by Sixer

When the World was Mine

It’s been a long time since I’ve felt like even looking at this blog.

I was all set to post every month in December of 2022. I had finally worked up the courage to sit down and look at themes and generally tidy things up for beginning again. And then . . . I installed a Bad Theme. And it ran a script and put nasty spam messages at the bottom of quite a few posts before I caught it and deleted it. I had to edit each post. By hand. Dozens and dozens of them. And I felt so stupid for installing something so awful. So it was hard to even think of the blog without feeling gross for a while. Nor have the curators of AI engines helped encourage one to put original content online, in an easily accessible format.

But I’ve been feeling like writing for a long bit. I’ve been reading, which is kind of like writing. As a teen I thought of writing as a kind of substitute for reading. The thing you did while you were waiting for the next book. But as I age I see how writing is itself useful as part of the conversation that reading exists to continue. To read, and read, and read and never discuss is not to read at all. Just as to eat, and eat, and eat but never digest is not really eating. Writing is one way of discussing. Not just what one reads, but what one sees and feels. What one is discovering. The joys and the sorrows and the truths and the illusions that almost misled: these are all part of the conversation too, and useful to record some where, some how. Over tea with a friend, or over a laptop keyboard with the whole silent void.

Today, as I lingered on my front walk, looking over my weedy patch of wilderness, I had such a strange, possessive feeling towards the insects therein. For a moment, and a 100 moments, it was not the flowers in my garden which mattered but the creatures that they sheltered. Indeed, when I planted the fennel two or three years ago (it’s a weed, beware!) I did so specifically to attract swallowtail butterflies, but still. To see three tiny green caterpillars, already twice as large as they were a few days ago, and one even tinier black one makes my heart swell right up with joy. And so with the bumble bees who show up in my garden in the first weeks of April and practically take up residence, hardly paying me any mind as I hover near them. Praying mantis and butterflies – someone saw a monarch here, a few days ago. The milkweed’s buds are just starting to show orange – and all the hundred little critters in between. How many things are affected by our smallest whims and fancies! Who would have thought so much life could exist in one small postage stamp of a yard? It feels miraculous. And miracles are personal things.

Miraculous like coming home and seeing a falcon atop the lamp post, tall and regal looking. I’ve grown spoiled with wild life here: once again we have a young deer attending preschool in our fenced in drainage pond. Just now he walked through my field of vision, as I sit here looking out the window, writing this to the constant jabber and retort of birds. But even still the falcon was special. It looked unmovable, and proved to be so when a red-wing blackbird flew up and dived bomb it. Personal a miracle might be, but also strangely universal, and I looked around in vain for someone to call over. To witness the wonder too. The falcon took the punch but didn’t move until a few minutes later when I began to walk again. Then it alighted over the drainage pond, to be pummeled by the same red-wing as it sought shelter in the trees on its far side. How strange to see so fierce a bird bullied by a creature so much smaller than it.

How sweet to be allowed to see it.

by Sixer

Lang Wae Gangged

I dinna ken it a’, but I kenned enouch to gang on with.

I think that would make a pretty tombstone for most people, “I didn’t understand everything, but I understood enough to get along.” I read George MacDonald’s Malcolm over my winter break (and skimmed through the wretched sequel), and then of course had to write poems and think in meter for the next 24 hours because reading such lovely prosery, and thinking about the ebb and flow of words – which is unavoidable when most of the dialogue is in Scots – does put my mind in a fidget. Of course, all the beautiful nature was also a bit intoxicating. It has been an unbroken silence of gray here for the past few days, with only a breath of muted rain late one evening. The same day on repeat.

I’m conflicted about MacDonald (at least his fiction. I love his allegories), but I am not conflicted about loving Malcolm. The first line stole my heart. Miss Horn and her vociferous thanksgiving over being made with no feelings! She is naturally my favorite character, followed by the ocean, the sky, and then Duncan. But of course the book is not about her, it’s about somebody else. I don’t dislike Malcolm (only vicariously, in the sequel, but this Malcom can’t be blamed for that). Malcolm is fine when you’re in the book, but when you’re out of it he can’t come with you. He is like faerie gold that dissapears in the morning, or like that first snowflake that you carefully carry home only to find it’s already melted once you’ve arrived. The ocean and the sky are more real than he is, I can dream of going to find them. But there never was and never will be a Malcolm in this world. I like the narrator better, because I can argue with him. I dearly love to argue, and the narrator is so opinionated I’m sure he would oblige me. I feel that we would get along, whereas Malcolm and Graham would find me a poor companion: Too impatient to watch the dawn for hours. Or to sit and work out the Eculid in the original Greek. To prosaic to find resolution in an abstraction.

