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howwelldoyouknowyourmoon · 3 years

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A History Of God – The 4,000-year quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

“I say that religion isn’t about believing things. It’s ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.” — Karen Armstrong on Powells.com

book by Karen Armstrong (2004)

The idea of a single divine being – God, Yahweh, Allah – has existed for over 4,000 years. But the history of God is also the history of human struggle. While Judaism, Islam and Christianity proclaim the goodness of God, organised religion has too often been the catalyst for violence and ineradicable prejudice. In this fascinating, extensive and original account of the evolution of belief, Karen Armstrong examines Western society’s unerring fidelity to this idea of One God and the many conflicting convictions it engenders. A controversial, extraordinary story of worship and war, A History of God confronts the most fundamental fact – or fiction – of our lives.

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Review: Armstrong, a British journalist and former nun, guides us along one of the most elusive and fascinating quests of all time – the search for God. Like all beloved historians, Armstrong entertains us with deft storytelling, astounding research, and makes us feel a greater appreciation for the present because we better understand our past. Be warned: A History of God is not a tidy linear history. Rather, we learn that the definition of God is constantly being repeated, altered, discarded, and resurrected through the ages, responding to its followers’ practical concerns rather than to mystical mandates. Armstrong also shows us how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have overlapped and influenced one another, gently challenging the secularist history of each of these religions. – Gail Hudson

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The Introduction to A History of God:

As a child, I had a number of strong religious beliefs but little faith in God. There is a distinction between belief in a set of propositions and a faith which enables us to put our trust in them. I believed implicitly in the existence of God; I also believed in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the efficacy of the sacraments, the prospect of eternal damnation and the objective reality of Purgatory. I cannot say, however, that my belief in these religious opinions about the nature of ultimate reality gave me much confidence that life here on earth was good or beneficent. The Roman Catholicism of my childhood was a rather frightening creed. James Joyce got it right in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: I listened to my share of hell-fire sermons. In fact Hell seemed a more potent reality than God, because it was something that I could grasp imaginatively. God, on the other hand, was a somewhat shadowy figure, defined in intellectual abstractions rather than images. When I was about eight years old, I had to memorise this catechism answer to the question, ‘What is God?’: ‘God is the Supreme Spirit, Who alone exists of Himself and is infinite in all perfections.’ Not surprisingly, it meant little to me and I am bound to say that it still leaves me cold. It has always seemed a singularly arid, pompous and arrogant definition. Since writing this book, however, I have come to believe that it is also incorrect.

As I grew up, I realised that there was more to religion than fear. I read the lives of the saints, the metaphysical poets, T. S. Eliot and some of the simpler writings of the mystics. I began to be moved by the beauty of the liturgy and, though God remained distant, I felt that it was possible to break through to him and that the vision would transfigure the whole of created reality. To do this I entered a religious order and, as a novice and a young nun, I learned a good deal more about the faith. I applied myself to apologetics, scripture, theology and church history. I delved into the history of the monastic life and embarked on a minute discussion of the Rule of my own order, which we had to learn by heart. Strangely enough, God figured very little in any of this. Attention seemed focused on secondary details and the more peripheral aspects of religion. I wrestled with myself in prayer, trying to force my mind to encounter God but he remained a stern taskmaster, who observed my every infringement of the Rule, or tantalisingly absent. The more I read about the raptures of the saints, the more of a failure I felt. I was unhappily aware that what little religious experience I had, had somehow been manufactured by myself as I worked upon my own feelings and imagination. Sometimes a sense of devotion was an aesthetic response to the beauty of the Gregorian chant and the liturgy. But nothing had actually happened to me from a source beyond myself. I never glimpsed the God described by the prophets and mystics. Jesus Christ, about whom we talked far more than about ‘God’, seemed a purely historical figure, inextricably embedded in late antiquity. I also began to have grave doubts about some of the doctrines of the Church. How could anybody possibly know for certain that the man Jesus had been God incarnate and what did such a belief mean? Did the New Testament really teach the elaborate – and highly contradictory – doctrine of the Trinity or was this, like so many other articles of the faith, a fabrication by theologians centuries after the death of Christ in Jerusalem?

Eventually, with regret, I left the religious life and once freed of the burden of failure and inadequacy, I felt my belief in God slip quietly away. He had never really impinged upon my life, though I had done my best to enable him to do so. Now that I no longer felt so guilty and anxious about him, he became too remote to be a reality. My interest in religion continued, however, and I made a number of television programmes about the early history of Christianity and the nature of the religious experience. The more I learned about the history of religion, the more my earlier misgivings were justified. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period of time. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine. As an epileptic, I had flashes of vision that I knew to be a mere neurological defect: had the visions and raptures of the saints also been a mere mental quirk? Increasingly, God seemed an aberration, something that the human race had outgrown.

Despite my years as a nun, I do not believe that my experience of God is unusual. My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines. I had revised simplistic childhood views of Father Christmas; I had come to a more mature understanding of the complexities of the human predicament than had been possible in the kindergarten. Yet my early, confused ideas about God had not been modified or developed. People without my peculiarly religious background may also find that their notion of God was formed in infancy. Since those days, we have put away childish things and have discarded the God of our first years.

Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognisably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art. This was not simply because they wanted to propitiate powerful forces but these early faiths expressed the wonder and mystery that seems always to have been an essential component of the human experience of this beautiful yet terrifying world. Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to. Like any other human activity, religion can be abused but it seems to have been something that we have always done. It was not tacked on to a primordially secular nature by manipulative kings and priests but was natural to humanity. Indeed, our current secularism is an entirely new experiment, unprecedented in human history. We have yet to see how it will work. It is also true to say that our Western liberal humanism is not something that comes naturally to us; like an appreciation of art or poetry, it has to be cultivated. Humanism is itself a religion without God – not all religions, of course, are theistic. Our ethical secular ideal has its own disciplines of mind and heart and gives people the means of finding faith in the ultimate meaning of human life that were once provided by the more conventional religions.

When I began to research this history of the idea and experience of God in the three related monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, I expected to find that God had simply been a projection of human needs and desires. I thought that ‘he’ would mirror the fears and yearnings of society at each stage of its development. My predictions were not entirely unjustified but I have been extremely surprised by some of my findings and I wish that I had learned all this thirty years ago, when I was starting out in the religious life. It would have saved me a great deal of anxiety to hear – from eminent monotheists in all three faiths – that instead of waiting for God to descend from on high, I should deliberately create a sense of him for myself. Other Rabbis, priests and Sufis would have taken me to task for assuming that God was – in any sense – a reality ‘out there’; they would have warned me not to expect to experience him as an objective fact that could be discovered by the ordinary rational process. They would have told me that in an important sense God was a product of the creative imagination, like the poetry and music that I found so inspiring. A few highly respected monotheists would have told me quietly and firmly that God did not really exist – and yet that ‘he’ was the most important reality in the world.

This book will not be a history of the ineffable reality of God itself, which is beyond time and change, but a history of the way men and women have perceived him from Abraham to the present day. The human idea of God has a history, since it has always meant something slightly different to each group of people who have used it at various points of time. The idea of God formed in one generation by one set of human beings could be meaningless in another. Indeed, the statement: ‘I believe in God’ has no objective meaning, as such, but like any other statement it only means something in context, when proclaimed by a particular community. Consequently there is not one unchanging idea contained in the word ‘God’ but the word contains a whole spectrum of meanings, some of which are contradictory or even mutually exclusive. Had the notion of God not had this flexibility, it would not have survived to become one of the great human ideas. When one conception of God has ceased to have meaning or relevance, it has been quietly discarded and replaced by a new theology. A fundamentalist would deny this, since fundamentalism is anti-historical: it believes that Abraham, Moses and the later prophets all experienced their God in exactly the same way as people do today. Yet if we look at our three religions, it becomes clear that there is no objective view of ‘God’: each generation has to create the image of God that works for them. The same is true of atheism. The statement ‘I do not believe in God’ has always meant something slightly different at each period of history. The people who have been dubbed ‘atheists’ over the years have always been denied a particular conception of the divine. Is the ‘God’ who is rejected by atheists today, the God of the patriarchs, the God of the prophets, the God of the philosophers, the God of the mystics or the God of the eighteenth-century deists? All these deities have been venerated as the God of the Bible and the Koran by Jews, Christians and Muslims at various points of their history. We shall see that they are very different from one another. Atheism has often been a transitional state: thus Jews, Christians and Muslims were all called ‘atheists’ by their pagan contemporaries because they had adopted a revolutionary notion of divinity and transcendence. Is modern atheism a similar denial of a God’ which is no longer adequate to the problems of our time?

