordan’s Mat. The absolute lack of self-awareness in being able to think those sentences side-by-side, because hey, Mat, if you don’t smile at girls that way anymore, how do you know she’s not responding to them? (Plus the fact that Mat’s ‘best smile’ has, I’m pretty sure, not actually worked once this series when he’s actually thought about it).

From these first few pages in general, Mat does sound somewhat more how I would expect him to—the way his thoughts and actions contradict themselves, his tendency towards an absolute lack of self-awareness, the running joke of his ‘best smile’… though it also feels like it’s being laid on a little thick? Almost as if Sanderson has picked out a handful of things that work, or that have appeared elsewhere, and is studiously applying them and avoiding adding in too much else or deviating too much from those narrow bounds.

But that’s almost certainly me nitpicking and also looking specifically for this; it’s not really a complaint and at first glance this does seem better than the writing of Mat last book, so… fair enough. Point is, this is definitely not as jarring to read as that first chapter last book was. Still different, sure, but more within the parameters of the rest of the differences.

Mat’s more interested in the local gossip, which—ah.

“They found him dead this morning. Throat ripped clean out. Body was drained of blood, like a wineskin full of holes.”

The gholam’s back in town, then.

Well, in town, anyway; I suppose it hasn’t actually been to Caemlyn before, that we’ve seen. Hey, Elayne? Maybe listen to Birgitte and your bodyguards for a bit and actually take a break from your errands and adventures into the city alone for a bit.

Dice are landing on their corners and also starting up in Mat’s head, so looks like your night of aimless fun and tourism is coming to an end, Mat. Don’t forget to sign the guestbook on your way out.

It seemed impossible that [the gholam] could have gotten here this quickly. Of course, Mat had seen it squeeze through a hole not two handspans wide. The thing did not seem to have a right sense of what was possible and what was not possible.

Oh, well, in that case you two have something in common! Good, you won’t run out of things to say on your next date encounter.

Though on a less flippant note, I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this before, but I like how Mat gets paired against or linked with opponents or entities who fall into the larger umbrella archetype of ‘trickster figure’ but in different or darker ways: the gholam, the Eelfinn and Aelfinn, arguably Fain/Mordeth… and then there’s Perrin, who is set against Trollocs (the darker side of a mix between animal and human) and Whitecloaks (who exist to force questions of morality). As if they’re both sometimes set against those who reflect a darker or warped version of some aspect of who they are.

It’s not a perfect like-to-like matching; they have other opponents who don’t fit that kind of classification quite as well (though I would still argue that just about any enemy they—and quite a few other characters—face highlight some aspect of themselves via contrast or by presenting a warped kind of mirror), but it’s just a little… random thing I quite like. Particularly Mat set against other types of trickster, because it fits with the very definition or idea of what a trickster figure is in the first place. This idea of looking into a kaleidoscope of mirrors and seeing theme and variation until they flicker at the edges.

He had sent word to [Elayne], but had not gotten a reply. How was that for gratitude? By his count, he had saved her life twice.

Sigh. I sort of thought they had reached an understanding as far as the accounting between them last time they spoke, but I guess we’re still doing this. Which, okay, before everyone comes for me on this, yes he has saved her life multiple times, and no she has not always responded immediately with gratitude, but specifically in the last instance she very much did, and it was a rather lovely moment where they both saw more in each other than they had before. Where they each realised that their previous (first) impressions were not necessarily the full truth, and that there was someone to like beneath that. A friend, even.

And I liked that; I absolutely have a soft spot for the friendship between Mat and Elayne, in part because they’re actually quite similar in a lot of ways. And so for both of them to start to see beneath the surface, to see more than just what they expect to see, was a nice moment of character growth for both of them.

Anyway, leaving the gratitude thing aside, it’s a shame Elayne hasn’t replied, if only because I wouldn’t mind seeing those two interact again. I just like their weird relationship. I like weird friendships between characters in general, really; it’s a good way to get to see a character from an ever-so-slightly different angle, or throw them into a slightly different kind of light. (In all honesty there’s a small part of me that would have been very open to an Elayne/Mat relationship rather than Elayne/Rand and Mat/Tuon, but mostly I just like them as friends who sort of… force each other to take a second look at things, and in doing so to realise some things about themselves).

For once, there had been a battle and he had missed it. Remembering that lightened his mood somewhat. An entire war had been fought over the Lion Throne, and not one arrow, blade, or spear had entered the conflict seeking Matrim Cauthon’s heart.

Yeah, well, don’t jinx it.

Also Mat you were sort of in the middle of some of your own battles and while you’re pretty good, you’re not quite good enough to be in two places at once. Still, can’t fault him for looking on the bright side, I suppose. Especially because there’s a rather large battle headed his way any day now.

Three inns in one night. Making a proper pub crawl of it, I see.

Though Thom’s more in the mood to play sad flute music, presumably over Moiraine. I mean fair; I, too, would probably play several laments for her sake. Bring her back already.

Caemlyn was seen as one of the few places where one could be safe from both the Seanchan and the Dragon.

Oh no doubt it’ll stay that way. What could possibly go wrong in this beautiful Camelot that’s been held up since Book 1 as an example of beauty and (relative) stability?

I’m pretty sure one of the first things I said upon seeing Caemlyn back in EotW was ‘that’s a nice city you have there. It’d be a shame if something happened to it’ and, twelve books later, I stand by that.

Mat tries to get Thom’s attention by snagging his coins, and Thom just tosses a knife through his sleeve without interrupting his playing. Respect.

***

Oh hey a mid-chapter break without a POV change. That’s unusual.

It’s something of a location change, though, because Mat’s back at the Band’s camp now, considering the pros and cons of horse meat. Well, mostly cons in his opinion but I would like to state for the record that horse is actually quite tasty. No of course I don’t know this from experience what are you talking about.

The gholam of course has an even less discriminating palate—or I suppose technically more discriminating, just less socially acceptable.

But Mat and Thom have moved on to planning for their fieldtrip to the Tower of Ghenjei, because, you know, these characters have it easy: just one thing at a time, all easily dealt with, no piling on of way too many problems and decisions and things or people out to kill them…

“Maybe Verin will come back and release me from this bloody oath.”

Unfortunately she had to take some rather drastic measures to release herself from a different bloody oath, so uh… sorry, Mat, you’re out of luck on that one.

“Best that one stays away,” Thom said. “I don’t trust her. There’s something off about that one.”

I mean, you’re not wrong. But you’re also not exactly right. Man, I’m going to miss Verin. She’s one I very much look forward to seeing on a reread: there was always something about her and it was great fun to speculate and try to work out exactly what her deal was, but it’s different when you know. And we got so very little time with her once that was revealed—it was a hell of a way to go out, of course, but I’m definitely excited to see how she reads when you know from the beginning.

“Either way,” Thom said, “we should probably start sending guards with you when you visit the city.”

“Guards won’t help against the gholam.”

“No, but what of the thugs who jumped you on your way back to camp three nights back?”

You know what this reminds me of? Birgitte scolding Elayne when Elayne tries to go out on her own. It’s far from the only thing Elayne and Mat have in common, but it does amuse me.

Talking to that clerk meant Elayne knew Mat was here. She had to. But she had sent no greetings, no acknowledgement that she owed Mat her skin.

Maybe because she acknowledged it last time the two of you spoke? Or have you forgotten? I think that’s what irks me here: they’ve already had that conversation. It made sense (more or less) for Mat to be annoyed about Tear, before Elayne and Nynaeve gave him their thanks and apologies, but after that fight with the gholam in the Rahad, Elayne and Mat seemed to clear the air between them, so it’s just… kind of weird and a bit annoying to have this dragged out again. It seems like it would make more sense at this stage for him to just be annoyed at her for ignoring him, rather than for not thanking him for… something she’s already thanked him for.

He does shift after that to wondering how to get her to set all her foundries to making Aludra’s dragons, which is a much more pertinent question. I now kind of want Elayne and Aludra to meet. I feel like that could be entertaining.

Teslyn Baradon was not a pretty woman, though she might have made a passable paperbark tree

This should sound insulting but for whatever reason I find it hilarious. Why is this so funny.

Maybe this is why we were getting Mat’s grumbling about Elayne not thanking him (again) for saving her life: because thanks are the first thing Teslyn, an Aes Sedai of the Red Ajah, offers Mat unprompted. That would more or less fit with how these things are usually set up in Mat’s narrative, I suppose.

Though Sanderson doesn’t quite seem to have the hang of the Illian dialect; it’s close but some of the phrasing is just a bit off. But that’s me nitpicking again.

“It do be important to maintain some illusions with yourself, would you not say?”

Wiser words than you may even realise, Teslyn, given who you’re talking to. Though I think she does realise this; she’s quite perceptive, and she’s spent a fair bit of time with Mat now, and I think she very likely does see his tendency towards… perhaps not quite denial anymore, at least not as strong as it once was, but a degree of self-deception (and total lack of self-awareness, of course).

She nodded to him. A respectful nod. Almost a bow. Mat released her hand, feeling as unsettled as if someone had kicked his legs out from underneath him.

Yeah, this is what you’d expect from Mat. This is what he does: grumbles to himself about lack of gratitude, or Aes Sedai causing problems and having no respect… but then as soon as that gratitude or respect is shown, he doesn’t quite know how to deal with it. Because he’s not actually arrogant enough to accept it with haughty disdain, but nor is he self-effacing enough to truly not care about getting praise and credit. So you end up in this awkward in-between state that is, I think, actually quite common amongst people in general. It’s definitely something I see play out in the workplace, at least.

And so he offers her the horses that, last book, he refused Joline. Because she’s shown him respect and so he will return the favour. Because they’re treating each other as people, and Mat may push for what he feels is his due, but he won’t just take it without giving something in return. He’s better than he likes to think he is, as Thom once pointed out.

“I did not come to you tonight to manipulate you into giving me horses,” Teslyn said. “I do be sincere.”

“So I figured,” Mat said, turning and lifting up the flap to his tent. “That’s why I made the offer.”

And that’s it, really. It’s amazing what open and honest communication can get you, sometimes. It’s almost like that’s a running thing in this series.

There, he froze. That scent…

Blood.

Mmmm, dinner.

Next (ToM ch 9) Previous (ToM ch 7)

#open! the! letter!#wheel of time #neuxue liveblogs WoT #Towers of Midnight

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bladekindeyewear · 5 years

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HS^2 bloggin’ mainline 2020-03-12

I have been told only a few things about the upd8 that just landed, over Discord by two people:

upd19 feat. 4,901,157 read it. now. note: the featuring note is accurate if in a different base than what you might be expecting

What the fuck does that even mean.

Okay Pretty good chapter.

...from another friend who VERY dislikes HS^2? Oh shit.

I also glimpsed a post that may or may not have been about Homestuck at all at the top of my Tumblr feed for an instant that said “YES YES YES YES YES” in huge bold print. I have no idea whether to be excited or nervous.

Okay, it’s not a Bonus update... let me comb through from an earlier page to be careful not to get a spoilerlook at the pagecount...

...huh. That seems... like a conversation that would be up my alley, but not necessarily unique so far or worth all this crowing about. I thought we were about to get Dirk-aliens with a full Horschestra backing... are we getting something else?

> CHAPTER 6. A Conversation Regarding Relevance

Hmmmmmmmm. With the contrast between their reactions and this ominous buildup, there’s got to be a serious fun-twist coming. Right? --I’ll stop with that talk for the moment though.

space is vast. an unproductive statement, almost a tautology. [...]

Alright, that and the starry background are riffing the fuck off Star Trek. Nice homage to Andrew’s roots.

the lives of the many are far too volatile and instinct-driven

Alt!Callie what the fuck are you doing. This is intentional now. You can’t play this off as “what’s a Star Trek”.

tautologies are, in general, reserved for stories. for narrative device. for finding new and inventive ways to tell an audience that which they already know.

God damnit she’s still doing it

neither of us ever able to convince the other of the righteousness of our stance. we were never meant to agree. it isn’t in our blood.

Blah blah overanalyzing classpect blah

when they scoff at my tautology ‘space is vast’, what do they really know? nothing. as far as any of them have experienced, space does not exist.

It’s still nice to see some real personality leak through on Alt!Callie. We definitely know from her other self that she can develop quite a relatable and colorful one. Have the years helped?

> ==>

dramantic pouse... ........

Also,

-look at that collar. Damn, Callie, that is a collar

very few have stood and looked into the abyss, the true gulf of nothingness that spreads out around the single point of consciousness adrift in a constellation. all the combined weight of sentient endeavour would quail underneath that sheer, irresistible truth. the realization that they are so small, that the universe cares about their puny lives so very little. sitting in the glowing light of the stars this becomes even more apparent

In the official aspect quiz I never took the time to analyze, the aspects were put on a wheel where Space was a neighbor to Void, if I recall correctly. I wonder how much those aspects engender feelings of goddamnit I’m doing it again aren’t I

...

are we out of orange juice?

Yesss let more personality Alt!Callie bleed through, more of it~

Wait, does Alt!Callie even taste through Jade? Isn’t this remote control? Is she vicariously drawing pleasure from Jade’s not-just-meat-or-candy mostly-human taste buds or?

> ==>

JADE: are you talking to me? JADE: because if you are i would like to remind you that i hate!! orange juice!!

OH FUCK YES!!! SHE’S IN THERE AND AWAKE!!! SHE STILL HAS AT LEAST ENOUGH AGENCY TO BE PRESENT AND ARGUE WITH CALLIE! YESSSSSS

no you don’t.

JADE: well i guess i never really had a strong opinion on it before JADE: but now i cant stand it!! JADE: its all you drink!

i like the pulp.

QUIT INADVERTANTLY FORCING SHIT ON JADE WITH NARRATIVESPEAK GIVE HER A BIT OF LEEWAY ALT!CALLIE YOU CONTROLLING--

JADE: its my body and i dont want orange juice! JADE: i hate pulp, and i didnt just make that up to spite you JADE: who wants strings in their juice?

i do.

JADE: ughhhhhhhhh

I have had friends hopefully fantasize about and/or therapeutically roleplay this exact situation with Jade breaking through and arguing with Alt!Callie’s control to make this all a fair bit more palatable but I didn’t dare to hope we’d get even THIS much

Maybe the HS^2 authors DO care about not leaving us wallowing in hopeless witness to the characters’ constant torture and existential turbosuffering!!!! :#D

i realize that jade’s situation is less than ideal from a characterization perspective, but i still politely point out that nobody likes a whiner.

Fuck you, this isn’t CALIBORN you’re trying to repress you asshole! Leave Jade some AGENCY!!!!! She deserves it!!

JADE: fuck you rude calliope inside my head!

YES EXACTLY

JADE: why dont you try being possessed by the spirit of some other version of a good friend of yours, and floated around a spaceship full of people you love JADE: unable to affect anything or say hello to anyone! JADE: then tell me about whiners!

i killed my brother and consumed him.

JADE: sounds like a you problem

Compromise and give her some agency finally come on compromise and give her some agency you red-text twatwaffle

i suggest to the witch that i have spent untold eons in the void between universes, waiting for the moment i would be needed to prevent the dissipation of reality as we know it. her appeals to emotion will not help her. i will remain unmoved.

Oh god damnit.

JADE: well i had to watch my boyfriend and my brother die in front of me on a tiny scaled version of a world that i shrunk for them! JADE: and then spend the next three years talking to myself, wracked with guilt that id killed them!

Oh. God. Damnit. This had better not be where the Suicide trigger warning was coming from. Are there going to be any characters left who DIDN’T emerge from this mess feeling suicidal?!? (I mean if there were any understandable case it would be three years alone on the golden ship Jade but-- I mean COME ON, we have to discuss that in our FIRST GLIMPSE at her since the epilogues?!?)

> ==>

i remind the witch that my time was in the void, which is far darker and lonelier [...]

Oh fuck you don’t compare suffering as an excuse to COMPLETELY body-enslave and squash the agency of someone when you probably don’t have to. You’re just doing what’s COMFORTABLE alt!Callie admit it. There’s a way you could give her some leeway, I’m almost positive.

JADE: even if i had the powers of a first guardian, my brain still worked in modules of human pattern recognition! JADE: three years is a long time for a human teenager, i dont care how many of her molecules are made of a god!

(i love it when jade talks smart, that bit of the epilogues was a treat too, plz reveal more of the big brain on jade)

It seems Jade can’t see or quite understand the full import of there being a “narrative”. Or THINKS she cant, because she still says:

JADE: your voice is impossible to read and i cant see your face

If she’s “reading” alt!Callie’s remarks, that means she’s breaking through to understand the narrative to SOME extent. She might be one of the ones who learns to do that a little more and better in the future, especially with alt!Callie almost unintentionally training her to see it.

> ==>

Oh, good. So A!C’s not above being considerate. That’s a step in the right direction.

> ==>

D’aww, Jade conceding and trying to empathize like her usual self. I appreciate it. :) --but Alt!Callie’s definitely in the wrong here.

JADE: but i think it is a very natural thing to be silly when you are used to being able to control your own body, but now cant

i will allow that, yes.

Thanks. Learn some damned reason.

jade smiles. dave and karkat will always be a source of pain for her, a low ache somewhere in her center of gravity, but she is happy for them. she knows that there is really no other alternative for how to be. they chose each other over her, and they always will. they are the two people who matter to her the most in every universe, and that will not change, no matter how much she wishes it would, no matter how--

JADE: do you actually know that?

pardon me?

Oh, shit.

JADE: do you actually know that im doomed to pine over dave and karkat across every iteration of reality? JADE: like, can you actually see that? JADE: because youre a space player, like i am. JADE: i know that you are more powerful than me, but i dont think you can see other timelines any better than i can JADE: so i think you are just being dramatic JADE: for the “audience”, whatever the heck that means

i experience a moment of unease as jade looks at me. keeping her out of my thoughts is proving to be more difficult than i had first assumed it would be.

That’s a damned interesting question. I was giving the narrative the benefit of the doubt, but given everything the Epilogues warned us about when it came to the narrators and alt!Callie’s occasional slips into her own bias, I really should have known better.

i had begun confident that i could keep her consciousness sleeping peacefully inside the shell of her body, tamed and quiescent, but she has proved to be more irascible than i initially gave her credit for.

JADE: heheh JADE: i have never been particularly tamable, and my consciousness is huge!

This might end up playing out more like my friend’s Jade-breaks-out roleplays than I initially assumed. (What does she mean “huge consciousness” though? Superpowered due to part-First-Guardian, like she alluded earlier in the conversation? That never got much play before, so it’s great to see that potential realized here a bit...)

> ==>

...I’m a fucking idiot. Of COURSE “huge consciousness” and the whole line around it was just an unsubtle double-entendre. A small part of me actually wondered if it was and dismissed it as a clumsy reading in an instant. How stupid am I? Jade is the best.

If only this sort of thing worked on Cherubs.

> ==>

Yeah. It really doesn’t.

...Alt!Callie, you are a fucking war-criminal for bottling all these double-entendres up where none of the others can appreciate them.

> ==>

JADE: you are a pretty tough crowd, evil callie JADE: but yes, i can hear most of what you are thinking to yourself JADE: it took a little while to separate it from my own thoughts, just like it did with dirk JADE: because thats what he was doing the whole time, wasnt it? JADE: controlling our thoughts JADE: making us believe things we never would, things he thought we SHOULD believe

Fucking excellent. She’s definitely training herself on this shit. The more people who have a harder time getting fooled by this nonsense the better.

jade knows all of this, i don’t have to tell her. she is a very bright girl, and even if she didn’t have partial access to my thoughts, she is good at compiling data and using it to fill in gaps. as she herself had rather licentiously mentioned, her brain is quite large.

and all of these reasons are why i know i can count on her to be reasonable and realistic about her situation. i need a body to continue interfacing with this timeline, and her body is the only one that will do.

Dammit. Trying to get her to logic her way back into keeping Alt!Callie in complete control. That’s a tactic that will probably work. :(

what about [kanaya], jade? she is a space player, it is true, but her powers are nothing compared to yours. for one, she isn’t god tier, and for two, she is dead. a living dead, but dead nonetheless.

Hm. Are you saying she maybe has less relevance, less of an effect on her surroundings because she spent some of her “cred” on unconventional partial resurrection? To the extent where she’d make a less influential vessel? Hmm.

For that to even matter, you have to be planning to use Jade’s Space powers too. Taking a far more active role in things than narrative beacon.

and a sylph’s specializations lie on a different end of the spectrum from my own. a witch is a far closer match.

!!!!!

Sounds like details of the classpect system that we don’t know will have relevance in HS^2, and we’re indeed gonna possibly get some actual new, clearer details about the system Andrew invented unlike the dearth of new info the Epilogues brought us. That is... promising.

no, jade understands and sympathizes with my assurance that her body, and her body alone, will do for my purposes.

JADE: um...no i dont!

YES. Jade is now officially immune to absolute command! :D :D :D

she does. after all, she would not wish this sort of state of being on anyone else, and especially not on one of her friends. jade may have undergone a lopsided number of narrative hardships in her life, but at least she is used to them. why spread that suffering to another?

What the fucking shit??? You’re using that on her? You think it’ll WORK?!

jade understands and accepts her place in the story, which has always been to enable events to play out around her, just as it has been mine.

..........yeah Jade’s gonna bust the fuck out on the very next page, isn’t she.

What the fuck is Alt!Callie thinking, here? Wasn’t the other Calliope the one to let us know that the Witch is one of the most active classes there is?? ...what exactly does a Witch officially do anyway, for Alt!Callie to think saying such a thing wasn’t dead wrong? This sounds MUCH more like the sort of statement someone might make after breezing through Homestuck and confusing the old Jade (cough) for the person she grew up into.

And the fact that you’re phrasing this as a narrative command to try and make her forcibly THINK this way deserves you a smack in the non-literal depictive face. Let’s see if you get one:

> ==>

Oh wow, no smack yet?! That’s some restraint!

because what is a story, truly? nothing but a series of misadventures and connections, actions spurring reactions, tumbling into one another, over and over and over. with so many competing interests, clearly the story cannot account for all perspectives, for all threads? it would be laughable, childish, even selfish, to demand that they do.

in other words, not everyone will achieve a happy ending. this is a truth that jade had come to grips with a long time ago.

JADE: wait. JADE: stop. JADE: why are you saying all of this?

Ohh. Because she still had even MORE smackworthy stuff left to say, to make the smack even SMACKIER, didn’t she. Alt!Callie you asshole. If this gets you kicked out of her almost entirely and jeopardizes the crew as Jade struggles to combat Dirk’s narrative influence on her OWN, then I’m fucking blaming YOU! Do you realize how horrible it’ll be if Dirk gets to almost singlehandedly write the whole story around her and the others for the first section of HS^2 with only one or two characters aware and trying to mentally avert it?? We already TRIED that in the Epilogues! It was awful!

jade’s body is my vessel, and it is through this realization that she will understand her true role in the story. her true relevance.

