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lhs3020b · 3 years

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The Ragged Astronauts, by Bob Shaw

Look! A books post!

I recently found myself in a mood to revisit old books (again), so I found myself re-reading Bob Shaw's "The Ragged Astronauts".

It turned out to be rather different from how I remembered. (Content warnings apply below the cut - this is an interesting book, but it’s also a dark one in places too.)

SYNOPSIS

The planets Land and Overland share a common orbit, revolving around a common centre of gravity. In fact the two objects are remarkably close together, separated by only a few thousand miles. In our universe, this would ensure that both bodies would lie inside the others' Roche Limit, and thus would ensure the destruction of both worlds. However, the region of spacetime in which Land and Overland exist is configured in such a way that the value of Pi is exactly equal to 3 (what this implies for the values of 0, 1, i and the base of natural logarithms is never addressed). Given this, we can assume that at least some of the physics is a bit different; perhaps the tidal force declines even more steeply then it does in our universe. Whatever the case, the Land/Overland planetary binary appears to be dynamically stable, and while both planets have problems, neither of them appears to be in imminent danger of gravitational disruption. The arrangement is implied to have existed for a geological timescale, so however they managed it, Land and Overland appear to be in an equilibrium.

However, due to their remarkable closeness, the two planets have ended up sharing a common atmosphere. This is actually not quite as strange as it sounds - in our universe, there is a category of stars called contact binaries, where two extremely-close stars have gravitationally-distended each other to the point where their atmospheres actually touch. (Seen up close, a contact binary would look a bit like a sort of stellar hourglass, with each star being a lobe of the hourglass.)

The novel opens on Land, whose inhabitants are entirely-unaware both of their folly and of the imminent end of their civilisation.

The lead character, Toller Maraquine, is technically a member of the scholarly Philosophical Order of the Kolcorronian Empire. However, with his short temper, muscular physique and his difficulties with reading (he's implied to be dyslexic, though no-one in Kolcorron would know that term), he feels ill at ease in his birth station. He wants to join the Kolcorronian army, but in practise this is out of reach due to both the internal politics of the royal court and also the strictures of the Kolcorronian aristocracy. (The aristocracy is in some ways closer to a caste system than the "classical" feudal system it presents as. While readers will see it through a European lens, the way it functions and is structured feels a bit more similar to Imperial China, given its centrally-organised bureaucratic orders and the absence of any equivalent to the Three Estates system that was common in parts of medieval Europe.)

However, things are about to change on Land, and Toller may well get what he wanted. Whether he realises it or not, he's about to find himself living the classic morality play - Be Careful What You Wish For.

The Kolcorronian Empire has made itself into a near-dominant world hegemon by exploiting the brakka trees. As part of their reproductive ecology, brakka trees fire their pollen high into the air, dispersing it over wide areas. The tree is essentially a sort of photosynthetic wooden canon; the explosive reactions are powered by two crystalline materials called halvell and pikon, which the trees' roots extract from Land's soil. Halvell and pikon are apparently hypergolic - mix them together and you get a very high-energy bang. Brakka wood is extraordinarily tough - with this sort of biology, it has to be! - and so Kolcorron uses brakka wood in all the places where we'd use metals or ceramics. (In addition, Land is said to be a low density planet that is under-enriched in heavy metallic elements, which seems to have discouraged the development of any native metallurgy.) Kolcorron's technology is entirely based around exploiting the brakka, pikkon and halvell. As such they don't map easily to any era in Earth history; while their society has feudal structures they also have a trade network based around pikon/halvell-powered airships. Honestly at times, their society feels closer to a steampunk age than a purely-medieval one.

Only there's a problem: Kolcorron has chopped down most of the brakka.

Kolcorron, you see, is not a pleasant society. The people who run it seem to vary from greedy to outrightly-sociopathic. Its politics are basically a sort of semi-totalitarian absolute monarchy; even people on the King's advisory high council have to be very careful what they say, and ordinary subjects can basically be conscripted, raped and murdered with impunity by the aristocracy. As such, the aristocrats have little time for things like "factual advice". The Philosophical Order has been trying to warn the government that a severe energy crunch is beginning, and this is deeply-unwelcome news.

But worse news is coming.

Land's people share their planet with the ptertha. Ptertha are gas bag creatures, possessed of a hard-to-determine level of intelligence. Ptertha are also inimical to Landians - when they encounter one, the ptertha explode, showering the person in question with poisonous dust. Anyone exposed to ptertha dust inevitably dies soon after. There is apparently no cure for pterthacosis; the normal response of Kolcorronians is to simply behead a pterthacosis sufferer, apparently on the assumption that trying to treat them is futile. (There is no suggestion that this is about saving the victim from suffering; that would involve a capacity for empathy, which very few people in Kolcorron appear to possess.)

What the Landers don't know is that the brakka and the ptertha are symbiotic species; the ptertha feed on brakka pollen, and in return they protect the sessile trees from any predator. Predators like Landers who keep chopping the brakka down. While the ptertha never show any ability to communicate, they are apparently at least somewhat intelligent, in some way. They are able to adapt their behaviour and apparently even their own biology to help them attack their ground-based enemies.

Up until now, pterthacosis has been a threat to individuals, but society as a whole has been able to cope. All that abruptly changes on a sunny morning, when the ptertha launch a mass attack against Ro-Atabri, Kolcorron's capital city. Only it's worse then that, because pterthacosis has changed - it can now spread in a viral manner, from person to person. With an economy based around outdoor manual labour and nothing resembling a public health system, the empire is swiftly devastated.

In barely two years, two thirds of Kolcorron's population die. By the mid-point of the novel, the monarchy has concluded that organised society has no future on Land, and they're probably right. In fact the evidence supports the conclusion that their species is facing extinction. Civilisation is tottering, and when it falls, there is no expectation that anything will succeed it. And the ptertha? They just keep coming, more deadly with every attack.

But, but, but ... Overland is just _there_, right above everyone's heads. The two planets share a breathable atmosphere. Perhaps, just perhaps, a migration to the neighbouring planet is possible? This is what the Kolcorronian leadership attempts - an interplanetary migration, via hot air balloon.

As a sequence of societally-catastrophic events take place, Toller Maraquine finds himself at the front of all of them, undertaking a personal journey that will take him from the Philosophical Order to the front ranks of the military, and eventually even to the surface of Overland itself.

OBSERVATIONS

This book was ... different ... from how I remembered it. I didn’t remember it being anything like as dark or as violent as it is.

First off, deary me, Land is a bleak place to live. Even before person-to-person transmission of pterthacosis becomes A Thing, the Kolcorronian Empire is a militaristic, authoritarian, dictatorial mess. The other societies on the planet don't seem to be any better; Kolcorron is bordered by tribal societies who practise virgin sacrifices. The opposite hemisphere of the planet is occuped by Chamteth, who appear to be an isolationist, xenophobic, theocratic empire. Kolcorron's response to the brakka shortage and the ptertha-driven economic collapse is to launch a genocidal war of conquest against Chamteth. This isn't to take Chamteth's land - rather, it's simply to steal their better-conserved brakka forests. As it is, Chamteth would probably have seen them off, but the Kolcorronian forces are followed into Chamtethian territory by the new, mutant ptertha. Chamtethians turn out to be even more vulnerable to pterthacosis than Kolcorronians, and their entire society is essentially destroyed within a matter of months. To his credit, Toller is increasingly-nauseated by the horrors that take place within the Chamteth campaign, though it's also notable that he doesn't attempt to repudiate it.

As for gender and representation, well, you won't really find any in this book. There are two female characters, Gesalla Maraquine and Fera Rivoo, but they're not treated well in the narrative. What happens to Gesalla is grim - Kolcorron's ruling family practise a particularly-twisted version of prima noctis, and the walking bipedal monster that is Prince Leddravohr doesn't miss his chance to inflict some personal misery on the Maraquine family. (Arguably Kolcorron's rot is from the top down - King Prad clearly knows what his depraved son is like, and has done nothing to rein him in.)

As for Fera, Toller actually marries her, then forgets she exists halfway through the book. Yes, seriously. The last mention of his wife is that she apparently moved out of the Maraquine household at some point; Toller is entirely unbothered by this. He doesn't even think about her during the evacuation. Admittedly rescuing her from the chaos in Ro-Atabri as the city disintegrates on its final day would have been a tall order, but he doesn't even try.

There is also a lot of bad sex in this book. Basically, any capital-P Problematic sex trope you can imagine? They're all here. The fail is fractal. It's bad even for the mid-80s, which was when this book was published. (It very much belonged to that period when SFF authors suddenly discovered they could write about sex, and the results were near-uniformly dire.)

As for gay Kolcorronians or ethnic minority Kolcorronians, honestly, being either seems likely to be a good way to get yourself an arbitary death sentence. If any exist, they're keeping their heads down. Like I mentioned above, Kolcorron is horrible; honestly, one unexamined question in this book is whether this civilisation is even worth saving. If the Reapers rolled in and Husk'd them all, I think you could argue a case here for it being an improvement.

To top it all off, it's suggested that all this has happened before; during the novel, Toller receives a peculiar stone, composed of a mineral found nowhere on Land. Later, he is surprised to find a deposity of the same material on Overland. Also, the Kolcorronian state religion postulates an external, cyclical exchange of souls between Land and Overland, which possibly is a folk memory of a previous migration between the planets. Oddly, the book and the trilogy it's part of never really do anything with this idea. The colonists on Overland never find any ruins, or any evidence of prior inhabitation by their own kind.

The positive qualities of the novel are that its viewpoint characters aren't 100% horrible - by the end of the book, Toller has turned into a somewhat-improved person than he was at the start. Lain Maraquine is that rarest thing in Kolcorron, a person who is actually genuinely-sympathetic and who actually does care about the welfare of other people. Lord Glo, while a senile drunkard, is also someone who is able to see the bigger picture and his early insights ultimately hold the key to ensuring that at least part of society survives the ptertha crisis. Gesalla turns out to be different from Toller's initial impression of her - honestly, Gesalla's a more interesting person then he is - and the monster Leddravohr at least ends up dead, so there is that. Also the new regime on Overland winds up in the hands of Prince Chakkell, who appears to be the most-sane of the pre-migration ruling quartet. (Chakkell is still fairly-unpleasant in many ways, but he's Lawful Evil than Leddravohr's Chaotic Evil and Prad's Neutral Evil. In fact, his dislike of Toller aside, you can argue a case for Chakkell being more Lawful Neutral, I think. That seems to be about as "benign" as the Kolcorronian monarchy is capable of being.)

The novel is also a page-turner. Awful as Kolcorron is, there is a sort of nightmarish clarity to its demise. It has that "can't look away from the trainwreck" quality. The book doesn't bore you - it may horrify you, it may appall you in places, but you're not bored. Also the mechanics of the inter-planetary migration are well-realised. The Kolcorronians' desperate struggle to flee their own world feels real. (I will admit some skepticism about whether a society undergoing a freefall demographic collapse worse than our Black Death is going to be able to run any large-scale projects, but perhaps sheer desperation counts for something here.)

The setting is also vivid and interesting. The planetary binary and the sky packed full of stars, galaxies and meteors - even during the daytime - was something that made a deep impression on me when I read it the first time. In our age with its increasingly-decarbonised electricity and the beginnings of an electric car transition, the brakka/halvell/pikon oil analogy does feel a bit heavy-handed, but it would have been timely when the book was written in the 1980s.

The last thing I'll note about the book is that it has some odd pacing. There are some rather-jerky time-skips - at one point, we jump two entire years between paragraph-breaks! There are also some sections that drag on longer than they perhaps should.

I don't know whether I can fully recommend this one - really, that depends on your tolerance for problematic content! - but it certainly does provide a unique reading experience.

#LHS reads #books 2021 #bob shaw #the ragged astronauts

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fairfieldthinkspace · 4 years

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Can the Trauma of War Lead to Growth, Despite the Scars?

By Phil Klay

When we speak of trauma, it is usually as something to be avoided at all costs. But the suffering that war brings can be a strange and terrible blessing.

This article is part of a series on resilience in troubled times — what we can learn about it from history and personal experiences.

The French weapon deployed against Spanish troops in 1521 was, contemporaries said, “more diabolical than human.” The rapid-firing light bronze cannon shot iron balls that crushed battlements, careened wildly and sprayed shards of stone in all directions. At the Battle of Pamplona, one cannonball twice injured the leader of a small Spanish garrison defying calls for surrender, nearly killing him, first by striking one leg with stone shrapnel, then in the other leg by the cannonball itself. His name was Íñigo López de Loyola. The effect on Loyola was not only physical, but also spiritual: Today, he is better known as St. Ignatius.

Back then, he was no saint. One biography describes him as “a rough punkish swordsman who used his privileged status to escape prosecution for violent crimes committed with his priest brother at carnival time.” But this near-fatal injury changed him, along with a few religious books he read during his exceptionally painful convalescence, in which his bones had to be broken again and reset, and where he came so close to death he was given last rites. He went on to found the Jesuits and send disciples all over the globe, in what the British historian Dom David Knowles suggested was Christianity’s “greatest single religious impulse since the preaching of the apostles.”

When we speak of trauma, it is usually as something to be avoided at all costs. “Interest in avoiding pain,” wrote the utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, is among “the most important human interests.” And yet soldiers like St. Ignatius, who found in their suffering a strange and terrible blessing, are not rare. Senator John McCain, brutally tortured at the Hanoi Hilton, famously declared himself “grateful to Vietnam” for giving him “a seriousness of purpose that observers of my early life had found difficult to detect.”

His might be an extreme case, but the expectation of exposure to some trauma has long been part of the draw of war. “The law is this: no wisdom without pain,” wrote the ancient Greek playwright and military veteran Aeschylus. “Wanted or not by us, such wisdom’s gained; its score, its etch, its scar in us goes deep.” Perhaps that’s true, but it leaves us with an ugly and, to some, offensive question: Can suffering be a gift?

In the early 20th century, the German writer Ernst Jünger, who had proudly served four years in brutal front-line fighting in World War I, declared the answer was a resounding yes. “Tell me your relation to pain,” he claimed, “and I will tell you who you are!” Civilization before the war had slid into bourgeoise decadence, he thought, fleeing from self-sacrifice and prioritizing safety. But the war heralded a new sort of man.

“Hardened as scarcely another generation ever was in fire and flame,” he wrote of himself and his fellow soldiers, “we could go into life as though from the anvil; into friendship, love, politics, professions, into all that destiny had in store. It is not every generation that is so favored.” Postwar Germany convinced him that the industrialized world these men returned to, which happily destroyed workers’ bodies for the construction of railways or mines, was ruled by the same cruel logic as the trenches. Men would have to rise to the challenge by accepting pain, and accepting the cruelty of the age. This is toughness and callousness elevated to a first principle. Unsurprisingly, many of Jünger’s admirers became Nazis.

One of their victims was an Austrian of Jewish descent named Jean Améry, who after the war forcefully rejected, in the starkest terms, any notions of suffering as a gift. Likewise, notions of stoic detachment born of the trenches were absurd to a man who had been tortured by the Gestapo before being sent to Auschwitz. Améry experienced pain beyond description; he was hung by his arms until they ripped from their sockets, and then horsewhipped. For the tortured man, he wrote, “his flesh becomes total reality.”

More lasting than the pain, though, the experience destroyed his ability to ever feel at home in the world, which requires faith in fellow men. Humans are a social animal, our inner self in constant outward search for communion. Torture inverts that expansive, capacious self into a collapsing star. Whatever you thought you were — a mind, a consciousness, a soul — torture reveals how simply, and casually, that can be destroyed. “A slight pressure by the tool-wielding hand is enough,” Améry wrote, to turn a cultured man into “a shrilly squealing piglet at slaughter.” There is wisdom here, though of a dark sort. “Whoever was tortured, stays tortured.” Améry committed suicide in 1978.

Where does that leave those who suffer? For the medical community, the safest option is addressing symptoms, not metaphysics. The writer and former Marine infantry officer David J. Morris has described his own therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder from his time in Iraq, during which he was urged to retell the stories of his trauma, practice breathing exercises, and reframe his cognitive responses to his environment and his traumatic memories.

But he was not encouraged to grow in response to what he had gone through; when he would try to speculate on how his experience might be converted to wisdom, psychologists would admonish him, he reported, “for straying from the strictures of the therapeutic regime.” One senior psychologist at the Department of Veterans Affairs told him that notions of post-traumatic growth were an insult to those who have suffered. For a medical community grounded in science rather than spirituality, and rightfully leery of telling the Amérys of the world to look on the bright side, suffering is no gift.

But another current can be found in theories developed during the Vietnam War. The study of psychological trauma suffers from what the psychiatrist Judith Herman has called “episodic amnesia,” in which periods of active interest, frequently following wars, are followed by “periods of oblivion.” But the generation of soldiers disaffected from war during Vietnam organized and demanded the first systematic, large-scale investigations of war trauma’s long-term effects. In addition to a medical diagnosis — PTSD was added to the American Psychiatric Association’s official manual in 1980 — many of these same veterans and their allies argued for the spiritual and moral significance of their condition.

Psychiatrists like Robert Jay Lifton and writers like Peter Marin argued that the suffering of Vietnam veterans was not simply neurosis, but appropriate moral response to horror. “All men, like all nations, are tested twice in the moral realm,” Mr. Marin wrote. “First by what they do, then by what they make of what they do.” Rather than numbing themselves to pain, they needed to sensitize themselves, to become alive to the “animating” guilt they supposedly lived with. Guilt forces the suffering consciousness outside of itself, the theory goes, sparking empathy and a drive to make reparation.

Whether guilt results in healing, though, is debatable. Some of the most fascinating research on growth after war trauma emerges out of a four decade-long study initiated by Zahava Solomon, which followed the PTSD trajectories of veterans of the 1982 war in Lebanon and the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, also known as the Yom Kippur War. A 2016 analysis of Israeli P.O.W.s from the 1973 war, who faced systematic torture, deprivation and social stigma, did find that those who reported the most guilt about their experience also reported the most growth. However, those veterans also had greater reports of PTSD symptoms as well. As Aeschylus warned, the wisdom they felt they had gained came with deep scars.

None of this would likely have surprised Ignatius of Loyola. In his tradition, suffering was at best a mystery: God never really answers Job, and Christ’s prayer to “let this cup pass me by” goes ungranted. As a Jesuit friend recently told me, suffering is never a gift, never truly willed by God; suffering is real, and awful, and not to be forgotten. “Consider how the Divinity hides Itself,” Ignatius’ followers have been directed to ask for hundreds of years, “how It could destroy Its enemies and does not do it, and how It leaves the most sacred Humanity to suffer so very cruelly.” But of course, that doesn’t mean that we cannot respond to such suffering with grace.

Phil Klay is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, a visiting professor at Fairfield University and the author of “Redeployment,” winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction, and the forthcoming novel “Missionaries.”

#St. Ignatius of Loyola #Phil Klay #Fairfield University #The New York Times

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lykegenia · 5 years

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The Things We Hide - Epilogue

Early morning sunlight streamed through the open hallways of the royal palace of the Fire Nation, the soft breeze bringing with it the rich scent of fire lilies and the trill of birdsong. Katara liked these times best; the worst of the rains had passed, leaving the hillsides verdant and rich with life. She had been three years in the palace now, first as the Water Tribe ambassador’s chief aide and then as the ambassador herself once Bato had mustered the courage to confess himself to Ursa. She missed the South Pole from time to time, but not even the remote blue beauty of the vast and empty icefields could compare to the jewel-bright comfort of her adopted home. Her clothes these days were all Fire Nation silk, dyed in Southern blue but tailored with inspiration from both nations, beading made from glass instead of bone, and in her hair, a string of Kyoshi Island pearls braided in place of the sea-wolf teeth she had passed along to Linara.