Despite its other-worldliness, religion is highly pragmatic. We hall see that it is far more important for a particular idea of God to work than for it to be logically or scientifically sound. As soon as it ceases to be effective it will be changed – sometimes for something radically different. This did not disturb most monotheists before our own day because they were quite clear that their ideas about God were not sacrosanct but could only be provisional. They were man-made – they could be nothing else – and quite separate from the indescribable Reality they symbolised. Some developed quite audacious ways of emphasising this essential distinction. One medieval mystic went so far as to say that this ultimate Reality – mistakenly called ‘God’ – was not even mentioned in the Bible. Throughout history, men and women have experienced a dimension of the spirit that seems to transcend the mundane world. Indeed, it is an arresting characteristic of the human mind to be able to conceive concepts that go beyond it in this way. However we choose to interpret it, this human experience of transcendence has been a fact of life. Not everybody would regard it as divine: Buddhists, as we shall see, would deny that their visions and insights are derived from a supernatural source; they see them as natural to humanity. All the major religions, however, would agree that it is impossible to describe this transcendence in normal conceptual language. Monotheists have called this transcendence ‘God’ but they have hedged this around with important provisos. Jews, for example, are forbidden to pronounce the sacred Name of God and Muslims must not attempt to depict the divine in visual imagery. The discipline is a reminder that the reality that we call ‘God’ exceeds all human expression.

This will not be a history in the usual sense, since the idea of God has not evolved from one point and progressed in a linear fashion to a final conception. Scientific notions work like that but the ideas of art and religion do not. Just as there are only a given number of themes in love poetry, so too people have kept saying the same things about God over and over again. Indeed, we shall find a striking similarity in Jewish, Christian and Muslim ideas of the divine. Even though Jews and Muslims both find the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation almost blasphemous, they have produced their own versions of these controversial theologies. Each expression of these universal themes is slightly different, however, showing the ingenuity and inventiveness of the human imagination as it struggles to express its sense of ‘God’.

Because this is such a big subject, I have deliberately confined myself to the One God worshipped by Jews, Christians and Muslims, though I have occasionally considered pagan, Hindu and Buddhist conceptions of ultimate reality to make a monotheistic point clearer. It seems that the idea of God is remarkably close to ideas in religions that developed quite independently. Whatever conclusions we reach about the reality of God, the history of this idea must tell us something important about the human mind and the nature of our aspiration. Despite the secular tenor of much Western society, the idea of God still affects the lives of millions of people. Recent surveys have shown that ninety-nine per cent of Americans say that they believe in God: the question is which ‘God’ of the many on offer do they subscribe to?

Theology often comes across as dull and abstract but the history of God has been passionate and intense. Unlike some other conceptions of the ultimate, it was originally attended by agonising struggle and stress. The prophets of Israel experienced their God as a physical pain that wrenched their every limb and filled them with rage and elation. The reality that they called God was often experienced by monotheists in a state of extremity: we shall read of mountain tops, darkness, desolation, crucifixion and terror. The Western experience of God seemed particularly traumatic. What was the reason for this inherent strain? Other monotheists spoke of light and transfiguration. They used very daring imagery to express the complexity of the reality they experienced, which went far beyond the orthodox theology. There has recently been a revived interest in mythology, which may indicate a widespread desire for a more imaginative expression of religious truth. The work of the late American scholar Joseph Campbell has become extremely popular: he has explored the perennial mythology of mankind, linking ancient myths with those still current in traditional societies, is often assumed that the three God-religions are devoid of mythology and poetic symbolism. Yet, although monotheists originally rejected the myths of their pagan neighbours, these often crept back into the faith at a later date. Mystics have seen God incarnated a woman, for example. Others reverently speak of God’s sexuality and have introduced a female element into the divine.

This brings me to a difficult point. Because this God began as a specifically male deity, monotheists have usually referred to it as ‘he’. In recent years, feminists have understandably objected to this. Since I shall be recording the thoughts and insights of people who called God ‘he’, I have used the conventional masculine terminology, except when ‘it’ has been more appropriate. Yet it is perhaps worth mentioning that the masculine tenor of God-talk is particularly problematic in English. In Hebrew, Arabic and French, however, grammatical gender gives theological discourse a sort of sexual counterpoint and dialectic, which provides a balance that is often lacking in English. Thus in Arabic al-Lah (the supreme name for God) is grammatically masculine, but the word for the divine and inscrutable essence of God – al-Dhat – is feminine.

All talk about God staggers under impossible difficulties. Yet monotheists have all been very positive about language at the same time as they have denied its capacity to express the transcendent reality. The God of Jews, Christians and Muslims is a God who – in some sense – speaks. His Word is crucial in all three faiths. The Word of God has shaped the history of our culture. We have to decide whether the word ‘God’ has any meaning for us today.

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Biography Karen Armstrong is the author of numerous other books on religious affairs –including A History of God, The Battle for God, Holy War, Islam, Buddha, and The Great Transformation – and two memoirs, Through the Narrow Gate and The Spiral Staircase. Her work has been translated into forty-five languages. She has addressed members of the U.S. Congress on three occasions; lectured to policy makers at the U.S. State Department; participated in the World Economic Forum in New York, Jordan, and Davos; addressed the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington and New York; is increasingly invited to speak in Muslim countries; and is now an ambassador for the UN Alliance of Civilizations. In February 2008 she was awarded the TED Prize and is currently working with TED on a major international project to launch and propagate a Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public and crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, to be signed in the fall of 2009 by a thousand religious and secular leaders. She lives in London.

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From Publishers Weekly This searching, profound comparative history of the three major monotheistic faiths fearlessly illuminates the sociopolitical ground in which religious ideas take root, blossom and mutate. Armstrong, a British broadcaster, commentator on religious affairs.., argues that Judaism, Christianity and Islam each developed the idea of a personal God, which has helped believers to mature as full human beings. Yet Armstrong also acknowledges that the idea of a personal God can be dangerous, encouraging us to judge, condemn and marginalize others. Recognizing this, each of the three monotheisms, in their different ways, developed a mystical tradition grounded in a realization that our human idea of God is merely a symbol of an ineffable reality. To Armstrong, modern, aggressively righteous fundamentalists of all three faiths represent “a retreat from God.” She views as inevitable a move away from the idea of a personal God who behaves like a larger version of ourselves, and welcomes the grouping of believers toward a notion of God that “works for us in the empirical age.”

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My wish: The Charter for Compassion – Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong TED Talk given in 2008

What God is, or isn’t, will continue to morph indefinitely unless…

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Richard Barlow:

‘The whole thing about the messiah is a human construct’

The Divine Principle: Questions to consider about Old Testament figures

How “God’s Day” was established on January 1, 1968

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Divine Principle – Parallels of History

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“… Many Koreans therefore have difficulty understanding and accepting religions that have only one god and emphasize an uncertain and unknowable afterlife rather than the here and now. In the Korean context of things, such religions are anti-life and do not really make sense…” LINK

#Karen Armstrong #God #monotheism

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sugarfreecapsicle · 5 years

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old magic (2/3)

A/N: well it is spooky time, my dudes. although this isn’t all that scary, it’s a little rattling. written for and with lots of support from @moonstruckbucky and her Halloween writing challenge! As always, huge props to @star-spangled-man-with-a-plan for beta-reading, helping me when I’m stuck, for adding the read more cut while I’m limited to mobile and for this gorgeous moodboard!

prince!bucky x reader

warnings: 18+ smut, angst, sub!bucky

DISCLAIMER: this is in no way a reflection of anyone who identifies, practices or otherwise affiliates with witchcraft. I bastardized some basics and ran with it. Please don’t come for me and correct my poor development of a fake magic system.

James stares in bewilderment at his trembling hand. Brow knits together in confusion, eyes dart quickly between the hand and your knowing smirk.

