I thought of appending this to my previous post, but decided it deserved it’s own:
The College-Of-Arms in England has issued Sir Terry Pratchett a coat of arms. It includes an ankh, a knight’s helmet, and an owl (in the Discworld books, one of the heraldic animals of Ankh-Morpork). The motto is “Noli Timere Messorum,” which means …
“Don’t Fear the Reaper.”
Two of my favorite authors are Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. I know of people who think of them as, not interchangeable, but linked, primarily because of the absolutely wonderful Good Omens.
I read them for different reasons. Neil Gaiman I read for his words — smoky or brilliant, or enveloping like burgundy velvet. (I knew I was in love when I read “Richard knocked back the green liquid, which tasted of thyme and peppermint and winter mornings” in Neverwhere.) Who can see such wild and wonderful worlds as that found in Neverwhere, or characters as deep and interesting as in American Gods. Who can show us the the other side of what we know, as the in short story “Snow, Glass, Apples.”
His words, above all, are pretty, often jewel-like.
Terry Pratchett, on the other hand, I read for ideas. Not that he can’t knock back a good phrase himself: from Reaper Man comes “Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.”
But his books, clothed as they are in the comic relief of the Discworld denizens, often have at their core reflections upon the world.
I have not read all of the Discworld books; for one thing, I have tended to concentrate on those revolving around the City Watch and Sam Vimes. (Sam Vimes may be my favorite character in literature, after Elizabeth Bennett.) Those I have read, I have tended to reread and re-reread, and each time I am struck by how deep they go, while on the surface appearing to be light and frothy.
And a central issue that arises again and again is of identity. Who are we, exactly? Are we who others define us to be? Are we who we appear on the outside? What about those other selves, those other parts of self?
In Men at Arms, Carrot, who is a dwarf because he was raised as a dwarf (in spite of being six feet tall and gorgeous), is shown to possibly be the rightful king of Anhk-Morpork. Carrot never acknowledges his own heredity, choosing instead to identify as belonging with those who adopted and raised him. Identity as an issue of self.
In Feet of Clay, a golem is, in the end, liberated from a life of empty servitude and wordlessness, in spite of the feelings of much of the populace. Identity as an issue of freedom.
In Thief of Time (my second favorite Pratchett book), two people are more than twins; for them to be whole, they must meet and become who they are destined to be. Who they are is a result of who their parents were — identity as an issue of family. And, perhaps, destiny.
In Night Watch, my favorite book by Pratchett and the best thing he’s ever written, Sam Vimes is sent back in time, and forced to relive his own past, albeit from a different perspective. Identity as an issue of personal history.
In Thud!, there are two different strands of inquiry at work. The first is outward looking: who are we as a people, as a society? And what lies will we tell, what atrocities will we overlook, in order to protect that identity?* And how do we move past that? Identity as an issue of tribal origin.
More personally, there is the issue of the other parts of self: Sam Vimes fights against a creature which would usurp his will, leaving him at the mercy of his own destructive urges. He has created his own watchman, who will “keep the darkness in,” preventing him from turning into the man he knows he could all too easily become, allowing him to be who he needs to be in the world to live by his own values. Identity as an issue of will, and self-control.
And in Reaper Man, Death takes a holiday where he assumes a disguise. Even Death, as certain as well, himself and taxes, has an identity that is mutable and contextual. Identity as an issue of … change, perhaps.
I keep reading these books because they fascinate me and challenge me to understand the forces that go into shaping my own identity, and how I see the identity of others. I think that happens to be a very good thing.
Thank you, Sir Terry.
*I will exercise restraint here and not discuss the relevance of this line of thought to the current American political situation.
Four hours sleep. Breakfast, but no lunch.
On days like this I start obsessing about things; my mind has a mind of its own, it seems. Today, as it often is, it is focused on my mistakes.
On the slights I have committed, on the casual woundings and unintended thoughtlessness I have inflicted on people. Of sins of omission. Of the words “Thank you” and “I love you” and “Can I help?” left unspoken, sometimes through timidity but more often through carelessness.
I find it easy to forgive others; forgiving myself is a much harder proposition.
I would say “you know who you are” to all the people whom I have failed to remind of their importance in my life, but you can’t know, can you?
You may have noticed that I will sometimes (these days, rather frequently) write about music. I write about music, or use song lyrics to speak for me.
My music takes a lot of personas: there are songs that I simply like (and some that seem to like me — they show up a lot on my iTunes when I hit shuffle). There are songs that carry profound intrinsic meaning.
There is the very small subset of music that, if it came to a choice between never hearing it again or remaining celibate the rest of my life, I’d have to think long and hard about which path to take — and on some days, I’d be more than willing to give up the sex. (To wit: Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” Aaron Copeland’s “Rodeo” and “Appalachian Spring,” and “Asking Us to Dance” by Kathy Mattea. Oddly enough, there is a piece of a song that probably also fits in this classification: on the Beatles’ Abbey Road, the bridge between “Polythene Pam” and “She Came In Through the Bathroom Window.”)