She paused briefly to watch a fledgling jadebird beg food from its parent. The turtleducks would be hatching soon, completing the tableau of new life that inhabited the Fire Lord’s garden, and Zuko himself would be at the feeders, refilling them with seed and fruit and honey so he could watch the flit of finches and hummingbees from his office window. Often, she watched with him. They shared tea as they pored over trade agreements or read the latest letter from Azula at the monastery. In those moments, their relationship didn’t have to bow to the strictures of Fire Nation nobility, and every day she looked forward to being able reach out and touch him, or lay her head on his shoulder, without the dark mutterings of the sages who all thought the Fire Lord too smitten for his own good. There was less bite to the grumbles than there had been, but for the sake of politics, she and Zuko tried hard to keep their affairs private.

The birds hopped away and Katara heard the tread of a guard headed in her direction. She nodded politely to him when he stopped in his tracks and bowed to her.

“Master Katara, I was asked to fetch you. His Majesty awaits you in his study.”

“Thank you, Jeran,” she answered, smiling at the faint blush that stained the guard’s cheeks. Even after three years, some of them were still surprised that she bothered to learn their names.

Curious about what Zuko could have to say to her so early, she turned and followed the familiar path to the Fire Lord’s rooms. Now that his mother had retired permanently to Ember Island, he lived in the royal wing all by himself. He often complained about the isolation, and used it almost every day as an excuse to get away from his duties and join her in the ambassadorial suite, or tempt her out to the market – whatever the other changes he had been trying to enact to end the war, he was making an effort to actually talk to his people, and it made her proud to see.

Somebody was already in the room with him. She knocked on the doorframe and waited for the invitation to come in. When he saw her, his face warmed like sunrise, but her gaze slid to the other person in the room, a man who had only arrived in the capital the day before, a full two weeks ahead of the ceremony that would mark the third anniversary of the peace accords.

“Dad?”

Hakoda rose from the tatami and wrapped his daughter in a bear-dog hug. “I don’t think I’ve ever known you be awake so early, Snowball.”

“What are you up to?” she asked with narrowed eyes.

“Me? I’m not up to anything. You should ask your Fire Lord over there.”

She frowned. “Zuko?”

“I…”

“I’ll see myself out.”

“Uh, yes… thank you, Chief Hakoda,” Zuko replied, falling back on his manners when his initiative deserted him. Did he look… guilty? Nervous, certainly, Katara decided, as she glanced between the two of them.

“Let me know how it goes.” The Southern Water Tribe chief grinned, and turned to his daughter with one hand still on the door. “See you at lunch?”

Once he was gone, taking his smug expression with him, Katara folded her arms and rounded a glare on Zuko. The Fire Lord had the decency to shift his weight on his feet, but the rapidly growing scarlet in his face made her too suspicious. Soon, the end of his sleeve would start smoking.

“And what was that about?” she asked, when it became obvious the conversation wouldn’t start with him.

With an uneasy rub of his neck, Zuko crossed to the cabinet at the edge of the room where he kept all his most important possessions. “I asked for his advice on a… culturally sensitive matter,” he said. “He was happy to help.”

“‘Culturally sensitive’?” she repeated, hurt creasing between her eyes. “Why didn’t you come to me? I am the ambassador for my people.”

“Because it concerns you.” He returned to his desk and laid a small object on the smooth surface. It was wrapped in embroidered red silk and fit into the palm of his hand. Curious, Katara seated herself across from him, her gaze darting between his face and his hands. The past three years had aged him well. His shoulders had broadened beneath his robes and the angles of his cheeks were sharper, but it was the quiet self-assurance in his movements that made his people love him. After the first reprisals against his profiteering ministers, even his political enemies had settled under his rule as the nation’s industries turned towards creation rather than destruction, and if he still feared those who wished to supplant him, Ozai’s death had left them a distant worry.

“This is for you,” Zuko said. “If you want it.

Her fingers brushed his as she took the wrapped object. The quilted silk rubbed softly against her skin, the corners of the fabric falling open easily to reveal a glint of gold nestled within. She didn’t dare believe what she saw, not until the last fold had been smoothed away and the gift lay fully revealed before her. The first object was a delicate triple string of alternating carnelian and blue lapis beads, bound and linked with filigreed gold. The three chains attached in the middle to a flat golden disc bordered by two embossed dragons that twined around the edge, also made of gold, carved with such fine detail she could make out every individual scale on the creatures’ snarling mouths. She had received many gifts since taking up her official position, from people trying to bribe or woo or impress, but few had struck such a balance between elegance and intricacy.

Considering Zuko’s gifts tended more towards the personal, she might have wondered about the reason he decided to give it to her, except she recognised the other item sitting in the parcel. The gold-pronged headpiece of the Fire Lady glinted at her, like it was waiting for something.

Yours, if you want it.

“The pendant has a clasp,” Zuko explained nervously. “I didn’t want to replace your mother’s necklace, so I thought I could… give it a new setting. The medallion should fit, but I can get it resized if it doesn’t – and I realise the tradition in the Water Tribes is to carve the, uh, betrothal gift yourself but –”

“Zuko…”

“The ministers would never approve of the Fire Lady wearing something that crude, and you deserve better than that anyway so I designed it and took it to the smiths. They’re really the ones who –”

“Zuko.”

“Huh?”

“I love it.” She smiled. “And I love you.”

He blushed again. “You – you do?”

“It’s not the first time I’ve said it,” she teased.

“Well no,” he agreed slowly. “But… if you do like it, does that mean you’ll… uh…”

“Does it mean I’ll what?”

“Lady Katara.” He let out a curse and shoved his hand back through his hair, so his carefully placed topknot fell awry. “Would you honour me by taking my hand as…” Another huff as he tried to get the words out, and a twinge of pity lodged itself like a splinter beneath her amusement. “Katara., I…”

“Zuko…”

“Will you marry me?”

She had expected the words, known what she would say as soon as she saw the crown laid out on his desk. Knowing, however, did nothing to still the flutter of the entire herd of sky bison that seemed to have settled in her stomach. He actually looked afraid, desperate, so much like a lost moose-lion cub that she had to stifle a laugh. Smiling, she picked her way around the edge of his desk, focussed entirely on those same golden eyes that had first captivated her a lifetime ago, and reached to take his hands in hers.

#zutara #zuko #katara #zuko x katara #katara x zuko #avatar #avatar: the last airbender #a:tla #i can't believe i actually finished this #it's been more than two years!

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quakerjoe · 5 years

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The China trade war, talks with the Taliban, the response to Iran after Saudi attacks, gun control, new tax legislation and a long list of other policy issues are up in the air and awaiting decisions from President Donald Trump — and him alone — heading into the 2020 election season.

In many ways, it’s the presidency Trump has always wanted.

He’s at the center of the action. He’s fully in command. And he’s keeping world leaders on edge and unsure of his next moves, all without being hemmed in by aides or the traditional strictures of a White House.

After four national security advisers, three chiefs of staff, three directors of oval office operations and five communications directors, the president is now finding the White House finally functions in a way that fits his personality. Trump doubters have largely been ousted, leaving supporters to cheer him on and execute his directives with fewer constraints than ever before.

“It is a government of one in the same way in which the Trump Organization was a company of one,” said a former senior administration official.

“In the first year in office, President Trump was new to the job. He was more susceptible to advisers and advice. There were more people urging caution or trying to get him to adhere to processes,” the former senior official added. “Now, there are very few people in the White House who view that as their role, or as something they want to try to do, or who even have a relationship with him.”

This Presidency of One is now heading into an election year supported by campaign staffers and White House aides who are quick say Trump is the best political strategist as well as the most effective messenger, and they intend to follow his lead wherever 2020 goes.

The transformation of the Trump White House, from its early attempts at a traditional structure to its current freewheeling style, has exacted a heavy toll on his staff. But a steady stream of departures — the highest senior staff turnover of any recent president by far — has also left fewer forces trying to bend the president to the usual process of the top ranks of government.

“It’s very easy, actually, to work with me. You know why it’s easy? Because I make all the decisions. They don’t have to work,” Trump told reporters last Friday as he explained why being his national security adviser, in his mind, is now a low-key post. Trump fired his third such adviser, John Bolton, last week, and he named a new national security adviser on Wednesday morning by tweet.

Acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney gives the president free rein to “Let Trump Be Trump,” as Mulvaney has said, having seen the fate of his two predecessors, Reince Priebus and John Kelly.

The dwindling of top senior staff has left the president in the company of his family members, Mulvaney, Kellyanne Conway, Larry Kudlow, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the omnipresent Stephen Miller, who mostly focuses on immigration, current and former senior administration officials say.

In the past three years, Trump also lost several trusted aides, most of whom played no role in major policy decisions but were frequent presences. Trump trusted them. They could read his moods, and their loss has been felt throughout the building, say current and former White House aides. This includes his former bodyguard Keith Schiller, former body man John McEntee, former communications director Hope Hicks and former press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who left the administration in June after morphing into more of a top adviser than a top communications aide.

To outsiders, it’s felt like watching an increasingly unbound, or unleashed version of the Trump presidency.

But to many Trump allies, aides, and longtime observers, the president is showing the world the way he’s always operated. Only now it has become clearer because he is receiving less pushback from staff and advisers — and has very few effective checks on his administration from Congress, the national security community or fellow Republicans.

“The Trump I’m seeing now, to me, is the same Donald Trump who has existed for the 50 of his last 73 years. This is very much in keeping with how he rolled in the business world. The only difference is now he is doing it on the global stage,” said Timothy O’Brien, author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald“ and executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion.

There is little policy process left as the White House faces consequential decisions on Iran, North Korea, China, trade and the economy, even as the president intends to use the last-named as a major selling point for his reelection bid.

“You can’t just turn the economy on and off. These are big, slow-moving machines. And he’s operating under this major fallacy that he can keep telling the market things, and they will keep believing him on China or whatever else,” said one adviser close to the White House. “And that he can just all of a sudden turn things around with a China deal or whatever it is and it doesn’t work that way.”

One of Trump’s top White House aides disputed the notion of a fractured policy process. “With every decision he makes, there is a deliberative, coordinated policy process and ultimately the president makes the best decision in the interest of the American people,” said Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary. “No president has had more success in his first 2½ years than President Donald J. Trump. In spite of 93 percent negative news coverage, this president has built a safer, stronger, and more secure America, including record job gains, economic growth, fair and reciprocal trade, criminal justice reform, energy independence, combatting the opioid epidemic, lowering prescription drug prices, and restoring our standing in the world.”

In the past few weeks, Trump has publicly announced that the U.S. is “locked and loaded” in case Iran turns out to be the culprit behind last weekend’s missile strikes on Saudi Arabian oil facilities. He laid out on Twitter since-scrapped plans to invite the Taliban to Camp David for negotiations days before the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

And he introduced the idea of additional tariffs on China one Friday, setting off a scramble inside the West Wing that forced his top economic officials to abandon top-level meetings, rush to the Oval Office and make policy in the wake of his tweet.

“The downward momentum in Trump’s approval rating scares me a bit from a foreign policy perspective because he is a win-at-all-costs type of a person. I worry he could get us into an ill-advised military conflict in an attempt to regain support,” said Anthony Scaramucci, the New York financier and short-lived White House communications director. “From an economic perspective, he’s going to reach into his bag of tricks to try to stimulate growth. I think he’ll end up cutting a trade deal with China to remove that cloud of uncertainty from markets, but I think due to his increasing desperation it will end up being a bad deal for the United States.”

In addition to the president’s relative isolation, he and the administration face several challenges this fall over which Trump does not have total control, including foreign policy challenges such as Iran, China or North Korea, ongoing risks to the economy, passage of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement or potential congressional action on gun control.

This uncertainty might not sit well with a president who has said he likes to make all the decisions, says O’Brien, the author of “TrumpNation.“

Whatever actions he does take now will also become part of his record heading into the election. “He will have to answer specific questions about that report card, and he will be frustrated by those,” O’Brien added.

If the president seems liberated, it’s been an evolution to reach that point.

In the early days, Trump felt out of his depth on national security and foreign policy or what he legally could do through executive action, said three former senior administration officials. He knew, for instance, he wanted to roll back the Obama legacy on regulations or environmental rules, but he did not initially grasp the mechanics of doing so.

Nor did he understand the breadth of the federal government — like the huge number of people it employed, or the usual checks on presidential power like Congress or the courts, said one of the officials. Trump is the first president elected who did not first hold political office or serve in the military. While this outsider status helped propel his political rise and underscored his populist message, it also left his government far behind operationally and organizationally as it took over the White House.

In the ensuing three years, Trump has grown more comfortable with the trappings of the office and has formed his own relationships with world leaders, say current and former administration officials, even as he’s upended traditional global alliances. He’s earned a greater understanding of his executive authority and has developed relationships with many members of Congress whom he calls directly.

Now the White House runs as he prefers, with him at the center of the action — speaking directly to reporters from the Oval Office, breaking his own news and laying out policy decisions by tweet.

“This is now more of a government built on the basis of Trump’s reactions to things,” said one of the former senior administration officials. “The president has learned as much as he cares to know about the mechanics of government. He’s figured out, on most things, he can continue to play a public relations battle.”

Daniel Lippman and Ben White contributed to this report.

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musical-chick-13 · 5 years

Text

you opened up the things I shut (cersei x melisandre)

Hello, @multifandomfix. It’s me! Your asoiaf rarepairs Secret Santa. (I’m sorry this is so much closer to the ending deadline/is a day after I said I’d get it to you; I might have gone a bit overboard in writing this because this thing is like 7000 words long, lmao.) Thank you so much for participating, I really enjoyed writing this! :D (I will also put this on ao3 for easier access, but I wanted to make absolutely sure I got this to you first.)

Lady Melisandre still mourns the loss of what she thought she had found at Dragonstone. Someone so committed to his goals, so willing to listen to her, that he would do anything. A man so concerned with justice and following what he believed to be the preordained will of the universe that he was willing to listen to her. Understand her.

Love her.

Feel something toward her that wasn’t disdain or abject fear. To give her a name other than that of “fanatic” or “lunatic.”

And as much as she loves the Lord, as much as she wants-needs-to do right by Him, she won’t delude herself into thinking that any of those other things were unpleasant or inconsequential.

Would he believe in her now? she wonders, If he were still here? She has lost her faith. Broken her own heart. She’s not sure she even believes in herself anymore, which is more terrifying than anything she has ever experienced. She has been the one earthly constant in her life, the only person she could trust, and the only thing aside from God she could every truly rely on.

But she will see this through to the end. It is her duty. She understands this. If she has no cause, she has no purpose. But even still, the thing she sees before she goes to sleep is the way Davos had looked at her after he found out what had happened to the little girl. And Jon. Everyone else at Dragonstone save Stannis.

“Terrible,” they called her. Mad. Poisonous. The manifestation of ruin itself. Poorly-hidden criticisms of every choice she had ever made followed her through every corner of Westeros, even now, especially now.

So when whispers turn to discussion of this Lannister lady, who they call “mad” and “loathsome” and “malevolent,” unable to make sensible choices if the world itself hung in the balance, it all sounds almost disturbingly familiar.

She can see the rage that underlies everything the Dragon Queen does. Perhaps she will shirk her family’s legacy. Perhaps she will not. All of that is in the hands of a far more powerful being than her. But Melisandre knows that she must be prepared should Daenerys succumb to the Targaryen curse.

Nothing the Lord wants is transparent anymore. And in light of the extreme strictures of conventional morality everyone else so desperately wants to hold her to, Cersei Lannister might be the most understanding ally she’ll be able to find.

The current queen of Westeros (well, half of Westeros, if she were to take to heart a somewhat-distant warning from her twin brother—which she was not) takes in her visitor. Hair as red as fire, a dress to match, a spidery necklace that Cersei suspects is much more than just a necklace.

She has heard of her, this fire priestess. Some foreign name that begins with an “M.” Previously aligned with Stannis. Cersei had never considered her worth any further investigation; she can only imagine what this woman wants with her now.

“Why are you here.” It’s somehow not a question. More a demand for transparency. She can’t afford to trust anyone anymore, and for all she knows this woman is here to try to assassinate her.

“The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

Wonderful…One of those.

After everything that had transpired regarding the Sparrows, Cersei hopes she never has to hear any mention of religion ever again.

“Lady…” she frowns.

“Melisandre,” the visitor supplies with an enigmatic smile.

“ ‘Lady’ Melisandre. I do not have time for riddles. Tell me why you are here or I will have my guard escort you out.”

Melisandre spares an uninterested, cursory glance at the menacing specimen in the corner, face hidden, armor dulled from a mixture of dust and blood. Others have cowered in fear in the presence of “Ser Robert Strong,” but this Melisandre person seems bored. Unbothered.

Intriguing.

Still, she elects to give Cersei an answer anyway. “I cannot know what the Lord wants. I assume it’s to bring the Dragon Queen and Jon Snow together, but I need to start forging down multiple separate paths in case I am wrong.”

Incredibly, (very credibly), this still doesn’t answer the question of why she is here.

Cersei’s skepticism must show on her face, because Melisandre continues, “Perhaps they are not the true heirs of Westeros. Perhaps the Undead will have to be defeated by another. I am here to make sure you are prepared in case these tasks fall to you.”

“And why would you assume the Lord’s” she practically spits out the word, “Plan would fall to me. Haven’t you heard what they say about me?” Cersei allows a restrained, yet feral grin to grace her countenance, “They think me mad.”

Melisandre echoes Cersei’s smile, “I think you are committed to your beliefs. And will do anything to uphold them. Even if they don’t align with mine, I can respect that. Sometimes, we must do what needs to be done. Not everyone is up to that task.”

For the first time in years, if not decades, Cersei feels a small knot of something-something that isn’t panic or rage-tightening in her chest. If she were less cynical she might call it security or validation.

“Very well.” Cersei isn’t willing to give her more latitude than that. Not yet.

“I will return.” And as suddenly as a leaf blowing away in the wind, Lady Melisandre is gone.

These three words stay on Cersei’s mind she retires to bed a few hours later. When she slips into sleep, the last thought she remembers having is There could be worse things.

Melisandre had a very incomplete idea of what to expect when she actually met the queen regnant in person. And upon arriving in King’s Landing and meeting Cersei’s eyes, she knows that will probably always be the case. Wrath colors her green eyes in a way that makes it clear exactly why people are so terrified of this woman. She does not tolerate nonsense. Will not accept half-hearted explanations. Under no circumstances will she bow to any will but her own.

She imagines that people must look at Cersei the way they used to look at her. Perhaps with even more vitriol. But underneath her rage, Melisandre can just make out fear, born of extreme pain and frustration. Something she finds within herself every time she’s unfortunate enough to be alone with her thoughts.

But in spite of all this, Cersei is committed. Committed to ruling and keeping herself alive in a way Melisandre has never seen anyone commit to anything. Not even Stannis.

Not even herself.

Lady Melisandre will, in all likeliness, have to seek out the Lannister queen again. She is almost looking forward to it.

In the meantime, she decides to investigate Cersei further. What exactly has she done? Why, precisely, do they call her “mad?”