Go fuck yourself, Alt!Callie. Read the audience a bit!

if i released my hold on her consciousness, there would be no guarantee that i would be allowed in again. therefore i cannot permit her the control of herself that she so desperately craves, and she understands that.

THAT’S your reasoning your used-to-surpressing-Caliborn ignorant--!??

JADE: wait. so...you could give me my body back, and then just hop back in when you need to?

in theory, yes.

JADE: then what the hell callie!

because i don’t trust you to cooperate when the time comes.

MotherfuckerTheMusical.mp4

(or real existing equivalent that’s just off the top of my head)

JADE: why not? JADE: i thought you said i was a reasonable girl with a huge brain!

you are, to an extent.

she is. but the truth of the matter remains that humans are capricious and emotional. and even jade herself can admit that she hasn’t been the most...committed example of her species in the last few years.

Oh my fucking god. I know they’re trying to make this more satisfying when she actually DOES take control in a few panels, but, Alt!Callie, seriously, get more on your other self’s level!!!

> ==>

Yes, please >:O some more

moving from lover to lover, job to job, interest to interest. over the last few years jade had found herself listless, unable to settle and unwilling to commit to anything or anyone. she knows there’s nothing wrong with that on a moral level, but on a personal level she’s always believed that she could be more, could do better. be better. and now, because of this, she realizes that sacrifices must be made.

and that she, as a space player, is uniquely built for sacrifice.

JADE: yeah JADE: i guess youre right JADE: i have been such a silly little slut! JADE: hey callie

yes, jade?

JADE: oh my god, whats that!!!!

You are so fucking screwed Alt!Callie.

this space is utterly under my control. jade could control it too, if she had any access to her own powers. but with my grip around her cortex, there is no chance of that.

(Wait, there’s an extent to which this space is “real” and not imaginary? Or does holding her space powers in check also mean keeping her imaginary space powers in check?)

Anyway, here comes the smack. And, though Alt!Callie deserves this, I hope Dirk isn’t let in too often amidst the others as a result.

> ==>

Yup, poising to pounce...

> ==>

I thought there was a weird infinity symbol underneath them but it’s just two spotlights and a shadow cast by her head.

and here i make my first mistake.

No you made your first mistakes WAAAY earlier in this conversation. And what you did to Jade in general. She’s a hero/player for a reason, she doesn’t take stuff lying down forever.

but bringing her into a place where we can both physically manifest has left me, foolishly, vulnerable.

First, physically manifest? This isn’t pure imaginationspace? And second, she’s going to blame her polite concession to Jade for this and hold on even tighter the next time, isn’t she. God damnit, not looking forward to that. Alt!Callie won’t learn her lesson til the end, will she? :(

her fingers tear at my throat, trying to find purchase. she won’t be able to kill me here, but it is certainly unpleasant, and not to mention slightly repetitive. we just saw this in the previous chapter, although this particular fight will not end as amorously as the last one did. so don’t get your hopes up.

JADE: who! JADE: are you talking to!

I really hope Jade ends up with full narrative powerOOOOOHHHH FUCK THEY COULD GO FOR THAT HUH

Dirk was able to become an Ultimate Self in his own body because it was the uniting of an irrepressible “self” that he always unbreakably represented. The others had more trouble.

But Jade

has a BIG PART-GOD BRAIN as reinforced in the narrative repeatedly!!

Meaning that later, SHE could Ultimate Self without ANY PHYSICAL CONSEQUENCE. :D

I was hoping Jade would end up with full narrative-dictating-and-reading power when she wants to use it, at some point, but I might’ve been aiming too low! :D :D :D

Yaaaaaaaaaaaay

Now all the playfully-horny omnipotent Jade fanfics are true, what that totally isn’t part of why I love this go ahead and admit she doesn’t deserve it

> ==>

Yesss flashy gif struggle against control! (Though, not as elegant as one of Andrew’s might’ve been. Gotta say.)

> ==>

Blinky-eyes about to resolve normal-Jade-colored....!

> ==>

Wait, what? I thought Jade was about to snap in and--

during the ship’s trip through space, there have been numerous experiments; modifications to the nutrition output of the various machines designed to create sustenance for the various species on board. i myself have been content with orange juice and synthetic proteins, but dave and roxy have both expressed longing for various ‘earth snacks’, and so the trials and errors began.

What the fuck? I don’t even know where this is going if it’s punways.

Is there like a dog treat somewhere that’s gonna push her over the edge? Where is this headed even.

> ==>

Wh...

WHa??????

the results were mixed. as roxy told us in a previous chapter, alchemized food all sort of tastes the same, although the visuals really help to bring about the flavor. and at the end of the day, isn’t it the journey that is more important than the destination? the stories you tell as you create the strangely flavored nutritional paste?

JADE: ????????????

Um?? What’s even going on.

so far, everyone’s favorite attempt has been a vaguely peanut-butter and chocolate flavored creation called "Rices'". nobody eats them really. they just sit in a bowl on the counter.

i’m not actually sure what the witch is trying to accomplish here.

Is Jade trying to humorously gross Alt!Callie out of her body with a candy she doesn’t like or? But, “suicide threat”? Why joke--

JADE: you dont? JADE: really?

i don’t know what she is trying to accomplish, because surely she would not be doing what it appears she is trying to do. making such a meaningless threat.

JADE: meaningless? JADE: do you even know anything about the body you stole? JADE: shouldnt you have run some sort of psychic physical before you possessed it? JADE: its definitely what i would have done!

Oh SHIT. You mean Jade has the same peanut allergy JOHN does?!?

> ==>

jade must know that i am well-aware of her family-wide peanut allergy. a story thread that has been extremely important and weighed in on in multiple parts of the narrative. how could i have forgotten such a key detail?

...yes, she totally forgot, but more than that.

I’m betting John is the ONLY one with a peanut allergy. That Jade is USING that fact to bluff like hell. :D

(Allergies aren’t usually inherited that way you alien!)

there is nothing remotely just or heroic about dying from self-imposed anaphylactic shock in the throes of a childish tantrum. at the most i’ll get a relaxing few minutes of sleep.

Is Alt!Callie bluffing now? Even a resurrecting death could throw her off.

> ==>

FUCK YES JADE.

JADE: do you really want to risk it?

what are you talking about, jade? i just said--

FUCK YES JADE, BE A HUGE WITCH

(i say in the most witch-connotatively and non-classpect-related way)

JADE: i dont know, callie JADE: ive never really understood the rules that govern the death of a god tier, have you? JADE: it seems pretty arbitrary from where im standing JADE: who makes the decision whether or not something is heroic or just?

...that’s unclear. but it certainly isn’t you.

JADE: right, of course not JADE: but are you so confident that youre a good guy? JADE: are you sure that the alpha timeline WANTS you to be here?

...what.

JADE: youve done some stuff, callie JADE: im only saying you shouldnt be so quick to assume that me killing you wouldnt be just JADE: and that taking my own life to do it wouldnt be heroic

Even with JUST this one fucking situation Alt!Callie put her in, throwing off her control forever by dying would be shortsighted but HELLA JUST. What Alt!Callie is doing to her is a crime.

Oh shit!?!?

> [S] ==>

What is this, HTML5? *clicks play*

...for a second, I thought this was gonna launch into a huge thing with that clock ticking song from the Felt album.

Having Rose and Dirk’s colors competing here really reinforces that... Prospit vs Derse vibe that was feeding the whole this-is-the-basis-for-the-game’s-structure-and-the-birth-of-Paradox-Space theory more earlier.

> ==>

i don’t let the witch manipulate me. i refuse to falter in the face of her whispers. without my careful planning and swift action, the prince would have taken full control over this timeline. none of my friends could even begin to imagine the turmoil.

In the end, you’re ignoring what’s right and brave in this instance to instead do something EXPEDIENT, to the exclusion of trust and compassion when things COULD work out just as well without taking the worst actions -- which is textbook villainous.

> ==>

JADE: they arent your friends!! JADE: you took them from me!

Now isn’t THAT a way to put it. :D :D :D

Alt!Callie is sinning almost as badly as Dirk, here. Viewing everyone else as characters in a story, the only way she’s ever viewed “friends”, and her as the not-so-humble narrator doing what’s best for all of them. If she’s going to win against Dirk -- or if that victory is going to MEAN anything -- she will HAVE to realize that she needs to be different.

JADE: you keep saying that youre doing all of this for my own good, but youre just lonely! JADE: i know you are, because so am i!

Ouch.

Will Alt!Callie force her to swallow it?

JADE: you said that being a space player is all about sacrifice JADE: well

> ==>

JADE: bet

...I guess she really might have an allergy.

> ==>

Aaaand the candy drops. A W A K E ! ! ! !

Yaaaaay Jade is BACK and we’ll get to see even more of her!!!

...please tell me on the next page she grabs the candy, noms it, and mentions she doesn’t have a peanut allergy after all. That would be sweet.

> ==>

...

Nope, you just leave us on a sad. Dammit, why do you gotta be all adult and showin’ us both sides in a moment of triumph, HS^2. Shucks.

Anyway, YAY JADE! C:

I am happy by this, if slightly too emotionally-rollercoastered by the past 24-hours to give this the full-rejoicing it deserves. That, and worried about the openings Dirk will get because of this... joy now for potential frustration later, even if Jade tries her best to let Alt!Callie back in in-time.

See y’all next time! And, uhm. I guess I’ll comment on whatever other asks I promised to comment on another less-eventful day. Keep reminding me and holding me to it though!

#Homestuck #hs2 #Homestuck Liveblog #upd8 #Homestuck^2 #bladekindeyewear #blastyoboots #(yes the past 24-hours includes witnessing everyone's despair at realizing the president is going to get our family members virus-killed)#Jade Harley

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ittybittytatertot · 4 years

Text

So not to be like “so my therapist said,” but my therapist has been really asking me to give voice to my emotions and internal thoughts in ways that I usually don’t, and so that’s been making me think a lot about feelings that are really hard to express through words, such as gender.

And maybe I’m chasing some futile dream of being able to find the perfect description for my experience so people will finally get it and let me live, but I could also be trying to make up for the world’s lack of referential resources for my experience by finding new ways to frame the way I experience and process gender.

Which is a long preamble into: gender is a lens through which to view yourself and the world around you and how you exist in that space. Kind of like glasses. Most people only have the one pair of glasses, the one metaphorical prescription that they see everything through. I am genderfluid.

While other genderfluid people may have their own understanding and relationship with the term, for me it is not a gender unto itself but rather convenient packaging used to tie multiple separate genders together. It is easier and typically more understandable than saying I am a man, woman, agender, third gender, and/or some combination there-of.

So basically, returning to my metaphor, Sometimes I wear man glasses, or woman glasses, or agender glasses, so on and so forth. Each lens affects how I relate to the world around me. And the change may not be particularly vast or externally noticeable, which can make it hard to identify.

Memory is such a fickle thing, and the lens of gender is something that (for me at least) is very now and present. It doesn’t matter if I was a girl five minutes ago and it doesn’t matter if in another five minutes I’ll be agender, I’m a boy now. Tautological as it is, we cannot see what we cannot see. I can remember, sure, being a girl or a boy or agender or simply nonbinary on and on, but if I cannot feel it in the moment, it becomes much less real, and thus, harder to accept, prioritize, empathize with.

So I get stuck in cycles of thinking “well I’ve been a boy all week, so maybe I was never really a girl. Maybe I’m just scared to admit I’m a trans man.” and then the next week thinking “well I’ve been a girl all week, so maybe I’m faking the whole trans thing.”

Really, that this cycle exists is how I know I’m genderfluid. It’s an experience, a process, an action that informs my life similar to the lenses of specific genders, but it is not the lens itself.

I don’t really have some stunning conclusion or epiphany. I think I just want people to know that being genderfluid is real and to bring attention to the fact that we really lack any sort of vocabulary for talking about it or simplifying it. And I hope people will like my metaphor of lenses, and start talking about gender more in that way that it is a tool (a sometimes necessary one) rather than a body part or a personality trait.

#gender stuff #hi it's midnight and i have thoughts

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starspatter · 6 years

Text

Heroes and Thieves, Ch. 7

Title: Heroes and Thieves Fandom/Universe: BTAS, pre/post-RotJ flashback

Summary: A story about second chances, healing, and having hope.

Rating: PG-13, for references to character death, child psychological torture and trauma.

Genre: Romance/Family/Friendship/Hurt/Comfort

Word Count: 2,067 Previous Chapters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Also on ff.net and AO3.

Well time has a way of throwing it all in your face The past, she is haunted, the future is laced Heartbreak, you know, drives a big black car Swear I was in the back seat, just minding my own

-Gregory Alan Isakov, "Big Black Car"

Now.

“The Bat Signal is not a toy, Ms. Brown.”

Startled, Stephanie swerved around at the sudden emergence of a man swathed in black from the shadows, cloak whipping wordlessly in the wind. She hadn’t even heard him arrive on the rooftop.

How does he do that?

“You know my name?”

She asked, flustered.

“I make it my business to know. You’re Stephanie Brown, daughter of Crystal and Arthur Brown, a.k.a. Cluemaster. …Tim Drake’s girlfriend.”

Stephanie blinked, sighing before lowering her mantle and removing the guise’s (apparently ineffectual) inner layer, letting luminescent locks fall free around her shoulders. (Reasoning that if the cops hadn’t come up to bust her by now, then it seemed rather unlikely they’d show up anytime soon.) …Wish I knew what the heck to do with my hair under this thing, she thought idly as she combed her hand through the tangles. Maybe I should try putting it in a ponytail or something.

“Then you probably know why I called you here then. Sorry about the theatrics,” she gestured towards the spotlight, “But I figured this was the fastest way to get your attention.”

“Tim told you about our history together.”

“Some of it. He wouldn’t tell me why you two split up.”

There was a palpable beat.

“If he didn’t see fit to explain, then it’s not my place to intervene.”

“Please, Mr. Wayne.” Those crescent slits narrowed at equally intimate address. “I think I deserve to know at this point.”

“This isn’t any of your business, Ms. Brown. I suggest you go home, and get rid of that silly costume.”

Like yours is any less ridiculous.

“This isn’t a game. Quit before you get yourself into trouble.”

Holy déjà vu.

She crossed her arms frankly, standing firm.

“Tim said the same thing. I’m getting real sick and tired of hearing it.”

“He’s right. The streets are far too risky, especially for someone like you.” There was a rough rigor to his tenor; like a razor blade scraping severely against the grain, incisive and insistent. Deliberately rubbing salt and steel into the wound until it irritated. “I’ve seen how you operate: rash, reckless, impulsive, impetuous – not thinking before you act. You might believe you’re being brave – that you’re endeavoring to prove something by jumping directly into danger, putting yourself in the constant thick of threats – but you’re just behaving brashly like a child. A person of your kind doesn’t belong in this field.”

Stephanie bristled at the blunt onslaught, blue irises burning boldly defiant.

“You don’t understand: My dad was supposed to be dead, and now he shows back up again in Gotham like nothing happened – except now he’s committing crimes without even leaving clues. I couldn’t just stand aside and let him get away with it. I had to do something. After all, I’ve got a stake in this.”

Batman made a smothered sound, like a pained grunt – as if someone had just punched him in the gut.

“You sound just like he did. All you stupid kids, don’t know what you’re getting into.”

“I know that without me you wouldn’t have been able to figure out the next place my father was planning to hit.”

Admit it, that “chopping mall” clue was a stroke of genius.

“And your assistance in bringing him down during the heist is appreciated. But this ends tonight. You should leave the crimefighting to trained professionals.”

“I just wanted to help…”

Batman took a step forward, looming ominously over her. His voice was dangerous.

“You don’t know what you want. None of you ever did.”

Despite the fierce menace in his tone, she staunchly stood her ground, eyes stubborn and challenging as she declined to back down. Her opponent carried on lecturing:

“You’ve accomplished your mission; succeeded in putting your father in jail. Now that you’ve gotten your revenge, there’s no more reason for you to continue this fight anymore. I suppose you’re just doing this now for fun, for the thrill. Because you think it’s ‘cool’.”

Stephanie clenched her fists. He had struck a chord, but she didn’t take kindly to being patronized either, her entire motivations being put down, brushed aside just like that.

“That’s not the only reason. I mean, yeah this just kinda started out as a goof to get back at my dad of course, and sure I’ll confess I do get a kick out of the rush – but there’s more to it than that. I may not be all that smart or skilled at… anything really. But this – this is something I can do to help others. People in need. For the first time in my life, it feels like I’m really doing something worthwhile, that I’m doing some good. Like I’m making a real difference. I’m doing this… I don’t know. Not even for me.” She turned towards the skyline, surveying over the (for the moment at least) peacefully sleeping city, lights reflecting above and below. “I’m doing this for all of them.”

Batman stared at her.

“Regardless, this isn’t your responsibility.”

“And it’s supposed to be solely yours? You’re just one man in a batsuit, you’re not in charge of this town. You may be able to handle all the crimes within the city limits, but the suburbs don’t have anyone. Not even you can be everywhere at once. Hell, no one can carry the weight of the world by himself.”

“This is a vow I took on my own shoulder’s, no one else’s. I work alone.”

“If you really thought that, why’d you agree to take an apprentice on in the first place?”

While visibly there was no noticeable wince, another wounded growl escaped from the cowl.

“That was a mistake.”

“Oh really? I’ve seen how you operate: Ever since you’ve gone partnerless, you’ve been colder, harsher, overly aggressive, and more unforgiving than ever before. Everyone’s noticed; it’s been all over news reports everywhere, criminals claiming to be the ‘victims’ of vigilante violence. All the tabloids assume you’ve gone off the deep end, that you’ve finally cracked – or that you were off your rocker all along. That’s why they say even the police won’t cooperate with you anymore.” She looked towards the tarp lying on the ground, which had been covering the searchlight up to now. Lucky for her they hadn’t removed the apparatus entirely. “You accuse me of being hotheaded, but I could say the exact same of you. Heck, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you seem to have some sort of death wish.”

“How I conduct myself is none of your concern.”

“It is when there are people suffering for it. Tim included. The truth is Batman needs a Robin, doesn’t he? Since your parents died, you need – want company. Otherwise you’ll go crazy, doing what you do all the time. Anyone would.”

Way to play psychoanalyst with the most famous and powerful – not to mention richest – man in Gotham, girl.

Batman held her undeterred gaze.

“…You really do sound just like him.”

Grudgingly, he gruffly acknowledged the comparison – though it wasn’t quite a concession.

Still, Stephanie seized on the opening.

“Seriously, just what the hell happened? You two used to be such a great team. You guys were a legend, the ‘Dynamic Duo’ and all that. Nightwing and Batgirl too, whatever happened to them?”

His answer was aggravatingly simple.

“Things change.”

Why do I get the feeling I’ve heard that somewhere before?

She exhaled in exasperation, sensing the discussion was going in circles. She wasn’t about to allow such curt tautology cut her off though.

“You used to mean something to people. This,” she pointed purposefully at the symbol in the sky, before jabbing at the mirrored center of his chest, “…used to mean something. Sure, you could be scary sometimes, but it was clear that you cared. Now, it’s like all the lives you save don’t even matter anymore. All that exists in your mind – or your heart, whatever’s left of it – that is, assuming you even still have one – is darkness and dread. Am I wrong?”

Her assertive allegation was met with stony silence. Tentatively, she tried to uplift the weight on the conversation somewhat.

“Not everything has to be about fear. There’s room in our line of work for hope too, you know.”

Again, he merely remained mute, scrutiny slanting into the distance.

All right, fine. Don’t answer me.

Growing annoyed by such obstinate reticence (which she recognized all too well at this point; it was no wonder where her boyfriend got it from) and desperate for some sort of reaction, she attempted to return again to the original topic – her whole goal for summoning this guy’s big broody butt in the first place.

“Look, I’m sure you’re as aware as I am this isn’t just about me trying to barge in on your territory – your private little crusade – is it? I don’t mean to pry open old wounds just for the sake of sating my curiosity either. Something obviously happened between you two – something that changed him – that changed the both of you – and I need to know what in order to get through to him.” She placed a palm on her breast, clutching and curling fretful fingers against cloth as she bit her lip, baring honest emotion. “I want to be able to understand what he’s going through, but every time I try to get him to talk about it, he won’t let me near. Refuses to open up, shuts me out just like you’ve been doing all night.”

His vision panned back slowly, restoring rapt concentration. Again, those slim slivers of snow were silent, searching – scant headlights scanning in the dark. Stark and cold against coal, yet somewhere within seemed to spark a vestige of warmth; like stoking, coaxing the burnt out ashes of an old flame to stir and rise again. To remember.

“Tim means a lot to you.”

“The whole world. He’s a great guy.”

“Greater than he knows.”

“Please,” she begged, “Let me help him at least. I’m worried about him.”

He regarded her unwavering expression, gauging sincerity.

“…You really care for him, don’t you?”

She nodded, thinking to herself that- despite his still-outwardly icy demeanor, there was indeed a thaw in his throat, a slight swell of sympathy slipping through the grave gravel.

He rotated with a sharp whisk of cape, heading for the edge of the roof.

“Come with me.”

She followed, taking cue to simultaneously fumble for her cheap grapple as he reached for his own (no doubt state-of-the-art) device. Whilst descending down the decel line, Batman pressed a button on his utility belt, and a rumble hummed from down the road as a long, sleek, jet-black vehicle charged along the street, skidding to a stop right in front of them as they alighted on the sidewalk. The hood automatically slid back upon recognizing its owner, inviting within the depths of its leather wings.

HolycraptheBatmobile.

She hesitated as he walked round to the driver’s side and climbed in, casting an expectant – impatient – glance at his guest.

“Well. Hurry up and get in.”

“O- okay.”

Dear Diary, whatever you do, don’t tell my mom I agreed to get into a strange car in the middle of the night with a shady man wearing a mask. Pretty sure she’d flip her shit.

She hopped in after, settling against the cozy cushions. Leave it to a billionaire to be able to afford the best quality sitting material. Admiring the impressive array of controls on the dashboard, she figured the machine in itself probably cost more than her whole house combined.

“Hang on,” he warned as they lurched forward, “And don’t touch anything.”

Stephanie hastily withdrew her itchy fingers from the nearest knob, sweating nervously.

“Can I ask what this does at least?”

“Passenger seat ejector.”

She shrank back sullenly, leaning slumped into the lavish upholstery.

Mock me at your peril, masked man.

As they sped past buildings and streetlamps, Steph inquired with a hunch as to their destination:

“So are we going to your hideout?”

“I prefer to think of it as a lair.”

She couldn’t tell whether that was supposed to be a joke or not. Either way, she couldn’t help but feel a hint of giddy excitement at her current situation. Not many people could proudly proclaim they got to ride in the freakin’ Batmobile once during their lives.

