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the-insomniac-emporium · 3 years

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Crimson Ties (Bela Dimitrescu/Reader, Soulmate AU) Pt. 4

Fandom: Resident Evil: Village Rating: T for language Warnings: None for this chap Genre: Hurt + comfort Summary: Sure, your soulmate may be a vampire (of sorts), but there's nothing that love can't conquer, right?... Maybe it's time you learn a little more about the odd circumstances of your soulmate's existence- and the fear that lies beneath the surface. Notes: If the last chapter was "hurt" followed by comfort, this is "comfort" followed by hurt, also known as the part where the story's central conflict comes into play. Features an appearance from Daniela, who reminds us that Cassandra's not the only one with a sharp tongue around here. Previous Chapters: 1: Stem the Flow, 2: Tangled Strands, 3: Rumbling Thunder

4: That Which Burns

“Of all the stars, the fairest,” Bela murmurs in your ear, keeping her arms wrapped loosely around your waist, before giving you a gentle kiss on the cheek. If you hadn’t already been blushing, you certainly would have now done so. You’re leaning into her touch, face flushed as can be, loving every moment of this. For a while now you’ve been curled up with her, while she reads excerpts from her favorite works. Although both of you would have preferred to do this outside, enjoying the view of the stars, you figured it would be best not to push your health too much. After all, you had lost a huge percentage of your blood. Well, temporarily, but it was still better to be safe than sorry.

“That’s probably my favorite line from Sappho,” you chimed, fondly remembering some of your schooling. “Though the one about being remembered always stands out to me. I’m not sure I remember it correctly, and I’m sure it’s been translated a few different ways over the years… but I think it’s ‘someone, I tell you, will remember us in another time’. Might have gotten that backwards, actually.” Giving an awkward little smile, you sheepishly rub the back of your head with one hand. “Either way it feels so romantic. To think of a love so strong that it echoes throughout time, fondly remembered for generations… it warms the heart.”

“Mhmm, most definitely, my dear. Many aren’t as lucky, however,” Bela laments, an odd expression crawling onto her face. There’s the slightest waver to her lower lip as she speaks. Concerned, you turn in place to get a better look, gently reaching out to caress her cheek. Is there something I’m missing? You think, wondering what you should say. “I’m alright, I promise. Merely distracted by a fleeting thought. Let’s read another, yes?” Before you can protest, she’s already turned to another page, starting to read as if she already knew which one was next (which would not, at all, surprise you).

Love shook my heart, Like the wind on the mountain, Troubling the oak-trees

“Oh, if only I could speak Aeolic Greek, so that I could serenade you with tender prose, all the days of your life… just as it was originally written. Wouldn’t that be lovely?” Bela offers, once again smiling wide, as if nothing in the world was wrong, at least not when you were by her side. Though you are not keen to ignore her earlier stroke of misery, you are equally reluctant to put a damper on her current upswing. Now what were you to do? Little comes to mind, other than the simplicity of human warmth, and so you lean once more into her embrace, head held aloft on the strength of her shoulder.

“Here, as I am now, is more than lovely enough. Your voice is soothing in any language, sweet as sugar, relaxing as can be,” you reassure her in your softest tone. Heart fluttering, she finds herself easing back into the comfort of the moment, forgetting all about her earlier woes. “Shall we read another?” Nodding, Bela again turns the page and begins to read:

He’s equal with the gods, that man Who sits across from you, Face to face, close enough to sip Your voice’s sweetness

And what excites my mind, Your laughter, glittering. So, When I see you, for a moment, My voice goes,

My tongue freezes. Fire, Delicate fire, in the flesh. Blind, stunned, the sound Of thunder, in my ears.

Shivering with sweat, cold Tremors over the skin, I turn the colour of dead grass, And I’m an inch from dying.

“Does that make me equal to the gods, then?” You ask, as soon as the last line is given its moment to shine. A small hum comes from your soulmate, who seems equal parts intrigued and confused. “I look in your eyes and my lungs light on fire, my heart ricochets around my chest, and I hear the chorus of angels singing your holy praises. The fact that I can manage to speak at all is confounding. Maybe the muses have seen fit to lend me their artistry, so that I might make conversation worthy of your existence, my dear.” With that said, you find yourself being squeezed gently, Bela placing another kiss against the top of your head. Now, it seems she is the one without the ability to speak. “The divine witnessing the divine, yes?... Let me read the next one, and we’ll see if my voice could ever compare to your own.”

It’s innocent enough, your choice. A turn of the page, just another poem, selected for nothing more than respect for chronology. Yet something drains from the space around you as you begin to read, so subtly slow that you hardly notice.

Girls, you be ardent for the fragrant-blossomed Muses’ lovely gifts, for the clear melodious lyre: But now old age has seized my tender body, Now my hair is white, and no longer dark

How were you to realize that the great shadow of fear loomed over your soulmate, when she had refused to name it mere minutes ago? How were you to know to halt your reciting, when the aching of her heart rendered her throat dry, and she could not bring herself to call out to you? Words poured like poisoned wine from your lips… your soulmate having no choice but to drink up every last drop.

My heart’s heavy, my legs won’t support me, That once were fleet as fawns, in the dance I grieve often for my state; what can I do? Being human, there’s no way not to grow old

A shaky breath from age-old lungs, exhaled into tense air, forced out past a trembling jaw. Say something, Bela tells herself, any poem but this. For a split second you pause, and she wonders if her thoughts have found new light in your own mind. But you break the momentary silence without much care, simply having been unsure of your pending pronunciation of an old name, perfectly unaware of your partner’s panic.

Rosy-armed Dawn, they say, love-smitten Once carried Tithonus off to the world’s end: Handsome and young he was then, yet at last Grey age caught that spouse of an immortal wife

At last her ordeal was over. The final words hang heavy in the air, weighing down her shoulders, but they are done. Her fears had been dragged out from the pit in her stomach, now waving about like dirty laundry. There was only one way for her to avoid this happening another time: Tell you the truth. By now her silence had earned your attention, with you turning in her lap again, concerned gaze meeting her hollow one. Gently, she gives you a reassuring squeeze.

“I… am not one to balk at the nature of things, however painful the truth. Yet I hesitate now, with the very person I am bound to with crimson ties… How cowardly of me,” Bela all but snarls, anger clearly not directed at you. It’s clear in the way that she holds herself that she has more to say. There’s not much you can do other than wait, though you do tuck an arm around her waist, beginning to rub soft circles against her back. “Allow me to drop the pretenses. You are not immortal, but I am. We’ve only been together for a day and a half, and already I’m worrying about your lifespan. It’s safe to say that this particular poem was an unfriendly reminder of our situation.”

Oh. How exactly were you supposed to respond to that?... Your girlfriend- your soulmate- was immortal. Hmph, as if her essentially being a vampire hadn’t already been enough to freak you out. Now this? Well, maybe it wasn’t too much farther of a stretch from the last revelation, even if you were still recovering from that one. Even then, something told you that this was equally hard for Bela- both to say, and to simply feel. As if she needed more stress surrounding her partnership with you…

“Of all the ways for us to mimic legends… I don’t even know what to say, my dear. I… I suppose that I can only reassure you that we will make the most of every moment we have. However much time we are destined to get, we’ll make sure it is filled with bliss,” you reply, slowly, making it up as you go. An ache builds in the center of your chest as you talk, an internal yearning for greater confidence. Although words were your “weapon” of choice, you were not always a master in your use of them, too human to be infallible. “Maybe we should set aside the poetry for now, shift our focus to something, ah, less meaningful?”

“That would be for the best,” Bela agrees, already shifting like she was going to stand up, before you even had a chance to get off of her lap. Something strange had fallen over her expression, an invisible veil, putting an uncomfortable distance between the two of you. Inside your chest, a thundering heart threatens to go still. Had you done something wrong? Did you commit some unspoken sin? Together the two of you rise, in sync yet more separate than before, a thousand questions and anxieties rendering both of you silent...

—————————

Across the room from you, a pair of bright eyes watch your every movement, peering out from over an open book. If you didn’t know better, you might have thought that the “ruse” was intentionally poor. But for all the five hours you had known her, Daniela Dimitrescu had done nothing other than prove herself odd, clumsy, and quite possibly… overconfident. Admittedly, that still made her undeniably more pleasant than Cassandra. If you had to be stuck alongside someone other than your soulmate, well, ‘twas best that it was this strange redheaded gremlin. Even if she had expressed an unfortunate interest in eating you.

Gods, what is wrong with this family? You think, frowning a tad, unable to stop yourself from making eye contact with Daniela. Instantly she’s looking away, pretending to be engrossed within her book. The very same book that had remained open to the same page for half an hour now. I do hope Bela is having more fun right now, with whatever “business” called her away so unexpectedly. She hadn’t seemed happy to have to leave your side, earlier tension notwithstanding. Coming here to the library had been her suggestion, though you doubted she knew that Daniela was there, or at least hadn’t anticipated her sister’s unnerving behavior. Already the redhead was looking back at you, even less subtly than before.

Sighing, you decided that you could only put up with so much of this tomfoolery.

“Are you in need of something? Or is there something on my face?” You ask, setting your own book aside as you do. There’s a few moments of silence, as Daniela glances around the room, as if you might actually be speaking to someone else. When no scapegoats teleport to her rescue, she very awkwardly clears her throat, then moves to sit at your table. Though you are loath to admit it, your heart starts beating faster as she approaches. Not out of attraction, hell no, rather fear. Perhaps getting her attention hadn’t been the wisest choice after all…

“I just think it’s funny,” Daniela chimes, trailing off just long enough to run a finger down the length of your arm, “that Bela abandoned you so quickly. You’re so… fragile. Cassandra told me about the fun little introduction you had to our family- the blood loss, being chained up, the fear you felt when you got caught in our territory.” Suddenly she’s devolving into a fit of giggles, hand resting not-so-gently on your wrist. When you try to pull away, her nails dig in, and her gaze snaps back to your own. “But you don’t remember that part, do you? If you did… oh, we’d have to lock you up, like the little pet you are, to keep you from running away. I’m sure Bela wouldn’t mind seeing you in chains.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” You snap, uncharacteristically furious. While it was true that you couldn’t recall exactly how you made it into the castle’s dungeons, you refuse to accept Daniela’s implications about your soulmate, or her assessment of your dedication. A brief second passes where you think she’s about to lunge towards you. Instead, she withdraws her hand, moving it to prop up her chin instead. Then, her lips slowly drag upwards into a wicked grin, wide eyes filled with dangerous amusement.

“So you’re more than a wannabe Shakespeare, after all? A bit more teeth, a touch more vulgarity, maybe a twinge of bloodlust, and you might actually fit in around here. Not enough to get our family’s ‘gift’- our secret to a long, happy life- but enough that Bela won’t grow bored of your sappy poems,” she teases with another string of laughter. Before you can question her about this ‘gift’, she’s all but jumping to her feet, stretching out her arms as she does. “I can’t wait to update Cassandra about you. We’ll be betting on how entertaining you’ll end up being. Try to keep from bailing on my dear sister too soon, alright?”

Just like that she’s disappearing into a swarm of flies, leaving you more confused (and angry) than ever. Taking a deep breath, you try to focus on what you need to do next: Find Bela. Talk to her. Get some goddamn answers.

#bela dimitrescu x reader #bela dimitrescu #resident evil: village #re8 village #got some fluff got some angst #casual reminder that daniela is capable of being just as cruel as cassandra #just normally a different kind

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gringolet · 4 years

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INTRO TO ARTHURIANA MASTERPOST

under the cut for absurd length

HOW TO GET STARTED WITH ARTHURIANA

The Arthuriana fandom is very broad and there's no one piece of media, which can be confusing for people just getting into it! There’s no right way to engage with arthuriana, and no minimum level of knowledge or reading you need to attain to qualify.

The basis of the Arthurian Legend is a body of hundreds of texts written across the medieval and early Renaissance period in dozens of languages and cultural traditions. Which can seem pretty overwhelming, but there are a lot of modern vernacular translations-- you absolutely don’t have to learn old French or anything. I’ll go more in depth on where to get started with texts further down.

You also don’t have to read texts at all. As I said, there is no minimum basis-- if you prefer to engage with modern adaptations, or want to engage with medieval arthuriana outside of reading texts, that's also cool!

In terms of modern adaptations there is a wealth of choices, which I am very much not an expert in lol, so I’m afraid I can’t give much in the way of reccs. Books I have heard good things about are, Exiled from Camelot, Idylls of the Queen, The Buried Giant, the Squire's Tale series, and Gawain by Gwen Rowley (warning that this one is apparently erotica? Good for him). I trust @princesslibs for modern book reccomendations. and if you speak French Kaamelott is purportedly a very good tv show. Frankly no modern adaptation will ever be better than Spamalot to me, but that's just my personal take.

If you are curious about engaging with texts but (understandably) don’t want to read a ton of dense medieval literature, one really cool resource is Norris J Lacy's New Arthurian Encyclopedia, which you can pick up at most used bookstores for under ten bucks. It’s a very thorough easy to look through reference of characters stories and texts. I know a lot of people like the Nightbringer wiki, though I personally am wary of it because it basically never cites sources. It’s a good quick reference though and a lot of people like it, I’d just take it with a grain of salt. Sparknotes also has a lot of summaries of the major texts like Le Morte D’Arthur and the romances of Chrétien De Troyes. You are not a fake fan for doing this I promise. And of course you’re always welcome to send me an ask <3

Finally, getting started with texts. Quick glossary of terms:

--Verse Romance

A verse (poem) story which can vary a great deal in length. These deal with the adventures of individual knights, usually Gawain, and tend to have a great deal of magical elements and the stereotypical monster slaying, questing, damosel rescuing knight adventures.

--Prose Novel or Romance

A non poetic narrative, more like a modern novel, more likely to deal with the fall of Arthur, sword in the stone, Mordred, fall of Camelot sort of affair. They are usually quite long. Most famous of these are Le Morte D’Arthur and the French Vulgate, but there are a slew of late medieval Prose novels floating around. Eluding Rey.

--Pseudohistory

I’m gonna b real these are boring I think. These are, as the name suggests, written as accurate depictions of history. They very much are not, but they claim to be. Most famous of these is Jeffrey of Monmouth, Mr Jeff Mouth himself, and his History of the Kings of Britain, which I haven’t read because it bores me. You can if you want. It’s in Latin. Whatever. These tend to be some of the earliest texts, and include the “lives of saints” stories. Life of Gildas is the only funny one.

--Ballads

These are only arguably texts, as most of them were written after the time of the “canon” being composed. But I like them. These are songs telling stories, recorded by people like Francis Child and Thomas Percy. They are very short and fun and include stories like The Boy and the Mantle, Kempion, and King Arthur and the King of Cornwall.

--Lai

A specific type of French verse poem, usually quite short. The most famous collection of lais are those of Marie le France, including things like Bisclavret and Lanval.

--Traditions

Since Arthuriana was written all over, there are different literary traditions across time and space. The French tradition is one of the most famous, including works like the vulgate, Chretien and a lot of verse romances. The English tradition is one of the most influential on modern adaptations, including the Morte D’Arthur and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. There are also Welsh, German, Dutch, Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Tagalog, Greek, Belarussian, Scottish, Irish, Breton, and probably even more. There’s a lot. It’s very cool and sexy.

A note that there is also a big tradition of Victorian revival Arthuriana. I wrote a starter guide to that here, it’s all very fun and like, aesthetic.

Alright, now, which texts do you start with?

If you’re a little intimidated by long texts or medieval lit, starting with short verse romances in modern translation is a great place to start. These include Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which is very good and gay and well known, Lancelot and the Hart With The White Foot, which is very good and gay and underappreciated, or Lanval, which is homophobic but funny.

If you want to start with what is considered the oldest King Arthur Story, Culwch and Olwen is short and fun!