“A simple protection charm,” you answer. “No physical contact without my permission.”

He whines in the back of his throat, knees wobble as if a child in a tantrum. James had for the past week been a man in a desert in search of an oasis found only with you. Your skin, your body, so close and yet too far. Tears prick at the corners of his eyes, desperate and wanting.

“Please.”

———————-

You’d bottle it if you could - the pretty keening of a desperate crowned prince, heir to the throne of one of the most powerful kingdoms in the realm. His right hand glides a short distance from your arm over your stomach to your shoulder to finally rest close enough to your cheek you can feel the warmth radiate from his palm.

“Please, love, let me touch you.”

The pet name unravels in your chest, tender, softer than you’d expected. You waver, a part of you moldable to his whims and pretty words, but the stronger part wills against such foolishness.

“And why should I allow it?”

The exasperation overflows into his posture - sagging shoulders, knees finally weighing him down to the floor, trembling hand weakly hovering over your hip and thigh.

“I ache for you in a way I have never longed for another,” he croons. “I fear if I cannot be with you, I may burst into flame. Without your love I will starve, waste away. Please, please don’t deny me.”

James leans in as if to place his forehead against your stomach and chokes on a whimper when he knocks against firm air guarding your bare belly. The tears dot his long eyelashes now, dangerously close to spilling out onto ruddy cheeks.

You crook a finger below his chin and direct his attention to your face once again - giving yourself ample time to appreciate each glimmer of desperation in his blue eyes.

“What kind of woman would I be to deny such lovely poetry?”

James’ entire body sags in relief, pushing out breath held deep in his lungs, chin pressing into your pinched finger.

You tsk quietly, and he startles.

“Conditions, my prince. Let me help you.”

James is astonished when he realizes belatedly you’ve touched him. The prince has never known a hunger like this - compelling, painful, obsessive. Since his resurrection, an event his father demanded be kept quiet, James only thought of the witch. Your beauty, your scent, your voice. An all consuming force. Compelled to go to you, must go to you, even if only to see you once more. No, even that would not be enough. He longs to touch you, to feel your skin against his. He wonders if it’s soft, supple, if it would bruise under his rough touch.

Would you keen, make noises in the back of your throat as he feasted upon you? Thoughts such as that surprised him. He is far from a blushing virgin, but he hardly ever fantasizes about tasting a woman. He wants to worship your body, bow down and pray at your altar, confess his transgressions, beg forgiveness. On his knees before you, James realizes the control he craves belongs to you, and pleasure washes over him as a wave in the sea.

How he stays upright on his feet without your constant aid, he’s unsure. An afterthought has both hands, flesh and metal reaching for you but without purchase.

“I can touch - you cannot,” you explain with a gentle shove against his thick chest.

The mattress on your bed is lumpy, scratchy - a far cry from his plush featherbed in the castle, but this foreign land of magic and lust erases any discomfort. His body simmers where your hands haven’t touched, blazes where they do. Careful, spindly fingers dance across his shoulders, chest, shivering stomach. Deft teasing, nails combing through wiry hair - he’s breathless.

His own hands betray him, reach for any part of you within inches of him but the damned charm holds true, keeping his fingertips close enough to feel heat but no friction. Unbearable torture for a man starved, deprived.

“What would you do, my prince, if you could touch me?” Even your words are made of sin. “Tell me. I do so love to hear your voice.”

James can barely breathe let alone form a sentence when your thighs flex against his hips. Dry lips babble out nonsense, his gaze focuses on your smug expression. Pouting mouth, mischief all over.

“I would- I’d, gods above, I’d bruise you, make you mine, anything to touch, please,” he whines, back arching for more of you.

“Should I not be afforded the same opportunity, James?”

He reels, explosions of desire barreling through him at the idea of your teeth biting into him, nails tracking pink lines on his chest and back. Willingly he would trade his family’s crest on his heart for your own mark.

A long drag of a single fingernail commands his body’s curved answer, stinging a trail from clavicle to hip. Sweat lightly covers him, his restraint on a fraying tether.

“Have I made you suffer? Am I too cruel a mistress?” Desperate eyes watch as you lift and align yourself with his pulsing need, red, angry, begging. “I can soothe your pains, my prince.”

Stars collide when he’s sheathed inside you, your clenches in time with the throbbing ache of him. Somewhere in the distance he hears blankets rip and tear by his own hands - the price of inability to touch you directly - and howls, all gravel and raw that eviscerate his throat.

With your palms splayed over his chest, at last comes a minute relief. Your touch ignites every nerve in his body, once dead alive again. Every shift and roll of your hips pulls cries of bliss from deep within him, and he catches a few soft moans from you.

The beauty of you writhing in sensual dance above him is obscene enough to make a harlot blush from head to toe. James understands now what it means to bed a woman, what he has been missing, why men flood brothels. Nothing compared.

“Oh, my prince,” you breathe against his lips, ghosting a kiss. “Come undone for me.”

Delayed only by a moment of your white hot climax and gnashing teeth against his lower lip, he releases, loses his vision behind a plethora of colors and whimsical patterns. His entire body stutters then falls loose to the bed, sated at last.

The required fire in the hearth crackles on long after the throes of passion dissipated. Delicate fingers wind and furl over tracked skin, broad chest heaving in breath. Cool metal plays at the small of your back affectionately.

“Tell me about your castle,” you offer, something to bring back the dazed prince. He inhales deeply, settles into the lumpy mattress.

“Old, wet, miserable.” The grin is all mirth in nostalgia, as if he could never return to a distant memory. “Why trouble yourself with such a thing as that? That place is nothing more than a prison of unhappiness.”

“It made you happy once.” Regret pricks at your heart briefly, but James seems undeterred.

“Once,” he allows. “Not anymore.”

You watch orange flame dance against the calm blue of his eyes, your prince’s mind taking him back to the castle, back to his proper life with a sardonic grin that you aren’t sure tells the truth.

“Did she make you happy?”

James shifts under your gaze, meeting it with all the wrong understanding.

“She could have, if Sophia had been you.”

The name halts your entire being, heart stopped, breath held. “Sophia?”

“The daughter of a land baron who owed great debt to my father. The marriage came to be since she was the only woman of title who could -“ James ends his retelling upon seeing your troubled expression. “Love?”

“James, I — there’s something I must consult with the Mother, don’t trouble yourself with awaiting my return,” you rush, saccharine and final. “Rest well, my prince, and I will be here when you wake.”

The ritual takes the remainder of your night, and exhaustion sweeps over you as the tears shed down your cheeks. Breathing hurts, air pulling tightly in your lungs in wheezes. James deserved this much. As did you.

Magic comes at a price.

#bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky barnes x female reader #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes fic #bucky barnes fanfic #bucky x reader #bucky x female reader #bucky fan fiction #bucky fanfic #bucky barnes smut #bucky barnes angst #bucky angst #bucky smut #my fic

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alvaar-aldaviir · 4 years

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Wondrous Tails: First “I Love You” (replacement) / Bandaging Wounds

("First "I Love You"" is a replacement for "Going on a Cruise")

Time Frame: Post Canon (years after Shadowbringers(?)), Minimal Spoilers for 5.0 end. Notes got long so they are under the cut.

Notes:

I continue to refer to Alphinaud as a Scholar instead of Academician for no reason but laziness and bad habits.

I understand the ‘time bubble’ issue of MMO’s, but for writing I subscribe to time actually passing between expansions. I don’t keep a hard and fast rule, but sort of lean toward roughly 1 year per expansion if not longer. Otherwise everyone would be mired under so much PTSD I don’t know how the Scions would get anything done, and please let my WoL breathe?

Somehow, someway, Alvaar has gotten the better of me and it’s eventual committed relationship polygamy with the Leveilleurs up in here. After actual months of telling myself no, I give up. If you hate that, pass on my stuff and have a great day.

Just for posterity, there will never be twincest. I don’t have a personal stance on people’s fiction about fictional people, but it just doesn’t make sense for the twins to me.

The first time Alphinaud hears Alvaar utter those words, he’s seventeen. Seventeen and full of fire and determination to help right the wrongs of a thousand-year war and maybe redeem some of his own foolishness.