She gets her answers very quickly. Everyone is quick to jump at the chance to criticize this woman. Melisandre, for once, might have found a woman more publicly hated than herself.

And this awakens a touch of uncharacteristic sympathy. Because nothing this woman has done sounds like anything Melisandre wouldn’t also be willing to do, given the right circumstances.

Melisandre thinks of Cersei, and all she sees is a woman dedicated to a cause and willing to do absolutely whatever it takes to accomplish it. Melisandre sees a woman broken by a prejudiced, violent world that explicitly refused to appreciate her. She could never truly hate a woman like that. To do so would be to hate herself.

So the first time Daenerys burns alive a valuable ally—a seemingly reformed, previously Tywin-Lannister-obsessed “bird” of the bald eunuch’s previous circle, with intel that could easily help her claim the throne and procure resources to protect the world from the Undead—Melisandre, as promised, returns to Cersei. Perhaps this action of the Dragon Queen’s was a simple misstep. A brief, uncommon lapse in judgment. But the time of reckoning is quickly approaching, and Melisandre cannot afford to place that much trust in her.

“The Dragon Queen has burned an informant.”

Cersei’s eyes narrow, assuming this is revelation of information is a test. Or perhaps she doesn’t believe her at all.

“Why?”

“He loved your father.”

The queen regnant closes her eyes for the briefest second, allowing herself some sort of internal sadness Melisandre knows she’ll never be able to dissect or understand.

“Why are you telling me this.”

“She isn’t prepared to do whatever it will take to get what she needs. I think you are.”

Cersei looks…almost surprised at this, with her eyebrows slightly raised, jaw clenched to reign in any sort of responsive noise that might wish to escape from her throat. But after a few moments studying Melisandre’s face, she concludes that her not-entirely-welcome visitor isn’t saying this to make a joke or bait her into a response, and her visage retreats to a neutral expression. Something passes between them. A flicker of what feels like understanding.

And Melisandre shivers, ever-so-slightly.

One of the handmaidens has been looking at her strangely. Coming entirely too fast when Cersei calls for her. Greeting her a bit too loudly. There are ugly, shadowy pockets of discolored skin under her eyes that can only be from lack of sleep. She even caught her trying to make off with an old piece of correspondence between her father and the not-so-fashionably-late Olenna Tyrell. An act she repaid by having one of her guards cut off several of the girl’s fingers.

Many would call her paranoid. She would call herself reasonably distrustful.

When she finds out the girl has run off in the middle of the night, her suspicions are all but confirmed.

Cersei does not want to seek the red woman out, but she sees no other option.

Meeting anyone was a thoroughly detestable experience. People with their small talk and shallow observations and empty, deceptive promises; men staring at her the way her girlish self had once wished Robert would; women considering her a traitor for daring to do what men had gotten away with doing for centuries. But Melisandre seems to be the first person Cersei has had the displeasure of meeting who didn’t immediately decry her as “mad” or perverse.

She knew better than to assume anyone was trustworthy. But if she was going to locate this treacherous girl, she needed someone who would not dismiss her on sight.

It doesn’t take her long to find Melisandre, as Qyburn’s spy network is vast and eager to please.

Melisandre doesn’t seem terribly surprised to see her. This annoys Cersei quite a lot.

“What do you need from me?”

“Why assume I need anything.”

“You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t.”

And, like before, it’s not a statement of judgment. Just a fact. A genuine observation. It’s a nice change from the way people usually talk to her, if Cersei were in the mood for candor.

“One of my handmaidens has run off. Presumably to help your little friend in the North. I need you to find her.”

“Why not find her yourself?”

“If you think that I would leave King’s Landing and risk someone using my absence to usurp me, you’re much more boring than I assumed. Even being here now is dangerous.”

The woman in red looks…not amused, but some nearby emotion. Cersei doesn’t care enough to puzzle through what that means. She doesn’t know this woman, nor does she have any worthwhile reason to.

“And why would I do this for you?” Melisandre replies, after entirely too long of a pause to be considered polite.

“I wouldn’t doubt Senna knows plenty of information. She wouldn’t have left if she didn’t think she could be useful.”

“I understand why you want me to find her. What I want to know is why I would want to.”

If Cersei still had any hair to tear out, she would. She plasters a sickeningly patronizing smile on her face instead. She hates this world and everything in it. But she particularly hates how clever everyone always thinks they are.

“You said yourself you don’t know if the Targaryen girl is fit to lead. Do you really wish for her to have information that could easily win her a war when you don’t even know if you want her to win?”

Melisandre tilts her chin up marginally. She has almost immediately shifted from close-to-amused to impressed.

“You said you wanted me available in case the girl and the bastard fail. I can’t be of any use to you or your ‘Lord’s’ cause if the North destroys us in a single battle due to extra intelligence. Surely you know that.”

Cersei makes a point to slip the smile off her face. She allows herself to settle into the feeling of power she loves to revel in, the one that almost fills the void in her heart that has existed ever since she was born. Cersei is serious and will not accept a refusal, and it is necessary that this woman in front of her knows that. “Doing this means I and any resources I have will remain to provide you with assistance should it come to that.”

And, for some reason Cersei doubts even the gods themselves know, Melisandre smiles. “Very well. I will find her.”

Two days later, Senna the handmaiden is found dead in one of the castle’s stables. Seemingly trampled by a horse.

Cersei doesn’t know how Melisandre managed to get the girl back inside the city. Cersei doesn’t care.

It’s not until after this that she realizes she never once threatened violence or death if her not-quite-an-ally didn’t comply with her wishes.

She staunchly refuses to think about what that means.

Ch. 2

Melisandre does not like the feeling of doubting herself. It’s been there ever since Stannis’s death, and though the joining of Jon and the Dragon Queen had alleviated it to an extent, it is now back, stronger than ever.

Which is why she finds herself in King’s Landing again, seeking out a certain wrathful, green-eyed ruler.

“The Targaryen girl has destroyed several key food and weapons stores in the North in order to win a battle against a few underarmed loyalists.” There is no preamble this time. Like the woman in front of her, Melisandre has no time for meaningless greetings or stalling through cleverness.

Cersei’s eyes do not change, and Melisandre, for all of her gifts, all of her intelligence, all of her everything, cannot even begin to fathom what she is thinking. “I see.”

Her back is now turned, and she leisurely pours out a goblet of wine. Some part of Melisandre knows that she is simply executing a power play, as she herself has done so many times before, occasionally even toward the woman in question. That doesn’t make it any less aggravating. “If she had any concept of strategy, she wouldn’t have needed to sacrifice so much ‘collateral damage,’ as she calls it,” Melisandre continues.

Even though she’s facing front again, the queen doesn’t even so much as half-glance toward her. Melisandre appreciates her feigned stoicism. And her loathing of the queen’s desire to stroke her own ego is tempered by a rather vulgar admiration at just how good at this she truly is.

After another agonizing minute (Melisandre knows her expression is getting progressively more desperate, but she craves certainty and resolution too much to fix that), Cersei looks up. She asks, simply, “And?”

“The people will be left that much closer to starving and defenseless during the coming Winter. She has proven she does not care about fighting the Undead. Only about increasing her own power.”

“What do you expect me to do about it. Supply resources to my enemies?”

“I expect you to beat her.”

“Yes, that is my intention.”

Melisandre rolls her eyes. (If she doesn’t, she might laugh. But she doesn’t think Cersei is trying to be funny. Or maybe she is. That was quite a thought: Cersei Lannister, agent of comedy.)

Somehow, Cersei lets this gesture pass without comment before narrowing her eyes in suspicion. The expression makes her look tired. She probably is, given how many different groups of people are trying to kill her at present.

“Why have you come to me? You’re afraid this girl is a tyrant. People say the same about me.”

“Even knowing what I know, I doubt you would be that careless.”

“You know I burnt an entire religious cult by gathering them in a church where I was supposed to stand trial.”

Melisandre can’t help but turn one of the corners of her mouth up at that. “They were not real believers.”

Cersei’s eyes move fractionally toward their usual position. Melisandre would say she looks almost…enchanted, if she thought the queen were capable of such an expression.

“I have executed many others.”

“Who have personally wronged you or your children. You have been willing to ally with others when needed. You would not kill potential informants on sight.”

“Has she done that again?”

“Many times, now. One came with a large supply of Dragonglass, the only thing we know can kill a White Walker. She incinerated all of it.”

The queen regnant blinks a few times. She looks almost pained with the thought that her greatest foe is nothing more than a naive child, play-acting at an overindulged fantasy. It’s all Melisandre needs to know that she has made the right choice in coming here.

“I have destroyed entire houses protecting my family.”

“And I burned a child alive.”

Cersei pauses. Takes a long, genuine look at Melisandre, eyes sweeping thoughtfully from the ground under her feet to the top of her red hair. And there is another moment of understanding. No hatred or fear or even disgust. Merely… acknowledgement, as Cersei would do the same if pushed far enough.

Melisandre’s gaze doesn’t quite falter under the queen’s eye. But it almost does.

“Why should I trust you,” Cersei responds at last.

“I’m probably the only person who won’t demand a marriage agreement from you.”

Cersei almost laughs at that. Or, at the very least, Melisandre can tell she wants to; the corners of her mouth relax, and her fiery-green eyes brighten just enough to be noticeable. And Melisandre finds herself smiling fully at the unexpectedly warm response.

When the queen speaks again, quite a bit of her characteristic venom is gone. “Very well. Return in three days. We’ll discuss this further. I have a council meeting to attend to.”

For the first time since Stannis, Melisandre allows herself the luxury of hope.

These meetings have become almost distressingly frequent. It seems as if every slight change in the political landscape, no matter how meaningless, is used as an excuse for her and the Red Woman to meet for discussion.

And as adept as Cersei has always been at keeping herself in denial to cope with the worst of the world, she knows it’s not only Melisandre’s doing.

Fortunately, the latest atrocity actually does necessitate a meeting. It seems the Stark girl has released a prisoner against the Targaryen “queen’s” wishes (indeed, she was just like her mother, it seemed). Things were mostly under control at present, but a small riot had broken out.

“The people are getting tense. This is not good.”

“Not good for whom? The more tense they are under her alleged ‘reign,’ the better for me.”

“Not if the Undead claim you first. Every moment she spends embroiled in political affairs is an extra advantage they gain over us. Not even you can survive them, though I’m sure you’d put up an excellent fight.”

And much to her own surprise, Cersei smiles. It’s not a very pronounced one. But a brief examination of herself reveals that the ends of her lips are unmistakably pulled up.

That hasn’t happened in quite a long time…

“Do you possess the tools to defeat her?” Her visitor presses.

“Yes. But I cannot guarantee there will be enough resources left to kill all of the White Walkers when I’m done. Nor can I guarantee the safety of the resources you already have.”

Melisandre nods.

“I had an idea about that, though.”

“Oh?”

It’s not lost on Cersei that this is the first time she is willingly sharing information with the woman across from her. But considering that her family had used wildfire as a weapon twice in the public eye, now, she presumes that letting someone know there was still more to use wouldn’t be giving away too much.

And it isn’t as if she’d tell her where it is. Age may have dulled her optimism, but not her discretion.

Mostly.

“I assume you’ve heard of wildfire?”

Melisandre’s face shines with recognition, then with something that Cersei thinks looks far too much like pride.

“I hadn’t thought of that. Do you think it would work?”

“Well, you would know better than I would.”

“It would likely kill the wights. But the actual leaders? The original Undead? Probably not. Only Dragonglass or Valyrian Steel can do that.”

“Or dragon fire.”

“Or dragon fire. But I assume you have an answer for that, too?”

She does.

“I wouldn’t have started this conversation if I didn’t.”

The fire priestess looks up at Cersei expectantly. And Cersei hesitates. This is the first time she has asked someone for a favor in…decades, at least, possibly her whole life. Everything else has been an order, a demand, or, in the case of her father, a plea. Never can she remember simply asking someone for something. She loathes it and never wants to do it again.

“You possess…abilities, do you not?”

And Melisandre, unanticipatedly, simply looks at the ground with something akin to self-reproach. “Yes.”

“Then perhaps you could use them. Change the nature of the wildfire, somehow combine it with Dragonglass-you’d only need a few pieces for that. Or, if not, use the fire to focus some sort of death charm.”

“All of which might not work.”

“Then what’s your idea?”

Her eyes drift toward the ground once more. This time, she doesn’t say anything.

As Cersei had thought.

She does not have time for this. She has a country to rule, wildfire to collect, and battle plans to oversee. “Well?” This time, she is forceful. Asking for the aid of her magic might be a favor, but asking for an answer to the question of that aid is not. She already has given far more chances than she’d care to admit to this woman, for some completely indiscernible reason.

“I’ve never done something on that scale. I don’t even know if I could.”

“You brought a man back from the dead.”

She hates how impressed she sounds when she says this.

But, apparently, this display of emotion that isn’t hatred or rage or grief moves her red visitor. “I’ll do my best.” And the accompanying smirk catches Cersei so off-guard she almost drops her wine goblet.

Melisandre takes her leave, and Cersei is left to wonder why her heart is beating so quickly.

Today, it’s some minor Northron lord who made an indecorous comment, which Melisandre tries to use as proof that the North is dividing further, but they both know is just an excuse to see Cersei.

The conversation has evolved into Melisandre talking about how she once tricked a man into handing over his horse. It’s a story she’s never told to anyone; she’d never thought it important, and it reminds her of a time when she was considerably younger (and thus very foolish and inexperienced), besides.

In truth, the only reason this is happening is because they are both far more drunk than they should be, but Melisandre imagines this is what “normal” women do (women who can just live, free of constant doubt and crisis of faith, women who don’t have potentially the fate of the country resting on their shoulders), and that feels…nice.

“And then he says, ‘When I mentioned things were getting too monotonous, this isn’t what I meant. Oh, he was livid.’ ”

Cersei chuckles, though Melisandre suspects that this, like everything else she does, even while under the influence of particularly strong wine, is carefully measured.

“What did you say?”

“I told him now that he finally had something worthy of telling his wife, perhaps she’d pay attention to him for more than two minutes because she probably wouldn’t let him out of her sight again.”

And Cersei abandons all pretense of restraint and absolutely cackles, slamming her free hand down on the table with an ear-piercing THUD. It seems that even in laughter, the queen is hard and fierce, not to be trifled with.

A thin, pink sheen wisps across her (admittedly stunning) cheekbones, and Melisandre thinks Cersei ought to laugh more often.

Perhaps they both should.

But, to quote the most cliché of expressions, all good things must come to an end, as Cersei’s expression, if not her body, suddenly sobers up completely. She is staring at Melisandre, but there is no feeling of familiarity, no understanding. It’s almost as if Cersei is studying her, and Melisandre, in her wine-induced fog, can’t make sense of why.

She gets her answer, though in a much less jovial way than she might have wanted.

“Why are you here?”

“What?”

“You and I both know that you had no real reason to come today, so why are you here? What do you want?”

Melisandre should probably be a little afraid. Cautious, at the very least. She is not. It’s probably the wine.

“I wanted to.”

“No one ever wants to be here.” And Cersei looks sad. Broken. Melisandre knows that expression well: it’s the one that’s been on her face every time she’s looked in the mirror since Shireen.

“I…” But Melisandre doesn’t know what to say. For someone so good at giving speeches, inciting crowds into action, for a woman who could make one of the most powerful men alive follow her without a second thought, she cannot think of any words to reasonably continue this conversation.

After a few minutes pass, the best her hazy brain can supply is, “Your…brother…wanted…?”

“Don’t talk about him,” Cersei growls.

And Melisandre is, once again, silent.

(Although, not out of fear. This silence comes from knowing she’s touched upon a sore spot, and she has no reason or desire to keep prodding it further.)

“I know you’re only here to lay out some sort of trap for me. You should leave while I still allow you to.”

“What reason have I given you to distrust me?”

“Everyone has reasons to distrust them.”

She supposed that wasn’t entirely wrong.

“How do I know you aren’t trying to entrap me?”

Cersei scoffs. “What use would I have of that?”

Melisandre tries not to interpret this to mean that she is ultimately unimportant, but she is painfully unsuccessful.

“I know what my reputation is,” the queen continues. “And I know why I have it. I don’t regret any of the things I’ve done to earn it.”

“Neither do I,” Melisandre answers, softly, pained. She probably should regret a lot of things. But she can’t. She was only doing what she had thought was R’hllor’s will. The right thing.

Cersei closes her eyes, grips the table until her knuckles are white. It is now that Melisandre notices the dark circles under her eyes. Likely due to many sleepless nights. Broken faith and extreme responsibility will do that.

“If you distrust me so much, why didn’t you dismiss me? It can’t be because you have any sort of affection toward me. I was under the impression that you didn’t really like anyone.”

Cersei opens her eyes, and their normally brilliant shade of green is diluted with a scattering of unfallen tears.

“I liked my children.” A deep breath. “I loved my children. Every single thing I ever did was to protect my family.” And with that, the tears fall. Followed by many more.

Before Melisandre even has time to process what is currently happening, Cersei begins sobbing quietly.

This is not a situation she knows how to fix.

There was a difference between comforting someone like…Selyse, and someone like Cersei. Selyse would be placated by empty compliments, reassurances that everything was proceeding according to plan, a prayer. None of that would appease Cersei.

She considers leaving the queen to her onslaught of emotions, letting her stew in her bitterness. But some part of her whispers that that’s not fair.

And so she walks the few steps over to the table with the wine to gently pry the crying woman’s hands from her face, before letting her arms wrap hesitantly around her. Because that was a thing people sometimes did when other people were sad, and it seems like a good thing to do. And, well, she doesn’t have any other ideas.

And from the way Cersei immediately clings back and lets her tears fall unrestrained into Melisandre’s hair, punctuated by a breathy “Thank you,” heavy with so many indecipherable emotions, she realizes just how much this woman has needed a hug.

They stay like that for quite a long while. It is deep into the night when Melisandre finally leaves.

After that night, everything changes. There are no more pretenses for their meetings. No charade of discussing politics. Everything is more familiar, softened, easy. Many days they don’t talk of the war at all.

Cersei suspects this is what having a friend must feel like. She won’t pretend that it’s unpleasant, but she knows it’s only a matter of time before something happens. Or before Melisandre abandons her, like everyone else.

…But that doesn’t necessarily mean she can’t indulge right now, does it? It’s been so long since anyone outside of her family made her feel something that wasn’t excruciating disappointment.

The servants are starting to talk, crying out that “history is repeating” and “has she learned nothing from Stannis.”

If Cersei were capable of simple leisure anymore, she would be laughing almost constantly. Stannis, with his over-inflated sense of responsibility and one-sided justice. He never needed the Red Woman to cause his own ruin. He had only kept himself alive as long as he had because of Melisandre’s council, divorced from his obsessions with keeping the realm pristine and with drawing lines no one was allowed to cross

With everything Stannis pretended he was, he could never have truly appreciated her.

It is late, and she has met her visitor just inside the gate. They begin their walk back to the Red Keep, passing two stable boys who have just finished repairing one of the walls. The younger of the two looks at the woman cloaked in red, expression a mix between panic and barely-suppressed anger. They run away as fast as their small legs can carry them, and the older one whispers something about “the fall of House Baratheon” just before they vanish out of sight into one of the many dark alleys that adorn this part of the castle.

Cersei hears a sharp exhalation beside her, and Melisandre’s face, made at once both smooth and angular by the glow of the moon, looks how Cersei imagines her own had upon hearing of Tyrion’s escape.

