#the idea of working on a poem had briefly occurred to me too

[fortes-fortuna-iogurtum]

well the plan was to work on my Honours application paper this afternoon... but my brain is fried. I've done nothing but count and enter numbers for the past two days, and apparently that has drained every bit of productivity or paper-editing power that I might once have possessed.

[holmesoverture]

I posted another fic! Still restricted to AO3 users for now, but I've included a snippet below the cut. It even includes an indirect Hobbit reference for funsies :)

March 13, 1945

My dear Watson,

It has occurred to me that I was not as considerate as I perhaps should have been regarding the recent vicissitude in your personal habits. You were of course well within your rights to employ whatever methods necessary to escape Dedrick’s associate, even if those methods involved inadvertently sacrificing your facial hair. It is only that I have never known you to look any other way, and the idea that weeks will pass before your face is restored to its usual condition was a disturbing one.

In short, I apologise for yelling at you for shaving your moustache and I would like to offer a small token as a penance. I don’t know why you insist upon keeping written accounts of my adventures when you know I won’t allow you to sacrifice my anonymity by publishing them, but I know that doing so makes you happy. Therefore, to make amends for my behaviour, I will tell you how I reunited the pieces of the broken key, rediscovered the lost windows of St. Aidan’s, and almost rescued you from two aspiring art thieves.

Our misfortunes began two mornings past. We were working our way through both our breakfasts, such as they were, and a lively discussion on the literary merit, such as it is, of Nordic poetry.

“But this makes no sense,” I protested. “Just look at this passage here: ‘Nyi and Nithi, Northri and Suthri/Austri and Vestri, Althjof, Dvalin/Nar and Nain, Niping, Dain/Bifur, Bofur, Bombur—’ and on and on it goes! It stops in the middle of the narrative to list off dozens of dwarfs who have no bearing whatever on the story the author has just introduced.”

“That text is centuries old,” you replied. “Passages such as that one were probably intercalated from other sources. Bellows says as much in his introduction.”

“That is only an excuse for its gaucherie, not a cure.”

“Bluster all you like, you’ll never convince me these poems aren’t a perfectly lovely way to spend an evening. Besides, I should hope that I, the aspiring author, am rather more familiar with good writing than you, the man who finds muddy footprints more entertaining than an afternoon at the cinema.”

“Muddy footprints make more sense than those silly comedies you waste your pension on.”

You prepared to defend your poor taste, probably with something along the lines of how comedy is one of the only genres not to regularly feature gunshots and explosions, and how paying to forget the war for a few hours was not a waste at all. I in turn would argue that scientific journals provided the same effect without the implausible plot devices and painful overacting. Then you would shake your head at me, with affection I hope, and flop back into your armchair by the fireplace and read your intercalated poetry as obviously and as obnoxiously as you could without making a sound. Fortunately we were saved the trouble of re-enacting this argument by Mrs. Hudson, who announced the arrival of a new client.

I told her to send him up and she went to do so, pausing halfway down the stair to readjust her left shoe, which she had been a bit hasty about stepping into when she heard the ring of the bell. She spoke briefly with our visitor in a voice too low for me to clearly hear and then went out to tend her infernal chickens, so the man—it was probably a man, for few women wore boots so heavy and broad, or possessed a gait so long and loud—ascended the stair alone. His knock was confident and perfunctory, performed out of a sense of obligation rather than genuine courtesy, and he entered without awaiting a response. He wore a recently-purchased secondhand suit—he was saving his coupons for something else, then—and had stayed up working on papers of some sort rather later than he should have. I remember you saying later that he could have been handsome if not for the thick sinister brows and the slippery smile. He introduced himself as James Dedrick and insisted that his story would be well worth our while.

[barricadebops]

A combination of 2, 5, 7 and 11. For my loves E and R.

Prompts:

"Is there a reason why you're blushing like that?"/"OH you're jealous!"/"Please just kiss me already." /"I think I'm in love with you."

The creak of the door opened wide enough to spill streams of light into the dark room as Grantaire turned away and groaned, an arm draped across his eyes. 

See, it wasn't that he was sick or had a headache that he needed to stay in bed and rest, and that the light was currently unbearable. None of that was true.

The matter at hand was that the day prior, Grantaire had broken his leg attempting to help Musichetta move into her new apartment with Joly and Bossuet, and it seemed Bossuet's bad luck was spreading to infect others with the way Grantaire had tripped and fallen down the stairs, breaking his leg in a rather painful manner. 

Now that he thought of it, Bossuet was near him when the accident occurred. Yes, it seemed Bossuet was definitely spreading his bad luck onto the others, starting with him.

And the thing is, it was just a broken leg. It wasn't as if he had caught the plague and was going to die. But Joly ordered him strict bed rest for the rest of that day continuing into tomorrow, and as much of a jolly man Joly could be, he could also muster quite the threatening smile when it came to medical matters. 

So Grantaire wasn't taking chances. Besides, even if he wanted to, it's not like Enjolras would let him. His boyfriend was taking this whole role of "personal-carer" (he said he refused to call himself a "doctor" on accounts that doing so would erase the years of hard work people like Combeferre and Joly go through to become one--Grantaire personally thought it didn't matter because none of this was necessary anyways, but hey, what does he know) a bit too seriously if you asked Grantaire. 

His boyfriend. God what a sentence. Grantaire could probably heal himself with those words only if this were some magic-kids cartoon or something.

So no, he wasn't physically sick; he was sick of having to lie in bed all day. He didn't feel sick. He wasn't sick. Hell, he didn't even have a hangover. As long as he used his crutches, he could move along. 

But alas. Joly. If he was here, he knows Joly would make some sort of a jollity out of being confined to the bed.

His attention was drawn out of his head and back to the present as the bed dipped by his side and he pitched his eyes up to Enjolras' familiar blue pair. 

Well, there wasn't much positive about his predicament, but the extra time with Enjolras? That was likely the one good thing that came out of this. 

Not that he didn't get enough time with him. But any extra time he got to spend with him was all the better. 

By his side above him, Enjolras laid a hand on his chest. "Are you feeling alright?" he murmured, mindful of the silence that preceded his entry into the room. 

Grantaire grinned up at him. "I broke my leg, Enjolras, I didn't have a stroke." All the same, he raised his own hand to curl around Enjolras', brushing a thumb over his soft skin. 

"It was worth asking," was all he replied softly. 

He rubbed another circle on Enjolras' hand before raising it up to his lips and pressing a light kiss on it. Enjolras' smile grew more brilliant even in the dim of the room. He chalked it up to the brightness of his, as Jehan once put it in a poem, exquisite teeth.

At the red that bloomed on Enjolras' cheeks, he smiled and teased, "Is there a reason why you're blushing like that?"

"Wouldn't you like to know." 

"Why yes," he grinned harder at the way his blush grew darker, and he paused a moment to press another lingering kiss on his knuckles, "I would like to know." 

Enjolras carded a hand through his curls, prompting a satisfied hum from Grantaire. "Live in suspense." 

He reached up his hand not already occupied with holding Enjolras' own and twirled a finger around a stray curl on the side of Enjolras' face.

"I thought lecture ended at three? It's--" he glanced briefly at the clock-- "five now. I'm not trying to keep you trapped at home, I can tell from personal experience it's not fun, but you've gotta understand my curiosity here."

Enjolras hummed. "Well, one of your classmates--I think he said his name was Sadiq--he said you left your newest project in Dr. Alvarez' classroom, but that her room was still open. And I would have passed the building on my way back here anyways, so I thought I could bring it home so you could still work on it. If you're up for it, that is." 

Grantaire's eyebrows knit in concern. "Enj that canvas is by far one of the heaviest things I've painted on before. You walked all the way home carrying that thing?"

With a teasing smile, Enjolras said, "It's my secret superpower." 

He quirked an eyebrow. 

Enjolras chuckled. "Alright, no I didn't walk home. The canvas does have some considerable weight to it. But I did bring it home; Maxence was driving me home, and he said he wasn't in any rush. And don't worry, I'm the one who loaded the project into the car, I know it's important. And I made sure he drove extra slow and careful too. So… here I am." 

Quite on the contrary, the idea of Enjolras on an extra slow car-ride with Maxence didn't exactly please Grantaire. Really the thought of Maxence anywhere near Enjolras didn't please him. 

He knew these were his insecurities at play. He knew he should probably address them before his behaviour turned toxic. But really, there had to be some merit to his dislike and suspicion of the man. He saw the way he would look at Enjolras, the way his touches would always linger just the slightest bit too long. And of course, Enjolras, who himself was quite the tactile person with his friends, never thought anything wrong of it. 

But everytime he was there with Enjolras, offering "companionship" by walking out of class with him, or walking him to his next lecture, or offering to help study a concept at the coffeeshop a sizeable distance away from the Cafe Musain--Grantaire couldn't help it; he seethed. 

Some of that displeasure must have shown on his face, or must have made itself heard in the beat of silence he allowed to stretch on for just a moment too long for it to not have been charged, but not with any sort of buzzing of joy. 

Enjolras' face immediately faltered. "Is something wrong?" He hesitated. "Should I have left it?" 

And despite the fact that his mind was clouded over in a haze of resentment at the mention of Maxence, he still had enough of it in him that he couldn't stand the way Enjolras' lips pulled down at the corners. He forced a smile on his lips as he strained to say, "No, why would you ever think that? Your mind, Enjolras, I swear I don't know where you get your ideas from sometimes, it's unreal--"

"Grantaire," Enjolras interrupted. He raised his eyebrows in a silent question. 

But Grantaire himself had never been one for answering what had been asked of him, so instead he smirked a little this time and lightly squeezed Enjolras' hand still held in his own. 

Sighing, he could tell Enjolras knew there was no point in pursuing a topic he knew he wouldn't get answers to, so instead he shifted and moved Grantaire head up off his pillow so he could instead lie his head in Enjolras' lap. He let out a contented sigh and burrowed closer as he felt his boyfriend's hand slip into his curls, stroking softly.

"Combeferre and Courfeyrac really need to sort things out," Enjolras murmured quietly. "I swear I'm going to lose it with the pining in that house. It's thick enough to--"

"To cut with a knife?" he finished lazily. Enjolras hummed an affirmative.

"Exactly. I mean, how any two fools can be this oblivious I have no clue. Courfeyrac keeps going out of his way to do all these things for Combeferre, and while I generally don't like using this phrase because of the way it tends to imply that romantic relationships are somehow superior to platonic ones even though that's not true at all, it's clear to anyone that Courfeyrac's trying to show he thinks of Combeferre as maybe more than a friend, and I don't know how Combeferre--who himself is clearly in love with Courfeyrac!--can miss them, I mean the gestures are clear enough--"

He hummed distractedly, too taken with the way Enjolras' hand felt in his hair. "Like the way Maxence drives you around all the time?" 

The hand in his hair stopped stroking abruptly. "What?" 

Grantaire peaked his eyes open in confusion before shutting them closed again, wondering why Enjolras stopped before the memory of the last few seconds struck him hard enough to make his eyes fly open once more as he realized what he said. 

"Wait, no, I--"

"Why does that matter?" 

He glanced away nervously, only to find once he looked back at his boyfriend, that Enjolras didn't look angry or even miffed. If anything, there seemed to be a hint of a smile playing at his lips. 

His throat dried; he wasn't exactly sure how he was supposed to react. "I…" 

Enjolras tilted his head, peering into his eyes with a sort of intensity it seemed only he possessed, though offset just the slightest bit by the way he seemed to be biting back a smile. "What's wrong with that? In fact, it's better when considering carpooling is a good choice to reduce emissions--though not the best way, mind you--and it saves time too. I don't see what's wrong. Maybe it's his vehicle?"

"Enjolras--"

"Or maybe--wait!" Enjolras' grin broke out in full this time. "OH you're jealous!"

Grantaire let out a long-suffering groan. "You're going to tease me about it?" 

Enjolras made a dramatic show of thinking. "Well," he started, "if I did tease you, you would kind of deserve it for being stupid enough to be jealous of someone I clearly see as a friend." 

"Well he clearly sees you as much more than that," he muttered darkly in reply. 

Enjolras pulled a hand through his hair, though this time was more to call attention to his eyes once more. "I know that, Grantaire. And I've been meaning to talk to him about it, too," he said softly.

His eyebrows crinkled in confusion. "Wait, you--?" 

"I'm not entirely oblivious, you know," he continued with a hint of amusement. "I know that he's been… trying to get past the territory of friendship. But of course, I'm not exactly looking for that with him. And I'm going to talk to him about it soon." He paused for a second before continuing on, "You, however, should comfort yourself with the trust that I hope you have in me, enough to know I wouldn't be dishonest to you in that kind of way ever."

He sighed. "I know. I don't doubt you, I just…" he trailed off, unsure of how to finish the sentence, even if he could recognize the emotions swirling around in his head. 

Enjolras cupped his cheek, and he gazed above into his face, an expression so gentle it almost made one wonder how it could turn severe, though it did happen on occasion. "We'll talk about this later, but we will talk about it," is all he said. 

"I'm sorry." 

Enjolras leaned forward, his curls reaching low enough to tickle Grantaire's forehead. "You are forgiven," he whispered before pressing a soft kiss to his skin.  

Grantaire closed his eyes took a moment to revel in the feeling of Enjolras' lips on his skin, humming in content for the while they lingered, and attempting to stifle his disappointment when he drew back. Of course, his attempts were no good and Enjolras laughed.

"Too quick?" he asked, teasing. Grantaire opened his eyes once more and grinned. 

"Always too quick. Would it be too fast to ask for another?" 

"That depends." Enjolras scratched softly at his head. "What's the magic word?" 

Grantaire's grin grew. "Magic words, you mean. All hail Feuilly our saviour."

Enjolras let out a surprised laugh. "While that is true, it wasn't what I was looking for." He shrugged his shoulders and smiled down at him mischievously. "Looks like no kiss for you--"

"No!" he interrupted. Enjolras' laughs grew more vibrant, making Grantaire soften at the sight of it. "Please?" 

"Hm. Please what?" Enjolras continued to tease. 

"Please just kiss me already."

This time, when Enjolras' lips kissed his own, he could feel the way they stretched into a smile, prompting Grantaire to smile into the kiss too. 

When Enjolras drew back, Grantaire had thought he had never seen quite so lovely a sight in so long. If Enjolras at his most fiery was like the radiance of the bright sun, then at his gentleness he had to be the soft colours of the morning's dawn. 

And for Grantaire, who had for so long seen only dark night, it was surely a most beautiful sight. One that ought not to be corrupted with a toxicity such as jealousy.

"I think I'm in love with you," he muttered in amazement. 

At that, Enjolras' smile simply grew even more dazzling.

"I'd sure hope so, or this engagement ring you bought me really would have been a bit of a waste," his fiance said, joy evident in his speech. "But know that I love you too."

[benwllbond]

14 for Isabelle and Thomas for ghosts prompts

i hope that you enjoy this! :)

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feel free to send me a prompt!

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Thomas was all too aware of what people said about him, far too aware of the laughter that occurred when he left a room, the jokes at his own expense - not that he’d let them know that. He wasn’t sure if it was his stubbornness that left him all too unwilling to give in to what they wanted - for him to shut up and give up - or just a vain need to have attention on himself, but whatever it was, it left him unwilling to say was enough was enough and put down his pen for good.

He wouldn’t lie and say it didn’t take a toll, putting his heart on pages only for his words to land upon the ears of those unappreciative of what he had to say, those people who listened with blank faces and their eyes glazed over to work that he had slaved over, that he was proud of. Thomas, in the privacy of his own quarters, would readily admit to himself the way it felt like his heart was being torn apart with every bitter reaction. He could share, if only to the paper on his desk, how much it hurt him when his mother absentmindedly placed a poem of his in a frame, never bothering to actually read it, dismissing him with a brief and detached “Good job, dear”, that he could tell her heart was never truly in.

When he had met the beautiful maiden Isabelle, he had sensed, in a way, a kindred spirit within her - the soul of a true artist, so to say - which was a refreshing break from the philistines that seemed to meet him at every turn. Unlike him, her beautiful melodies were met with applause and true emotion, emotion she elicited from her audience with every key she pressed, and deservedly so. Not only was she a woman of great elegance, but surely the most talented person Thomas had ever met.

For quite a while, he had observed in silence - Thomas would see her on the days where the socialites would gather under one roof to enjoy the offerings of the arts, and watch her from afar, in awe of her grace as she carefully played every note of whatever song she had to present to her crowd. Looking on, he would alternate between getting lost in her music and her beauty, both of which were awfully alluring, and it was all that Thomas could do to resist going over and introducing himself, which would most likely only lead to his own humiliation.

But as he watched on, he would compose verses in his mind, a perfect muse in front of him. Thomas found lines naturally weaving together better than ever before in her presence, and he yearned to spend more time with her, around her, lines flowing from pen to paper, but still the fear of humiliation held him back - it was far easier not to let the belittling damage his ego when he could pretend it didn’t happen, because he never saw it, but Isabelle’s rejection would without a doubt tear his heart in two.

Thomas then figured it was natural to feel apprehensive as he became aware of Isabelle’s eyes on him as he recited one of his poems, her focused face standing out in a sea of bored eyes. He didn’t often get nervous when he would present, well aware that whether it was his best or worst performance, no one in his audience would appreciate his art regardless, but the idea that the muse to this very piece actually appeared interested, it nearly caused him to stumble on his flowing words, disrupting the rhythm and rhyme.

Refusing to give up any of his dignity by stuttering or stammering, he slowed his speaking, taking the time to carefully recall every syllable before he pronounced it, until once again he lost himself in his own story-telling, the people in front of him fading into the back of his mind.