Cool.

Hope was a letter I never could send Love was a country we couldn't defend

And through the carnival we watch them go round and round All we knew of home was just a sunset and some clowns

#TimSteph #Tim Drake #Timmy Todd #Stephanie Brown #Batman the Animated Series #Batman Beyond #DCAU #Return of the Joker #fanfiction #starstories #I'm kinda knee deep in Kagepro hell right now but #I still love my Bat babies too #so here's a quick lil update #<3 #in which I combine all the quotes #*shot*

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matildainmotion · 6 years

Text

All The Things I Wish I’d Said on Woman’s Hour

As many of you will know we went on Woman’s Hour last Thursday morning, 10.30am, the last item up before the daily drama. ‘We’ here is Mothers Who Make, represented by me, Lucy Simm from Halifax and Naomi Lange from Bristol (thank you Lucy and Naomi!). We had all of 12 minutes which the producer assured us is a long time on live radio, and we had all of 3.5 million listeners. What an amazing opportunity. So amazing that as soon as we came off the air at 10.42am, and for the 48 hours since, the radio of my mind has been live streaming all the things I wish I’d said. I have a long list of other things I should be focussing on – I’m moving house and there are many boxes to sort and pack. Meanwhile my son wants me to set him a continuous series of ‘Yoda-puzzles’ and my daughter wants The Tiger Who Came to Tea read over again. I think I’d better broadcast here all the things I wish I’d said to Jenni Murray so that I can get on with the urgent mothering at hand. It is unlikely to reach 3.5 million of you. Maybe 35. I’ll settle for that, since at the core of what I wish I’d said is an issue about value, what things are worth and how we talk about them in a way that does not bring us back to measuring by numbers. Having said that, I can tell you that there are exactly 4 things I wish I’d said – I’ve been counting them over and over. Here goes…

Firstly, for me, our 12 minutes didn’t start too well. Jenni Murray introduced us as, “A network for women with children who are keen to be full time mothers but also want to set up some kind of career in the arts…”. I did manage to clarify on air that Mothers Who Make is for ANY kind of mother, although I didn’t get to spell out the full list: stay-at-home; out-at-work; single; married; divorced; surrogate; step; grand; adoptive; any race, religion, sexuality, gender identity. And it is also for ANY kind of maker, professional and/or passionate, and not only for those ‘making a career in the arts,’ since a creative practice lies at the heart of so many kinds of work (ask my sister, the eminent scientist, who would also call herself a mother who makes). But there is something else I would have liked to say as well: that phrase ‘full time mother’ bothers me, because it is a tautology. Whoever heard of a ’part time mother’? Being ‘full time’ is part of the job description of motherhood, however much support you have, however much you have to or choose to enlist the help of a nursery or nanny. Sorry to interrupt you Jenni, I just wanted to clarify that one. Let’s go on…..

Secondly, despite the fact that when asked for a one line description of myself prior to the show, I said I was “a theatre-maker, writer and mother”, I was introduced as a “former aerialist” and so I should have seen the question coming……”Do you miss your circus work?” I said no. I gave a nervous laugh. I said I didn’t miss the push ups. I didn’t say but thought, “Why are you asking me that? It’s irrelevant!” But it isn’t. It wasn’t – it was right on topic because it was a question about what roles are easily visible, which have glamour and which don’t, and ‘trapeze artist’ is so much more glamorous than ‘mum.’ I sincerely want to replay this section of the interview. Please? Can I? Here goes, for your ears only.……

”Do you miss your circus work?”

“No, I don’t. I don’t because I’m writing and I’m being a mother now and both of these things are far more daring than anything I ever did in circus. In fact I gave up the circus work for the very reason you are asking me about it. Because it was too cool. Because I grew tired of being cast as the free-flying fairy or the sexy sorceress - female archetypes, slumped into stereotypes. None of that felt dangerous or difficult, unlike my mothering, which is so challenging it gives me vertigo every single day. ”

Imagine if I had managed to say that on Radio 4.

Third thing: a question I knew was coming but I still didn’t get it quite right: “Why not include the fathers? Why Mothers Who Make? Why not ‘parents who make’?” I had the words ready, but I didn’t change my answer to acknowledge the context, to talk to the men that were listening in that moment. I didn’t manage to tell them that I would love them to set up their own ‘Fathers Who Make’ group, and for someone else to set up a ‘Parents Who Make’ one. We need all of these groups. I don’t have time to run them all, but amongst the 3.5 million of those listeners maybe there was someone with the passion and the energy to do it. I hope they do it anyway.

And finally, the last question of our 12 minute slot, and the real deal breaker: “Are any of you actually making a living doing this?” Jenni Murray asked. At 10.40am on Thursday morning I felt obliged to respond to this by acknowledging how fortunate I am to have my husband’s financial support - I gave the polite, slightly embarrassing answer that the question was inviting. I sincerely wish I hadn’t. I’d like to have questioned the question because it is linked to the attitude that money is what gives work a stamp of approval, money makes it valid and valuable, and any work that is unpaid is a privilege (because who else could afford to do it?), a fun hobby with little status. But that is almost all mothering. That is most making. So I wish I had said: “Am I making a living? Yes actually. Emphatically yes. I am earning hardly any money but I’m making a living – I am making two lives, my son’s and my daughter’s, and I am trying to make all of our lives worth living. I am working as hard as my partner whose work is seemingly worth a lot more. Mothers Who Make exists precisely to give value to this work that is all too often unpaid and unseen - and we are doing the whole thing on a shoestring, with a tiny pot of funds and whole lot of goodwill and passion.”

That would have rounded off our 12 minutes just fine.

It feels important to acknowledge at this point that, despite all the things I didn’t say, we have had an overwhelmingly positive response to our 12 min slot. It has been wonderful to be contacted by so many new people. There are only the two of us at this point – Lizzy Humber, MWM’s producer, and me - and it is a busy time so please bear with us if it takes us a few weeks to get back to everyone.

Meanwhile thank you for tuning in to all the things I wish I’d said on Thursday morning. You can listen again to the things I, Lucy and Naomi did say here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0bfx5lb

And you can join Mothers Who Make, via the holding page for our soon-to-launch website: https://motherswhomake.org

Now it is late Saturday night and I had best get back to the gritty, daring, difficult job of making my living - I’ve boxes to pack, Yoda puzzles to invent, tigers to invite to tea, children to love, stuff to make.

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veniceperformanceart · 7 years

Text

Ein Gespräch – A Conversation

By Aisha Ryannon Pagnes

Conversations between ART WEEK writer Aisha Ryannon Pagnes and artists and co-curators of the III Venice International Performance Art Week 2016.

Photograph © Claudia Popovici.

In order of appearance:

(LSC): Leisa Shelton-Campbell

(JK): Julius Kaiser

(ADR): Alexander Del Re

(ARP): Aisha Ryannon Pagnes

(K): Kyrahm

(NF): Nicola Fornoni

(DQ): Douglas Quin

(SW): Susanne Weins

(SV): Sašo Vollmaier

(HC): Helen Cole

(LC): Lorne Covington

(JM): James McAllister

(PRS): Preach R Sun

(JE): Jeannette Ehlers

(NB): Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro

The gift, or the awful burden of the artist is that they see details in the world and they see their implications and that is what they bring into the space; we all walked passed that old woman, we all walked past that box on the ground by that old woman, we all walked passed. But they can’t because of the dynamic of that person and how they relate to the very fact that people were walking past and they have to do something with it. But we were all there. I don’t think they can present anything different, they are just presenting rather than ignoring. (LSC)

The difference between manifesting and showing is getting to the heart. (JK)

And by mediating between ideas and people you are in a position where you can open a question, but I doubt we can provide an answer; I am not convinced that I have any solution to the problem. (ADR)

How do you think this can be misinterpreted? (ARP)

These topics are so fragile that anything is enough to cause misunderstanding. (K)

When something is taken out of context and put into an anonymous realm

it is everyone’s to play with and assume a context for. (LSC)

It is not that complex, in fact, it is very simple… (NF)

Disconnect the brain and connect the heart.

And it is that idea of being alive, and maybe it is as simple as that. (DQ)

There was a very strong need to express movement. It is there that I felt the most alive.

This feeling of where life is… (SW)

But the reality is that when I close the door I close myself. So this is what I need to learn, how to live this quality outside... (SV)

What is this quality?

It’s curiosity… This is what I am looking for, not just for others but also in my Self.

Believing in human creativity… all this aggression, all these suppressed feelings exist because we are creative creatures… so he welcomed aggression, to ask what’s behind this, what’s unread and to transfer this aggression into the voice, into movement, dance; to focus on each person’s expression as a creative source… and express this… this fragility… and suddenly all these colours… but you have to go through all those true personal states, you really have to go into your guts and feel this pain to find a true voice, something which is meaningful… (SW)

I was always connected to the voice through my family… more so with my father.

There were nine children in the family and I think singing was also a way to survive.

They would sing together to get emotionally stronger,

so this tradition I remember because they kept it, till now.

For me performance is almost like surviving. It is going to a deep process of… almost of death… and surviving this… many fears… (SV)

Sašo Vollmaier and Susanne Weins. Photograph © Lorenza Cini.

It is the cornerstone of art, because art for art’s sake is so tautologically irrelevant, it is very easy to produce, it is a comfort zone for many artists. I need some challenge and the challenge involves the other, it involves failure, in many ways, because in performance you are not supposed to have everything under control and do exactly as you thought you would, I don’t believe in that kind of practice. (ADR)

Knots were forming and I wasn’t able to disentangle them. I wasn’t able to make a homogeneous wig: it was full of knots. It was all a process of becoming and I wanted to let myself be transported by a continuous and unpredictable flow.

I found myself within the situation and I wasn’t trying to govern it,

I let my Self be moved, I surrendered.

When I am performing I am in a therapeutic level. I do try to transform something from its negative to its positive through actions towards the public.(NF) Even though we are not using performance art as therapy, we are not supposed to, we are not qualified to, it has some therapeutic aspects to it at some levels and I am aware that I am using it in my own personal life. You are using your body not only as a tool, but as a terrain, as a battlefield and addressing phobias is a good way to be aware of the body, because you become aware of its fragility. (ADR)

It dealt with an aspect of loss. (HC)

It is part of life… Tied to the gestural action, to the preciousness your feel of yourself, or a body, or a relationship, or an experience lived personally. Art needs to make you identify with what it wants to say, with the mind, with the spirit and heart. (NF)

How much more marvellous and essential, of synthesis, direct, a punch to the stomach, no filters. (JK)

It is just an ongoing investigation (ADR) of addressing things that our minds have problems with: it touches you at a visceral level, and that is a way of getting people to think about it. (DQ)

It is an open exercise in dealing with difficulties, especially when you are dealing with something that can be really difficult to perceive, it’s a good exercise for understanding other people’s perception, too.

Many times we forget about what the audience perceives or what they want to perceive, and sometimes it is interesting to work with things that are difficult to perceive for the audience, too, because there is always someone in the audience that can do that and others that can’t. Many of the things I address come from my daily experience, and how the understanding of one another can be faulty in many ways or incomplete, and I feel the need of addressing these issues, maybe just to provide some other perspective. And sometimes that change of perspective can be very useful for an audience, to see something that they haven’t seen before. Art is a communication tool really. It is a form that can create ways of communicating with each other, in unexpected ways, complex ways, lots of ways. If there is no communication I think performance art would be empty. Performance art creates a temporary situation in which people can be real but disconnected from reality, and that breaks some of the barriers people have. (ADR)

It’s about place. You are bringing everybody together in that place and giving to them a way to interact with one another in a way they never have before. Really creating a new kind of space. (LC)

It’s a different language. (JK)

So then you realise that it is a common language, which maybe has something to do with a collective common imaginary. (K)

I think it is the only language that enables you to express your Self with authenticity and without added filters. I had a necessity of extreme truth in terms of my own personal life, and through art I found the way to express my Self without suffering. The moment I live the creative experience I feel like I am living in the right dimension.

Everything recomposes in equilibrium, harmoniously. (K)

It can lead to failure, but failure isn’t failure if you think of it in terms of growth. (ADR)

James McAllister. Photograph © Edward Smith.

I wanted to work with people, to be in touch with people…

I studied human beings, and this was so interesting. Our task was to study, to see what the problems are… we had to learn how to see, to look at people, to learn what they could have.

I see the strength of people. I see the strength of the body… loosing blood while keeping concentration… how strong the body is... So then I wondered:

“What is the most fragile?”

And then I thought: “Yes... relations... society, how to cope for example with strains, with this energy…

This is the most fragile… relations... what we try to do really is to strengthen relationships.” (SW) And to rediscover ourselves socially, not in places of worship, socialising or business transactions, but a shared art making creates a safe space to discover each other potential— an inward turning of outward creative energies. (DQ)

It gives space to more direct relationships, as opposed to the daily mundanity, which is based a lot on the flattening of conversations, flattening of time, which always runs short anyway, so then here your are giving your Self, your time, you go back to a way of relating that is normal, before or beyond contemporaneity.

It gives space to be able to accept that which I went through with the energy that the public gives back. This freedom from negativity I find it to be an experiential exchange of love. (NF)

I wanted to use something that is personal and social at the same time, almost anyone has some sort of phobia.( ADR)

But the necessity doesn’t lie in needing to talk about one’s Self, but to express the message, which in us is entrusted. Revealing one’s Self, revealing one’s own fragility somehow gives you strength because not hiding your own discomfort which in any case you are constantly afraid of it being revealed, gives you awareness... And awareness is everything. (K)

When we release something, we lose this sense of judgment. (SV)

Seeing their emotion, the trembling of their voices… their breath even, under the gaze of the public. (K)

You are tackling immaterial fragile relationships… And because you need to engage the audience somewhat directly, fragility has to be seen… but what happens if you don’t see anything, if you just perceive something. For some people that perception can be interesting but for some people it does nothing, that too can happen. (ADR)

I don’t know how far it goes once it leaves the room… (LC)

OK so what’s for dinner? (DQ)

Douglas Quin and Lorne Covington. Photograph © Alexander Harbaugh.

I know that things that touched me deeply in my life I still remember and have coloured my perspective, so hopefully what happens when they leave the room, who knows, you touch them in some sort of way. (LC)

It is my strong belief that something very special can happen between people, where you have to be very present both as an audience and as an artist, and there is something about our world that kind of prevents you from doing that; a lot of the time we build up resistance to that and I think performance is one of those strategies we can employ to break down the border, to

Feel. Again. Together. (HC)

In Ecce (H)omo (by Kyrahm) there is a woman in the second room.

She is listening to her partner’s tapes:

Love messages.

She was with her for 23 year.

You are there with her, your back to the wall, facing this woman’s profound love.

So I am showing you this sentiment, and this can be far more effective than a debate on the meaning of love (and the violation of human rights when societal structures neglect this on the basis of categorisations.) (ARP) Therefore, at a certain point art and activism meet and it is this, being able to use effective ways and enable the public to reach the same conclusions, vehicled by a different language, that of the heart that enabled this connection, between everyone. (K)

It is based on the simple biology of osmosis, you have a concentration of saline solution and a membrane and a concentration of lower saline solution, and what happens is the salt passes through the membrane, it is what happens in our cells, the salt passes through the membrane until the concentration of salinity are equal, that is what I think is I’m trying to look at.

I aspire to creating some sort mechanism where the flow of information in between the artist and the witness is kind of equal, where there is as much coming one way as there is the other, so what I tried to make was a series of apertures through which things would flow in both directions, in a more or less restricted way. (JM)

An encounter between people. (K)

You have this range of intensity of what you can exchange, so the value of that transaction really depends on how much you are willing to put into it. (ARP)

The creation of a link between my Self and the other,

how am I reflected in the other and how they are reflected in me. (ADR)

Sometimes, situations confront you with yourself, in whichever way and then you realise that you have a lot to work on… and the connecting link here is this recognised belief that everything is so fragile, and that we are not perfect, and that we need to connect, and we need to share, and we need to understand one another. (ARP)

Confrontation requires a great effort. (K)

some people were eager to discuss this

some people didn’t want to address it at all

and some people even rejected it. (ADR)

No matter what you feel, the very fact that you won’t understand it, that you want to reject it...

It is already too late because I planted a seed in you. (PRS)

Leisa Shelton-Campbell and Marilyn Arsem. Photograph © Claudia Popovici.

Art is a peaceful rebellion. (NF)

A form of resistance.

There are various forms of resistance. (JK)

There is no attention to the individual, which could be a universe of its own, categorical to nothing. I could even choose to be a completely transparent being, indefinable, that daily morphs its own gender, its own identity, this too can exist...

Yet convictions of what society expects from you, that perform a function, can at some point become very strong shackles of social control and to live the experience of deconstructing and re-inventing who you are (K) has to do with self-determination: I define myself based on what I feel, not based on what is imposed on me.

And the political act is that to show one’s Self for who you are, and the language of performance art is that of the body, which in any case is true to itself. A person is born with a body, like we all do and this body is ‘described’ based on notions of gender. Human society has prerequisites, it has rules; that everything should return to a gender binary. (JK) There is no acknowledgment of the various infinite shades of identity. (K) Society still expects a boy or a girl. (JK)

A society still highly patriarchal, catholically conditioned and controlled, and it shows through these issues. (K)

It has to do with the amount of differences that each individual is being exposed to – culturally, mentally, religiously spiritually; suddenly everything enters your sphere of how the other lives and it can be threatening because we are so basic, we are so simple and we need comfort, we need stability and the moment it is disrupted you instil this sense of fear; it takes a lot of self-deconstruction to be able to realise what is the faulty key in the system, in relationships, in society, but in order to do that you have to present a model or to inspire a means of communication that is uncharted, and to see it objectively

and that is really difficult because you are also part of it. (ADR)

Artivism if you may. (K)

Activism has a lot to do with reclaiming.

A neglected right that I reclaim, so most often there is a contraposition where these situations create conflicts and internal ones, too, because what I see in the world, my partner sees differently, and so you create a conflict based on differences.

The dynamic of the message is something else, and the main difference here is that in art there is no counterattack. There is feeling, there is enabling a condition to be felt, and that may just as well bring people closer, despite their clashing ideologies. Activism is frequently tied to the contrast in ideologies; in art ideologies don’t reign, there is the human experience, there is life, there is death, there is sickness, there is joy, there is love, there is suffering.

But this suffering, I try to share... there is sharing, yes, so it is a different approach that tends to shorten gaps, or perhaps even widen them, at an emotive level, because effectively I can distance myself from a strong emotion, but it is a peaceful reaction. (JK)

So rather than just talking about statistics or climate change as a political problem or an issue, I think it is important to appeal to people’s senses and emotions rather than just their intellect, so people can hear and not just be overwhelmed by data of how quickly the ice is melting or what have you…

So, what does it sound like?... (DQ)

Is that a voice? Is that the wind? (LC)

How do we relate?

We relate to one another through sight, through sound, through touch…

Alexander Del Re. Photograph © Edward Smith.

So I think the sensory engagement is a very important part of the message rather than just a data dump where people can feel overwhelmed and a bit helpless.

It becomes art as a social interaction.

The ultimate goal for us, is self-awareness but also awareness of what’s out there. (DQ)

So with all this raising of awareness, the need to communicate these ideas (because art in a way is just another tool for communication) everyone is craving answers, everyone is craving solutions, so what should an audience go home with? (ADR)

That human voices are part of a fabric of many voices. (DQ)

As an artist you can provide possibilities, ideas, or questions that can be tackled differently, and I you can rethink possibilities but I don’t think there is a solution that I can provide. (ADR)

Part of the contract of the piece is how you relate to each other and not just to the work. People then become aware of their own behaviour, and aware of other people, and that is the key for us. That you become more self-aware but also more aware of other people.

That it’s not just me, I, we, it’s us.

That dynamic is really beautiful, and people get it when they start paying attention. (DQ)

That difference of active engagement. So this is about layers of responsibility, of people’s desire to engage to take time, to go in and say “oh yep, got it” or to chose to go in and have a relationship and bid your time and to make the transaction, which some people really did, and when you see it all there, you get this really clear representation of humans.

Here we all are, here it all is. The levels with which we transact our relationships.

And that is very telling. (LSC)

An ongoing investigation of human relations. (ADR)

Bianca Bonaldi and Nicola Fornoni. Photograph © Catarina Ragg.

And now when I see people talking about progress, in my personal experience we have not progressed at all. So for me the issue of race in America is something that I experience first hand, so when I hear people philosophise or talk about these issues from this hypothetical or statistical point of view, and not understanding the experience and how it plays out, it sometimes infuriates me.

If we can postulate that human beings are free by nature, but that freedom requires a moral and intellectual responsibility, and if we live in a society where so many of us are struggling and starving while so few have so much, then what I do know is that this society is not free. So if someone says that we are scared of freedom, it means we are scared to fighting against something, because if we reach humanity that means that people won’t be in prisons, people won’t be starving, we’d be taking care of each other. I don’t know what freedom is, but I think that is what it would look like, maybe it is utopian. I think we are in a pre-revolutionary phase now, and unfortunately that’s where a lot of people don’t like me because I describe myself as an anarchist and an active nihilist. I believe that you have to burn down in order to rebuild. First and foremost, we have to organise.

I think the poor have to organise, the black have to organise around the globe, and I think everyone else will organise around, and that is why I use blackness as a political means to activate revolution. But I don’t think we would want to do that because we are constricted or tied down or bound by need, so we need things to look like this, we need our cars, we need our nice clothes, we need our bars, we need to sit in big comfort, so that is why I think the brilliance of capitalism and globalisation is that it has us conditioned, and that is how we remain slaves, so it might seem impossible, and it is impossible if we think it is impossible. We are scared of being failures, it is this conditioning, fear of being ostracised. “What do you mean you don’t have this or that?” So I think it is that condition where in essence we are perpetuating our own slavery. (PRS)

Even failure is a good thing to experience, but of course it is difficult to embrace failure, you are not supposed to, that is the problem. (ADR)

What is not freedom –

That we live like this is not freedom. We have to crush the blocks, all of them, and I think they reflect issues of sexuality, race, religion, culture, we have to question everything; all these things that we don’t want to question, all these institutions, they have to be challenged, so how far do we want to go? I am hopeful about younger generations, but at the same time

I don’t think they will be as radical; it is difficult for white children to free themselves from privilege. It’s always our responsibility to be vigilant and to stand up against the powers. And I think that to co-opt and to be a part of the system, takes over at a certain point because it is called responsibility, it is called adulthood, there are many ways to try to get the youth to change their minds. So I think it is always a thing that when people are young they are radical, they are standing for the date, they believe in freedom, they believe in these things and it is not fair to blame them, it happens with every generation. It is hard to break free.

It is hard for anybody to standalone.

And hear people talk about you and call you crazy.