“I think it best I should leave.” Her friend ally guest occasional conversation partner speaks tensely, almost as if she could shatter at the insult, were she too uncareful. She whirls around and starts moving back toward the gate.

“Melisandre,” Cersei says, and they both freeze. They both know this is the first time she has openly addressed her by name, without an accompanying title or epithet.

And the tension instantly slides off Melisandre’s face, as simple as a flame being extinguished by a puff of air.

Cersei looks at her inquiringly; Melisandre meets her eyes, nodding stiffly. They stroll back to their customary meeting spot, and Cersei feels a nervousness she can’t name creep up her neck and around her skull. She thinks she hears her escort of choice breathe observably louder than usual as they step over the threshold into the room. She isn’t sure what this means, other than it makes the dreadful feeling worse.

She tries to think of something to say, but her mind is blank. As if someone has burned away all the thoughts in it, or spilled an inkwell over any pages of conversation she might have pre-written, rendering them unreadable.

To give herself something to do, she decides to light a few candles. But she finds herself so distracted by whatever-in-the-Seven’s-name this is that she burns her finger, a small “Aarh” escaping her mouth, unbidden. Melisandre glances over in concern, and-upon realizing what has happened-gently walks forward to help. At this point, Cersei is scrambling to light a second candle. Quite ineffectively, as her finger hurts too much for her to use it for anything.

Red hair brushes over Cersei’s arm as Melisandre takes the candle and the stick used to light it. Their hands brush during this exchange, and for some curious reason, Melisandre keeps her head down, pretending to be fascinated by the tendrils of smoke peeling off from the candelabra as she transfers flame to the rest of the candles.

She pulls a handkerchief out of some fold of her dress (red, always red, like the color of Cersei’s house or the blood that runs through her veins), and, instead of merely handing over the scrap of fabric, gingerly winds it around Cersei’s injured finger with utmost care.

“There,” the Red Woman murmurs. Her hand is still on her makeshift bandage, curled around Cersei’s finger; her eyes are wide, her lips pressed tightly together, as if trying not to say something.

A minute passes and still neither of them lets go.

Shrouded in the half-light of the candles, Melisandre continues to keep her gazed fixed to the ground, and Cersei feels an increasing need for her to, instead, train her deep blue eyes on Cersei’s green. There is no practical reason for her to want this, other than an inkling that, should it happen, the strange and terrible feeling will lessen. Eventually, she is rewarded for her patience; Melisandre seems to resolve some inner conflict before looking into her eyes unwaveringly, taking her available hand and hesitantly tucking a lone, stray thread of hair behind Cersei’s ear.

Cersei’s breath catches, and she realizes just what that feeling is.

Melisandre nearly crashes her hand back down against her side in a rush to get it away from Cersei’s face. The skin around her eyes is taut, the rest of her face colored with trepidation. She looks…

…Afraid.

That was not an emotion she had ever thought she’s see on Melisandre’s face. She had somehow thought her incapable of feeling such a thing. A thrill rushes through her at the idea that, in a world containing the Undead, dragons, endless stretches of war and struggle and death, she alone was responsible for this expression gracing the Red Woman’s face.

She can tell Melisandre wants to leave, convinced she has crossed a boundary that cannot be uncrossed. And if it were anyone else, she would gladly tell them to get out.

But that isn’t what she wants.

It’s been quite a long time since she’s truly gotten what she wants.

So, before her conversation partner guest ally friend can so much as turn around, she frames her face between her hands and kisses her.

Melisandre responds enthusiastically, fisting one hand in Cersei’s short hair, the other wrapping around her waist in an effort to pull their bodies closer together.

Cersei thought kissing a woman would be…different…somehow. And it was. But not as drastically as she had assumed. It was an odd contradiction of having an intimate knowledge of what was effective (such as running her thumb over Melisandre’s cheek here), and being acutely aware that the body pressed against hers was of a different shape and construction than any of those she had previously allowed this close to her.

It’s intoxicating.

All she feels a heady sensation a thousand times more powerful than even the strongest wine, and everything, everything is Melisandre.

She is no longer foolish enough to believe in the existence of happiness. But perhaps this comes close.

It’s not as pronounced of a change in their relationship as last time, but it is, undoubtedly, a more meaningful one.

The remnants of stilted distrust have given way to a new openness between them, one punctuated by languid kisses and running soft fingers through the other’s hair.

Now, when Cersei’s eyebrows knit together while revising a battle plan, Melisandre can place a gentle hand there to smooth them out. When Melisandre experiments with fire, Cersei is there to tell her (bluntly, with a hint of irritation) when she is breaking her focus and to ask her what more she needs.

They have formed a cohesive unit; their plans to stop the Dragon Queen and the Undead have reached their final stages. Melisandre is practicing what magic she can, and when they are not finding solace in each other for a few precious moments, they are reviewing and re-reviewing war tactics. The end is near. For some, if not all of them.

“We attack tomorrow,” Cersei pronounces. Resigned. Resolute.

Everything that had happened over the past year had been building up to this.

Cersei’s newborn son has been sent away with one of the only knights the two of them have agreed she can trust. If God is kind, the boy will be tucked away in the far southwest, on the coast of an unmapped island, cared for and defended.

Everything is in place. Except for one small item of discussion.

“Absolutely not.”

“I am not asking you to spare anyone else. Just the girl.”

“Why should I spare Sansa? How could I justify that?” Cersei turns from the window she had been staring out of. The wind ruffles the top of her head and she looks graceful, poised.

(Beautiful.)

“We are not allowed to pay favorites in war, Melisandre.”

“She has been nothing but an agent of peace. Every single thing the Dragon Queen has done, she has been against. If we need anyone left alive on our side when this is over, it must be her.”

Cersei remains unconvinced.

“Her sole motive has been to protect her family and vanquish the Undead. Surely you can understand that.”

The barely-perceptible droop in Cersei’s shoulders indicates that she does.

“The world is not done with her yet. She simply wants to be left alone. She won’t disturb you if the North is safe. If you want to protect your child, sparing Sansa Stark will help do that.”

“Very well. I will spare her. Only. Her.”

“Promise me. For the love of this country—”

“I don’t love this country. I love you.” Her eyes drift wistfully out the window once more, mind temporarily lost in a dream of some other, happier, theoretical life. “I love my child. More than anything. More than my own life.” Cersei’s eyes shift back to the here and now, her gaze piercing, but almost as if in a show of bravado. She is posturing, trying to undo this show of vulnerability. And as Melisandre takes in her rigid back; clenched hands, with sharp, leonine nails digging into them; eyes fighting desperately to stay open instead of closing to indulge in some other, less ferocious emotion, she realizes that Cersei is afraid she’ll leave. Even now.

Extreme, non-pious emotions have never been something she wore well. But she cannot let this woman stand here and doubt her loyalty. She cannot let her think her trust and love have gone unrequited.

“I assumed I would never know what it meant to love something that wasn’t God. I never thought myself capable. You proved both of those things to be false. Thank you for that.”

The smile on Cersei’s face is sweet, tender, almost beatific in its loveliness.

When she turns toward the window again, her demeanor has changed into something almost unrecognizable. She looks oddly calm for someone about to end a war years in the making.

Melisandre takes a few steps and joins her, surveys the starless sky, feels the icy, uncomfortable breeze on her face.

And as Cersei quietly threads her hand through hers, Melisandre feels that strange sense of calmness wash over her, too.

For, whatever happened, they would face it together.

#cersei lannister #melisandre #cersei x melisandre #femslash #got #asoiaf #asoiaf rare pair exchange

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writing-after-the-disaster · 5 years

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Hisham Aidi writes:

Exactly 20 years ago I was running around Cairo trying to find people who had met Malcolm X. I spoke to Jamal al-Banna (liberation theologian, trade unionist & youngest brother of Hasan al Banna) and David Du Bois (journalist, Maoist & jazzhead and step-son of W.E.B. Du Bois. They were both very helpful in making sense of MX's thought.

(The image below is from Al Bilad, a Saudi newspaper (in July 1964) -- it's one of my favorite interviews with MX, where the interviewer tells Hajj Shabazz – I don’t understand why you describe yourself as black, when you’re actually “wheat-colored;” MX laughs and proceeds to explain the “one drop rule” and how race works in America.

In this long-acoming essay, I discuss the globalization of MX's image over the last 20 years; MX's time in Egypt, Ghana, and Saudi; his interest in setting up a branch of Al-Azhar in Harlem & how in Sept 1964 (following months of training) he was appointed an official representative of the (Salafi) Muslim World League and hoped to make Muslim Mosque Inc a "legal branch of the Muslim World League" - also in Harlem; also discussed -- the controversy surrounding the 2011 Marable biography, and the once published - now off the market - slightly redacted travel diary of MX.

==================

"‘I have difficulty praying. My big toe is not used to it,’ Malcolm told his diary on April 20, 1964 shortly after arriving in Mecca. Having recently left the Nation of Islam with their practices, he was still acclimating to sitting on his knees during prayer. Despite the pain, the following day he embarks on the journey to Mount Arafat, part of the hajj pilgrimage, joining ‘hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, all colors, buses, car, camel, donkey & foot.’ Mecca, he writes, is surrounded by the: "cruelest looking mts [mountains] I’ve ever seen. They seem to be made of the waste material from a blast furnace. No vegetation on them at all. The houses are old & modern. Some sections of the city are no different than when the Prophet Abraham was here over 4000 [years ago] – other sections look like a Miami suburb.

Wandering among the pilgrims, he describes the rituals, the seven stones cast at the devil, the circumambulating of the kaaba, and observes,‘This would be an anthropologist’s paradise.’

The diaries also provide a firsthand account of Malcolm’s travels in Egypt, Ghana, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia in 1964. There’s Malcolm crossing Tahrir Square to buy some lemonade at Groppi’s, a still-existing pastry shop; then he’s buying pajamas, picking up vitamin C tablets (because he’s feeling kind of “woozy”), going to the movies, and so on.

Malcolm X is a powerful optic through which to understand America’s post-war ascendance and expansion into the Middle East. His is the perspective of a ghetto-dweller who has transcended the borders drawn around him.‘[A]s though I had stepped out of prison,’ he writes, when he travels abroad. The diaries – several notebooks of single-spaced hand- writing – show an anthropologist’s eye. Malcolm comments on the landscape, the politics, cultural and religious differences, with humorous asides. When a friend arrives late, he quips, ‘Arab time!!’ At one point, he observes, ‘The worst most dangerous habit among Arab Muslims is cigarettes. They smoke constantly, even on the Hajj.’ There are also personal reflections on his mood, health and intense solitude.The words ‘lonesome’ and ‘alone’ appear on almost every other page. His thoughts on Saudi Arabia support the standard narrative that the hajj was transformative.

Yet the diaries show something else: when not in Arabia, Malcolm seemed to enjoy being away from his role as a religious leader, and away from religious strictures as well.Whether in Ghana, Guinea, Kenya or Egypt, he immerses himself in the cultural life of these newly independent states, and the younger Malcolm, the music aficionado, resurfaces, as he frequents night-clubs and dance centers again. In Nairobi, he goes to see his friend Gee Gee sing at the Equator Club, and then accompanies Vice-president Oginga Odinga to a party at the Goan Institute of Dance. (‘The PM is a good dancer, remarkably for his age,’ he writes.) In Guinea, he attends a wedding party, then goes to a nightclub and,‘watche[s] some Americans from the Ship-hope try to dance.’ He rejoices in seeing newly independent states shunt aside European colonial music and celebrate their own musical traditions. In Accra – accompanied by Maya Angelou – he attends a party at the Ghana Press Club and enjoys ‘Highlife,’ which would become the country’s national music (Angelou 1986, 134). But it’s mostly in Egypt, which he saw as the bridge between Africa and Asia, a key player in the Non-Aligned Movement, that he spent the most time and experienced the most cultural immersion.

The story of Egyptian jazz dates back to the Harlem Renaissance, when African-American musicians who had settled in Paris, ventured east. In December 1921, Eugene Bullard, the Georgia-born military pilot, drummer and prize fighter, traveled from Paris to Alexandria, Egypt. For six months, he played with the jazz ensemble at the Hotel Claridge, and fought two fights while in Egypt (Lloyd 2000, 79). A decade later, the blues singer Alberta Hunter followed suit, singing in Istanbul and Cairo (Shack 2001, 43). The trumpeter and vocalist Bill Coleman would live in Cairo from 1939 to 1940, leading the Harlem Rhythmakers/Swing Stars. As Islam began to take hold in American cities and within jazz circles, Muslim jazz musicians would journey to Egypt. In 1932, an African-American Muslim with a saxophone turned up in Cairo, saying that he was working his way to Mecca (Berger 1964). With America’s post-war ascent, jazz would spread around the world carried by servicemen, Hollywood and Voice of America broadcasts. In 1958, the bassist Jamil Nasir, trumpeter Idrees Sulieman, and pianist Oscar Dennard traveled to Tangier, where a VOA relay station would broadcast Willis Conover’s Jazz Hour to listeners behind the Iron Cur- tain, where they recorded an album. They then went on to Cairo. In the Egyptian capital, the thirty-two-year-old Dennard would fall ill and die from typhoid fever; he would be buried in the city, his grave a regular stop for visiting jazz musicians.

All to say, by the time David Du Bois arrived in Cairo in 1960, there was already a local jazz scene and the State Department had launched its jazz diplomacy tours aimed at countering Soviet propaganda. Du Bois and his friends – with the support of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture – would try to create a music culture different from that sponsored by the US government. The Egyptian government was also leery of the jazz tours, and turned back ‘jambassador’ Dizzy Gillespie at Cairo airport in 1956 following the Suez War.

This was the buoyant cultural moment that Malcolm X encounters when he arrives in July 1964. Egypt is flourishing culturally, a regional leader in music, cinema and litera- ture. Malcolm’s diary entries from Egypt confirm the events and personalities described in Du Bois’ novel. David Du Bois is working as an announcer at Radio Cairo, and lobbying Egyptian officials to have his father’s books – especially Black Flame Trilogy – translated. (Black Boy by Richard Wright was the only work of African-American literature available in Arabic, he would write to his mother in November 1960; he wanted the government to translate Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun and Langston Hughes’ primer on jazz.) The local jazz scene was feeding off musical trends in the US, as American jazz artists wrote compositions in honor of Africa and Afro-Asian solidarity. Malcolm would soak up the scene in Cairo and Alexandria, attending weddings and concerts, socializing at Cairo’s elite social clubs, sailing down the Nile to the Valley of Kings. It’s in Cairo that he meets Fifi, a Swiss woman who works for the UN, and who is quite smitten by him. All along, of course, he is networking with regime officials and scholars hoping to build a branch of Al-Azhar in Harlem.When he travels from Cairo to Saudi Arabia for hajj, he is struck by how culturally barren the kingdom is compared to Egypt.

The diaries in effect show a man who has landed smack in the middle of the ‘Arab Cold War’ of the early 1960s, which pitted Nasser’s Egypt and her socialist allies against Saudi Arabia and the conservative monarchies backed by the US. As part of the Non-Aligned Movement, Nasser had stepped up his rhetorical attacks on American-allied monarchies in the region, through Radio Cairo, denouncing the royals for their social conservatism and alliance with the West. Music was at the heart of this propaganda effort, as top musicians were enlisted to sing the praises of ‘our destiny’ and ‘historical leader.’ And the expat jazz artists were solidly on the Egyptian side. One of the musicians, saxophonist Othman Karim, would set up the Cairo Jazz Quartet and record a track called ‘Yayeesh Nasser’ (‘Long Live Nasser’) (Du Bois 1964, 47). Karim would go on to collaborate with Salah Ragab, a young drummer and major in the Egyptian army, who would become Egypt’s most famous jazz musician, working with Sun Ra and Randy Weston.2 When Malcolm X arrives in Cairo, he negotiates this cultural tug of war, hanging with the ‘bros’ but also listening to jazz with Morroe Berger, a Princeton Arabist, expert on Black Muslims and organizer of State Department jazz tours. This contest is subtly rendered in Du Bois’ novel. Both Ragab and Karim make appearances – as characters named Salah Janin and Muhammad X – performing at the Cairo Jazz Combo.The Saudis would soon respond to Nasser’s cultural diplomacy, creating a radio station with religious broadcasts. In 1964, they launched their own ideological offensive, setting up the Muslim World League, to mobilize various Islamist groups to counter the spread of socialism and secular Arab nationalism."

Hisham Aidi, “Du Bois, Ghana and Cairo Jazz: The Geo-Politics of Malcolm X” https://www.academia.edu/36710145/Du_Bois_Ghana_and_Cairo_Jazz_The_Geo-Politics_of_Malcolm_X