As his epic came to a close, he bowed to the audience sat before him, imagining them applauding loudly, rather than the few, soft claps he always received. Looking out for a moment, he dared to catch the eyes of the darling Isabelle, who gave him a sweet smile, gesturing slightly towards the door with her head. His eyes widening, he could hardly breathe from the apprehension, if the tilt of her head meant what he thought it did.

She wanted to talk to him.

Rushing off the small stage with as much grace as he could muster, he waited impatiently for people to begin to move around again, to gather in small groups to have a chat, so that he could slip out unnoticed. He saw Isabelle leave, once again briefly catching his eyes, and he gave a slight nod, waiting a few moments and then following in her footsteps.

Once he left the main room, he followed Isabelle silently to a small sitting room, a place they could find privacy from the listening ears of the hordes of the local upper class.

“Your poem was beautiful, Mister Thorne, I’m sorry that most here are too uncultured to recognise that.”

He could feel his cheeks going red at the praise, slightly disbelieving that Isabelle could be so perfect, both possessing such beauty, and being able to appreciate art where others failed.

“You may just call me Thomas,” he began, “and I’m afraid that even the best of my verse will never compare to your music.”

Apparently his compliment fell on deaf ears, as she disregarded it, laughing softly, a pretty giggle for a gorgeous woman.

“You’re blushing, Thomas!”

The fact she had noticed only caused him to flush even redder, embarrassed at being called out on his reaction to the compliment.

“I am doing nothing of the sort!” Thomas denied, not that there was any real use when they both knew it to be true, but if nothing else, it did make Isabelle laugh, and he was more than willing to give up his dignity for that.

He couldn’t help but join in with her contagious laughter, and they sat there for a moment, not a single concern for the rest of the world around them. While they both knew the moment would eventually be broken, they simply shared it while they could, and Thomas could already feel words writing themselves in his head, ready to fall onto a page when he got the chance, a possible magnum opus, his perfect work.

Thomas was certain he was feeling the beginnings of storybook love, the feeling that he had yearned for since he had heard of it, in tales from his childhood. He could not wait to tell his cousin Francis of this newfound joy he had found.

[aellynera]

Frayed Wires (Nathan Bateman x Reader)

FRAYED WIRES (Nathan Bateman x Reader)

(so i decided i may turn the drunk texts thing into a series? i decided at least to do one with Nathan because...well...it’s Nathan. the poem he quotes is Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was incidentally married to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein (or: The Modern Prometheus) which is also kind of appropriate for Nathan and anyway i sat down today and this happened.)

Word Count: 2122(ish)

Summary: All you want to do is sleep. All Nathan wants to do is talk.

Warnings: Language, naturally.

(Nathan’s texts are in bold. Your texts are in bold and italic.)

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

You reached blindly for your phone as it rattled on the bedside table. You had no idea what time it was but you did know it was the middle of the night, your phone should not be going off, and you had gotten entirely too little sleep. Like, maybe two hours worth. You were so tired and groggy that you made the mistake of checking your messages before you actually even thought about what you were doing.

Do you ever think about the meaning of life?

I mean like really think about it.

Why we’re here, why the sky is green and the grass is blue?

No wait that’s not right.

You sighed and buried your face in the pillow. It was 3:27 in the morning and Nathan was texting you. Which was just odd anyway, since he knew where your room was and it was much more his style to just walk in and start a random conversation with you in person. 

He was probably drunk.

And now he could see that you had read the messages, so you were going to have to reply, or he really would show up at your door. Technically it was his door, it was his house, you just worked for him and stayed there, but the point was you were not in the mood to deal with him at all right now, and most decidedly not in the flesh.

You rolled your eyes before sending him a reply. You really should just ignore it, but...you were annoyed. Nathan was annoying. And it was now 3:30 in the morning and you were going to push a few buttons. Figuratively AND literally! your sleep-deprived brain cheered.

And things like why is water wet and air is invisible?

YES exactly see that’s why I want you.

I’m sorry?

Your brain. I want to pick you up. Your brain I mean. Pick your brain.

You just want me for my brain, huh?

You have a very nice brain.

Yep, Nathan was definitely drunk.

Not that him being drunk was anything out of the ordinary. But a few hours ago, when you were both in the lab testing some of his most recent ideas about the AI code, he had seemed...normal? Well, normal for Nathan anyway. He wasn’t irritated, he wasn’t condescending, he was actually (you honestly could not believe you were even thinking this) pleasant to be around.

You had been working for Nathan as his personal assistant for a few months. It was a promotion for sure over being a code slinger in a cubicle, but sometimes you honestly wondered what made you say yes to this bizarre existence. It was a beautiful house, beautiful scenery, interesting and highly intellectual conversations...when Nathan was sober.

There was also something you could never quite put your finger on. Something that was shifting as the weeks went on and you spent more time working alongside Nathan in the lab. As you spent evenings eating sushi and steaks and whatever else you were in the mood for that night (most nights, he actually let you choose the menu, you realized.) As you took afternoon walks around the estate, just taking in the scenery. As you debated various philosophies and ideas and theories and tried your damndest to prove Nathan wasn’t always right about everything. He almost seemed like he appreciated it all, but he would never say anything.

And you weren’t about to open that can of worms. Especially when he wasn’t sober.

How drunk are you right now?

On a scale of shitfaced to really fucking blitzed I would say I’m feeling no pain.

Jesus Christ. Well that was obvious. It was obvious just from the fact that he was texting you. Nathan was so uptight about security and data leaks and wiretapping and signals being hijacked (he’d admitted to doing it himself, so he did have a point) but had decided, after much insistence from you, that rigging the cell phones to only work inside the compound was an acceptable idea. It was so vast, you’d said, and what if something happened and one of you was all the way across the house or down in the lab, how were you supposed to let the other person know? It made sense at the time.

Now you were vaguely regretting it.

You could count on one hand the number of times you’d actually considered your boss to be pleasant to be around, and you still had your thumb left over just in case you needed to add to that tally.

At least personality wise. He was definitely pleasant to look at. Very pleasant.

You coughed and cleared your throat. That was not a line of thought to travel right now. The proper course of action was to get him to stop texting you.

A few minutes passed in glorious silence. Maybe a new, shiny thought had occurred to him and he was madly writing it down on a Post-It note. Maybe he just got bored and went to get a new drink. Maybe he’d finally just passed out and---

What are you thinking about?

Dammit. How to make you shut up, your brain snapped back. How to get you to let me sleep. How good your arms and shoulders look in that tank top after you’ve been hitting that punching back and you’re flushed and sweaty and…. Oh no. No no no. Stop it right now, brain.

Nathan hated to beat around the bush. Straightforward was the best policy with him, right?

How to get you to shut up and let me sleep.

Wonderful, glorious silence for exactly forty-six seconds.

Bro...that’s...so not cool.

Okay, this was getting ridiculous. Why were you participating in this? Why was he? You narrowed your eyes and looked toward a corner of your room. You hoped he could see you glaring into the camera that you knew was there and that he was watching while he was texting you. If not, you were sure he would watch it in the actual morning and you hoped the look was withering enough to make him think twice. Probably not. Because this was Nathan Bateman.

Your incredibly narcissistic, incredibly intelligent, incredibly attractive...stop it brain.

But he was pushing your buttons right back. Neither of you could ever really back away from an exchange like this..

I’m not your “bro”, Nathan. Please knock this shit off.

Dude, it’s a figure of speech.

I’m not your dude, either. Please just stop talking.

What’s wrong with dude. Dude is a gender neutral term, anyone can be a dude. Guys are dudes, chicks are dudes, dudes are dudes

Yeah, well, you’re kind of being an asshole, dude.

Dude. Chill.

Turning my phone off now.

No, wait, don’t. I’m sorry. I’ll stop.

Now that was...unexpected. Nathan Bateman just apologized to you? For being a drunk asshole in the middle of the night? Your eyes narrowed again. Suspicious.

You’ll stop texting me so I can go back to sleep?

No not that. I’ll stop calling you dude.

Oh for the love of...you closed your eyes and briefly considered the merits of hurling your phone at the surveillance camera.

Nathan, seriously, can we please just leave this until the morning?

A whole minute of wonderful, glorious, blessed silence this time. You couldn’t believe he might be considering this.

You were right.

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away

If a brain cramp was an actual thing, yours would most certainly be doing it now. You could barely even process it. He was drunk as hell and he was quoting poetry to you? You supposed you probably shouldn’t be entirely surprised, he’d quoted Oppenheimer once in a worse stupor (which you could only quantify because he had actually passed out that time.)

Are you fucking serious right now.

What.

Are you fucking quoting Ozymandias to me right now?

I am.

You couldn’t get the color of the sky right earlier, and now you’re just flawlessly quoting philosophical Romantic poetry at me?

I am.

You are not a normal person, Nathan Bateman.

What is normal anyway, besides really fucking boring? Who wants to be normal?

I would like to be somewhat normal, at least between the hours of midnight and 8am.

See, I knew there was a reason I liked you.

That was the second time he said that, you noted. You found it hard to believe. Nathan liked his work, his routine, his own brain. He liked talking about his work and how smart he was. Other than telling you that you were doing a great job, he barely handed out a single compliment, and if he somehow accidentally did, it was so backhanded you weren’t sure you could actually define it as one.

You mean you like my brain.

Well, yeah, your brain is fucking amazing. It has to be if you work with me.

I work for you, Nathan, not with you. But thanks?

No, no, see, that’s where you’re wrong. You work with me. We’re like partners. None of that employer employee bullshit.

Oooookay now I am one thousand percent sure you are completely piss drunk.

I am but that doesn’t make it any less true.

You could almost hear him saying those words in your head. You could see the way his eyebrows went up, the intensity in his eyes, the way he held his finger up to make the point.

The thought made your brain go slightly fuzzy, and not from exhaustion. Because now you were wide awake. Damn him.

Okay, Nathan, I’ll bite. What do I have to do to get you to stop doing this right now?

There was a pause before he answered, and you swore you’d heard a phone alert that wasn’t your own. It sounded like it was coming from...oh no, he wasn’t…

Getting tired of typing. Can I come talk to you for a while?

Are you outside my door right now?!

You heard the phone chime very clearly this time. He was, definitely.

I am.

You sighed, deeply. So deeply.

Is that really a good idea?

I think it’s a great idea.

Nathan, being serious here.

You could have sworn you heard him sigh from the other side of the door. He could have just come inside. It was his house, his keycard worked on all the doors.

But the door didn’t open.

So am I. Please can I come in? My mind just won’t shut off and I really am fucking drunk but talking to you is helping but tired of typing shit out, I’d rather say it to you.

I wanna see you. And tell you how sexy your brain is.

And that I like you for more than your brain.

And you knew in that instant there really was only one way to get him to shut up. And it was to just let him talk. It made sense, in an oddly Nathan kind of way. What’s the worst that could happen, really? He’d come in, you’d talk, he’d eventually pass out, maybe you could get a couple more hours of sleep, and then in the morning you’d either talk about it on a very deep cerebral level or you’d just pretend it had never happened at all. 

A press to the door release button on the side of the table and the latch let go. The door opened, revealing Nathan standing on the other side. Still wearing what he’d been wearing in the lab earlier that night, black lounge pants and that tight white henley he seemed to love so much. The corner of his mouth turned up in the most miniscule of smiles, but it was there.

You were about to toss your phone back onto the bedside table, when the text alert went off again. You shot an exasperated look in his direction, but gamely checked the message.

Did you mean what you said before? About biting?

You glanced up at Nathan and saw that the sliver of a smile had taken over most of his face and his eyebrows had raised to emphasize his question.

You didn’t say anything. You didn’t text him back. You just nodded your head to the empty spot next to you in your bed.

You had a feeling you weren’t going to get any sleep tonight after all.

~end~

taglist: @anetteaneta​ @rosemarysbaby13​ @darksideofclarke​ @girlwiththemostcake​ 

(taglist is open, let me know if you’d like to be tagged for future fics)

[46ten]

AH: marriage and military service should not mix

The summary of this post: A lot of historians have noted how important AH’s marriage to EH was to his future, a true before and after marker in his life. But the strangeness of it has gotten less attention - AH married while the war was going on, and even wrote of not hanging around the army at all in order to setup for his life with his new wife. Once one sees the oddity of that, a lot of other things fall into place in his 1780/81 letters.  

For the past few years, I’ve wanted to work more on the theory that although marriage was generally expected of the 18th century Anglo-American colonial man (see prior posts here and here), the elite in AH’s circle did not marry until their military obligations and other duties were complete. From their examples and a few phrases here and there, getting married seemed to have been frowned upon, perhaps because of the uncomfortable examples of general’s wives and this idea that romantic love with a woman was a weakness that interfered with duty and hindered one’s commitment to military glory. (I am familiar with the challenges faced by Martha Washington, Catharine Greene, and Lucy Knox; Philip Schuyler refused a return to military assignment and presidency of the Continental Congress after the death of a newborn, among other things, in 1778). AH is an exception among his circle, with Meade, in getting married during the war itself - nearly everyone else who is unmarried waits until after their military service is complete (and sometimes well after) to marry. Not enough is made of the oddity of his courtship and marriage, within his circle, while the war is ongoing.

Now to modern thought, the title of this post makes a lot of sense - relationships are often strained when one partner is in military service, and the hows and whys are very familiar to us. But for the 18th century, when adult manhood was tied to matrimony, avoiding matrimony seems odd, as does the length of some of the courtships of AH’s friends: two years for William Jackson, about the same for Tilghman, four years of flirtation for McHenry. At a time when engagements lasted a matter of weeks (and AH notes that his own is unusually long - it’s lasting “an age” in one of his letters to ES), the delay in taking the next step is notable. Even in the prior generation, although Philip Schuyler was sexually intimate with Catharine Van Rensselaer, he continued his military service and did not marry her until it became unavoidable by decency standards (CVR was 4 months pregnant). 

So what’s with AH and ES wanting to get married in such a hurry, comparatively, besides the obvious emotional ones? Maybe he really was 26-27 years old and time was running out! Another obvious possibility, noted then and noted by biographers since, was the benefits of their marriage on a personal and political dynastic level. @aswithasunbeam has noted a contemporary article (sourced from Mitchell) about what Philip Schuyler had to gain through the new attachment between himself and Washington’s aide-de-camp. (And look how quickly P. Schuyler had AH working to get GW to visit them.) The advantages for AH were obvious to, as the Marquis de Fleury stated outright to AH: “ I congratulate you heartyly on that conquest; for many Reasons: the first that you will get all that familly’s interest, & that a man of your abilities wants a Little influence to do good to his country. The second that you, will be in a very easy situation, & happin’s is not to be found without a Large estate.”

I also suspect part of AH’s decision to hurriedly marry was tied to getting a command and spending the rest of his time studying the law.* I agree with most biographers that he never takes the steps of leaving Washington’s family and asking for (Nov 1780) and then demanding (June 1781) a command without being Philip Schuyler’s son-in-law. (I also think the break with GW doesn’t happen without AH feeling VERY confident in his relationship with his new wife. EH should have been a better patriot - as in other times - and seemed less happy in her marriage, or at least not let AH read her letter to her sister.) I think that’s what Laurens knew while on parole in Phil. and causes the minor flurry of letters in late August/September 1780, when P. Schuyler was briefly at HQ and then sending lots of letters about Congress to GW, AH was going on about his planned six month leave, McHenry was writing a love poem about AH and ES and trying to get AH to get P. Schuyler’s help in getting him a command, etc . AH and ES likely intended to marry in October/early November, but both Meade and Harrison took leave instead, and AH had to stay, though he would leave in late November before their return (in fact, Harrison and Meade never returned.)

Take Laurens (left wife and daughter he’d never see in England) and Lafayette (absent from France from March 1777 to Feb 1779 and March 1780 to early 1782). Both of them left wife and child(ren) behind, and here AH was planning a long absence from military service and telling his fiancee that he’ll leave it entirely if that’s her wish. AND Meade is discussing doing exactly that! [So Laurens presumably wrote to AH - we don’t have that letter - that he hopes AH will get over this quickly, and AH wrote back that he won’t, but I’m getting ahead of myself.]

I offered to make a comparison of AH’s letters to Laurens vs Elizabeth Schuyler - while revealing of personal feelings, in content and expression they are more different than they are similar - but I think I first need to set up that major transition that’s occurring in AH’s life in 1780/81. To the extent Laurens may have objected to AH’s excitement about ES and their impending nuptials (and there’s only one phrase in one letter, and that from AH to Laurens, from which it can be interpreted that those were Laurens’ feelings), and AH felt embarrassed about conveying the news of his engagement, it was because it interfered with a (believed to be mutual) sense of military obligation and public duty and dismissal of marriage and its attendant obligations. I touch on it in a response here; I’ll try to elaborate on it in upcoming posts. [I will get into why this makes the most sense, and why claims of AH trying to spare any romantic feelings JL may have felt, quite frankly, do not make sense in a later post. Spoiler: AH wrote absurdly callous stuff re ES and his relationship with her in his letters to JL if he was hoping to spare JL’s feelings.]

I already put some of my thoughts on this in old posts that may have some helpful content and may spare me having to repeat myself too much, and then I’ll also provide some quotes from letters to get started, limited to 1777-1782 and then probably the most famous quote from 1799. 

Hamilton on marriage part 1 (overview)

Hamilton on marriage part 2 (feelings on marriage 1777-early 1780)

Hamilton-Schuyler engagement (early 1780-mid 1780)

Hamilton on marriage part 3 (my breakdown of the July-Oct 1780 letters to ES)

Hamilton on marriage part 4

Reynolds Pamphlet, part 2

And a post (not my own) about how much AH’s military involvement as Inspector General was affecting his family financially. 