If you want to read about the grail quest, you can start where it started with Story of the Grail or Percival, then the four continuations, Essenbachs Parzival, the vulgate version of the Grail quest which you can buy paperback for like 5 bucks (I can also scan my copy for you just shoot me an ask <3)

If you want to read about the fall of camelot, I have the Vulgate death of Arthur section scanned here. There’s also the Alliterative and Stanzaic mortes, which are in middle English. I have scanned Simon Armitage's Alliterative Morte translation here. I’m working on my own translation of the Stanzaic but it’s not done lol. If you want the first third or so DM me lol. King Artus is very short and readable and it’s a Jewish text which is really cool.

If you want to read about Lancelot, Chrétien de Troyes Lancelot is his first text. He also has a whole long vulgate section, the first part is scanned here by val <3, and there's Lanzelet, Sebile is in it so it’s probably very good. He’s also basically the main character of Le Morte D’Arthur which I might as well talk about here uhm. It’s long and fun in places and boring in others but it does have like the version most modern adaptations take from and tells the whole story of Arthur and Camelot from beginning to end. The Keith Baines version scanned by val is the most readable but it is an abridgement I believe. people who like le morte usually read this version so its probably the best choice lol

If you want to read about Gawain, good news! He’s in basically everything. Even texts that aren’t supposed to be about Gawain are doomed to become The Gawain Show Featuring The Protagonist Of This Text As A Sidekick. Which is so funny of him. The Roman Van Walewein is very funny and long and Gawain™. I also recommend, L’atre Perilous, Diu Krone, Sir Gawain and the Turk, and I could go on but for brevity's sake let's start there.

If you want to read about Tristan, go shoot an ask to Valentine @lanzelet on tumblr because Tristan scares me.

Thank you to rey @gawain-in-green for helping me find links and put this together! They are also a super great resource for stuff and very cool and nice <3 They have a tag on their blog for full text resources so deffo look at that if you want more scans and links, and an info tag and tons of cool shit that is way better organized than my blog lol

Okay finishing this off, if you want content warnings for any texts, feel free to shoot an ask! I know medieval lit can be A Lot and there aren’t a lot of good warning systems, so if I’ve read it or know someone who has I can give you warnings if you want to read something but are understandably wary . <3

In terms of tagging, Arthuriana and Arthurian Legend are the main ones on tumblr. Arthurian Mythology is also used but tbh shouldn’t be. On Ao3, we’re trying to get our own Arthurian Literature tag but <3 its a whole thing. Anyway the tag is Arthurian Mythology, but I’ll b real, it’s kind of flooded with stuff that doesn’t really belong there, because even though it’s a fandom tag other people unknowingly tag stuff as Arthurian Mythology when it’s like, a knight au. Which is not their fault bc it’s confusing but, ah, alas. ANyhow, feel free to drop in my inbox anytime with questions, suggestions, reccs, etc!

Okay godspeed!! Have fun reading, watching, browsing, etc!

#arthuriana #arthurian legend #arthurian literature #arthurian mythology #:/

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glittergummicandypeach · 4 years

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Fake Hafez: How a supreme Persian poet of love was erased | Religion | Al Jazeera

This is the time of the year where every day I get a handful of requests to track down the original, authentic versions of some famed Muslim poet, usually Hafez or Rumi. The requests start off the same way: "I am getting married next month, and my fiance and I wanted to celebrate our Muslim background, and we have always loved this poem by Hafez. Could you send us the original?" Or, "My daughter is graduating this month, and I know she loves this quote from Hafez. Can you send me the original so I can recite it to her at the ceremony we are holding for her?"

It is heartbreaking to have to write back time after time and say the words that bring disappointment: The poems that they have come to love so much and that are ubiquitous on the internet are forgeries. Fake. Made up. No relationship to the original poetry of the beloved and popular Hafez of Shiraz.

How did this come to be? How can it be that about 99.9 percent of the quotes and poems attributed to one the most popular and influential of all the Persian poets and Muslim sages ever, one who is seen as a member of the pantheon of "universal" spirituality on the internet are ... fake? It turns out that it is a fascinating story of Western exotification and appropriation of Muslim spirituality.

Let us take a look at some of these quotes attributed to Hafez:

Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, 'you owe me.' Look what happens with a love like that! It lights up the whole sky.

You like that one from Hafez? Too bad. Fake Hafez.

Your heart and my heart Are very very old friends.

Like that one from Hafez too? Also Fake Hafez.

Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions.

Beautiful. Again, not Hafez.

And the next one you were going to ask about? Also fake. So where do all these fake Hafez quotes come from?

An American poet, named Daniel Ladinsky, has been publishing books under the name of the famed Persian poet Hafez for more than 20 years. These books have become bestsellers. You are likely to find them on the shelves of your local bookstore under the "Sufism" section, alongside books of Rumi, Khalil Gibran, Idries Shah, etc.

It hurts me to say this, because I know so many people love these "Hafez" translations. They are beautiful poetry in English, and do contain some profound wisdom. Yet if you love a tradition, you have to speak the truth: Ladinsky's translations have no earthly connection to what the historical Hafez of Shiraz, the 14th-century Persian sage, ever said.

He is making it up. Ladinsky himself admitted that they are not "translations", or "accurate", and in fact denied having any knowledge of Persian in his 1996 best-selling book, I Heard God Laughing. Ladinsky has another bestseller, The Subject Tonight Is Love.

Persians take poetry seriously. For many, it is their singular contribution to world civilisation: What the Greeks are to philosophy, Persians are to poetry. And in the great pantheon of Persian poetry where Hafez, Rumi, Saadi, 'Attar, Nezami, and Ferdowsi might be the immortals, there is perhaps none whose mastery of the Persian language is as refined as that of Hafez.

In the introduction to a recent book on Hafez, I said that Rumi (whose poetic output is in the tens of thousands) comes at you like you an ocean, pulling you in until you surrender to his mystical wave and are washed back to the ocean. Hafez, on the other hand, is like a luminous diamond, with each facet being a perfect cut. You cannot add or take away a word from his sonnets. So, pray tell, how is someone who admits that they do not know the language going to be translating the language?

Ladinsky is not translating from the Persian original of Hafez. And unlike some "versioners" (Coleman Barks is by far the most gifted here) who translate Rumi by taking the Victorian literal translations and rendering them into American free verse, Ladinsky's relationship with the text of Hafez's poetry is nonexistent. Ladinsky claims that Hafez appeared to him in a dream and handed him the English "translations" he is publishing:

"About six months into this work I had an astounding dream in which I saw Hafiz as an Infinite Fountaining Sun (I saw him as God), who sang hundreds of lines of his poetry to me in English, asking me to give that message to 'my artists and seekers'."

It is not my place to argue with people and their dreams, but I am fairly certain that this is not how translation works. A great scholar of Persian and Urdu literature, Christopher Shackle, describes Ladinsky's output as "not so much a paraphrase as a parody of the wondrously wrought style of the greatest master of Persian art-poetry." Another critic, Murat Nemet-Nejat, described Ladinsky's poems as what they are: original poems of Ladinsky masquerading as a "translation."

I want to give credit where credit is due: I do like Ladinsky's poetry. And they do contain mystical insights. Some of the statements that Ladinsky attributes to Hafez are, in fact, mystical truths that we hear from many different mystics. And he is indeed a gifted poet. See this line, for example:

I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being.

That is good stuff. Powerful. And many mystics, including the 20th-century Sufi master Pir Vilayat, would cast his powerful glance at his students, stating that he would long for them to be able to see themselves and their own worth as he sees them. So yes, Ladinsky's poetry is mystical. And it is great poetry. So good that it is listed on Good Reads as the wisdom of "Hafez of Shiraz." The problem is, Hafez of Shiraz said nothing like that. Daniel Ladinsky of St Louis did.

The poems are indeed beautiful. They are just not ... Hafez. They are ... Hafez-ish? Hafez-esque? So many of us wish that Ladinsky had just published his work under his own name, rather than appropriating Hafez's.

Ladinsky's "translations" have been passed on by Oprah, the BBC, and others. Government officials have used them on occasions where they have wanted to include Persian speakers and Iranians. It is now part of the spiritual wisdom of the East shared in Western circles. Which is great for Ladinsky, but we are missing the chance to hear from the actual, real Hafez. And that is a shame.

So, who was the real Hafez (1315-1390)?

He was a Muslim, Persian-speaking sage whose collection of love poetry rivals only Mawlana Rumi in terms of its popularity and influence. Hafez's given name was Muhammad, and he was called Shams al-Din (The Sun of Religion). Hafez was his honorific because he had memorised the whole of the Quran. His poetry collection, the Divan, was referred to as Lesan al-Ghayb (the Tongue of the Unseen Realms).

A great scholar of Islam, the late Shahab Ahmed, referred to Hafez's Divan as: "the most widely-copied, widely-circulated, widely-read, widely-memorized, widely-recited, widely-invoked, and widely-proverbialized book of poetry in Islamic history." Even accounting for a slight debate, that gives some indication of his immense following. Hafez's poetry is considered the very epitome of Persian in the Ghazal tradition.

Hafez's worldview is inseparable from the world of Medieval Islam, the genre of Persian love poetry, and more. And yet he is deliciously impossible to pin down. He is a mystic, though he pokes fun at ostentatious mystics. His own name is "he who has committed the Quran to heart", yet he loathes religious hypocrisy. He shows his own piety while his poetry is filled with references to intoxication and wine that may be literal or may be symbolic.

The most sublime part of Hafez's poetry is its ambiguity. It is like a Rorschach psychological test in poetry. The mystics see it as a sign of their own yearning, and so do the wine-drinkers, and the anti-religious types. It is perhaps a futile exercise to impose one definitive meaning on Hafez. It would rob him of what makes him ... Hafez.

The tomb of Hafez in Shiraz, a magnificent city in Iran, is a popular pilgrimage site and the honeymoon destination of choice for many Iranian newlyweds. His poetry, alongside that of Rumi and Saadi, are main staples of vocalists in Iran to this day, including beautiful covers by leading maestros like Shahram Nazeri and Mohammadreza Shajarian.

Like many other Persian poets and mystics, the influence of Hafez extended far beyond contemporary Iran and can be felt wherever Persianate culture was a presence, including India and Pakistan, Central Asia, Afghanistan, and the Ottoman realms. Persian was the literary language par excellence from Bengal to Bosnia for almost a millennium, a reality that sadly has been buried under more recent nationalistic and linguistic barrages.

Part of what is going on here is what we also see, to a lesser extent, with Rumi: the voice and genius of the Persian speaking, Muslim, mystical, sensual sage of Shiraz are usurped and erased, and taken over by a white American with no connection to Hafez's Islam or Persian tradition. This is erasure and spiritual colonialism. Which is a shame, because Hafez's poetry deserves to be read worldwide alongside Shakespeare and Toni Morrison, Tagore and Whitman, Pablo Neruda and the real Rumi, Tao Te Ching and the Gita, Mahmoud Darwish, and the like.

In a 2013 interview, Ladinsky said of his poems published under the name of Hafez: "Is it Hafez or Danny? I don't know. Does it really matter?" I think it matters a great deal. There are larger issues of language, community, and power involved here.

It is not simply a matter of a translation dispute, nor of alternate models of translations. This is a matter of power, privilege and erasure. There is limited shelf space in any bookstore. Will we see the real Rumi, the real Hafez, or something appropriating their name? How did publishers publish books under the name of Hafez without having someone, anyone, with a modicum of familiarity check these purported translations against the original to see if there is a relationship? Was there anyone in the room when these decisions were made who was connected in a meaningful way to the communities who have lived through Hafez for centuries?

Hafez's poetry has not been sitting idly on a shelf gathering dust. It has been, and continues to be, the lifeline of the poetic and religious imagination of tens of millions of human beings. Hafez has something to say, and to sing, to the whole world, but bypassing these tens of millions who have kept Hafez in their heart as Hafez kept the Quran in his heart is tantamount to erasure and appropriation.

We live in an age where the president of the United States ran on an Islamophobic campaign of "Islam hates us" and establishing a cruel Muslim ban immediately upon taking office. As Edward Said and other theorists have reminded us, the world of culture is inseparable from the world of politics. So there is something sinister about keeping Muslims out of our borders while stealing their crown jewels and appropriating them not by translating them but simply as decor for poetry that bears no relationship to the original. Without equating the two, the dynamic here is reminiscent of white America's endless fascination with Black culture and music while continuing to perpetuate systems and institutions that leave Black folk unable to breathe.

There is one last element: It is indeed an act of violence to take the Islam out of Rumi and Hafez, as Ladinsky has done. It is another thing to take Rumi and Hafez out of Islam. That is a separate matter, and a mandate for Muslims to reimagine a faith that is steeped in the world of poetry, nuance, mercy, love, spirit, and beauty. Far from merely being content to criticise those who appropriate Muslim sages and erase Muslims' own presence in their legacy, it is also up to us to reimagine Islam where figures like Rumi and Hafez are central voices. This has been part of what many of feel called to, and are pursuing through initiatives like Illuminated Courses.

Oh, and one last thing: It is Haaaaafez, not Hafeeeeez. Please.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial stance.

This content was originally published here.

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smallfrost · 4 years

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MFSRI: The Burning of Scylla Ramshorn Comprehensive Analysis; Scylla as Ovid’s Phoenix

A while back I proposed the Burning of Scylla Ramshorn as a theme for our Sexy Weird Necro (now re-branded, Sassy Sexy Weird Murder Nugget Necro). This was primarily about how she may have been burned in the past, either literally (her family was burned) or figuratively (Porter turned in her dodger parents). This evolved to include the fact that Scylla is literally wreathed in fire throughout the season, with actual flames and with more vague references to burning dancing around her. After having separate posts about this (here and here) in addition to my original theory, I figured I would first make a comprehensive list of all the times Scylla has referenced burning or is surrounded by actual flames throughout the season and then propose several options for what this might mean. Including, how the use of fire imagery combined with “nothing ever really dies” parallels to Ovid’s Metamorphosis and the Phoenix.

This one is a long one but come with me on this ride...

To start, we have all of the times she has used fire for Spree Glamour. (Note: Faux Raelle burning is still Scylla’s motif because she represents someone she cares about and loves, and the flames are reflected in Scylla’s eyes).

Then we have Scylla and Raelle in Memorial Hall discussing if the Burning Times are really over, followed directly by a shot with a fireplace in the background and Scylla in the foreground. The same fireplace Porter is standing next to a few seconds later (re: Porter burned Scylla).

And we have Scylla saying she has been burned before and tends to burn.

She also mentions the recent burnings of witches, even as recent as last year while she’s in the dungeon.

So, what does this all mean? The strength of this theme for Scylla is ominous. Is it possible foreshadowing of a literal burning? Could be. Perhaps Scylla is terrified that she herself will be burned at the stake since a witch had been burned as recently as last year. She is terrified she will be executed.

Perhaps this theme is referencing something that happened in the past, such as witnessing her parents being burned or being betrayed by someone she cared about as previously proposed. The parallels to Greek mythology in MFS have been a favorite topic of discussion amongst the theorist community and at the Research Institute, leading to many posts including analyses done by @captainjeclid and @trash-deluxe. We know that Scylla is a Greek monster. We know that Odysseus, whom Raelle parallels, encounters Scylla on his journey home (after having visited the underworld). Could the Burning of Scylla be referring to her own personal Odyssey through the underworld; her own inferno? Would be quite fitting, seeing that she is a Necro. But I think there is yet another possibility… and that is fire as a form of rebirth; that which has died, transforms into the living - shedding a previous nature for a new one.

After seeing how Scylla and Raelle parallel the Odyssey, I hope to convince you of yet another series of mythological parallels, this time as it relates to balance, resurrection, and life becoming death, over and over again, all while linking Scylla to the phoenix as a symbol of rebirth [through fire].

Ovid’s Metamorphosis is an epic poem thematically contemplating transformation. Here we get stories like that of Narcissus, the man doomed to love himself, and Arachne being transformed into a spider. Over 15 ‘books’, the Roman poet, Ovid weaves his tales and ends on one containing the teachings of Pythagoras. And what do we learn? To quote directly, “All things are always changing, but nothing dies. The spirit comes and goes, is housed wherever it wills, it shifts residence from beasts to men, from men to beasts, but always it keeps on living”. Sound familiar?