Seventeen and half scandalized to catch his Warrior of Light buried against Lord Haurchefant’s chest before they readied to infiltrate the Vault after Ser Aymeric.

It wasn’t as if he’d gone looking of course. Such things would have been kept a better secret behind a closed door and not front and center to whomever strolled into House Fortemps expecting an audience. But romantic subtly wasn’t... exactly Lord Haurchefant’s forte and neither was it Alvaar’s. And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t known when it was the talk of Camp Dragonhead and the house servants anyway.

But it is perhaps the first time the Arcanist had seen any hint of the word “love” meaning something beyond dutifully repeated and expected phrases. Spoken as if it’s some personal secret, or more of a promise than just a response. Something alive and wild instead of the light and flippant ways he’d heard it used in Sharlayan and among nobility.

There’s a weight to those words that’s like aether humming in an incantation.

It means something when Alvaar says it and the Lord’s sharp features soften as he nuzzles into blond hair, and it means even more when Haurchefant answers in kind and some of the tension in the Bard’s shoulders ease. There’s a thousand words held in that phrase, like pages and pages of information distilled in a single line of arcane shorthand. History condensed into a lone footnote.

He never had to ask why Alvaar’s wails of pain as he’d held his dead lover mere hours later sounded like a heart breaking in two.

The next time he hears them, it’s not quite the same.

He’s twenty (or was it twenty-one?) and farther from home than he’d ever dreamed. Fresh from facing off against Emet-Selch as they’d fought to save the First from destruction. Twenty and exhausted and content to doze quietly in the newly returned night alongside the beds two other occupants, arms draped over Alisaie and Alvaar both. He remembers feeling Alvaar’s knuckles brush his cheek, tiredly meeting the Bard’s gaze in the dark and hearing those words again.

They don’t mean the same thing, but it doesn’t overly bother him after the torture Alvaar had endured for the worlds. After the last several months Alphinaud had spent fighting sin eaters, stubborn short-term mindsets, and bitter loneliness in Kholusia.

Being called family, being called ‘home’ had only echoed what he’d felt too. The Scions, his Sister, and Alvaar, were what felt most like home. Not a large but empty feeling manor back in Sharlayan, cut off and indifferent to the world.

It’s a different kind of love but it doesn’t mean any less nor is it remotely insincere.

And even if there’s a faint disappointment in his heart he would never admit to, it’s fine. More than anything he’s simply happy that they’re still together. Still alive. Still able to fight and produce another miracle for the people of the First and the Source.

He’s twenty-two and he knows Alvaar loves him deeply. He’s said it in every other conceivable way. Let poetry and sweet words fall from his lips or sent the meaning across in those brushes of familiar contact. Had the feeling burned into his body and mind more times than he could ever hope to keep track of...

But Alvaar hadn’t ever said it.

It’s silly and he knows it. He has no reason to doubt Alvaar and truly he knows the way the Bard feels for him isn’t anything less than his previous lover. That there was room enough in that gentle heart for all three of them. Jealousy is a terrible thing after all, so he convinces himself it doesn’t matter. Comforts himself and chides Alisaie gently when she inquires on it herself. Alvaar had been through a great deal of hardship and pain. And as they both didn’t doubt the depth nor truth of his feelings, the specific words should hardly matter.

He’s twenty-three, and when Alvaar finally says them he barely notices. There’s too much blood, and Alvaar’s laugh is too weak and lilting from it. His mind is too busy on spells and incantations to register it as he works quickly.

Alvaar is fine. He’s always fine. He comes back beaten and bloody and smiling and laughing and visibly delights in being doted upon and taken care of. A routine scouting of the border wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near as deadly as the hopeless situations he’d been sent into before. He’s fine.

The Scholar is internally utterly terrified of course, but he knows from too much firsthand knowledge that there’s no room for panic as a healer. If he panicked, things would quickly turn into ‘not fine’ and neither of them had time for that.

So for right now, spells and aether humming in his veins, it’s fine.

“Did you get a haircut recently?” Alvaar asks, letting Alphinaud clean, tape, and bandage his wounds. Magic had healed the critical damage and stopped the bleeding, but it would take time to heal the rest and a few more applications of white magic tomorrow. Cleaning and bandaging would ensure a smoother transition through the process, so it’s a step he takes anyway, perched on the edge of the medical bed while the Bard sits propped up against pillows.

“You should be taking this more seriously,” the Scholar returns flatly, pushing Alvaar’s hand away from his hair gently so he can keep working.

“I am. But I’m just so... very happy,” Alvaar murmured, a smile stretching across his exhausted face. “I made it back this time, I’m here, and you’re here, and it will work this time.”

It’s said with such offhanded confidence it makes the Scholar blink. “What? Alvaar you’re delirious, stay still.”

A hum of agreement rings in the Bards throat as he nods. “Okay. Let me know when you’re done and listening. He said I didn’t say it enough... That when I made it back to be sure to tell you something.”

He wants to pay more attention to Alvaar’s curious words but there would be time for it later. Though he was comfortably stabilized and would no doubt make a full recovery in a matter of days with the Warrior of Light’s sometimes obnoxious recovery speed, it’s never something he likes to leave to chance. If he overlooked something now, it could be disastrous later.

“He?” The inquiry slides off his tongue in a distracted manner, during which his moonstone carbuncle chirps with interest where it’s bedded down along Alvaar’s legs.

“Don’t worry about it,” Alvaar replies, glossing over it as his attention shifts back to the carbuncle eyeing him expectantly. “Can I have my hand back now?”

Another deft turn of the roll of bandages, a swift snip of the medical shears, and a tidy tie off had him releasing Alvaar’s arm with a nod. “Sure. Other arm if you would.”

Swapping obediently, Alvaar quickly settled his freed hand into plush white fur, grinning brightly. “Hey Carbi... I missed you too,” he cooed, chuckling at the fond chirp and purr he got in answer. “You’re the best summon ever aren’t you?”

Snorting under his breath, Alphinaud keeps at his work until he’s finished, letting his summon keep up its job of distracting Alvaar’s focus from pawing at him so he can work in peace. Alvaar was always a good patient, but woozy with blood loss he sometimes got sillier than was helpful. It made his moonstone carbuncle an utter lifesaver, and there were few helpers he would rather have working beside him. Though he had long developed more potent summons, Alvaar’s preference and the sheer number of revisions and intricacies of its design had left moonstone as one of his masterpieces. The patient bedside manner and attentive nature had made it a nursemaid second to none, and given the way it was currently cozied into Alvaar’s side and subtly keeping him quiet and still as it soaked up affection like a sponge, it remained a staple of his repertoire for good reason.

Inspecting the last of his work, he gives a satisfied nod before starting to pack things away. After almost seven years of chasing Alvaar’s shadow and tending to his wounds, his first aid is as neat and tidy as an experienced chirurgeon. A far cry from his fumbled and panicked work the Bard had coached him through with grit teeth in Coerthas. It’s only once he sets the supplies back on the shelves that he finally gives himself leave to think about anything but healing.

He’s seated back at Alvaar’s side before he realizes he’s made the steps, a bandaged hand curling warm at his jaw and pulling him closer until they bump foreheads together. It’s a movement that he’s long used to, a familiar gesture that helps to quiet the panic that had boiled over in his chest if not the emotion that threatens its place.

“I would appreciate it if you would refrain from frightening me like that again,” Alphinaud murmured softly, a faint tremor in his voice but refusing to cry. Alvaar was fine! There wasn’t any reason to overreact!

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to. Was the best I could manage,” Alvaar replied in the stilted way he picked up when he was exhausted. Given how much harder he was leaning into the Scholar, none of it surprised him.

Making a thoughtful sound in the back of his throat he leaned the faintest bit back into the Warrior of Light, soaking up the steady warmth that wicked off him and the silent reassurance he was still there. “Just... be more careful next time. For now you should focus on healing.”

“Thank you for saving me Alphi,” Alvaar whispered with a heartfelt gratitude.

It was enough to make the Scholar flush. “I... Any other healer would have done the same.”

“Maybe. But any other healer wouldn’t be worth me dragging myself back to. Sides, Alisaie was too far,” he joked fondly.