#Hisham Aidi #malcolm x #cairo #du bois #ghana

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jim-reid · 6 years

Text

Sporran Co-Despondents

Keith Cameron / NME 24.09.1994

After ten years on the road, The Jesus and Mary Chain find themselves in pretty much the same place they've been for years: on licensed premises sitting at a table filled with margaritas and naked dancers. But, reckon Jim and William Reid, the place may be the same but they've moved on. Keith Cameron drinks his fill. It is across the road from the Moulin Rouge. There appears to be an al fresco Ann Summers party in full swing just next door. And our chosen late-night Parisian refreshment stop rejoices under the name Lili La Tigresse. Yet the ultimate piece of circumstantial evidence confirming that this is not the place to come for a quiet lager top and quick game of dominoes hangs above the bar, in the form of a trapeze, a young woman of insufficient dress straddles it and begins to swing extravagantly. Her stilettoed feet come within inches of grazing the startled features of one Mr Jim Reid. Well "Hey! Hey! Hey!", as the man himself has been won't to utter on many an occasion over the past ten years. What more could you want from a Paris rendezvous avec le Jesus et Mary Chain? There are frozen margaritas on tap, dodgy-looking heavies in every corner and the naked chicks are said to "do" "it" "all night long". Pretty soon we'll hit the sidewalk take ourselves to the dirty part of town; you know the place, where all our troubles can't be found. Whaddya say, Jim? Jim?? Hey Jim, where ya goin'?! "Gotta get some kip. 'Night." Aw! Never mind, here's William. Yo William! Have a seat, have a drink, lets talk about the last time you were here and got chased out of town by the local vice squad in cahoots with a gang of machete-wielding LSD-crazed nuns. "Aye, I went to the Highlands for my summer holidays last year. Fuckin' rained every day. Hey, did you just see a girl with no clothes on dancing on the bar just now? Anyway where was I? Oh yeah, the ferry to Skye was a bit choppy, though..." The Jesus & Mary Chain are growing up so gracefully that their unrelenting progress is hard to believe. Some would say this is just as well. We are ten years since they stuck a pointy boot through the ear of a nation and screamed "Fuck" for 20 minutes before trashing the joint and still getting home in time to cop as much sulphate as they could before maw and paw came home from bingo. It's not pipe and slippers time yet but we can forgive them for at least beginning to consider acting their age. Even in a dodgy bar in Paris at two in the morning... This ten year-year tour of duty in rock's field of dreams has seen the brothers Reid resolutely ploughing the same furrow, against the odds and expectations of others, unearthing different ways to say much the same old things. "Fuck with me and I'll fuck with you / Isn't that what we're supposed to do / Kick me down and I will kick you too," sings Jim on 'Dirty Water', a new Jesus & Mary Chain song. "But you break me in two / And you throw me away / Knock me on my back / I'll send a heart attack," sang the same man on 'You Trip Me Up', a ten-year old Jesus & Mary Chain song. To the band's detractors, the fact that either lyric could conceivably fit in either song proves that the Mary Chain are a pair of con-men, desperately flogging their one trick pony 'til the poor beast can take no more. OK, so the early song was soused with feedback while its junior sibling bathes in a soothing acoustic balm – no matter, both are cut from the same starry-eyed cloth. Of course, claim the fully-paid up Chain-holders, this is the whole point. Rock'n'roll's corpse has been exhumed and defiled so often that nothing truly new of worth is ever likely to emerge. What makes The Jesus and Mary Chain so remarkable is that through persistently drawing upon the same chords, the same words, the same obsessions – they manage to continually reinvent themselves as a slightly but subtly different version of the old model, and still succeed in being unique. For, as much as they sound like other bands, no other band sounds quite like the Mary Chain. It really is ten years, then. Ten years of proving that the rule book need never be purchased, let alone read and its strictures followed. Compared with their contemporaries only the Mary Chain have enjoyed continuous chart success allied with critical acclaim. Primal Scream's star might have shone brighter at times but at others it's resembled a black hole. Ironically, in view of their early hell-raising activities, the Mary Chain have assumed the role of rebel rock's dependable elder statesmen. This month's new jacks come, last year's young things slip into oblivion, but Jim and William just keep on playin' their song. How much longer they are inclined to do so seems the not unreasonable topic for discussion this morning after the night before. Reeling from the dual impact of hangovers and a day-long interview schedule, both Jim, in his 33rd year, and 36-year-old William betray the haunted look of men for whom this business long ceased to be a respectable occupation. "It feels like it's getting hard to deal with as the years go on," considers William. " 'Cos I think the business side of it it getting less and less interesting. Making records, writing songs is just brilliant. It's brilliant to be able to do that and it's good to be good at it. But the rest of the stuff it's appeal is wearing thin. To be honest, for me it was only the first five months being in the group that was any real fun, and after that it seemed a chore." "I still like touring, though," adds Jim. "I still like seeing new places, still like to get around. I mean, I'd rather be sitting in Paris talking, than some shithole in London." The Mary Chain are in Paris not just to shoot the breeze with a chorus line of earnest local hacks. Last night they had performed live for only the second time with their latest out-of-studio line-up, following a bizarre liggers-only set at Soho's sleezemungous Madame Jo-Jo's the previous month. Joining guitarist Ben Lurie, who has been part of the set-up for five years now and is therefore eligible to sit in on interviews, are bassist Lincoln Fong (Moose) and former Curve drummer Steve Monti, who as well as hoping to make the Mary Chain his new regular seat of employment is also currently a Blockhead. "Great fun," he says of working with the venerable Mr Dury, Curve, he says, felt like playing with U2. And this lot? "Well it doesn't feel like U2, put it that way." The performance for French national radio's The Black Session – hosted by Bernard Lenoir, whose fierce enthusiasm and avuncular appearance result in him routinely being dubbed "the French John Peel" – was by the band's own admission "rusty" but proved them still capable of bristling the neck hairs when it counts. Moreover, in front of a rapt audience it served as a graphic demonstration that outside their own country at least the Mary Chain are still very much regarded as mythical rock'n'roll outlaws. At home, however, it's different. Or that's how the Reid brothers perceive matters, certainly. The generally cool critical reception meted out to the new 'Stoned and Dethroned' album seems to have confirmed their opinion of Britain as a fickle place that refuses to accord them their deserts but instead views them as a faintly comical cabaret act. "This record's been reviewed all over the world but it's been reviewed particularly fucking nastily in Britain," says William. "It's like it's the worst record in the world. I wish I could have somehow released the record without our name on it, as if it was by a new band, 'cos I'm sure it would have been seen differently. I'm sure it would. But no, it's The Jesus & Mary Chain and we've got a lot to live up to." "There seems to be no way we can win," sighs Jim. "You make a record with loud guitars and it's like (tuts)'Mary Chain, still got that feedback thing...'You make a record without feedback and it's, (tuts) 'Mary Chain, softening getting old..." Such are the problems of having made one of the landmark albums of the 1980s – people will always insist on remembering it. But aren't you proud of the fact that you carry this baggage around with you, that you made such an impact on the national pop psyche that people maintain these preconceptions? "I think I would be if it wasn't such a fuckin' albatross around our neck," says William. "We do get a lot of respect outside Britain. We're seen as an important band. But in Britain it's totally different, we're just a bunch of old fuckin' has-beens... Which is not true. Yeah, the baggage we should really be proud of, but when you read a review of your record you don't wanna hear about 'Psychocandy'. That was almost ten fuckin' years ago. We're different people and we cannae make that music. We've done it, we've done it as best we could and we moved on. And I think we've kept moving on." So how would you prove to someone that you weren't an old has-been? William: "I'd say listen to our new record. This record's pretty mellow, it's quiet. But it's no' because you get to a certain age and then all of a sudden realise, 'Oh, I don't know how to make noise'. It's just because we wanted to make this record. We recorded the (decidedly un-acoustic) 'Sound Of Speed EP' at the same fuckin' time." Jim: "I wouldn't even try. It's ludicrous. Anybody that thinks it can never really be convinced otherwise." If only bands were somehow incapable of reading their own reviews. Despite the fact that their records sell more than respectably, Jim and William's assessment of their esteem in Britain appears entirely based on what the press has said about them. This goes a long way to explaining why it's been over two-and-a-half years since they toured this country and why they have no plans to do so again for the foreseeable future (though they're off to the USA soon for six weeks). Which in turn might have something to do with why one of the bands that supported them on that last Rollercoaster tour – Blur – are a considerably hotter property than the Mary Chain at this present moment. As they are no doubt aware, making good records is not necessarily enough. But if that is the only aspect of being in a band that gives them any joy then why bother with the rest? "Unfortunately," says William, heaving a gargantuan sigh, "we are not in a grand economic situation. We're no' rich. Our records don't sell millions. So to maintain the sales we've got to do the interviews and photo sessions and 'travel the world'..." He spits the words out like someone has laced his mineral water with prune juice. "He says Paris is as good a place as any to be," nodding across at his brother. "I don't think so. I don't want to be in Paris right now. There's other places I'd like to be right now and people I'd like to be with. This is my work. And the reason I say I love songwriting is 'cos it never feels like a job. It's a pleasure. The rest of it's abstract. I wonder what would happen if we never did it, never spoke to people, never did photo sessions, TV interviews..." "I imagine," counsels Ben, "that people would think we're a bunch of snotty bastards." "But people already think we're a bunch of snotty bastards!" yells William. Couldn't you afford to give it a try? How well off are you? "We're no' poor. But if we stopped making records we could be poor. If we suddenly gave up we couldn'ae easily survive." "I had to fire my butler last week," Jim deadpans. "Caught him stealing the last hundred quid out of my safe." In many ways, Jim and William are ill-suited for life in this, the fifth decade of that multi-formatted, superannuated behemoth known as Rock (Inc). Despite their artful manipulation of video imagery they are deeply uncomfortable in front of any type of camera lens. Nor are they the most natural live performers in the world, which led to a notably traumatic experience on the second Lollapalooza tour in 1992. William: "It was the most soul-destroying experience I've ever had in the group." Jim: "Going on at four in the afternoon in broad daylight, it's not what the Mary Chain's about at all. And then there was all the backstage bullshit with everybody talking about guitars and having this wild great time...We shouldn't have been there. We thought it was gonna be more like a European festival on the road, and we get there and it's 4pm with a bunch of American kids sitting there waiting for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. You're playing your heart out and there's silence. Ten weeks' worth. It was hellish." "It's happening to Nick Cave this year," adds William. "He's stiffing badly. When we play live there's got to be a certain mystery to the show, because we're not the greatest showbiz performers, and the same with him. When you see Nick Cave you wanna see him in darkness with a bit of smoky atmosphere. Broad daylight in Oklahoma just isn'ae sexy! "Lollapalooza was an exercise in hypocrisy, the whole thing. The philosophy behind it was freaks, weirdos and outsiders get together and let's all be free. But backstage we kept to ourselves and instead of letting us be free about that people got fucked off with it. It was supposedly a celebration of freaks and weirdos but we weren't allowed to be freakish or weird." Perhaps unsurprisingly then, the Mary Chain turned down the offer to play the great celebration of freakish weirdosity and 13-dollar pizza that was Woodstock 2 ("it sounded tacky," sniffs William, "and it was!"). Can it really be that after ten years they still find the most fundamental aspects of being in a rock'n'roll group problematic? "I think we've settled down a bit," says Jim. "We don't fuck up as much as we used to, 'cos the whole situation was a lot more intimidating at the beginning. We just didn't think we were good enough. We believed in the songs but presenting the songs to an audience scared the shit out of us. So we used to get really shitfaced before we went onstage and there was always some incredible fuckup gonna happen. These days it's a lot more relaxed and it seems to be in front of people who want hear the music and accept it any way you give it to them." See? They've always wanted to be a regular band. Which perhaps hits the nerve as to why when some people listen to 'Stoned and Dethroned' and hear the groovy swing of Jim's duet with Hope Sandoval or the Drifteresque hand-jive of new single 'Come On' they maybe think, "This is nice but..." In conquering the demons that once led to their shows being so singularly chaotic, the Mary Chain succeeded in removing much of the excitement. "That might be true," ponders Jim, "but it's easy to be exciting onstage. You could walk onstage with a gun and shoot a dog. That's exciting, but so what? There's more to what we do than sheer in your face excitement, that's only one element, a small element, to what a band should be about. So OK, we don't walk onstage and fall over, you lose something if you don't do that. But I think what you gain from not doing that is more important. Excitement is easy, you just walk on with a road drill and destroy the stage. But anybody can do it. And if that's what you're into buy a road drill and a stage and do it yourself!" Every revolution eventually assumes the robes of the regime it succeeded. But maybe The Jesus And Mary Chain were never the revolutionaries some of us took them to be in the first place. And it might well be that they're getting tired of being misunderstood. "I'm sure there's gonna be an end to The Jesus & Mary Chain." Says William, "and sometimes it feels like it's right around the corner. Right after Lollapalooza I was thinking, 'I don't want to do this'. Same with him – you go through phases where you just want to stop it." "I think recently I've felt it could finish," nods Jim. "Whereas before we've just kinda talked about it. It seems more real now. I can actually imagine life without the Mary Chain. These days I could easily do it. Sometimes you just wonder, 'Is this worth it? I could do something else with my time." Such as? "I'd still like to make music but just not within this band. It's just the fact that we've been doing this for years and years and years and years. And you like to see there's some kind of progress in terms of people listening to your music, and sometimes we get really frustrated. You play the same clubs as you played in 1985...It's a thought." And one they seem reasonably preoccupied with at the moment. The previous evening, oblivious to the theatrics at Lili La Tigresse, William had expounded at length and with utter enthusiasm about the simple pleasures of music, of picking up a guitar and writing a song, purely for his own enjoyment. He'd said he writes maybe 40 or 50 a year, of which maybe eight are deemed worthy of recording ("ten, if you're lucky"). As the margaritas kicked in, your correspondent blithely predicted that they'd write ten more classics to shut the doubters up. Suddenly, William Reid's ebullience melted away. "We might. We might...Remember when you went from primary school to high school? They're just one summer apart but it's like moving from complete innocence to total cynicism and world-weariness. That's what the music business is like. We're hard. We started out and we thought we were soft as shite but we've been here for ten years now and we're hard. We've seen a lot and we've changed. Sometimes it's best not to know certain things."

#interview

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belerencodex · 6 years

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The Synod of Palandari

Gods of the Synod

The angelic hosts of Palandari are governed by a static hierarchy. Every celestial from the lowest ranks of archons to the high solars and planetars serve the will and spirit of the gods who have shaped the plane. Most are celestial beings born native to the plane but in rare cases mortal beings have ascended to godhood among the peerage of angels.

Adarra Progenitor of Palandari, Adarra was born in the earliest days of the elemental planes, she emerged from a pearl and began shaping the heavens from the firmament. It was Adarra who created the angels, who created the lesser divines of Palandari and commanded her children to be wardens of the order of creation. When she was content with her creation she untethered her essence and became one with the plane itself. Anywhere you are in Palandari you are within the sight and the love of Adarra.

Faithful of Adarra: Among the common folk prayers to Adarra are mainly parents wishing well for their children, those who have recently lost loved ones, and those seeking guidance in matters of love. The priesthood of Adarra fulfills a couple roles in these regards, any Synod cleric can perform the proper Adarran rites for the deceased but it is believed that Adarran priests have extra sway to help the spirits of the dead reach Palandari. To this end the priesthood have mastered arts of divine mummification and guard mausoleums of the faithful. In the sphere of the living they are frequently teachers, mentors, and matchmakers. In the springtime the Festival of Adarra is held where the priests weave magic over the festivities to help people find their soulmates, individual priests may also take it upon themselves to help the lovelorn in the name of their god. Some of these priests of love are called the Kedesha, essentially holy sex workers said to have the power to heal wounds, cure impotence, and the most powerful are said to even be able to revive the recently deceased through the powers granted through their rituals. Temples of Adarra: The high temple of Adarra is located about fifty miles north of Feldri. A town named after the goddess has grown up around the temple as among the many functions of the Adarran priesthood are the running of orphanages and running the houses of the Kedesha. Many of the children raised within the temple stay on as priests themselves or have moved into the township around the temple. Many of the residents make their living as professional mourners in the necropolis of Adarra. An expansive graveyard filled with mausoleums stretching back before the Ascren Empire. In the early days of the Crucible States period raiders and dragons drove away the priests from the temple and emptied the town. In their absence the unattended necropolis became rife with undead and to this day paladins and clerics are still working on clearing it. The temple is prosperous as the kedesha earns the temple significan coin in addition to donations made by those raised among the priesthood. Adarra is one of the more popular and her temples are found ranging widely, even into Orum and Cymrin where the Synod’s reach is limited. Domains: Family, Repose, Love, Healing

Arbanix In an ancient time, long before humans, before any of the elven or dwarven races that now dwell on the material plane, there were dragon tyrants ruling over the mortal races. They warred with the genies, angels, and fiends for dominance over the Material Plane. For hundreds of years the realms of earth were tossed between the control of these immortals. Finally the dragons stood triumphant against all comers as the unrivaled rulers of their native planes. Next came the wars between the dragons themselves. Metallic and Chromatic turned on each other, common cause lost with their enemies defeated. Among the metallic dragons one stood above all others. Arbanix the Golden called upon the greatest of his kind, he was honorable, kind, and powerful beyond measure. Those who lived within Arbanix’s dominion lived in peace. But the curse of such power and the reputation of a warrior god is that there is always another challenger. Eventually Arbanix came to understand that to live on the material plane any longer would only cause more instability. He ascended to Palandari where he had befriended many of the angels and was granted true godhood. Still though, Arbanix keeps eternal vigil over his home, he will not meddle in the affairs of mortals but against greatest perils, against the darkness that lies beyond the world, he will protect us. Faithful of Arbanix: There is a separate religious structure called Drakoveriism that worships a pantheon of draconic deities and mythic figures,. However because of Arbanix’s dwelling on the plane of Palandari he is considered de-facto a part of the Synod’s religious structure similarly to Menswar. Arbanix is a popular god especially among halflings, whose oral history stretches far enough back to contain legends of his deeds. The priesthood of Arbanix works closely with metallic dragons and maintains an aloof attitude to mortal affairs. The priesthood of Arbanix is instead ever vigilant for the creeping influence of the forces of the lower planes as well as maintain treaties with the genies that keep them out of the Crucible States. Temple Structure: Temples of Arbanix are built on draconic design, monuments with no interior section. Decorated arches or columns showing scenes praising Arbanix. Other than this the worship of Arbanix is carried out by remote monasteries that work closely with the priesthood of Semia to detect diabolic presences, or frequently among halflings who tell tales of Arbanix and look for more subtle influences of dark forces to undermine. The High Temple of Arbanix is on the Isle of Sequoia, it lies south of Orum, in ancient days gold dragons brought redwood seeds from the great western wilds and the mighty trees still stand proud over the island. Domains: Luck, Good, Dragon,

Menswar Born a mortal man, the first king of Thayl was a warrior ruler of the hillfolk in the earliest age of humanity. When he was born Thayl was ruled by sorcerous tyrants from the lowlands of Nashto. He was struck by a vision from Neswei, the god of valor and began a rebellion against the Sorcerer Kings. Upon his final victory he was met by a trio of angels sent to earth by Neswei to ordain him as rightful king of his people by valor and honor. His reign was long and peaceful and when he died it is said that a pillar of golden light shone upon his body and it was drawn to heaven where he took up the mantle of godhood. Faithful of Menswar: Menswar is not a god most humans follow, he is the chief deity of the Thaylites but to others he is seen as a god of the nobility. A King of Kings so to speak, in the days of the Ascren Empire, pious rulers would seek out high priests of Menswar to try and seek his wisdom or blessing. Few succeeded in gaining the acceptance and guidance of Menswar as the Ascren Empire was founded in unrighteous conquest and oppression. Nobles of true piety and faith though have been empowered before as paladins. A Thaylite scholar called Balisaris long ago wrote a book transcribing the oral tradition of laws of rulership handed down through the culture from elders to novices and it is considered by many something of a masterwork on how to be a leader. Temples of Menswar: There are few dedicated temples of Menswar within the Synod due to his limited popularity. Pious nobles often will have a chapel dedicated to him built within their walls. The high temple of Menswar is a fortified complex on top of Mount Tyslan in the Azurin Mountains in the west. The priesthood there commune with the angels and seek to support righteous rulers as they are commanded by the servants of Menswar. Domains: Glory, Good, Nobility, Fate

Neswei Neswei, the Artisan of War, is the angelic god of valor and honorable combat. Leader of the heavenly hosts, ancient protector of Semia and close friend of Arbanix, Neswei stands tall amongst the gods. In ancient days in the Age of Enchantment, she strode across the Material Plane, directing her angelic host as well as their mortal counterparts in battle against the forces of evil. At the behest of the metallic dragons though angels have mostly withdrawn from direct tampering with the mortal realms, in times of great peril, or in places where demons still tread, angels descend on the command of Neswei. Faithful of Neswei: Among true hearted warriors Neswei is a popular choice. Soldiers, especially peasant soldiers will often paint her symbol on their shields as a device. However it is considered something of a trade-off. Neswei’s priesthood hold certain rites and oaths that they bind any warrior who would seek the aid of the Artisan of War to cooperate with. Warriors who break this pledge of honorable warfare may find themselves hunted from anything from paladins of Neswei to angels sent directly to punish them for their transgressions. Clerics of Neswei put themselves at the service of generals and commanders, offering healing to their army if they will abide by the strictures. Those who perform admirably are written of in the Codices of War, an ongoing collection of military history being composed by the priesthood. Temples of Neswei: Temples of Neswei are usually in fact holy fortresses, at these sanctums monks, paladins, and clerics are trained in the martial arts. In times of trouble these temples will bring in peasants from the countryside to protect them. The high temple of Neswei lies in a mountain valley called Angel’s Rest. Long ago ago battle was fought between Neswei’s legions and a demonic host over this valley. Many angels were felled and their bodies laid to rest in the valley below. A strong aura of good still hangs in the air, creating year round springtime. Domains: War, Archon, Protection