Scylla teaches us the same lesson in the graveyard when she shows Raelle the Death Cap. Death is not so cut and dry. Nothing ever really dies. Life becomes death which becomes life again. Over and over. Scylla is almost quoting Ovid verbatim here, “Nothing remains the same: the great renewer, Nature, makes form from form, and, oh, believe me that nothing ever dies.”

Pythagoras really says nearly these exact words several times. He explains that death is not what it seems and not to fear it, but to understand that our souls are deathless, and that when they leave our bodies, they will find new dwelling places. Things are not static. They are always changing. The soul, the life force, is recycled in a never ending and eternal circle… That which once was, is no longer the same but still present. It is a process of renewal… In other terms, while Necros cannot bring the dead back to life, the cycle of souls shifting residence is itself, a form of resurrection. So, even if Willa Collar is death, her soul is not gone. Just… repurposed. It’s going to be up to our little Necro to find it.

Aside: I just want to point out that this portion of Metamorphosis is riddled with examples of duality (day and night, fire and water, life and death), one of our favorite themes throughout MFS. And the never ending, harmonious cycle of renewal fits perfectly into a magic system built on the foundation of maintaining balance.

So besides quoting Ovid almost verbatim, giving us our MFS Necro “religion”, why else is this portion of Metamorphoses relevant? Because immediately following discussions on how the life of one creature can come from the death of another, we learn that while “all of these things have their beginning in some other creature, there is one bird which renews itself, out of itself. [They] call it the phoenix.”

Now, Pythagoras does not necessarily say that the phoenix is born out of its own ashes. In fact, the historical association of the phoenix with fire is hard to trace and I had difficulty finding anything related to the exact origin of flames. But the symbolism of the phoenix throughout its mythology associates with the sun and fire. In Egyptian mythology, the phoenix flies to Heliopolis, the “City of the Sun” and builds its nest atop the Temple of the Sun, or brings its remains there after rebirth. In various versions of this myth, the nest catches fire from the rays of the sun. I’m not about to make this a thesis on the origins of fire being associated with the phoenix, but for now, let’s fall back on our western mythology of being reborn in flames and connect them to the theme of “nothing ever dies” in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Indeed, Pythagoras discusses fire several times throughout Book 15 and how fire itself is part of these changing cycles. Including one instance where he literally states that “[They] set wood on fire by pouring water on it in the dark of the moon.” Considering @theycallmestephlee established that Scylla is Fire and Raelle is Water … the parallels are hard to ignore.

The Phoenix from the Aberdeen Bestiary could lead us down another rabbit hole of parallels with Christianity and Lesbian Jesus Christ, Raelle Collar as @likethefoximalwayschanging has established.

Ovid’s use of fire imagery throughout this portion of the poem, and the eventual association of the Phoenix with fire as a form of rebirth that is rooted in western legend, strongly suggests that Scylla is going through her own transformation by being wreathed in flames. She has lived her life by one set of values up until now, but her current nature is dying. Through that death, she will be renewed with a new moral compass. Scylla is questioning the foundations of her morality. She still believes that the Army is evil but knows that what the Spree asked her to do was equally horrendous (she has regret, she did not hand over Raelle). She has been through fire and brimstone, her own inferno. Her motivations were driven by that. She committed horrible acts. But now we’ve seen her begin strip away her old nature. Because Raelle, like water, found the cracks and flowed her way into Scylla’s fiery heart.

So even if there is a literal Burning of Scylla Ramshorn, she won’t die. She will be saved and “reborn” in a new light with a new nature. She has been scorched by fire in her past; what she has been through has led her to commit things which she regrets. There used to be no room for attachments, for love. But through her journey and through meeting and loving Raelle, her perspectives have changed. “That which has been, is not; that which was not, begins to be…”

Quotes from Rolfe Humphries’ translation of Metamorphoses.

#MFS Research Institute #mfs theories #mfs analysis #motherland fort salem #motherland: fort salem #scylla ramshorn #the burning of Scylla #sassy sexy weird murder nugget necro #necro things #ovid's metamorphoses #raelle collar #raylla

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betweenthetimeandsound · 3 years

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Three Minutes to Eternity: My ESC 250 (#220-211)

#220: Yiannis Dimitras -- Feggari Kalokerino (Greece 1981)

"Κοίτα τον έρημο γυαλό Σου ψιθυρίζω σ’ αγαπώ Τώρα θα χτίσω εκκλησιά Για της αγάπης τα τρελά παιδιά" "Look at the desolate seashore I whisper you “I love you” Now I’ll build a church For the crazy children of love" The opening shot, the rose on the piano, set the stage for such a romantic journey under the summer moon. And the soundscape created through the piano and instrumental throw us into this endearing scene, one which is also tinged with melancholy. Feggari Kalokerino is not only an ode to this beauty, but also an admission of craziness for falling in love. With such pretty lyrics, one can't help but get enveloped in this pretty world, where everything is so beautiful. The combination of Yiannis' singing and the woman's piano playing is also quite cute, albeit with some...interesting undertones to it. Either way, it's classical yet timeless.

Personal ranking: 3rd/20 Actual ranking: 8th/20 in Dublin

#219: Liliane Saint-Pierre -- Soldiers of Love (Belgium 1987)

“Neem elkaars handen Smeed nou die banden toe Hoor je die verre kreet? Geen mens vraagt dat leed” “Take each other’s hands Come on, weld those bonds Do you hear that distant scream? Nobody asks for that suffering” Top ten opening themes of anime, haha. It also helps that "Soldiers of Love" is the English translation for the song "Ai no Senshi" from Sailor Moon (which I've listened to many times but haven't gotten that far into the anime...). That said, Soldiers of Love packs a punch with the instrumentation and the high intensity of the melody. The lyrics are a powerful battle cry, albeit one which advocates for peace amongst people. There’s so much energy and determination in Belgium’s host entry, one would prepare themselves for battle for a good cause. Liliane really delivers this earnestly and with determination, though sometimes the military-style get-up stands out to me the most when I watch it again. Though those two guitarists turning their ends as if they were firing guns is a cool thing to behold.

It's one of the host entries that is better than the song which one it for the country, which is something because J'aime la vie is considered a fan favorite.

Personal ranking: 6th/22 Actual ranking: 11th/22 in Brussels

#218: Beth -- Dime (Spain 2003)

"Cuántas veces te llamé en la noche Cuántas veces te busqué Por mis recuerdos yo vuelvo Y no pierdo la fe" "How many times did I call you in the night? How many times did I look for you? I return for my memories And I don’t lose faith" For some reason, Dime reminds me of "Die for You" from two years earlier--both feature modern pop bops with ethnic influences, both imploring about the state of a relationship (while they both want to make it wor. And they're both in the same key! At the same time, Dime holds its own as one of the strongest 2000s entries from Spain. They had similar flamenco/Latin inspired entries in 2001 and 2004, which were highlights in rather mediocre years because of their uniqueness overall. But the guitar flourishes here work well with the dance beat, and it provides its own fun.

Personal ranking: 3rd/26 Actual ranking: 8th/26 in Riga

#217: Svala -- Paper (Iceland 2017)

“Drawing every bit of my truth Colour me in with your blue” I didn’t actually pay attention to this song in the follow-up to the 2017 contest. I also didn’t watch the semi-finals, which could’ve led to me neglecting the song entirely otherwise, especially I've heard a lot about Blackbird during that time. However, the summer after the contest, I discovered the song and listened to it. And I liked it! (And then I got hooked with Svala's other songs through her different groups) I was interested particularly in the lyrics, which discussed a fight between one’s mental demons and anxiety. I like the English version more than the Icelandic one; the latter is a bit more optimistic on winning against the battle whereas the former really takes the issue seriously. The production, while a bit staid, added to the feeling of helplessness with its electronic coldness. The staging also tries to incorporate this, though it didn't work in making it stand out. (I did like Svala's cape and makeup, though!) While I do love "Hear them Calling" a lot, I had a more interesting journey with Paper--it grew until it became something I highly enjoyed. Personal ranking: 6th/42 Actual ranking: DNQ -- 15th in the first semi-final in Kyiv

#216: Live Report -- Why Do I Always Get it Wrong? (United Kingdom 1989)

“You can do what you want to do now...” Honestly, this has to be one of my favorite British entries ever. While "Go" from the previous year gets a lot of acclaim because of its songwriting and Scott's performance (along with how it ended up second in the end), "Why Do I Always Get it Wrong?" is better on how it envelops a mood and could actually be found from this era (though it sadly didn't do too well commercially afterwards, sigh)

Whenever I do something wrong, or self-hate, this is the song I turn to a lot. The synthesizers drew me in—it fit well with the late 1980s-early 1990s sound elsewhere. It's also helped that Celine performed "Where Does My Heart Beat Now" earlier in the contest, which piqued my interest. And while Ray’s ponytail was a choice, it didn’t distract from how he delivered the song.

Despite getting more 12-points, it ended up losing to Yugoslavia by just six points that year. While not my favorite that year, I think it was the better one of the top three; it equally reflects the times and holds up!

Personal and actual ranking: 2nd/22 in Lausanne

#215: Tommy Nilsson -- En Dag (Sweden 1989)

“En dag vi alla förstår, En dag, när stillheten rår, En dag jag finner din hand, När vägarna möts förstår vi varann,” “One day, we all understand, One day, when silence rules One day, I find your hand When our roads meet, we will understand each other” My two favorites from 1989 are sonically different, diverging between despair and hope. I listen to "Why Do I Always Get it Wrong" a bit more, but "En Dag' would stand out for me in a few different ways, more from being just the optimistic song of the two.

The intro features really good brass, which leads way to the fun instrumental. I like how it builds, and Tommy’s interplay with the backing vocalists is incredibly strong. You get a sense of energy from the both of them as they send the song to new heights.

Basically, it's just glorious!

Personal ranking: 1st/22 Actual ranking: 4th/22 in Lausanne

Final Impressions of 1989: It's a pretty fine year, both in songs in production. There are a number of good songs there, though not many classics which hold out in the long-term (except for Vi maler byen rød, which became famous in Denmark and even became the premise of a musical!). Highlights include an overactive conductor from Turkey, two children, and an awesome interval act involving a crossbow!

#214: Bang -- Stop (Greece 1987)

“Ότι κάνεις για δόξα και λεφτά Δες τι χάνεις, αλλού είναι η χαρά”

“Whatever you do is for fame and money See what you are missing, joy is somewhere else”

I’ve heard this song compared to Wham’s output, especially with its vintage rock-n-roll sound (wake me up before you go go). This doesn’t make it any less bad, with its charming tone and thoughtful lyrics about how a girl who only wants material goods should stop chasing them.

(This is another reason why sometimes, the original-language version is better that any other one--the English version to this song has goes on a completely different tangent)

The performance also falls into vintage aesthetics, with the suits for both Thanos and Vassilis and sock-hop style dresses for the backing vocalists. It's really cute, and the way they dance fits the scene.

On another note, apparently Greeks saw this as a favorite at the time, can someone verify that?

Personal ranking: 5th/22 Actual ranking: 10th/22 in Brussels

#213: Guy Bonnet -- Marie-Blanche (France 1970)

“Nous sommes là dans une douce quiétude Nous avons mis fin à notre solitude Nos corps apprennent de tendres habitudes Et Marie-Blanche est à moi”

“We’re there in a soft stillness We’ve put an end to our loneliness Our bodies learn tender habits And Marie-Blanche is mine”

By 1970, chanson was on its way out; in its place was folk, rock-n-roll (spearheaded in France by Johnny Halladay, who has a great French version of "House of the Rising Sun"), and psychadelia. Within France itself, some of the #1 singles from that year include Comme j'ai toujours envie d'aimer, Let It Be, and Bridge over Troubled Water (a total masterpiece, I tell you).

So, what does one make of Marie-Blanche, in this case?

It's a really sweet love poem, in which Guy declares his love for the girl. and conveys a particularly cute scene. Whenever I listen to this, I envision two lovers cuddling inside while watching the snow fall during the winter. There's a sense of magic and serenity in all this, and the lyrics match the pretty piano melody.

Basically, hits are important to keep the contest alive. But songs like Marie Blanche can pull on the feels in the right ways.

Personal ranking: 2nd/12 Actual ranking: =4th/12 in Amsterdam

#212: Justyna -- Sama (Poland 1995)

“I czuła się tak marnie Poczuła się tak marnie Jakby Bóg, dobry Bóg Nie lubił pcheł..”

“And I feel poor Feeling so poor As if God, the good God Didn’t love little fleas...”

If 1994’s To nie ja represented something classic and hopeful, 1995’s Sama takes it and reverses it. (And in the grand Eurovision timeline, they're only separated by the last song of 1994, Je suis un vrai garcon from France) Instead of a young woman filled with life and singing a decent ballad, we have another one pondering herself, all alone, with nobody to help her.

Also, this is more of an acquired taste with its out-of-tune recordings and Justyna’s scream. But it doesn’t feel out of place within the 1990s, with its alternative influences and production, and I like Sama a lot for that!

Unfortunately, it also caused it to do substantially worse, which is simultaneously explainable and baffling. A good result would've made waves for future Eurovision entries; the 1990s are my favorite decade, but they did misalign quite a bit from the mainstream.

Personal ranking: 7th/23 Actual ranking: 18th/23 in Dublin

#211: The Shadows -- Let Me Be the One (United Kingdom 1975)

"You and I could have an affair/make sweet music, go anywhere"

Isn't this lyric really charming? I couldn't help but have a little giggle because of it; there's a sense of naughtiness (especially with choosing "affair"; are they trying to something illicit?) underneath it.

That said, The Shadows are mainly known for their instrumental rock, but Let Me Be the One has a neat melody line. The rock-n-roll vibe, which could be released within that decade, is light but lovely, and added a jolt of uniqueness to the otherwise poppy contest up to that point. The flubbed line in the beginning ("let me be the one who literally holds you tight", haha) adds to the whole thing, but they were able to carry on, nevertheless.

And while I like all the 1970s winners to some extent, I would switch out "Ding-a-Dong" for Let Me Be the One in terms of winners vs. runners-up; like with Sama, it could've changed the contest in a positive way.

Personal ranking: =3rd/19 Actual ranking: 2nd/19 in Stockholm

#esc 250 #esc top 250 #esc greece #esc belgium #esc spain #esc iceland #esc united kingdom #esc sweden #esc france #esc poland #vintage eurovision #three minutes to eternity

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fragiledewdrop · 5 years

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High school Newspaper Shenanigans

I don't have a lot of good memories about high school, but today I found a dusty copy of what passed for a "newspaper" in my school and it brought me back to when I was 16.

The girl who had been running the school newspaper for as long as I could remember was graduating that year, so she had to prepare for the final exam and university and she did not have time to edit anymore. My friends B., C., and I, in what was probably a fit of madness, decided to try our hand at it. And so I found myself co-editor of a newspaper. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but it would be one hell of an adventure.

The paper was called "Up!", after the Disney movie, for...some very creative reason I cannot remember. The first thing we did was change the title to "Up patriots to arms!"

One of the first things we had to cover was a very important, popular, yearly student strike,which would have been fairly easy, if not for the freaking tension between the two student organizations in our city. The biggest one, the "Rete" , was basically left wing - although many people didn't know or care about their affiliations- and they constantly butted heads with the student block, a group of self proclaimed neofascists who dressed in all black, used smoke bombs during protests and were always surrounded by the police.

We decided it would be a grand idea to interview the respective leaders to get both opinions on the matter.

The president of the "Rete" came to meet us after school. The highlight of the interview was when he said that his was a "non political organization", at which point we looked at each other in disbelief and asked him:"Really?"

The answer was "Yeas, although of course many of us are registered in different parties along the whole spectrum, such as..." and he started listing all left wing parties in the country, from communists to centrists, because apparently that's what he meant by "variety". Anyway.

It was time to interview the leader of the Block. He told us to wait in a square until someone would come get us.