Letter quotes [my emphases]: 

You and I, as well as our neighbours, are deeply interested to pray for victory, and its necessary attendant peace; as, among other good effects, they would remove those obstacles, which now lie in the way of that most delectable thing, called matrimony;—a state, which, with a kind of magnetic force, attracts every breast to it, in which sensibility has a place, in spite of the resistance it encounters in the dull admonitions of prudence, which is so prudish and perverse a dame, as to be at perpetual variance with it. AH to Catharine “Kitty” Livingston 11Apr1777

Do I want a wife? No—I have plagues enough without desiring to add to the number that greatest of all; and if I were silly enough to do it, I should take care how I employ a proxy. AH to John Laurens 1779 [likely from mid-April up to July - this letter is actually undated, and the April date is based on other mentions in the letter; both JCH and Lodge dated it December 1779]

The most determined adversaries of Hymen can find in [ES] no pretext for their hostility, and there are several of my friends, philosophers who railed at love as a weakness, men of the world who laughed at it as a phantasie, whom she has presumptuously and daringly compelled to acknowlege its power and surrender at discretion. I can the better assert the truth of this, as I am myself of the number. She has had the address to overset all the wise resolutions I had been framing for more than four years past, and from a rational sort of being and a professed contemner of Cupid has in a trice metamorphosed me into the veriest inamorato you perhaps ever saw. AH to Margarita Schuyler, Feb1780

I would add to this by way of consolation, or rather of countinance, that the family since your departure have given hourly proofs of a growing weakness. Example I verily believe is infectious. For such a predominancy is beauty establishing over their hearts, that should things continue to wear as sweet an aspect as they are now beheld in, I shall be the only person left, of the whole household, to support the dignity of human nature. But in good earnest, God bless both you, and your weakness, and preserve me your sincere friend James McHenry to AH, 18March1780 [this was during the time of AH’s courtship of ES]

Here we are my love in a house of great hospitality—in a country of plenty—a buxom girl under the same roof—pleasing ⟨expect⟩ations of a successful campaign—and every thing to make a soldier happy, who is not in love and absent from his mistress. ... Assure yourself my love that you are seldom a moment absent from my mind, that I think of you constantly and talk of you frequently, I am never happier than when I can engage Meade in some solitary walk to join me in reciprocating the praises of his widow and my betsey. AH to ES, 6July1780  

I hope for a decisive campaign. No one will desire it more than me; for a military life is now grown insupportable to me because it keeps me from all my soul holds dear. Adieu My love. Write to me often I entreat you, and do not suffer any part of my treasure, your sweet love, to be lost or stolen from me. AH to ES, 20Jul1780

Impatiently My Dearest have I been expecting the return of your father to bring me a letter from my charmer with the answers you have been good enough to promise me to the little questions asked in mine by him. ... Meade2 just comes in and interrupts me by sending his love to you. He tells you he has written a long letter to his widow asking her opinion of the propriety of quitting the service; and that if she does not disapprove it, he will certainly take his final leave after the campaign. You see what a fine opportunity she has to be enrolled in the catalogue of heroines, and I dare say she will set you an example of fortitude and patriotism. I know too you have so much of the Portia in you, that you will not be out done in this line by any of your sex, and that if you saw me inclined to quit the service of your country, you would dissuade me from it. I have promised you, you recollect, to conform to your wishes, and I persist in this intention. It remains with you to show whether you are a Roman or an American wife. AH to ES, Aug1780

But now my love to speak of the practicability of complying with both our wishes in this article—There is none, I am obliged to sacrifice my inclination to ⟨my public⟩ ch⟨aracter.⟩ Even though my presence shou⟨ld n⟩ot be essential here, yet my love I could not with decency or honor leave the army during the campaign. This is a military prejudice which while I am in a military station I must comply with. No person has been more severe than I have been in condemning other officers for deviating from it. I have admitted no excuse as sufficient, and I must not now evince to the army, that the moment my circumstances have changed, my maxims have changed also. This would be an inconsistency, and my Betsey would not have me guilty of an inconsistency. Besides this my Betsey, The General is peculiarly averse to the practice in question. If this campaign is to end my military services, ’tis an additional reason for a constant and punctual attendance, if it is not my leaving the army during the campaign would make it less proper to be away all the winter ’till late in the spring. In one case, my honor bids me stay, in the other my love. AH to ES, 31Aug1780

Pardon me my love for talking politics to you. What have we to do with any thing but love? Go the world as it will, in each others arms we cannot but be happy. ...I was once determined to let my existence and American liberty end together. My Betsey has given me a motive to outlive my pride, I had almost said my honor; but America must not be witness to my disgrace. AH to ES, 6Sept1780

I have told you, and I told you truly that I love you too much. You engross my thoughts too intirely to allow me to think of any thing else—you not only employ my mind all day; but you intrude upon my sleep. I meet you in every dream—and when I wake I cannot close my eyes again for ruminating on your sweetness. ‘Tis a pretty story indeed that I am to be thus monopolized, by a little nut-brown maid like you—and from a statesman and a soldier metamorphosed into a puny lover. I believe in my soul you are an inchantress; but I have tried in vain, if not to break, at least, to weaken the charm—you maintain your empire in spite of all my efforts—and after every new one, I make to withdraw myself from my allegiance my partial heart still returns and clings to you with increased attachment. To drop figure my lovely girl you become dearer to me every moment. I am more and more unhappy and impatient under the hard necessity that keeps me from you, and yet the prospect lengthens as I advance. AH to ES, 5Oct1780

I would not have you imagine Miss that I write to you so often either to gratify your wishes or to please your vanity; but merely to indulge myself and to comply with that restless propensity of my mind, which will not allow me to be happy when I am not doing something in which you are concerned. This may seem a very idle disposition in a philosopher and a soldier; but I can plead illustrious examples in my justification. Achilles had liked to have sacrificed Greece and his glory to his passion for a female captive; and Anthony lost the world for a woman. I am sorry the times are so changed as to oblige me to summon antiquity for my apology, but I confess, to the disgrace of the present age, that I have not been able to find many who are as far gone as myself in such laudable zeal for the fair sex. AH to ES, 13Oct1780

How often have I with Eloisa exclaimed against those forms which I now revere as calculated to knit our union together by new and stronger bands...Meade already begins to recant. I have received a letter from him on the Journey2 in which he tells me he finds he must return to the army. This will be a new proof to you that I cannot leave it, as we both so ardently desire. AH to ES, 27Oct1780

You possess a heart that can feel for me; you have a female too that you love. I was reduced at one period to entreat, threat, kiss, but all to no purpose; her fears were for my safety, mine for hers. You must imagine to make out the tragedy all that I am incapable for want of words to express. After placing her with at least Twenty other females & children at a safe distance I immediately returned, & joined the Baron about the time the Enemy left Richmond in order to render him all the aid I could being intimately acquainted with the Country for many miles in the vicinity of the Enemy & on their return down the river I left him to go in pursuit of a residence for a favorite Brother who was driven from his home & obliged to attend to his Wife & a family of little children. Was it not cruel my dear fellow that my matrimonial enjoyments should have been interrupted thus soon; not more than one month had passed when the damned invasion seperated us, & we have yet to meet again, for 60 miles divides us. You know I am a Philosoper my dr fd & prepared to meet much more serious disappointments. This gives me an opening to speak of my return to the army. I have been long wishing your advice in full on the occasion; you are acquainted with the arguments I have used in favor of my stay here. I have now but one to add to them, the experience of that happiness I ever expected to enjoy with the best of Women. She loves not less than your Betsy, & I fear could not bear a seperation. I have not however as yet thrown off the uniform, but I am inclined to believe that it must be the case. Meade to AH, 13Jan1781

I was cherishing the melancholy pleasure of thinking of the sweets I had left behind and was so long to be deprived of, when a servant from Head Quarters presented me with your letters. I feasted for some time on the sweet effusions of tenderness they contained, and my heart returned every sensation of yours. Alas my Betsey you have divested it of every other pretender and placed your image there as the sole proprietor. I struggle with an excess which I cannot but deem a weakness and endeavour to bring myself back to reason and duty. I remonstrate with my heart on the impropriety of suffering itself to be engrossed by an individual of the human race when so many millions ought to participate in its affections and in its cares. But it constantly presents you under such amiable forms as seem too well to justify its meditated desertion of the cause of country humanity, and of glory I would say, if there were not something in the sound insipid and ridiculous when compared with the sacrifices by which it is to be attained.

Indeed Betsey, I am intirely changed—changed for the worse I confess—lost to all the public and splendid passions and absorbed in you. Amiable woman! nature has given you a right to be esteemed to be cherished, to be beloved; but she has given you no right to monopolize a man, whom, to you I may say, she has endowed with qualities to be extensively useful to society. Yes my Betsey, I will encourage my reason to dispute your empire and restrain it within proper bounds, to restore me to myself and to the community. Assist me in this; reproach me for an unmanly surrender of that to love and teach me that your esteem will be the price of my acting well my part as a member of society. AH to EH, 13Jul1781

Don’t think me unkind for not talking of your making a journey to the Southward. It would put us to a thousand inconveniences and would in fact be of no avail; for while there I must be engrossed in my military duties. Heaven knows how much it costs me to make the sacrifice I do. It is too much to be torn away from the wife of my bosom from a woman I love to weakness, and who feels the same ardent passion for me. I relinquish a heaven in your arms; but let me have the happiness to reflect that they ever impatiently wait my return sacred to love and me. Give your Mama, your sisters and the whole family every assurance of the warmest affection on my part. Indeed I love them all.

Yrs. with unalterable tenderness and fidelity AH to EH,  25Aug1781

Early in November, as I promised you, we shall certainly meet. Cheer yourself with this idea, and with the assurance of never more being separated. Every day confirms me in the intention of renouncing public life, and devoting myself wholly to you. AH to EH, 6Sept1781

My heart disposed to gayety is at once melted into tenderness. The idea of a smiling infant in my Betseys arms calls up all the father in it. In imagination I embrace the mother and embrace the child a thousand times. I can scarce refrain from shedding tears of joy. But I must not indulge these sensations; they are unfit for the boisterous scenes of war and whenever they intrude themselves make me but half a soldier. AH to EH, 12Oct1781

You cannot imagine how entirely domestic I am growing. I lose all taste for the pursuits of ambition, I sigh for nothing but the company of my wife and my baby. The ties of duty alone or imagined duty keep me from renouncing public life altogether. It is however probable I may not be any longer actively engaged in it.

I have explained to you the difficulties which I met with in obtaining a command last campaign. I thought it incompatible with the delicacy due to myself to make any application this campaign. I have expressed this Sentiment in a letter to the General and retaining my rank only, have relinquished the emoluments of my commission, declaring myself notwithstanding ready at all times to obey the calls of the Public.4 I do not expect to hear any of these unless the State of our Affairs, should change for the worse and lest by any unforeseen accident that should happen, I choose to keep myself in a situation again to contribute my aid. This prevents a total resignation.

You were right in supposing I neglected to prepare what I promised you at Philadelphia. The truth is, I was in such a hurry to get home that I could think of nothing else. AH to Meade, March 1782 (from a JCH transcription)

You were right, My dear General, in saying that a Soldier should have no Other wife than the service...William North to AH, 12Nov1799

AND just for amusement:

I thank you My Dear Sir for the military figures you have sent me. Tactics you know are literally or figuratively of very comprehensive signification. As people grow old they decline in some arts though they may improve in others. I will try to get Mrs. Hamilton to accompany in games of Tactics new to her. Perhaps she may get a taste for them & become better reconciled to my connection with the Trade-Militant. AH to McHenry, 21June1799

__________________________________________

*I broke this down in a prior post too, but I’ll repeat it here again: I think the clearest statement of his plan left to us is from the draft of the letter he sent to Philip Schuyler explaining why he wants to break with GW (18Feb1781): 

As I cannot think of quitting the army during the war, I have a project of re-entering into the artillery, by taking Lieutenant-Colonel Forrest’s10 place, who is⟩ desirous of retiring on half pay. I have not however made up my mind upon this , Start insertion,head, End,, as I should be obliged to come in the youngest Lt Col instead of the eldest, which I , Start deletion,should, End, , Start insertion,ought to, End, have been by natural succession had I remained in the corps; and , Start insertion,at the same time, End, to resume studies relative to the profession which, to avoid inferiority, must be laborious.

If a handsome command for the campaign in the , Start insertion,light, End, infantry should offer itself, I shall ballance between this and the artillery. My situation ⟨in the latter⟩ would be more , Start deletion,substantial, End, , Start insertion,solid, End, ⟨and permanent;⟩ but as I hope ⟨the war will not last long enough to make it progressive, this consideration has the less force. A command for the campaign would leave me the winter to prosecute studies relative to my future career in life. With⟩ respect to the former, I have been materially the worse for going into his family.11

I have written to you on this subject with all the freedom and confidence to which you have a right and with an assurance of the interest you take in , Start deletion,what, End, , Start insertion,all that, End, concerns me.

This letter implies 1) he had a plan post-military; 2) he had discussed with PS what that plan was, and possibly that six month leave (that never happened because of illness and unavailability) was tied to undertaking some of those studies to be a lawyer, to put himself in better shape to support a family. Being able to do so was important to AH - Philip Hamilton was born Jan 1782, and Angelica would not be born until Sept 1784.

[cynicalrainbows]

Poetry & Prose

In which Cathy suffers with Guilt and Jane discovers poetry.

The poems mentioned in this fic are (in order of mention Her Kind by Anne Sexton, an extract from Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur, On A Train by Wendy Cope, The Dormouse and The Doctor by A A Milne and The Past by Ella Wheeler Wilcox.) Wendy Cope is absolutely recommended if you’re not a fan of poetry in general- her poems are very simple, and all the more effective for that simplicity. The dormouse poem I recommend if you wish to have your heart torn into shreds- yes, it’s technically a children’s poem but even thinking about the absolutely tragic plight of the sad dormouse still makes me tear up to this day. Literally no other piece of poetry has ever affected me so deeply so I’ve just projected that onto Cathy.

In regards to the brief mention of Thomas and Elizabeth….I do sometimes think the case gets examined in a slightly….I don’t want to say unfair way but a way that applies modern understandings of things and modern expectations to a time that was wildly different. Specifically, during a time when it was entirely legal to beat your wife and divorce for women was not an option, what else would you do in a similar situation, other than sending the victim away?

Anyhow, I hope you all enjoy this fic!

*

‘I have gone out, a poss- poss-’

‘Possessed.’

‘Possessed witch, h- haunting the black air, braver at night, dreaming evil, I have done my hitch-’

She pauses.

‘What does it mean?’

‘Hm?

‘What does done my hitch mean?’

She thinks of horses- All hitched up; I’ll just hitch up the cart, words she’d only overheard in her first life since the tending of horses with none of her concern back then, and words she’d heard not at all in her second, since no one seemed to ride much nowadays. And getting hitched, hitched up- Anne had told her that it meant ‘marriage’ nowadays. 

Neither meaning seems to fit here though.

Cathy takes the book and scans the line herself, her brow creasing, which makes her feel vindicated. Cathy is never, ever patronising on purpose, and she can tell that she takes especial care never to reply to a question as if the answer is obvious (even when it is) but even so, it pleases her when Cathy has to actually consider her answer before she gives it.

‘Mmmm… A spell, I think. Or a period of time.’

She sounds disinterested, lacklustre, even though this is usually the sort of question Cathy enjoys: usually, they’d debate it back and forth until they’d come up with an answer between them.

Now though, Cathy answers like she just wants to get on.

‘I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light-’

She’s reading slowly to make sure she doesn’t stumble but it’s alright- it’s one of the reasons that she enjoys reading poetry, because it’s one of the rare, precious times when reading quickly doesn’t matter. In fact speed (as Cathy has told her over and over) is actually a bad thing, especially if you’re reading a poem that’s unfamiliar.

‘It just means that you have to read it again because you’ve missed the meaning. Much better to read slowly so you can absorb it.’

And they do absorb it- it’s become their thing. Cathy’s the only queen with an unending appetite for poetry; she’s the only queen who reads slowly as a matter of course (she likes to focus on that rather than on the fact that she’s the only queen who needs to practise reading aloud) and so in this, they’re well matched.

Reading the poetry slowly doesn’t make her feel humiliated in the way that reading prose slowly does, and being able to argue over the meaning of whatever they’re reading- over the word choice and the subject and the feel of it- after she’s finished is her reward. It stops her feeling like a child because although Cathy is undoubtedly the better reader, they’re equals when it comes to interpretation, and that’s another reason she enjoys it.

Not that she’d taken Cathy seriously when she’d first suggested it.

(‘Practise makes all the difference, you know.’

She was sitting in the windowseat of the bedroom she shared with Catalina, back in the first house, hot-eyed and burning with embarrassment and steadfastly trying to ignore Cathy’s presence next to her.

‘It needn’t even be for long.’

She’d had to fight to keep her voice even.

‘There’s no point. I’m no good at it, I’m no good at any of it.’

‘True.’ Cathy’s bluntness sometimes makes her laugh- then it had made her want to cry. ‘But you don’t have to be. You can get better at it, but only if you actually work at it.’

‘I am working at it.’

‘I know- and it’s good you’re going to classes, I’m glad Anna suggested them but….you need to practise at home too.’

‘I do.’

‘With someone else it’ll be more effective. I can help with the hard bits.’

‘Cathy. I know you mean well. But I don’t want you to feel like you need to- to teach me like I’m a child.’

Cathy had shrugged. ‘That’s ok, I understand. Would it help if we didn’t think of it as teaching though? Because honestly I don’t want to think of it as teaching either. Too much pressure and I’d worry I wasn’t doing it right and-’

‘What would you call it then?’

‘How about….two friends who just happen to get together sometimes to read together?’

Jane had shaken her head. ‘You wouldn’t enjoy the sort of books I’m reading.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of books.’ Cathy held up the slim volume in her hand. ‘I was thinking of this. Poetry is MEANT to be read aloud but it’s too weird just doing it on my own.’