Semia All-Knowing Semia, chief among the children of Adarra. When the creator diffused her essence Semia took over the mantle of ruler of the divine hierarchy of angels. As the near-omniscient ruler of Palandari, Semia is the final judge of souls trying to reach the heavenly realm. No sin, no cruelty, no evil is hidden from her sight when one appears before her. From her home in the Sanctum Eternis she commands the legions of angels in their never-ending struggle against fiend-kind. It was Semia who inspired Idenna’s revelation as a way of drawing the mortal races closer to the divine. She handed down her laws to be spread upon the material plane. Her power is so great that she can manifest in the mortal realms much more easily that most angels though she eschews her true form as it would terrify most as they felt the weight of every transgression no matter how slight burn in their hearts. Faithful of Semia: The priesthood of Semia are in large part lorekeepers, historians, judges, and soothsayers. Many wizards, especially diviners hold Semia in high regard as she has helped preserve huge amounts of knowledge that would have otherwise been lost through war and civilization collapse. Among the ranks of the priesthood are many oracles, mortals chosen as vessels of the truth of the divines. Semia is most popular among generals, ship captains, and seekers of lost knowledge. Notably there is a sect of Semian priests called Truth-Speakers, these wandering priests seek to overturn lies, recover lost knowledge, and often make their living as fortune-tellers and soothsayers. Within the ranks of the Synod the priesthood of Semia takes on the role of overseers and judges. Semian jusicitiars carry out orders of the high priesthood from the Temple at Phosis. When corruption or infiltration of the Synod is detected it is agents of Semia who track it down. Temples of Semia: The temples of Semia serve a few roles, some are courts where traitors and accused demon cultists are put on trial under the direct witness of the gods. Others contain vast libraries, collections of knowledge curated by librarian priests. Yet others are sanctuaries, secluded monasteries where oracles are trained and cared for while they use their powers to uncover the will of the divines. Few temples of Semia actually have space for ley-worshippers, those wishing to perform rites in her name must ask permission of the priesthood and join them in veneration as the priests do rather than simple prayer or offering. Domains: Knowledge, Fate, Light

Yothri When fair winds catch a ship’s sail, when the pirates slip over the horizon and out of sight behind a trade cog, when a merchant arrives safely home from a long journey, the faithful praise Yothri. The god of trade and commerce, he is beloved to traders of all stripes. Originally Yothri was simply a messenger of the gods of Palandari but more and more he became a figure of great respect and praise among mortals until he was anointed by Semia as a god in his own right. The worship of Yothri as a god of merchants really blossomed fairly recently, during the early age of Ascren. Today he is considered the patron of the merchant republic of Feldri and his clergy are some of the most prosperous as merchants offer thanks for safe journeys. This money is put to use supporting some of the less popular temples like Semia and Menswar as well as for altruistic purposes like road upkeep and insuring merchants against losses. Faithful of Yothri: As mentioned above, Yothri is most popular among merchants however many folk rituals are practiced throughout the Crucible States from all segments of society in hopes of divine windfall. One of the most popular holidays of the Synod happens yearly, at the beginning of winter there is a six day festival called Palandrium. On the last day, Yothri’s Day, there is a traditional gift giving ceremony where loved ones and friends give each other treasures. It is also said on Yothri’s Day that one person of true piety is visited by a vision of Yothri guiding them to a great treasure. The priesthood of Yothri fulfills a couple roles, paladins patrol the roadways to keep them safe and clerics often accompany ships and caravans on perilous journeys. Temples of Yothri: In addition to their role of veneration, temples devoted to Yothri act as reputable money-lenders and insurers. In fact they often act as credit unions for people, especially in larger cities many people rest easy in the knowledge their money is protected by paladins of Yothri ever vigilant against corruption and theft. Domains: Trade, oceans, community

#pathfinder #d&d #beleren #synod #worldbuilding

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selinaogrady · 5 years

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TO TOLERATE OR NOT TO TOLERATE? THAT IS THE QUESTION

Anti-immigrant group mistakes empty bus-seats for burqua-clad women

Should Muslim parents in Birmingham be banned from protesting against classes that teach their primary school children about LGBT lifestyles? This was the question posed by The Moral Maze last week. It led to a fascinating examination of one of the fundamental tensions which bedevil Western states: that between traditionalist religious communities - most obviously traditionalist Muslim communities - and the liberal secular state. The programme asked how far the liberal state should tolerate the intolerant; in other words, how far it should accommodate practices and beliefs which it believes fly in the face of its own liberal values.

It’s a deeply complex issue so inevitably none of the four panellists could fully untangle the knots the West has got itself into over the issue. But I think Mona Siddiqui and Anne McElvoy got the closest.

The parents who are protesting in Birmingham are mainly traditionalist Muslims. They believe that homosexuality is wrong. It’s an illiberal view. But Melanie Phillips argued that to suppress their illiberal views in the name of liberalism would also be illiberal.

Defenders of the LGBT education classes, like Dr Anna Carlile argued that they were simply intended to show primary school children that there are different ways to have sexual relationships and bring up a family. They were not telling children that they should live in these ways but simply that people in their society do in fact live like that. How else can children understand the society they live in and not ostracise or bully those that live and behave in a different way to their own family?

But, as Phillips pointed out, herein lies the problem for the religious, most especially for the traditionalist - that is, fundamentalist - religious. Teaching children about LGBT lifestyles may indeed describe the way society now is, but it fails to say anything about whether non-heterosexuality is right or wrong, whether the traditional heterosexual model of a family is better for children than any other. For the traditionalist/ fundamentalist religious - Christian, Muslim or Jew - non-heterosexuality is not value-neutral. It is, they believe, wrong and condemned by God, even if they try to comfort the ‘wrong-doer’ with the weasel words ‘God hates the sin but not the sinner’.

Siddiqui tried to get round this by making a distinction between the religious traditionalist/fundamentalist and the religious modernist. The former takes their own interpretation of their holy scripture as the only possible one and fails to distinguish between the general principles of their religion and particular rulings and utterances which were determined by the historical circumstances prevailing when their holy scripture was written down. Of course she’s right to distinguish between the traditionalist and the modernist. The modernist Christian, Jew or Muslim might well see the strictures against homosexuality as time specific, or claim the same right as the traditionalist to interpret those strictures and see them as directly in conflict with the general principles of their holy scripture. But the problem is that traditionalist communities do live in our society and they do believe that their God says homosexuality is wrong.

It was all very well for Siddiqui to argue that traditionalists of all faiths are and must be perfectly free to instil the values they believe in within their own home and religious institutions. It was indeed the state’s duty to protect that right. But, she said, in the public realm the state must uphold the principle of equality on which the whole liberal tradition is based, and traditionalists must accept that. But surely that is precisely what traditionalists can’t do? For them there can be and should be no separation between the private religious sphere and the public secular one.

Phillips, correctly I think, identifies both the potential hypocrisy and the dangers that lurk in liberal secularism. The liberal state rests on the assumption that the flourishing of the individual is the ultimate good - that that flourishing can only occur when the individual is free to follow their own beliefs and lifestyles, as long as they do no harm to others. That of course means that the liberal state must be a pluralist one. But pluralism can very easily fall into the trap of relativism: every belief, value or practice is as good as any other. Phillips and one of the witnesses, Dr David Landrum of the Evangelical Alliance, argued that the English liberal state had indeed fallen into that trap. Homosexuality, in the eyes of the religious traditionalist, is wrong. In teaching children about LGBT lifestyles but keeping silent about their moral status, the state was contradicting that view. Far from being neutral between religions as the liberal secular state purports to be, the English liberal secular state, they argued, was in fact preaching the religion of relativism and seeking to impose it on all of us.

Like Phillips, I abhor relativism. Most sensible liberals do. You certainly don’t need to be religious in order to do so. She argues that the English state is being dishonest - covertly imposing a religion of relativism while pretending to be neutral between religions. My argument with Phillips is simply about what the state should come clean about. The LGBT classes are indeed not saying anything about the morality or otherwise of people who are LGBT. But that is because our liberal state rightly does not think it is a moral issue. I will come back to this later.

According to the fourth panellist Andrew Doyle, the liberal state does not have to be relativist. As a Catholic he defended the importance of religious liberty, while as a gay man he believed that homosexuality was not wrong (although traditionalist Catholics do), and that children should be taught about non-heterosexuality. But he argued that allowing different conflicting beliefs and practices to co-exist does not commit a state to relativism. It does, however, commit a state to tolerance - considered to be the hallmark of a liberal state. According to Doyle, to tolerate a practice is not to approve of it: on the contrary it is to say that although you don’t approve of it, you will allow it. But that of course is precisely the problem of toleration and why the tolerated object to being tolerated - who wants to be told that you or what you do is not approved of although you or it will be grudgingly allowed to exist.

And tolerance has a further drawback. A tolerant state accepts the status quo. It says: ‘You are free to go your way, although I believe it to be wrong, and I will go my (better) way’. Tolerance is a recipe for a permanently divided society. It is also, I believe, a recipe for a permanently unstable society. Tolerance is in effect a polite, restrained form of dislike and in times of stress and insecurity, dislike can readily become hatred.

I don’t believe that tolerance provides a satisfactory solution to the dilemmas that traditionalist religious communities pose to the liberal secular state. Anne McElvoy had it right. She admitted that in the past we were guilty of marginalising other lifestyles, such as non-heterosexual ones, and that that bias needed correcting. She also admitted that pluralism can lead to relativism. But liberalism she argued is more than adopting a neutrality between different beliefs and practices. It is itself a commitment to values: there is a progressive drive within liberalism which sees society as moving onwards and upwards.

The question, however, is not whether to tolerate or not to tolerate. Siddiqui put her finger on it. The question we should be asking is how we all - religious and non-religious, traditionalist and modernist, heterosexual and not - find a common good, a common goal which we together want to achieve. That is to go way beyond tolerance, beyond grudgingly accepting our different communities. It is to seek what will unite us in a joint commitment to what we all want our future society to be.

Phillips argues that the English state is being dishonest - covertly imposing a religion of relativism while pretending to be neutral between religions.

Indeed our state should come clean. It should openly and proudly declare that of course it is not neutral. That it does indeed have its own creed which indeed it does want to impose on all its citizens. It is a belief in the Enlightenment values of liberty, equality and fraternity, or as I prefer to say, fellow-feeling. Yes, these principles have been abused in the cause of colonialism and hypocritically applied; yes, these principles often have done and still do apply only to men, and white privileged ones at that. None the less, they are magnificent principles if they are applied, as they should be, on the basis that all humanity is indeed equal - if therefore they are applied to women as well as men, to slave as well as free, to white and non-white, rich and poor, Christian and non-Christian and of no religion at all, to straight, gay and everyone in between.

Our liberal state should openly declare its allegiance to these principles and its desire that all our citizens work towards creating a state in which its citizens realise those principles. Of course those principles will clash Unlike Siddiqui I don’t believe that the principle of equality should always trump liberty or fellow-feeling. We will have to negotiate each issue, such as the protest against the teaching of LGBT lifestyles which pits equality against the right to express a belief, but at least we can do this not on the basis of tolerance but on the basis of how far it moves our society further towards realising its goal of liberty, equality and fellow-feeling.

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tlatophat · 7 years

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Lifting Restrictions

Recreating the Alignments - Part 1 Part 2 || Part 3

Okay, so everyone’s done their take on this at least once, and you know what, it’s fun to do, so I’m gonna throw out my own version of this. Here is my take on the classic 3x3 DnD Alignment Grid! First, let’s get some key terms defined. Lawful - To me, lawful just means that the character follows a clear and codified set of objective standards. A list of things they ideally will or won’t do, and a standard for behavior. This code can be broken, but it will feel wrong to that character, and they will be upset when they are put into a situation where they must violate one of their standards. Lawful may give too strong a sense of “Law” being the driving force. I think “Principled” would be the better choice. Chaotic - To me, Chaotic is not ‘lol so randumb’. It’s the antithesis of Lawful. Where a lawful character has an ideal standard they strive to conform to, a chaotic character has no such high standard for themselves. They only have their goals and philosophy. In fact, a chaotic character sees standards, rules, and other strictures as impediments. Chaotics won’t break rules for the sake of breaking them, necessarily. They just don’t care for such things and aren’t going to even consider them while making their choices. They act more on primal sensation than logic, making “Instinctive” a good alternate term. Good - I find this and its counterparts, Neutral and Evil, to be misnomers. Good isn’t always ‘goody 2-shoes’ or ‘FOR THE GREATER GOOD’. Let’s be honest, a kingdom ruled by a caste of Lawful Good Paladins isn’t going to be a very happy place for long. Additionally, a Good Paladin may not think twice about cutting down a tree, but a Good Druid might very strongly object to that, and consider it Evil... or at least worthy of a good lecture. So I think Good would better be called Selfless. A Selfless character will always make decisions with the consequences to other people or things in mind. What those other things are will vary by the character, but they all want to avoid collateral consequences that would hurt others. Evil - Now, you might be expecting me to ask what the opposite of Selfless is and then apply it to evil, but I don’t think that fits. When I look at classic examples of Evil characters, they share basically one thing in common: they aren’t necessarily the antagonists and villains of the story, but they all strive for domination and control. Of others, of their environment, of their kingdom, of other people: They want to be in control. So I feel Dominant is the better descriptor. Their driving motive is to gain power and control for its own sake. Neutral - Ah yes. Nestled between Selfless (Good) and Dominant (Evil) is this little slice of ambiguity that often has a horrible reputation for being mind-numbingly bland or pure off-the-wall bonkers. Both of these misrepresent what I find to be one of the more compelling alignment sets. Neutral is, again, a poor choice of word, in my opinion; especially juxtaposed against Selfless and Dominant. What are Neutral characters after? If they’re not looking out for other people (Good/Selfless) or trying to take control (Evil/Dominant), what are they doing? Well.. they’re looking after themselves, and/or after a very select and small group of people. They are Selfish. Not necessarily in the negative sense, just that their frame of reference is their own well-being. They don’t necessarily care about collateral, and they really don’t want to impose on other people either. They will act for their own satisfaction, whether that be financial, emotional, spiritual, whatever. So, with those terms out of the way, let’s ACTUALLY do the 9 alignments and give you a taste of how I see them. PRINCIPLED SELFLESS - (Lawful Good) This is the home of the Noble Knight, the Holy Paladin, the benevolent King, the beleaguered Town Mayor, the Hunter watching over the sleepy village during the night, the Girl who puts herself between the victim and the bully’s fist, the young patriotic Soldier on the front lines. These men and women hold themselves to a standard of action and behavior, and are always thinking about the well-being of others, even to the point of putting themselves in harms way to secure it. Whatever their source of values, it puts a high priority on defending others and they are uncomfortable with, if not downright hostile to, the idea of acting outside of their principles, as they feel that doing so may actually hurt others around them, or make them no better than the ones they’re trying to stop. PRAGMATIC SELFLESS - (Neutral Good) This is the Town Medic, doing all they can within the limits of their knowledge, but knowing that some injuries just aren’t worth treating when supplies are limited. It hurts, but it’s necessary, and they are comfortable with shouldering that burden. It’s the Upstanding Citizen, who knows they can’t face the threat themselves, but will scramble to make sure the authorities know what’s happening. This class of character will do everything they can reasonably be expected to do to protect those around them, even bend some rules or take a blow to their principles if it means getting results. But they’re not going to overextend themselves when all that’s going to do is hurt them. INSTINCTIVE SELFLESS - (Chaotic Good) This is woodland Ranger who poaches to feed the orphanage; the grizzled Bounty Hunter who kills his targets in cold blood to stop them from repeating their crimes; the Royal Assassin who kills the enemy general before his invasion plans come to fruition. These characters just want to help. Screw the rules, screw anything that stands between them and helping, they’re going to make sure other people are secure by any means necessary, and they will fight to correct anything they see as threatening other people, even if that threat comes from seemingly noble sources. PRINCIPLED SELFISH - (Lawful Neutral) This is the Merchant plying his trade in the capitol; the Blacksmith who refuses to do business with cutthroats because it would spoil his reputation; the Mercenary who keeps a blacklist of persons or organizations he won’t work for. Characters in this bracket are in it for themselves, but they have standards. There’s a list of things they most definitely will not do, and are very reliable and trustworthy because of it. While this might put them in a bind, where their well-being may suffer due to their principles, they will staunchly adhere to them, or grimace bitterly if forced to cross those lines. Like all Selfish types, it’s not that they won’t protect others or try to gain control, but they won’t do it to their own detriment. PRAGMATIC SELFISH - (True Neutral) This classification is often misrepresented as being boring. However, characters in this bracket are purely self-driven and that means this is a very unstable alignment. Keeping a character purely Pragmatic Selfish is hard. They have to frame everything in terms of how it will benefit or hurt them. They’ll do whatever they reasonably can to promote their own well-being, and willingly swallow some bitter pills to do it, but they’re not going to stick their neck out too far. This means they’re easily pulled along into other alignments based events around them, but this also gives characters starting in this classification the largest room for growth and the coolest potential stories. Like all Selfish types, it’s not that they won’t protect others or try to gain control, but they won’t do it to their own detriment. INSTINCTIVE SELFISH - (Chaotic Neutral) These people will do anything in service to their own well being. They don’t want control, and they don’t care about collateral, all they want is their own security and happiness. The Sellsword who will fight for whoever is the highest bidder, the citizen who refuses to share his food with his starving neighbors out of fear of starving himself, the streetrat who steals to survive, the Deserter who flees the battlefield when he realizes the battle is lost. These people have a finely honed sense of self-preservation, making them great allies if you can convince them that working with you is in their best interest. But if you haven’t fully convinced them, they will just as easily abandon you. Like all Selfish types, it’s not that they won’t protect others or try to gain control, but they won’t do it to their own detriment. PRINCIPLED DOMINANT - (Lawful Evil) These are your Moguls, who play by the rules as they consolidate control of a market. The Paladin who’s stopped caring about others and is only in it for the authority it brings. The mediocre King who manages to keep his people content, but really is only in it for the privileges of the Monarchy. Characters in this category relish the sense of power they have and thirst for more. But they’ve got principles, and there are lines they won’t cross. Sure, they can be controlling assholes, but they stay in line and play by the book. At least, by whatever book they’ve elected to use as their rules. PRAGMATIC DOMINANT - (Neutral Evil) You could also call these guys ‘Lazy Dominant’. They want power, and they want to keep accumulating it for themselves more and more, but they’re not going to get over-excited about it. It’s the corrupt Sheriff who just enjoys skimming the coffers every so often, the Commander who waits for a superior to make a mistake before trying to take his seat. They’ll slowly, patiently accumulate power and influence for its own sake, using some dubious methods, but nothing so radical as to be called ‘grasping’. They’re more... opportunists than anything else. INSTINCTIVE DOMINANT - (Chaotic Evil) These guys just like flaunting the fact they’re in control. They will get up in your face with that, and they will definitely have the power to back them up. They like seeing other people bow or kowtow to their whims, and will take ample opportunities to demonstrate their power. In short, these guys are assholes, and they love being assholes. The problem is that if they’ve been doing it for any decent length of time, it usually means they have the power to justify their power plays. And they’re always on the lookout for ways to get more power, by any means they can devise. So, there we go, my own personal take on the old RPG meme. Is this useful, probably not. Was it fun to write? Hell yeah! And being of Principled Selfish nature, that’s all that matters to me :P

#TLATopHat #DnD #D&D #dungeons and dragons #dungeons & dragons

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bluewatsons · 7 years

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James Duesterberg, Final Fantasy, The Point Magazine (2017)

Neoreactionary politics and the liberal imagination

Like every virtual world, there is something seductive about the online realm of the new reactionary politics. Wading in, one finds oneself quickly immersed, and soon unmoored. All of the values that have guided the center-left, postwar consensus—the equal dignity of every individual, the guiding role of knowledge, government’s positive role in shaping civil society, a general sense that we’re moving towards a better world—are inverted. The moral landmarks by which we were accustomed to get our bearings aren’t gone: they’re on fire.