Alphinaud tutted under his breath, pulling back to grip Alvaar’s face in his hands and press a featherlight kiss to his brow before burying his nose into soft golden strands. “Jokes aside, thank you for coming back. If scaring me half to death means that you’ll pull through, then I would take that burden every time.”

There’s something about the way Alvaar relaxes into him, the faint breath of a sigh before tension eases out of his neck and jaw, that has always meant the world to him. It was too many emotions to articulate clearly, but it always made his heart feel warm. Reminded him that even if he wasn’t able to command the same fear and awe as the Warrior of Light, to be a brilliant blade that cut through the dark and evil that threatened them, the rallying cry that brought their forces to victory, what he could do was no less important.

All great hero’s needed a home to return to, else they would eventually feel they had nothing left to fight for.

“Alphi?”

“Yes Alvaar?”

Pulling back enough to regard him a moment with scrutiny, the Bard leaned in with a purposeful ease, lips brushing against his chastely for a moment before murmuring something against his skin.

This time he heard them. Felt their movement and the warmth of them against his lips and burning against his skin. Poetry and promise and providence all in one.

“I love you.”

It was no big deal. It was a sentiment he’d always known from 1,001 things Alvaar did all the time. Something he had long convinced himself didn’t matter. A phrase used over and over until it’s meaning was practically lost.

But oh.

Oh...

How those words shook him to the depths of his soul and cut him in two regardless.

He’s twenty-one again for just a moment. Full of questions and a heart fuller still with longing, listening to Alvaar speak of love he’d known with that easy and sincere air of his. Brutally honest as ever.

Love was ruinous. Love would destroy you in ways you didn’t think were possible. Love was thirst and hunger. And all your days, when you’d known the taste of true love, of something that clutched past your heart and into your soul, you would always want for more of it.

In the present with his face buried against Alvaar’s shoulder, tears welling over and soaking into clean white bandages, he feels like a beast half starved.

“I would really like it if you stayed,” Alvaar murmurs, still running his fingers along the Scholar’s back soothingly. He’s infuriatingly casual for having just reduced his lover to tears. If he hadn’t just spent an hour healing and bandaging him up, Alphinaud would probably have swatted him.

Instead he just nods.

He’d never been very good at refusing that particular request anyway. Even when he was the one chastising Alvaar on why sharing a medical bed was in poor interest of his health.

But it’s late, and he’s tired, and nuzzling into the warm muscle of Alvaar’s shoulder he doesn’t want to leave anyway. So, he pulls himself up onto the bed fully, curling up beside him and keeping his cheek settled against the Bard’s shoulder that’s free of bruises. He knows he won’t sleep well but the situation is unfortunately familiar enough he knows that he’ll still get plenty of rest for tomorrow’s troubles.

“Alvaar?” he asks softly after they’ve both settled into the pillows, sheets, and each other accordingly.

“Yea?”

“You really need a shower.”

It has Alvaar laughing enough to make him wince, “Brat... don’t make me laugh that hurts.”

Alphinaud just smiles softly and hums an amused note as Alvaar settles further against him.

“Alvaar?” he asks again after a few minutes, getting a soft grunt of acknowledgement.

Shifting enough to study the soft and unguarded profile he’s sketched a hundred times before from memory, he presses a brief kiss to the Bard’s jaw and settles in for sleep.

“I love you too.”

#alphinaud leveilleur #alphinaud #wol #warrior of light #alvaar aldaviir #ff14 #ffxiv #mywriting #writing #wondrous tails #wondrous tails of ffxiv #sfw #oc #alphinaud x wol #wow. it finally happened. established relationship time. bless.

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hunkpurveyor · 4 years

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Knocked over Ted Chiang’s short story collection Exhalation in about a week, which is a nice feeling. The stories have a very classic science-fiction structure to them - all of them are exploring a single premise, often to do with time-travel and/or free will, and puzzling out the consequences of the story’s conceit. And when he hits he hits - the titular story Exhalation is transportive, moving from the defamiliarisation of the alien scientist to the wonder and intrigue of the world they inhabit to the deft reveal of the story as universal, as being about entropy.

Unfortunately sometimes when he misses he also really misses, one of the (mercifully in this case) shorter stories “The Great Silence” felt clumsy, directionless and mawkishly sentimental. You can slightly see this tendency in Exhalation: the ending lingers a moment too long on its poignancy- instead of trusting the reader it asks you specifically to consider its moral implications. This penchant for moralising is also a familiar trope of classic science fiction so I suppose sometimes you have to take the good with the bad as far as stylistic inheritance is concerned.

The difference between understanding what a story is talking about & thinking about it and the story dictating it directly seems small but it always makes a big difference in how I experience and enjoy a narrative. I guess it’s kind of like a therapist gently guiding you to come to your own conclusion about a problem you have as opposed to just outright confronting you with the issue. Which reminds me of a possibly apocryphal tale about Robert Frost who, when asked to explain one of his poems, responded, “You want me to say it worse?” His answer is particularly true for poetry - which for me is very much about crystallisation of meaning - but it also holds true for more diluted art-forms. I think I could use reminding sometimes that art is more than just a didactic mechanism, it is not a thing that you feed into one end of a brain-machine for churning a moral or critical product out the other end. It’s vital to remember and esteem the experiential component of art.

It’s complicated though, I wonder about the nature of that experience, its shallowness or depth and it especially eats at me when I can’t remember what happened in a book, how it made me feel. This is the reason I started taking pretty detailed notes as I read last year, with more or less success and while it definitely helped me with Frankissstein, with Exhalation I felt no compulsion to note anything down at all while I read. And I suppose there are only so many things one can remember but I do feel that sometimes this genre fiction lapses into a kind of sugar literature, eaten then gone immediately. And again this isn’t a damning argument against it necessarily - I eat plenty of sugar. But I fret about its transience. Here I am writing, battling against the entropy of memory, inscribing my own brass tablet for a future civilisation of self to find and wonder over.

#this was supposed to be just a short post because... i didnt take any notes on the book #but i guess my brain keeps going on its own!!! whats it doing up there!#keep an eye out for future diversions into my personal neuroses available at all good bookstores #i am genuinely terrified of forgetting shit. my memory is so bad #it feels like vanishing sometimes #crit #review #ted chiang #exhalation #sci-fi #books

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plantrock · 6 years

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Hi Internet!

It’s that time of year again. I’m pleased to report that even with moving, traveling, and starting school again, I still managed to read 53 books in 2017. Not as many as last year, but given the chaos my life has been through in the last 12 months I am not in the least upset. 50 books is a good goal for me, as it’s roughly one book a week–though in reality I read in jumps and spurts. Sometimes a book will take two weeks, whereas, in weeks like this one, I’ll read three books in one week.

For this year’s recap I am going to separate the books I read into categories by my ratings, as well as give a one-sentence (ish) review. Want more info? Message me or look up the book!

FIVE STAR

THE POWER, Naomi Alderman

Women around the world spontaneously obtain the ability to generate and control electricity and the chaos that ensues left me shaken in the best way. (WORLD WAR Z meets THE HANDMAID’S TALE.)

GLAMOUR ADDICTION, Juliet McMains

A very readable academic analysis of the socioeconomic landscape of competitive Ballroom dance that had me excitedly annotating from page one.

HAMILTON: THE REVOLUTION, Lin-Manual Miranda & Jeremy McCarter

I mean do I really have to explain this–there’s a million things I haven’t done, but just you wait.

THE END OF THE DAY, Claire North

A slow-but-emotional travelogue of the adventures of the Harbinger of Death–not my favorite of North’s novels, but contains her characteristically beautiful prose.

THE COLLAPSING EMPIRE, John Scalzi

The first installment in a cinematic space opera series by sci-fi giant Scalzi, EMPIRE is tightly plotted, has fascinating characters, and the far-future world feels familiar without exactly copying others in the genre.

REJECTED PRINCESSES, Jason Porath

Tired of the Grimm and Disney versions? This collection of women from myth, legend, and history around the world explores less convenient and less kid-friendly tales of women who stuck to their guns and caused a ruckus.

SO YOU’VE BEEN PUBLICLY SHAMED, Jon Ronson

Though slightly dated in our modern light-speed internet world, this exploration of the power of social media is required reading for anyone participating in the Feed.