And then there are memory songs. The soundtracks which reflect so much of my life.
Memory of places. Memory of people. Memory of feelings.
“Mambo No. 5” is the back roads of Normandy, where I first heard it. The album Graceland is southern Nevada, where I and the other person who was driving West with me had a fight and let the tape roll over three times while not speaking to each other. “Hotel California” is not merely California, but the border between California and Arizona — which I was weeping over when the song came on the radio, because I never wanted to return to the state. (“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave….” ) Jimmy Buffet’s “Boat Drinks” is Wellesley, Massachusetts in February. For self-explanatory reasons, if you’ve ever heard the song.
“The Sound of Music” is my father. As is the Marine Hymn. Sarah Mclachlan’s cover of “The Rainbow Connection” is my friend Sarah; Eddie From Ohio’s “Number Six Driver,” my friend Cathy. “Rocky Raccoon” is my older brother. A lot of people who stay in my life for any length of time (although not everyone), and even some who pass through quickly if they have been memorable or important enough, end up with songs attached to them in my mind.
There are the lullabies, “Sweet Baby James” and “Baby Mine” (from Dumbo) and “Deliver Us” (from the Prince of Egypt). Lullabies that in their own odd way ended up being reflected in the souls to which they were sung — restless, sweet, and dramatic.*
There are the songs that describe me to me: “The Moon & St. Christopher” by Mary Chapin Carpenter, “Travelin’ Thru” by Dolly Parton, the Byrds’ “My Back Pages,” among others. There are the songs I wish I could sing to other people, and the songs I wish others would sing to me (chief among them being “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”)
There are songs that, no matter how happy or beautiful, are for their own reasons difficult to hear, like picking a scab off a wound that has long been closed: Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl”; “For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her,” by Simon and Garfunkel. Which does not keep me from listening to them, because they are beautiful and were once important to me, but there are days when I cannot bear to, when I deselect their boxes from my playlists.
I often wonder how weird I am, whether other people have this almost obsessive need to create soundtracks for all the parts of their lives. Not that it matters, much: I don’t think I can stop doing this even if I wanted to.
How about you? How does your music resonate to your life?
*A tiny part of me is insanely happy that Sweet Baby James has gone off to the wilds of Western Massachusetts, and will end up, if not already, quite familiar with the “turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston” being covered in snow.
October 1st is a significant day for me. Three organizations that have had profound impacts on my life celebrate anniversaries:
On October 1, 1891, Stanford University opened its doors to students. Go Cardinal!
On October 1, 1958, NASA became operational (after being created by an act of Congress on July 29 of the same year). Happy Birthday — it’s been fun being (indirectly) associated with you the last, oh, twenty-three years.
And finally, on October 1, 1971…
Disney World opened.*
*Believe me, growing up within easy driving distance of the House that Mickey Built can have lasting effects; when one of the questions of the day your senior year becomes “You wanna cut school and go to Disney World?” it sort of warps a person.
Yesterday, while discussing email addresses over coffee with a friend, I found myself reminiscing about my early days as an AOL subscriber. This was relatively early in the email game for most people outside of technical or academic settings. Back then, for most people, Spam was simply a pressed meat product produced by the Hormel Company and the subject of a rather bizarre Monty Python sketch.
I have a fairly common name which was adopted into a fairly common sounding email address, and as a result found myself the recipient of emails clearly intended for others. Most of them were routine, and I generally ignored them. A couple struck me as being important enough to notify the sender that their email had gone astray.
There was the very nice retired commercial pilot who was trying give advice to his hoping to be a commercial pilot son. I sent him a reply, wishing him and his son luck, and received a lovely answer.
But my all-time, very favorite mis-sent email ran something as follows:
Dear Pat:
It turns out that we can’t be in Miami next month after all. Would you be interested in the Super Bowl tickets?
Eric
************
My reply:
Dear Eric:
I am not the Pat you’re looking for. But I would be more than happy to take the Super Bowl tickets off of you.
Pat
***********
Eric wrote back thanking me for letting him know that his email had not reached its intended target, then said that he had already disposed of the tickets.
Rats. Just when I was thinking that something really cool might come from all this electronic communication.
The commenting problem is fixed. Sort of. Turns out it was not so much a Blogger problem as a FireFox problem. When I use Safari, I can actually comment. Thanks to datagoddess who mentioned that she had to change from Firefox to IE to get a comment box. Being a Mac user, that was not an option, but I tried Safari, and violá! Commenting commences!
I just wish I had seen it when it was first written in 2004 — I could have used it a lot since then:
Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s “Things I Believe.”
There is far too much to quote extensively, but one statement stands out: “I believe that the God who made (among other things) light, and space, and number, and time, and the spiral curve of Fibonacci numbers, must be acknowledged to understand more than I do about why there’s pain in the world.”
We here at WWF love T.S. Eliot.* And good parodies of T.S. Eliot, too. Having already presented “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, as Rewritten for Frat Boys” some time ago, it now falls to us to introduce all of you to… “The .doc File of J. Alfred Prufrock.” (From the absolutely brilliant copperbadge at Live Journal, by way of Making Light.)