‘I’m not really into poetry.’

‘Why not?’

The idea had stumped her a bit, she’d never had to defend herself like this before. ‘I’m just not. I can’t understand it.’

‘No one’s meant to understand it, not the first time anyway. That’s part of the fun of it.’

‘And I read too slowly anyway, you’d be just as bored.’

‘Poetry is meant to be read slowly.’

‘Mmm. Yes. Sure.’

‘No, really! Listen-’

Cathy flipped the book open. ‘I’m looking for something short….ok, this’ll do-’ She’d sat up a little straighter and began to read quickly, flatly, as if she was reading from the newspaper, an account of something: ‘You tell me to lie down, cause my opinions make me less beautiful-’

The first line interested her but she had been distracted too because even she could tell that there’s something wrong about how Cathy was doing it- she’d felt rushed.

‘Do it again.’

‘Why?’

‘You were too quick-’

‘No.’

‘Oh.’ She’d felt deflated- had Cathy just been trying to prove her point because now she’d felt tricked and cheated- but then Cathy had put the book into her own hands, open on the page.

‘You read it.’

She’d tried to push it away.

‘I don’t want to.’

‘Don’t you want to hear it again?’

‘Yes-’ And she did. Something about it had struck her in a deep inside place: My opinions make me less beautiful. A memory teased her until she grabbed at it: Henry’s cold, closed up face when she’d screwed up her courage and begged for mercy for Robert Aske and the Pilgrimage of Grace. She’d been less beautiful to him that day, she was sure.

‘So read it. I’ll help if you get stuck on a word. And there’s only us here, no one else is listening.’

Still, she hesitated.

‘It’ll sound better when you read it, I promise you. Just give it a try. Please.’

It’s the please that did it, because she’s never able to say no to people when they use it. Even when she should. (Henry had said please when he’d asked for her hand- the first and last time he’d ever used it with her. She should have said no.)

‘Ok.’

‘You tell me to quiet down-’

It turned out actually to not be too hard to read, she’d only hesitated briefly over ‘tongue’. And oddly enough, she’d found that Cathy was right. It did sound better, somehow- perhaps because she was reading so slowly that she had time to take in each word, like bricks being added to a wall, one by one, each making the whole a little more complete.

‘-difficult to forget but not easy for the mind to follow.’

She’d closed the book on the last word and seen Cathy beaming at her. ‘You see? You see?’

Reluctantly, she’d nodded- but she hadn’t been able help a smile twitching the corners of her own lips too. ‘I see.’)

She hadn’t taken Cathy seriously when Cathy had told her that maybe she could like poetry, because she’d believed she couldn’t- she associated with confusion, with trouble. (They had said that Anne had had poems dedicated to her at Court, so many that it had caused a stir and then more than a stir. She hadn’t been able to trust poetry after she’d heard that.)

The poems Cathy has her read aren’t like that though- they have easy, simple words and some of them aren’t about anything much but they manage to make her feel things in a way that she’d never imagined printed words would be able to do.

There’s one that Cathy shows her, about riding in a train, that makes her want to cry for the soft simplicity of it, of  how it reminds her of the peaceful feeling of watching the scenery as Kitty sleeping against her shoulder when they have to travel for an interview. It surprises her- she didn’t think that poetry could be that easy.

But now Cathy doesn’t look as if she finds it easy. She just looks tired.

‘-my ribs crack where your wheels wind-’ She reads on. It occurs to her that on a normal day, she’d be more focused on the words, about how they remind her of how she’d writhed and strained so hard giving birth that it had felt as if her own ribs were splintering in her chest- but now she’s more preoccupied with Cathy’s wan, drawn face.

‘A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.’

It’s only as she finishes that she realises Cathy’s eyes are glistening with tears- and although it’s not as if she’s never seen Cathy cry over a poem before, this doesn’t feel like last time.

(She’d thought Cathy had been joking.

‘How can this be the saddest poem in the world?’

Cathy had blinked at her, brushing at her eyes. ‘Because it IS. Doesn’t it make YOU feeling like crying?’

‘Not...really.’ She had wondered if there was some hidden meaning to it that had affected Cathy so, but she wasn’t sure how there COULD be. ‘It’s a children’s poem.’

‘That doesn’t mean it isn’t TRAGIC!’ Cathy looked genuinely sad. ‘Jane, the dormouse has to live FOREVER in the wrong sort of flowerbed, just because the doctor wouldn’t listen to what he actually wanted!’

Jane had shrugged. ‘Yes but- Cathy, love, it’s a children’s poem. It’s not meant to make you get this upset.’

‘Ugh, you sound just like Catalina.’ Cathy had picked up her copy of When We Were Very Young and left the room in a huff.)

This isn’t the same though- because rather than trying to explain herself, Cathy just looks wearily resigned.

‘Are you alright love?’

‘Fine.’ Cathy blinks a couple of times but the tears spill over, rather than disappearing like she’d obviously hoped they would.

‘No you’re not.’ 

Cathy sniffs and doesn’t respond; Jane edges closer and wraps an arm around her shoulders, hoping that she won’t pull away.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘It’s nothing, it’s silly.’

‘More silly than crying because a dormouse had to sleep in a bed of daffodils?’

Despite the tears still sliding down her cheeks, Cathy gives a short laugh. ‘They were chrysanthemums, actually. And yes.’

‘Well then’ She tightens her hold and Cathy rests her head against her shoulder. ‘Now you really do need to tell me love, because I’m fascinated.’

‘That's the thing. It really is nothing. I just feel really-’ Cathy searches for the word.’ You know like the opposite of rose tinted glasses?’

‘Yes.’

‘Like that. Just- tired and flat and pointless. And I don’t know why. The poem was just the last straw- it reminded me of, of how much I ruined by dying when I did….how many things could have been fixed if I hadn’t-’ Cathy’s face crumples and Jane feels it like an ache. ‘I’m sorry, I said it was stupid.’

‘Cathy love, no, no, no. Oh you poor thing-’ Cathy leans into her, sniffing and Jane rocks her gently back and forth. ‘It isn’t stupid in the slightest but that doesn’t mean it’s true-’ She isn’t quite sure where she should start. ‘You can’t blame yourself for dying, that isn’t fair.’

‘But if I hadn’t-’

‘But you couldn’t help it- and goodness, even if you had-’ Jane pulls back enough to cup Cathy’s damp cheek. ‘If you had been able to control it...I hate to say it, but there’s so, so many other things that could have gone wrong, even if you had been alive to see them.’

Cathy shakes her head. ‘I left Mary all alone- you know, some historians think she could even have died of neglect because they can’t be sure she ended up somewhere safe? And Jane- she had to go back to that awful house, those terrible people, because she couldn’t be part of my household without a proper chaperone, she might not have died if I’d been there to oversee things….I never had a chance to explain to Elizabeth, I always meant for her to know that I only sent her away to keep her safe and I meant to be explain one day when we were together but I never saw her again, there wasn’t TIME….and Edward and Mary might have reconciled, perhaps they wouldn’t have been so opposed, I made them all a family when I was alive and then when I was gone, it just fell apart….’ Cathy breaks off, sobbing too hard to speak and Jane shakes her head.

‘Oh Cathy. Oh love. It’s alright, let it out.’  She waits until the tears have slowed a bit before passing over a handful of tissues.

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome. Now. Can I say what I think?’

Cathy nods, dabbing her swollen eyes.

‘Cathy. You are a wonderful, intelligent, kind, caring young woman and we are all love you and count ourselves very, very lucky to know you and have you with us, ok?’

Another tentative nod.

‘But love, you are not God. You’re not magic. You cannot possibly think that you would be able to have solved all of those problems, all of those issues, if you’d been alive. Honestly, even if you had a hundred years to try, I don’t think you’d have managed.’

Cathy looks wrong-footed. ‘But all of it- when I was alive, things were alright, they weren’t-’

‘Were they? Were they really alright? Or was it just that the problems didn’t exist yet?’

‘Well-’

‘Love, you did a wonderful job bringing the family together. But that’s so much easier when the children are- well, children. Do you see how much harder it would have been when they were adults? Edward was….seven, when you met him?’

‘Six.’ Cathy blows her nose.

‘See? He was a child. And Mary was a young woman but- well, with her father alive, even with a definite King in place….well, it would have been madness for her to double down with her beliefs the way she did. It was different when you were gone.’

‘Yes. When I was gone-’

‘No.’ She shakes her head decisively. ‘When you were gone, I said. Not because you were gone.’

Cathy contemplates for a moment and Jane pulls her closer, so that Cathy can lean against her comfortably. ‘Think love, for a minute. Did everything go to plan when you were alive? Did everything go just how you tried to make it turn out?’

Reluctantly Cathy shakes her head. ‘No. Hardly ever.’

‘So.’ Jane presses a kiss to the top of her head. ‘What makes you think it would have been any different if you’d lived longer?’ She pauses. ‘You need to let go of the blame. You need to stop torturing yourself with thinking how things could have been different- trust me, it’ll be easier when you do.’

She can see by Cathy’s expression that she understands what she means.

‘You make it sound so easy.’

‘Oh it won’t be. It isn’t. It’s always hard.’ She can say it lightly but honestly, it’s something that she doesn’t even think she’ll stop struggling with. ‘But you’ve taken the first couple of steps today….so that’s a start at least.’

‘I suppose.’ She’d be more bothered by the non-committal response if it wasn’t for the fact that she can tell by Cathy’s expression that she is actually thinking about it- only passingly now, perhaps, but later, when her tears have dried, tomorrow or the day after, she will think on it again, think about it seriously and examine the idea, and turn it over and over in her mind until she’s made peace with it.

She knows how Cathy does things after all, which is why she doesn’t push it too hard. She might not be able to read well but she knows about people.

Nestled up against her, Cathy looks even wearier and more wrung out than before but it doesn’t worry her so much as it did when she first noticed it. She smooths Cathy’s hair away from her damp face and smiles when she hums in response.

They sit in silence for a minute or two, and Jane imagines dust settling around them after a storm, normalcy returning slowly. She isn’t planning on going back to the poetry- she imaginges Cathy has probably had enough of it for one day, and then she remembers something and jerks up, dislodging Cathy from her arms and making her squeak in surprise.

‘Jane?’

‘Sorry, sorry- I just- I remembered something, something I meant to show you and I thought...it might help. You, I mean.’

Cathy looks slightly skeptical, and then she shrugs. ‘Ok. What is it?’

‘I’ll fetch it. Get comfortable while I look though because it might take a minute.’

She waits until Cathy has re-arranged the pillows and lain down properly on the the bedspread, half smiling despite herself.

‘I’m curious now-’

‘I knew you would be. Just- Oh!’ She unearths the book from under her bed, where she remembers putting it for ‘safe-keeping’ and climbs back onto the bed with it. 

And begins to read.

‘I fling the past behind me, like a robe, worn threadbare at the seams, and out of date…’

Cathy curls back up into her side again and she smiles. ‘I have outgrown it. Where- where-’

‘Wherefore.’ Cathy’s voice is quiet; she goes on.

‘Wherefore should I weep and dwell upon its beauty-’

As she reads, she feels the tension leaving the girl next to her as she sinks into the cadence of the words.

‘-starred with gems made out of ch-ch-’

‘Chrystalled-’ Cathy’s voice is nearly a whisper now, but she can still hear it.

‘Chrystalled tears. My new robe shall be richer than the old.’ She finishes, flushed with the glow of hearing how much more confident her voice is than when they’d begun these sessions, all those months ago.

‘That’s you, Cathy. And all of us.’ She leans closer to the curly hair- Cathy’s face is buried in Jane’s cardigan but she knows she is still listening. ‘All of us, stronger than we were. You can put the past down, you don’t have to carry it with you, if it’s hurting.’

Cathy gives a tremulous nod, her face still buried and Jane kisses the top of her head..

She isn’t concerned, they can talk about it more later.

For now, she’s happy to wait until then.

[sergeanttpoliteness]

➹puppy love➹(peter b. parker x reader)

Requested by @connorshero➝  “Something fluffy and sweet: Peter B surprises Reader (his best friend, who he's in love with) with a puppy after Reader lost their previous puppers.”

Forget listening to sad songs as you eat pizza that burns the roof of your mouth— Peter B. Parker believes a puppy is the medicine for a grieving heart.

word count: 3.5k

a/n: finally, i wrote something short. hello! i’m sorry this took so long, @connorshero , i’m going to be 100% honest and admit that i struggled quite a bit lol— i wrote the entire thing but i decided to delete it and start over bc i wasn’t happy with it. but i finally finished and here it is! requests are open, so feel free to send some if you want (: hope you enjoy!

A desperate thumping on your front door along with the fierce crackle of the storm roused you from the light slumber you didn’t even know you had succumbed to, your body jerking as you choked on the drool that had managed to slip down your chin. You grimaced, wiping the gross saliva off of your face with one hand while the other rubbed your eye. You sat on your floor, your back against your sofa which explained your sore neck and shoulders, staring at the carpet until the knocking returned and brought you fully back to consciousness. You didn’t know what time it was— it felt as if an entire year had gone by whilst you slept, honestly, but you were certain it was too late for it to be your landlord reminding you about your rent payment. You clumsily stood to your feet, the lack of illumination dooming you to knock your shin into the sharp edge of the coffee table. You screamed, but continued limping toward the door anyway, flinging the door open with a scowl as you held onto your throbbing leg. Your expression softened, however, and your brows drew together for in front of you stood a dripping wet Peter B. Parker wearing a large coat that barely covered the red and blue suit underneath it, and… holding a puppy covered in dirt?

“What the fuck?” You muttered, suddenly fully awake. It was an odd and unkind greeting, but Peter really couldn’t blame you for your reaction. He opened his mouth, laughing nervously as his eyes shifted down to the creature in his grasp.

“Hey? Sorry if I woke you up, I just… kinda had an emergency.” He nestled the puppy on his chest and your attention came back to it. The animal shivered wildly, and so did your best friend who smiled at you while his teeth chattered.

You silently moved aside for him to walk in, your brain working hard to figure out what in the world was happening and trying to arrange all the questions speeding by. Peter briefly studied the living room— images of days prior, when he embraced you as you dampened his neck with your tears in that same spot he was in, flashing through his eyes. A twinge of worry invaded him when he took in the abandoned box of pizza on the couch, and the two empty cans of beer littering your red rug. Meanwhile, you might as well have heard the dog talk, because your stunned face— eyes as big as a full moon, your eyebrows almost reaching your hairline— represented just that as you couldn’t tear your gaze away from the stray puppy huddled against the man. “Oh my god,” You finally said, gasping and your hand reaching out to hang above its head. “Why do you have a puppy with you?”

“It was a surprise, to say the least.” He allowed you to take the animal from him, groaning when he saw the grime on his hands and coat. You didn’t mind much about the dirt, though, as it was a dog; laundry day was tomorrow, you told yourself as you hugged the puppy like a young child with their favorite stuffed animal. “I was in an alleyway when I heard something break behind me and so I went to investigate, but instead of a homeless person or something, I found this little girl right here.”

“And you decided to take her with you?”

“Well, yeah, we… had a connection.”

A lovely trail of footprints and droplets of mud now adorned your floor which you had actually swept hours earlier; not the makeover you wanted, exactly, and it would’ve irked you except that you were too exhausted and confused to save a place for an extra emotion. You glanced back at Peter, studying his shivering body, and sighed. The man could be bleeding out to death, yet he wouldn’t complain nor do much about it unless you physically dragged him to a nearby hospital; it wasn’t an exaggeration, rather a characteristic of his you gathered after having a friendship with him since prehistoric times, but also since (to your dismay) the exact same scenario had occurred many times before. “You had a connection, huh? Alright, dork, I bet there’s a forgotten collection of your clothes in my closet— go get changed while I get the bath ready.”

There was a certain weakness that threatened to attack Peter, and the fact that he was freezing after swinging to your apartment in the ruthless downpour easily might have been the culprit of that; but as bad as he wanted it to be that way, it was evident in his heart that you were the true delinquent— you, with your tangled hair perhaps from the slumber he disrupted, with just your presence really, continued to transform him into a teenager who wrote long melodramatic poems about his crush and doodled their initials on his school notes during class. It was absurd, truthfully, how you managed to do such thing to a fully-grown man. But you were his time machine, his youth potion, that remedy that allowed him to see life as colorful as a pure child did, and he’d never complain about it, because that’s just what he needed all the time.

Peter had forgotten about the pile of clothes belonging to him that neatly rested on one shelf of your closet. Ever since you two were in college— when he’d pretty much constantly live in your apartment for an entire week— you’d been assembling the shirts and other articles of clothing the man often left behind as if clothes were as expensive as a carton of milk that’s about to expire. So that’s where that shirt went, he thought as his eyes settled on a green flannel he used to wear religiously back before Christ, partially because you always voiced how much you liked how he looked with it. You’d truly had him wrapped around your finger for the longest time, he realized, and yet he’d never had the guts to make a move. That frustration abandoned him, however, when he put on an old shirt and it smelled like you; there was that youthfulness again as contentment pecked his entire face, coloring his skin a rosy tint. Like a new man, he headed down the hallway to the bathroom where he could hear water running. He peeked his head inside, the corner of his lips tugging upwards when he saw you on the floor caressing the puppy on your lap and talking to it. “I see you two already became friends.”

You looked up at him, directing to him a tired twitch of your mouth. “You better be scared, ‘cause your title of best friend is at risk. Could you close the door?” You gestured your head toward the entrance and your wish was his command as a gentle click left the bathroom’s door when he closed it.

“Again, sorry about bothering you. I just didn’t know where else to go, and you’re the best person I know when it comes to dogs.” He shrugged, descending to sit down in front of you, his knees uncomfortably tucked close to his chest to fit his long legs in the small room. The puppy forgot about you, and was determined to snuggle under Peter’s knees as he jumped off of you. “No! I just changed!” He groaned and wriggled away from the animal into the wall.