I think generally humans want to love each other, or they try, but I think there is a flaw in humanity. (PRS)

And art is a tool, a social weapon. (NF)

Preach R Sun and ORLAN. Photograph © Alexander Harbaugh.

I have encountered racism many times. Maybe more subtly, but still I experience racism every day, since the structure of our society is racist. It might not be personal to me, but still the whole structure of the society influences me as well. The stronger you are in your own history, the stronger you will seem. They listen to you because they see that there is a connection, they might not understand that but they see that something is there. I don’t expect people to do it overnight, it takes time, I’m still trying to decolonize myself, I’m not there at all and it is an ongoing thing because it is so rooted in our structures, deep into ourselves, it takes a long time, I wonder if it will be in my lifetime… and that is what I’m trying to do,

I hope that it can have an impact, that it can help people see alternatives and to move on in different directions. I am also educating myself all the time; so it is a long journey, not tiring at all, but there is a lot of work to do, for myself but also for the community as well, for the nation. (JE)

What does it mean to decolonise? (ARP)

It’s a matter of choices, its a matter of possibilities, it is a long-term work, you can’t really do it like this, I don’t know what the future will look like but I just hope that my work and what we are all doing here, is capable of changing the mindset of people, so we can have a future with more equality. It doesn’t have to be this way, the society is a structure, it is a European structure, the way it looks now. There are so many other pre-Columbian societies that looked different, not that I want us to go back to being in the jungle, but the mindset and the perception of the world could be very different, and still we could evolve and move forward in new ways. So that is what I’m trying to do, that my work will at least inspire people to think outside the box. And now we are having so much gender talk, and we are trying to give voice to so many different perceptions of what it is to be a human being.

Life is so full of nuances,

and why don’t we allow them to be there, why don’t we allow all these voices to be heard, but that is the structure that we live in, and that is the colonial structure, that it has to be one way, but the colonial structure that is in power of the world is just a structure, it could be different, it could be another structure. (JE)

It has to do with our education and the history taught across the spectrum globally is or has been authoritarian in some way. The artist’s voice is a way to deconstruct that, to say that there are histories out there and they should be prominent too. It doesn’t mean that if it is written in a history book that it is OK, because it has been published, because, the first thing that people say is “I didn’t hear that, where did you find that information, I didn’t read that.” So then that makes my story not a part of history. The thing is, you have to go on with this conversation. People throw it at you like a spit in the face, “OK I have you now and I am going to make you converse with me, I am going to make you learn how to talk…” Because a lot of people are afraid of their own memory. I see this in Germany, in Berlin, there hasn’t been this exercise of memory, they had to deal with so much since WWII, and so only specific things have been put there... Because it is too much, so there hasn’t been this exercise of memory. It should not be about victimisation, it should be about empowering all communities and being aware of it.

So the first thing that happens is that there is rejection…

Three months later the same person calls me and says,

I’ve been thinking about it…

I see it this way now.

That is history right there, I don’t need to publish it in a book. That is my reality, your reality, our reality, and that is real. I don’t need Sarkozy to tell me that Africa hasn’t entered history yet. You know? Come on… So it is very necessary.

So first I’m telling you the story you know, I’m only speaking in words, but the performance, that says everything because it transcends all of it. I don’t even need to speak, and you understand it and it’s you. It’s not about me huh. It’s about you, you are decolonizing your own body your own mind, your own history and this takes a lifetime… It is not just nine months, it is your whole life. (NB)

Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro and Jeannette Ehlers. Photograph © Claudia Popovici.

I’ve been thinking about this question for many years, especially when I am addressing these very sensitive and important issues, which are really relevant in some contexts. So I started to rethink some of the projects that I had based on that, also given the feedback that arose from the interactions which was so relevant that it changed the whole project. So I decided to use it as a tool, because I didn’t want to impose some idea, criteria or vision onto another human being without incorporating the feedback of other people’s point of view. (ADR) My responsibility is to keep doing what I do, and keep revealing and manifesting this cultural narrative and to educate myself so that I can be here and be here the way that I want to be, but I think it is everybody’s responsibility to educate themselves, to know where we are coming from, and to open up and get out of this colonial narrative and structure. Especially for white people it is really necessary to let go of this narrative and listen to those other voices, because there is so much to learn. Because most of the time this whole history is seen as a burden of the black people and not of whites, but it is actually a burden of the whites, too. It is so necessary for whites to let go of this structure. (JE)

I believe that responsibility never ends. Because you are an artist, you are a person, a citizen, you are fundamentally a human being, and so it is an ethical matter, and ethic doesn’t have an off switch, it is something that I carry with me constantly. It is a constant questioning of whether you are behaving in an ethical way, and of course we are humans, so we make mistakes, we even do things which we are ashamed of, otherwise the world would be a different world. And I think that paying attention, if we are able to do so, if you are able to live with the same intensity you live a performance or a theatrical act, even the most mundane aspects of human life when it comes to relationships and respect, you will have a richer life, a beauty not of aesthetics but a beauty of fulfilment that can give meaning to your life. (JK)

The responsibility of the individual is to rebel, no matter what.

What happens in a slave society, is that people don’t understand the power of the individual voice and the responsibility of this individual voice. Under these oppressed positions the way it is designed is that we are dependent upon the very system that is suppressing us, and this is why I compare racial slavery to capitalism. What they replaced with slavery (via capitalism) is something far more nefarious and far more oppressive, which is need. So we feel like we need this situation, because we have this idea of capitalism, we fetishise the Dollar, or the Euro or whatever, so our relationship to money is that we need money to live and that’s not the case. Money is a piece of paper, so our lives are invested in pieces of paper that we feel conditioned to strive for, when in fact if everyone said “Fuck this, this piece of paper doesn’t mean anything” then the system would fall, it would stop; but we fetishise, and we are taught that. So I think that the individual’s job is to see through and to sacrifice themselves, and I think that we don’t understand is that no matter how many of us want to just live our lives and be safe and secure, in order to get free you have to sacrifice, you have to be willing to die for it, because no one is going to give it to you, because the thing that we don’t understand in this capitalistic situation is that it is spreading throughout the world and it is predatory. It is designed to just crush the poor. That’s not democracy, that’s not freedom by any stretch of the imagination. So we are free no more than free-range chickens; you place animals on the farm and you just let them roam, but you are waiting to fatten them up for the slaughter house, like cows. You just put grass there and they won’t leave, you don’t even need to put fences up – and that is where we are, circumscribed by need. This is what we have to break out of, this idea that we need this way of life. Because what we don’t seem to understand is that, in fact, it’s this reality that is actually poisoning us all.

So what you are starting to see now is that there are these pockets or groups of indigenous people in different areas and I feel they all have power, and share equal responsibility (as human beings) in this struggle. For example, Native Americans are fighting to protect the land. We all have a responsibility to stand and fight with them. The strength and struggle of black people (black people have always been known around the globe as the sufferers of racial and systematic oppression) is to stand and fight to abolish the oppressive system of white supremacy – I’m specifically speaking to the construct of race and the economic institution of capitalism, and I feel that if the rest of the world identified with the black struggle then we could all come together, but so often people think that the black struggle is anti-whiteness, as opposed to looking at it like: if poor people oppressed everywhere saw what was happening to black people is inevitably happening to all of us, then you could connect. So I use blackness as a means to liberate.

Yes, first and foremost my goal is to try and liberate my own people, to wake up my people, but at the same time if black people in general are the key to everyone’s liberation, people see it, because we were the ones that were on the first row of oppression, so we saw it. So if you see that and you align with that then we start building, once you build though – and that is the thing that we don’t understand is that inevitably the enemy is going to reveal itself to you, and they are not going to give it up without a fight – but if we build together we outnumber them. But we are too scared of seeing that; if we build together the rich, the powerful, the status quo, they cannot withstand such an onslaught. But we will have to be willing to die, so I think the only way that this is going to end unfortunately is in revolution. You are talking about nations that hold power through war, so they are not going to give it up, but I think that as long as people stay afraid and say, well we have to honour the civil society, then we are always going to be enslaved. And the richer slaves too, and that’s what they don’t understand, because this is not the nature of our humanity. Our nature as human beings is freedom. We are the manifestation of freedom, so if we are not living free we are all slaves. But the rich don’t care about being slaves, they don’t care about the environment, they don’t care about women’s rights, they don’t care about equal rights for everybody. They care about their rights, and so they will do anything to hold on to that. So the responsibility of the individual is to rebel, so in my work I’m always calling up “Wake up slaves, why don’t you rebel!”

That’s what I think the responsibility of the artist is, to use that power to change the perspectives of people – even if it is difficult and also “to reflect the society.” As an artist, you can’t just go around entertaining. You have this gift, you have this power, you have this voice, so it is your responsibility to stand. And I think that artists right now in the world are the last that can stand, that can say something and change things, but I don’t think it is going to happen as long as art is cloistered away in galleries… (for consumerism), so it’s a reflection of the very society that we are living in, because the artist is so enslaved by the idea of capitalisms. The saddest thing I’ve ever seen is when I look at art in galleries cause it reminds me of animals in zoos, cause the power is taken out of it. It is like the bear over the hearth, the hunter kills the beast and the head is its trophy, so I think art kind of lives in that situation where the artists are thirsty and feel like “Oh I have to work, I have to eat and my value, my validation relies in the capitalist who buys.” So we are traded, we are commodified and our works are as objects. So I don’t think that is radical, the responsibility of the artist is to take it to the street, is to find new ways to disrupt this, to find new ways of revolutionise the society around them, and yes that can be taken the wrong way, it's like saying “What good is it to reason with slaves about freedom,” and when you talk about the phenomenology of reason – we have the gift but we are not reasoning, we are not living free, and we are okay being slaves; that's not freedom.

And some people think that doing something in the streets isn't going to change anything; there are many layers to revolutionary struggle and we have to connect the dots. The artist has a role in social change and activism but unfortunately many artists think of themselves as “I'm an artist and not an activist.”

And that’s a problem, that we aren't dealing with politics. I don't even care about being accepted in the performance art community, that's just accidental. I don't even like the term art, so I feel that the artist's responsibility is to wake up and to radicalise society, and you have to radicalise and revolutionise the minds first so the society around us has to be awake. If you’re not awake and if you're not pushing them to be awake, then they are not going to do anything. So I think the artist can do that, but then we have to be able to connect everybody. We have the responsibility of the farmer, the teacher, of the educator, everyone has a role but we have to see that and connect in order to build something of “whatever your passion is it should be the tool for your liberation.” (PRS)

And journeying through life based on a desire you had during childhood is a process of liberation. (K)

And it is easy for the white person to say it is universal.

So if I’m black, and I’m talking about these issues, but you are stuck on my blackness, my black perspective, does that not make it universal, or does it mean that you just don’t have the ability to allow yourself to go through the blackness to see your Self, this affects me too…

I can only free me and that is responsibility of the individual, I cannot free you. But what I can do is set an example and spark something in you where you say: “You know what, I’m going to free myself, too.” Then we can work together, but I can’t free everybody, I can’t do that, because many people will be like: “Yeah, I want to get free, too” but it’s easier for people to stay in a group, but people standing in a group sometimes do it for different reasons, because its fashionable, its cool… And they essentially become co-opted because what a lot of these people are looking for, is acceptance and validation through what they claim they are trying to fight against. So the responsibility is to go on a journey and to find what is liberation, what is freedom, so they have to find it for themselves, and they have to try to fight to get there. And ultimately I feel that people are not going to go that far.

Radical is dealing with the root, eradicating the root. (PRS)

Photograph © Alexander Harbaugh.

I think one of the good tests you can have as an artist is the perception of the audience, because the audience can sense what is real, what is truth and not in a very instinctive way, and I think the audience is the best way to measure that because as humans we can sense this directly. (ADR)

It is easy to absorb a small amount and walk on and look at the next thing, particularly at an exhibition, but I think, generally, an audience member actually wants more than that. They want a really substantial…. really they want is a transformative experience that they very rarely get, so they don’t expect it. (JM)

It’s like with any artistic experience, you have to be open; if you come with pre-judgment then you will leave with nothing. But if you come in with an open heart then you can have a great experience, regardless of who you are.

It’s about being present and paying attention. It is so undervalued, and that is all you can ask really:

A moment of presence.

We’ve been very interested in the idea of being present and of having agency; being aware that you are changing things. On a simple level it is just being aware of your place in the world. And from the artistic context here, just being aware that you are changing things, as we are always changing things. (DQ)

You are moving in the world and the world is responding to you. (LC)

And if you close your eyes and listen, it is a completely different experience. (ARP)

In this very moment of human history you need something else, you need to create questions rather than saying: “This is the solution, don’t worry, don’t confront.” I don’t want the piss the audience off but I want to create something with the audience that can be disturbing or complex or whatever, but the audience has to resolve some situation, or else it means nothing. It is very easy to see some traditional performances where the body is doing some actions, and the actions are created well, beautifully, and that is it. Then you’ve had a beautiful experience, not to say that it is not needed, you need that too, it is part of life, but it is not the only thing you need. (ADR) That is the sort of transformation of art in our times, it serves as a social conversation for a way of being in the world. (DQ)

The privilege of being an artist is of having this vocation and being able to reach people with this. (NF)

So how do you use your privilege, how do you check your privilege, how do you really challenge yourself?

Really put your privilege where your mouth is.

If you care, really do the work,

by being very open and honest with yourself,

really take the time to look at what is around you (PRS)

to encourage… the most beautiful part here:

how people are adapting, the way people are looking, with curiosity, with respect, with so much humanity. This is the most beautiful aspect of the whole VENICE INTERNATIONAL PERFORMANCE ART WEEK.

It is a little social island of where relationships can strengthen… (SW)

And so what it is enabling are these layers of people becoming better people. (LSC)

There is a lot of cooperation between all involved, no matter their social role within the project and that is a model that is so inspiring… If you can just take a fragment of the message and transpose that into daily life, I think the purpose has been fulfilled. It’s not about the works that are being shown, but about the understanding that is elicited in the viewers… (ARP) There are trapped doors into alternative worlds, in the end it’s about these incredible bodies, rubbing up against each other, and what meanings we make together, and I think artistic work of all kinds creates the opportunities for that, which means that I’m on the lookout for these special encounters because I believe they do come between us all the time… (HC)

Kyrahm and Julius Kaiser. Photograph © Alexander Harbaugh.

Breath, life, the meaning of breath, losing the breath, fragile body,

Breath is really the one thing that makes us the most

Fragile and it is the first to the last thing we’ll ever do as humans.

And when that last breath comes (JM)

It is an exhalation (LSC)

My job is

To plant seeds (PRS)

Sašo Vollmaier and Susanne Weins. Photograph © Lorenza Cini.

#interview #aisha ryannon pagnes #preach r sun #susanne weins #kyrahm #leisa shelton #james mcallister #julius kaiser #alexander del re #nicola fornoni #douglas quin #saso vollmaier #helen cole #lorne covington #jeannette ehlers #nathalie bikoro

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it-d035n-t-m4tt3r · 6 years

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1/29/19

This past Tuesday I found myself riveted and gnarled and twisted up into a rag ready to be rung. I was so eager to contribute to the discussions this week that it had come to a point where I was letting out the faintest of sounds when I had become excited about a new assertion or point added to the discussion. I should really try more to let other people in the discussions speak because I know I can commandeer a discussion very quickly and I don’t want to do that. HOWEVER!! I think on today's agenda I wanted to talk about one outstanding thing from the discussion this week that had me either writhing in agreeance or confusion.

My writhing (so to speak) came during the discussion of Camus’ Sisyphus essay. Particularly, in the face of quantity over quality. After reading this a few times I loved how people were so keen on not withholding their ideas. Particularly in reference to longevity and it is something that I happen to agree with because of reasons outstanding. However, specific to the discussion I would like to further argue for a better identification with the “Bruno” archetype rather than the one of “Galileo”. For me I understand Camus’ reasoning behind valuing that specific archetype. He sees the opportunity to have a “quality” existence, as being one brought about by sheer numbers (longer life). With what I would dub as an Absurd Statistic. He asserts that living more equates to living more, which within itself expresses a form of Tautology that I don’t like. Just because you live longer does not guarantee you meaningfulness in existence. I would agree however that it does provide more chances. Nevertheless, assuming that one could live a meaningful life, predicated solely on the fact that they are living longer to me is something that nobody can possibly know except to those who have aged AND those who have contemplated suicide. BUT ONLY TOGETHER. The reason I say this is because Camus begins his essay by saying that

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest, whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories, comes afterward.”

Because suicide is the imperative philosophical question, predicated meaningfulness in an otherwise absurd world, only those that understand the importance of this question can really consider a full assessment of their life and act in the individual’s best self-interest.

To put this into an example lets use a woman walking into a restaurant. This woman walks into the restaurant and is hungry, so she sits down. She has now begun to ask herself what she wants to eat because she was already hungry. The waiter offers her a menu and says that everything off the menu is as normal, and should she refuse it, she will be brought the chefs special (I don’t know what’s in it, but apparently its special). So, she begins to look at the menu. She decides on a meal based off her personal preference, implicit before she even walked in the door. She had not so much as considered the option that wasn’t even on the menu, and made a decision because of her personal preference, and her instinct. This to me says that while she understands the food on the menu and the food she likes, she has no reasonable grounds to say that the Chef’s special was not going to be worth it. Her lack of considerations for something that was not normal means that she is unaware of all the possible outcomes that could fit within her appreciation for food.

With regards to Camus, one MUST consider the option of suicide, one MUST understand intimately its implications on just the self and only the self, before making the assessment on whether to peruse quality, or quantity. Before assessing intrinsic meaning.

Camus’ identifies with the “Galileo” archetype because and only because of his assessment of his life in the face of death. Does this prescribe meaning? Is this the only thing that can do that for me? How do I know? These are questions that I believe often become overruled by more present and concrete thoughts.

I would agree with Camus, that quantity has its benefit over quality, but should any existentialist turn our noses up at Bruno, only because the context of his death had no meaning in a meaningless world? Isn’t that to be expected from the meaninglessness of the universe? I think that although we see in Bruno, along some sort of malignant lines while juxtaposed to Galileo, a degree of meaningless, I find it hard to relate Galileo to someone like Merseault, who didn’t care about how the state perceived his actions. Who are we to say that someone like Bruno did not die in meaningfully? Who is to say that an ontological argument does not prescribe abject meaning to that particular individual?

They have both read the menu, but the only difference between these two, and between the dining woman, is that both Bruno and Galileo asked to hear the chefs special, and only one of them took it. I see no difference between living in absurdity and dying in it.

With that, I wanted to leave you all this week with a Painting and some thoughts.

This is a painting called “Wanderer, in a Sea of Fog”, and was done in oil on canvas by Caspar David Friedrich, a German artist of the era of romanticism. I see in this painting a similar sense of pause, likewise to that of Sisyphus’ pause at the top of his mountain. What is this mans struggle? What brought him here? What will he return to? To me this painting symbolizes that instantaneous breath of a quiet, “I’m here now, and I have forgotten why. All I am is existence, all I am is the present, before I sink bank down and try again”

UUUUUUGH I love this painting!!!!! (It was my phone wall paper for the better half of my senior year of High School)

Please feel free to comment or rebuttal. I think my constitution can handle it. If you agree let me know, if you don’t let me know even more. With that I bid you all adieu until Tuesday next!

~Put that in your pipe and smoke it~

#dead #quality #quantity #albert camus #sysiphus #phy304

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nautilusopus · 7 years

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The Number I

Chapter 2: Cloud Has A Conversation With Some Friends and Coworkers

This was technically done a while ago but I sat on it for ages because I sort of hated it. This one's a bit slow too, I guess. Which is normal for post-series low-stakes fluff pieces.

Is it cheap to go back like three days later and just delete whole chunks of your story if nobody notices? Maybe we'll find out.

Again, thanks to @cateringisalie, @fury-brand, and everyone else I pestered at 3 am to bounce ideas off of.

Four years after meteor-fall and Cloud Strife still isn’t himself. The thing that haunts him comes always at the same time… and when it does, on a distant far-off world, a needle moves. Twisty AU. Warnings for future chapters.

Cloud went through the dinner service in a kind of stupor. When they closed the kitchen at 11, he was too disoriented by the events of the day to properly feel tired. He hadn't realised he'd been sweeping around the same table for the last fifteen minutes until Tifa tapped him on the shoulder and told him he could go to bed if he liked. He spent most of his time looking over his shoulder, catching things flitting from surfaces out of the corner of his eye. He had a nasty feeling there probably wasn't anything there, at least not now. He expected to see them everywhere and now they were everywhere. They wanted in. They wanted in, and they were patient and he would slip up eventually.

At 6:09 am, he was roused from his sleep by a noise. He rolled over and turned his back to the window, keeping his eyes firmly shut until he drifted back to sleep.

Contrary to what Barret thought, Tifa did not spend every moment of her day worrying about Cloud. That wasn't to say she didn't spend every moment of her day worrying. Most of it she could handle --there was a bar to run, bills to pay, and former Turks to throw off her property. Most of it was something she was used to by now, and was even easier than it had been before now that she was no longer checking for wiretaps and EM sweeps every four hours to hide the terrorist organisation cloistered away in her basement. Just a nice, legitimate business that she didn't have to launder money for or smuggle explosives into for a change. Other things, she couldn't fix -- Nibelheim, or worse things besides. There was plenty of worry to go around.

One of her more recent worries was the rebuilding effort -- she was being called in to help with aid -- a quick supply run to what used to be the cities up north. The bar was important, but so was this. As of two years ago, she'd started specifically requesting any and all volunteer jobs that had room for another person on them be given to her. It was the least she could do, considering.

She didn't start worrying about Cloud until he retreated back into his room after filling his last appointment, closed business for any more, and did not emerge the next day. Tifa waited for a few hours or so, in case he had decided to sleep in (unlikely, but one could always hope), then went out back to check for his sword. As she had feared, he had removed it from his bike and likely had it on him constantly again.

She endured another half hour of prep work for when the bar opened at lunch, then knocked on his door. "It's me. Can I come in?"

"Close the door behind you," came the muffled response. Tifa quietly let herself in to avoid startling him, then shut the door and turned around.

She was no stranger to panic attacks -- not her own, and certainly not Cloud's. But this time seemed different: normally, Cloud would switch off the artificial lights in the room but open a window and sit in front of it on a blanket, staring out of it. She'd sit next to him for a while if they were both up to it, and wait it out. There were probably better methods, but that's what he seemed to prefer the most.

Cloud was indeed sitting in front of the window staring intently at it, but there were papers taped over it, muting the early morning sun and leaving the room poorly lit. His sword lay on his lap, his fingers clenched tightly around the hilt. Tifa sat down next to him, on the side that didn't have the blade pointing towards her.

"...Bad day," he said after a moment of glancing between her and the window, by way of explanation. She nodded uneasily.