I love the absurdity of the uneveness of the past. Our minds even things out so much, they’re always supprised to find dips and peaks in reality. We want to find things better or worse and so do, when often they are only rearranged. We think about the oppurtuinty for education now, and imagine there was little of it available before. But sometimes reading old books it seems that it’s always been an uneven mixed bag. Here’s a fishing village with a school master who knows greek and latin (duh. Doesn’t every college educated man?), so naturally anyone with a desire to learn a little more than the basics will, between catching herring and mending nets, pick up those languages too. Oh, but let us not talk about education. The word is so dual in my mouth it makes my head swim, and so hard and cold it makes my teeth ache.

And let’s not talk about poetics either. The way colors can be all cast up together in a paragraph, bunched up tightly to fit, to describe a single night sky. Certainly, lets not talk about the soul-poetic, for that would leave me out of my depth. I’m afraid I have a hard time believing in it, and must go on faith that it does exist in some people. It’s much easier to talk about a book’s internal inconsistencies than about it ecstasies, just like I suppose it’s easier to point out someone is wearing mismatched socks than to put into words the effect of their outfit on the whole.

I think that’s the genius of the poetic mind. They can take the soul of a thing and put it in flat, ink-printed (only, I read it on my ipad) words, where it’s preserved until it enters someone’s brain and is there rehydrated, in a sense. I suppose that means there must be some extra soul in the reader for the soul of the original to come out right. A sunset is after all only a sunset. But a moment is a thing with history and context and feeling and meaning, and the poet has to put the one in the other, and then trust the reader is able to unpack and assemble it.

by Sixer

Mists and Memories

What does hope mean to you? I ask this question after re-reading the Mistborn trilogy. Well, I say “read” but I mostly skimmed the first book. Skipping swaths of dialogue, whole chapters, jumping from paragraph to paragraph through (painfully violent) fight scenes. It was the book closest to me, that’s why I had picked it up. And it was interesting after all, so I kept at it. But, honestly, I wasn’t really paying attention until I started the second book.

I don’t think I have ever been so amazed at my ability to forget.

Now might be a good time to mention that there are going to be major spoilers, so if you are the kind of person who enjoys how the story unfolds you ought to stop reading here (and, really, Sanderson’s story is so well crafted from beginning to end that it’s a shame to not try to solve the mystery yourself as you read it. There are places that made me stop and wonder, “did he retroactively make that decision?” What an intricate attention to seemingly decorative but ultimately plot-vital detail).

 

But I digress. Memory. I had forgotten so much. The ONLY thing I remembered of the second book was . . . . well, actually, nothing. Not one thing. Marsh – I distinctly had the impression that he sacrificed himself in book one. So I was completely puzzled when he, you know, was still alive at the end of that book. I remember really liking him, and yet I had managed to block out two books worth of his actions. And the kandra. I had forgotten literally everything about them. I mean, I knew what they could do, but I didn’t remember anything else. The Kolosses too, it didn’t even occur to me to ask how they were made when they were introduced in book two. I knew Vin and Elend would gain control of them and be uncomfortable about it . . . . but I had (probably on purpose, because it really is too wretched to fully realize) forgotten how they were made. And the siege – you know, the thing that takes up two-thirds of the third book? – completely new to me. I remembered who the final hero of the ages was, but nothing about the final battle. I had even somehow managed to be surprised when it became obvious what Ruin was looking for and why. In fact, when you look at the hundreds of things that happen in the last two books, the only four that I really remembered was the infallibility of metal, the earring, the purpose behind the mists (only, for some reason I thought they had affected Elend? And that the discovery of the purpose had been almost immediate?), and Elend and Vin crashing a ball. That last one I remember so vividly I assumed it happened a lot. And, because I didn’t remember anything about Elend being king (much less emperor), I thought it happened in book 2.

All of these things point to only one explanation: I must have stayed up late reading these books, and I must have, in my desire to Find Out What Happened Next, skimmed pretty badly. I didn’t think I did that (at such scale) with unknown books but how else do you account for such a vast lack of recollection?

Of course, there is another theory too, and that is that I was dissatisfied with the ending and so forgot everything else in disgust. Well, yes, I have been known to do such things for far less provocation. For one thing, the book’s concept of godhood is bizarre – which is actually my main point in writing this. But, probably more to the heart, it killed off its main couple at the end. Tragic.