You giggled, quickly grabbing the excited creature before it tragically attacked your friend’s immaculate clothes. “I don’t really mind, honestly. I wasn’t exactly having the best night anyway; so thanks, Prince Charming, for coming to rescue me with a stray puppy— hic!” You hiccuped, the alcohol finally getting to you. You stood up, waving your hand which you weren’t cradling the puppy with for him to do so as well.

He hummed, amused, his hand on his hip as you closed the faucet. “I’m excellent when it comes to bathing dogs.” You glanced back at him, quirking a brow and narrowing your eyes.

“You sure? Because every time I asked you to help me give Webster a bath you just watched while I did all the work.” A grin may have remained on your features, but the rain cloud of sorrow that showered over you was evident after you mentioned that one name— the one you used to cheerfully call all the time, but now tried to avoid at every chance you got. Peter noticed, his eyes sad, but he elbowed you playfully hoping that it would help somehow, even if just a little bit.

“Lies, I think I did a pretty good job at holding him still.” It was unavoidable, no matter how hard he could’ve fought, the dreamy smile that etched on his face simply as a consequence of your empyrean laugh; such a minor thing that had a tremendous effect on him, and it embarrassed him, but again, he wouldn’t ever complain. It was baffling how you’d never noticed the stares that lasted too long whilst you just existed, or the utter and raw infatuation his eyes burned with as you smirked up at him.

“Sure, keep lying to yourself. I really need you to help me, though, because this girl is a shit ton more hyper than… uh, you know.” Peter recalled in his head the trip to your place and the humiliating amount of times he yelped while swinging as the dog would continuously squirm out of his grasp and attempt to climb onto his shoulder. He nodded, releasing a big puff of air because you had no idea. You grabbed a red a bucket from the cabinet and handed it to him. “Okay, just use this to pour the water over her.”

“Am I going to get something if I do a great job? You know, like a sticker?”

You shrugged, kneeling down before the bathtub. “I don’t know. A kiss, maybe.” You stared back at him when moments passed and he didn’t say anything, both of your faces as red as the bucket he shakily held. “It was a joke. C’mon, get down.”

He waited for you to take your words back, or maybe add something along the lines of “but if you’re down so am I” if the cosmos decided to bless him for once. You remained quiet, though, and a quiet sigh slipped through his lips as he decided to leave it behind for his own sanity’s sake. “Why did you make me stand up if we were gonna get back on the floor again?” He grumbled, following you suit. He looked at you confused when you began to laugh at him. Was he still blushing? You did always make fun of him when he blushed. “What?”

“Why are you making those dad noises?”

“Me? Dad noises?”

“Yeah, like—” You let out a low grunt, your lips puckered and your eyebrows scrunched together, and then breathed out obnoxiously loud and heavy. “That’s what you sound like— hic!” You hiccuped for a second time, and he threw his head back as he laughed.

“Shut up, you can’t even handle drinking two cans of beer, look at you right now.” He teased, the many times you’ve flirted with him throughout the years after getting hammered with a ridiculous quantity of alcohol in the back of his head.  He stretched out his arms, making grabby hands at the puppy, the bucket abandoned and floating in the water. “Gimme.”

Your mouth curved into a smile at his childlike actions as you carefully placed the creature in his hold. “I can’t believe you’re such a dad, but also a man-child, it’s adorable.”

He chose to say nothing, lest his voice decided to backstab him and crack like a fourteen-year-old boy during an oral presentation. He took a deep breath, instead focusing on the dog who believed it was a menacing beast as it chewed on his finger, and the grey layer of mud covering its short fur. He frowned, thinking of different scenarios of how the poor pup could’ve possibly ended up such way, none happy. He filled the plastic bucket with water before draining it slowly down its back, revealing its true dark brown color. “She’s so cute, I might have to cry.” He mumbled, his expression strangely serious in spite of his words.

“What are you gonna do with her?” There was a glint of what he wished was hope in your tone, anticipation clouding your features as you tried to nonchalantly squirt a generous amount of dog shampoo on the palm of your hand.

The animal tried to escape as he rinsed the grime but he held it in its place while he waited for you to start washing it. He raised his shoulders, glancing sideways at you. “I don’t know, I guess I’ll take her to a shelter or something.” You almost announced your disappointment, but you nodded, drawing your lower lip between your teeth. “You look disappointed.”

“Me?”

“Uh, no, the fucking ghost in your bathroom.” He said sarcastically. “Don’t roll your eyes at me, of course I meant you.”

You chuckled, shaking your head as you massaged the shampoo into the puppy you cared about too much despite only knowing it for less than thirty minutes, creating enough foam that miniature bubbles drifted in the air. “Did you know that my apartment is haunted?”

Peter snorted at your spontaneity. “Oh, is it?” In a mere second, however, he completely tuned out everything along with your response; all purely because of the accidental caress you gave his hand as you scrubbed the dog’s loin. Was it accidental? Your touch lingered for too long for it to be, no? Or was he just overthinking? Most likely. He desperately needed to put himself together, he groaned internally— and if only he’d done so sooner, then he wouldn’t have been too distraught by a hand touch to notice the rapidly approaching mountain of foam on your hand until it was too late. He felt pressure on the top of his head, and that’s when he recognized your hand sliding down the side of his face, lathering the bubbly liquid on his skin. He jumped, pushing your arm away as his eyes widened. “Why did you do that?!”

Your beam was as contagious as a virus as you giggled, your foamy hands proof of your crime. “I asked you something like twenty times and you didn’t answer!” You defended while he wiped his eyebrow with the back of his hand. “Hey, I saw the opportunity and I took it!” Red alarms went off in your head, and you regretted everything when you saw his sly smirk. You lifted your finger up as a warning when he picked up the bucket and loaded it, innocent eyes staring at you. “Don't you— hic!— fucking dare…”

“Your shirt’s kinda dirty. Here, let me clean it for you—” He spilled all the water over your head and you shrieked, wielding yourself with your arms, which was nothing other than pointless as— regardless of your efforts— you still finished entirely soaked. Peter held his fist up to his mouth, wheezing while you glowered at him with wet hair stuck to your forehead.

“You dick…” You chuckled incredulously, giving him no time to feel satisfied before scooping more foam and launching yourself at him, slamming your hand into his mouth.

It was the cafeteria food fight you’d always dreamed of having; except that it was just two people (and a puppy playing in the bathtub) in your bathroom instead of a big cafeteria, and food was exchanged for water in an old bucket close to breaking and wasted dog shampoo with enough bubbles for a little kid to have a stroke from the excitement. Not a degrade, but an upgrade, indeed— one you’d accept without a doubt; even if you could already imagine how much your back would hurt after you mopped up the mess you two made, for it was impossible not to as Peter grinned widely at you with his fake bubbly Santa Claus beard, and you held your soaked stomach as you hysterically laughed. Peter’s body tingled when he thought about dropping all his fears and doubts to crash his yearning lips against yours; to hold your chin with the delicacy you deserved, inundate the room with all his repressed lust and emotion, like a volcano that’s been asleep for eons gushing everything out for the first time in forever. He held himself back, though, like he always did, and just admired your sunshine from afar.

You lounged on your couch, your arm hanging off the side while Peter rested on the floor with his head against your knee, ignoring the discomfort just to be as close to you as possible. It was a well-deserved break after your puppy bath-time-turned-into-a-water-fight as you two watched the clean animal almost do a handstand while trying to eat from the larger bowl. You chuckled, your cheek squished against the cushion. “Did you know I named him Webster because of you?” You mumbled, and you felt Peter’s head graze your knee as he glanced at you, humming questioningly. “Webster. Web.”

“And you waited seventeen years to tell me that?”

“Thought it was sort of obvious.”

“I kinda just thought you were really passionate about the dictionary.” He said and you let out air through your nose, gripping the worn Mickey Mouse blanket wrapped around you. You clutched the memory of Peter gifting you the cloth for your dog’s first birthday close to your heart— the cloth which would become the Australian Shepherd’s most beloved possession, even up till to his last moments and as you said goodbye to him. You sniffed, closing your eyes when your vision began to blur.

“Spidey was an option at first, but I felt really lame calling my dog ‘Spidey’. Plus… he also really reminded me of you.”

His eyes softened. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, y’know: brown hair, brown eyes, adorable…” He almost had a heart attack. “He was always there for me and I… I really loved him.” You whispered.

Peter’s stare moved down to your hand, and soon you felt his fingers curl around yours. “Hey, Y/N?”

“Hm?”

“I have a confession to make.” You peeked an eye open. “I didn’t just bring the puppy here so you could help me clean her up.”

“What do you mean?”

“I, uh,” He scratched his stubble, trying to find his words. “Webster took care of you when I couldn’t, y’know? Not just that, but I hate seeing how much it hurt you to lose him. It hurt me as well— you saw me bawling my eyes out like a baby when they put him to sleep.” He laughed.

You frowned, giving his hand a squeeze. “Thank you for being there with me. I probably would’ve broken down if it weren’t for you. But why’d you bring the stray puppy here?”

“I know I said I was going to take her to a shelter, but I really just wanted to see your reaction. I don’t want you to think that I’m trying to replace Webster, though, because nothing ever could, and he deserves better than that.”

You then sat up, holding his hand on your lap as you began to understand what he was trying to say. “Peter…” You warned him— you truly weren’t in the mood for a prank, but his voice and features expressed nothing more than honesty. Peter rose from the ground and you immediately followed him, your hands linked as he walked up to the puppy.

“Sorry, bud, but I’m gonna take you for a sec,” He muttered as he bent down and scooped the dog. He faced you, your heart glowing at the sight of his sheepish smile and his giggles whilst the dog began to lick his neck. “I need someone to watch after you now that Webster can’t, and this girl right here is perfectly fit for the job.”

You were aware of how ridiculous you were for tearing up, but it was bound to happen when Peter handed out the puppy— your puppy to you. You gawked at him, taking her gently into your arms, blinking furiously when she washed your knuckles with her tongue. “Are you serious?”

“Do I look like I’m joking?” He scoffed, although showed you a crooked grin. You couldn’t contain yourself anymore, and took a step closer to him before landing a tender kiss on the corner of his mouth, lightly brushing his lips. He gulped when you pulled away, his eyes going round. “O-oh.”

“It’s not a kiss like I said back in the bathroom, but it’s what you’ll get for now.” You murmured shyly, suddenly your feet much more interesting to look at than the flustered man in front of you or the sweet creature you held. However, once again, you missed that stare of his and his growing smile as his whole face lit up.

“I really can’t complain.”

[headlessartistblog-blog]

Post 1: On Poetics

Poetry, am I right? Who needs the stuff? Well, I do. I get paid to go to school for it. I’m not going to bore you with some longwinded introduction where I satisfy your checklist of things that constitute a reliable source because I know you don’t really care. Instead, I’ll direct you to a list of the top 5 most important things to keep in mind when reading and writing poetry (for all ages!). As you can see, they aren’t written on stone tablets, so feel free to disagree with anything I say here (if you do leave comments of dissent, please be kind enough to follow it up with a “because” for others who may be interested).  This is just my personal take from my experiences. Take what you will.

1. Your Poem Should Have Some Sort of Surprise or Insight (It Should Change You) 

What distinguishes a good poem from a great poem (or a good poem from a bad poem) is its transformative qualities. To put it simply, a great poem is a poem that truly changes you. You should leave the poem feeling that you’ve learned something about yourself or about the world. Not only will minding the transformative qualities of a poem help you assess others’ poetry, but it can also serve as a guide for your own endeavors.

When writing a poem, we sometimes find ourselves engaging with things (emotions, memories, ideas, art, etc.) that we don’t quite understand or can’t account for. Let us, for example, say we are writing a poem about something wholly original and not at all trite: love. Anyone who has ever been in love has felt the strange emotions that circumspect its comings and goings: euphoria, despair, infatuation, apathy, content, anxiety, reassurance, fear. Now, imagine trying to describe these emotions in a way that accurately conveys their essence; “I’m afraid” isn’t much of a poem (though the conciseness of T.S. Eliot’s “and in short, I was afraid” is quite striking).

The arrival of the surprise in poetry is the result of a successful engagement with the ambiguous and arduous. Put simply, you get the surprise by working through your thoughts and emotions on paper. Be aware that there is no way to foresee the arrival of the surprise. In fact, you might find that it’s in the first few lines you’ve written. Conversely, you might find that it takes weeks of writing or revision to arrive at some sort of insight. Regardless, you should leave the poem somehow changed.

Examples of Surprises:

The Archaic Torso of Achilles- Rilke

The Warning- Creeley

2. Let the Poem Be Its Own Guide (Don’t Force It)

A successful artist is an artistic who recognizes their art and works with it. Well, what the fuck does that mean? Much like every other art, intention often finds itself at odds with the poem. Intention essentially means the objective we bring to the table when we make art. A simple example: “I want to write a love poem.” Great! Everyone loves a good love poem. However, where most beginning poets -and experienced poets time and time again- stall is reconciling intention with output. By output, I simply mean what ends up on the page.

Imagine this: you’re writing your love poem and, suddenly, you find yourself writing about a box of photos you found in your grandmother’s attic. Well that just won’t work, will it? We’re trying to write a love poem! Not a poem about old pictures of your grandmother. What the sensible person would do is get back on track, cross out those inane lines and continue their trek of love. What the poet does is follow the trail of memory. The poem knows what it wants to be just as your intuition knows what the poem should be.

Perhaps one of the greatest struggles beginning poets tend to face is the seemingly sporadic nature of intuition. “This is what I want the poem to be! Why can’t I get it to do what I want?!” Well, uh, that’s because the poem is kind of like a person. I mean, it’s being written by a person based on that person’s experiences, and we all know human experience is anything but simple and linear. Trying to force a poem to do something is like trying to force a person to do something.

As artists, we often forget that our art is not always going to be in tandem with our goals and aspirations. That’s okay. In fact, it’s great! It keeps us from being indebted to our own egos. “Oh? You thought you were going to write the modern epic? No no no! You’re going to write about the hole in your shoe.” Additionally, who’s to say that love and the box of photographs are entirely unrelated? Love is a complex and multifaceted emotion. There are many kinds of love: romantic, sexual, familial, idealistic, etc. What the poem is trying to show you is the relationships between your love for a partner and your love for your grandmother. Let the art run its course.  

3. Avoid Clichés

This, in my opinion, can be a make it or break it for poetry (and all art). Nothing turns an audience off like being cliché (think dad-rock). Unfortunately, there’s no end to the barrage of hip, Instagram poetry that somehow passes as insightful and profound (@ Milk and Honey). I try not to sound like a pompous asshole as much as possible, but everybody has a line in the sand, and this is mine. Just don’t do it. Don’t be that person (poet).

For one, it’s contrived, and it’s obvious because you can’t tell the difference between any of the people writing the “poems.” Two, it takes little to no effort to write Instagram poetry:

Just because you’ve decided to

Stay inside doesn’t make you

Anything less.

Even the butterfly needs

Time alone to grow

 Truly inspired.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, there are other clichés that you’ll want to avoid. The most common ones usually occur in metaphor or simile:

My love, you are like a flower

Swaying in the summer breeze

Okay, so let’s break this down. One, there’s nothing really surprising about comparing your love to a flower. It’s been done many times; at this point, probably too many times. Two, there’s also nothing surprising about a flower in summer. It’s to be expected. Three, while the entire image itself is beautiful (flowers in the summer breeze), it doesn’t reveal anything unique about the speaker’s love. In fact, some would find the use of such a bland and predictable simile almost insulting.

*Now, here’s where an exception to clichés comes in. This would be a perfect simile if you were trying to be sarcastic or humorous about your relationship without being too on the nose*

So how do we spice this up? Well, we make the simile surprising:

My love, you are like the muddy river that runs under the bridge

Cool and murky as you drift through my fingers in the summer’s heat

Okay, not the greatest lines ever written, but more interesting than flowers in the summer breeze.

What often helps all writers think about interesting comparisons and images is being honest about the emotions behind them. We understand that you’re in love, so we want to hear about it, actually hear about it. When you think about the person you love, do you actually think about flowers in the summer breeze? Or do you think about the dumpster behind the cafeteria where you first kissed? Or how they snore in the middle of the night? Or how you’re always late because you both decide to lounge in bed until 2 in the afternoon?  I guarantee you that being honest about the mundaneness of love (or whatever else you decide to write about) will produce something with more candor and accessibility (meaning, resonant with others) than lofty misconceptions about what love is.

As a final note on the cliché, always remember to be true to your own voice. Emulating other people’s poetry can be a fun and useful exercise to develop your own skills, but it is not an end. I’m honestly surprised how many times I’ve encountered poetry from the 21st century written like this:

Hark! Mine fellow scholars! Doth thou hear the gentle wings of poesy?

No, sir, I don’t hear it. Chaucer is dead. Shakespeare is dead. And for good reason. Let’s keep it that way. While most of us don’t speak poetically often, we certainly don’t speak like that anymore. Stay true to the times.

Examples of subverting or flirting with the cliché:

Porphyria’s Lover- Browning

The Flea- Donne

4. Play With Formalities of Structure and Grammar

I’ll keep this point brief because it’s pretty straightforward. Poetry does not have to abide by the formal rules of structure and grammar. In fact, there are very few rules at all.

You can write your lines as whole sentences

Or you can break them up.

You can use commas, periods, exclamation points, etc.

Or you can completely forgo them?

CAPITALIZATION and italics can help

Emphasize certain words that you think are IMPORTANT

Words can be bro     ken up in any num-

Ber of ways do(n’t) be afraid 2

Experiment w/the formalities of language!

