not too loud cause the baby's sleeping

[lotesse]

--I always find myself wanting to tell someone about, or write about, the times when I experience intense overlays of affect or signification. For me, this is what it's all about, what I read for, what I listen for, what I live for. But they're always so deeply obscure and personal that I'm never sure if they're worth sharing, if the frission of it is something that can be conveyed to people outside of my head.

I'm going to anyway, because this is my journal, and I can be self-indulgent.

The bit from The Dark Is Rising with "Good King Wenceslas" has always been important and central for me. Part of that is that I was a choir girl whose peak event of the year was the holiday concert with the local symphony orchestra; part of it has to do with my general Thing for traditional carols. But it was also about Will and Merriman, alienation and community unlooked-for. Will loses the support of his brother's voice, sings alone as he goes forward, and just as he's wondering what he's going to do to keep the song going by himself Merriman comes in on the joyful king's verse, lyrically offering protection and restoring harmony. The Old Ones aren't always good community for Will - there's a darkly funny way that I think of DiR as the opposite of Harry Potter, where becoming a wizard on your eleventh birthday means leaving your abusive family for a wonderful world of magic, because in his waking Will loses his family, his humanity, and his future, and only gains a set of crochety old absentee mentors. Will Stanton is the eternal graduate student. But in that moment, singing "Good King Wenceslas," Merriman comes through for his pupil. In that moment, at least, Will isn't left alone.

And it means something to me that this is all framed in terms of poverty, generosity, honor, and snow.

So, on the opposite side of the collision--

I keep drawing the Fool card in my tarot, shall I or shan't I, and one of the questions pulling at me now is how much I want to keep fighting to wodge myself into the world versus how much I want to just go be the crazy witch lady at the edge of the woods. And I've been reading a lot of pieces like this one at the Atlantic about reclusive or in-revolt artists who start letting the madness through; the link centers Blackness, touching on Kanye West, Dave Chapelle, Lauryn Hill, and Nina Simone, but Courtney Love and Tori Amos are also artists that are part of this for me, in addition to badgal Rihanna. I grok that there are racialized aspects of this subject position that I can't legitimately lay claim to, but it's been giving me language for the simultaneous turn-away and aggressive-visibility impulses I've been feeling.

Well.

I've had a rough few days, dealing with an unusually nasty menstrual period, handling unfamiliar work that I'm less fluent with, and also doing first talks with a new therapist that I'm checking out. So yes, I was watching What Happened, Miss Simone? on Netflix looking for catharsis; but I really wasn't expecting the doc to open with her coming onstage, pushing the edge of her alienation, and sit down at the piano and start playing "Good King Wenceslas." God. The footage is from her 1976 return concert in Switzerland. She casts this beautiful incantation - she draws her limits verbally, hard, and it's awkward, and she does the throw-away gesture over her shoulder, and tells them they have to go with her to the beginning, girlhood. And this is still before the title card.

I recommend the doc, fwiw. It bothered me sometimes that her songs were used so heavily in the soundtrack; it especially nerdled me that "Put A Spell On You" underscored the section on her experience of marital abuse. It's too specific and too general all at once; those songs are standards, not confessional contemp-style singer-songwriter pieces. The civil rights music is different, it belongs in the context.

Comments

[starlady]

You're so painfully correct about how DIR is the opposite of HP. Except, the crowning irony: Dumbledore is arguably even more ruthless than the Old Ones and the Light.

[lotesse]

I've been thinking since yesterday about why, even though you're objectively right on the ruthlessness thing, I still feel Will's tragedy so much more intensely than Harry's. I think it's because Harry has so many co-victims and fellow-sufferers, young and old - which makes Dumbledore much worse, morally - while Will has no one at all that he can tell. He can speak openly to Bran for an interval of a few years, before Bran is made to forget; apart from Bran, Will has no real peers. The Old Ones who had been a part of his childhood, like the Dawsons and Miss Greythorne, and the ones like Captain Toms he works with in his quests, leave the world with all the others.

We never see the moment when Will finds out about the "watchman" thing, and I suppose there's room for ambiguity in terms of how much it was known by any of the Old Ones - the "one go alone" interpretation question and all that. But if Merriman knew it all along it makes his affect even colder - at least Dumbledore was affectionate and grandfatherly to his sacrificial lamb, you know?

[msilverstar]

Your view is always fascinating, in unexpected and wonderful ways. I might watch the doc, with your warning in mind.

I did a similar choir thing but being Jewish had a complex relationship with the words.

[lotesse]

you always leave the sweetest comments :)

in re: Christmas carols, that was one of the things that my being brought up so totally un-churched made easier - because my family didn't have any particular relationship to Christianity one way or another, I'm able to enjoy a lot of Christian-derivative art on a pretty purely aesthetic basis. I've always been into the Christmas iconography and narrative, and anyway up here in the snowy north winter holidays are a big deal!

[copracat]

I love what you have to say here about Will and Merriman.

[lotesse]

thank you! I've been attempting to Commit Fic on the Subject, but as my fic-finishing muscle is sprained I don't know if any of it will see the light of day.