"...Do you want me to call --"

"No," he interrupted. "I think she's on her way anyway, right?" Tifa didn't answer. "You can go if you like. I'll be fine, I promise."

"Show me you've got your phone on you," Tifa said, crossing her arms. Cloud reached into his pocket and held it up for her to see without taking his eyes off the window.

"And you're going to use it?" she pressed. Cloud just looked at her wearily.

"Are you going to use it?" she repeated, this time sounding a bit irritated. When it came to Cloud, pride and shame seemed to be one and the same for him as far as she was concerned. "I'm going to call you at ten. Will you answer it?"

"Yes. Phone call at ten." He tore his eyes away from the window, properly this time, and focused them on her. She could see bags forming underneath them. "You had stuff to do, and we planned for it, right?"

They had. Cloud did not handle being alone well anymore, among other things, so they had worked out a system. But still...

"If you need to, call me," she relented. "Okay? Even if it's to ask me how to set the clock on the oven."

"I thought I wasn't allowed --"

"If you really need to set the clock on the oven, then call me."

"Alright."

She gave his hand a quick squeeze, and he squeezed back so hard she thought he might've broken a finger, but at least it was something.

"You know..." she began carefully, "if there's something bothering you --"

"There's not," Cloud said quickly. Tifa glanced between him and his sword looking unamused. They were both silent for a moment.

"...I've been seeing things," he finally admitted. Tifa kept her expression neutral, even though Cloud could probably smell the quick thrill of fear that went through her.

"What kinds of things?" she asked evenly. If they had learned anything from the last few times, it was that if Cloud was seeing something it was only because, at the risk of it being tautological, the rest of them simply couldn't. The fact that a lot of it was in his head didn't make it any less real. Yet, anyway. He was rather like an anxious, well-armed canary in a coal mine.

"Just... I dunno. Things."

"'Things'?"

Cloud squirmed a bit, clearly uncomfortable. "They don't look like anything. It could probably just be floaters." He curled and uncurled his fingers from the hilt of his swords, the way she would do sometimes with her hands, a habit he had picked up (mimicked?) from her. Wanting to fight an enemy that wasn't there, in the vain hope that one could pound whatever the issue was into submission.

"...Sometimes, I'll look at a window or a mirror really quick, and I'll think I see something reflected in it," he said hesitantly. "But then there's nothing there. I've -- I've thought about moving the furniture, so it looks less like people. If that's okay."

"As long as you don't block the doorways," she replied. He still had not let go of her hand.

"Is She --"

"I haven't felt a pull or anything," he quickly amended. "And if I do, I'll let you know."

Would you? she thought to herself, looking at the papers on the windows. Then again, would she tell Cloud if it had been her? She couldn't be sure that she would.

"Alright." She stood up. "I trust you. Just don't hurt yourself okay?"

"I'll be fine," he said, quickly turning his gaze back to the window. "Call at ten o'clock. See you in ten days."

"See you in ten days," she said, and left, closing the door behind her again.

Cloud stared at the door for a moment after she left, then turned his attention back to the window. There hadn't been anything unusual since that morning. No noises, no shadows, no heaviness in his limbs. Perhaps if he just kept watch, they wouldn't show up again. Perhaps if he didn't look at them they wouldn't be there. He didn't know which set of rules to follow, which only made him more anxious.

Perhaps he was just going stir crazy from being confined to one place for two days.

He let himself into Tifa's room again and closed the door to that. For good measure, he drew the curtains across the window anyway. Just in case.

He had realised a while ago it was always better to do this in Tifa's room. It made reaching the right state of mind more difficult, but her familiar scent made things easier to stop in case it didn't work out properly. He could probably go in deeper in his own room, with his own scent, but that made coming back a lot harder too.

Maybe I can just zone out through everything for the next ten days, he thought. He made a good effort for about ten minutes, but the fact that there was nothing going on downstairs actually distracted him from being able to focus on anything, let alone functions in his brain he still had a very poor handle on. He got back up and went downstairs.

It was quiet. The bar hadn't opened yet, and the rest of the staff wasn't there either. He sat down on the couch and began to listen for anyone coming. The lights hummed in the ceiling. A few ice cubes settled as the ones under them melted. Next door, someone's dog paced across a hardwood floor in anticipation.

He felt the panic start to set in about two minutes later, when the dog and its presumed owner left for a walk. The bar was absolutely empty, and would remain so for a while. There was nobody here. No one knows you're here. No one --

He felt himself reaching for his phone, then scolded himself for it. It would probably only be an hour. Toddlers could wait by themselves longer than that.

After another fifteen minutes, Cloud found himself resentfully conceding that said toddlers had better resolve than he did, and walked back upstairs to his room. Sleep. If he just slept through as much of this as possible, he wouldn't even know he was alone.

And besides the point, he was exhausted. Sleeping had been a privilege, as he'd been made aware of a long time ago. Cloud thought he'd be sick of sleeping by now, but the fact that it wasn't on anyone's schedule but his own anymore made it significantly more appealing.

He stole a pillow from Tifa's room anyway before going back to his own and buried his face in it. It was gonna be a long ten days.

Tifa leaned back into the window of the airship she was on as the icy wind stung her face. Rebuilding here had been one of the bigger challenges they'd faced. The remote location, coupled with the harsh weather, made it hard to get both people and supplies up this far, and people were one of the few commodities that were even lower than supplies. Most human life in the northernmost continent had been wiped out, and what few survivors there were had fled the area until the carnage had died down. They had considered leaving it uninhabited (after all, it wasn't as though there was suddenly a space issue), but she supposed Barret had been right: people wouldn't want to leave their homes, no matter how bad they got.

Its isolation had given it one advantage: there had only been two cases of geostigma in the entire area, and only a handful more of more mundane diseases. If anything like it ever popped up again, it would be good to have a haven to fall back to.

Tifa hoped it wouldn't. She knew she wouldn't be able to go through all that a second time, and she wasn't sure if she'd have let anyone else do it either.

Someone cleared their throat behind her. "Miss Lockhart?" It was one of the other volunteers, looking at her expectantly.

She closed the window and adjusted the collar of her coat. "We're landing soon?" she asked, and the man nodded.

"Good. It's a six hour hike to the settlement. The sooner we get going, the better." She hefted her bag over her shoulder and a first aid kit over the other.

Now that they were on the ground, the air didn't have the bite of windchill to it. It wasn't as bitterly cold as it could have been, considering it was summer, which made it the ideal time to set up as much as they could before the area was too closed off by the elements. It would also be more difficult to get birds willing to cooperate the colder it got.

They unloaded the chocobos from the airship as well, though most of the volunteers and staff would be walking. The supplies were the first priority, and they could carry a lot more if unencumbered by a rider. It didn't take long to get everything packed up, and then they headed out into the wilderness, with Tifa at the front.

Every now and then they found the strewn remains of a house. Bones, sometimes animal, sometimes human, picked clean by scavengers long ago. As they pressed further into the mountains, they found more intact remains, preserved by the cold and a lack of bacteria to take care of them over time, not unlike Midgar. The most they could do was incinerate the bodies using magic. It seemed disrespectful, but they couldn't afford to waste fuel that was meant for the settlement, and couldn't carry every body they found back with them with their limited personnel and time. It would have to do. It was better than leaving them in the ice.

Tifa clutched the little green materia tightly (fire had not been one of the spells she had chosen to master), restoring the warmth to her hands, then passed it to the woman behind her leading one of their birds. Nobody spoke much. Most of the people here either had once lived here, or knew someone that had. Tifa herself had seen much of the carnage firsthand -- Sephiroth had been a force to contend with. It seemed as though they had been running from him as much as they had been pursuing him at times.

Sephiroth... when Cloud had first recounted some of "his" escapades in Soldier, he had mentioned his strength and skill and ability with almost as much reverence as he had contempt. She hadn't quite understood it until she saw it for herself, though. She had supposed he was simply a very powerful mage (which he had been), or unnaturally strong (which he had been). But it became quite clear that there was a lot more to Soldier than just performance enhancements.

She "knew" that, of course -- she knew about Jenova, had heard the stories about the dodging of bullets and the surviving broken necks: it had been another thing entirely to see it; to know for certain that what they were fighting was utterly inhuman. To see things done that must have been magic, but couldn't possibly have been, because there was no magic to do the sort of things he did.

It was impossible. All of it was, by definition. Magic had rules. Things it could and couldn't do. It was one of the first things anyone learned about it in school -- magic was the rules that let you use other rules to your advantage.

It shouldn't bother her as much as it did, with all the things they'd seen. She tried to think about something else, and looked around her environment. Snow. Rocks. Icicle. Snow. A burning chunk of someone's arm. Moss. More snow.

She quietly asked for the materia again when it had made it all the way down the line to anyone that didn't know enough magic to cast it themselves. It was going to be a long hike.

By the time they got to what could generously be called a "town", Tifa was in a lot better condition than the rest of her group -- growing up in Nibelheim and climbing mountains for most of her life (and for some years, for a living) had acclimatised her to the conditions they had faced, and she was one of three people in any state to unpack anything as soon as they arrived without a rest first. A few representatives from the WRO spent several minutes panting before beginning to assemble the large receiver tower they had brought in pieces with them. The sooner they established connections, the easier it would be to coordinate future endeavours. This area was the last to be added to the grid, due to the remote location and the need to hike out on foot for the time being.

Tifa, meanwhile, began doling out the other supplies they had brought with them -- mostly batteries and dried fruit. There were enough animals nearby for things like fur and meat, but power and fresh produce was harder to come by.

One of the men lingered nearby her table and seemed to be waiting until everyone else had left. She glanced at him occasionally, doing her best not to stare back. After another ten minutes when the crowd had thinned out, he spoke.

"Don't I know you from somewhere?" he said. Tifa actually looked at him properly then. He seemed too old to be coming onto her (though one never did know), and the question was phrased with a certain amount of sincerity.

"...I don't think so. Do you own the cabin on the outskirts?" she guessed. They'd spent three days in that cabin waiting for a storm to pass, but that had been years ago.

The man shook his head. "No, I live here. But I know I've seen you somewhere."

Tifa shrugged, keeping her tone as professional as possible. "Just one of those faces, maybe. It's a bartender thing, I guess."

That seemed to spark something in the man. "Yes, that's it! You were on the news two years ago. Something about a --"

The colour drained from Tifa's face. "I'm not sure what you mean."

"That girl in Edge, that's you isn't it? They said you were a hero. Gave some big speech over you and that nasty pandemic business, didn't they?" he continued cordially, oblivious to her discomfort.

"Oh. Yes, that. No, just a look-alike. Excuse me," she said, and retreated into the crowd to find something else to look busy doing, leaving the man standing there looking bemused.

Of course. Of course there had been fucking cameras there, and of course anyone with a working screen had seen it. She'd hoped no one would remember, but obviously someone did. Now she could hope he didn't say anything to anyone else.

Her thoughts inevitably drifted back to the stigma after that. It was still poorly-understood what it was -- something auto-immune, she'd heard. She wasn't sure how true it was. The contagion seemed to spread regardless of how well they had quarantined it, and there were theories it had been spread directly through the Lifestream, which had become tainted as well -- apparently its cells weren't the only part of it that had been infectious. That would be the sort of thing Sephiroth would do, because by all rights it made no sense and was just another perversion of the rules of how everything should work.

Either they didn't teach that sort of thing in whatever school Sephiroth had gone to, or he knew and simply didn't care. She had watched him move through the air with nothing but force of will; pass through walls as though they weren't there at all; rend buildings to pieces without so much as lifting a hand; create spaces inside spaces that might not have been there at all. It was as though he simply ignored the world around him and what it should be and its rules, because no one had told him he couldn't.

It was completely alien. Which was fitting, all things considered, and for a while that was the easiest way to think about it. Weird alien stuff from a weird alien guy.

Then Cloud had done it too -- understood the rules that weren't rules, and...

He wasn't human, they knew. Not biologically, anyway. It was easy enough to pretend he was most days, but sometimes he would move in a way he shouldn't, or something else would, or...

Or whatever had happened during Meteorfall. Tifa didn't understand it, and if Cloud himself did he wasn't telling.

"Miss Lockhart." Thank god, a distraction. Tifa turned around. Shera waved at her.

"Got a job for you," she continued. "Scouting."

Tifa approached her and lowered her voice. "Scouting? I thought we had this area mapped."

"We do. The important parts, anyway," she explained. "It's not where we're concerned with, it's what. There's a lot of small caves a bit further up north. Now that there's more raw Lifestream in the atmosphere than there was, we think some of the local wildlife might have started moving closer."

Well, that was another reason she'd been assigned to this job specifically, she supposed. Mountaineering was already a pretty valuable skill, but there weren't a lot of mountaineeers that could also handle "local wildlife". The great glaciers has small pockets of dragon populations sprinkled throughout the area, among other things.

"Don't be gone too long." Shera handed her a small bag. Tracking tags, in case she found a nesting female, the gods forbid. "If you're more than twelve hours we're sending a rescue party after you."

The minute Tifa was out of sight of the settlement she felt her shoulders unknot. This was something she could handle -- a big cave with a bunch of monsters in it. It was almost like old times. Those few brief weeks had probably been the happiest in her life in a long time, even amid the near-death experiences and the recent sting of loss. The sense of accomplishment one got from puling themselves up a sheer cliff-face, the thrill of a fight alongside that growing family they had built with each other, the little discoveries of bits of ruins left over from the Ancients.

There seemed to be a lot of them in this area, she mused as she began to make her way across a particularly narrow crevasse by bracing her weight against the wall above it. Never anything too intact -- bits of old armour, sometimes the remains of weapons, presumably from the ensuing fight against Jenova. She wondered how long they had lasted -- if they'd been wiped out in a matter of days, or had slowly been worn away over a few decades or even centuries.

Tifa carefully slid down the side of the cliff she found at the end of it, kicking off the wall at the end to land lightly on her feet. Cloud or Yuffie would have probably just jumped straight off, but she was no slouch either (and also had a better sense of self-preservation than the both of them combined, in all honesty).

There was a huge structure in the distance -- a natural ridge that seemed sunk into the ice as much as it jutted over the horizon. No one had gone there -- there was little point given the arctic temperatures and the long hike over. It was just far enough out of her way to where she probably wouldn't be able to take a look, either. Perhaps someday, though...

There were rumours the lost capital of the Ancients was this far up north. Who knew, maybe she'd finally discover it and be famous for something that wasn't awful and upsetting.

Further around the edge of the cliff she'd come down from, she found an entrance to the cave system. A few gremlins were lurking around the entrace, she'd have to deal with those first, and that probably meant the cave was already teeming with them.

Never mind dragons, this would be what she'd have to deal with for the next few hours.

Tifa sighed, worked out the last few kinks in her neck, and adjusted her gloves. It was gonna be a long ten days.

Cloud had one of his bad days then.

It was something that would never quite go away, he had realised. He wasn't really sure why, and didn't care for the idea of seeing a doctor to find out. It could have been Jenova, or the tests, or leftover brain damage, or just something psychological, or a whole host of other things. Whatever caused it, it was another thing he just had to deal with, and another reason they had their system.

By the time he woke up, there wasn't a Cloud. All the pieces that made him up had fallen apart or crumbled away in a wash of deafening voices, not all of which were his, and not all of which were Jenova. Bits of noise that had been him once drifted away, each one of them not large enough or loud enough in their own right to properly be a person.

There was a noise. A real one, that existed. Something heard it, and realised it had perceived something else different from itself, and realised that it was itself. It clung to that idea, which was all it could really do: I.

There were more bits, then, after it realised that it wanted to be, and would continue being. I am. It was all he could do to latch onto the concept, because that was all he was -- I am.

More voices buffeted him and continued tearing at I am, making him waver, the I am faltering before strengthening itself again. Something touched him (real?) and pulled him, and his thoughts weren't yet strong enough to focus on it. They continued focusing on themselves, and suddenly I am was a self-evident, obvious thing.

Then he realised, as much as he could "realise" at that moment, that something was horribly, terribly wrong. That he was hurting very badly, or was about to. The fear sharpened his thoughts, and he became acutely aware of the something touching him. It was a hand, holding his and giving it a gentle squeeze.

That didn't make sense, he thought, and the thoughts came easier that time, which they had obviously been doing the whole time, and he was Cloud, and something was wrong... but that didn't make sense, because he was here. Maybe nothing was wrong after all.

Since he existed, then he must be able to move, which he did then. The hand was still there touching his, which was nice, and there was a noise too -- the same one he had heard and recognised. Talking. It was someone, and they were talking, at him... to him? His thoughts briefly fogged over again, and he looked at the source in confusion.

It snapped into place then, more or less. He was Cloud, and nothing was wrong. There was warm air filtering in through the window, and someone was holding his hand and sitting next to him, and talking about...

"...up and left me there! What a dick! If you hadn't come and picked me up I'd probably have been there for hours or --" The voice stopped, as though it had noticed something.

Cloud steadied himself against the other voices and turned to look at where it was coming from. "Jessie?"

Jessie smiled. "Hey, there you are! 'Bout time."

Cloud nodded mutely. At some point she appeared to have led him downstairs and onto the couch in the living area in the back. He stared at the floor and continued lying against Jessie, waiting for the fog to clear. She was saying words, but his brain wouldn't quite parse them properly, and his thoughts wouldn't line up the way they were supposed to in order to make many of his own. It was nice to just be for a while, though.

She continued to talk. About him, maybe? And someone else. Three someones. And a fourth? No, that was her too. Only lost, because of another someone, that said something wrong. His head felt heavy and talking seemed too complicated. So were the directions, which Jessie wasn't supposed to get because he should have been here? No, someone else.

It must have been another hour or so before the fog cleared from his head enough to make requests from his mouth. "How long was I out?"

She paused, checking the clock. "'Bout three hours, give or take. I had to spend a while poking you to until you twitched to make sure you didn't fall down the stairs if I went to the trouble of getting you out of bed, and even after that you didn't really respond to anything," she explained.

He grimaced. Four hours was a marked improvement over the two days it had taken him three months ago. He wished he felt happier about it.

"But, hey," she continued, directing his attention to an end table she had pulled up in front of them, "I made us lunch." Chopped up fruit in a bowl and some cheese. Like himself, Jessie couldn't cook much either, but at least she wasn't barred from the kitchen.

She then scooted away from him and hauled a large box up onto the couch between them. "Found this just lying on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere," she said, and opened the box, displaying the remains of an old sweeper bot. Before Shinra had collapsed, taking most of the government down with it, they'd been used to prevent unauthorised travel in and out of the city, but now that Shinra's servers were no longer active they sat around waiting for orders that never came until they broke down on their own.

Cloud immediately cheered up. "Wait wait wait, lemme --" he blurted, before disappearing out the back door. A moment later he came back with an old broken down desktop computer he'd smuggled out of an old military base the week prior and set it on the floor. The screen was miraculously still intact. Jessie squealed in delight.

They didn't really have the sort of plugs either one would use, so Cloud was forced to jab his thumb into where the cord would have been and continuously run a lightning spell through it while Jessie carefully unloaded the magazine from the sweeper. The power surged and cut out intermittently, but it was better than nothing. Within a few minutes, they had switched off, Cloud dismantling the remains of the robot to look at what was left of the engine, and Jessie excitedly working her way through the state-of-the-art command prompt with one hand and keeping the power supply going with the other (lightning was really the only spell she had bothered mastering).

Jessie would handle the software. Cloud would deal with the hardware. They had a good arrangement.

So, it had been Jessie's turn this week. And Yuffie a week before that, and then Tifa, and then Barret. So next week it would be Barret again. Probably.

Their system was something Tifa had come up with after he slipped into his third vegetative state after Meteorfall and they realised this wasn't going to stop. Cloud needed more or less constant watching, for a variety of reasons. There was always the risk of him mentally shutting down and starving to death in his own bed, of course. But his anxiety had returned with a vengeance after his memory had been sorted out, and the blanks in it were filled in, to the point where it was unmanageable at times. The thought of isolation, for any reason at all, was unbearable. It was more than dislike -- it was a full-blown phobia, and as much as he knew it was completely idiotic and juvenile and so, so stupid and pathetic to wind up sobbing, backed up into a corner to fight off a threat that wasn't there, it didn't take more than an hour or two before the first nagging sensations of terror began to set it. There were other problems, too -- his brain not storing memories properly at times, things that triggered panic attacks that Cloud couldn't understand why, and the very real threat of the entity still sitting at the edge of his consciousness that he had to focus on browbeating into submission once every few hours.

Barret kept insisting he see a doctor, but the thought of seeing another doctor was one of the only things that scared him more than being alone. Or maybe that was the reason why in the first place. Never again, he'd sworn, and he'd meant it, even if it killed him.

He loved the company, of course. It was everything he'd never even hoped to have in a million years. But he hated the reasons behind it. There was another fear, behind all the rest of them, that if they had the choice to they'd never come back.

That was probably the only reason Tifa even let him live with her for free. Because he was a danger to himself and everyone around him. It couldn't possibly be enjoyable, putting up with him the way she did. No small wonder no one else could before.

So, his family worked in shifts, making sure he got out of bed, or at least was awake and simply choosing not to. Making sure he remembered that he was supposed to be somewhere, and when he was supposed to be there. Making sure he didn't go outside without his sunglasses on. Making sure he wasn't alone.

Weeks with Jessie were actually a bit easier, in that regard. She was almost as much of a mess as he was. It was a bit ironic that they had someone as jumpy as her building their bombs at one point.

Yeah, but Jessie has her own place, he thought bitterly. You live off Tifa's charity. Jessie doesn't have nightmares about --

"You okay?" asked Jessie. "You've been kinda quiet. We don't have to do this now."

"...No, I'm fine," he said. "Do you think we could move this, though? Don't wanna get grease all over the rug."

It took them a few minutes to get everything, lunch included, packed up and moved upstairs, before they went back to taking their finds apart, metaphorically in Jessie's case, literally in Cloud's.

"Anything interesting on there?" he asked, wiping his hands off on his pants before reaching for a piece of cheese.

"Nothing we didn't already know," she replied, looking up from the lines of green text on the black screen and scooting the plate closer to him. "But this was last updated right before Sephiroth cacked the president, so it's before they patched that bug where it doesn't check for signatures of incoming communication requests while you're scanning for unauthorised communication requests. I've always wanted to poke around with that one a bit, just for its own sake." Cloud pushed the plate back towards her, and she took another slice of cheese for herself. "The keyboard's a little water damaged, too, and I keep getting bad sector errors. Did you leave this thing in the rain yesterday?"

"A little, yeah. Is that bad?"

"You can't leave computers outside, Cloud! They're meant for indoor use in labs and fancy military guy stuff. I waterproofed mine for Avalanche but that's not industry standard."