B. and I were getting very nervous.

A guy with a shaved head and a black leather jacket came towards us. "You the journalists? Follow me"

We followed him to the lair. I mean headquarters.

(By the way, we realized we knew this guy. He was a lamb. I had no clue what he was doing there.)

The headquarters' walls were legit covered in swastikas and pictures of Mussolini. Yikes.

The leader was also very nice. Didn't stop me wanting to throttle him when he said that poor Mussolini was just misunderstood.

I had to ACTUALLY stop B. from doing something rash. No picking fights with the fascist dudes in he fascists's lair, please.

They straight up told us, I shit you not, that they were a brotherhood and, as a very effective bonding experience, they put on music and danced in a circle while whipping each other with leather belts. I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. Maybe they were, but it didn't seem so. That didn't make it into the article, but it's forever etched into my brain.

I was shaken, but the double interview turned out great. #journalism

A while later we were sitting at a school assembly in the local movie theater. Everybody was complaining about the fact that our gym's roof had collapsed the year before and nobody was doing anything about it. We were taking the bus every week to a public gym, but we had to pay for it and were Officially Not Happy About It.

It was then that B. went : "You know what would be great? If we could interview the mayor about this"

I lit up. "Oh my god! We could ask him so many things! And not just about our school, but about the Linguistic High school that had to be evacuated and about [all the other schools that were literally falling to pieces. You know, Italian things]"

But the consensus was that, while we could try, it would be almost impossible for us to get an interview. So we sighed and sat back.

C.cleared her throat. "Guys." "Yes?" "You know how the mayor is a lawyer?" ".... Yes?" "Well, my dad is a lawyer. He knows him."

We dragged her to the bathroom

"We are not leaving here until your dad gets us an appointment" (poor guy)

He did

For that same night. At the town hall. At 8 pm.

We cleared our afternoon to come up with pertinent questions and practice and freak out.

At 8 we were at the town hall.

There was a red banner on the balcony with a slogan on it, that would be there for months afterwards, because...

... that same night a group of workers had occupied the town hall to demand better pay and better working conditions

Good for them

Bad for us

We were about to leave, but they assured us the mayor would be with us shortly

We waited three whole hours

During which, obviously, an old council member came to talk to us about how, if we wanted to do some real journalism, we should investigate the presence of the Illuminati in our town

Not gonna lie, we were kinda interested at that point

Around 11, the mayor called us in

I am going to concede that he must have been tired

But he was still a slimy son of a bitch

Extremely condescending

When we brought up our problems, he told us our schools were the Province's responsibility

(the Province would of course later tell us we were the Mayor's responsibility)

It was a train wreck

But eye opening

The article we wrote was extremely passive aggressive

He told C.'s father that he really liked it

I don't know if he was impermeable to sarcasm or just a politician.

Fast forward a few months. While our math teacher was talking, a giant piece of plaster fell from the ceiling, missed her by millimeters and crashed on the floor. We went on, business as usual, but that was kinda scary. And it was not the first incident of that kind to happen in our school.

We decided to do a reportage

Armed with notebooks and a camera, we went from classroom to classroom, asking students and teachers about problems with the building.

It was like opening a can of worms.

We got everything from "Oh yes, don't you see those huge holes in the ceiling and in the floor?" to "Yes, every time it rains the classroom gets flooded" to "See this giant wooden piece of tent rod? It fell on my shoulder last week. We don’t even have tents!"

Everyone had something to complain about. The teachers. The janitors. It was scary, to be honest. Especially considering we were repeatedly told ours was the safest school structure in town (what with having been standing since the end of WWI and all)

One day, while we were trying to get on the roof to evaluate its conditions, the headmistress called us in her office.

She said that she had gotten wind of what we were doing (duh)

And she hoped that we wouldn't give a bad impression of her "to parents and important people"

Because after all her hands were tied

It was the responsibility of the Mayor and the Province

(Just who the fuck was responsible for us?)

She smiled sweetly, leaned in towards us and whispered "You'll be careful now, won't you?"

She looked at me and said my name

Hoping I'd be the responsible/most easily intimidated one

(I had beef with that woman, mmmkay? But that's a story for another day)

I smiled and I told her: "Of course. We are just taking pictures of what we see. We'll let the truth speak for itself"

We did

No commentary

Just very objective descriptions and pictures

We really felt like heroes of the free press and free speech, at the service of the people despite the threat of power. (Yes, it sounds dramatic. It's because we were teenagers)

And then there were the other, less momentous adventures:

That one time when, after days of editing, we had to fill a little blank space at the bottom of the last page and nothing fit. We were frantically searching through our notes, the articles other students had sent us, drawings, everything, and we were slowly losing hope, until B. unearthed one of my notebooks and said : "What is this? 'Requiem. In memoriam termosifoni malati, ego ista verba pronuntio..." I was horrified. "NO" I yelled. "That's just a joke. We are NOT publishing that. NO WAY!" It was really a silly thing, you see. There was a radiator in our classroom that didn't work very well. Sometimes it was scorching hot, sometimes (on the coldest days, obviously) it was icy. So my friend E. and I had decided that the radiator was "sick", and we wrote its last will, its epitaph, parodies of famous poems like "La fontana malata" (The sick fountain) by Palazzeschi or "All'amica risanata" (To the healed friend) by Foscolo (can't find translations, sorry). It was fun. B.had found my silly attempt to write a "Requiem" in...kinda dog Latin I guess? But the grammar was correct. In any case, IT WAS NOT MEANT TO SEE THE LIGHT OF DAY. But we were desperate, so I relented. On one condition: it had to be ANONYMOUS. And that was the best decision I ever made in my entire life, because when we distributed the newspaper I saw a bunch of Latin teachers analising the fucking thing in front of their classes. "Mmmmhhh I am not sure an accusative was the best choice here. I would have gone with a dative." Then write your own pastiche poem, Marta! One of them had even copied it on the blackboard and was trying to figure out the metric! That was the equivalent of a 3am shitpost, not fucking Catullus, people! I have never been so embarrassed in my life! At least my friends were having a field day with it. Oh, and my Latin and Greek teacher figured it out. She read it and told me : "This was you, wasn't it?" I wanted to disappear. But she said it was funny, and that was the end of it.

All the times we had to edit what other students gave us and it was WILD, you guys. The grammar alone...The choice of topics....We got quite a few articles about UFO sightings over our town, so that was a thing. (We got to see a lot of really interesting and creative stuff, though)

The times we absolutely lost our cool, because it was hard work, okay? "Federica, your Isabel Allende analysis is a bit too long. Maybe if we cut the Scheherazade comparison..." "YOU ARE NOT CUTTING THE SCHEHERAZADE COMPARISON, B." "But.." "That is the backbone of the whole thing. The structure would collapse without it." "It's only a metaphor!" "No! I won't sell myself and my principles for a chance to be published" "Guys! CALM DOWN! It's just...essentially a book report." "SHUT UP C."[........] "I think we need to eat something" "Yeah. Should I make pancakes? With chocolate chips or without, B.? "

The time we got stuck at school because it was snowing, and C. wrote a beautiful piece called "The agonizing mesmerism of snow", and our friend P.,who was a wizard with a pencil, made an earie and amazing drawing for it that almost made me cry. Coincidentally, it was the day pope Ratzinger resigned. We thought it was a joke while still at school, then later on agreed that it was the reason it had been snowing in the first place. None of us wanted to write about the pope, so we asked the guy who was always sending us articles about the occult and arcane symbols hidden in churches. It turned out great.

The time a bunch of our more "troublesome" classmates started making hilarious dirty jokes based on Catullus' double entendres and B. promised them we would publish them (anonymously) if they wrote them down. They did, and the result was a page titled "Surrealism" full of the dirtiest "poetic" stuff in existence that made everybody laugh themselves unconscious, with the exception of some teachers who somehow didn't get the jokes.

The time we interviewed our student representative (a classmate of ours), whom B. had always thought was too full of himself and needed to be brought down a notch. So we "accidentally" misspelled his name in the article. Nobody noticed except him. He was fuming and it was glorious (not my proudest moment, but what can you do)

The time another brilliant classmate wrote a piece called "The pathologic mysoginist" that absolutely enraged some of the guys in our school. I stan her to this day.

That time I wrote a long article for Woman's day about the abuse and mistreatment of women in our country and across the world. I thought it was nothing special, really, but then Maria the janitor (the sweetest lady in existence) stopped me in the corridor and teared up a bit and said that she hadn't known about a lot of the things I had discussed, but she thought it was important to talk about them and that she felt represented as a woman and that she wanted to bring the paper home to read it to her husband. It touched me so deeply I still get emotional when I think about it.

Anyway, all of this and more happened in one year. Then we, too, had to worry about university admissions and exams and we passed the burden on to "aliens and occult" guy (who was amazing too)

But I remember the passion we poured into it, the willingness to take risks, the feeling of defying authority for the "greater good". We were idealists, all of us, and so full of hope and a will to change things in every way we could. Maybe a high school newspaper means nothing in the great scheme of things, but it meant something to us. It made us brave when we didn't think we were. It made us defiant. I wonder if that part of me is still sleeping, somewhere deep inside.

#Memories #High school #Journalism #I guess #High school newspaper #Adolescence #Adventures #Funny #I am so full of feelings right now #We were crazy #About me #Long post

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istheresomebodywhocanimagine · 6 years

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Because I’m selfish could you do a shipping me with members thing? I’m short, half Greek and Scottish but raised in Australia (yes, I do have an accent) I have really long brown hair and hazel eyes, and I play bass and sing. I love to read and write, and I almost always have headphones on and music blasting. I also am a drama student and I love to act. Thank you so much xxxxx Love your blog btw.

hi! don’t feel selfish for this, i’mma keep it real with you pal - i have asked for several ships before nO SHAME

anyways, in relation to BoRhap - I ship you with Gwilym!!! At first I was going to say Joe, but I think I see you meshing with Gwilym really well:

When Gwilym got cast as Brian in BoRhap, you were the first one he called. First, to break the news. Second, to ask you for a little help brushing up on his skills. He knew you played bass, and it wasn’t exactly lead guitar, but he still wanted to know all of your little tips and pointers in case there was something he could use when he finally met Brian.

In fact, he came over the next day with his guitar, already ready to learn. You were happy to oblige, but you admitted to him early on that you didn’t exactly know how well you’d be able to translate your bass-centered ideas to the guitar.

“What’s different about the two?” he’d asked, seated across from you and leaning forward over his guitar, genuinely interested in what you had to say. He considered you a great mind on the subject.

“Well, the mechanics are similar, you know, as far as that goes, but the fingerings aren’t going to be the same…” you rambled on for a minute, Gwil transfixed by everything you were saying.

After you were done speaking, he’d grinned at you proudly. “You’re brilliant, love.”

He calls you brilliant a lot, actually. It’s his favorite thing to say to you, because of the way your eyes light up when he says it. They are already brimming with all kinds of energy, but after he calls you brilliant - that’s when he’s the most captivated.

You heard that word - brilliant - coming out of his mouth the most often when he was reading over your latest writing, no matter what style it was. Poetry, prose, he loved it all.

“Can I keep this one?” he’d asked one time, holding up a piece of prose you’d written specifically about him. You grinned and took it back from him, looking over it for a moment.

“What’s so special about this one?” you’d asked as you sat back on the bed, preferring the poem you’d written about him a few months ago much more than this piece. But boy, did he have an answer for you. In fact, you’d never heard someone speak as passionately about something as Gwil would once he got going.

He stood up and gave you a 10 minute speech about why he thought you should let him keep that short story, introduction, body, and conclusion to the speech all included.

“So, can I?” he’d asked after a moment of you sitting there, dumbfounded. He gave you a toothy smile as he sat back down next to you.

“You were definitely born to be an actor,” you mumbled, handing the prose to him and shaking your head in disbelief at how much he’d fought for those two pages of writing. That’d gotten a chuckle out of him, and he peppered the side of your face with kisses before happily taking the story back.

Speaking of acting, Gwil LOVED coming to your performances. He took a whole week off of filming once just so he could see every night of your theater company’s Anything Goes.

He’d posted a big long paragraph about your performance after opening night, telling all of his loyal followers how brilliant you had been, and how proud he was of you. And, of course, he’d put some sentences in there about how much he loved you and loved going on this journey with you.

And then Joe commented “-Bri” just to make fun of how eerily alike Gwil was to his elder double. Classic Joe.

Now, if we’re talking Queen, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I really think I ship you with Roger - HEAR ME OUT, I have some (probably weak) reasons:

The reason I think you’d caught Roger’s eye before any of the other boys is because of your accent - he’d latched onto it almost immediately after hearing you speaking to Deacon, who had hired you as a bass tech. You were both eagerly discussing some kind of system that Roger hadn’t a clue about, but your voice was like a drug to him.

He’d made a point of inserting himself into the conversation, introducing himself and chastising John a bit.

“How come I haven’t met your friend here sooner?” Roger scolded John playfully, John just laughing and shaking his head.

“This is Y/N, she’s my new tech. I figured I’d introduce her to the most sane members of the band first, but first I have to figure out who those are.”

You’d laughed at that, particularly because of the mock hurt on Roger’s face before he’d reached out to shake your hand, you introducing yourself this time.

“That accent,” he’d had to point out, letting go of your hand, “Where is it from?”

“Australia. What about yours?” you’d countered, noticing a bit of a different lilt to his words than John’s.

Roger scoffed at that, shrugging. “Cornwall. Exciting stuff, eh?”

After that day, he’d always find reasons to come and talk to you, sometimes the reason being no better than him wanting to hear your accent.

The day Roger realized he actually might fancy you was when he’d noticed you writing on one of the off days and asked to see a sneak peek of what you were doing. Roger loved writing songs, and wondered if you had any good material.

You did. In fact, he was thoroughly impressed by your work, and spent the rest of the day work-shopping with you, which spilled over into a late night coffee run before it was time to go hop on the bus to head to the next tour stop.

You were in the coffee shop, talking about what Queen had coming up after this tour, when Roger had redirected the conversation.

“You know, I’ve never asked, what did you study back home?” he’d inquired, curious to see what kind of person you were. He’d pegged you as some sort of major similar to John based on your identical knowledge of his bass, so he was pleasantly surprised when you revealed that you were a drama student. “An actor, huh? That must be why you’re so seemingly interested in all of Brian’s stories. God, explains so much now.”

You had to laugh at that, shaking your head. “No, no, Brian actually has some good stories and knows how to tell them. Now you, on the other hand…” you’d trailed off, Roger recoiling in slight insult at what you’d suggested.

Someone who could keep up with his humor and insult him while they were at it? You were growing on him quickly.

One thing he always really enjoyed doing once you grew more comfortable around him was (carefully) taking your headphones and listening to a little bit of whatever you were currently listening to.

At first, it annoyed you a bit, but when you realized he was genuinely wanting to pick up on some of your music taste, you allowed it to happen with little to no issue.

Also, he’d started slipping you song recommendations on tapes of his, labeling them cute things and drawing little smiley faces on them. Though it was difficult to understand his scrawlings sometimes, you cherished those tapes.

While we’re talking about songs, Roger liked to hear you sing. One time, you were trying to explain a part of the song where you thought Deacon wasn’t getting a good sound out of his bass to another tech, and you started singing the chorus part where it started sounding off.

Roger was, for lack of better words, shook.

Like, he loved your voice.

So, clever little gentleman he is, he found a way to start getting you to sing around him more by pretending to hear issues with the bass in the songs they’d play during their sets.

“It was like, it was muted during the last part of the second chorus, you know?” he’d said one time, working his way into it nonchalantly. “Like, the part where, you know, Fred goes, ‘and I love the things…’“ he’d trailed off, pretending not to remember the next part.

You thought for a moment, then you sang in a soft voice just to clarify. “And I love the things, I really love the things that you do, oh, you’re my best friend? That part?”

“Yeah, yeah!” he’d say, smiling and pointing at you like you were a genius for remembering the simplest lyrics in the whole set.

You caught on after a few times of false alarms from him, but you let him keep believing that he had you right where he wanted you. It was honestly really cute that he’d go through so much work to hear you sing, even if he didn’t necessarily need to try that hard.