5. Stay Grounded in the Real

This may seem like an odd piece of advice but it’s something that has significant consequences for most art. A few, short years ago I was briefly enamored with the complexities and possibilities of language that poetry offered, which manifested in this poem:

For if she flees I should pursue, Through vision, Thereafter? Feather footed, criminal as we are.

 Samael, So once we were, Golden swans littered across the sky, Bathing/bourn/bearing

Light

 Time beyond candlelight, Wicks, unto you, Progenic burning, Great love, Fallen

 Meadows, Whisper sweetly and, Slither into my dreams, Carry with us, black as we rose So Mourned, Thus forgotten

 Disembodied, I will never be beautiful

 Windows, Searching fragments, Arrested above the surface, And if we look back, Snatched away

 Remnants, Objects of decay

 Simply, perpetually, Echo

 From you, Eternity, Effusive threshold, Forlorn foundation, Dripping through fingers, All the things you are

 Cuping flame, Gentle blow

 I was new enough to poetry to still be proud of my writing and gave it to my mentor for his thoughts. After reading it, he asked me “what part of this poem is grounded in the real?” At that moment, I realized that I had gotten so caught up in creating images that I had forgotten to give the poem any kind of “soul.”

Indeed, all this poem is is a bunch of nebulous images that say nothing of the world. There’s a reason we relate to Lucifer instead of God in Paradise Lost. It’s because Lucifer represents us, “the real.” Despite the fact that he is a celestial being, his actions and emotions are human and that’s why we like him. He’s grounded in the worldly.

Think about it like this: the reason you probably hated those books you read in high school and college is because they didn’t resonate with you (yet?). There’s nothing in those books that speaks to your reality. Take, for instance, The Crucible; it’s written well-enough, but I hate it because it doesn’t say anything about my experience. It doesn’t say anything that I can relate to or care about. You “don’t get” Shakespeare, or Chaucer, or Faulkner not because you’re dumb or you didn’t try hard enough, but because their stories might not speak to your experience as a human being.  

It’s also worth noting that age does play a factor in almost every kind of art. That’s why you grow out of certain literature, tv shows, genres of music and people, because they no longer speak for or reflect who you are. The art that remains is the art that continues to say something about the world in our eyes.

[julesdelorme]

Genius by Harold Bloom Jules F. Delorme Literary criticism, true literary criticism, that deconstructs and doesn’t just attack, that isn’t just a collection of soundbites, criticism that is whole and aims at our higher selves, seems to have gone the way of the dodo. We get most of our information in soundbites and memes today. And longer, more thoughtful, in depth criticism seems to be very much a lost art.

Harold Bloom might well have been the last truly great literary critic. He made you want to read. He broke down why Shakespeare or Milton were great, what made their work so special. He could be provocative and opinionated, but most often these were tools in his hands to get your attention. Once he had it he kept your attention with thoughtful deconstruction, breaking down passages to show you what made them work, what made them so powerful.

Harold Bloom was rarely boring.

I have to admit, when I saw his book Genius, a Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, on the shelf at my local bookstore, I grabbed it up without much inspection, based almost entirely on Bloom’s name, and assuming that it would be a work on genius in general. I expected passages on Einstein, Freud, Jung and Thomas Aquinas. It didn’t even occur to me that, this being Harold Bloom, this book would be exclusively on literary genius. Even as a writer myself, I’m not sure that I would have chosen to spend good money on a book about one hundred literary geniuses. I doubt very much I could have named anything close to a hundred literary geniuses and many of the names in this book I’d never even heard of before. Some of the names I may never read.

I don’t agree with all of his choices, both in who he chose to include and who he didn’t. Some of the passages seem far too short and some seem too long. 

But that is part and parcel of great criticism. It requires the critic to take a point of view. One of the greatest film critics of all time, Pauline Kael took the point of view that small verite films are good and big ones are bad. She turned on Stanley Kubrick for making 2001, saying he had sold out to Hollywood. She once wrote an article claiming that Star Wars and Jaws had murdered cinema. I don’t agree with any of those things, but her ability to break down a single scene in a film and explain why it worked or didn’t work was nothing short of art. She was also, as is Bloom, a very good writer. 

I’ve often found myself disagreeing with Harold Bloom too. But I have never, not once, found his writing to not provoke me into thinking more deeply about why I disagreed with him or why I agreed with him.

That, to me, is the sign of a truly great critic.

Great critics, quite literally, teach us how to think.And they definitely are a dying breed.Don’t get me wrong. I love that IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes and Goodreads exist. They democratize opinion about movies and books and give all of us access to feedback about any book or movie with a few clicks of the keyboard. But in democratization we also become subject to denomination, to census more than individual opinion. You’re probably scanning this piece or not reading it at all because it’s too long. But that is the point. Art, great art, is textured and complex and difficult. You have to sit with it and struggle with it, to pause and really take serious art in. And writing about it should, I would even go so far as to say has, to reflect that.

That’s not to say that every single thing has to be deep and mysterious or it isn’t worthwhile.

A fun read, a fun film is a pleasure of its own kind.

But have we become a culture of the glib, of the soundbite and the meme?

People like Harold Bloom remind us of the beauty of depth, of complexity, of Genius.

And Genius, as a book, can be said to be Bloom’s sequel to How To Read and Why in that it presents us with a list of what Bloom considers to be one hundred of the greatest writers in history. In doing so he invites us to explore some of these writers, discover some we never knew about or only vaguely knew about and maybe go back and rediscover some writers we read but did not fully appreciate. He presents poets like Hart Crane and Emily Dickinson and prose writers such as Cervantes, Beckett and my beloved Faulkner. He gives each writer a chapter in which he deconstructs one work or one piece, giving you some idea why this writer is special.

Since he is presenting one hundred writers it is of course a long book.

And it’s not always easy.

Some of the writers are obscure and difficult and he doesn’t present them as anything but.

But he gives you a glimpse of greatness, one hundred glimpses of greatness. 

Some you will appreciate this immediately and some may take some time to sink fully in. And some you will just not see the point of this book or of Harold Bloom.

But they are there for you.

 what Harold Bloom does, what he hopes to do, is to give you glimpses of these genius writers’ daemon, their spark of inspiration, while maybe, just maybe sparking your own daemon along the way.

Genius is not an easy book.

It wasn’t meant to be easy.

But I don’t think Bloom is asking you to abandon your Stephen King, your Harry Potter, your romances or your fun reads at all. Of course those books have their place and they are deserving to be read.

I think that he’s just trying to show you that the deep end of the writing pool may be a little intimidating but some of it is well worth the venture away from the shallow end, however briefly.

As I said, Harold Bloom might well be our last great literary critic.

That may not attract you. That may not speak to you.

You may have abandoned this piece about his book a long time ago.

But, if you haven’t, if you’ve read all of this piece despite its length and challenges, then maybe you should pick up Harold Bloom’s Genius, A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative minds.

I did.

And I can honestly say that I have a long list of writers that I now want to explore. And that my thoughts on writing have been greatly expanded.It’s not a book for everybody. Nothing Harold Bloom ever wrote was for everybody.

Most of what he wrote challenged us to think more deeply about what we are reading and why.

If you sincerely don’t care about that at all, don’t read this book.

If you do, read Genius, or any other of Bloom’s many books.

They’re more fun than you might expect.

And you will definitely be smarter for having read them.

I, for one, think that you couldn’t ask for more than that from a truly great critic. https://www.facebook.com/delormewriting #writing #writer #writers #poetry #poem #poems #poet #JulesDelorme #JulesFDelorme #delormewriting #ScarboroughWritersFightClub #book #booksbooksbooks #bookshelf #author #authors #goodreads #GoodreadsChoice #critic #critics #criticism #greatwriters

[mysticsparklewings]

NaPoWriMo 2020 Day 18: The Little Things

can you see the way the light catches the twinkles of life folded into the pages gently tapping the roof warming your lap and your heart ____ This may have actually been one of the easiest NaPo's to write so far, once I had a few concepts to latch on to. And after a relatively busy day yesterday, I am grateful for that. The prompt? "An ode to life's small pleasures." As per usual, I thought this was interesting because I distinctly remember thinking something about noticing the little things like that--as napowrimo.net gives the examples of the first sip of morning coffee, looking up at the sky and watching the clouds, etc--though I cannot for the life of me remember what it was I was thinking that about or why. Regardless, I like this prompt and I was fairly eager to take a stab at it. The main issue I had was coming up with some "little things" to include that I could make decent imagery for without 100% directly stating what they were. I started by trying to come up with my own list, but after a couple of minutes, I realized that about half of the things I could think of while small pleasures for me, would necessarily be that for other people. Now, the "rules"/prompt doesn't say anything about these happy tidbits having to be universal or widely accepted, but I thought the poem would communicate a bit better if the focus was on small things that the majority could relate to, rather than just me. So I hopped over to Pinterest because I was 99% sure I had saved at least a couple of posts that had lists of "little things" like this, and I figured even if I didn't agree with everything on them, I could use them to come up with some more of my own if nothing else. This turned out to be a very good idea because once I found one of these posts, I was indeed able to do just that. Between my own list and my Pinspiration, the little things I tried to include here are: the way dust/air particles look almost like glitter in a ray of sunlight, the smell of books (new or old, for me, though I know most people prefer "old book" smell. But there's something equally inviting to me about one that you can tell by the scent has been freshly printed) as well as any neat little remnants of a previous owner that you might find in a secondhand book, that feeling you get on a lazy rainy day, and the cat-lovers favorite: the catharsis of a cat cuddled up in your lap. And it's kind of interesting to me that you could, in theory, have all of these things occur in one scene. It's a rainy day outside, you're cuddled up inside with two new books; one from the bookstore, one from the thrift store, with your cat sleeping on you, and as you read the rain stops briefly and the clouds part, and there's that ray of sunshine. It is, at least to me, a very cozy picture, which is the feeling I was aiming for with the mandala. Soft, cozy, delicate but fun. It's a bit hard to truly capture that feeling in something like a mandala, but I did my best.  I think the color scheme was a bit more important in this case, and I specifically went with softer colors and some warm browns and a pinkish gold for that purpose. Also, you can see I tried to be slightly more creative with the actual arrangement of the words; I was aiming for a "rays of light" kind of look, considering how the poem starts and that that was one of my "little things." Likewise, it works out visually pretty nicely that my main light source for the photo is a window to my left, the same direction the words are coming from, so the way the metallic gel pens catch the light follows through really well.   Admittedly, I haven't been playing with the shape/arrangement of the words much because a lot of the poems have been too long to consider it, or I was more focused on getting the words down and the mandala was done so I didn't really think to do so. I would like to try and do that a bit more though, even if it can never be anything too terribly exciting or complicated. But it really does depend largely on the length of the poem if that's even possible, and the length of the poem more often than not has a strong correlation to how simple or complex the prompt is. So, in that case, let us all hope for some more as equally (or even more so) simple prompts as this one going forward! ____ Artwork/Poem © me, MysticSparkleWings Inspired by FridgePoetProject ____ Where to find me & my artwork: My Website | Commission Info + Prices | Ko-Fi | dA Print Shop | RedBubble |   Twitter | Tumblr | Instagram

[alitheia-writes]

Automaton (KamiMiyo/Miyokami) ch 1

Automaton - Alitheia Fandom/Relationships: Joker Game/KamiMiyo-MiyoKami Tags: Canon Universe. Friendship/Love. Light angst. Non-chronological. Summary: —but spies were not machines. (Kaminaga recounted the past and dreamed of the days to come; of a world in which Miyoshi hadn’t ceased to exist.) Chapters: one | two | three | four Link: AO3

A/N: Did a fanfic with this kind of writing style before, I thought it'd be fun to try it with KamiMiyo too (and in English ;w;). Portraying both Kaminaga and Miyoshi is so hard—I have so many ideas for them, which I'd probably never be able to write lol—but the nature and complexity of their relationships was the thing that made me love this pairing instantly. Hopefully, though, I won't mess up so much and this fanfic comes out in the way I see them in my head, hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it! (´・ω・`)

Joker Game © Yanagi Koji and I do not gain any profit from writing this fanfiction.

i. under the morning light

One of the reminiscences that could never be washed away from Kaminaga's memories was of a spy named Miyoshi, as he sat beside the window at the agency’s small library on the fourth floor, with a book on his lap, basked under the morning sun. It was a modest scenery, neither a special occasion nor a point of culmination, but there was just something in its simplicity that made the moment lingered. Perhaps because it was their first chance to talk with only the two of them present, or maybe because it was the first time he realized how flawless the contour of Miyoshi’s face was—from his pretty eyes to his salient chin—carved by shadows and golden rays.

Kaminaga had pretty much picked up on everyone’s quirks since the early of their trainee days. It was a little harder with the number of people who started at first, but later as the days went and they finally dwindled to eight men, the more chance they got to interact, the more each of their personalities became prominent. But it had never occurred to him, the Miyoshi who liked reading books—not that Kaminaga thought he didn’t fit the smart image—he just didn’t see that narcissistic Miyoshi would also need to hide himself away sometimes.

“Sorry,” he remembered it was he who first attempted for any sort of conversation, during the first few weeks of their training, “did I disturb you?”

“As long as you won’t start screaming or something of the like,” chestnut-colored eyes glanced, “then I’m not bothered.”

“I’m just going to open the window and smoke, if that’s alright with you?”

“Be my guest.”

Miyoshi titled his torso a bit to the side so he could easily open the windowpane, followed by a slight shake of the head and a thin smile when refusing the cigarette Kaminaga offered him. They eventually just sat there, falling into a sweet silence of the early winter. Kaminaga leaned on his chair, eyes parking somewhere between the bookshelves behind Miyoshi’s back, as his ears searched for proof of lives, even if it was just a faint sound of breaths or tiny chirp of birds outside.

He wasn’t thinking about anything particular when without a warning, Miyoshi closed his hardback book with a dull thud, blowing off dust particles that looked akin to light snow. He left it on his thighs, while his gaze shifted outside; still as a statue, as if was contemplating, or trying to find inspiration in the windows of other buildings. Bending forward to tap the cigarette on the ashtray on the small table separating them, Kaminaga peeked at his book—The Odyssey, carved in silver letters on a sky blue cover.

Positioning his back to be as comfortable as the wooden chair allowed him to, he puffed trails of smoke.

“I never thought you’re a fan of Homer.”

“I’m not,” their eyes met for a brief second, before Miyoshi returned his gaze to his book, tapping his fingers on the binding, “was just looking for something to keep me busy last night.”

“You could always come to cafeteria like usual, you know,” Kaminaga said, “we played cards until past midnight.”

The corners of his lips turned slightly upwards, and the only thing that crossed Kaminaga’s mind was how Miyoshi was always able to make his lips curved in a way that look so effortless and natural, “Sometimes you just need the time to be alone.”

“Well, if you say so, I guess I could understand.” He chuckled a bit. “So, did you find something interesting about Odysseus?”

“Not particularly, except maybe for the fact that he probably slept with pretty much every woman he met,” Miyoshi looked at him, still smiling, “somehow that sounds a bit familiar, doesn’t it?”

“Let’s just pretend you weren’t looking at me when you said that.”

“I’m still looking at you, though.”

Kaminaga laughed. “May I ask what are you trying to imply here?”

“Other than things that have been depicted in some ancient Greek epic poems actually still could be found in today’s society, no,” Miyoshi replied, “I’m not trying to imply anything.”

Only a couple of weeks ago, this man and all of his sickeningly sweet, disparaging innuendos had irked him to no end. But now when he’d realized that Miyoshi might simply be a cynic to the core, and that by throwing sarcastic remarks was his way of trying to keep the conversation going, he instead found himself grinning, genuinely amused at how bizarre his personality was. For the same reason he also didn’t reply. Kaminaga hated losing, but for this one time, he’d let Miyoshi feel satisfied. Consider it as him being genial. And he could be wrong, but Miyoshi did seem a bit younger than him, so consider it as Kaminaga being a courteous big brother as well.

So then he resorted to just enjoy his cigarette, while the smoke danced above his head before it dissipated in the morning wind. There were, after all, some moments that were meant to be savored, just like this one.

Kaminaga might not look like it, but he actually fancied reading. So far the only trainee he met most often in the library was Jitsui, though their relationship was just that of a polite conversation with occasional comments or recommendations about books that both of them had read. Miyoshi’s presence might be a good change of pace; listening to other people was indeed Kaminaga’s natural interest. Miyoshi would almost certainly be a great partner for conversations, though sometimes he made Kaminaga want to throw him the ashtray.

“Actually,” Miyoshi said, suddenly, “there was something that kind of caught my attention more than Odysseus and his adventures.”

“Oh?”

Miyoshi set the book in his hands, letting the papers turned swiftly under his fingers, as if trying to find a certain page. Kaminaga didn’t want to admit that he was already curious. But he didn’t stop until the back cover was reached, and the man returned it to his lap instead. “I just thought there was something quite amusing.”

“And that something is?” When his interlocutor only smiled, he quickly added, “Don’t make it as if you want to say it then leave me hanging.”

“Am I catching your interest, Kaminaga?”

“Perhaps.” He puffed his cigarette, looking as absent-minded as possible. Though Kaminaga was a good actor—that was part of his job as a spy, actually—he knew there was no use of pretending in front of people who were also always faking.

“Automaton.”

“Pardon?”

“You asked what’s amusing, my answer is, automaton; King Alcinous’ gold and silver dogs,” Miyoshi said, “that, if you’re familiar with some Greek myth or Homer’s works.”

And of course he did. Kaminaga had read The Odyssey—hell, he even read The Iliad before that—and his memory was excellent, so he knew exactly what was being talked about. “The dogs that guard his palace?” he asked. “What’s funny about them?”

Miyoshi placed the book on the table, almost making Kaminaga think that he wanted to show something, but the book cover was closed. “Define automaton?”

“The Homer’s one? A statue out of metal, having the ability to move by themselves because they were given life by the gods or something.”

