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“Why do you style yourself "your worthless and insignificant brother"? You recognize your insignificance? . . . Recognize it before God; perhaps, too, in the presence of beauty, intelligence, nature, but not before men. Among men you must be conscious of your dignity. Why, you are not a rascal, you are an honest man, aren't you?

Well, respect yourself as an honest man and know that an honest man is not something worthless. Don't confound "being humble" with "recognizing one's worthlessness."

Anton Chekhov, The Letters of Anton Chekhov

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The Power of Silence in A Story

Harold Pinter believed that what isn't said in a play can be more important than what is said. He thought that when characters face intense emotions or experiences, they often struggle to express them, or choose to stay silent. This creates mystery, tension, and deeper meaning. Pinter’s famous use of pauses and silences lets the audience read between the lines, making the unspoken just as powerful as the dialogue itself.

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“If you’re thinking about something every day, you’re not really remembering it. It’s just there, like heartburn.” — James Ijames, FAT HAM

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During wars the mothers of every nation, with their children pressed to them, scan the skies in horror for their deadly invention of science.

- Bertolt Brecht, from "A Short Organum for the Theatre"

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"Our representations of human social life are designed for river-dwellers, fruit farmers, builders of vehicles and upturners of society, whom we invite into our theatres and beg not to forget their cheerful occupations while we hand the world over to their minds and hearts, for them to change as they think fit."

- Bertolt Brecht, from "A Short Organum for the Theatre"

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“First thing in a crisis. Ancient times, soon as some major shit went down - war, famine, death of the Pharaoh - first thing you do, find a goat. Put all your shit on its head - fear, shame, iniquity, whatever you got - and you let it loose, out into the wilderness. Then you hunt it down, cut out its heart and burn it as an offering to the gods. Have you done that yet? Did I miss it?”

— Jez Butterworth, THE HILLS OF CALIFORNIA

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“Magic in fantasy for children is not the redistribution of wealth, but the redistribution of hope.” — Diane Purkiss, “Books of Magic”

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Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red [ID in ALT]

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“The touch which does not understand is the touch which corrupts, the touch which does not understand that which it touches is the touch which corrupts that which it touches, and which corrupts itself.”

— Tony Kushner, from Homebody/Kabul

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“Magic and books: there aren’t many things more important than that. But there are one or two.”

— Lev Grossman, THE MAGICIAN’S LAND (via betterinthedarkblog)

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Poetry Hunter (Uncontrollable Passion)

poetry hunter

lost in mist

sage mysteries of language

woods and words and vocabulary

fragrant, verdant trees

trails and pathways

metaphor and rhymes and meter

I’m a junkie, hooked

traumatized, dramatized

syllables and stanzas

stand center stage

I turn the page

I disengage

I cannot control the fire

flames of my uncontrollable passion

ignited desire

poems, my bounty

waterfalls or fountains

I write in great shadows of mountains

priest of nothing

poet, some become legends

most of us just make the ends

poetry hunter

most of our lives fall asunder

how can we not help but wonder…

@followcb | Copyright October 4, 2018

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you’ve all heard of golden retriever’s now get ready for 

Golden Shepherd - a mix breed between a German Shepherd and a Golden Retriever 

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Your gift, Merlin, was given to you for a reason

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RESIST THE REPTILE

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You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Nothing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood. For we have only what we know we must lose, what we are willing to lose… That selfhood which is our torment, and our treasure, and our humanity, does not endure. It changes it is gone, a wave on the sea. Would you have the sea grow still and the tides cease, to save one wave, to save yourself?

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore (via reptilealiensmadeoflight)

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RIP

Possibly the most important person in my life is Ursula K. Le Guin.

I say is, even as news has broken that she died today, 1/23/18, because what she gave me is still here. Le Guin’s books demolished and reshaped my mental framework. Her boundless empathy, her refusal to treat anything as simple, her belief in the sheer power of words: they’re all the lenses through which I view the world. (Or try to, anyway.) She was the first person to teach me the value of uncertainty. To be convinced of a single ideal is to be dangerous to yourself and others. Nothing is that easy; doubt is a great tool. I am who I am now, and will be what I will be tomorrow, because of her.