(But don’t tell him that, for God’s sake.)

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msclaritea · 7 years

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~Napoleon, Nietzsche & TFP~

A Study In Holmesian Iconoclasm: Masks & Images P.2

This is the final part of a series that looked into the canon story The Six Napoleons, resulting in mary-resurrects-lucretia & sherlock-on-the-ocean-when-neitzsche-wept. In the story, someone is running around, smashing Napoleon busts. Strange enough, but even more so when you find out that this has all happened before. Arthur Conan Doyle was masterful, it seems, at embedding real-life people and true tales of History in the Holmes stories. Iconoclasm is the social belief in the importance of the destruction of usually religious icons and other images or monuments, most frequently for religious or political reasons…In Political and revolutionary iconoclasm, revolutions, and changes of regime, whether through uprising of the local population, foreign invasion, or a combination of both, are often accompanied by the public destruction of statues and monuments identified with the previous regime.

During the French Revolution, the statue of Napoleon on the column at Place Vendôme, Paris was the target of iconoclasm several times: destroyed after the Bourbon Restoration, and during the Paris Commune.

Napoleon loomed large as a political figure in the 19th century. The artists of subsequent periods were a mix of elevating his image…or smashing it. Napoleonic Iconoclasm is an actual known trope, as he evolved into a mythical figure during the Romantic Period.

“Such a fact must tell against the theory that the man who breaks them is influenced by any general hatred of Napoleon. Considering how many hundreds of statues of the great Emperor must exist in London, it is too much to suppose such a coincidence as that a promiscuous iconoclast should chance to begin upon three specimens of the same bust.“

The Adventure of The Six Napoleons touches on true political history, and the image of Napoleon intertwines with the enduring quality of Holmes. Moriarty was not called ‘The Napoleon of Crime’, for nothing. He was created as a nemesis to Holmes; his mirror image, for his eventual death. But whereas Moriarty died, Sherlock Holmes, like Napoleon, was ‘banished’, only to return, and be celebrated, while once again, taking control of ACD’s career.

“Privately, he has become something of a villain, over time, tyrannically taking control of Doyle’s writing, and his endlessly-replicated heroic figure invited smashing.” This quote, from The Secret Marriage of Sherlock Holmes: "Shattering the pedestrian image of reason is Holmes’s great iconoclastic gift.“ "His reasoning is obsessive, impulsive, unpredictable, astonishing.” Holmes displays much enthusiasm and dramatic flair in The Six Thatchers, and “When the blow of the riding crop shatters the image so long sought, and reveals the pearl inside, all subsequent explanations seem a footnote. That blow is this story’s symbolic representation of reason’s power, and that single gesture sums up the transvaluation (re-evaluating of the values) of reason’s image that Sherlock Holmes has wrought.“ It’s part of my theory that BBC Sherlock is engaging Holmesian Iconoclasm; in a literary sense, breaking the man down to his most basic parts, taking him into dark places in an experiment of re-integration, using the teachings of Nietzsche in Season 4, as a way of aligning his moral code for the world we live in now. What ARE the sum of his parts?

The Question: Sherlock and Theseus’s Paradox by Dennis O’ Neil

"An Ancient Greek named Theseus…builds a ship. Over time the ship needs repairs and pieces of it have to be replaced and finally everything has been replaced. Not a single splinter of the original craft remains. Which brings us to what is known in some circles as Theseus’s Paradox. We ask: Is the ship our man Theseus ends with the same one that he built years earlier?”

In The Beginning: Birth & The Bi-Part Soul

Below is an excerpt from a thesis The Influence of Duality and Poe’s Notion of the Bi-Part Soul’ on the Genesis of Detective Fiction in the Nineteenth-Century by Stephanie Craighill. It is a lengthy, beautiful piece on the genesis of the creation of what we refer to as the Mirrors. Like Nietzsche, Poe and Doyle held strong belief in Duality/Dualism/Balance, and used that belief, NOT just when structuring characters, but the stories themselves.

"Observing him in these moods, I often dwelt meditatively upon the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul and amused myself with the fancy of a double Dupin; the creative and the resolvent." Poe‘s explicit reference to the double‘ directly intertwines with the theme of duality which resonates throughout the Gothic novel and the Romantic Movement in nineteenth century fiction; this paradigm is evident in texts such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe‘s Faust, Mary Shelley‘s Frankenstein…This motif has been extensively examined by scholars and has been defined using numerous but vague classifications which include the fictional double‘, the evil twin‘, the alter ego‘, the antithetical self‘, the fragmentation of self into dual‘ and the twin soul‘. Dupin reproaches the Prefect of the Parisian police for being too cunning to be profound‘,

(which mirrors the game of chess where what is complex is mistaken for what is profound‘. The detective, also, rebukes the Prefect‘s wisdom‘ for being all head and no body‘ which relates to the detective‘s earlier supposition that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic‘ The Prefect‘s reasoning is too fanciful‘ to be successful. It is through the combined use of both aspects of the Bi Part Soul‘, the head‘ and the body‘ and their associated faculties of the imagination and reason, that the detective was able to outwit his opponent.)

Duality is implicit in the structure and characterization of The Murders in the Rue Morgue‘. It is visible in the tale‘s twin plot, the divided self which is the narrator and Dupin, the doubling of the criminals, victims and detective and most prominently the detective‘s creative and resolvent‘ Bi-Part Soul‘. Dupin‘s dual psychology is associated with moral ambiguity and a blurring of boundaries which, consequently, has shaped a compelling psychosomatic template for a genre of multifaceted and complex detective protagonists. Holmes‘ inherent dualism is summarised by Iain Sinclair and Ed Glinert who state that: Holmes is the classically divided man that the age required: alchemist and rigorous experimenter, furious walker and definitive slacker, athlete and dope fiend. He could, as the mood took him, be Trappist or motor mouth … Holmes is forever lurching between incompatible polarities. From the beginning Holmes was a double figure, first in himself as the mixture of scientist and poet and even more significantly in the double figure of Sherlock Holmes Doctor Watson‘. Conan Doyle‘s implicit doubling of Poe‘s detective trilogy extends further; like Dupin who doubles the criminals in The Murders in the Rue Morgue‘ and the thief Minister D. in The Purloined Letter‘, Holmes represents a doppelgänger for his arch nemesis, the criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty. Moriarty only directly appears in two of the sixty Holmes accounts; in the short story The Final Problem‘ and the novella The Valley of Fear, though he is mentioned in a selection of the other narratives. In these two accounts we learn that Moriarty shares a number of common characteristics with Holmes. He is of similar physical appearance, has a phenomenal mathematical faculty‘, is a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker‘ and a scientific criminal‘ Moriarty conforms to the same Bi-Part‘ mould as the detectives Holmes and Dupin; he is both reasoned and artistic. In The Final Problem‘ Holmes refers to Moriarty as the organiser of half that is evil. Moriarty could characterize an inversion of the values embodied by Holmes‘ and, as a result, the criminal represents the detective‘s doppelgänger who is equipped with an identical skill set but motivated by an evil purpose."

Context: Paralleling the Works of Nietzsche and Sherlock

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.

Thus Spake Zarathustra: Sherlock On The Ocean:

"The above piece was written in 1875 by William Ernest Henley. Perhaps most famous is Henley’s closing statement: “I am the master of my fate:/I am the captain of my soul.” The poem is a declaration of the triumph of the human spirit - the refusal to bend to a universe Henley called “a place of wrath and tears. Holmes was an unprecedented sort of hero. Emerging from a culture enthralled by scientific progress, he was a superhero who relied almost entirely on his powers of deduction…Holmes was and is the sensationalized personification of Henley’s captain of the soul. His powers of deduction are presented as the triumph of reason, a triumph open to all of humanity if we’d only try a little harder. In this way, Sherlock Holmes is Nietzsche’s “superman” (a term coined in Thus Spake Zarathustra, written a few years before A Study in Scarlet). He is the moral, observational and logical evolution of mankind.

The Übermensch is Nietzsche’s concept of the ideal, and it can translate to overman, superman, above human, and probably some other things. The Übermensch doesn’t have incredible physical abilities. Instead, his power is mental and spiritual. The greatest power in the world, according to Nietzsche, is freedom, and I’m about to make a huge and tragic over-simplification of Nietzsche’s theory as to what that means. It is that complete human freedom is achieved by radically breaking with all forms of guilt, shame, and external authority. It combines many qualities of a completely naïve and fearless toddler with those of an experienced and wise elder."

Sherlock: Isn't that...one of those Law things?

"In the first or second episode a minor character calls him a sociopath, and the show really delves into the question of what actually makes Holmes and Moriarty (a really evil criminal who is as good at crime as Holmes is at solving crimes) different from each other aside from pure occupational interests. The sociopath comment was my first clue. Critics of Nietzsche’s philosophy have always contended that his Übermensch would really be a sociopath who just looks out for number one. What is useful in making the connection between Sherlock Holmes and Nietzsche’s work is that I think the Holmes series provides a picture into how the Übermensch doesn’t necessarily play out as a sociopath.“

"He can’t stand the boredom of the day to day, the absurd. And it is just like any good German existentialist to value present experience over the longevity of life. Furthermore, he is completely open about his habit with Dr. Watson, who is initially very concerned. His openness about it shows that Holmes gives no credibility to prescriptions other than his own as to what constitutes a good life.

His passion happens to be for forensic science, or the “science of deduction,” as Holmes calls it. The key, though, is that he throws everything he has got into what he truly cares about, leaving no room for time wasters like social obligations, civic engagement, parties, etc. Dr. Watson even finds that Holmes isn’t aware that the Earth revolves around the sun, since it has no use for his forensic studies.”

“There is an old illusion—it is called good and evil. Around soothsayers and astrologers hath hitherto revolved the orbit of this illusion.

Once did one believe in soothsayers and astrologers; and therefore did one believe, "Everything is fate: thou shalt, for thou must!”

Then again did one distrust all soothsayers and astrologers; and therefore did one believe, “Everything is freedom: thou canst, for thou willest!”

O my brethren, concerning the stars and the future there hath hitherto been only illusion, and not knowledge; and therefore concerning good and evil there hath hitherto been only illusion and not knowledge!" Thus Spake Zarathustra

”On Nietzsche: While most of his contemporaries looked on the late nineteenth century with unbridled optimism, confident in the progress of science and the rise of the German state, Nietzsche saw his age facing a fundamental crisis in values. With the rise of science, the Christian worldview no longer held a prominent explanatory role in people’s lives, a view Nietzsche captures in the phrase “God is dead.” However, science does not introduce a new set of values to replace the Christian values it displaces. Nietzsche rightly foresaw that people need to identify some source of meaning and value in their lives, and if they could not find it in science, they would turn to aggressive nationalism and other such salves. The last thing Nietzsche would have wanted was a return to traditional Christianity, however. Instead, he sought to find a way out of nihilism through the creative and willful affirmation of life.“

The Gay Science: Nietzsche’s first consideration of the idea of the eternal recurrence

“What if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ […] Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”

This was one of the themes of Shakespeare’s No Fear Sonnets 1-60, some of which have been found embedded and acted out in the show. 59 is heavy with this theme and found in The Six Thatchers. “Not only does Nietzsche posit that the universe is recurring over infinite time and space, but that the different versions of events that have occurred in the past may at one point or another take place again, hence "all configurations that have previously existed on this earth must yet meet…” And with each version of events is hoping that some knowledge or awareness is gained to better the individual, hence “And thus it will happen one day that a man will be born again, just like me and a woman will be born, just like Mary—only that it is hoped to be that the head of this man may contain a little less foolishness…”

The Antichrist, originally published in 1895

MARY: Hm. Now you’d think we’d have noticed, when she was born. JOHN: Hm? Noticed what? MARY: The little 666 on her forehead. JOHN: Hmhmhm, that’s The Omen. MARY: (lifts her head to look at him with a frown, stays like that though John’s entire answer) So? JOHN: Well, you said it was like The Exorcist. They’re two different things. You can’t be the Devil and the Antichrist.

“Nietzsche writes scathingly about Christianity, arguing that it is fundamentally opposed to life. In Christian morality, Nietzsche sees an attempt to deny all those characteristics that he associates with healthy life. The concept of sin makes us ashamed of our instincts and our sexuality, the concept of faith discourages our curiosity and natural skepticism, and the concept of pity encourages us to value and cherish weakness. Furthermore, Christian morality is based on the promise of an afterlife, leading Christians to devalue this life in favor of the beyond. Nietzsche argues that Christianity springs from resentment for life and those who enjoy it, and it seeks to overthrow health and strength with its life-denying ethic. As such, Nietzsche considers Christianity to be the hated enemy...Christianity is called the religion of pity. Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vitality: it has a depressing effect. We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. That loss of strength which suffering as such inflicts on life is still further increased and multiplied by pity. Pity makes suffering contagious."

Sherlock: This hospital is full of people dying, doctor, why don’t you go and cry by their bedsides, see what good it does.

Nietzsche claimed that the Christian religion and its morality are based on imaginary fictions. Concept of morality is falsified. Morality is no longer an expression of life and growth. Instead, morality opposes life by presenting well–being as a dangerous temptation. Priestly agitators “… interpret all good fortune as a reward, all misfortune as punishment for disobedience of God, for 'sin,’…The sacred book formulates the will of God and specifies what is to be given to the priests. Priests become parasites.”…All things of life are so ordered that the priest is everywhere indispensable; at all the natural events of life, at birth, marriage, sickness, death. Not to speak of 'sacrifice’ (meal–times)…Natural values become utterly valueless. The priest sanctifies and bestows all value. Disobedience of God (the priest) is 'sin.’ Subjection to God (the priest) is redemption. Priests use 'sin’ to gain and hold power.

Sherlock: …And contrast is, after all, God’s own plan to enhance the beauty of his creation. Or it would be if God were not a ludicrous fantasy designed to provide a career opportunity for the family idiot.

*Interesting footnote about the first part of this statement. Goethe, from whom Nietzche gets the word Ubermensch, apparently actually invented the Color Wheel. THIS video shows how he used light, shadow and a color to enhance the beauty of another.

“The Truth’s Boring!”

“Nietzsche is critical of the very idea of objective truth. That we should think there is only one right way of considering a matter is only evidence that we have become inflexible in our thinking. Such intellectual inflexibility is a symptom of saying “no” to life, a condition that Nietzsche abhors. A healthy mind is flexible and recognizes that there are many different ways of considering a matter. There is no single truth but rather many.”

“Because You’re an Idiot”

"Nietzsche thought that the word idiot best described Jesus. According to Walter Kaufmann, he might have been referring to the naïve protagonist of Dostoyevsky’s book The Idiot. “The fable of Christ as miracle–worker and redeemer is not the origin of Christianity..Jesus did not want to redeem anyone. He wanted to show how to live. His legacy was his bearing and behavior. He did not resist evildoers. He loved evildoers. Nietzsche claimed that the Christian faith as practised was not a proper representation of Jesus’ teachings, as it forced people merely to believe in the way of Jesus but not to act as Jesus did, in particular his example of refusing to judge people, something that Christians had constantly done the opposite of."

Human, All Too Human: On Becoming

JOHN: Don’t pretend you’re not enjoying this. SHERLOCK (not looking round): Hmm? JOHN: Being back. Being a hero again. SHERLOCK: Oh, don’t be stupid. JOHN: You’d have to be an idiot not to see it. You love it. SHERLOCK (turning to face him): Love what? JOHN: Being Sherlock Holmes. SHERLOCK: I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean.

"Nietzsche wrote that Heraclitus "will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction”. Nietzsche developed the vision of a chaotic world in perpetual change and becoming. The state of becoming does not produce fixed entities, such as being, subject, object, substance, thing. Ephesus, who in the sixth century BC, said that nothing in this world is constant except change and becoming." Sherlock, at this point, is still in a state of becoming.

"Reptile!"