Reading it this second time, braced as it were for the inevitable (ha! I did remember that much!), their deaths didn’t bother me. Their world was, after all dying, and if they didn’t die in saving the world they would have died, and everyone one else with them, in loosing it. And also, they knew they had won when they died, which is quite a lot, and the whole second and third books actually, when you look at them together, had been specifically cultivating them to feel their lives were not their own to live anyway. So that’s all good then. Not that I approve of people killing off their characters willy-nilly, but I’ll concede that these deaths made sense both for realism and the narrative.

 

And, looking at it as a chance to sandbox – and after all, what else is fiction really for? –  the god thing is fascinating. Actually, it was book two when it became fascinating, book two and its cult of the Survivor. And that, ultimately, is what made me keep reading, to see what faith would mean in this universe. Because, for a depressingly significant percentage of books two and three, the only hope offered is the hope of surviving. That’s it. The characters’ goal was literally “everyone not dying.” Not in the sense of saving everyone, but in the sense of at least saving someone. And it made me think, almost instantly, of something I’d read in a book recently. The author said that, when you looked at what some people believed, all it boiled down to really was surviving. They were only living for life – success, health, happiness, contentment. Even when talking in general of people focused on love and service, even just talking about regular people, so many of us on this planet live our lives as if this is all there is. We’re just trying to get by, as the saying goes. And you can really see, pretty quickly, how this kind of thinking can corrupt even the most well-intentioned of people. There is no pay-off for being altruistic, especially if the world is ending. It is what causes Vin to overthrow Elend’s carefully crafted dreams of the perfect legal system, and what leads Elend to lay siege on a more or less innocent city. Because when your only hope is to survive, when survival itself becomes your goal, you no longer have the option of failure. The option of being the better person, of turning the check, of dying for your principles. Death is the only evil, and you must stave it off at all costs to win.

In this sense, it is perfectly fitting that when Elend finally realized his hope is not in survival but in renewal – in new life – he was able to choose the right way instead of the necessary way. And too, when Vin fully understood that Ruin was afraid, and that his fear indicated he could be, not just survived, but defeated, she took her life-risking gamble. And won, by loosing. In effect, she chose too die, chose to not survive, so that the earth could be a place of life and not death.

 That still seems a bit depressing, really. Sweet, but still . . . . very, very final. But then that is the other oddity that bugged me. The other side of the “just survive” mantra: the finality of death. Not one of the religions mentioned in the trilogy, and there were a few, were known for their afterlives. For a hope that existed beyond death. There was no Hell, no Heaven. No, what, nirvana? This just seems statistically unlikely. Oh sure, someone raised the possibility of ghosts at some point, so certainly there must have been superstitions about the soul, but the only “ghosts” we Readers see are phonys or illusions. This rather puts a damper on the whole dying thing. For all the deaths that occur throughout the books, the only person who we see struggling with the Death of the Soul question actually becomes an atheist because of it.

And yet, despite this perfectly finite notion of the soul that is built up in all three books, the trilogy ends with a note from the new god stating that Vin and Elend are perfectly happy where they are, and, hey, that guy who died in book one says “good job.” So . . . . there apparently is an afterlife after all? But, and I’m going off on a particularly unstable limb here, I suspect it’s not one run by the same forces that created the world. It’s not the kind of thing Ruin could have sanctioned (being eternal preservation, as it were) nor, if it was under Preservation’s power, would there have been much of a point in saving the world. If this afterlife were Preservation’s domain, than he should have let Ruin have the world and taken all the souls to said “better place.”

But even more fundamentally, Ruin and Preservation were part of the world – not just active gods, but physically integrated as well –  and so how could they have made a place separate from it? No, there must be some other power who controls this place, a place none of the other religions mentioned because its existence was beyond the scope, the jurisdiction, of the world’s creators. Perhaps a force higher than Preservation and Ruin, one with different goals and a different nature. This would be an exciting story to read! After all, we still do not know if Preservation and Ruin were originally one. Nor do we know who (or how) they had previously possessed (that they were possessing other people is obvious in that, when they “died” they left behind human corpses). I can see these two being attributes of a greater power, shaved off and set loose. Evolving over time and association – with each other and with their own creation – personalities and desires distinct from their original abstract natures. How does this change the way we view their war? The suffering of their people?

 

But going back to hope: I’m in the middle of writing another post, about what actually decides me on a book, and it’s obvious when discussing Sanderson what is most precious to me is his complete inability to accept despair. Feel it, see, it, taste it: yes. But accept it? Never. Even if his world isn’t set up in a way that seems to encourage hope, humility, or sacrifice, his characters embody it anyway. This is most beautifully (and dramatically) illustrated in the bridge runner portions of his The Way of Kings novel, but you can clearly see it here too. After all, isn’t his idea of trust, freely given, as the best basis for all relationships, and therefore societies, defiantly reliant on hope? Of expecting, even assuming, the best out of people even if people don’t always show you their best? It’s not surprising that I ate Mistborn up the first time I read it, or that I found it still engaging all these years later. Hope is a story I will never tire of hearing.