He shrugged. "Nothing's industry standard anymore, technically." He stuffed a handful of berries into his mouth and turned back to his dismantled robot. "The mako drive on this thing overheated and melted most of the moving parts together," he said, picking up the ungainly chunk of metal that used to be the engine and giving it a firm shake to demonstrate. "Not that it'd matter anymore. The lock on the maintenance panel was still working, actually. Must've been a backup battery in there. I don't have the code for it or anything so I just had to rub a magnet against it for a while." He gestured to the chunk of neodymium he kept in an old sock he'd been using.

Jessie sniffed. "Can you keep that away from the computer, then? And stop picking out all the blueberries like an infant-baby?"

Cloud opened his mouth to firmly refuse and tell Jessie exactly what hole she could put her pineapple chunks in before a noise in the kitchen took the words from his mouth. It seemed like movement.

"...Did you hear that?"

Jessie stared at him for a moment. "Uh... no. Sorry."

Normally he would have left it at that -- there were plenty of noises he noticed that most people that weren't Nanaki didn't. Lately, however...

"Be right back." He got to his feet and quietly walked to the kitchen, pacing himself to make it sound as though he hadn't heard anything, the electricity he'd been using earlier now humming at his fingertips in deadlier amounts.

He stepped around the corner, looking around. The kitchen appeared empty.

No, not empty. Something else moved. Maybe a floater across his eye. Maybe not. Cloud took another couple steps forward, and the noise started up again.

He tensed up. They had followed him from the tower. They must have. They couldn't get inside, could they? He hadn't let them inside. He couldn't quite see them, but they were inside now.

"Jessie?" he called out in warning. That was all he got out. If she replied, he wouldn't have heard, as his thoughts were abruptly snuffed out again.

It was different this time -- more inconsistent. A few moments later, he was suddenly treated to the shock of having a functioning mind and realising that he couldn't move all at once before it drowned him out again. Brief periods of awareness seemed to come in waves that he had no control over, no matter how much he struggled. He tried to leave, but his legs didn't seem to work, and half the time he couldn't seem to feel them at all. Every muscle was locked up, and in the brief flashes he was able to feel anything, he felt a sharp, stabbing pain in his chest. The shapes whirled around them, and he was struck with how much he hated looking at them. Everything felt far away, as though he was being pulled somewhere. Before it could, something else pulled him away, with sharper claws, and it seemed as though he were falling. Help was the last coherent thought he managed to have, as the claws loosened and he slipped under.

"Jessie?" Cloud's voice echoed down the hall, a note of alarm in his voice. Jessie looked up from her computer.

"Yeah?"

No response.

"Do they need me on tables already? Isn't it a little early for that?"

Silence.

"Cloud, Tifa called! She's pregnant and Red's the father!"

Nothing. Jessie snatched up an electric drill from Cloud's tool kit and ran into the kitchen.

Cloud was standing there, quite alone, staring at a spot under the sink. She lowered the drill in confusion. "What, what is it?" She looked under the sink. It was empty, and she turned back to Cloud. "What are you... looking..."

His jaw was set, but his eyes were unfocused. His face was ashen and his lips had acquired a blue tint. He had stopped breathing.

"Cloud?!" She slapped him then, uncertain of what else to do. It always worked in the movies, didn't it?

Cloud didn't start breathing again, but that was enough to unbalance him and cause him to topple to the floor with a dull thud. She rolled him over, her panic growing, and fumbled for her cell phone as his eyes rolled back and he passed out.

Before she could finish dialing, he started breathing again.

Cloud stood on the edge of the crater's lip, staring over it, hefting the Buster Sword in his hand. His foot shifted, and a pebble dislodged and skipped down the walls of the cliff. The wind howled, drowning out the staccato tapping after a few moments, and the cold bit right into him through his jacket. Barret came up behind him.

"You ain't done it yet?" he said, clearly wanting to be on his way.

Cloud shook his head. "It's dumb. I know it's dumb. It's just --"

"'Course it's dumb. Of all the stupid-ass things you've done, you standin' here for ten minutes and not moving is the dumbest." Cloud said nothing. "What are you gonna do with that thing, anyway? That's what he wanted. Jackass is dead. You gonna keep doing what he wants? Who'd it be for?"

Cloud didn't turn around. "...I dreamt about it for years. It was everything I wanted. It feels like... if I did, it'd all be for nothing. Wouldn't it?"

Barret snorted. "You could do ten times as good as anything they wanted you for. Wasn't that the whole point? This was your own damn idea."

"I guess so." He shifted on the balls of his feet.

"You guess?"

"...No. I'm right. That's why this was a good idea. I thought of it." Barret rolled his eyes, but Cloud thought he saw him smile a bit.

Cloud took about ten steps back, judged the weight, then took a running start and hurled the Buster Sword off Gaea's Cliff with a yell.

They watched it clatter off the rocks, making a racket all the way down, before it bounced out of even Cloud's sight. For a split second, Cloud had the urge to jump down after it and retrieve it. He'd have to fix that. Maybe make his own sword. One that was even better than that one.

"Let's get back to the ship. Marlene's probably getting bored," he said, turning back to Barret, but Barret wasn't there.

There was nothing here with him. He could hear wind, louder than ever, but the air was still around him. Things were lurking behind the wind. They reached for him, gesturing for him to come closer, and he reached back, but the living room floor was in the way.

Cloud snapped awake to see Jessie peering over him, looking shaken, rocking herself nervously. A couple of the new wait staff watched from the doorway.

"...Are you okay?" she asked hesitantly.

"Yeah. Fine," he grunted. The room spun around him, and he shut his eyes to avoid being sick all over her leg. "Must've tripped."

"You... you weren't breathing." Well, so much for that lie.

"I choked when I tripped," he supplied.

"That's not funny, Cloud."

"It's what happened."

"...Well, I'm covering your shift. We already decided," she said slowly. "Go lie down somewhere."

Cloud sat straight up. "You can't do that."

Jessie looked away and took a deep breath. "It was Jensen's idea. I had to have her help me carry you."

Jensen scowled and retreated back out to the dining room. Jessie did not look at Cloud's face. "You stopped breathing. If it were anyone else I'd say you should probably see a..." she stopped short at his glare. "I said if it were anyone else!"

"I'm not gonna lie down, because I feel fine," said Cloud, feeling even worse as he stood up. "I'm gonna be sitting in the dining room, and if you guys need me then I'll be right there ready to say I told you so." He began to head back through the doorway.

"Glasses," Jessie interjected sharply, offering them to him.

"...Right," he said, quietly sliding them on. The last thing they needed was to cause a panic. He paused on his way out again.

"...Please don't tell Tifa," he added quietly.

Jessie crossed her arms and glared at him.

"Fine," she huffed, and got up herself to grab an apron. "Moron," she added under her breath, obviously not caring that Cloud could hear her anyway.

Cloud sat in the corner of the dining room, picking angrily at the placemat. He'd lost another two hours this time, judging by the clock. If he'd been unconscious for that long just from lack of air he probably would be in the hospital, even for someone enhanced. Whatever it was had taken longer than just a few minutes to actually let him wake up.

There had to be a pattern. It was usually at 6:09, but today it hadn't been. It had started at the tower, but they watched him at home, and were clearly already inside. This time he had suffocated. Last time he had walked up a few flights of stairs and stood still for over five hours. This time he hadn't been able to move at all, but he'd still been aware, if barely.

Was it Jenova? This morning he'd had to put himself together again. No, it couldn't be that. Yesterday he had been fine, and had only started having problems afterward. It was Jenova's sort of thing to use him, but not to get its host killed. If that had been an attempt on his life, anyway. It would have been much easier to have him throw himself out a window at the tower.

He had been alone at the tower. But Jessie had been in the other room. Did they know that? Would they have cared about her if they did?

There's no pattern, he thought glumly. There's no pattern and there's no "they" and you're going crazy and all that stuff Hojo put in your brain finally melted a hole in it. He didn't even have solid evidence any of it was real. It could just as easily be a relapse, entirely on his part, or worse.

Cloud suddenly couldn't stand another second indoors under the fluorescents. He made a quick stop to his room, retrieving his sword and the portable radio, then slipped out the back door. Maybe he would lie down somewhere. Because he wanted to.

There was a spot he liked in the ruins. He'd discovered it on accident four years ago, after he put a hole in the roof. He'd thought about fixing it, but that would have worked against the whole reason he liked being there in the first place. Years later, Tifa had coincidentally rediscovered it on her own.

Cloud parked Fenrir just outside the old abandoned church and stepped inside. Between the holes in the roof (besides the one he'd made when he crashed through it) and the stained glass windows, broken or otherwise, the building was filled with sunlight. Some of the broken pews still had cushions on the seat. While the isolation wasn't ideal, sometimes it was just nice to take a nap somewhere and wake up with the sky in full view and the sun in his face.

Cloud switched on the radio again and retuned it to one of the three stations available at this point, which was playing a song he vaguely remembered liking during his time in the military. He couldn't recall any lyrics. He lay down on one of the pews and wondered if he used to know them.

In all likelihood, it was probably just a regular old-fashioned crack-up. The kind he'd never been able to handle before, but especially couldn't now. He'd told himself, and had believed for a while, that it had ended when he had gotten out of the lab; the crying, the pleading, and eventually the resigned submission when he realised no one in the world would help, the shame at the things he'd done and said for the sake of his own self-preservation, and then later for reasons he didn't even understand himself. There was no one left that could hurt him, not really. It should have been over then.

It wasn't over. It would probably never be over. Every last one of them were dead, and there still wasn't a single part of his life that they hadn't dug their fingers into and taken for themselves. He could do whatever he wanted, and pretend to be a mechanic, and have a family that was willing to pretend along with them, but no matter what he was still, in some way, exactly what they had made him.

"It's not fair," he said to the radio, which indifferently continued hitting on an undisclosed third party by comparing her eyes to blue jewels. Cloud felt as though he were being mocked, and tuned the radio back to jazz before tossing it over to the patch of dirt that had broken his landing four years ago, next to the pool of deceptively harmless-looking water. It landed speaker-down but continued playing. It didn't take him long after that to doze off in the warm sun filtering in through the windows.

He slept for longer than he had wanted to, and was woken up by the sound of his phone ringing. Tifa. He'd forgotten entirely.

He missed the first call while fumbling through his pockets for the right one, but when he called back she picked up on the first ring.

"Hi. Sorry. Dropped my phone," he said. He wasn't entirely sure why he lied about misplacing what pocket he put it in. Maybe it sounded less stupid that way? The first lie of probably several in this call.

"Well, you called back on your own," came Tifa's voice from the receiver. "How is everything?"

"I spaced out earlier today," he said hesitantly. "I'm fine now, but Jessie's covering for me at the bar."

"How long were you this time?"

"About four hours."

"That's good!" She sounded genuinely happy about it. Cloud felt his chest clench painfully, and kept his gaze on the floor, as though she were there in front of him. "And you were worried it was getting worse."

"Yeah... guess so," he replied, trying to match her tone.

"They've got reception set up here, finally. Don't feel bad about calling, we've got the juice to support it now. They think they'll have a generator here in the next six months, as long as nothing goes horribly wrong all at once." A pause on the line. "Is Jessie there with you? Your end is pretty quiet."

"I stepped out for a bit. It's really nice out tonight." It was. The sun had just set, and the first few stars were beginning to appear. It was a bit colder, but not unpleasantly so.

"Send me some warm weather if you get the chance, alright?" she joked. "I'll see you soon."

"Mm. See you soon." He flipped his phone closed.

It wasn't fair.

#the number i #forfdorfsorf #spitegarbage #amazing literature #formatting sucks and i hate it #writing is fake actually

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secretshinigami · 8 years

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Hyoid

Author: casuistor For: mklt Pairings/Characters: Light Yagami, Teru Mikami Rating/Warnings: General Prompt: “Mikami/Light , walking home together” Author’s notes: This is a post-canon divergent AU where both Light and Teru survive the events of the warehouse and find themselves sharing a cell for the indefinite future. Teru does not have memories of using the death note because Near burned the notes at the end. Light has his memories intact because I’m assuming he was able to switch the death note in the Task Force’s possession out for a fake one. Given that I wanted this to be more based in canon I did end up interpret “walking home together” a bit uh.. liberally. You did specify a preference for hateships after all :P Anyway, I really hope you enjoy!)

Compared to the average Japanese, Mikami Teru has a strong sense of right and wrong. What was “good” and what was “evil” did not require an explanation. His sense of justice was innate, and like a compass unerringly led to a path of righteousness. Teru had no need for anything else – he was just because he did not know how else to live, and his way of living was just because that was the only way his way of life could be. It was a convenient tautology that could have been taken from the pages of any logic textbook as an example of fallacy, but he’d never acknowledged it as such. Some things in life were simply true by definition.

Even as he became a prisoner hidden behind locked doors somewhere in the bowels of Tokyo, he was still desperate to find ways to make the narrative of what occurred at Daikoku Wharf, if not clean of any personal culpability, then at the very least more palatable. It simply doesn’t make sense that an unremarkable (albeit unusually unscheduled) visit to the bank on the 26th of January could play an instrumental role in the end of an era of divine justice.

Suppressing a violent shudder, Teru clasps his hands together tightly as he sits on the edge of his narrow cot and tries not to breathe too loudly. On the inside, he hasn’t stopped screaming.

The smell of chlorhexidine soap coming from the man sharing his cell fills Teru’s nostrils, but there are no chemicals potent enough to make him forget how the scent of that man’s blood had made the back of his throat burn with vomit.

The cell is small for one person as it is, and Teru no longer knows why he expected to be detained privately. This is, by design, surely meant to be a personal hell. Not just for him, but for that man too. In a way, he supposes he’s relieved that he left his glasses at home for some peculiar reason this morning. No need to look at the imposter in crisp resolution.

Hours pass in silence as Teru cycles between the need to claw at the walls of his new home and willing himself to fossilize on the spot in anticipation of an inevitable confrontation. For years he’d yearned for the god’s arrival, and every day since his dearest hopes became reality, he’d dreamed giddily of one day walking alongside his god. Metaphorically speaking.

God never had a face in those innocent fantasies. God was protean and immutable, unknowable and familiar all at once and nothing made Teru happier. Even when it became increasingly clear that god was indeed a person rather than a truly divine force of will, Teru had simply recalibrated. God wasn’t defined by a physical form.

But you? You’re not god. You can’t be god. God would never fail. God would never have let this happen. God would never–

And so his thoughts continued, until Yagami Light made a benign noise – a cough, a sniffle or a shiver – and startle Teru so badly that he’d forget that he’d been adhering to a sensible policy of staring pointedly at his own hands and feet.

Yagami Light is very human and very much in pain. Lying in a cot with the thin blanket pulled up to his nose, brow furrowed and eyes squeezed shut, Yagami looks no older than a teenager fresh out of high school. A sickly, pale boy like that couldn’t have been the leader of a movement to change the world – alleged magical notebooks and shinigami be damned.

Teru can only suppose that it’s physical pain that’s keeping Yagami’s mouth shut for the time being. When Yagami Light had been carted away in an ambulance, there’d been nobody in the world that Teru had wanted answers from more. Now that they’re prisoners together, every second is leeching years off his life. Arguably that can only be a good thing. He closes his eyes and buries his face in his hands.

Perhaps beyond these walls, Kira was still carrying out judgments and Yagami Light’s true purpose was to serve as a decoy for god, and Yagami Light had dutifully deceived everyone at the warehouse. Perjaps Teru himself was merely the sacrificial lamb of a sacrificial lamb. The fact that he’s even entertaining something this ridiculous ought to be reason to stop, but a bitter ‘God could have cut out the middleman’ is all he can manage to think through the band of pressure squeezing his head.

A bodily gnawing pain grows in intensity and his breath gets sourer and sourer, but when a tray of food is pushed through a slot in the door, Teru ignores it. He’d been so excited this morning that he’d rushed through his breakfast. And for what? I don’t deserve this, I want –

A lawyer. One phone call. He could leave a message for Nakajima; she was a reliable sort.

Nakajima-san, I’ve been abducted and am currently being held prisoner somewhere in Tokyo. Please promptly inform the chief of why I will not be at work for the foreseeable future and then request a police investigation on my behalf, thank you.

The futility of such desires threatens to swallow Teru whole. Save me. Help me. I want to go home. God…

Rather foolishly, Teru steals a glance at the man across the room.

Misa! Takada! Mikami, what are you doing? Hury up and write down their names!! Teru’s throat constricts with sudden outrage. You can’t save me, you couldn’t even save yourself. You’re not god. This is all your fault.

“Mikami.”

Immediately Teru gets to his feet, fists balled. He has half a mind to correct the man speaking to him, but feeling too tired to bother with a pointless argument, resigns himself to leading by example.

“Yagami-san.”

Teru’s palms are coated with a thin film of sweat. He wouldn’t have dared call a true god by name without permission, but he does so now. And we both know why. Truthfully, he’s a little proud of his defiance, but the sentiment is undercut by the fact that Yagami doesn’t have the decency to acknowledge the disrespect as a proper insult.

“I’ve evaluated the situation and I’ve determined that the only way that everything makes sense is to assume that your name was written in the note.”

When it’s clear that the remark was meant to provoke a reaction other than ’you can’t be so dim as to miss the fact that I’m alive’ Teru replies with dry contempt. “I see.” Say something useful, damn you.

Yagami sits up slowly, gingerly moving one leg over the side of his cot after another His discomfort is obvious, but Teru can’t help but feel he thoroughly deserves it.

“Sit.”

It’s unquestionably an order, and one that Yagami clearly expects compliance with. Teru isn’t a man who is contrary for the sake of being contrary, but this… He opens his mouth to fire a retort.

“Or stand if you prefer. It makes no difference to me,” Yagami finishes with an audible shrug.

Teru narrows his eyes. “I’ll do that without your permission, thank you,” he says coolly. Strained civility isn’t particularly satisfying, but he can’t seem to marshal his thoughts without it.

Yagami raises an eyebrow incredulously, and Teru’s fists tighten.

“As you wish. But as it appears that we’ll be imprisoned together for now, don’t you think hostility is wasted energy? I’d rather not provide our captors with entertainment.”

On some level Teru sees a grain of truth in this, but that only makes Yagami all the more despicable. “You presume to lecture about dignity.” The vindication he gets when Yagami narrows his eyes is exhilarating enough that he’s able to sit down without feeling servile.

“No,” he says after a drawn out pause. “I was talking about a theory. You insisted on a more frivolous subject.”

Teru exhales forcefully as though punched in the gut. He’d never been one for laughter before, but with his face pressed into the rubble of the world as he’d always known it, all that’s left is unorganized, petrifying chaos with Yagami Light’s face.

“What could possibly be more frivolous than theories that don’t have meaning? Will that theory undo the irreparable damage you’ve done?”

Yagami’s jaw tightens, as they lock eyes. “Trusting you to understand a set of simple instructions was foolish.” A beat. “It must be convenient to simply forget your own oversight.”

Teru purses his lips, thoroughly disgusted that moments ago, he’d stretched the limits of his imagination to rebrand this man as a person who might be in a similar situation to himself.

“Assuming your knowledge of the powers of this ‘death note’ is complete and accurate, how would you know that your name wasn’t also written?”

The question doesn’t seem to faze Yagami. His tone is the most confident it has been all conversation. The SPK had taken his tie, as a “necessary precaution" but Teru is no longer sure who that was meant to protect.

“Because writing my name in the note to force a confession would’ve been meaningless. You were merely a means to an end. You were the person I was relying on. Turning you against me would’ve been strategically optimal, though impossible given your beliefs. But you gave them an opening by killing Takada on your own. You led the SPK to the note by going to the bank and they’ve been controlling your actions ever since.”

An icy silence. Going from having too many words to know what to say to having none at all seems to rip open a vacuum. Teru doesn’t fully understand how the poison coming out of Yagami’s lips could possibly be true, but he stares with magnetized revulsion. The continued insistence on an alternate reality that makes just a little too much sense to safely dismiss offhand numbs him from head to toe. If he’d been chosen by Kira, there’s no question that he would have dutifully and delightedly carried out god’s will. I wanted to be seen by Kira. I didn’t want this.

Somewhat anticlimactically, it’s Teru’s stomach that ends the standstill with a squelch of displeasure. “You have no proof.”

“Should you die within the next twenty-one days, that’ll be sufficient proof. The note can only control a person’s actions for twenty three days.”

Now fully aware that Yagami is actively waiting for him to drop dead, Teru turns his back on the despicable boy who might have been god.

“I used to dream about walking by your side. They were nice dreams then.”