"But wherever ye would ascend with me, O my brethren, take care lest a parasite ascend with you! A parasite: that is a reptile, a creeping, cringing reptile, that trieth to fatten on your infirm and sore places. And this is its art: it divineth where ascending souls are weary, in your trouble and dejection, in your sensitive modesty, doth it build its loathsome nest.”

“Enemy” shall ye say but not “villain,” “invalid” shall ye say but not “wretch,” “fool” shall ye say but not “sinner.”

And thou, red judge, if thou would say audibly all thou hast done in thought, then would every one cry: “Away with the nastiness and the virulent reptile!” Thus Spake Zarathustra

Why All The Pain? The Birth of Tragedy

“Artistic creation depends on a tension between two opposing forces, which Nietzsche terms the “Apollonian” and the “Dionysian.”

"Apollo was the god of light, reason, harmony, balance and prophesy, while Dionysus was the god of wine, revelry, ecstatic emotion and tragedy.

Nietzsche uses this duality for discussing the artistic process which relate to either Apollo or Dionysus. Apollo and Dionysus symbols of this duality which he further distinguishes with the terms of “dreams” and “drunkenness.” For Nietzsche, dreams represent the realm of beautiful forms and symbols, an orderly place of light and reason. Drunkenness, on the other hand, is that state of wild passions where the boundaries between "self" and "other" dissolve. (This may strike as odd, but Nietzsche seems to make the assumption that, when dreaming, one is aware of the fact that one is dreaming and so still able to separate appearance from reality. I believe that he would claim those who are entirely caught up in their dreams are experiencing Dionysian ecstasy, not Apollonian beauty.)"

Meet Nihilism

”The nihilist believes in nothing, has no loyalties and has no purpose in life. Some are left with only an impulse to destroy.“

EURUS: Am I being punished? MAN (offscreen, faintly): You’ve been bad. EURUS (almost sing-song): There’s no such thing as ‘bad.’ MAN (offscreen): What about good? EURUS: Good and bad are fairytales. We have evolved to attach an emotional significance to what is nothing more than the survival strategy of the pack animal. We are conditioned to invest divinity in utility. Good isn’t really good, evil isn’t really wrong, and bottoms aren’t really pretty. You are a prisoner of your own meat. MAN (offscreen): Why aren’t you? EURUS (raising her head and looking directly into the camera as she speaks the words slowly and clearly): I’m too clever.

"Moral nihilism, also known as ethical nihilism, is the meta-ethical view that morality does not exist as something inherent to objective reality; therefore no action is necessarily preferable to any other. For example, a moral nihilist would say that killing someone, for whatever reason, is not inherently right or wrong. Nietzsche characterized nihilism as emptying the world and especially human existence of meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or essential value."

Eurus is most definitely a Sherlock mirror; a Bi-Part Soul. She doesn’t even know 'if something’s beautiful or not; only right’. Eurus is pure Nihilism. A Brain without a heart; an actual calculating machine, attempting to show that making a supposed 'morally-right decision can actually create the opposite result, so that moral codes don’t matter. She used tests, like sherlocks-paradox, tests he has been put through before. As we witness, Sherlock succeeds.

This is still the same journey many have pointed out, just using the Nietzschean Method to do so. Growing from a great man…a Superman into a good one; flawed and very much human, with a Moral Code to match.

"Friedrich Nietzsche believed that the corrosive effects of nihilism would end up destroying all moral constructs, religions, and metaphysical convictions...that nihilism would be the most corrosive force in history.”

Fun Note: On Mustaches & Military Kinks

“Nietzsche lived with the mustache most of his adult life, and it represented for him the military life. He served briefly in the military, and always held certain admiration for military discipline. In him we get a sense that the military attitude is very important towards living a proper, fulfilling life. If you ask most people what does Nietzsche look like, what they will immediately say is: ‘oh that’s the guy with the huge mustache’. And if you ask: ‘well, what about the eyes? the nose? what about the chin? what about the hair?’ They will probably draw a blank. And Nietzsche himself points out that when you see someone with a big handsome mustache, what they see is: the mustache. It is a mask, it allowed Nietzsche in effect to hide.”

To conclude, through the eyes of Nietzsche, the show is smashing the previous images of Sherlock Holmes, using the Philosopher’s works, in addition to Freud and Josef Breuer, to take him through a journey of self-discovery, and yes, love. Given the strong hints to a troubled childhood and suppression of feelings, the philosophies of these men, together, are employed, just as presented in When Nietzsche Wept. This meta cannot even begin to cover the full scope of Nietzshe’s works or his strong influence on the blueprint of Sherlock Holmes. His presence is found throughout canon; sometimes, in the form of other characters. I will say that Nietzche’s ideas are many, profound and important. Considering his influence on Arthur Conan Doyle, and Sherlock Holmes, who has in turn, been so important to 21st century, in many fields, Friedrich Nietzsche should always be held in high regard. Not bad for a guy who in the good old days would have been labelled a Heretic, and burned at the stake. So maybe he’s right; we can be better.

“I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against everything that had been believed, demanded, hallowed so far. I am no man, I am dynamite. Ecco Homo

(Don’t you just love some of his book titles?)

Read also the-reptile-in-221b & sherlock-denying-the-devil

@brilliantorinsane @simpleanddestructivechemistry @shylockgnomes @possiblyimbiassed @raggedyblue @rinkagaminesstuff @artfulkindoforder @radogost @asherlockstudy @fellshish @multivariate-madness @madzither @yorkiepug @loveismyrevolution @consultingidiots @tjlcisthenewsexy

Full text of Thus Spake Zarathustra

X X X X X X X X X X X

#Napoleon Nietzsche & TFP Meta #Threads #1895 #The Ubermensche #Josef Breuer #Freud #Nietzsche/Sherlock Parallels #Holmesian Iconoclasm #I'm Done!

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centaurianthropology · 7 years

Note

I am not particularly well-versed in meta-analysis so I'm curious what someone better versed in the art (aka you) would have to say about the relevance of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias (to which I'm assuming the ep title was a reference) to the episode, the story as a whole, and potentially also specifically the Unknowing?

First off, don’t sell yourself short! Meta is seriouslyjust the art of blathering your own opinion about something with some semblanceof structure and using the facts at hand as evidence. That’s why it’s sofun to meta with other people. My own meta is always just my opinionbacked with whatever knowledge on the subject I happen to have. Hearing the metas from other people enrichesmy opinion and let me test my own theories against others.

Second, I should probablywarn you that it’s been a healthy while since I did any sort of poetryanalysis, and never considered myself particularly versed in it (no punintended). So for this meta, we’re going to only be using the words ofthe poem, and the context of the Library of Alexandria, which I believe is what’sbeing obliquely referenced with that particular quote. And given that we’re drawing ever closer tothe Unknowing, I feel like that’s a particularly apt little bit of poetry todraw from. I’m also going to dig alittle into the history of the Library of Alexandria for this one. Again, this isn’t my area. I took a few classes on Egyptology during myMaster’s work, and that’s been more than a decade ago. And even then, we didn’t get far into theGreco-Roman rule of Egypt, which is in large part where the history of thelibrary comes from. So I’ll be using myold friend Wikipedia here. If someoneelse out there happens to have made a proper study of the library and wouldlike to add things or correct some of my misapprehensions, please do!

So, yeah. Preliminariesdone. Let’s meta. And history.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from anantique landWho said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:And on the pedestal these words appear:‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.”

I think a huge part of the underpinnings of the storyof ‘The Magnus Archives’ is change. The Unknowing is apparently adance that doesn’t end the world, but changes it irrevocably into somethingthat better resembles the Stranger. Something even more bizarre anduncanny than the world is currently.

It’s my theory, since hearingthis, that the world as it currently is, is held in balance. None of theGreat Old Ones have managed to get a firm enough foothold to fully transformthe world. But there have been moments when something like the Unknowinghave likely succeeded, but those successes were temporary. Let meexplain.

A little bit of historicalcontext, likely tweaked in the TMA universe, regarding the Library ofAlexandria. The Library was considered to be one of the great centers oflearning in the western world from around the 3rd century BCE until itsdestruction. It was believed to house somewhere between 40,000 and400,000 papyrus scrolls at its height.

The exact date of itsdestruction is unknown, though some believe that Julius Caesar’s army burned itas early as 48 BCE, though it might have been as late as the 270s CE. Quite a few of the works there survived at a smaller site called the Serapeum,a large temple built during the Greek rule of Egypt. The Serapeum itselfis thought to have been destroyed on the orders of Pope Theophilius ofAlexandria, during his purge of all non-Christian places of worship, around 390CE. A library to rival Alexandria’s likely did not exist again in thatarea until the House of Wisdom in Baghdad built its library in the 9th centuryCE (many historical books from before that period would have been entirely lostwere it not for the Arabic translations reconstructed there).

I want to lay this out toshow that there was no singular destruction of the library. All the dates are contested, and all theevents surrounded its eventual burning were also questionable. Given that the Serapeum survived as anoffshoot, and in the TMA universe, the library had an even more secretiveoffshoot in its Archive, it’s likely even harder to place the date of thatUnknowing event. But for convenience,let’s use the later date as the destruction of the Archives. Specifically, the library wasburned around270 CE during an attack on the city by the Roman Emperor Aurelian.

He’s an interesting guy. He’s one of those rose-up-the-ranks militaryemperors like Domitian that tended to do fairly well by his empire. Aurelian’s rule was actually a period ofbarely keeping things together for the Roman Empire. They were stretched too thin, and it was onlythrough his concerted military efforts that the whole thing didn’t collapseduring his reign. He was actually deifiedby the Empire for his work.

So it’s interesting that theLibrary of Alexandria was destroyed as part of an effort to maintain order, tokeep the world as the Romans knew it from unravelling. It was done as an effort to fight change, inour world.

Could that have been whereGertrude’s plan started to hatch? Weknow she went to Alexandria and studied the remnants of that Archive. She might even be responsible for the deathof that former Archivist still trapped there.

We’re viewing the destructionof the Institute as a part of the Unknowing, but whose word do we have forthat? Elias, who defines himselfentirely as the beating heart of the Institute. Of course he believes that the preservation of the Archive and theInstitute are necessary to prevent the Unknowing. And superficially, that makes sense. If the Unknowing is about changing the worldto be less, well, knowing, then maintaining the Archives should be of paramountimportance. But instead, Gertrudedecided to detonate the whole thing. Why? That’s the question I keepasking. If she knew that the Unknowingwas coming, and that things were rapidly declining toward the dance thatchanges the world, why would she pick that time to destroy the Archive?

Unless preventing theUnknowing is less about one side or the other winning than it is preserving thebalance.

So we come back to the poem ‘Ozymandias’,which is a hauntingly short, lonely piece. At its most basic, it’s a poem about all things ending, all thingsdecaying, and all things ending up as equal in the vast flat desert. We have in this a once-great statue, and aboast on a plaque demanding that the reader gaze upon the great works of thislost king. Except the works are gone,swallowed back by the equality of the desert.

Nothing beside remains.

I think that this specificline could certainly reference the Unknowing, in the simple fact that nothinglike that lasts. We don’t know if thedestruction of Alexandria was a successful Unknowing or not. One might claim that the fact that theStranger is attempting to dance the Unknowing again indicates it wasn’t. But how would we know? What is the result of the Unknowing? Change. But change keeps on going. Novictory is static. Do you think that ifthe Unknowing were to succeed, the Beholding would die? No. These beings, whatever they are, don’t have any concept of an end. They don’t exist that way. So one wins, and for a while they have astronger grip over this reality. Buteventually things turn around. All theirgreat works fall. The library isdestroyed. The mask shatters. All that’s left are remnants of thattime. A face in an empty desert.

And on a smaller level, Ithink that line is being addressed to Elias. His hubris clearly knows no bounds. He is very much Ozymandias, this King of Kings, this beating heart of hiskingdom. Look on his works: the libraryof the Institute is one of the premiere paranormal libraries in the world. The other supernatural beings look at thisman—because he still is mostly a man—and they respect him. They respect the order he keeps and the powerhe wields. And right now, it really doesfeel like we have to look on his works and despair. He’s the single most powerful entity directlyinvolved in the story right now.

But change happens. The library falls. The Unknowing happens or it doesn’t. This show is masterful at the surprisinganticlimax, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a part of theUnknowing. If the Stranger wins … andnothing in particular happens. Becausethe world is already uncanny. Things tipone direction or the other, but they are always eventually leveled backout. It seems much more immediate forthe characters, of course, as they are affected on an amplified scale by theseevents. But to the Great Old Ones? It’s just another move in the game, with therubble of a thousand moves before stretched out across the globe.

And this is why I really needto find out why Gertrude decided that destroying the Institute wasnecessary. This is why I need to knowwhat she discovered when she went to Alexandria. When she met the oldest Archivist inexistence. This is why I need to knowwhat was in the Schwartzwald tomb that was powerful enough to restart theArchive through Jonah Magnus. This iswhy I want to know more about what happened during the last Unknowing event,who won, and how. Because even though it’sjust another move in a game without end, even though everything does eventuallyrevert to the desert, we care about this particular move. And to understand how this is going to playout, Jon needs to understand what came before.

Elias is Ozymandias, revelingin his works even as they are fleeting. He’s lost track of his own scope in this game, his own importance. I think Gertrude kept that sense that she wassmall, and that her moves had to be strategic to achieve her ends, whateverthose were. She had a sense that allthings end, that some things might need to end. Perhaps she let go of too much. Jon isn’t Elias or Gertrude. He’sslapped in the face at every opportunity with the notion that he’s not the mostpowerful being in the room. He cares somuch he hates it. He wants to protectpeople, which makes this move and this choice matter to him perhaps more thanit even did for Gertrude. She wasplaying the game. He’s trying to save asmany people as possible. It’s the pieceson the board he cares about, not necessarily the result of the game.

And that’s where his choicesare going to differ from Elias and Gertrude. He’s not a statue in the desert, nor is he the sacking army that levelsthe library. He’s just one guy given acertain amount of power and more importance in this game than he everwanted. He’s connected to his humanity ina way that Gertrude wasn’t, and that Elias can’t understand. His entire history says that he’s isolatedand distant. That he avoids deep andmeaningful relationships. But that doesn’tmean he doesn’t care. Entirely theopposite, really. He cares toomuch. And that means that how he playsthis game is going to be radically different to the way that Elias or Gertrudewould. In the end, the Archive may wellfall. The Stranger may or may notwin. But Jon will simply try to savewhoever he can.

#The Magnus Archives #this has been a bit rambly #I started out with the poem #but ended up spiralling out through theories about characters #and a stroll through history #because I love me some history #hopefully you can figure out what the hell I was trying to say here #apologies for a certain lack of a central point here #biextroverts

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allmykindsofthings · 6 years

Note

It's me, an asshole, 1 to 30 please

…… I hate you…….YOU BETTER READ IT ALL!!!

1.favourite place in your country? Pairi Daiza, a zoological and botanical park.Most beautiful thing ever! Nothing to do with a freaking zoo I swear

2. do youprefer spending your holidays in your country or travel abroad? I actually haveno preference. But I like to meet new cultures, which I definitely do not dooften because well that cost money, so this July will be the first realvacation far away I’ve book since 2005. I’ve been to Holland and France butthey’re like neighbors… it’s pretty but it still feels like staying in Belgiumsomehow. It’s not different enough I guess.

3. doesyour country have access to sea? Yes we do! Though another language is spokenthere. And sometimes it feels like I’m supposed to be able to speak it to enjoythe place? I don’t, not really… I’m not a beach person anyway, I get boredreally easy if you try to make me spend hours just playing rotisserie chickenon a sunbathing mat…

4.favourite dish specific for your country? Maybe the Boulet Liégeois (s’ily a des liégois-e-s qui lisent ceci, chez moi ça a toujours été boulettesliégeoises, corrigez moi je sais que c’est pas bon)… or just waffles, eitherfrom Brussels or Liège. Alsowell chocolate obviously

5.favourite song in your native language? FYI my native language is French. Myfavorite song… mmh… I don’t really have one… I like Coeur de Pirate, her songsare really beautiful. Maybe the one song that comes to mind in a split secondis Que je t’aime (I hate saying that because I actually hate the artist). Ialso like a few songs of Jacques Brel if the question was aimed for nativeFrench artists singing in French, I’d say that’s the guy. I haven’t listened toFrench songs in a long while though.