 

 

by Sixer

Ghosts of Mists and Shadow

Another victim of “I’ll edit it tomorrow,” this has been waiting to go out for a month now. I’m backdating the posted date to protect the canon.

It has been grey and damp all day, the sky persisting in the exact same shade of dullness so that it has been impossible to tell what time it is. It has felt like 11am since 8 this morning, and up until 6pm still felt that way. Perhaps I can blame my obsessive bout of reading on that, though of course we know I need no excuse. I just finished a historical fiction novel – no, not that kind of historical fiction. Or perhaps it would be better just to admit that all fictions are, in one way or another, romances? But this book wasn’t romantic in the true-love sense. Maybe in a gloomy, doomed-ideal sense it could be called romantic, but if you read it for love you’d be entirely disappointed. The history bits, however, are excellent. Not so much a novel as a collection of short stories, it covers the life and fortunes (or misfortunes) of a specific family, in a specific building, from around 530 AD to 1975. And yet, format aside, it was thoroughly a novel: there was a wholeness to the book that made you want to see how the story ended. The author knew her craft well. Even though her characters had very little time on stage, they all seemed round, full people. The time period made sense, and the characters made sense both in the context of their time (as related by the author) and in the larger story of their family.

Naturally this is my first complaint: the people were too realistic. There were nice, thoughtful ones among them, but on the whole they were a proud self-centered lot. Understandable but not admirable. And the ones who cared about something besides themselves were often the worst. Greed is one thing, but all the children ignored in favor of a favorite child? Truly scary. In fact, as often as it showed its face, love was never portrayed as a panacea for human woes or weaknesses. It had strengths of its own but, in all its aspects, seemed always to end in more misery. The marriages of reason and cultural expectations were more likely to prosper and give, if not happiness, at least satisfaction than any of the love-matches. Not that even content couples were happy – I don’t think anyone in the whole 1700 years of family history could be said to have been happy for more than 15 years at a time. Inevitably their first 15 years. But maybe that was the books point – resilience is breed out of a commitment to, not happiness, but survival. The characters compromise the future for both reasons, but compromises for happiness in the world of the book were rarely rewarded. So, though the book ends on a happy note, there is no happily ever after in the minds of the reader. We know that tragedy is going to strike again, shattering the illusion. And the fact that we can survive through it, to live the struggle and disappointment all over again, is hardly a glowing recommendation for the future.

This book made an oddly somber companion to the audiobooks I finished last week, Omnilingual and The Curved Blade (which, now that I think of it, was there a blade anywhere in that book?), and that Heyer mystery I read over the weekend – yes, I fell back into mysteries. Military SciFi is neither as well populated nor as easily dipped into. I did read a sci-fi pirate book two weeks ago – kind of Firefly meets Treasure Planet – but even that was more mystery than MSF. Mysteries are, almost by definition, short, one novel affairs, and MSF is generally exactly the opposite.

Of these three books, I suppose Omnilingual was the most fascinating. Cocktail hours! And all those cigarettes, contaminating the dig site! And no computers, no AI to analyze and draw comparisons. So much to think about from such a short story. And yes, the ending made me think of that one Stargate episode . . . . The Curved Blade was . . .  well, it actually felt like it was written by someone who hated all the characters in it. Which is not an uncommon feeling for a whodunit, but this book had a quite poisonous, mocking edge. Possibly attributable in part to the reader, whose reading voice was . . . distinctive. The women were extremely beautiful, and the author seemed disgusted by the fact that none of the men could suspect either of them as a murderess. In sympathy for the author, and in my desire for the equal representation of the sexes in every sphere, I rather wanted it to be them, partners in crime, but alas – the evidence. All in all, the Heyer mystery was probably the best, if you rate books purely by enjoyment. For one thing, it had less death in it than any of the other books (well, okay, Omnilingual didn’t really have deaths, only corpses). But mostly it was enjoyable because Heyer can, and occasionally does, write likable characters. People who aren’t half bad (or, are only half bad) and who actually care for the people around them. People who have nonsensical, natural conversations with each other about nothing much at all. A lemonade of a book. Even an iced lemonade. I enjoyed the inn book but it has left a bad taste in my mouth, as a penny dipped in honey might.  It might be another book or too before I cease to hear its bitter whisperings, for even now it seems to say “don’t live for tomorrow, it will not thank you for the effort.” Luckily, I have quite a number of books in my queue.