PANDEMIC, Sonia Shah

Yes, I’m a sucker for the world-wide-plague book, but this non-fiction depiction of how epidemics begin, spread, and shape the world we know today is excellent.

SPINNING MAMBO INTO SALSA, Juliet McMains

An ethnographic and historical comparison of the three US cities that spawned Salsa and Mambo, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in social dance and the phenomenon that is Salsa.

EVERYTHING I NEVER TOLD YOU, Celeste Ng

A deft and moving family drama about immigration, middle-class America, and the secrets we keep from those closest to us.

FOUR STAR

SAILING TO SARANTIUM & LORD OF EMPERORS, Guy Gavriel Kay

A lyrical and occasionally violent duology that walks the line between alt-history and fantasy based on the Byzantine empire.

THE REFRIGERATOR MONOLOGUES, Catherynne Valente

THE VAGINA MONOLOGUES meets every superhero story ever–this short-story collection is piercing look at (loosely) veiled comic book tales and the women they have wronged.

THE NURSES, Alexandra Robbins

A non-fiction account of lives of those in the medical field who often seem to play second-fiddle to doctors. (Honestly I don’t remember much about this one, but I must have enjoyed it.)

STORIES OF YOUR LIFE, AND OTHERS, Ted Chiang

A mind-bending collection of science fiction short stories, including the one that inspired the 2016 movie ARRIVAL.

VAMPIRE GOD, Mary Hallub

The most comprehensive academic analysis of vampire media in the 19th through 21st centuries I have ever read.

IT DEVOURS!, Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor

This second book in the Night Vale world tackles science vs religion, and though they miss the mark a little, I will always love their prose and the universe they have built.

DANCE WRITINGS AND POETRY, Edwin Denby

This collection of original poetry and arts reviews contains gems from mid-20th-century dance critic Edwin Denby, including a fascinating interview regarding classicism with George Balanchine himself.

THE CITY AND THE CITY, China Mieville

Is it science fiction? Is it artfully written detective fiction? I don’t think I’ve read a book so able to walk that line between fantasy and reality–as the characters walk the lines between their inexplicably separated cities.

BEAUTIFUL FLESH: A BODY OF ESSAYS, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind

A collection of essays from a variety of authors, each focusing on a particular body part and their relationship to it. My personal favorite was a musing on the heart and humans’ relationship to electricity from an author with an implanted defibrillator.

WHAT IS LIFE? HOW CHEMISTRY BECOMES BIOLOGY, Addy Pross

A systems chemists attempt to re-frame how we think about life and its origins on our planet. This book is short but technically dense–good for the trained scientist, less so for the layperson.

THE BEGINNING OF THE WORLD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, Jen Campbell

A quietly creepy collection of fairy tale and folk-lore-influenced short stories. My favorite was the first story, about a man who buys his girlfriend a new heart to ensure that she won’t leave him.

THE QUEEN OF BLOOD, Sarah Beth Durst

A bit of a guilty pleasure read, this fantasy series opener explores a world where the ruler of the realm must fight back malevolent natural forces.

AMBERLOUGH, Lara Donnelly

CABARET the musical in novel form–this darkly beautiful story details the rise of facism in a fantasy world and how it impacts a colorful cast of miscreants.

THE ESSEX SERPENT, Sarah Perry

A beautiful and suspenseful tale of romance and loss in Victorian England, set again the backdrop of a hunt for a fantasy creature.

HILLBILLY ELEGY, J. D. Vance

Both an autobiography and an attempt to explain the socioeconomic situation of Appalachian folks–but I’m conflicted on how much to buy into his arguments. Worth a read, though.

THE DIABOLIC, S. J. Kincaid

This story of a test-tube-grown bodyguard finding her humanity in a crumbling, corrupt space empire is the first YA sci-fi in a while that I didn’t hate!

BALLROOM DANCING IS NOT FOR SISSIES, Elizabeth & Arthur Seagull

Despite the sub-title, there is nothing R-rated about this how-to guide in balancing relationships and ballroom dancing.

DANCE WITH ME: BALLROOM DANCING AND THE PROMISE OF INSTANT INTIMACY, Julia Erickson

Despite the author’s obvious disdain for GLAMOUR ADDICTION (see Five Stars), this sociological analysis of studio ballroom culture lands on many of the same points as that other title, in addition to a hilariously accurate layout of the different performances of gender roles seen on the social dance floor.

THREE STAR

FOSSE, Sam Wasson

High on the drama and the page count, this biography of choreography legend Bob Fosse wastes no opportunity to dip into his sordid history and the seedy side of Broadway.

FUTURE HOME OF THE LIVING GOD, Lousie Erdrich

Despite its lovely prose, this novel doesn’t rise above the fact that it’s basically a less-good retelling of THE HANDMAID’S TALE.

MINDSET, Carol S. Dweck

My boss at my old job ‘suggested’ I read this. I remember nothing about it.

THE MAD SCIENTIST’S GUIDE TO WORLD DOMINATION, Edited by John Joseph Adams

This collection of mad-science-themed short stories was sadly a mixed bag of quality–I loved one or two, barely finished others.

THE AERONAUT’S WINDLASS, Jim Butcher

A rollicking romp through a steampunk fantasy world, though I found the characters stock and the world forgettable. (The cat, though, is worth the price of admission alone.)

THE PALACE THIEF, Ethan Canin

Four not-particularly-memorable short stories concerning isolation and mid-century masculinity.

THREE DARK CROWNS, Kendare Blake

You’d think I’d have learned by now that YA fantasy does not float my boat, but, alas, I went into this tale of warring island factions and powerful queens-to-be expecting more than it delivered.

HOW TO BUILD A GIRL, Caitlin Moran

Sadly the details of this book have also faded, though I recall not understanding the nuances of British classism.

HEADS IN BEDS, Jacob Tomsky

A bit memoir, a bit how-to on cheating the hotel system of years gone by, a bit forgettable.

YOU’RE NEVER WEIRD ON THE INTERNET (ALMOST), Felicia Day

I’ve been a fan of Day since the Guild years, but this memoir suffers from the same problem as most of its internet-personality cohort–her story isn’t over, and the book feels unfinished.

JEROME ROBBINS: HIS LIFE, HIS THEATER, HIS DANCE, Deborah Jowitt

An interesting but dense biography of Broadway legend and second-fiddle-to-Balanchine Robbins. I was glad of the information, but am wary of glorifying a man who had a reputation as a tyrannical director.

DANCING OUT OF LINE: BALLROOMS, BALLETS, AND MOBILITY IN VICTORIAN FICTION AND CULTURE, Molly Engelhardt

Some interesting comparisons between Regency era and Victorian era social dance norms, but this book’s focus on dance depictions in time-period fiction did not hold my interest.

THE HOUSE OF GOD, Samuel Shem

A bizarre and polarizing account of the lives of medical residents in the 1970s that reads like a fever dream.

THEN WE CAME TO THE END, Joshua Ferris

I think this fictionalized account of office life was supposed to be equal parts pathos and satire, but I found it just vaguely sad and forgettable.

FROM BALLROOM TO DANCESPORT: AESTHETICS, ATHLETICS, AND BODY CULTURE, Caroline Picart

The author makes some interesting points about changes necessary to the DanceSport world in order for the sport’s inclusion in the Olympics, but the rest of the book is superseded by GLAMOUR ADDICTION (see Five Star).

AN EMBER IN THE ASHES, Sabaa Tahir

Again with the I-apparently-don’t-like-YA-Fantasy, and this one had the added bonus of being way too violent for my tastes.

THINKING WITH THE DANCING BRAIN, Sandra Minton

Neuroscience 101 for dancers–a nice refresher for me, but not much beyond that.

THE CROWN’S GAME, Evelyn Skye

Romance! Czarist Russia! Romance! Magic! Sadly I didn’t get into the relationship of the main characters.

TANGO AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PASSION, Marta E. Savigliano

This academic analysis of the history of tango and the socioeconomic forces at work during the dance’s creation had some interesting tid-bits, but I found it difficult to read and some stylistic choices hard to decipher.

TWO STAR

ZONE ONE, Colson Whitehead

I love zombie novels, but this one tries to be ‘litrary’ and cerebral and I just found it dull, forgettable, and overly wordy.

