in an attempt to re-start my writing mojo

[lotesse]

a meme from musesfool: Pick any passage of 500 words or less from any story I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you the equivalent of a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you’d expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

Comments

[theprimrosepath]

A week since, walking through a hall in his lodgings, he'd seen a scrap of paper fluttering on a fellow student's door, a girl reading Modernist literature who lived there with her girlfriend and cooked things that smelled amazing, all spices and saffron and peppery heat. On it was printed a quotation in a sans-serif font, bold and confrontational: “erotohistoriography: a politics of unpredictable, deeply embodied pleasures that counters the logic of development. against pain and loss, it posits the value of pleasurable interruptions and momentary fulfillments from other times.” Beneath that, in decisive slanting script, a hand-written addendum questioned: “How do you fuck the past?” His mouth had gone wry at it, then, but now it seemed to him the saddest sentence in all the sorrowing world. How do you fuck the past? How can you fuck the past? You can't, he told himself, and deep inside his heart someone began wailing, crying out a wild grief.

[lotesse]

AHAHA THIS IS THE QUOTE THAT SPARKED THIS ENTIRE STORY.

Okay, so I footnoted it in the fic - the quote is from Elizabeth Freeman's article "Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography," which is one of the best things ever. "How do you fuck the past?" came out of a graduate seminar discussion of the article. Freeman's deal is, among other things, about looking at the queer and erotic attachments scholars form to their historical objects, about our desire for erotic connection backward through time with other queers and freaks. And that sparked HARD for me - the other writing that came out of my engagement with the article was a poem about my frustrated sexual desire for intimacy with the poet Edna St Vincent Millay - but also led me back to DiR, which often hovers around the edges of my consciousness, and particularly in relationship to historical research. Will is such an identity character for me as a scholar and an intellectual - feelings of loneliness and distance and difference, not belonging fully to either present or past, always watching never joining in. Waiting in the wings of time, watching other lives slide by.

Will/Bran works so wonderfully as a ship because, for a little while, neither boy is properly affixed to time - Will wanders it, Bran's been transplanted through it, and both belong to one another in their shared lack of belongingness to the world in which both physically live. But then Bran chooses not to step out of time altogether - in fact chooses very directly to rejoin time, to become fully a part of the human world in which he was raised. And Will can't make that choice, could never make that choice, because he's ultimately not human even though he thought for eleven years that he was. Bran, who felt like a freak but was really a hero, ends his story by reintegrating into contemporary society; Will, the ordinary boy who wasn't ever really either of those things, has to end his by giving up on the idea of integration, or even community: one go alone, right?

This passage also shows my inner font nerd coming close to the surface. I'm a graphic designer's child; I can't help it.