6. mosthated song in your native language? Any dumb summer songs or soccer songs thatjust stay in your head for a freaking long time with meaningless lyrics. I’drather not think further about any by fear of repercussions.

7. threewords from your native language that you like the most? Une touyette (a tiny spoon),une guindaille (a party) and une baraque à frites (literally a fries house – it’susually a type of food truck that sells fries along side the highways or onmarket places)

8. do youget confused with other nationalities? if so, which ones and by whom? I’ve beenasked if I was from Danemark once… because of my English accent I think. Otherthan that maybe French from France?

9. which ofyour neighbouring countries would you like to visit most/know best? Visit most:Holland because I know it least. Know best: France because (real Parisians withstanding)the people are really great and the scenery is stunning.

10. mostenjoyable swear word in your native language? PUTAIN FAIT CHIER BORDELDE CUL!

11.favourite native writer/poet? I don’t know any but if song writer is all thesame, Jacques Brel. His texts are beautiful.

12. what doyou think about English translations of your favourite native prose/poem? I don’treally read prose or poems from my country specifically. If I happen to, and it’spretty I’ll like it. But I suck at remembering stuff like that.

13. doesyour country (or family) have any specific superstitions or traditions thatmight seem strange to outsiders? My mom has that weird thing where you can’treplant parsley, like if you have it in a pot, you can’t just take the pot offand plant it again or someone will die apparently. Also there’s that thingabout never being 13 around a table, or one person will also die… okay theremight be a recurring theme…

14. do youenjoy your country’s cinema and/or TV? Not really though I know we have qualitystuff it’s mostly not in my language and I don’t want to make the effort ofreading the subtitles at the moment.

15. asaying, joke, or hermetic meme that only people from your country will get? Jevous sonne et je vous dis quoi. Meaning literally: I call you and I tell you that.It’s a bit hard for the French people to understand this because there isnothing after the “that”. It’s just common knowledge here that there is nothingafter. It just means that I’ll call you to tell you that this or that went wellor bad. It’s silly but I like it

16. whichstereotype about your country you hate the most and which one you somewhatagree with? I hate the stereotype saying that my side of the country issupposed to be lazy af and just living off of the government. I agree with theone saying that we eat a lot of fries. They are not FRENCH fries okay, they’reBelgian. Just live with it, French people! :P

17. are youinterested in your country’s history? A bit. I guess the grass is always more interestingin the neighbor’s garden :P

18. do youspeak with a dialect of your native language? Not as much as my parents wouldlike me to. I sometimes understand it. It’s called Wallon and it’s really funnyto hear.

19. do youlike your country’s flag and/or emblem? what about the national anthem? We havethat? Yeah probably… I couldn’t sing it to save my life except for the lastline: le roi, la loi, la liberté (the king, the law, and liberty).

20. whichsport is The Sport in your country? Soccer, probably. I’m not interested insports.

21. if youcould send two things from your country into space, what would they be? A tinystatue of the Manneken Pis and a waffle from Liège.

22. whatmakes you proud about your country? what makes you ashamed? Proud: must I be? We won the Eurovision once, does that count? Ashamed: the politics.

23. whichalcoholic beverage is the favoured one in your country? I don’t know which isthe favoured one of all but the official one on my side is Peket (a type ofgenever, well that’s what Flemish people like to think but Peket is Peket). It’sglorious and comes in many many tastes! My favorite is the cuberdon one whichis a type of candy. It’s delicious!

24. whatother nation is joked about most often in your country? France probably.

25. wouldyou like to come from another place, be born in another country? No… I don’treally care about where I was born. I grew up in another country, I have noattachment to this one, this is how I was raised. Without wanting to offendanyone, I’d more describe myself as citizen of Earth, inhabitant of Europe,born in Belgium.

26. doesyour nationality get portrayed in Hollywood/American media? what do you thinkabout the portrayal? OMG yes. Belgium is mentioned SO many times in movies andshows it’s actually ridiculous! I have no idea why…

27.favourite national celebrity? Yes we probably have that too… I have no clue

28. doesyour country have a lot of lakes, mountains, rivers? do you have favourites? Wehave a lot of rivers. We don’t have mountains like the Alpes but my side of thecountry is far from flat so we have quite a lot of valleys and ups and downs.Big forests. Probably many lakes as well. A favorite? uhm not really nature oriented though I don’t mind it… I live in the city and I don’t have a car, me going in the country is quite a trip that I never really do…

29. doesyour region/city have a beef with another place in your country? I think we’repretty chill… I have never heard of Namur being angry against any other place…now the Flemish side of the country is mad at us because they say we’re lazy.Well they’re arrogant so we don’t care :P

30. do youhave people of different nationalities in your family? YES! I have a Greekcousin in law! Other than her, unfortunately no… I find that really sad, I’malso the only LGBT member of my family… not much diversity in my family I’mafraid…

#aboutme #Belgium #IT'S LONG DUDE!!#WHY!#thank you BUT WHY!#I love you tho

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meaniechan · 7 years

Text

lighten the cares of my sorrowful soul

This is probably way too out of character but I tried. Just imagine an early-Creatures era/present day Aleks and a much younger, present day Brett.

Paring: Brett/Aleks

It was Brett and Aleks’ six month anniversary a few days ago. Except, Brett got called into work and couldn’t get out of it. Cue: big, huge, enormous fight. A few days later, they make up.

your laughing lovely: that, I vow

makes the heart leap in my breast;

for watching you a moment, speech fails me,

my tongue is paralyzed, at once,

a light fire runs beneath my skin,

my eyes are blinded, and my ears drumming

the sweat pours down me, and I shake

all over, sallower than grass:

I feel as if I’m not far off from dying.

Brett shuts the door behind him.

“What do you want?” Aleks snaps, and from the sound of his voice, Brett knows he’s been crying.

Aleks is usually very careful with his appearance, but Brett understands that- with the circumstances- he probably doesn’t really give a shit about how he looks. His hair is messed up, eyes red, and his clothes are baggy: nothing that he’d wear outside of this house. He’s scowling, and usually, Aleks scowling was funny to Brett- he looked like an angry puppy. It’s not so funny, now, when his boyfriend looks vulnerable and small and defeated and... lost.

Every little, lingering bit of Brett’s anger has dissipated, in this moment, and their argument seems so unnecessary.

“I got your present.”

Aleks looks down. “Yeah, well… I don’t wanna take care of it.”

Brett crosses the room and sits on the edge of the bed. Aleks pulls his legs in and wraps his arms around his knees protectively, purposely looking away from the older. The bed is, surprisingly, lacking a certain fluffy dog, who usually spent every moment she could in Aleks’ bed with him. His cat, however, is there, and she seems to get annoyed with all the movement, deciding to get up from her spot next to Aleks and jump down from the bed.

“I love it,” Brett tells him. “It’s really nice. Especially the poem. Did you write it?”

Aleks shakes his head. “Some Roman guy.”

“It’s very sweet.”

“Yeah, well, whatever.”

There’s a moment of silence, which is uncommon for Brett’s boyfriend. Aleks isn’t as socially awkward as his two best friends, but he still wasn’t great with the whole ‘socializing’ thing. Though the younger is primarily an extrovert, there are moments that even Aleks preferred to stay in the comfort of his room- far away from the main part of his family’s hillside mansion that- due to Aleks’ father and step mother’s busy jobs- was usually empty. Aleks filled it with friends- his classmates, James and Joe, and their friends, Trevor and Jakob and Asher and Anna- but his friends had lives of their own, and Aleks still spent a considerable amount of time on his own, with just Mishka and Celia to keep him company.

He thinks that’s why Aleks likes Lindsey and Brett’s shitty, two-bedroom apartment that they rent close to campus. Less space meant less to fill.

Brett clears his throat, ready to say something.

“I’m sorry,” Aleks whispers, at that moment, before Brett can speak. “I don’t know why I’m being such an asshole. Or why I got so mad about you having to work. I’m just… I don’t know. Everything was supposed to be perfect and then it just… wasn’t. I’m being stupid, I know.”

Brett stands, moves closer to Aleks, and sits beside him. “It’s okay. You were upset. Yelling at you didn’t help anything.”

Aleks unravels himself and looks up, revealing the tears streaking his cheeks. It pulls at Brett’s heart, and he reaches up to put both hands on either side on his boyfriend’s head, wiping at tears with his thumbs. It doesn’t help physically- Aleks lets out a hiccup of a sob and his face is wet again- but it mends things, Brett thinks, internally, and he leans forward to kiss Aleks’ forehead, his nose, both cheeks, and his chin, before finally kissing his lips.

Aleks hiccups a sob, again, but he kisses Brett back, hungrily, and they reposition themselves slowly so that Brett is more on the bed and Aleks is in his lap. Brett kisses him softly and Aleks takes each one like a pill and they stay there, for what could be seconds, what could be minutes. It’s not exactly making out, and it’s not sexy at all, but it’s what both of them need after the past few days and Brett takes it.

Eventually, Aleks mumbles something into Brett’s mouth that he doesn’t understand, and Brett pushes him away gently.

“What,” he asks, and Aleks blushes.

“Nothing,” his boyfriend answers, sheepishly. “Just… more stupid poetry.”

“By the same person?”

Aleks nods. “Yeah. Umm, I don’t know why, but I just started reading this poetry book and I… I thought you’d think it’d make me seem like, fuckin’, super grown up or something. So I kinda, just, like memorized a few.”

“Very romantic. I don’t know any- what was it, Roman poetry? Get this kid ready for college. Start saving for his 401K.”

Aleks giggles and Brett presses a quick kiss to his nose, which makes him giggle again.

“Fuck you,” he laughs, a lightness to his voice that makes Brett relax. “I know a few verses of a Roman poetry that I’ll forget by next month.”

“I won’t let you. You’re going to have to tell me them every day, so I know how grown up you are.”

Aleks pouts and pinches Brett’s arm, playfully.

“So, tell me,” Brett laughs. “What’s this magical poem that you decided was so important that it had to interrupt our hardcore, sexy make out session?”

Aleks grins, and he looks down at his lap. He picks at the hem of Brett’s shirt, for a moment, and normally, Brett would make a dumb comment about the lack of words coming from the younger’s mouth, but he keeps quiet himself. After about a minute, Aleks lets go of Brett’s shirt.

“‘Give me a thousand kisses,” Aleks says quietly- not quite whispering. “A hundred, another thousand, a second hundred, a thousand again, a hundred more, until we ourselves lose track of the score.’”

Brett smiles, leans forward slightly, and kisses Aleks’ neck softly and Aleks hums, softly. His boyfriend smells like something woodsy and an Old Spice deodorant that Brett doesn’t know the name of and it feels like home. Eight months ago, Brett never imagined he’d ever find someone that makes him feel at home, like Aleks does, and he never imagined it’d be in this eighteen year old, high school brat, with dumb emo hair, a green card, and a love for hardcore punk bass lines, dogs, and video games.

Hell, Brett might even love this kid.

“It’s very grown up,” he says instead, with a shitty impression of that one Vine meme.

Then, in his regular voice quieter. “And very pretty.”

“You’re pretty,” Aleks mumbles, and Brett doesn’t need to look at his boyfriend to know his face is bright red.

“So are you. Very pretty.”

Aleks pulls back, his face- indeed- very red. “What does… umm… fuck.”

“What?”

“Umm, fuck how does it go?”

A moment passes- in which Brett’s kinda confused- before Aleks looks up at Brett between his eyelashes. It sends a shiver down Brett’s body, and he doesn’t need context to know where Aleks is going.

“‘Be a sweetie, joy and charm personified, invite me to join your afternoon nap.’”

Brett grins. “Why, Mr. Marchant, are you trying to seduce me?”

“I might be.”

“I’m not just some harlot, sir.”

Aleks rolls his eyes. “Harlots fuck, asshole. They don’t make love.”

“First poetry, now this,” Brett teases. “How very grown up of you.”

“Don’t be an ass about it, Brett.”

“An ass? Me? No, I’m- what was it you said? ‘Joy and charm personified?’ Lucky for you, I fully intend to invite you to all my afternoon naps for a long time.”

Aleks laughs, and Brett kisses him, and they fall together.

The next day, when James and Trevor show up around noon, and Aleks is almost all the way in Brett’s lap, and his friends roll their eyes at him.

“I told you that shit would work,” James yells. “Am I good or am I good?”

“You didn’t do shit, James,” Aleks shoots back, though there is no malice in either of their voices.

“Excuse you, Aleksandr. I drove to a hornet’s nest and poked at it while you were listening to your shitty, emo music and crying.”

“Fuck off, I wasn’t crying.”

“Fuck you, you were!”

Despite it, Aleks and James laugh. Trevor laughs. Brett laughs.

It feels like home.

The first poem that is mentioned is actually, like, a copy of one that the Greek poet Sappho wrote something like, 600 years before and I like her version better than Catullus. I left out the part where Sappho/Catullus are super insane jealous of this guy hanging around their girls. I didn’t think that part really fit my vision.

Just in case you’re curious: title is from Catullus, 2.10. Included poems are Catullus, 5.7-10 and 32.1-3. All three are from the David Mulroy translation. The first mentioned poem is from Catullus 51, but the one I put in is the M.L. West translation of Sappho’s poem.

#hundarhd #everyone is under 22 and brett and lindsey are in college #the rest of them are little hs babes #aleks is 18 dont worry #also known as meanie reads poetry in class and gets an idea #its 11:30 and im on 4 hours of sleep #i still have latin homework to do #so lets see how this goes over #ahhhhhhhh

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limejuicer1862 · 6 years

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Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger. The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

Peter J. King

was active on the London poetry scene in the 1970s, running Tapocketa Press and co-editing words worth magazine with Alaric Sumner. Aside from a brief return to writing and publishing in the 1980s, and translating from modern Greek poetry with Andrea Christofidou, he abandoned poetry for philosophy until 2013, since when he has been writing, performing, and publishing frenetically. His poetry, including translations from German and modern Greek, has been published in journals such as Acumen, Bare Fiction, The Curlew, Dream Catcher, Eye to the Telescope, The Interpreter’s House Lighthouse, New Walk, Osiris, Raum, Oxford Magazine, the Quarterly Literary Review of Singapore, A Restricted View from Under the Hedge, Shoreline of Infinity, Tears in the Fence, and The Writers’ Café. His latest collections are Adding Colours to the Chameleon (2016, Wisdom’s Bottom Press) and All What Larkin (2017, Albion Beatnik Press). A second, expanded edition of the latter is scheduled to come out some time in 2019.

https://wisdomsbottompress.wordpress.com/

Peter J. King wisdomsbottompress.wordpress.com

The Interview

When and why did you start writing poetry?

It was at school — probably when I was about sixteen or so. I can’t say why (it’s a fairly common thing to do at that age, or was then; perhaps less common to think in terms of people reading it, and to continue writing).

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

It’s hard to say; I have two sets of memories, but they’re not chronologically orderable. One is of my father’s books, and his encouraging me to read (not that I needed much encouragement!); the other is of what I encountered at school, both primary and (more significantly, I think) secondary.

3. How aware are you of the dominating presence of older poets, traditional and contemporary?

The question assumes that there’s a dominating presence of which to be aware… I don’t feel dominated by other poets; I either enjoy what they write or I don’t. When I do (perhaps especially when I don’t), it might give me ideas for my own writing, or it might have no effect on me.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

I’m not a creature of routine, except when it’s imposed upon me. In the dim, dead past (especially in the 1970s), I used to write a lot at night, often all through the night. That’s no longer possible, but I might write (or paint, or both) at any time that I feel like it. I do tend to like writing in public places such as cafés, restaurants, and trains — but that’s also irregular.