THE ANUBIS GATES, Tim Powers

The cover of this absurdist time-traveling fantasy promises way more Ancient Egypt than I actually got. Crazy premise, idiotic characters, and only enough rollicking fun to laugh at.

YOU ARE A BADASS, Jen Sincero

For all its bluster and wanna-be subversiveness, BADASS is a pretty standard self-help book. Sadly I am one of the most self-motivated people I know, so the get-up-and-go was lost on me.

THE BLACK PRISM, Brent Weeks

The fascinating magic system was the only thing carrying me through this mess of unlikable characters and fantasy tropes.

ONE STAR

BALLROOM! OBSESSION AND PASSION INSIDE THE WORLD OF COMPETITIVE DANCE, Sharon Savoy

Never have I disagreed so completely with advice given and conclusions drawn as I did from those of professional-ballet-dancer-turned-cabaret-division-star Savoy. Want a rant? Ask me more.

And that’s a wrap! If you made it all the way down here, thank you for reading, and may you have a wonderful New Year!

A Reading Re-cap: 2017 Hi Internet! It's that time of year again. I'm pleased to report that even with moving, traveling, and starting school again, I still managed to read 53 books in 2017.

#2017 wrap-up #book ratings #book review #books #celeste ng #claire north #favorites #glamour addiction #hamilton #jen campbell #john scalzi #night vale #ted chiang #the power

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lamingtonladies · 7 years

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The Darkening Ecliptic – Ern Malley

Printable pamphlet here

These poems are complete. There are no scoriae or unfulfilled intentions. Every note and revision has been destroyed. There is no biographical data.

These poems are complete in themselves. They have a domestic economy of their own and if they face outwards to the reader that is because they have first faced inwards to themselves. Every poem should be an autarchy.

The writing was done over five years. Certain changes of mental allegiance and superficial method took place. That is all that needs to be said on the subject of schools and influences.

To discover the hidden fealty of certain arrangements of sound in a line and certain concatenations of the analytic emotions is the “secret” of style.

When thought, at a certain level, and with a certain intention, discovers itself to be poetry it discovers also that duty does after all exist: the duty of a public act. That duty is wholly performed by setting the pen to paper. To read what has thus been done is another thing again, and implies another order of loyalty.

Simplicity in our time is arrived at by an ambages. There is, at this moment, no such thing as a simple poem if what is meant by that is a point-to-point straight line relation of images. If I said that this was so because on the level where the world is mental occurrence a point-to-point relation is no longer genuine I should be accused of mysticism. Yet it is so.

Those who say: What might not X have done if he had lived? demonstrate their different way of living from the poet’s way. It is a kind of truth, which I have tried to express, to say in return: All one can do in one’s span of time is to uncover a set of objective allegiances. The rest is not one’s concern.

Dürer: Innsbruck, 1495

I had often, cowled in the slumberous heavy air, Closed my inanimate lids to find it real, As I knew it would be, the colourful spires And painted roofs, the high snows glimpsed at the back, All reversed in the quiet reflecting waters — Not knowing then that Dürer perceived it too. Now I find that once more I have shrunk To an interloper, robber of dead men’s dream, I had read in books that art is not easy But no one warned that the mind repeats In its ignorance the vision of others. I am still the black swan of trespass on alien waters.

Sonnets for the Novachord

(i.)

Rise from the wrist, o kestrel Mind, to a clear expanse. Perform your high dance On the clouds of ancestral Duty. Hawk at the wraith Of remembered emotions. Vindicate our high notions Of a new and pitiless faith. It is not without risk! In a lofty attempt The fool makes a brisk Tumble. Rightly contempt Rewards the cloud-foot unwary Who falls to the prairie.

(ii.)

Poetry: the loaves and fishes, Or no less miracle; For in this deft pentacle We imprison our wishes. Though stilled to alabaster This Ichthys shall swim From the mind’s disaster On the volatile hymn. If this be the norm Of our serious frolic There’s no remorse: Our magical force Cleaves the ignorant storm On the hyperbolic.

Sweet William

I have avoided your wide English eyes: But now I am whirled in their vortex. My blood becomes a Damaged Man Most like your Albion; And I must go with stone feet Down the staircase of flesh To where in a shuddering embrace My toppling opposites commit The obscene, the unforgivable rape. One moment of daylight let me have Like a white arm thrust Out of the dark and self-denying wave And in the one moment I Shall irremediably attest How (though with sobs, and torn cries bleeding) My white swan of quietness lies Sanctified on my black swan’s breast.

Boult to Marina

Only a part of me shall triumph in this (I am not Pericles) Though I have your silken eyes to kiss And maiden-knees Part of me remains, wench, Boult-upright The rest of me drops off into the night. What would you have me do? Go to the wars? There’s damned deceit In these wounds, thrusts, shell-holes, of the cause And I’m no cheat. So blowing this lily as trumpet with my lips I assert my original glory in the dark eclipse. Sainted and schismatic would you be? Four frowning bedposts Will be the cliffs of your wind-thrummelled sea Lady of these coasts, Blown lily, surplice and stole of Mytilene, You shall rest snug to-night and know what I mean.

Sybilline

That rabbit’s foot I carried in my left pocket Has worn a haemorrhage in the lining The bunch of keys I carry with it Jingles like fate in my omphagic ear And when I stepped clear of the solid basalt The introverted obelisk of night I seized upon this Traumdeutung as a sword To hew a passage to my love. And now out of life, permanent revenant I assert: the caterpillar feet Of these predictions lead nowhere, It is necessary to understand That a poet may not exist, that his writings Are the incomplete circle and straight drop Of a question mark And yet I know I shall be raised up On the vertical banners of praise. The rabbit’s foot of fur and claw Taps on the drain-pipe. In the alley The children throw a ball against Their future walls. The evening Settles down like a brooding bird Over streets that divide our life like a trauma Would it be strange now to meet The figure that strode hell swinging His head by the hair On Princess Street?

Night Piece

The swung torch scatters seeds In the umbelliferous dark And a frog makes guttural comment On the naked and trespassing Nymph of the lake. The symbols were evident, Though on park-gates The iron birds looked disapproval With rusty invidious beaks. Among the water-lilies A splash — white foam in the dark! And you lay sobbing then Upon my trembling intuitive arm.

Documentary Film

Innumerable the images The register of birth and dying Under the carved rococo porch The Tigris — Venice — Melbourne — The Ch’en Plain — And the sound track like a trail of saliva. Dürer: “Samson killing the Lion” 1498 Thumbs twisting the great snarl of the beast’s mouth Tail thrashing the air of disturbed swallows That fly to the castle on the abraded hill London: Samson that great city, his anatomy on fire Grasping with gnarled hands at the mad wasps Yet while his bearded rage survives contriving An entelechy of clouds and trumpets. There have been interpolations, false syndromes Like a rivet through the hand Such deliberate suppressions of crisis as Footscray: The slant sun now descending Upon the montage of the desecrate womb Opened like a drain. The young men aspire Like departing souls from leaking roofs And fractured imploring windows to (All must be synchronized, the jagged Quartz of vision with the asphalt of human speech) Java: The elephant motifs contorted on admonitory walls, The subtle nagas that raise the cobra hood And hiss in the white masterful face. What are these mirk channels of the flesh That now sweep me from The blood-dripping hirsute maw of night’s other temple Down through the helpless row of bonzes Till peace suddenly comes: Adonai: The solemn symphony of angels lighting My steps with music, o consolations! Palms! O far shore, target and shield that I now Desire beyond these terrestrial commitments.

Palinode

There are ribald interventions Like spurious seals upon A Chinese landscape-roll Or tangents to the rainbow. We have known these declensions, Have winked when Hyperion Was transmuted to a troll. We dubbed it a sideshow. Now we find, too late That these distractions were clues To a transposed version Of our too rigid state. It is an ancient forgotten ruse And a natural diversion. Wiser now, but dissident, I snap off your wrist Like a stalk that entangles And make my adieu. Remember, in any event, I was a haphazard amorist Caught on the unlikely angles Of an awkward arrangement. Weren’t you?

Night-piece (Alternate Version)

The intemperate torch grazed With fire the umbel of the dark. The pond-lilies could not stifle The green descant of frogs. We had not heeded the warning That the iron birds creaked. As we swung the park-gates Their beaks glinted with dew. A splash — the silver nymph Was a foam flake in the night. But though the careful winds Visited our trembling flesh They carried no echo.