I first read her because of a death. When I was thirteen or so, my youngest aunt passed away of cancer and my family inherited her boxed set of the Earthsea trilogy. I read them with a sense of trespass: they were full of magic, and I wasn’t even allowed to read Harry Potter. And when I was finished, I put them aside for years, not realizing the seed they’d planted. Then, in my early twenties, once I caught on to what was happening in my head, I picked them back up. I went on to The Left Hand of Darkness, and from there to the rest of her body of work. Each one fixed a part of me I didn’t know was broken.

Her work is so self-assured you don’t quite realize at first how good it is, and how unexpected. Her style is tough, clear, and indelible; she doesn’t need to impress anyone with verbal flourishes. There isn’t a word out of place. Meanwhile, she constructs worlds far removed from typical fantasy. There aren’t quite heroes and there aren’t quite villains. The universe won’t be fixed by killing a dark lord; more often than not, the answer is understanding. But she doesn’t pretend that’s easy. And that’s one of the best things about her. Never in all her work is there a whiff of bullshit. No facile answers or easy solutions. Where lesser authors might offer the catharsis of a battle, she has diplomatic negotiations. This is such a different kind of fantasy that I’m always a little shocked and disoriented in her books.

She takes people outside the default of Straight White Male and brings them in, gives them center stage. Many of her protagonists are women, or queer, or people of color, or genderfluid, or some of those combined, or all at once. And she does it naturally, without grandstanding, without ever saying look how virtuous I am. It was just how she writes. After all, why wouldn’t you? Why not present a range of experiences beyond the Brave Hero? One of her best books, Tehanu, is about a housewife. Another of her best, Powers, is about a slave—not one with a grand destiny, just a boy who wants to be free.

She mistrusts heroes and governments and even power itself. When she writes any kind of idealized society, it is always a bit granular, a bit anarchist. A lot anarchist, actually. She understands the human impulse towards organization, understands its necessity, but picks at it anyway. The importance of consent in all things is immanent in all her work, so omnipresent it’s almost invisible. Her most scathing critiques are reserved for authority and those who abuse it. Even, really, those who possess it, for there’s no guarantee they’ll use it wisely.

And amazingly, she was never, ever dull. Political fantasy and science fiction can be daunting: lots of talking, lots of lords and kings and admirals and emperors. Very abstract, really: a fantasy of statistics. But her characters are rarely in positions of power. To them, the struggle is always as deep and important as their very bones: Rather than a revolution, she writes about a young girl whose life depends on a change in the social order.

This foregrounding of the everyday person is also a masterclass in worldbuilding. You learn far more about the life and breath of Earthsea or Ansul from the small rhythms of kitchen and market than you would if the stories focused on a Hero™. We can’t necessarily grasp a battle on the scale of the Pelennor Fields, but when Memer is thrilled to find some fresh greens for sale, you know immediately how terrible the occupation has been for her, how devastating the war was. And Memer is always alert to safe routes home, avoiding soldiers, good places to hide in the ruins. But in the midst of that, there’s still the taste of fish cooked with greens.

That emphasis on contrast, of simple joys amidst complex evil (or vice versa), and on death inextricable from life, ties to Le Guin’s interest in Taoism. Even in books written when she was young, this engagement with death is present. Her books accept it as a fact, not necessarily a tragedy. Only in silence, the word. Her young adult work, therefore, is often far more mature than a lot of fiction for adults. After all, you can only know a story’s meaning once it ends. And the same with a person’s life.

In the few hours since I heard of her death, I’ve learned more about what she means to me than I thought possible. How I think, how I write, how I exist, have all been shaped by her. On Twitter, I said, “A great light has departed”, and someone responded with, “It will shine through her books forever.” Which is also true of those of us who read them, loved them, and absorbed them.

So I’ll go home from work today. I’ll make something good to eat. I’ll wash the dishes. And I’ll pick up one of her books and be changed again.

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RIP Ursula K. Le Guin

RIP Ursula K. Le Guin. 

One of my favorite little details in the Wizard of Earthsea, one of my favorite books as a kid, is that, when speaking the dragon language, it was impossible to tell a lie. I also loved how often her heroes were anthropologists dedicated to exploring alien cultures, like in her classic The Word for World is Forest. Supposedly, this was because her father was an anthropologist.

“We live in capitalism. Its’ power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.”