5. What motivates you to write?

I ought to be able to answer that, as my career (?) as a poet has a very useful shape: I was very active on the London poetry scene in the 1970s, centred on the Poetry Society and the Troubadour; I had what might be termed an emotional breakdown which stopped me writing for a few years, but I returned briefly in the early 1980s; academic work then took over, and I didn’t write again until 2013, since when I’ve been extremely active. So, given all that, shouldn’t I be able to say why I did or didn’t write during those different periods? Yet I can’t. I write because I enjoy it, both the process and the product. I’d write even if no-one but me was going to read it, but having other people read and hear my poetry is also a pleasure.

6. What is your work ethic?

I’m never wholly sure what that means. There’s the chilling notion of a Protestant Work Ethic, but having been brought up a Catholic (long lapsed) I’ve never suffered from that. Leaving aside an odd usage that uses “ethic” to gesture at a kind of self-absorbed concern with oneself, but taking it to mean some sort of set of moral principles, then I think that most work is demeaning and soul destroying, forced upon people as a necessary part of the capitalist system in which we’re imprisoned. That our current government thinks that it has a duty to force people into this demeaning activity (relabelled “dignity-providing”) by treating them badly until they give in, is appalling. On the other hand, as Flanders and Swan so elegantly put it:

Heat is work and work’s a curse And all the heat in the universe Is gonna cool down as it can’t increase Then there’ll be no more work And there’ll be perfect peace (Really?) Yeah, that’s entropy, man!

7. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

Another one that’s hard to answer. Leila Berg’s “Little Pete” stories have never left me, and my lifelong love of science fiction has had a big (and is currently having a huge) effect on my writing. Of all the poets whose work I read before the age of, say, nineteen (before I discovered “experimental” poetry, and came under the influence of Bob Cobbing, et al.), the ones that made the biggest impression were probably Rupert Brooke, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Paul Verlaine, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, and Kenneth Patchen. They’ve probably all affected me in one way or another.

8. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

I love Sophie Herxheimer’s poetry — both on the page and in performance. Camilla Nelson and Amy McCauley have both produced poetry and performance that have really grabbed and excited me. Adnan al Sayegh, Abughaida, Wole Soyinka, Jenny Lewis, Jee Leong Koh… I’ll end up just listing all the poets whose poetryI’ve enjoyed. For the most part, I’m very reluctant to rank them in any way.

9. Why do you write?

I can’t really disentangle that from Q. 5 (“What motivates you to write?”).

10. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”

You write. There’s nothing more. To be a good writer, you read (not just the same things over and over, but new things), enjoy what you read, and write a lot.

11. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

I don’t generally have projects, as such (I find the idea of “writing my next book” rather perplexing and alien to my understanding of poetry — more like what an academic writer does, or a novelist). I’m currently putting together a collection of poems that I’ve written over the decades inspired by and on themes of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and myth, and writing some new poems for that. I’m creating some new cut-up poems for the second, expanded edition of my “All What Larkin”, coming out next year from Albion Beatnik Press. I’m writing lots of other poems as they come to me, in all sorts of styles and on all sorts of themes. I’m filling in gaps in a sequence of seven-line poems on “Great Britain by Registration Numbers”, which I’ve been writing on and off for a couple of years. I’m also working intermittently on translations of the Greek poets Kavafis, Karyotakis, and Doros Loizou ( in collaboration with Andrea Christofidou) and the German poet Gustav Sack, and on reversionings of Rabindranath Tagore’s poems.

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Peter J. King Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

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aliter-a-culinary-adventure-blog · 7 years

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Prologue

Opportunities rarely present themselves without some effort on one’s part. I say “rarely” and not “never” because one such opportunity did come my way in exactly such a manner. For the past year or so, having freshly dropped out of college, I had begun to divide my time between my work as a line cook at a rather mundane greasy spoon in midtown Manhattan and my other occupation: discovering the secrets of the universe. Again, the secrets of the universe rarely present themselves without some effort on one’s part. I say “rarely” and not “never” because we’ve probably all seen God (or some fellow we thought to be God in the heat of the moment, but who we later determined was far more likely the Demiurge) once or twice on a mushroom trip or something. I also say “rarely” and not “never” because the secrets of the universe presented themselves to me in exactly such a manner. Having gotten to a point in my study of the esoteric arts where I simply could learn no more without the aid of an instructor, I set out to find someone to teach me. Now, Indeed and Monster didn’t exactly have any openings for an apprentice to a potions master or a sorcery intern. It would seem I’d need another way to find myself a teacher. At least it would have seemed that way had Chef Solomon Eisberg not barged into my apartment on a cloudy Sunday afternoon and demanded my services as a saucier.

“Em!” a voice, accompanied by frenzied knocking, decided 3:00 PM was the perfect time to launch an assault on my fragile door. “I’m here to teach you magic! Also how to make this week’s specials!”

“Who are you?” People knocked on my door frequently. Such is the nature of establishing a rapport with the Universe. Usually it wasn’t anyone particularly useful. Robe-clad men with strange markings on their faces speaking unknown tongues, grotesque beings of innumerable faces and multitudes of wings rotating on interlocked wheels, people trying to sell me a fancy new security system – all the usual candidates.

“Your new chef,” he replied, “Now open up.”

“Never asked anyone for a chef. I asked for a teacher of the esoteric arts.”

“Same thing,” he said, “Now come on: the dinner service is about to start!”

“Where?” I asked, hoping this wouldn’t be like the last time I followed one of those many-faced fellows to a dimension of infinite darkness.

“It’s not so far, we can walk,” he answered, as I grabbed an army green sweatshirt and followed him down the flight of stairs.

The Talisman Grill, like most eateries in Hell’s Kitchen that happen to be named after works of Russian literature, was a relatively small contraption with doors of dark, glazed wood and walls of rough brick. Beside the door, a bronze plaque bore a portion of the poem that gave the restaurant its name:

“От недуга, от могилы,

В бурю, в грозный ураган,

Головы твоей, мой милый,

Не спасет мой талисман.

И богатствами Востока

Он тебя не одарит,

И поклонников пророка

Он тебе не покорит;

И тебя на лоно друга,

��т печальных чуждых стран,

В край родной на север с юга

Не умчит мой талисман”

Immediately to the right of the text was a translation to English:

“Neither from sickness nor from death,

Will this tool protect you,

Nor from hurricane or storm,

My talisman’s not meant to,

All the riches of the East,

It surely will not offer,

Nor will the Prophets of these lands,

Open to you their coffers,

You can be sure a friend’s embrace,

From my charm won’t follow,

And not a laugh or friendly face,

Among far off hills and hollows,”

Below was the author’s name – Alexander Pushkin. The beginning and end of the poem were missing. The passage didn’t quite convince me of the merits of the talisman. Above the plaque, a yellow awning displayed the restaurant’s name, along with an illustration of the talisman in question. Inside, about two of the tables had people seated at them. A family of three at one and a couple at the other. We walked past to a back room across from the kitchen, where two cooks were hard at work.

“Peppered throughout the writings of Vladimir Lenin,” explained Chef Solly, “Is the saying ‘Learn, learn and learn’ or ‘учиться, учиться и учиться.’ The Greeks identified three forms of knowledge. They are as follows: γνοση (gnosis), σκηνη (skene) and μαθειν (mathein)”

I gave him a puzzled look. We had, after all, just arrived at the restaurant. Noticing this, he ignored me and continued.

“This is not a coincidence because nothing is a coincidence. Three is quite an important number. There are three sephirot on the top of the Tree of Life, three components of the Trinity, three legitimate Internationals, the list goes on!”

“The overt meaning of Kabbalah is ‘a tradition that is passed down.’ The Kabbalistic meaning of Kabbalah is self-explanatory. So here we have a word that refers to two of our three types of knowledge!”

“So,” I manage to get a word in, “Your little conspiracy theory about the number three doesn’t hold.”

“It very much does,” He says, returning control of the conversation into his hands, “Gnosis is a greater form of knowledge than the other two. It is Keter, the very highest Sephirah. The other two, Binah and Chokhmah, are two sides of the same coin. In the first case, we open up a direct channel for connection with God. This is the goal of kabbalah, to know and to recognize God. You will notice, in fact, that ‘recognize’ is simply another form of the word ‘gnosis.’ In the other cases, we use either observations or calculations to divine the nature of God. Skene and Mathein are where we get the words ‘science’ and ‘mathematics.’ Both these pursuits are ways of knowing God, but in a far more abstract way than Kabbalah. That is, we get both meanings of Kabbalah: both the personal and intimate knowledge of the Divine, as well as the structured and formulaic knowledge that comes with following an established tradition – “standing on the shoulders of giants,” as Isaac Newton put it. Have you, by any chance, considered a computer science minor?”

“I’m not even a college student.”

“Fair point. The reason I ask is that computer science is a great way for even muggles to understand abstraction in such a way that it can be applied to understanding the mystical nature of the world we live in. But I’ll explain later At the moment, you’re probably wondering why I’m telling you all this when we should be cooking.”

“Muggles? Actually, I’m wondering why we’re in a restaurant when you could be telling me the secrets of the Universe anywhere.”

“Muggles. Flatscans. Normies. Take your pick,” he said “And you have a point, I suppose. But let me ask you something, Em. If I can’t trust you to spatchcock a chicken, then how can I trust you with the secrets of the Universe?”

He also had a point, I suppose.

“Anyway, you were discussing the number three?”

“I was,” he confirmed, “With the purpose of explaining that I will teach you the art of cookery and the esoteric arts in three ways. I will teach you to develop intuition, to know how to recognize the Divine and to build intimate familiarity with the many flavors you will encounter. However, I will also teach you ways to recognize divinity through observation and through calculation.”

He continued, “You’ll be spending a lot of time working here with me. May I suggest you get to know the area?”

“Is there anything worth doing around here?” I asked.

“There are a few nice restaurants. You may want to check out Goddess Garden.”

“What’s that?”

“Wiccan-run vegan place. A bit on the pricy side but their baby kale salad is to die for.”

“Not exactly my thing,” I say. I’d always been more of a carnivore, though I’m not someone to turn away a good salad.

“There’s Apicius, if you’re looking for something a bit more classic. Pretentious ritual magick folks. Wouldn’t serve a dish if it wasn’t around since the fourth century.”

“Interesting. Are all the restaurants around here like-”

“Enchanted to some degree? Yeah. It’s a tough business and if you aren’t slaughtering an animal of some sort at a crossroads with any regularity to appease a deity of your choosing, you’re likely to be run out of business fairly quickly. Speaking of which, Chaos Shack lets you draw sigils on their burgers with their signature sauce and they are to die for.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, stay away from Kvasir’s Pub. The owner is a nice fellow and their mead micro-brewery is a local favorite, but they tend to attract the wrong crowd.”

I made sure to note this, as Chef Solly continued to tell me more about what I’d be learning with him. Beyond the door, the two cooks still hurriedly attended to their work and the patrons, table by table, asked the waiter for their checks and made their way out.

“Now, Em,” announced the chef, “We can begin cooking,”

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anneathenadura-blog · 8 years

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My journey as a writer

I’ve always been a storyteller. Ever since I could remember myself, I’ve been telling stories. From a very young age, I started making up stories. Stories about monsters, wizards, the eternal fight between good and evil (cliche).

My story as a writer, however, begun when I was about 6 years old. Just like most children, I had to write a short story for school.

(I can draw better than that, I swear.)

We had to write a poem that would be published in the school’s yearbook. I didn’t even play with dolls back then, but it was much better than the very original I wrote:

“School is nice

It has many mice

They eat all the rice”

Or the amazing poem

in Tagalog: which means:

“Isa, dalawa “One, two

Ako’y si Athina I’m Athena

Tatlo, apat Three, four

Salamat lahat” Thank you all”

I was six and hated rhymes, don’t judge me.

I turned to short stories immediately and won my first national short story contest at the age of 10. A fantasy short story - something about a shapeshifter. I can hardly remember the plot.

At that age, I started keeping a diary. Up to this day, I have filled more than twelve notebooks. I found out that writing was a great way to express myself as an awkward kid. I’ve always been an introvert and finding a way to extrapolate my feelings was pretty fulfilling and something I wanted to do for life. It was when I considered becoming a writer for the first time. I wanted to become a short story writer.

My stories grew bigger in time and I thought I wasn’t meant to write short stories after all. Back then I believed in fate and I watched out for any signs. All the signs pointed towards novels.

The problem with novels, though, was that they were soooooo long. Before I ever got to the middle of the story, I’d get ideas for another story. I used to abandon the first one and start writing the new one. Then, I thought to myself that I could never become a writer if I leave unfinished work behind.

At about that point I also switched genres. From fantasy, I went to romantic comedies and mysteries. At the mean time, I had very little support from the people surrounding me.

“Writing is not a job”

“Writers are losers, they’re homeless and starving”

“You should quit writing ‘cause I’m sure you’ll fail and I don’t want to see you disappointed and hurt”

(Look at me now! Boom!)

I finished writing my first novel when I was fifteen. “The last goodbye”

It was about a girl who lost her parents in a car accident and had to move to another country to live with her aunt. She struggles with school, learning a new language, making new friends, falling in love. And somewhere within all that, she discovers that her parents weren’t killed in an accident; they were murdered. No spoilers! Hah!

Several months later I finished my second novel. “Like toy soldiers”

And so it went until I was seventeen. That’s where my life paused - I had no life. For about a year, I disappeared. But that’s a different story.

When I got into university, the new friends I made were very eager to read the stories I had written and urged me to write more. I started writing short stories again and this time also poems. My friends would read every single one of them. They were willing to give me feedback and to this day they are my favorite beta readers. They were also the ones who made me look for publishers.

I sent some emails back in my second year at Geology and every single reply was exactly the same. No Greek publishing company was willing to publish work written in English. They asked me to translate it and I refused.

I turned to literary magazines based in the UK and the USA. The feedback was amazing and extremely helpful. I learned so much from their observations. Some gave me awesome comments but asked me to resend it for the next issue, ‘cause they were looking for something else at the moment. Others rejected me without explaining why. And others gave me good and bad comments, asked me to revise or rewrite it and send it within six months.

This whole magazines thing was time-consuming and I had so much work to do at the university. Eventually, I stopped submitting.

Through social media, I met some amazing writers who were self-published. Till then, I didn’t know I had that choice. I did some research and about a year later, I decided to try it, too. Being a freelance writer is also time-consuming. However, I get the advantage of publishing any genre I want. While with magazines, I had to aim for that very one interested in my genre.

Now I write thriller, mystery and science fiction. Occasionally, I might write anything - ANYTHING!

If I could go back to submitting to literary magazines, I would. Right now, though, I feel like I’d stick with self-publishing. I have my own reasons, maybe I’ll write about that in a future post.

So, I started looking for editors and for book covers and decided to publish my first short story in 2016.

On July 19, 2016 I published “Nadine” via Kindle Direct Publishing.

Description: It is a realistic, yet fictional story about a thirteen-year-old girl, who just survived a war. Coping with the loss of her family and questioning her faith, Nadine decides to leave town. On her way, she meets a blind man. As Nadine offers to help the man, she is lead back into town, unaware of his true intentions.

On August 28, 2016 I published “Sweet Sweat”

Description: Stephen and Maria have been together for almost a year and are both very comfortable talking about Stephen's condition. One day, Maria finds out what it really is like to live with someone who suffers from diabetes.

With very little promotion they did great. I had not expected it. Maybe one day I’ll prefer traditional publishing again. Not yet, though.

On March 13, 2017 I will publish “Through Michael’s Eyes”.

Michael is a five-year-old boy who dreams of becoming a monster fighter when he grows up. Not the kind of monsters that hide in one’s closet or under the bed. The monsters we encounter every day.

Whatever I choose to do, though, I’ll keep writing. And I know exactly who to thank for not giving up. Writing is a calling. Being a writer is not a job. It’s not a hobby. It’s just an inevitable status to go by. A lifestyle. Who I am.

I’ve always been a storyteller. I’ve always been a writer.

www.anneathenadura.com

#writer #writerslife #amwriting #amediting #ampublishing #self publishing #story of my life #journey #books #booklover #writblr #short story #blogging #lifestlye #calling #storyteller

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