Trying to regain their footing, the mainstays of consensus thought have focused on domesticating the threat. Who are these Tea Partiers and internet recluses, these paleoconservatives and tech futurists, and what could they possibly want? The Atlantic mapped the coordinates of the “rebranded” white nationalism or the “internet’s anti-democracy movement” in the previously uncharted waters of 4chan and meme culture. In Strangers in Their Own Land, Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild peers over the “empathy wall” between her and her rural Louisiana Tea Party contacts, while in Hillbilly Elegy, Ohio-born lawyer J. D. Vance casts a melancholic look back—from the other side of the aisle, but, tellingly, from the same side of the wall—on the Appalachian culture he left behind for Yale Law and a career in Silicon Valley.

These efforts follow a line of center-left thought that begins with Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? Its guiding assumption is that those who balk at its vision are fundamentally mistaken: victims of an unfortunate illusion, perpetuated by big businesses or small prejudices, lack of education or surplus of religion. But now the balance of power has shifted, radically. And as reactionary ideology has grown—seemingly overnight—from a vague and diffuse resistance to a concerted political force, the veneer of objective interest and pastoral concern has started to crack.

“Darkness is good,” proclaimed Steve Bannon, the self-styled architect of Trumpism, to the Hollywood Reporter. “Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power.” This is the face the new reactionary politics presents to the technocratic elite: mysterious, evil and dangerously potent. It promises that some other way of doing things is possible. Since the election, the media, too, seem to be lured by it. As this alien force approaches, concern shades into fear, and fear starts to mix with attraction. Like Mulder in The X-Files, we find comfort in imagining some other power out there, even if it means us ill.[1] The shame of seeing one’s own impotence laid bare can also feel like a relief: unshouldering the burden of Universal Progress, we make room for a secret desire to flourish.

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The political imagination of the last thirty years has largely been shaped by the paradoxical belief that, as Margaret Thatcher put it, “there is no alternative”: that beliefs themselves are powerless to change the world. Life in the post-industrial West would be the happy end of history, and thus of ideologies, a calm and dreamless state. But the world into which we have settled has begun to feel cramped, and its inhabitants are increasingly restless. It is no longer possible to deny that there is a dream here, and it’s starting to seem like a bad one.

Since 1979 the divide between rich and poor has widened, while real wages for the non-managerial work that most people do have fallen and economic mobility has decreased. “Think different,” Apple urged in the Nineties: words of wisdom, to be sure, for the new economy, although the rewards seem to concentrate in the same place. Apple is 325 times bigger than it was in 1997; the average real wage for college graduates hasn’t increased at all. Like postmodern theory, Apple’s slogan makes “difference” into an opaque object of worship, a monolith or a space-gray smartphone: something intelligent but not quite human. “Think different,” not differently: the point is not to change your mind but to contemplate something else. Meanwhile, as the Silicon Valley tech giants grow ever more “different,” we sit around thinking about it in the academy, and living it on our phones. Tech executive or Uber driver, we find ourselves stuck in what Hito Steyerl calls “junktime,” an empty expectancy, somewhere between work and play and going nowhere.

It is in this context that the new reactionary politics have generated such a strange mixture of excitement and fear. The alt right seems really to want something. And within this nebulous (and mostly virtual) world, a group of writers who call themselves neoreactionaries offer the most concrete and detailed map of an “exit” from the status quo. Amid the diffuse politics and intractable ironism of the alt right, neoreaction promises a coherent ideology, a philosophical backbone and a political program directly opposed to what we have: they call it a “Dark Enlightenment.” If these thinkers are especially disturbing to read it is because, unlike the meme warriors of 4chan and Twitter, they seem to have reasons for the nasty things they say.

As a rule the alt right is scattered, anonymous and obscure—thriving, as the curious metaphor has it, in the “dark corners of the internet.” By contrast, neoreaction is centralized and public: darkness enlightened. It revolves around two well-known figures. The first is Curtis Yarvin, a software engineer who made money in the first internet boom developing an early protocol for mobile browsers. His current startup Urbit—backed by Peter Thiel— is a platform promising to “reboot” the internet by privatizing the virtual real estate where cloud computing takes place. Since 2007, his other big project has been his blog, where, under the name Mencius Moldbug, he has written millions of words of revisionist history, pessimistic philosophizing, racist fearmongering and intellectual parlor games. His writing constitutes the canon of neoreaction, and it has found readers from Steve Bannon to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the finance expert known for predicting the 2008 crash, to New York Times editorialist Ross Douthat. While alt-righters trade memes about campus snowflakes, Moldbug one-ups the enemy soldiers of Enlightenment, drawing on David Hume, Thomas Carlyle and the obscure nineteenth-century English historian James Froude to prove that slavery is natural and monarchy is the only stable form of government.

Less prolific, but more charismatic, Nick Land is neoreaction’s guru. An academic philosopher turned gonzo theorist, Land baptized the emerging movement the “Dark Enlightenment” in a 2013 commentary on Moldbug’s writing. In the Nineties Land taught in the philosophy department at Warwick University, where his Deleuzian “schizoanalysis” of the postmodern world formed the basis of a group called the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru). The Ccru became a hub for radical thought about the intersection of technology, capitalism and desire. Out of it came a new school of philosophy (speculative realism), Turner Prize-nominated artists (Jake and Dinos Chapman), a hugely influential electronic music label (Hyperdub) and one of the dominant strains of Marxian political theory (accelerationism). For Land it catalyzed an eventual break—from sanity (too many amphetamines, he admits) and from the strictures of academic philosophy. Since the early 2000s he has been living in Shanghai, where he turned to blogging, and to the defense and encouragement of an unbridled techno-capitalism.

Land’s techno-Darwinist account of race (“hyper-racism,” he calls it) is strange to read next to his early academic work, in which he called for “feminist violence” against the racist patriarchy “without limit.” A YouTube search for Yarvin produces equally jarring results. Ponytailed and painfully self-conscious, he reads his poetry on nineties Berkeley public-access TV (“this is, um, dedicated to my mother”). One click away is Yarvin at a 2012 TED-inspired “unconference,” baby-faced and affectless, asking his audience to “get over [their] dictator phobia.”

Yarvin and Land continue to thrive in the liberal milieu into which they were born. “I live in San Francisco,” Yarvin brags, “I grew up as a Foreign Service brat, I went to Brown, I’ve been brushing my teeth with Tom’s of Maine since the mid-Eighties.” Both can be considered architects of the emerging tech- and knowledge-based economy; they are the “autistic nerds” that, Land says, “alone are capable of participating effectively” in the emerging economic system. But even they do not feel at home in this world they have helped to build. If the new anti-liberal politics runs on ressentiment, as commentators on both the left and right have suggested, the nerds of neoreaction channel this sense of betrayal at the heart of the American liberal project into an either/or Boolean clarity. Their passion rivals that of their avowed enemy, the “social justice warrior.” And what they believe is, quite simply, that everything about the modern world is a lie.

Western democracy, Mencius Moldbug tells us, is an “Orwellian system,” which means that its governments are “existentially dependent on systematic public deception.” Nominally, a democracy like the U.S. is founded on the separation of church and state, and more fundamentally, of government policy and civil society. With a state church, government power shapes what citizens think, which means citizens can no longer shape government policy. Rather than expressing or even guiding the will of the people, the state aims only to increase its own power by producing the people it needs. But a state church, according to neoreaction, is what we have: Moldbug calls it “the Cathedral,” and exposing it, critiquing it and trying to destroy it is neoreaction’s avowed goal. The Cathedral, like the Matrix in the 1999 film (a favorite reference point for neoreaction), is everywhere; it infects every experience, shapes all aspects of our waking lives. Its main centers of power are the university, the mainstream media and the culture industry.

Want to earn enough money to support your family? You’ll need a college degree, so you’d better learn how to write a paper on epistemic violence for your required Grievance Studies 101 class. Want to keep your job? You’d better brush up on climate-change talking points, so you can shift into regulatory compliance, the only growth industry left. Want to relax with your friends after work? It’s probably easiest if you like movies about gay people, pop music that celebrates infidelity and drug use, and books about non-Christian boy wizards. Want to communicate with other people? Better figure out how to use emoticons. Which race of smiley face do you use when your employer texts you on the weekend?

And so on. Living in the Cathedral, we may not notice this web of norms, mores and social rituals as such; it is simply the texture of our daily lives. But neoreaction is keen to point out that this constitutes a distinct vision, a way of life: they call it “universalism” or “progressivism.” Neoreactionary writing—and the whole culture of “SJW fail” videos and 4chan humor about political correctness that goes along with it—is directed to getting us to notice it, and to ask why we live like this. The idea is that once we start asking these questions, we will start to see things very differently.

But progressivism doesn’t just coerce people into seeing the world in a certain way; according to neoreaction, it also exacerbates the very problems it claims to correct. The Cathedral amounts to a massive system of what economists call “perverse incentives,” or in Land’s words, an “automatic cultural mechanism that advocates for dysfunction.” Yarvin’s excruciating “Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations”—11 parts, 100,000 words—essentially boils down to this claim:

The intended effect of the policy is to inflict some good or other on America, the rest of the world, or both. The actual effect of the policy is to make the problem which requires the policy worse, the apparatus which formulates and applies the policy larger and more important, etc., etc. … The consequence [is] a new system of government by deception—the Modern Structure.

On one level this is just econo-theism: every direct attempt by government to fix a problem, to play God, interferes with the unknowable logic of the all-powerful market, resulting in just the problems it aimed to fix. Imagine yourself above the market, and you will feel its wrath. But there’s a more savage bite to neoreaction. Why, the neoreactionaries ask, do we make this error in the first place? Or: why are we required to believe in political correctness, rather than simply being forced to accept progressive policy as the rules of the game for our time? And why, after all, are liberals so threatened by dissent?

The neoreactionary answer is that the goal of the policy is not to fix the problem. Progressivism is not self-defeating but massively successful (a mantra of Yarvin’s: “America is a communist country”). The dominant, liberal-contractarian understanding of democracy descended from Locke is that it is a crowdsourcing technique for the rational administration of common resources, a “free market” for political opinions. But the recent history of democracy offers scant evidence of its efficiency. It is enough, the neoreactionaries point out, to look at authoritarian zones like Shanghai, Singapore and Dubai, which combine high growth, significant personal “liberty” and almost zero political participation to see just how unnecessary democracy is—or has become—if the goal is simply capital growth. The neoreactionary account of democracy emphasizes something that its partisans, at least of the (neo-) “liberal” variety, do not: the ultimate justification for democratic politics is not good administration—the ordering of resources toward a particular goal—but rather, simply, more politics.

It is not an accident, then, that the keywords of progressivism, according to Yarvin—“humanity, progress, equality, democracy, justice, environment, community, peace, etc.”—are difficult to define; really they are “philosophical mysteries … best compared to Plotinian, Talmudic, or Scholastic nonsense.” Democracy is like the divine revels of the monk or the mystic, enjoyed publicly; its guiding concepts do not accomplish worldly goals but rather “absorb arbitrary mental energy without producing any rational thought.” In the neoreactionary view, democracy amounts to a belief in belief: it imagines that the world itself is a product of the collective imagination, something that we aim to realize and that, without our investment in it, ceases to exist. As the Cathedral becomes more and more powerful, it remakes the world in its image; beliefs start to matter, to give shape to our experiences. In such a world, as Land puts it, “nothing except politics remains.” (A sixties version: “the personal is political.”)

The neoreactionary looks upon this world incredulously, as an increasingly strange and disturbing spectacle, careening toward disaster. Democracy is “not merely doomed,” Land writes, “it is doom itself.” As the actors seal their fate in this tragedy by their very attempts to avert it, only one option remains: get out. But if the problem with this world is that it is a collective fantasy, what could they be imagining in its place?

There is a famous scene in The Matrix, near the beginning of the film. “Neo,” played by Keanu Reeves, is a corporate programmer by day and a renegade hacker at night. Something about his world feels wrong; it is a world compressed between grays and greens, and the pallid daylight in nondescript Mega City, USA blends uncannily into the neon glow of the MS-DOS underworld he haunts after hours. Cryptic messages referring to “the Matrix” have been appearing on Neo’s computer; increasingly curious and unsettled, he follows a trail of mysterious symbols and characters, and eventually finds himself alone in a room with a man named Morpheus. This legendary hacker, whose name recalls the Greek god of dreams, promises to reveal the secret, to explain to Neo what it is that’s been bugging him:

Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain—but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life: that there’s something wrong in the world.

This is the Matrix. The Matrix, Morpheus explains, “is everywhere. It is all around us. … It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” Neo has been on a quest to find out what the Matrix is, but it turns out that it was right there, all around him: indeed, it’s the only thing he knew. What he didn’t know is that it was fake. The Matrix is a computer simulation, an illusion—but an illusion so pervasive, so powerful, that it literally constitutes “the world.” Everything that Neo experiences is not just unreal but blocking reality: a world that “blinds him from the truth.” Morpheus offers Neo a choice: blue pill or red pill. If he takes the blue pill, he will return to his dull and easy life; this worldly prison will be a home again. But after the red pill, there’s no going back. Neo takes it, and he is ejected into the “real world”: naked, cold, alone and for the first time in his life, “awake.”

This is how neoreaction describes the Dark Enlightenment. The Cathedral, like the Matrix, is an illusion, a system of mass deception; at the same time, it shapes every aspect of our lives, constituting our world. Neoreactionary writing is “the red pill,” the “genuine article,” as Yarvin puts it. To read it is to see the Matrix from the other side: the “redpilled” neoreactionary, like the “woke” leftist, has escaped from a dream. Instead of the Cathedral’s comforting bromides, with the red pill you get something brutal, painful, unquestionably real: it has a “sodium core” and it “will sear your throat.”

But there’s a pleasure in this pain. Like the religious ascetic turning himself toward the joys of the next world by mortifying his flesh in this one, the neoreactionary’s painful process of “disillusion” offers its own satisfactions. Yarvin’s “Unqualified Reservations” promises to be “an ultimate ascent. Out of the Computer’s infinite fluorescent maze. Into the glorious air of pure, unfiltered reason,” but his writing lingers stubbornly in the “black, unthinkable madness” that proceeds it, describing in loving detail the Cathedral’s massive apparatus of deception. Part 9a of the “Gentle Introduction,” over eighty thousand words in, finds us still savoring “the true red-hot pill of sodium metal—now igniting in your duodenum. Smile grimly! You have almost passed through the flame.”

The Matrix trilogy has been a massive cultural and economic force. It made $1.6 billion at the box office, shaped how we saw the emerging internet-mediated world, and generated a passionate and vibrant fan culture, of which neoreaction is certainly a part. After its release, a flood of books with titles like The Matrix and Philosophy appeared; a decade later, neoreaction is trying to be something like “The Matrix and Politics.” The appeal is primal: like Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” which imagines the ordinary condition of human life—life, that is, without philosophy—as that of men who sit in darkness, chained together and enthralled by a shadow-play projected on the wall in front of them, The Matrix is a fiction that promises to lead us to reality, life unleashed from all arbitrary, social confines. The exquisite tortures of the red pill are supposed to lead us to a better world; with the right political theory, politics can finally fulfill its promise and get rid of itself. “We can hope to escape from history,” Yarvin argues, by coming to “understand how completely we’re still inside it.”

But this escape route from history, or fantasy, leads in a loop. Neoreaction borrows its “realist” politics from a fictional film, and sustains it through a thriving online subculture, sparking with arcane references and “meme magic.” What’s fascinating is that people love the movie. The “autistic nerds” and failsons, sitting in their man caves or their parents’ basements, dream of a world realer than their own: primal and gooey-thick, the real depth behind the flat image. But it is Neo who wakes up into this world; and Neo exists in our imagination, his image on our screens. If we wonder at the rise of the alt right—at the fact that the ideology most capable of galvanizing political passions is the one that promises to overcome politics once and for all—we should notice that their fantasies in fact look a lot like our reality. Man caves exist, and they shape our world; the neoreactionary is not the only one who lives in their shadows.

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Neoreactionaries have another name for the Cathedral, which they take from the work of the early twentieth-century American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s synthesis of scientific detachment and occult mysticism reached an apex in the figure of the sublime, otherworldly sea creature “Cthulhu.” For neoreactionaries Cthulhu is a totemic image of the world they hate. The Matrix is from the future, an artifice laid on top of reality, a veil “pulled over your eyes”; Cthulhu is primitive, monstrous and natural, lurking deep, behind, below. “Cthulhu always swims left,” as Yarvin puts it in one of his most quoted koans. The mystery is in how he moves.

A sea monster—winged, tentacled, humanoid—he is unknown to men of science. He first appears in the strangely synchronized dreams, recounted to the narrator of Lovecraft’s tale, of “artists and poets”; further research reveals that others may have more intimate knowledge of his existence. While the artists and poets dream, “voodoo orgies multiply” in Haiti, “African outposts report ominous mutterings” and policemen in New York are “mobbed by hysterical Levantines.” Finally, the narrator, a reclusive New England professor, discovers the existence of an ancient cult, dispersed across the globe and yet strangely united in their reverence for this monstrous creature.

The connection is not, exactly, in the object of their worship: after all, Cthulhu himself is forever shrouded in darkness. It is something in the worshippers themselves. “Degenerate Esquimaux,” “half-castes” in “African outposts,” “hysterical Levantines” in New York: as Lovecraft details repeatedly, it is a “dark cult,” the men are “low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant,” the sites of worship in a region “of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men.”

Lovecraft was a timid New England recluse who concealed his abject poverty with a veneer of Mayflower-descended gentility. In 1924 he moved from Providence to New York City, and his encounters with urban life transformed him. Vivid letters detail the “Italo-Semitico-Mongoloid” creatures that confronted him on the Lower East Side:

The organic things … inhabiting that awful cesspool could not by any stretch of the imagination be call’d human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal; vaguely moulded from some stinking viscous slime of the earth’s corruption, and slithering and oozing in and on the filthy streets or in and out of windows and doorways in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities. … From that nightmare of perverse infection I could not carry away the memory of any living face. The individually grotesque was lost in the collectively devastating.

A strange and unknowable power lurks in these dark masses; their messy organicism dissolves clear distinctions, revealing some deeper, more primitive, “collective” thing. Lovecraft was thrown into a frenzy. “The New York Mongoloid problem,” he wrote to Frank Belknap Long, “is beyond calm mention.” “The Call of Cthulhu” was published four years later. The “deep-sea unnamabilities” now had a name, and other writers in his New York coterie (among them Belknap Long) began to build what is now a rich and diverse Cthulhu mythology.

Though neoreaction, unlike much of the alt right, does not identify with white nationalism as a platform—anyone, technically, can live in the authoritarian city-states they imagine—the figure of dark and threatening masses plays a similarly charged role in their writing. Yarvin makes constant, specious use of historical crime statistics, and he describes the “old cities of North America” as “overrun and rendered largely uninhabitable by murderous racist gangs” (he’s not talking about police); white flight, for him, is a form of “ethnic cleansing” inflicted on whites by non-whites. In sum: liberal democracy is Cthulhu, a creature so monstrous he cannot be known firsthand. In the frenzied pleasures of his worshippers, though, he makes his presence felt.