#mikalight #Teru Mikami #Light Yagami #casuistor #mklt #death note #Light's Birthday Extravaganza 2017 #ratings: general #fanfic #submission

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networkingdefinition · 5 years

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Towers Quotes

Official Website: Towers Quotes

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• A 60-story tower in New York evokes a 70-story tower in Chicago [and] a 60-story tower in New York evokes a 70-story tower directly across the street. – Hugh Ferriss • A bottomless pit of violence, a Tower of Babel where all are speakers and no hearers. – Alexander Smith • A different kind of pleasure surfaced in the aftermath, the pleasure of seeing the towers fall time and again, the experience of being entranced by the visual spectacle, and then also the very graphic forms of public mourning for exemplary citizens (taking place at the same time as the refusal to mourn the undocumented, the foreign, gay and lesbian lives lost there, for example). I am not sure that the guilt over the pleasure re-installed the good citizen. – Judith Butler • A good poem is a tautology. It expands one word by adding a number which clarify it, thus making a new word which has never before been spoken. The seedword is always so ordinary that hardly anyone perceives it. Classical odes grow from and or because, romantic lyrics from but and if. Immature verses expand a personal pronoun ad nauseam, the greatest works bring glory to a common verb. Good poems, therefore, are always close to banality, over which, however, they tower like precipices. – Alasdair Gray • A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art. – Benjamin Disraeli • A journey of a thousand miles starts in front of your feet. A tower nine stories high is built from a small heap of earth. A journey of a thousand miles starts in front of your feet. – Laozi • A mother’s love is like a tower, Rising far above the crowd, And her smile is like the sunshine, Breaking through a threatening cloud. – Helen Steiner Rice • A prince, the moment he is crown’d, Inherits every virtue sound, As emblems of the sovereign power, Like other baubles in the Tower: Is generous, valiant, just, and wise, And so continues till he dies. – Jonathan Swift • A second plane hit the second tower. America is under attack. – Andrew Card • A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate millions… Of all targets New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm. – E. B. White • A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home. – Kobo Abe • After a hundred years the son of the King then reigning, who was of another family from that of the sleeping Princess, was a-hunting on that side of the country, and he asked what those towers were which he saw in the middle of a great thick wood. – Charles Perrault • After the First World War, Germany was trying to build a democracy. Then when the Reichstag, the legislature, was burned down in 1933, this was seen as such an emergency that human rights had to be suspended. The attack on the World Trade Towers has allowed Bush and his gang to do anything. What are we to do now? I say when there’s a code red, we should all run around like chickens with our heads cut off. I don’t feel that we are in any great danger. – Kurt Vonnegut • All over France, in every city there stand cathedrals like this one, triumphant monuments of the past. They tower over the homes of our people like mighty guardians, keeping alive the invincible faith of the Christian. Every arch, every column, every statue is a carved leaf out of our history, a book in stone, glorifying the spirit of France. – Sonya Levien • Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told; somehow he publishes it with solemn joy: sometimes with pencil on canvas, sometimes with chisel on stone, sometimes in towers and aisles of granite, his soul’s worship is builded; sometimes in anthems of indefinite music, but clearest and most permanent, in words. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • And off in the far distance, the gold on the wings of the angel atop the bell tower of San Marco flashed in the sun, bathing the entire city in its glistening benediction. – Donna Leon • Anything Can Happen is also, incidentally, a poem that arose from teaching. I’d talked about the Horace Ode (I, 34) [on which the poem is based] in a lecture I gave at Harvard in the fall of 2000 entitled Bright Boltsand remembered it after the Twin Towers attack. – Seamus Heaney • Architecture is the alphabet of giants; it is the largest set of symbols ever made to meet the eyes of men. A tower stands up like a sort of simplified stature, of much more than heroic size. – Gilbert K. Chesterton • Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower. – Denis Diderot • As a system of philosophy it is not like the Tower of Babel, so daring its high aim as to seek a shelter against God’s anger; but it is like a pyramid poised on its apex. – Adam Sedgwick • As for mathematicians themselves: don’t expect too much help. Most of them are too far removed in their ivory towers to take up such challenges. And anyway, they are not competent. After all, they are just mathematicians-what we need is paramathematicians, like you… It is you who can be the welding force, between mathematicians and stories, in order to achieve the synthesis. – Apostolos Doxiadis • As there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got above, but they tower over us, and most in the moment when our interests tempt us to wound them. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • At every crossway on the path that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past. Let us have no fear that the fair towers of former days be sufficiently defended. The least that the most timid among us can do is not to add to the immense dead weight that nature drags along. – Maurice Maeterlinck • At the great iron gate of the churchyard he stopped and looked in. He looked up at the high tower spectrally resisting the wind, and he looked round at the white tombstones, like enough to the dead in their winding-sheets, and he counted the nine tolls of the clock-bell. – Charles Dickens • Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible. – Paulo Freire

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Tower', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_tower').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_tower img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Barclays Bank in England purchased bankrupt Lehman Brothers Tuesday along with its Manhattan tower, saving nine thousand jobs. It’s humiliating. The United States of America is 232 years old and we’re having to go to mom for money. – Argus Hamilton • Be as a tower firmly set; Shakes not its top for any blast that blows. – Dante Alighieri • Be like a solid tower whose brave height remains unmoved by all the winds that blow; the man who lets his thoughts be turned aside by one thing or another, will lose sight of his true goal, his mind sapped of its strength. – Dante Alighieri • Be not that far from me, for trouble is near; haste Thee to help me. Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight. My goodness, and my fortress; my high tower, and my deliverer; my shield, and he in whom I trust; who subdueth my people under me. O my God, I trust in thee: let me not be ashamed, let not mine enemies triumph over me – Barry Pepper • Beautiful city! . . . spreading her gardens to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age . . . her ineffable charm. . . . Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! – Matthew Arnold • Because I was new to comics, I didn’t know what to expect! However, I really like working collaboratively [on Dark Tower series], since I feel that – with so many different imaginations working together – the final product is so much richer. I also feel incredibly lucky to be able to work with such an accomplished and experienced team. – Robin Furth • Before Bin Laden did everything but advertise. Yet he had to blow up the Twin Towers just to get the attention of anyone outside the intelligence community. So what did we do? We invaded the wrong country, killed the wrong madman, and too often used the wrong interrogation techniques on the wrong people-all because our leaders lost contact with the truth. – Richard North Patterson • Boston: Clear out eight hundred thousand people and preserve it as a museum piece. New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it. – Frank Lloyd Wright • Bowing down in blind credulity, as is my custom, before mere authority and the tradition of the elders, superstitiously swallowing a story I could not test at the time by experiment or private judgment, I am firmly of the opinion that I was born on the 29th of May, 1874, on Campden Hill, Kensington; and baptised according to the formularies of the Church of England in the little church of St. George opposite the large Waterworks Tower that dominated that ridge. – Gilbert K. Chesterton • But it seems that something has happened that has never happened before; though we know not just when, or why, or how, or where. Men have left God not for gods, they say, but for no gods; and this has never happened before. That men both deny gods and worship gods, professing first Reason, and the money, and power, and what they call life, or race, or dialect.The church disowned, the tower overthrown, the bells upturned, what have we to do but stand with empty hands and palms upturned in an age which advances progressively backwards? – T. S. Eliot • But the power of destiny is something awesome; neither wealth, nor Ares, nor a tower, nor dark-hulled ships might escape it. – Sophocles • Can you imagine the headlines if I gave someone food poisoning? They’d hang me off Tower Bridge by my ballbag! – Gordon Ramsay • Character is both formed and revealed by how one deals with everyday situations as well as extraordinary pressures and temptations. Like a well-made tower, character is built stone by stone, decision by decision. – Michael Josephson • Chefs who cook in these ivory towers are in control in their own world. We try to approximate that world as best we can, but ultimately our goal is to please our clients. – David Castle • Children from ten to twenty don’t want to be understood. Their whole ambition is to feel strange and alien and misinterpreted so that they can live austerely in some stone tower of adolescence, their privacies unviolated. – Phyllis McGinley • Come, weave us a scheme so I can pay them back! Stand beside me, Athena, fire me with daring, fierce as the day we ripped Troy’s glittering crown of towers down. Stand by me – furious now as then, my bright-eyed one – and I would fight three hundred men, great goddess, with you to brace me, comrade-in-arms in battle! – Homer • Command is a mountaintop. The air breathed there is different, and the perspectives seen there are different, from those of the valley of obedience. The passion for order and the genius for construction, which are part of man’s natural endowment, get full play there. The man who has grown great sees from the top of his tower what he can make, if he so wills, of the swarming masses below him. – Bertrand de Jouvenel • Do you call the people in Los Angeles in the nineties – do you call them rebels or opposition ? They are rebels. They are not rebels even, they are beheading. This opposition, opposing country or government, by beheading ? By barbecuing heads ? By eating the hearts of your victim ? Is that opposition ? What do you call the people who attacked the two towers on the 11th of September ? Opposition ? Even if they’re not Americans, I know this, but some of them I think have nationality – I think one of them has American nationality. Do you call him opposition or terrorist ? – Bashar al-Assad • Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility. – Saint Augustine • Donald Trump used undocumented labor to build the Trump Tower. He underpaid undocumented workers, and when they complained, he basically said what a lot of employers do: “You complain, I’ll get you deported.” – Hillary Clinton • Ellen Barkin, your upcoming TV show ‘The New Normal’ premiers on September 11th. September 11th, that sounds about right. Every clip I’ve seen feels like I’m watching a third tower collapse. – Anthony Jeselnik • Everybody was going along thinking that it was a day like any other day, and bang, down went the Twin Towers. Changed everything. So you can’t really predict the future, but you can say, “Boy, are those glaciers ever melting.” You can measure that, and you can say, “When they’re all melted there won’t be any Athabasca River,” and you can say, “What will happen to the oil sands then?” because you need a lot of water to make that oil. “Where’s that going to come from?” You can say things like that. – Margaret Atwood • Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel, which consequently had to be destroyed. And then came the next shock. We had to realize that the people that did this were brilliant. It showed that the ego we could hold up until September 10 was inadequate. – Norman Mailer • For a while I thought I was the dragon. I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was the princess, cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle, young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with confidence but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess, while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire, and getting stabbed to death. Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal. You still get to be the hero. You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights! – Richard Siken • For some, bottles of liquor gleam like the towers of Eldorado. – Mason Cooley • Four years ago, I promised to end the war in Iraq. We did. I promised to refocus on the terrorists who actually attacked us on 9/11. We have. We’ve blunted the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over. A new tower rises above the New York skyline, al Qaeda is on the path to defeat, and Osama bin Laden is dead. – Barack Obama • From the exterior face of the wall towers must be projected, from which an approaching enemy may be annoyed by weapons, from the embrasures of those towers, right and left. – Marcus Vitruvius Pollio • From the shaken tower A flock of bells take flight, And go with the hour. – Alice Meynell • From whatever you wish to know and measure you must take your leave, at least for a time. Only when you have left the town can yousee how high its towers rise above the houses. – Friedrich Nietzsche • Grace! It’s Christmas for goodness sake! Think about the baby Jesus. Up in that tower letting his hair down, so that the three wise men could climb up and spin the dreidel and see if there’s six more weeks of winter! – Karen Walker • Great towers take time to construct. – Herman Melville • Hawai‘i Pacific University’s new use of the iconic Aloha Tower Marketplace will continue its historic role of welcoming visitors, and now students, to the heart of Honolulu in a modern, vibrant mixed-use space. – Kirk Caldwell • His Name will never fall. His Name will never be defeated. His Name will never be reduced to rubble. A tower that’s stronger than any man-made fortress and large enough to see from a distance, even if we’ve lost our way. – Liz Curtis Higgs • Huge knots of sea-weed hung upon the jagged and pointed stones, trembling in every breath of wind; and the green ivy clung mournfully round the dark and ruined battlements. Behind it rose the ancient castle, its towers roofless, and its massive walls crumbling away, but telling us proudly of its own might and strength, as when, seven hundred years ago, it rang with the clash of arms, or resounded with the noise of feasting and revelry. – Charles Dickens • I actually felt calmer and more serene when we got up to the tower that I think I ever have. We had literally done everything we could to prepare. – Roseline Filion • I am an idealist. I often feel I would like to be an artist in an ivory tower. Yet it is imperative that I speak to people, so I must desert that ivory tower. To do this, I am a journalist – a photojournalist. But I am always torn between the attitude of the journalist, who is a recorder of facts, and the artist, who is often necessarily at odds with the facts. My principle concern is for honesty, above all honesty with myself. – W. Eugene Smith • I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song. – Rainer Maria Rilke • I am more than happy to invite my five favorite fictional characters. Roland Deschain from Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. There’s a whole world about Roland left to know. I’ve got questions. He’d have answers. So pour him a glass of wine. – Megan Chance • I am very sorry to say that I rejoiced when I once more perceived the towers of Windsor behind me. – Karl Philipp Moritz • I consider part of lower Manhattan to be hallowed ground. Nearly 3,000 people lost their lives in the World Trade Center towers… and for that reason alone, our nation should make absolutely sure that what gets built on Ground Zero is an inspiring tribute to all who loved the Twin Towers, worked in them, and died there. – David Shuster • I decided, “Well, I’ll be a forest ranger!” Because I thought, “I’ll get to go out in the woods, I’ll be in the forest, and I can sit in a tower and watch for forest fires and play my guitar. That’s what I want to do!” Well, I was an idiot, of course. – Keith Carradine • I do know that if you can name certain things and understand them, it allows you to make better choices. Unfortunately, there’s so much misinformation that towers over a person’s head, it’s really difficult to make the right decisions. Consequently, we just go along because it’s way too hard to sift through the information. – Jimmy Santiago Baca • I don’t think that we need to see [Donald Trump] tax returns to verify his financial acumen. I walk into the Trump Tower every day and I’m like, this guy did pretty well for himself before I got here. – Kellyanne Conway • I don’t want to become an ivory tower filmmaker. That sounds peculiar, but I want to be a mainstream filmmaker. I want the largest possible audience that I can find – but, of course, on my terms. – Peter Greenaway • I famously stole tons of VHS tapes from a video store I worked in. It was detailed in my special, Laboring Under Delusions. I worked at Tower Video and stole a bunch of videotapes from them, and then got caught and had to return the videotapes. It was a mortifying experience. – Paul F. Tompkins • I fear I shall never be…good for anything in this world, but composing airs, building towers, forming gardens, collecting old Japan, and writing a journey to China or the Moon. – William Thomas Beckford • I grew up looking at the Sunset Strip, literally. The things that I remember are the Rainbow Room, the Roxy, the Bizarries, Tower, I grew up my whole life going there, Filthy McNasty’s and I said, I need these things and now fill it in with other iconic buildings. – Adam Shankman • I had no idea what to expect! When the series began, I was new to comics, so I really had to keep my head down and plow forward so that I could learn as much about this new medium as possible. I wanted so much to do a good job and to please Stephen King and all the longtime Dark Tower fans. – Robin Furth • I have a commission to do a piece in a place in California, Oliver Ranch, which has an eight-storey structure called The Tower designed by the visual artist Ann Hamilton. – Pauline Oliveros • I knew if we could pull in the Stephen King fans, we’d have a ball game. The point at which I finally became confident of the audience interest was when I showed up at one of the Marvel midnight openings to launch the very first issue of Dark Tower. – Peter David • I learned that there is good in this world, if you look hard enough for it. I learned that not everyone is disappointing, including me, and that a 1,257 bump in the ground can feel higher than a bell tower if you’re standing next to the right person. – Jennifer Niven • I live my life in widening circle That reach out across the world. I may not ever complete the last one, But I give myself to it. I circle around God, that primordial tower. I have been circling for thousands of years, And I still don’t know: am I a falcon, A storm, or a great song? [I, 2] – Rainer Maria Rilke • I look to the right as I cross the bridge and smile to see the tip of the Eiffel Tower soaring over rooftops in the distance on the other side of the river. I’ve seen it in photographs a thousand times, but seeing it in person for the first time that reminds me that I’m really, truly here, thousands of miles away, across an ocean from home. – Kristin Harmel • I love her with a love as still As a broad river’s peaceful might, Which by high tower and lowly mill, Goes wandering at its own will, And yet does ever flow aright. – James Russell Lowell • I met this wonderful guy who owned an old pub near the Eiffel Tower called Malone’s (he’s French but it’s an Irish name). He had a cellar with a piano and told me I could use it whenever I wanted to. I played lots of gigs down there. When I came back I played a show at the Knitting Factory. – Regina Spektor • I must brave the interior of the most tawdry and literally trumpery tower of them all … the Trump Taj Mahal. For taking the name of the priceless mausoleum of Agra, one of the beauties and wonders of the world, for that alone Donald Trump should be stripped naked and whipped with scorpions along the boardwalk.- It is as if a giant toad has raped a butterfly. – Stephen Fry • I seek the spread of freedom and democracy in the way that satisfies God. They [Americans] have planned and paved the ways for a long time, but it is God who is the real planner – and the proof of this is the fall of the American twin towers […] a miracle from God. – Muqtada al Sadr • I suppose that, for me at least, the biggest difference betweenThe Gunslinger Born and the next two story arcs (The Long Road Home and Treachery), is that while Gunslinger Bornwas a translation of an existing novel, the next two arcs are really the stories that I’ve been weaving since I first started working with Steve King on the Dark Tower back in 2000/2001. – Robin Furth • I think the only boundaries are individual and personal. A writer should be free to write about anything he or she wants to, including the twin towers. I have made small references to 9/11 in my past two books. – Michael Connelly • I think there’s a longer shortlist for that particular position and others.Highly qualified men and women who have come to Bedminster, come to Trump Tower. People of different races and ethnicities. All political persuasions. People who have different backgrounds, public sector, private sector. Most of them will not be in the cabinet. Most of them are coming because they love the country and they want to share what their work on a particular issue or a particular success story has been. – Kellyanne Conway • I understand, probably more than anyone, what a threat Iraq was and the people that threatened Iraq was. I was beneath the towers on September 11th when they fell. And I — again, I just — I want to thank the President for the honor in allowing me to go there, because I lost 23 people. I wear this memorial band for the 23 I lost. – Bernard Kerik • I’ve never known fear; as a youth I fought/ In endless battles. I am old, now,/ But I will fight again, seek fame still,/ If the dragon hiding in his tower dares/ To face me – Burton Raffel • If Donald Trump builds the wall the way he builds Trump Towers, he’ll be using illegal immigrant labor to do it. – Marco Rubio • If I’m the president of the United States, I walk right into Union Square, I set up my little presidential podium, and I say, ‘Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you’re not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead. And if Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we’re not going to do anything about it. We’re going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you, except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.’ – Bill O’Reilly • If in the twilight of memory we should meet once more,we shall speak again together and you shall sing to me a deeper song. And if our hands should meet in another dream we shall build another tower in the sky. – Khalil Gibran • If one attempts to achieve deity or to have the holy, he is thrown back; he is refused. His language is taken from him. He can no longer even communicate. That’s the Tower of Babel. – Frank Moore Cross • If only it were possible to love without injury – fidelity isn’t enough: I had been faithful to Anne and yet I had injured her. The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation. In a way I was glad that my wife had struck out at me again – I had forgotten her pain for too long, and this was the only kind of recompense I could give her. Unfortunately the innocent are always involved in any conflict. Always, everywhere, there is some voice crying from a tower. – Graham Greene • If you gather a lot of stuff, then you write it, write in scenes with dialogue. Somewhere in the middle, rising from all this research like strong metal towers, is your opinions. – Jimmy Breslin • If you shut yourself up disdainfully in your ivory tower and insist that you have your own conscience and are satisfied with its approval, it is because you know that everybody is criticizing you, condemning you, or laughing at you. – Luigi Pirandello • I’m the tower of power, too sweet to be sour. – Randy Savage • In December of 2002, the late Richard Corliss, a respected movie critic with a long and illustrious career, wrote an embarrassing letter of support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan in the guise of a Time magazine review of Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers. – Viggo Mortensen • In order to capture Mid-World for new readers, I had to streamline the original tale [ The Gunslinger Born], but I also had to incorporate scenes from earlier Dark Tower novels. – Robin Furth • In the earlier novels, Steve King tells us that John Farson, and perhaps even the Crimson King himself, are but other names and faces that belong to Walter O’Dim. However, in The Dark Tower, he tells us very clearly that Walter, John Farson, and the Crimson King are actually separate individuals. – Robin Furth • In truth, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” isn’t about Sept. 11. It’s about the impulse to drain that day of its specificity and turn it into yet another wellspring of generic emotions: sadness, loneliness, happiness. This is how kitsch works. It exploits familiar images, be they puppies or babies – or, as in the case of this movie, the twin towers – and tries to make us feel good, even virtuous, simply about feeling. And, yes, you may cry, but when tears are milked as they are here, the truer response should be rage. – Manohla Dargis • Inanimate objects sometimes appear endowed with a strange power of sight. A statue notices, a tower watches, the face of an edifice contemplates. – Victor Hugo • It [destroying Twin Towers] was a leap into another realm – the realm of crazy abstractions and mythological generalities, involving people who have hijacked Islam for their own purposes. It’s important not to fall into that trap and to try to respond with a metaphysical retaliation of some sort. – Edward Said • It has passed over mountain ranges and The waters of the seven seas. It has shown upon laborers in the fields, Into the windows of homes, And shops, and factories.

It has beheld cities with gleaming towers, And also the hovels of the poor. It has been witness to both good and evil, The works of honest men and women and The conspiracy of knaves.