Baroque Exterior

When the hysterical vision strikes The façade of an era it manifests Its insidious relations. The windowed eyes gleam with terror The twin balconies are breasts And at the efflux of a period’s error Is a carved malicious portico. Everyman arrests His motives in these anthropoid erections. Momentarily we awake — Even as lately through wide eyes I saw The promise of a new architecture Of more sensitive pride, and I cursed For the first time my own obliteration. What Inigo had built I perceived In a dream of recognition, And for nights afterwards struggled Helpless against the choking Sands of time in my throat.

Perspective Lovesong

It was a night when the planets Were wreathed in dying garlands. It seemed we had substituted The abattoirs for the guillotine. I shall not forget how you invented Then, the conventions of faithfulness. It seemed that we were submerged Under a reef of coral to tantalize The wise-grinning shark. The waters flashed With Blue Angels and Moorish Idols. And if I mistook your dark hair for weed Was it not floating upon my tides? I have remembered the chiaroscuro Of your naked breasts and loins. For you were wholly an admonition That said: “From bright to dark Is a brief longing. To hasten is now To delay.” But I could not obey. Princess, you lived in Princess St., Where the urchins pick their nose in the sun With the left hand. You thought That paying the price would give you admission To the sad autumn of my Valhalla. But I, too, invented faithfulness

Culture as Exhibit

“Swamps, marshes, borrow-pits and other Areas of stagnant water serve As breeding-grounds ...” Now Have I found you, my Anopheles! (There is a meaning for the circumspect) Come, we will dance sedate quadrilles, A pallid polka or a yelping shimmy Over these sunken sodden breeding-grounds! We will be wraiths and wreaths of tissue-paper To clog the Town Council in their plans. Culture forsooth! Albert, get my gun. I have been noted in the reading-rooms As a borer of calf-bound volumes Full of scandals at the Court. (Milord Had his hand upon that snowy globe Milady Lucy’s sinister breast . . .) Attendants Have peered me over while I chewed Back-numbers of Florentine gazettes (Knowst not, my Lucia, that he Who has caparisoned a nun dies With his twankydillo at the ready? . . .) But in all of this I got no culture till I read a little pamphlet on my thighs Entitled: “Friction as a Social Process.” What? Look, my Anopheles, See how the floor of Heav’n is thick Inlaid with patines of etcetera . . . Sting them, sting them, my Anopheles.

Egyptian Register

The hand burns resinous in the evening sky Which is a lake of roses, perfumes, idylls Breathed from the wastes of the Tartarean heart. The skull gathers darkness, like an inept mountain That broods on its aeons of self-injury. The spine, barbed and venomous, pierces The one unmodulated cumulus of cloud And brings the gush of evanescent waters. The lungs are Ra’s divine aquaria Where the striped fish move at will Towards a purpose darker than a dawn. The body’s a hillside, darling, moist With bitter dews of regret. The genitals (o lures of starveling faiths!) Make an immense index to my cold remorse. Magic in the vegetable universe Marks us at birth upon the forehead With the ancient ankh. Nature Has her own green centuries which move Through our thin convex time. Aeons Of that purpose slowly riot In the decimals of our deceiving age. It may be for nothing that we are: But what we are continues In larger patterns than the frontal stone That taunts the living life. O those dawn-waders, cold-sea-gazers, The long-shanked ibises that on the Nile Told one hushed peasant of rebirth Move in a calm immortal frieze On the mausoleum of my incestuous And self-fructifying death.

Young Prince of Tyre

“Thy ear is liable, thy food is such As hath been belch’d on by infected lungs” — Pericles

Inattentive, suborned, betrayed, and shiftless, You have hawked in your throat and spat Outrage upon the velocipede of thriftless Mechanical men posting themselves that Built you a gibbet in the vile morass Which now you must dangle on, alas. The eyeless worm threads the bone, the living Stand upright by habitual insouciance Else they would fall. But how unforgiving Are they to nonce-men that falter in the dance! Their words are clews that clutched you on the post And you were hung up, dry, a fidgety ghost. The magpie’s carol has dried upon his tongue To a flaky spittle of contempt. The loyalists Clank their armour. We are no longer young, And our rusty coat fares badly in the lists. Poor Thaisa has a red wound in the groin That ill advises our concupiscence to foin. Yet there is one that stands i’ the gaps to teach us The stages of our story. He the dark hero Moistens his finger in iguana’s blood to beseech us (Siegfried-like) to renew the language. Nero And the botched tribe of imperial poets burn Like the rafters. The new men are cool as spreading fern. Now get you out, as you can, makeshift singers: “Sail seas in cockles, have an wish for’t.” New sign-posts stretch out the road that lingers Yet on the spool. New images distort Our creeping disjunct minds to incredible patterns, Else thwarting the wayward seas to fetch home the slatterns, Take it for a sign, insolent and superb That at nightfall the woman who scarcely would Now opens her cunning thighs to reveal the herb Of content. The valiant man who withstood Rage, envy and malignant love, is no more The wrecked Prince he was on the latter shore.

Colloquy with John Keats

“And the Lord destroyeth the imagination of all them that had not the truth with them.” (Odes of Solomon 24.8.)

I have been bitter with you, my brother, Remembering that saying of Lenin when the shadow Was already on his face: “The emotions are not skilled workers.” Yet we are as the double almond concealed in one shell. I have mistrusted your apodictic strength Saying always: Yet why did you not finish Hyperion? But now I have learned not to curtail What was in you the valency of speech The bond of molecular utterance. I have arranged the interstellar zodiac With flowers on the Goat’s horn, and curious Markings on the back of the Crab. I have lain With the Lion, not with the Virgin, and become He that discovers meanings. Now in your honour Keats, I spin The loaded Zodiac with my left hand As the man at the fair revolves His coloured deceitful board. Together We lean over that whirl of Beasts flowers images and men Until it stops . . . Look! my number is up! Like you I sought at first for Beauty And then, in disgust, returned As did you to the locus of sensation And not till then did my voice build crenellated towers Of an enteric substance in the air. Then first I learned to speak clear; then through my turrets Pealed that Great Bourdon which men have ignored. Coda We have lived as ectoplasm The hand that would clutch Our substance finds that his rude touch Runs through him a frightful spasm And hurls him back against the opposite wall.

Petit Testament

In the twenty-fifth year of my age I find myself to be a dromedary That has run short of water between One oasis and the next mirage And having despaired of ever Making my obsessions intelligible I am content at last to be The sole clerk of my metamorphoses. Begin here: In the year 1943 I resigned to the living all collateral images Reserving to myself a man’s Inalienable right to be sad At his own funeral. (Here the peacock blinks the eyes of his multipennate tail.) In the same year I said to my love (who is living) Dear we shall never be that verb Perched on the sole Arabian Tree Not having learnt in our green age to forget The sins that flow between the hands and feet (Here the Tree weep gum tears Which are also real: I tell you These things are real) So I forced a parting Scrubbing my few dingy words to brightness. Where I have lived The bed-bug sleeps in the seam, the cockroach Inhabits the crack and the careful spider Spins his aphorisms in the comer. I have heard them shout in the streets The chiliasms of the Socialist Reich And in the magazines I have read The Popular Front-to-Back. But where I have lived Spain weeps in the gutters of Footscray Guernica is the ticking of the clock The nightmare has become real, not as belief But in the scrub-typhus of Mubo. It is something to be at last speaking Though in this No-Man’s-language appropriate Only to No-Man’s-Land. Set this down too: I have pursued rhyme, image, and metre, Known all the clefts in which the foot may stick, Stumbled often, stammered, But in time the fading voice grows wise And seizing the co-ordinates of all existence Traces the inevitable graph And in conclusion: There is a moment when the pelvis Explodes like a grenade. I Who have lived in the shadow that each act Casts on the next act now emerge As loyal as the thistle that in session Puffs its full seed upon the indicative air. I have split the infinite. Beyond is anything.

#poetry #The Darkening Ecliptic #ern malley #this thing was a hoax btw read about it #also i made it with a shithouse program so its kinda ssketch #pamphlet

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