by Sixer

All the Dark We Cannot Hide

I was speaking with someone at church before Christmas about reading, admitting that I hardly ever read non-fiction, and she recommended a few books for me. Book recommendations are right up there with blind dates in my opinion – if you refuse them you imply you don’t trust the recommender, but accept and you have all the anticipation of absolutely hating it, and the awkwardness of letting the recommender know your opinion of their tastes. I had just finished Elinor Oliphant is Perfectly Fine, based on a coworker’s glowing review (after getting only halfway through that potato-peel society book, suggested to me by another co-worker), so I was a bit wary of yet another promise of “it’s just delightful.” But this colleague said the two things that make any recommendation irresistible: one, that the book used words beautifully, to the extant you would want to go back and read certain passages over again; and two, that there were places in the book that were cruder than she would wish but – it was grudgingly admitted – they made sense in context. Strangely it’s the latter comment that means the most. It gives me the freedom to come back and say “it ended up being too crude for me,” if I just can’t get through it. It gives me permission to be a prude, when normally that’s something I have to hide or make excuses for. It also means that there will be no nasty surprises. There may be nasty things, but at least they won’t be a surprise. Yes. I like my fiction with twists, not trapdoors.

So I put a hold on All the Light You cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, and waited. It finally came in just before new years, but I wasn’t able to pick it up until Saturday morning. And then I had bread to bake, and laundry to do, and all in all I didn’t get it started until after 3. You can probably guessed what happened next. Yes, Reader, I finished it. And, because this is one of the things I want to grow in, I’m writing up a little impression for it. Not a review, because I’m bad at those, but a “thoughts and take aways.”

And of course, the first thought is that it was beautifully written. The words painted a vivid picture, a real 3-D world that called for us to step into it. Now I want to go to France and tour Saint Malo. I want to go through the exhibits in Paris’ muesem. To breath the salty air of the one and eat the food of the other. Even though one of the characters – the one who, really, shows us the most – is blind, the book has a deep impression of color. Bright, bold, subtle, everyday, extravagant colors. Perhaps the continual use of texture in descriptions gives the colors something to hold onto, like sauce on ridged pasta. But it’s not just the colors, the format of the book also was masterful. The book is divided into time periods instead of chapters – some lasting weeks, some merely lasting days. Inside each period the narrators trade back and forth, like a tide, in short views, sometimes no longer than a half page. Just as the narrators’ experiences weave back and forth, so do the time periods: going forward almost to the end, then back to the beginning, skipping ahead a month, falling back a week; until finally narrators and tenses meet. The format – meaning the words and construction – of this book is wonderful. It sometimes feels like there are so many stories to be told, we’re all rushing to get them down on paper as fast as possible and don’t have time to pretty them up. This slow, intentional building of a story shines as a hopeful gem of craftsmanship.

Which is a contrast with its content. Because All the Light you Cannot See is about the second world war. The beginning, the middle, the end. The deceptions, the disruptions, the deaths. So many kinds of death. It’s about loss and living. About denial and realization; knowledge and learning; drive and disillusionment. This book didn’t leave me feeling awful to be a human, it left me feeling awful because I am human. No flaw in our nature went unexposed. Greed? Cowardice? Complacency? All are displayed by the author’s pen – Doerr doesn’t have to make them up, only puts down what is there. There is no shadow large enough to hide the evil that humans are capable of. And, honestly, the book doesn’t leave one with a hopeful, humanistic “but we can overcome our nature” kind of feeling. Just as the beauty shown was everyday, so was the grossest misuse of power, love, intelligence. The impression I’m left with is “the only beauty we have in us as human beings is brought forth in delighting in the beauty of nature – the beauty of this wonderful, complicated, world.” This isn’t something the book ever says, you understand, it is only the conclusion I’ve reached after reading it. If I were in college, that would be the essay I’d want to write. Even now, it’s tempting. Naturally, no one reads in a vacuum, but there is so much in the book that supports this feeling – I would love to discuss it with someone who had a different impression of it!

Of course, because I pulled an all nighter for this one, my memory of it is already a bit misty, like a dream. I really should go back and reread it, but the subject matter is not the kind of thing that invites return trips. Not because of the forementioned crudeness (which was an occasional thing in the latter half of the book, and fairly easily skipped), but the terrible depth of evil. Of blatant disregard for other people, of actual joy in using and hurting anyone perceived as weaker than ones-self. Of our willingness to close our eyes. . . . Once you’re out of it you feel free, like the mummy has finally been vanquished, the labyrinth escaped, the long night over. How could you go back? We cannot hide the darkness – ought not, maybe – but we can turn resolutely from it and run, even as it breaths down our backs and tangles around our ankles.