“Precisely,” Miyoshi sighed, “and that also sounds strangely familiar, isn’t it?”

Kaminaga raised an eyebrow, this time not catching what Miyoshi meant. He hoped his expression was enough to make the other spy elaborate further, but the man only maintained the curve on his lips, as if it was the only thing that he was supposed to do in the world. He then rose from his seat, dusted invisible dust off his waistcoat, and took the suit jacket from the back of the chair. Without any word, he walked toward the door.

“Wait,” Kaminaga called him right when his hand was on the doorknob, “where are you going?”

“I meant to catch some sleep, if you don’t mind,” stopping briefly, he said, “I was up all night, you see.”

“Well yes, but I still don’t get what you mean.”

He stared at Kaminaga for a few long seconds, face unreadable. Miyoshi then shrugged. “Yet.”

The door closed. Kaminaga was left alone in the room, with old books and tales about automatons.

[hishotandhaywireheart]

Survey from Esther~

1: 6 of the songs you listen to most? Janina Gavankar - Don't Look Down The Irrepressibles - Two Men In Love The Irrepressibles - The Arrow Flor - Warm Blood Shearwater - Animal Life Bastille - Laura Palmer 2: If you could meet anyone on this earth, who would it be? I'm overwhelmed by this question and can't pick a single answer, sorry lol. This is like asking me what my favorite Pokémon is. 3: Grab the book nearest to you, turn to page 23, give me line 17. I'm in a dog boarding facility's kitchen at the moment, no books in sight, I'm afraid. But I am reading the first book of the Raven Cycle series in audio form, if that helps 4: What do you think about most? What a question. Art? Animals? 5: What does your latest text message from someone else say? It's my boyfriend saying he's going to sleep :3 6: Do you sleep with or without clothes on? *Gamagoori voice* I sleep in the nude 7: What’s your strangest talent? Even though I am not a smoker [unless you count a couple of hookahs per year], I can tell the brand of a cigarette by the smell of the smoke. The smell on someone's clothes, I know immediately what brand it is. Mixture of childhood exposure, sensory sensitivity, and the jobs I've worked lol. 8: Girls… (finish the sentence); Boys… (finish the sentence) Girls are powerful. Boys are powerful. 9: Ever had a poem or song written about you? I dunno. Maybe? 10: When is the last time you played the air guitar? Uhh. Not a thing that occurs to me to do, to be honest lol 11: Do you have any strange phobias? Big phobia of hypodermic needles, or generally anything like a splinter, tiny shard of glass or hook getting underneath my skin. Phobic of getting pregnant. I guess those are weird. 12: Ever stuck a foreign object up your nose? Uhhh probably? 13: What’s your religion? What a complicated question lol. Simple answer: I'm pagan. But there is literally nothing simple about my endless thoughts about spirituality 14: If you are outside, what are you most likely doing? Taking a walk in the woods, or sitting by a stream or body of water [water sources are especially sacred parts of nature for me] 15: Do you prefer to be behind the camera or in front of it? Both. But I love taking photos and nobody really takes any photos of me. So I guess behind. Especially when it's behind a Polaroid. 16: Simple but extremely complex. Favorite band? Shearwater. Honorable mention to the Irrepressibles. 17: What was the last lie you told? Fuck if I know 18: Do you believe in karma? Not really. But as always I believe in the awesome power of the brain. 19: What does your URL mean? It's my name with "Irrepressible" after it, in the style of Jamie Irrepressible, the vocalist of, well, you can probably guess which band. 20: What is your greatest weakness; your greatest strength? Weakness - I'm extremely prone to gaslighting and self doubt about my own reality. Strength - I might not be a fan of abrupt change, but I am very adaptable, given time to adjust. 21: Who is your celebrity crush? None 22: Have you ever gone skinny dipping? No, sadly. Remember what I said about my irrational fear of stepping on hooks or sharp objects? Interferes with my sacred need to swim in every lake I see. 23: How do you vent your anger? Ideally, art. Drawing, writing, even recording myself ranting to my microphone about it. 24: Do you have a collection of anything? I collect retro Pokémon merchandise and certain old video games. :> this makes me sound like a massive genwunner but rest assured, it's just an Aesthetic™ 25: Do you prefer talking on the phone or video chatting online? Text, to be honest. Us auties generally do better communicating in text based media. Skype calls are useful at times but I've always found them too awkward with delays and such to use reliably. 26: Are you happy with the person you’ve become? Hmmm. Tentatively, yes? 27: What’s a sound you hate; sound you love? Sound I hate: male voices shouting. Sound I love: music bouncing off walls and becoming ethereal and far away. 28: What’s your biggest “what if”? What if I don't understand what this question is asking me? 29: Do you believe in ghosts? How about aliens? Ghosts, no. I talk about them a lot though because the idea of them is dear and important to me, but literally, no, I have no belief in some vaporized version of your personality that goes on after death. Aliens, I assume are a matter of inevitability. But I don't believe we will probably ever find or meet them in the foreseeable future. Humans think they are much more fascinating than they actually are. Aliens are not crawling all over themselves to build technology just to come fly over to our house and meet us. Sry 30: Stick your right arm out; what do you touch first? Do the same with your left arm. Air both times lol 31: Smell the air. What do you smell? The heat coming on at work because morning is here. Faint dog poop smell. Gonna have to tidy that up lol 32: What’s the worst place you have ever been to? Buttfuck nowhere, West Virginia 33: Choose: East Coast or West Coast? East Coast, if we're talking america 34: Most attractive singer of your opposite gender? I don't have an opposite gender 35: To you, what is the meaning of life? To create something meaningful and beautiful, and to enjoy myself to the fullest while helping others whenever possible 36: Define Art. If it makes you think about whether or not it's art, then it's art. 37: Do you believe in luck? Uhh. Like as an actual outside force that decides whether good or bad stuff will happen to me, no. 38: What’s the weather like right now? Coldddd 39: What time is it? 6 am. Time to get off work! 40: Do you drive? If so, have you ever crashed? Yes, I drive, don't love it but glad I am able. No, but I did run over a bin once 41: What was the last book you read? A book about the history of heterosexuality as a concept, fascinating read actually 42: Do you like the smell of gasoline? As a kid I liked it but it's kinda gross now 43: Do you have any nicknames? Many 44: What was the last film you saw? Can't remember a film rn but I am currently watching The Story Of Film which I CANNOT recommend enough, it is a documentary series about, well, the history of cinema and even if you don't care about movie making... It will absorb you completely and make you not only care but be totally fascinated. I adore it. 45: What’s the worst injury you’ve ever had? You know, I've been really lucky. Never broken bone or needed stitches or even like, been to the hospital, lol. I think I chipped my shin bone on a brick stair once. And a couple years ago I missed a stair going down and sprained my ankle, and my work refused to let me spend any time off my feet so I was crying from pain in front of customers lol. But it healed fast once I had a brace. No problem. 46: Have you ever caught a butterfly? I dunno. I was taught as a child that if you touch their wing dust even a little, they will lose their flight and die. So probably I haven't. Even though I now know this isn't quite true. 47: Do you have any obsessions right now? The Story of Film, some bands, getting sucked back deep into my lifelong love Pokémon again lol 48: What’s your sexual orientation? Pansexual, or: Why Are Gender And Genital Shape Our Main Social Indicator Of Romantic Or Sexual Preferences, Of All Things, That's Really Weird And I Can't Relate, Please Save Me From This Bizarro World 49: Ever had a rumour spread about you? Oh yes, plenty back in school 50: Do you believe in magic? Ahh. I believe in the power of will. I believe in the ability to make your own life full of magic via willpower. I believe in the harmless use of willpower to try and cause a change in your environment. I believe the force exercised by children known dismissively as "imagination" have incredible power to influence the mind and soul. I have no belief in a metaphysical force in the universe called "magic" that could describe basically anything and everything unknown to current science. If you ask me flat-out, I will say yes, I believe in magic. But this is more of what I mean. I don't believe in "magic", except that I do. Adamantly. 51: Do you tend to hold grudges against people who have done you wrong? I do not tend to forget. Forgive is a matter of situation. But I don't forget. And I am quite the talented ice prince when it comes to freezing someone entirely out of my life. This includes immediate family. I only speak to my little sister out of my entire family. 52: What is your astrological sign? Taurus-Gemini cusp! 53: Do you save money or spend it? Spend :T 54: What’s the last thing you purchased? Bread, milk and a couple very cheap, very pink, very glittery nail polishes. My weakness. 55: Love or lust? Yes. 56: In a relationship? Yep 57: How many relationships have you had? Uhh... Many? Serious, deep romantic relationships, which I suspect is your real question: three. 58: Can you touch your nose with your tongue? Nope 59: Where were you yesterday? Home, and briefly out at the store. 60: Is there anything pink within 10 feet of you? My nails are pink and glittery. 61: Are you wearing socks right now? Yep. I wear two pairs to work because my super comfy work shoes are just the tiniest bit too big. 62: What’s your favourite animal? You asked the impossible question. Today, your answer is: praying mantis. Specifically praying mantis godmothers. Ask me again in two hours for an entirely different answer. 63: What is your secret weapon to get someone to like you? Sorry, too socially awkward for this prompt 64: Where is your best friend? In bed, it is very late and/or early. 65: Give me your top 5 favourite blogs on Tumblr. Don't really have favorites? Just people and stuff I like. 66: What is your heritage? Whitey white. Scots Irish, English, a bit of German, and like everything else you can expect from a family that's been in America about as long as a white devil could possibly be. My mother is a hobbyist genealogist, so this isn't just typical white folks bullshit, I'm vaguely more educated on my roots. I am in fact a distant cousin of notable American politician of the 19th century, Henry Clay. 67: What were you doing last night at 12AM? Playing Pokémon Blue! Beating the game for literally the first time ever! 68: What do you think is Satan’s last name? Uh. Um. Oh god, I don't know lmao 69: Be honest. Ever gotten yourself off? Yes, everyone has, normalize it 70: Are you the kind of friend you would want to have as a friend? Hmmm. Yes. 71: You are walking down the street on your way to work. There is a dog drowning in the canal on the side of the street. Your boss has told you if you are late one more time you get fired. What do you do? Lose my job bitches, and maybe hope to go viral and boost my chances of getting a new job for doing this thing lol 72: You are at the doctor’s office and she has just informed you that you have approximately one month to live. a) Do you tell anyone/everyone you are going to die? b) What do you do with your remaining days? c) Would you be afraid? A-Maybe. At least a few people. B-Travel, make good art, write my will, get my affairs in order. C- Yes, for a while. 73: You can only have one of these things; trust or love. Trust obvs 74: What’s a song that always makes you happy when you hear it? Many. First one that comes to mind is Empire by Jukebox the Ghost 75: What are the last four digits in your cell phone number? Nope 76: In your opinion, what makes a great relationship? Being best friends and trying to understand one another and willing to be open and honest, no ego in the way 77: How can I win your heart? Buy me sushi. 78: Can insanity bring on more creativity? Yes. 79: What is the single best decision you have made in your life so far? To not have children. 80: What size shoes do you wear? American size seven in men's, nine in women's. Sometimes half a size up or down. 81: What would you want to be written on your tombstone? No idea. I should get thinking on that. 82: What is your favourite word? Don't really have one favorite tbh 83: Give me the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word; heart. Glowing lights, core imagery 84: What is a saying you say a lot? Hell yeah 85: What’s the last song you listened to? Maxiimo Park - Going Missing 86: Basic question; what’s your favourite colour/colours? Long story short: indigo. 87: What is your current desktop picture? Some Pokémon, I forget which. 88: If you could press a button and make anyone in the world instantaneously explode, who would it be? A random white supremacist, maybe, but honestly, I probably wouldn't press it 89: What would be a question you’d be afraid to tell the truth on? No idea rn 90: One night you wake up because you heard a noise. You turn on the light to find that you are surrounded by MUMMIES. The mummies aren’t really doing anything, they’re just standing around your bed. What do you do? I'd be quite disturbed because I cut my teeth on Ocarina of Time and was very creeped out by ReDeads 91: You accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and what’s even cooler is that they endow you with the super-power of your choice! What is that power? Shapeshifting. Always my answer. Covers being an animal, or being a child, or flying, or swimming. 92: You can re-live any point of time in your life. The time-span can only be a half-hour, though. What half-hour of your past would you like to experience again? First thought is a marching band performance from high school. Second thought is back in that car in the vast moonlit Utah desert. 93: You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be? Bad math teachers. Gave me a complex about math and didn't improve me as a person in any way like most of the others did. 94: You have the opportunity to sleep with the music-celebrity of your choice. Who would it be? No interest 95: You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere. You have to depart right now. Where are you gonna go? Japan motherfuckers 96: Do you have any relatives in jail? Not that I'm aware of but I couldn't care less tbh 97: Have you ever thrown up in the car? If I have, I must have been very small. 98: Ever been on a plane? Yep, just twice. 99: If the whole world were listening to you right now, what would you say? If they actually absorbed what I had to say? Love yourselves. Love each other. Endeavor to understand each other. Try to figure out what you were taught wrong about yourself and your fellow humans, and unlearn those things. Embrace humanity in all its diversity. Open up and be vulnerable.

[nageshchandramishra]

Fulfilling Sir M. Visvesvaraya’s

Unfinished Dreams Of AATMANIRBHAR BHARAT

[*NAGESH CHANDRA MISHRA, Former Engineer-In-Chief, Paper for 53rd Engineer’s Day, September 15, 2020]

“बाद मरने के मेरी क़ब्र पे आया वो ‘मीर’ याद आई मेरे ईसा को दवा मेरे बाद “

: मीर तकी मीर

(O Mir , he came to my grave after I’d died ; My messiah thought of a medicine after I’d

died : Meer Taqi Meer )

Celebrating 53rd Engineer’s Day during Covid-19 Pandemic through social distancing gives a strange feeling of togetherness with Bharat Ratna Sir M. Visvesvaraya’s spirits. It seems as if he has come alive to guide our Political Masters with Nation’s desired compass of AATMANIRBHAR BHARAT .

2) BACKGROUND:

Before hitting the nail right on the head, let’s examine what do we mean by AATMANIRBHAR Bharat ? Self - Reliant India or Self - Sufficient India ?

Since time immemorial & also during 73 years since Independence , India has been experiencing many concepts of Self-Reliance & Self - Sufficiency based on indigenous as well different global philosophical thoughts explained in brief as the following :

( A ) SriMadBhagwatGeeta :

ननयतंकुरुकममत्वंकममज्यायोह्यकमणमः। शरीरयात्रापपचतेनप्रससद्ध्येदकमणमः।।3.8।।

( You must perform your action which has been enjoined . For action is superior to inaction and even the maintenance of your body could not be properly accomplished through inaction ) [ Approx. Timeline 3 to 5 millennium B.C. ]

( B ) Colonial & Soviet Models :

“He who does not work

Neither shall he eat “

[ Timeline : New Testament aphorisms cited by John Smith in early 1600 in colony of Jamestown Virginia & by Communist Revolutionary Vladimir Lenin in early 1900s Russian Revolution ]

( C ) Great American Idea : “ Do your own thing “

[ Timeline: Ralph Waldo Emerson ( 1841 ) impressed by Benjamin Franklin’s Great Ideas of 18th Century ]

( D ) Indian Experimentation from Mahatma Gandhi’s Gram Swaraj , Nehruvian & Indira Gandhi’s Socialism , PV Narasimha Rao’s Globalisation To UPA & NDA’s ‘One step forward & Two Steps backward’ Types Models Of Confusions To Modi Ji’s AATMANIRBHAR BHARAT.

[ Timeline :1947 to 2020 ]

It would be appropriate here to put the facts straight in very brief.

India’s socialism made it an economic laggard in Asia.

“...it is worth investigating the costs borne by countries like India that did not become communist but drew heavily on the Soviet model . For three decades after its independence in 1947, India strove for self-sufficiency instead of the gains of international trade, and gave the state an ever-increasing role in controlling the means of production.

These policies yielded economic growth of 3.5 percent per year, which was half that of export-oriented Asian countries, and yielded slow progress in social indicators, too. Growth per capita in India was even slower, at 1.49 percent per year. It accelerated after reforms started tentatively in 1991 , and shot up to 6.78 percent per year after reforms deepened till 2009 ...”

“The delay in economic reform represents an enormous social tragedy. It drives home the point that India’s socialist era, which claimed it would deliver growth with social justice, delivered neither.”

( Courtesy: Swaminathan Aiyar , CATO Institute Journal , October 21, 2009 , No. 4 ) Remaining period of UPA2 was mired with Policy Paralysis & Corruption that resulted into bringing NDA’s Modi1.O aspirational India in 2014 with high hopes of ‘Make In India’ & ‘Minimum Govt. Maximum Governance’ .

Some bold steps like ‘Swachh Bharat’, ‘NoteBandi’ , GST etc. were tried with honest & good intentions but old age corrupt colonial bureaucratic systems matastasted from Top echelons of Power to Bottom levels ( of course, with few exceptions ) , entrenched deep upto Local Bodies & Gram Panchayats in forms of ‘Nazaraana, Shuqraana , Haqraaana & Zabraana’ has yet to bring Corruption Free Government & Efficient Service Delivery System .

Nationalism & ethos of Defending Integrity & Sovereignty of the Country has given NDA

Modi2.O yet another chance with greater support by the People of India to prove himself & his Govt.

Unprecedented COVID-19 Pandemic’s Clarion Call of ‘Aapada Mein Awasar ki Talaash’

( आपदा में अवसर की तलाश ) rechristened as Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan with actual

stimulus package of 1% of the GDP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's excessive caution is causing undue pain to people despite India being a resilient economy, says Swaminathan Aiyar of The Economic Times.