The French writer Michel Houellebecq explains Lovecraft’s deep racial animus as ressentiment; Lovecraft, he suggests, “knows full well that he has no place in any kind of heroic Valhalla of battles and conquests; unless, as usual, the place of the vanquished.” His anemic, professorial heroes are “stripped of all life, renouncing all human joy, becoming pure intellects, pure spirits tending to only one goal: the search for knowledge.” The only thing left for them in this world is the meticulous cataloguing of their own obsolescence. Yarvin begins many descriptions of the Cathedral with sentences like this: “Suppose you are an alien…” In this act of imagination, the neoreactionary seeks to dissolve his human form, to become a pure thinker like one of Lovecraft’s heroes—or, for that matter, like an Anglo-American philosopher.[2] Supposing himself an alien, he aspires to a voice at once purely objective and totally ironic, infinitely exacting and light-years away. “The Western civilization show has been discontinued,” Nick Land wrote in “Circuitries,” from 1992. In his last philosophy classes, he would teach class lying on the floor, referring to himself as the collective entity “Cur” and monologuing nonsense intercut with lines from the poetry of Artaud. Around 2000, Land suffered a schizophrenic break; this was the end of his academic career, and the beginning of his life as a political guru.

Writing on the Alternative Right blog, Land eschews backwoods “ordinary racism” for a futuristic “hyper-racism,” according to which accelerating technological progress will create intense and highly specific evolutionary pressure: for example, the traits needed by Mars colonists, or the reproductive success afforded to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. The result will be not just eugenics, but “neo-speciation” on a fantastic scale. You get to become the something else that ordinary human “races” prefigure—or to use another phrase of Land’s, “think face tentacles.”

The neoreactionary imagines his back turned, as others warm themselves by this strange fire, call it the cult of Cthulhu or the cult of progress, Enlightenment. “Coldness be my God,” proclaims Land’s Twitter bio. But ultimately the fantasy is to get sucked up into this omnipotent, alien force, whether it’s an artificial intelligence or a dark and primitive other. Networked computers or slimy masses, the advent of the Matrix or the return of Cthulhu: the neoreactionary looks for signs of the arrival of this strange entity, either the origin or the destiny of man, and either way his end. In the meantime, the neoreactionary waits, listening for the call. By describing it, he hopes to slip away without having to respond. When Cthulhu came, Lovecraft wrote,

The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

●

Life in the Cathedral is nasty and brutal, a nightmare: this is the picture neoreaction paints. What they want, though, is not exactly to destroy it. They want rather to get outside of it, in order to, as Morpheus promises Neo, “know what it is.” In the end the problem with the Cathedral is not that it’s bad, but that it’s dishonest. So what would honesty look like?

Basically, the internet. If a state church exists in the U.S. present, “Google” is probably a better shorthand for it than “progressivism.” The only real problem, according to neoreaction, is that we haven’t made this explicit: that we don’t yet know that our lives are lived inside an Internet of Things.

Yarvin and his friends are one step ahead of the progressive policy nerds: while the beltway wonks look to Silicon Valley for innovative techniques for “disrupting” social problems, Yarvin the entrepreneur-theorist wants to cut out the middleman and “reboot” the state himself. He has a simple plan: dissolve the U.S. government and replace it with a “gov-corp.” Retire all government employees (“R.A.G.E.”), “draft ten thousand Googlers,” and perhaps—as Justine Tunney, former Occupy Wall Street leader, current Google engineer and vocal advocate for neoreaction, proposed on a Whitehouse.gov petition—“hire [then-CEO of Google] Eric Schmidt as the CEO of America.” Or better, break the country up into smaller city-states: maybe a red and a blue America, an Apple America and a Ford one. Right now the U.S. is the “Microsoft of nations”—much too bloated. Smaller, affinity-based states will be leaner and more efficient. What you choose is up to you; “if you like your country, you can keep it,” as Balaji S. Srinivasan promised in a talk (“Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit”) at Y Combinator’s Startup School.

We thought the Cathedral was about politics, but actually it’s economics; we thought we were choosing, but in fact we are merely pawns. Freedom for the neoreactionary then means simply knowing that you are “a slave.” While the cyberpunk reference points for neoreaction (The Matrix, Blade Runner, Neuromancer) are usually called dystopian, neoreaction amounts to the wager that if you could figure out how to actually live in these fantasy worlds, they would be good. Since they’re imaginary, you can do whatever you want, like Neo—stopping bullets, flying around—when he figures out that the rules of the Matrix are “no different than the rules of a computer system.” In other words, absolute; but once you know how they work, infinitely hackable. The Matrix is about getting out, but all the cool shit happens inside (“I know Kung Fu”).[3]

The goal of neoreaction is to harness the power of the state church by getting rid of the fantasy that it is an expression of popular will, that we want it. Seeing the collective imaginary as an autonomous, alien force—call it technology or capital, ideology or world-spirit—rather than a form of human life (i.e. politics) paradoxically frees us to embrace it. In Silicon Valley they call this force “the Singularity.” Those who believe in it predict that computers will soon learn how to improve themselves, resulting in a “liftoff” moment in which technology becomes autonomous and self-sustaining, rapidly freeing itself from the biological limitations of its human creators.[4] In The Singularity Is Near, futurist prophet Ray Kurzweil, who is also the director of engineering at Google, writes that by allowing us to “transcend [the] limitations of our biological bodies and brains,” the Singularity (always capitalized) will erase the distinction “between human and machines or between physical and virtual reality.” He pictures this as the moment in which humans finally get “power over our fate,” but it could also be described as the moment when we finally submit to it. The idea of the Singularity implies that technology is not just humanity’s essence, but ultimately a force that transcends it.

In Silicon Valley, the Singularitarian hears the rumblings of this primitive, chthonic power as it prepares to shrug off its merely human form; by acknowledging this force’s absolute supremacy, he hopes ultimately to upload himself into the cloud, to become part of it and live forever. “We have come to the end of the series,” Land wrote in an early essay, still published as academic philosophy. “Can what’s playing you make it to the next level?”

●

Trump’s election, in which the alt right’s ideological warfare certainly played a part, is not the end of this story. Bannon, for one, described him as a “blunt instrument for us” who may not, himself, “get it.” But the imaginative investment in Trump, however temporary, reveals something important about politics in the present. If he can be, as posters on 4chan put it, “memed into existence,” then perhaps miracles can happen; a route out of the omnipresent Cathedral starts to seem mappable.

At the Conservative Political Action Conference last February, Reince Priebus, flanked by Steve Bannon, described his excitement: “We love being here,” even though “we actually hate politics … What we were starving for was somebody real, somebody genuine, somebody who was actually who he said he was.” It’s not so ironic that Trump played this redemptive role for Priebus: though insincere, Trump is in a sense “authentic,” a word which (not just for the right) has become almost an antonym for “politician.” Trump is nothing if not an exemplary product of the system the neoreactionaries want to tear down. But this is his virtue. His brand of politics is “pure” in that it does not pretend to aim at anything other than increasing its own power. Like Neo, so crushingly ordinary in his day job—or Keanu Reeves, so fantastically vacant in his acting—Trump serves as a pure vessel for something else.

We cannot explain away the strangeness of the current moment in U.S. politics. But we should not turn away from the even deeper strangeness it reveals. From Puritan fantasies of an American apocalypse to the Manson Family’s hippie inferno, American culture has always been obsessed with the thought that its utopian visions might flower into something rotten. The American dream is of a waking life likea dream, a definite world with no limits; it is the dream of a society bound together by individuals’ pursuit of just whatever they want. It’s a dream that slides easily into a nightmare, of a world that, without any limits, careens straight into the abyss. The Puritan patriarchs ruminated endlessly, in their private journals, about the unprecedented corruption into which their new world had fallen. In the virtual world of the neoreactionaries, our modern priestly class of professors and technologists make these apocalyptic fantasies public.

The fear of political life—of the uncertainty that comes with wanting and doing things with others—has long been a driving force in modern democratic politics. The fantasy worlds of reactionary thought present themselves as an absolute break with the postwar liberal consensus, even with “politics” as such; they are not that, but they are not just illusions, either. In the end, the dream of an “exit” from the contingency and unpredictability of worldly life is still a human one. Against its own claim that “there is no alternative,” neoreaction’s fantasy of an “exit” from history gives evidence, as brutal and real as it imagines, of the political life that we are destined to share.

Footnotes

Since 2001, U.F.O. sightings in the United States have tripled.↵

Imagining yourself an alien observer is a classic trope in analytic philosophy, a thought exercise bootstrapping up to the “view from nowhere.” But the academic left, too, has its Cthulhu dreams. In 1985, Donna Haraway inaugurated the field of posthuman studies with her “Cyborg Manifesto,” a frequently cited text in the humanities and cornerstone of the postmodern left. Her most recent book, Staying with the Trouble, looks in a different direction. Recalling us to our biological roots, she enjoins us to see ourselves as “means and not just ends,” and to try to reduce the human population from a projected 11 billion at the end of the century to “two or three.” “We are compost,” she says now, “not posthuman.” Rather than the currently popular “anthropocene,” she suggests we should see ourselves in the “Cthulucene.”↵

Note that neoreaction’s examples of good governance—Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore—are also where cyberpunk imagines its vaguely Asian futures.↵

In the mid-Nineties, Land described technology as an “invasion from the future”; perhaps now he sees himself as a kind of Terminator, sent back in time by Skynet to destroy in advance the human resistance and clear the way for “Judgment Day.” Yarvin, for his part, got his start in the early Aughts as a prolific commenter on “Overcoming Bias” (later LessWrong), a site run by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and who devotes his life to figuring out how to make artificial intelligence “friendly.” Discussion on the site collapsed in 2010, when user Roko posted a decidedly unfriendly thought experiment: Imagine a future AI that punishes those who had impeded its development. If people had known about this future, malevolent AI, they would have had a strong incentive to assist it. But now you (or rather, the rest of us) have a problem: your own thought experiment has created the threat against which you must try to protect yourself, further increasing the threat…↵

#politics #modernity #anthropocene #the way we live now #neoreactionism #postmodernism

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“Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai?”: Bollywood's Scandalous Question, and The Hardest-Working Scene in Movies by Genevieve Valentine

In a nightclub with the mood lighting of a surgical theater, a village belle is crying out for a husband. Her friend Champa encourages and chastises her by turns; her male audience is invited to be the bells on her anklets. (She promises, with a flare of derision, that serving her will make him a king.) Her costume, the color of a three-alarm fire, sparkles as she holds center screen. The song and camerawork builds to a frenzy as if unable to contain her energy; the dance floor’s nearly chaos by the time she ducks out—she alone has been holding the last eight minutes together. And the hardened criminal in the audience follows, determined not to let her get away.

Subhash Ghai’s 1993 blockbuster Khalnayak is a “masala film,” mingling genre elements with Shakespearean glee and a healthy sense of the surreal. By turns it’s a crime story, a separated-in-youth drama, a Gothic romance with a troubled antihero, a family tragedy, a Western with a good sheriff fighting for the rule of law, and a melodrama in which every revelation’s accompanied by thunder and several close-ups in quick succession. (There’s also a bumbling police officer, in case you felt something was lacking.) It was a box-office smash. But the reason it’s a legend is “Choli Ke Peeche Kya Hai?”—“What's Behind That Blouse?”— an iconic number that’s one of the hardest-working scenes in cinema.

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See, Ganga (Madhuri Dixit) isn’t really a dancer for hire. She’s a cop gone undercover to snag criminal mastermind Ballu (Sanjay Dutt), who’s recently escaped from prison and humiliated her boyfriend, policeman Ram (Jackie Shroff). Ballu, undercover to avoid detection, is trying to avoid trouble on the way to Singapore...but of course, everything changes after Ganga.

Though the scene shows its age—the self-conscious black-bar blocking, the less-than-precise background dancers—it’s an impressive achievement. Firstly, it’s a starmaker: the screen presence of Madhuri Dixit seems hard to overstate. By 1993 she was already a marquee name, and she would dominate Bollywood box office for a decade after, both as a vivid actress and as a dancer whose quality of movement was without peer. But if you’d never seen a frame of Bollywood you’d still recognize her mountain-climb in this number—playing the cop who disdains Ballu playing the dancer trying to court him, performing by turns for the room and to the camera, conveying flirty sexuality without tipping into self-parody, and all on the move for kinetic camera shots ten to fifteen seconds at a time. Dixit’s effortless magnetism holds it fast; the camera loves what it loves.

But this is more than just a career-making dance break; “Choli Ke Peeche” is the film’s cinematic and thematic centerpiece. Khalnayak is about performativeness. Ballu performs villainy (sometimes literally) in the hopes it will fulfill him; Ram vocally asserts the role of virtuous cop to define himself against those he prosecutes. As Ballu performs good deeds—saving a village from thugs, ditching his bad-guy cape for sublimely 1993 blazers—his conscience grows back by degrees. As Ganga performs a moral compass for Ballu, her heart begins to soften. And at intervals, crowds deliver praise or censure, reminding us that all the world’s a stage. (It’s in the smallest details: While on the run, Ballu’s ready to kill a constable until it turns out he’s an extra in the movie shooting down the street.)

And nowhere in cinema is the fourth wall more permeable than a musical number. Bollywood’s turned them into an art. Playback singers are well-known (they even have their own awards categories), a layer of meta in every performance. Diegetic dance numbers are common. Movies often halt the action entirely for an item number, as a guest actress drops by. For the length of a song, the suspension of disbelief the rest of a movie requires is on pause.

Musical numbers are a place where a movie can comment on itself, and Khalnayak takes full advantage of the remove. (In an earlier number with more traditional Hollywood framing, Dixit winks at us while singing to her beloved.) Likewise, Saroj Khan’s choreography in “Choli Ke Peeche” invites us to enjoy Ganga’s sexuality without concern about racy lyrics—or even about the villain, who dances in his chair along with the rest of us. With the camera as chaperone, it’s safe for “Ganga” to asks what else she’s meant to do but lift her skirts a bit as she walks (that skirt's expensive!), and to let her prince know she sleeps with the door open. The men around her are either part of the act, or an audience safely contained by the narrative and the frame for our benefit. (At times, her back is to her audience so she can dance for the camera; Khalnayak knows we’re watching.) “Choli Ke Peeche” is a thesis statement on the relationship between performance and audience.

It’s a moment powerful enough to cast a shadow across the rest of the film. This number, not the crimes or the cops, is what the movie returns to repeatedly; it’s too good to ignore and too subversive to solve. Not least, among the other layers of performance, is queer subtext. In Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, Gayatri Gopinath points out that “female homoerotic desire between Dixit and [Neena] Gupta is routed and made intelligible through a triangulated relation to the male hero.” Champa’s masculinized within the performance; she asks the loaded title question, addresses our heroine’s male savior, and discusses him with Ganga. It’s a significant connection between women in a song supposedly directed at a man—which might be why Champa is the one who defends Ganga’s reputation by explaining the dance-hall sting, and reminding the audience it was all for show.

But that’s not going to stop “Choli Ke Peeche.” At the end of the second act, Ballu blows Ganga’s cover. (He’s known she’s a cop since their backstage meeting—another layer of performance). To prove they mean no real harm, the men don lenghas and veils and parody a chunk of the number, right down to interjectional close-ups and a wandering camera that brings kinetic energy to the static space.

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In one way this reprise tries to undercut the song’s power by making it faintly ridiculous, suggesting it isn’t really sexual—it’s camp. But if “Choli Ke Peeche” functioned as a ‘safe’ way for Ganga to express sexuality when we first saw it, it serves a parallel purpose here. Despite the mocking undertones, with this number the men are reassuring her; they understand her sexuality was itself just a performance—her purity is therefore safe with them. (We know that’s a concern here because her shawl is pulled close about her; the free-spirit act is over, and her virtue is at stake.)

But there’s also something undeniably subversive in hyper-masculine, violent figures reenacting coy expressions of feminine desire. To prevent things from getting too subversive, Ballu invades Ganga’s personal space, a reminder of his power amid the making fun. And the performance ends in the threat of violence against Ganga when she breaks the spell—the expected order of captor and captive reestablishing itself as the film falls into a formulaic last act, an attempt to wrest social order out of the exuberant chaos one musical number has wrought.

It caused some chaos offscreen, too. When the soundtrack was released ahead of the film, “Choli Ke Peeche” was deemed obscene; the song was banned on Doordarshan and All India Radio, and faced legal challenge at the Central Board of Film Certification. In “What is Behind Film Censorship? The Kahlnayak debates,” Monika Mehta writes that “the visual and verbal representation combined to produce female sexual desire. It was the articulation of this desire that was the problem—it posited that women were not only sexual objects, but also sexual subjects.” And within the number, there’s no doubt Ganga’s in control; she sends alluring glances Ballu’s way, mocks (then takes) his money, and signals he’s free to follow her if he dares. The undercover-cop framework gives these gestures the veneer of respectability, but since Ballu doesn’t know that yet, the frisson of the forbidden remains.

Letters of condemnation and support rolled in. Many claimed the song was too suggestive; an exhibitor from Paras Cinema in Rajasthan wrote in favor because “Choli Ke Peeche” was based on a folk song from the area, and “If it was vulgar then the ladies would have never liked it.” The examining committee eventually ruled in favor of letting the number remain, with some edits: one that removed the chorus entirely (which Ghai successfully appealed), and two cuts to beats considered provocative, including one of Ganga ‘pointing at her breast’ as she sings, “I can’t bear being an ascetic, so what should I do?”, unequivocally claiming sexuality without even a man as her object. No wonder it had to go.

It wasn’t the only controversy dogging the film; star Sanjay Dutt was arrested under The Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act for possible connections to the 1993 Bombay bombings, which added an uncomfortable self-awareness to Ballu’s onscreen misdeeds. Yet those controversies did Khalnayak no harm at the box office, where it broke records, and the movie’s had such nostalgic power that as of 2016, Ghai was considering a sequel.

But “Choli Ke Peeche” remains the movie’s most measurable influence. In Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies, Rosie Thomas notes that after Ganga, “distinctions between heroine and vamp began to crumble, as the item number became de rigueur for female stars,” suggesting Khalnayak was a harbinger of less rigid strictures for Bollywood’s leading ladies. Another legacy of Khalnayak: more numbers feature women—with a man as the absent locus of their affections—dancing with each other instead, forming their own narrative connections and opening the opportunity for queer readings. (One of the most famous, “Dola Re Dola” from 2002’s Devdas, features Dixit again, alongside costar Aishwarya Rai.)

The pressure of so much cultural influence and metatextual weight might have turned a lesser scene into a relic, a stuttery car chase from a silent movie that starts a montage of the ways the camera has developed. It’s a testament to “Choli Ke Peeche” that it absorbs the weight of the years as gracefully as it does. If you want a watershed moment for sexual agency in Bollywood, you have it. If you want a starmaker with dancing that’s influenced choreography and direction for twenty years since, it’s happy to help. If you want a scene that dissects the idea of performance as subversive act, the offscreen vulgarity scandal only adds to your case. And if you want a musical number that reminds you what cinema can do, “Choli Ke Peeche” is as vibrant, campy, and complex as ever.

#bollywood #choli ke peeche #khalnayak #sanjay dutt #subhash ghai #masala film #all india radio #oscilloscope laboratories #musings #indian cinema #cinema of india #ganga #devdas #aishwarya rai #madhuri dixit #doordashan

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