It has seen marching armies, bomb-blasted villages And “the destruction that wasteth at noonday.” Now, unsullied from its tireless journey, It comes to us, Messenger of the morning. Harbinger of a new day. – Clinton Lee Scott • It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds. – W. G. Sebald • It would be an endless battle if it were all up to ego because it does not destroy and is not destroyed by itself It is like a wave it makes itself up, it rushes forward getting nowhere really it crashes, withdraws and makes itself up again pulls itself together with pride towers with pride rushes forward into imaginary conquest crashes in frustration withdraws with remorse and repentance pulls itself together with new resolution – Agnes Martin • It would be as easy for the United States to build a tower to remove the sun, as to remove polygamy, or the Church and Kingdom of God. – Heber C. Kimball • It’s a fallacy that writers have to shut themselves up in their ivory towers to write. I have all these interruptions, three of which I gave birth to. If I was thrown for a loop every time I was distracted I could never get anything done. – Jodi Picoult • It’s about communication, no matter how impossibly hard your art is to understand and how much of an ivory tower or high horse you get on, it’s still basically communication or why are you doing it? – Wayne White • It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. – J. R. R. Tolkien • It’s not by coincidence that a lot of protesters against the new presidency in America and in front of the Trump Tower, even in London… the protesters were 90 percent women. The image of the woman and the problem of the woman still exists. Not exactly in the same terms as 200 hundred years ago, but we still have the problem here. – Claude-Michel Schonberg • It’s true that non-ionizing radiation lacks the power to have damage. But its damage seems to come from its modulated signal. So every 900 milliseconds, if you have a cellphone in your pocket, it’s getting half of that radiation which is getting into you as it seeks the signal from the tower. – Devra Davis • I’ve always been interested in pop culture. Some of my colleagues think of pop culture as beneath them, or there’s the ivory tower and then there’s everybody else, and I never could buy into that wall that’s been put up by so many people over the decades and even the centuries. – Neil deGrasse Tyson • I’ve been to Mar-a-Lago. I’m not going to Trump Tower. – Rush Limbaugh • I’ve learned a heck of a lot this way [making Dark Tower comics]. I’ve also learned a lot from the editors at Marvel, who are always an equal part in the creative team. – Robin Furth • Jack Aubrey is a tremendous tower of strength and you always want to read about him. – Clive James • Just like Trump Tower, he [Donald Trump] must have hired a foreign worker to do his own tweets. – Marco Rubio • Just wait and see this stuff play out as it does. But if, for example, why would he say some human activity linked to climate change when he has gone on record as saying that he doesn’t believe it and we’re gonna get people out of the EPA who do and we’re gonna stop playing games with this. Why would he say it? [Donald Trump] wants to build a bridge with the opposition. This is why you don’t see me at Trump Tower going up and down the elevators. – Rush Limbaugh • King Henry: But what a point, my lord, your falcon made, And what a pitch she flew above the rest! To see how God in all his creatures works! Yea, man and birds are fain of climbing high. Suffolk: No marvel, an it like your majesty, My lord protectors hawks do tower so well; They know their masters loves to be aloft, And bears his thoughts above his falcon’s pitch. Gloucester: My lord, ’tis but a base ignoble mind That mounts no higher than a bird can soar. – William Shakespeare • Language as the technology of human extension, whose powers of division and separation we know so well, may have been the “Tower of Babel” by which men sought to scale the highest heavens. Today computers hold out the promise of a means of instant tr – Marshall McLuhan • Lay a beam between these two towers of such width as we need to walk on: there is no philosophical wisdom of such great firmness that it can give us courage to walk on it as we should if it were on the ground. – Michel de Montaigne • Let’s say I take a picture of the Eiffel Tower in front of the casino in Las Vegas. That type of pattern might suggest I’m just a tourist. But if my next one is of another dam or electrical station, someone might say ‘Well, that’s kind of strange’. What do the different pieces of the puzzle mean when you put them together? And one of the advantages of geographic profiling in geography is a common denominator for so many different types of information sources. – Kim Rossmo • Living in a tower, however secure it may feel, is hardly a social attribute. – Dirk Bogarde • Long ago I decided that this program has nothing to do, the success of the program depends nothing at all on who wins or loses elections. “Are you abandoning [Donald] Trump?” No, no, no, no, don’t misunderstand, I’m just explaining. I should have told you. I get emails constantly from people asking me when am I going to Trump Tower. I’m not going to Trump Tower. – Rush Limbaugh • Louis Armstrong is the master of the jazz solo. He became the beacon, the light in the tower, that helped the rest of us navigate the tricky waters of jazz improvisation. – Ellis Marsalis, Jr. • Ludlow….is probably the loveliest town in England with its hill of Georgian houses ascending from the river Teme to the great tower of the cross-shaped church, rising behind a classic market building. – John Betjeman • Manhattan, one of the most moneyed spots on the planet, also has one of the greatest concentrations of people in its skyscrapers. Its also, of course, the place where every architect wants to build his tower. – Norman Foster • Many live in the ivory tower called reality; they never venture on the open sea of thought. – Francois Gautier • Maybe what I admired most about John Steinbeck is that he never mortgaged his 45-acre heart for a suite in an ivory tower. – Tom Robbins • Meadows trim with daisies pied, Shallow brooks and rivers wide Towers and battlements it sees Bosom’d high in tufted trees, Where perhaps some beauty lies, The cynosure of neighboring eyes. – John Milton • Merely taking the profits from the hotels and putting those aside is not enough. They need to look at bank loans. They need to look at foreign banks leasing space in the Trump Tower. – Reince Priebus • Moira sacrificed all that she had and all the richness of life that still lay in front of her in order to save just one more person. Moira was killed when the south tower collapsed … Today, we choose to remember and share the joy Moira brought to all of us, and we vow that she will always live in our hearts. – James Smith • My father built low- and moderate-income housing in Queens and Brooklyn. I learned a lot from him. But I went in a different direction. I built Trump Tower in Manhattan, the most luxurious building in the world. It’s not going to be easy for my son, but maybe it shouldn’t be easy. Life is, after all, a test. – Donald Trump • My father was always anxious to give pleasure to his children. Accordingly, he took me one day, as a special treat, to the top of the grand old tower, to see the chimes played. – James Nasmyth • My friends are gone and my hair is grey. I ache in places I used to play. And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on. I’m just paying my rent every day in the tower of song. – Leonard Cohen • My loving friend, you see, my life was never given a foundation, no one was able to imagine what it would want to become. In Venice there stands the so-called Ca del Duca, a princely foundation, on which later the most wretched tenement came to be built. With me it’s the opposite: the beautiful arched elevations of my spirit rest on the most tentative beginning; a wooden scaffolding, a few boards….Is that why I feel inhibited in raising the nave, the tower to which the weight of the great bells is to be hoisted (by angels, who else could do it)? – Rainer Maria Rilke • My prophecy is but half his journey yet, For yonder walls, that pertly front your town, Yon towers, whose wanton tops do buss the clouds, Must kiss their own feet. – William Shakespeare • Nigel Farage, even if you don`t follow British politics, he`s a British politician but you may recognize him from his frequent visits to the United States, for example, his time at Trump Tower. You may recognize him from his time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump. – Rachel Maddow • Nineteen people flew into the towers. It seems hard for me to imagine that we could go to war enough to make the world safe enough that nineteen people wouldn’t want to do harm to us. So it seems like we have to rethink a strategy that is less military-based. – Jon Stewart • No creaking gates, no gothic towers, no shuttered windows. Yet for the past ten months this house has been the focus of an astonishing barrage of supernatural activity. – Michael Parkinson • No one ever asks me about Breeze O’Rourke! I did the pilot for[Payne] right after Jawbreaker, or at least right around the same time, and it was an Americanized version of Fawlty Towers. That was the first time I worked with John Larroquette, and it was definitely not the last time. – Julie Benz • No one had more impact on my career than Gil Hodges. Playing for him was a learning experience, and he was a tower of strength. Not everbody liked him, but everybody respected him. He went about his job in a very professional manner, and it caused me to do the same with my job. – Tom Seaver • Nor aught availed him now to have built in heaven high towers; nor did he scrape by all his engines, but was headlong sent with his industrious crew to build in hell. – John Milton • Now you can leave home at any time you like.Your mother comes down and finds a picture of the Eiffel Tower on her plate. And she says, ‘Oh! Rosemary’s gone to Paris. No wonder the bathroom was so tidy.’ And nobody minds. But in my day, to go abroad with all those wicked Frenchmen, what would become of them? So no-one ever went anywhere. – Quentin Crisp • On 9/11: … those towers represented human triumph over nature. Larger than life, built to be unburnable, they were the Titanic of our day. For them to burn and fall so quickly means that the whole superstructure we depend upon to mitigate nature and assure our comfort and safety could fall. – Starhawk • On a trip to Germany, Lange and his entourage were climbing the tower of an ancient castle when they stopped to catch their breath. “How old is this ruin?” someone asked a guide. “Forty-two years,” said Lange. – David Lange • One of my unsung heroes is Erich Mendelsohn. I met him when I was a student and he was a cranky old man and very unpleasant. But if you go to his Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany you see an enormous intellect at work with a language that was personal and new. It has a sense of urban design and of theater and procession I hadn’t seen before. – Frank Gehry • One of the things I like about being a celebrity is that you can get away with murder. Not just metaphorically, literally. Remember that annoying blond dog reporter at E News used to talk smack about me? I paid two mobsters five million dollars each to throw her off the Stratosphere tower in Las Vegas. – Zach Braff • Only imagination that towers can reproduce evanescence and render rigidity flexible. – Marianne Moore • Our lives are full of supposes. Suppose this should happen, or suppose that should happen; what could we do; how could we bear it? But, if we are living in the high tower of the dwelling place of God, all these supposes will drop out of our lives. We shall be quiet from the fear of evil, for no threatenings of evil can penetrate into the high tower of God. – Hannah Whitall Smith • Our Lord never called His people to help build the tower of Babel in the hope of getting a Bible study in the basement. He commanded us to build our own city on a hill. – David Chilton • Our problems may tower over us, but God towers over our problems. – Dillon Burroughs • Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn, the word “sophisticate” means, very simply, “obscene.” A sophisticatedstory is a dirty story. Some of that meaning was wafted eastward and got itself mixed up into the present definition. So that a “sophisticate” means: one who dwells in a tower made of a DuPont substitute for ivory and holds a glass of flat champagne in one hand and an album of dirty post cards in the other. – Dorothy Parker • Pale death, with impartial step, knocks at the hut of the poor and the towers of kings. Lat., Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas Regumque turres. – Horace • Peaceful New Yorkers, pls refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real. – Sarah Palin • Pride juggles with her toppling towers, They strike the sun and cease, But the firm feet of humility They grip the ground like trees. – Gilbert K. Chesterton • Protected by a no-fly zone, surrounded by protesters, Trump Tower is buzzing with intensity. The president-elect’s family, loyalist advisers and wannabes all jockeying for position. – George Stephanopoulos • Rome in the ages, dimmed with all her towers, / Floats in the mist, a little cloud at tether. – Alice Meynell • Shepperton Church was a very different looking building five-and-twenty years ago. To be sure, its substantial stone tower looks at you through its intelligent eye, the clock, with the friendly expression of former days; but in everything else what changes! – George Eliot • Skill is successfully walking a tightrope between the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center. Intelligence is not trying. – Marilyn vos Savant • Smooth shapes are very rare in the wild but extremely important in the ivory tower and the factory. – Benoit Mandelbrot • So, on the eastern summit, clad in gray, morn, like a horseman girt for travel, comes, and from his tower of mist night’s watchman hurries down. – Henry Kirke White • Social media has created a legion of social delinquents, billions of people speaking not their minds but their spleens, venting everything from the gum-cracking snark befitting a hair-twisting mallrat to the froth-flecked rage of a bell tower marksman. – Steven Weber • Societies raise their grandest monuments to what their cultures value most highly. As the tallest buildings in a city noted for tall buildings, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were certainly monumental. – Michael Mandelbaum • Sometimes, looking up at Sophiatown… I have felt I was looking at an Italian village somewhere in Umbria. For you do ‘look up’ at Sophiatown, and in the evening light, across the blue-grey haze of smoke from braziers and chimneys, against a saffron sky, you see close-packed, red-roofed little houses. …And above it all you see the Church of Christ the King, its tower visible north, south, east, and west. – Trevor Huddleston • Sta come torre ferma, che non crolla Giammai la cima per soffiar de’ venti. Be steadfast as a tower that doth not bend its stately summit to the tempest’s shock. – Dante Alighieri • Stand firm as the tower that never shakes its top whatever wind may blow. – Dante Alighieri • Statues and children frame the Eiffel Tower and its watery image. When the Germans occupied Paris, they housed a beacon light in the Tower to guide their night planes. The victorious United States Army requisitioned this landmark as a radar transmission point. – Maynard Owen Williams • That tower of strength Which stood four-square to all the winds that blew. – Alfred Lord Tennyson • The artist’s life is to be where life is, active life, found in neither ivory tower nor concrete shelter; he must be out listening to everything, looking at everything, and thinking it all out afterward. – Sean O’Casey • The ascendancy over men’s minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs. – Rose Macaulay • The day I was born, my house burnt down; the day I left home, the Twin Towers burnt down; and I lived in a jungle in India at 15. – Neon Hitch • The fame of a battlefield grows with its years; Napoleon storming the Bridge of Lodi, and Wellington surveying the towers of Salamanca, affect us with fainter emotions than Brutus reading in his tent at Philippi, or Richard bearing down with the English chivalry upon the white armies of Saladin. – Robert Aris Willmott • The great Emathian conqueror bid spare The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower Went to the ground. – John Milton • The higher the tower, the greater the fall thereof. – Horace • The ideas of [ Le Corbusier ] that actually found their way into practice were deeply destructive – for instance, the tower-in-a-park, which mutated into the vertical slums of the late 20th century. – James Howard Kunstler • The ivory tower of the artist may be the only stronghold left for human values, cultural treasures, man’s cult of beauty. – Anais Nin • The King is in his Tower, eating bread and honey. The Breakers in the basement, making all the money. – Stephen King • The king’s name is a tower of strength. – William Shakespeare • The lofty pine is most easily brought low by the force of the wind, and the higher the tower the greater the fall thereof. – Horace • The lofty pine is oftenest shaken by the winds; High towers fall with a heavier crash; And the lightning strikes the highest mountain. – Horace • The most beautiful conception of immortality of which I know, and certainly one that by contrast shows the utter vulgarity of Christian ideas, is set forth in Pindar’s second Olympian: after three or six lives in which a man has lived with strict justice and perfect integrity, he passes beyond the tower of Cronus to the fair realm that cannot be reached by land or sea, where gentle breezes from a placid ocean blow forever on the fields of asphodel. For a description, see Pindar. If the beauty of great poetry can commend a religion, here you have it. – Revilo P. Oliver • The new goddess contingency could not be erected until the God of heaven was utterly despoiled of his dominion over the sons of men, and in the room thereof a home-bred idol of self-sufficiency set up, and the world persuaded to worship it. But that the building climb no higher, let all men observe how the word of God overthrows this babylonian tower. – John Owen • The only refuge left to us was the poet’s ivory tower, which we climbed, ever higher, to isolate ourselves from the mob. – Gerard De Nerval • The people who died in the Twin Towers in that terrible crime mattered. The people who were bombed to death in dusty villages in Afghanistan didn’t matter, even though it now seems that their numbers were greater. The people who will die in Iraq don’t matter. – John Pilger • The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star. – Gilbert K. Chesterton • The polls demonstrate that 50 percent of Americans who get their news from TV think Saddam Hussein was behind the Twin Towers attack. Man, have they got ways for getting half-truths out right away now, thanks to TV! I think TV is a calamity in a democracy. – Kurt Vonnegut • The reason for the scaffolding on the tower of Saint Germain-des-Près is that a rich American has purchased it and is having it crated for shipping. – Cornelia Otis Skinner • The repeat run of Fawlty Towers (BBC2) drew bigger audiences than ever and deservedly so. Statistical surveys reveal that only the television critic of the Spectator is incapable of seeing the joke, which is that Basil Fawlty has the wrong temperament to be a hotel proprietor, just as some other people have the wrong temperament to be television critics. – Clive James • The same architect who designed the Seattle fair’s futuristic Science Center, with its lacy Gothic arches and spires, Minoru Yamasaki, was hired to design the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Seattle had promised fairgoers a glimpse of the world that would exist in 2001. That year eventually unfolded as something less than the dream we’d imagined. – Chuck Palahniuk • The spring rains woke the dormant tillers, and bright green shoots sprang from the moist earth and rose like sleepers stretching after a long nap. As spring gave way to summer, the bright green stalks darkened, became tan, turned golden brown. The days grew long and hot. Thick towers of swirling black clouds brought rain, and the brown stems glistened in the perpetual twilight that dwelled beneath the canopy. The wheat rose and the ripening heads bent in the prairie wind, a rippling curtain, an endless, undulating sea that stretched to the horizon. – Rick Yancey • The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather- beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins. – Heinrich Heine • The sun sets in the west (just about everyone knows that), but Sunset Towers faced east. Strange! – Ellen Raskin • The tarot card ‘The Tower’ seemed a chilling reflection of the events of September 11, 2001. – Neil Peart • The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now & with somebody & and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. – Hunter S. Thompson • The towers fell, and the first thing that went through my head was my dad’s voice: ‘Well, you brought a new life into the world, and the world’s over. Nice timing, numbnuts! – Christopher Titus • The university must be retrospective. The gale that gives direction to the vanes on all its towers blows out of antiquity. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • The world should have stopped, but it didn’t. The world kept on going. How can the world just keep on going? An earthquake in India kills a thousand people, and the world keeps on going. A famine in China kills a million people, and the world keeps on going. The twin towers of the World Trade Center buckle and fall, and the world, the world keeps on going. – Alison McGhee • There are other great writers who are not read properly in their own day for the reason, perhaps, that their readers are not yet born. What they have to say to their own generation is said so at cross-purposes and with such apparent irrelevance that it is not understood. They are, as it were, giants who tower above their own age to cast their shadows across the next. – Caroline Gordon • There is an attraction and a charm inherent in the colossal that is not subject to ordinary theories of art … The tower will be the tallest edifice ever raised by man. Will it therefore be imposing in its own way? – Gustave Eiffel • There is in the world no rock or tower of such a height that it cannot be scaled by any man (provided he lack not feet) if ladders are placed in the proper position or steps are cut in the rock, made in the right place, and furnished with railings against the danger of falling over. If we examine ourselves, we see that our faculties grow in such a manner that what goes before paves the way for what comes after. – John Amos Comenius • There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers’ battle with the heavens that cover them. Snow, rain, and mist highlight, drench, or conceal the vast towers, but those towers, hostile to mystery and blind to any sort of play, shear off the rain’s tresses and shine their three thousand swords through the soft swan of the fog. – Federico Garcia Lorca • There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tower high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. – J. R. R. Tolkien • There’s an interesting book about that called The Third Reich and the Ivory Tower, written by Stephen H. Norwood. It has a long discussion about Harvard, and indeed the school’s president, James Conant, did block Jewish faculty. He was the one who prevented European Jews from being admitted to the chemistry department – his field – and also had pretty good relations with the Nazis. – Noam Chomsky • There’s something ever egotistical in mountain-tops and towers, and all other grand and lofty things. – Herman Melville • Things poll well, but people don’t believe that politicians are telling the truth. Politicians might mention renewable energy, and the public will think, “That sounds good, but I don’t believe they’re going to do everything they can to build those towers.” – Zephyr Teachout • This general tendency to eliminate, by means of unverifiable speculations, the limits of the categories nature presents to us is the inheritance of biology from The Origin of Species. To establish the continuity required by theory, historical arguments are invoked, even though historical evidence is lacking. Thus are engendered those fragile towers of hypothesis based on hypothesis, where fact and fiction intermingle in an inextricable confusion. – W. R. Thompson • This is going to sound strange, but I really feel I know Roland very well. In Wizard and Glass, I got to know the young Roland, and then as I traveled with him from Eluria (found in the story “The Little Sisters of Eluria”) through Tull and the Mohaine Desert (The Gunslinger), and then all the way to the Dark Tower. – Robin Furth • Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lull’d by the coil of his crystalline streams Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ’s bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave’s intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them. – Percy Bysshe Shelley • Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: ‘It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.’ – James Keller • To neglect the common ground with other primates, and to deny the evolutionary roots of human morality, would be like arriving at the top of a tower to declare that the rest of the building is irrelevant, that the precious concept of “tower” ought to be reserved for the summit. – Frans de Waal • Tower Records is like a temple to me. I’ll stay there for hours. Nobody can shop for records with me. It drives them out of their minds. – Billy Bob Thornton • Towers in a modern town are a frill and a survival; they seem like the raised hands of the various churches, afraid of being overlooked, and saying to the forgetful public, Here I am! Or perhaps they are rival lightning rods, saying to the emanations of divine grace, “Please strike here! – George Santayana • Trinity Park lies directly across from the library, Trinity Church rising like a midieval thought amidst the glass and steel towers. – Nick Flynn • True, we [lawyers] build no bridges. We raise no towers. We construct no engines. We paint no pictures—unless as amateurs for our own principal amusement. There is little of all that we do which the eye of man can see. But we smooth out difficulties; we relieve stress; we correct mistakes; we take up other men’s burdens and by our efforts we make possible the peaceful life of men in a peaceful state. – John W. Davis • Trump has a clear goal: the division of Europe and the destruction of the European domestic market. The fact that Brexit propagandist Nigel Farage was the first European he received in his tower speaks volumes. That is why we must strengthen the European domestic market and work even more closely together in Europe. That is absolutely compulsory for Germany. – Martin Schulz • Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?–startling, unexpected, unknown? – Virginia Woolf • We do know that they are foreign missions today that are using Trump Towers, they say, why wouldn`t we want to show favor to the president of the United States? It would be offensive if we stayed at his competitor`s hotel. – Chuck Todd • We have had the stone age; we have had the iron age; and now we have the sky age, and the sky telegraph, and sky men, and sky cities. Mountains of stone are built out of men’s visions. Towers and skyscrapers swing up out of their wills and up out of their hearts. – Gerald Stanley Lee • Westminster Abbey, the Tower, a steeple, one church, and then another, presented themselves to our view; and we could now plainly distinguish the high round chimneys on the tops of the houses, which yet seemed to us to form an innumerable number of smaller spires, or steeples. – Karl Philipp Moritz • What [Franz] Kafka says about the Tower of Babel: In the beginning there were actually many languages, and then as a punishment God gave the world a single language. And then they stopped understanding each other. – Elie Wiesel • What a curious workmanship is that of the eye, which is in the body, as the sun in the world; set in the head as in a watch-tower, having the softest nerves for receiving the greater multitude of spirits necessary for the act of vision! – Stephen Charnock • What do we plant when we plant a tree? A thousand things that we daily see, We plant the spire that out-towers the crag, We plant the staff for our country’s flag; We plant the shade from the hot sun free, We plant all these when we plant the tree. – Henry Abbey • What the Londoner sees in his mind’s eye is that cluster of towers and pinnacles seen from Pentonville Hill and outlined against a foggy sunset, and the great arc of Barlow’s train shed gaping to devour incoming engines, and the sudden burst of exuberant Gothic of the hotel seen from gloomy Judd Street. – John Betjeman • What’s important is that you make the leap. Jump high and hard with intention and heart. Pay no mind to the vision that the commission made up. It’s up to you to make your life. Take what you have and stack it up like a tower of teetering blocks. Build your dream around that. – Cheryl Strayed • When all men were of one language, some of them built a high tower, as if they would thereby ascend up to heaven, but the gods sent storms of wind and overthrew the tower, and gave every one his peculiar language; and for this reason it was that the city was called Babylon. – Josephus • When I was a very young author, I knew I needed to build myself a tower outside of Europe. Like when you’re a hunter, and build towers to watch the animals move. I knew I would never understand the world without that perspective. I came to Africa for that rational reason, although I love Mozambique now. – Henning Mankell • When Larry Wright won the Pulitzer for The Looming Tower we all strutted around for weeks, until some sourpuss among us noted that it was actually Larry, and not the rest of us, who won the prize. – Elizabeth Crook • When we look at the settling of America we see a Bible in hand and God. Every Thanksgiving has God and the peacefulness of gratitude. It was important when the Twin Towers were hit and the sorrow with them that the first thing Congress did was sing “God Bless America.” – Bill Cosby • Where dwells the religion? Tell me first where dwells electricity, or motion, or thought or gesture. They do not dwell or stay atall. Electricity cannot be made fast, mortared up and ended, like London Monument, or the Tower, so that you shall know where to find it, and keep it fixed, as the English do with their things, forevermore; it is passing, glancing, gesticular; it is a traveller, a newness, a surprise, a secret which perplexes them, and puts them out. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always be a certain small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest. – H. P. Lovecraft • Who knows when Donald Trump will have a press conference? Maybe he’s just going to stay in Trump Tower and issue tweets – you know, gold-plated tweets to the American people. It’s scary. – Barbara Boxer • Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don’t know. The gamble of triumph or tragedy at this scale — and ultimately it is a gamble — demands an extraordinary payoff. The trade center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world. – Ada Louise Huxtable • With the advent of Trump Tower Live, the campaign`s new nightly broadcast, streamed over Facebook, rumors are once again, swirling of a potential Trump media empire to be launched after the election. – Chris Hayes • You are your own forerunner, and the towers you have builded are but the foundation of your giant-self. And that self too shall be a foundation. – Khalil Gibran • You might be a redneck if you’ve ever hauled a can of paint to the top of a water tower to defend your sister’s honor. – Jeff Foxworthy • You think fairy tales are only for girls? Here’s a hint – ask yourself who wrote them. I assure you, it wasn’t just the women. It’s the great male fantasy – all it takes is one dance to know that she’s the one. All it takes is the sound of her song from the tower, or a look at her sleeping face. And right away you know – this is the girl in your head, sleeping or dancing or singing in front of you. Yes, girls want their princes, but boys want their princesses just as much. And they don’t want a very long courtships. They want to know immediately. – David Levithan

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equitiesstocks · 5 years

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Towers Quotes

Official Website: Towers Quotes

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It has beheld cities with gleaming towers, And also the hovels of the poor. It has been witness to both good and evil, The works of honest men and women and The conspiracy of knaves.

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