*DO NOT get us started on the musical Cats. Just don’t. Unless you have time for a very lengthy diatribe about Andrew Lloyd Weber.
As it stands, your choices are either 1) keep hiding, and die a slow death of starvation, or 2) wait until nightfall, try to escape, and die a quicker but much more violent death at the paws of one or both cats. (I would be most worried about the black and white one: she once killed a snake much larger than you.) The fact that my youngest son has named you “Charlie” in no way changes the fact that you are now as good as dead.
You should have let us capture and release you when you had the chance.
You really need to start posting about something other than your psyche. You may be interesting, but you’re not that interesting.
All I can hear in my brain is Cole Porter’s “It’s Too Darned Hot,” from Kiss Me, Kate. (No thanks for the earworm, Cole.) This post both sums up how I’m feeling today, and reminds me how much worse things could be.*
*Except since I wrote that, the tech industry — along with a lot of others — have tanked and Barry Bonds has retired. Which leaves the price of real estate as the major thing to whine about.
I have a lot of music on my iTunes. Maybe not a lot by most people’s standards, but I think so: 1953 items (and that after I purged about 100 songs this morning, to make room for the latest episode of America’s Next Top Model), not including television shows; four days, nineteen hours, fifty-six minutes and 19 seconds worth of music. A scary amount of that is locked up in Broadway show tunes and movie soundtracks (33 complete soundtracks, from one to four songs from 58 other shows/movies). That still leaves a lot of room for my other music, which runs from hard rock/heavy metal (Led Zeppelin and Metallica), through country (any one of a number of artists) through rock, and alternative, classical, standards, jazz and even Newfoundland folk rock (Great Big Sea).
Like most people I know, there are a few songs I have multiple versions of; Christmas music, mostly: I’ve heard a lot of different interpretations of “Silent Night.” There are a couple of non-holiday songs I have multiples of — I have four versions of “Route 66” (not one of which is by Nat King Cole), and I have eight versions of “Over the Rainbow.”
“Over the Rainbow” may be the quintessential song of childhood. Recognition that life is not always lollipops and Santa Claus, that dreams don’t come true — except in that mythical land which all of us assumed existed when we were very young. In the original, it was sung by a child, or a teenager at least: Judy Garland was sixteen when she starred in the Wizard of Oz, even though her character, Dorothy Gale, was supposed to be only twelve. Her rendition is given special poignancy if you know anything about the life of child stars at that period — in many ways they were anything but children.
For the most part, the versions of the song that I have, other than the original, seem mostly aimed at adults. (The only exception may be Isreal Kamakawiwo’ole’s cheerful yet wistful take on the song. The ukelele is a large part of its charm.) Harry Nilsson’s soaring version was even used in the soundtrack of a romantic comedy which was very much not about children.*
My youngest son, while listening me play each version in order while writing this, made the astute observation that all of the versions after the original were slower and sadder. (Again, the exceptions would be Isreal Kamakawiwo’ole’s and Eric Clapton’s. Quite frankly, I bought the Clapton version mainly because the words “Eric Clapton” and “Over the Rainbow” wouldn’t fit in my brain at the same time.) “The original was not sad, because you could get there someday,” he said. “These say ‘life sucks’ and although I would like it to be different it won’t be.” He hit the nail on the head.
While I admit this may be as much an artifact of the covers of the song I ended up buying as anything else, as all one’s music is a reflection one’s psyche, something is happening here. In the hands of these more sophisticated singers, the song moves from a wistful ballad of possibilities to a sad reflection upon lost childhood.
I’m not sure where I’m going with this, other than to note how adults often reimage childhood things — songs, toys, holidays (I could do a whole post on the co-opting of Halloween) — to suit their emotional needs. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as we recognize what we are doing.
Revisiting childhood as a foreign country is okay, as long as we remember it is a foreign country, and we can’t stay there forever, and that there should be limits on how much baggage we carry away.
*You’ve Got Mail. I’ve said before how this movie is one my favorite romantic comedies. Although it’s not the only reason, its use of this and other pieces by Nilsson is part of its charm.
Blogger is not letting me make comments. I have heard from other people that it is not letting them make comments, either. Looking at the help boards, it appears this has been affecting a number of blogs and there has been no fix yet.
Sorry for any inconvenience.
I have an idea for a NaNoWriMo plot! It’s not very good, tending toward the maudlin and soap-operish (and I’m not going to reveal it here). It should be fun to write, though.
I already have rough physical descriptions of the two main characters. I have to do research, though — about PTSD, about DADT, about battered-woman syndrome, and, on a more mundane level, how much of a car could you get if you traded in a brand-new Lexus SUV. I told you it was not going to be a bunch of roses.
The rough outline runs to 606 words.* Given the 50K word requirement, I just have to extend it by a few orders of magnitude in November and I’m good to go.
*According to the rules, you are allowed to do outlines, character sketches, and research before November 1. You just can’t start writing before then.
The Wild Winds of Fortune 