3) Sir MV’s COMPASS FOR BUILDING INDIA AS “ONE OF THE STRONGEST NATIONS OF THE WORLD “ : Against the above Background as briefly described in Para 2 , Sir MV in his “Memoirs Of my working life “ ( printed by F. Borton for G. Claridge &

Co. Ltd. Bombay published by himself in Bangalore 1951 ) has dedicated one complete Section on “SOME LESSONS FOR INDIA’S FUTURE”.

He begins Chapter XVII titled as ‘Threats to National Security’ in following words: “Up to this stage the book gives a succinct account of most of my personal work

experience.

I have stated before how I began my career 66 years ago , by joining Government service in Bombay. During this fairly long period I had frequent occasions to study questions of national importance & also to discuss with statesmen , thinkers & writers , both local & foreign , the comparative economic position & status of India in relation to the more progressive countries of the world .

In course of my experience I had opportunities to devote much attention to the interests of the rural population. This was particularly so while employed on irrigation works in the Bombay Presidency and during administrative work in Mysore.

Also , numerous invitations afforded me occasions to visit various States or parts of India & to study requirements and advise on a variety of subjects such as

irrigation, water supply , drainage , public or municipal administration, finance & other problems of national or regional significance.

Questions of economic interest in particular engaged my attention. These have been dealt with in the two books ( “ Reconstructing India “ and “ Planned Economy for India “ ) separately published by me . I now feel I should record in this & subsequent two chapters ( National Character in Chapter XVIII ; & Nation - building and National Efficiency in Chapter XIX ) of this book some of my thoughts and views which have occurred to me on the various practical problems concerning future of India”.

4 ) At this point, I urge all the Political Masters & their Think-Tanks , specially the Prime Minister Sri Narendra Modi Ji, to spare a few minutes of their precious time in going through the above paragraph for self-introspection & examine what had been prescribed by Bharat Ratna Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya for India’s Future seven decades ago. Only then, they can realise what went wrong & what are the costly failures of the government.

The blame must be shared by ‘We, the people, along with the government; because it is the public who elect politicians to power ....

From ‘Mera Joota Hai Japani, Ye Patloon Englistani,Sar Pe Lal Topi..’ to IMF , World

Bank & Mackenzies , ‘Maine Madira Pikar Bhi Dekh Liya, Maine Madira Tajkar Bhi Dekh Liya ..’ etc. etc. we have tried all ‘cut copy , paste’ models , yet the Manzil has been eluding us .

Modi Ji ! Ab aur ‘Anweshan’, please , Nahin - recite Ram Naresh Tripathi’s Poem “Main Dhoondta Tujhe Tha, Jab Kunj Aur Van Mein , Tu Khojta Mujhe Tha ,Tab Deen Ke Sadan Mein “ invoke Sir MV during this

Pitripaksh of CoronaKaal

to Walk His Talk & Follow His Footprints for flawless AATMANIRBHAR BHARAT .

5) SALIENT FEATURES OF SIR MV’S THOUGHTS & CONCERNS :

( a ) National Character : “The way to Build a Better Nation is to Build a Better Individual ;

( b ) Threat to National Security : advocated for developing nuclear capability & world class weaponry ;

( c ) Threat of Rapid Population Explosion : Advocated for strict action - oriented time - bound programme on lines of ‘ Planned Parenthood Association as in America’ ;

( d ) “Grow More Food “ by ensuring block system of irrigation & rural industrial schemes in all villages ;

( d ) Compulsory Mass Education & Learning Basic Skills : 3 R’s etc.

( e ) Nation-building & National Efficiency : Country’s Productive Power ; Consumers’ Demands ; Administrative Efficiency; National & International Activities ; Political

Strength; Business Pursuits ; Cultural Efficiency ;

( f ) A Five Year Plan & National Planning Commission with 3 Bureaus etc. etc.

Each & every word he uttered with calibrated precision has proved true on the anvil of time.

Had Sir MV ‘s World Class Pragmatic New Idea of ‘NAYA BHARAT’ as outlined above would have translated into action by the then Govt. of “tryst with destiny” , by this time , India would be competing with America & other developed nations of the world . It’s sad that we lost precious decades charting out zig zag ways for Nation-building , as the result of which , another Quest for AATMANIRBHAR BHARAT has been necessitated by the present leadership during this pandemic ( that too being perceived as half baked & faulty one by experts ) .

How long our Motherland would continue the same old hackneyed ‘trial & error’ faulty methodology prescribed by the same colonial bureaucratic mindset that have been advising every Government from Lord Macaulay to Modi Ji? (aptly defined by Lord Curzon , the then Viceroy , in the following prophetic words ,

( “India’s is the strongest bureaucratic machine of the world which couldn’t be corrected or controlled even by the viceroys . “ )

6 ) Sir MV’s Forewarnings for Removal of certain traditional anomalies & deficiencies which retard progress :

[ Extract :

“Men of capacity in every field should be utilised for country’s service provided they have good professional, technical or business qualifications. Two much importance should not be attached to party spirit or other extraneous considerations till a democratic two - party system, after the example of United Kingdom or the United States of America, grows up to full maturity.

It is one of the basic duties of the Government to find occupations for the people, no matter to what community or party they may belong, who are willing to work but who are

not able to find employment for themselves.

Nepotism & class preferences are common fault in official life. The practice of appointing men of the same caste or the same region without regard to qualifications is often noticed. If such practices are not rooted out, the chances of India ever rising above the level

of second class State are slender.

I will quote here what Charles H. Pearson, author of “National Life & Character”, has said on these “ popular but highly dangerous practices “:

“In the countries where promotion of merit is now practically unknown, responsible mediocrity and a tame discharge of routine duties have come to be the almost inevitable notes of the junior men in the Civil Service. If , therefore, as seems probable , the State is continually extending its control over industry , and is taking men more and more into its pay , not only with the stimulus of competition, which has often perhaps been excessive, be removed throughout the services, but the standard of work in all departments is likely to be kept at so low a level that a great school of training for character will be lost . “ ]

For Occupations etc. Sir MV preferred American & Canadian Models where occupations are grouped or classed under ten heads. The classification is almost the same in this country also. But in America each of the ten main groups is sub- divided into many occupations drawing equal opportunities & prospects for all men & women . The scenarios in India is diametrically opposite where Indian Administrative Service is the only “heaven born Service” available for talented young men & women. Ethos of SARVA DHARMA SAMBHAAV ( equal respect for all religions), must be extended in the areas of Occupations also in form of SARVA SEWA SAMBHAAV (equal respect & opportunities for all occupations) ,for which PMO , Ministry Of Home Affairs , DoPT in consultation with High Powered Committee comprising of highly talented Professionals of impeccable Integrity of patriotic minds may think of either following American Model in toto or by immediately restructuring Indian Administrative Service & other All India Services into ten sub-heads giving equal opportunity & prospects of career progression by reducing the role of bureaucracy strictly adhering to ‘minimum govt. optimum governance’ .

Unless the ‘PM CM DM’ type the same old flawed colonial hierarchy is not changed,

India would continue to remain laggard on all economic & social indicators.

New Education Policy with an appropriate accreditation on the lines of Indian Teaching Service ( ITS ) for educating every individual should be evolved ; it’s very intriguing when an IAS or lower rung bureaucrats poke their noses in every area of domains like ‘Jack of all trades ‘ . Why not Indian Military Service ( IMS ) ; Indian Medical Service ( IMS ) ; Indian Engineering Service ) ; Indian Science & Technology Service, Indian Agriculture Service, Indian Finance Service, Indian Law & Order Service ( ILOS ) etc. immediately after completing Class 12 examinations in accordance with their merits, suitability & aptitude by educating & training them in world class academies of excellence ?

“Catch Them Young” on the pattern of National Defence Academy; Railway Apprentice Class I Services etc. is highly desirable.

Needless to remind that nothing sort of world class service delivery system is

possible without the active support of our political masters. When I was a child , NETAS used to inspire us like Gandhi Ji’s associates ; gradual erosion of value system during all these 70 years , NETAS , by their presence , create a sense of unknown fears in the minds of common man of India . No doubt there are outstanding individuals but in any Party system , their ultimate aim remains focused on winning elections either by hook or by crook . This unpleasant situation must change by cleansing our body politic through various Reform Processes so that no Pan Singh can tell through cinematic dialogues,“ Beehad Mei Baghi Hote Hain , Dacoit toh Parliament Mei Hain “ . We , the People , are equally responsible in degrading Democracy into KLEPTOCRACY. Parliamentary Democracy in India is passing through strange interlude & Two Party System as in Britain doesn’t seem to happen in near future . Is it Time for Presidential Form of Government in India ?

Only Time Will Tell .

7) Conclusion:

National Character of our body politic, Strong Ultramodern Security Mechanism for defending Nation’s Sovereignty & Integrity , Time - bound people - friendly Population Control Measures , Grow More Food with innovative Farming & assured block system irrigation , Efficient Executive & Judiciary , Meritocracy in lieu of Mediocrity, Compulsory Mass Education for Basic Skills , Robust Health services , SARVA SEWA SAMBHAAV ( equal opportunity & respects to all Occupations) , Ethos of Nation - building & National Efficiency for service delivery system in all walks of life through innovation, enhancing country’s productive power for meeting consumers’ demand & promoting Business enterprises for world class consumer goods , Administrative Efficiency , harder work enforcing strict discipline & conduct rules , according to Bharar Ratna Sir M. Visvesvaraya are the pre - requisites for AATMANIRBHAR BHARAT .

As how to complete any mission with precision, Sir MV has advised to emulate Joseph Pulitzer, Master Journalist, of theNew York World,as given in the following extract taken from Pearson’s Magazine for March 1909 :

“ At the call of his newspapers , his ( Mr. Pulitzer’s ) mental & moral powers fall into instant order & he will struggle for hours to get a fact or a thought in its most powerful & striking relationship, or feel out a single phrase or even a word in its nicest , most exact and unforgettable sense to startle and convince . This is the result of discipline.”

Hope & pray, our PM would kindly relook at his thoughts of AATMANIRBHAR BHARAT by walking on Sir MV’s footprints with Pulitzer’s precision.

On this note, I pay my tributes to Sir MV whom we worship as an incarnation of Lord Vishwakarma having similar capabilities of creating infrastructure with the

same precision & discipline.

JAI HIND

*Nagesh Chandra Mishra, Author of this Article, is the Former Engineer - in - Chief Of Drinking

Water & Sanitation Department , Govt. Of Jharkhand.He founded HRD, Training & IEC Cell while in undivided Bihar , Programme Management Unit ( PMU ) & Visvesvaraya Sanitation & Water Academy ( ViSWA ) in Jharkhand with the active support of Govts. & Unicef ; Founder Chairman Of Indian Water Works Association ( IWWA ) Of Bihar & Jharkhand respectively ; He is Life Member Of Institution Of Engineers , Indian Association Environmental Pollution , IWWA etc.

[anewhope4change-blog]

Protest and the Erotic

“America” by Claude McKay is a relatively short and incredibly compact poem.  America, to McKay, is a cruel woman who feeds him “bread of bitterness” and sinks into his throat “her tiger’s tooth”, likely implying that America is trying to silence him and people like him. Although despite her flaws, America is a place that he both loves and hates, writing that he “love(s) this cultured hell that tests my youth”. At a glance, this poem’s meaning appears to be one of resistance. McKay tells us he will continue to exist, to live in spite of the hatred and bitterness he receives from the land he hates to love. This stance is not unlike Langston Hughes, who, rather than wanting America, as the racist society it was, torn to shreds, simply wanted it to live up to its founding ideals and become a nation of equals. 

McKay was considered then, even today, as one of America’s finer protest poets. The manner in which he wrote his protest poetry is different than say, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Despite his unabashed pride about his Jamaican and African heritage (Drayton) and the fact this poem was written at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, he doesn’t mention race a single time. The language of the poetry makes it clear he is talking about race, but regardless, the fact he chose to omit any language about race speaks volumes. McKay decides to make the poem about criticizing America the nation, not through the lens of a black American, but simply as an American. This speaks to McKay’s writing style and poetic philosophy, which is described as him “...protesting as a Negro and uttering a cry for the race of mankind as a member of that race.” (Drayton). It is possible this aspect of his poetry is due to his early attraction to Communism (Smethurst). Many of the thinkers and poets that were around towards the closing years of the Harlem Renaissance, specifically the year 1920 onwards, became infatuated with Communism similar to McKay (Smethurst) due to its revolutionary and egalitarian appeal. However, McKay, despite his love-hate relationship with America, never fully committed himself to the ideology, even going so far as to virulently criticize it a few years after the Harlem Renaissance “ended” (Smethurst). 

Why would McKay opt not to embrace radicalism, be it political or poetic, despite many of his peers deciding to do so? Fortunately, McKay answers this for us. His answer is a lot more interesting than one would expect, to say the least. Personally, this required a couple more readings before I could find McKay’s answer. 

Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,

Giving me strength erect against her hate,

Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.

Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state

I stand within her walls with not a shred

Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer

McKay stands “erect” in the face of America’s “hate”, whose “bigness” overwhelms him. Despite being overwhelmed, he “stand(s) within her walls”, unafraid of what might happen to him. McKay could have just as easily used different words to get the idea across he will stand resolute in spite of the country’s racism. Why would he eroticize this entire section of the poem? It all has to do with the love-hate relationship he has with America. Relationships between couples can get very complicated - I doubt further description is needed in that subject. McKay is using that dynamic between certain couples to describe his relationship with America. He does not like America, America does not like him. Yet they still have sex all the same, as couples generally do. The answer to why McKay rebuffed and rejected the radicalism which had influenced other artists from the Harlem Renaissance is that he, against all odds, loved the country too much - like a man loyal to his woman, or vice versa. 

After reading that part of the poem over for the third time, I was surprised I didn’t pick up on McKay’s erotic language the first time. However, after picking up on it, I encountered a new problem. “How can I use this information to discuss a protest poem?” I thought. “It’s not like eroticism has anything to do with protest... or does it?” In the span of 5 minutes, I was hit with two major “aha!” moments. First from realizing you could use eroticism in protest and second from realizing that we have been using it for quite some time. Although this might be common knowledge to some people, humor me for a few minutes. It is possible I and possibly many others, did not realize the nature of this section of the poem because of how widespread eroticism has become. 

Even beyond protest, eroticism - sex in general - has permeated society at almost every conceivable level. Eroticism, for better or worse, has been intrinsically linked with the idea of protest for decades. This is especially relevant when looking at recent events, such as Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign in 2016, as well as the protests that occurred before and after his election. Eroticism as protest has been particularly popular against Trump, due to a leaked tape which recorded him making several sexist comments, chief among them being the famous “grab her by the pussy” line. This tape, as well as a few other questionable past comments by Trump, prompted waves protests following his ascension to the Presidency in 2017. The most famous of these protests occurred on January 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration. The Women’s March, which became the single largest protest day in American history, was defined by the sheer amount of protesters, as well as the “pussyhats” worn by many of them. Although the hats are not necessarily eros in the form of protest, many of the signs employed by the protesters were sexual (sexually derogatory towards Trump to be precise) in nature - at least in Richmond. Another example was the Trump statues that popped up overnight in multiple states in August of 2018 (Snyder). These statues were designed to resemble a naked Trump, depicting him as an overweight, unhealthy, and unattractive man, with a micropenis (Snyder). 

This trend of anti-Trump, sexually-based insults and protest slogans/signs employed by protesters has increased in popularity and absurdity. While the original meaning of the protest is still present, the protest messages have degenerated into the realm of ineffectiveness and pettiness. A brief journey to one of the political hashtags on Twitter or other social media platforms is proof of that. 

While eros is not something Claude McKay should be remembered by, his use of erotic language in “America” and other poems helps shed a light on its usage in modern protest. The Greeks believed the idea of eros came from the god Eros. They recognized that eros, as an idea, was extremely powerful, divinely so. While there are certainly many ideas made, or inspired by, the ancient Greeks that are worth forgetting, perhaps their concept of eros is worth remembering. It is an immensely powerful idea, one that should be applied in the form of protest against the most worthy of opponents. In his time, McKay used these ideas to fight the racism and discrimination he and other African-Americans encountered. In our time, it was used effectively, however briefly, against Trump. While politics and discrimination are worthy subjects to use eros as protest, it is important not to overuse the idea. The key aspect of protest is the hope that change will come as a result. By using the same idea to protest, no matter how powerful that idea is, it is hypocritical and foolish to believe that any change can be made.

Works Cited:

Drayton, Arthur. "Claude Mckay's Human Pity: A Note on His Protest Poetry." Introduction to African Literature: an Anthology of Critical Writing. (1979): 86-98. Print.Smethurst, J. (February 19, 2009). 

"The Red Is East: Claude McKay and the New Black Radicalism of the Twentieth Century". American Literary History. 21 (2): 355–367. DOI:10.1093/alh/ajp011. ISSN 0896-7148.

Snyder, Chris. “Naked Donald Trump Statues Are Popping up across America.” Business Insider, Business Insider, 18 Aug. 2016, https://www.businessinsider.com/naked-donald-trump-statues-video-2016-8.

[her-culture]

My Fear of Creativity

“Can you change the song?” my friend called from the kitchen, where he was busy grabbing himself a second glass of Hawaiian punch. “I’m tired of Taylor Swift.”

“Yeah sure, I feel that.” I replied. I put my bowl of the coconut curry he’d made us for dinner on the coffee table and reached for the TV remote. After briefly fumbling with the controls, I successfully changed Swift’s “Sparks Fly” to a pop song I didn’t immediately recognize. I instinctively nodded along to the beat of the song, overlaid with the bright, clear voice of a female singer I had definitely never heard before.

“Hey, this is great,” I said as my friend joined me on the couch. “What is this?”

“My friend’s newest release, actually,” he said.

“Really?” I said. “Talented friend. This is truly a bop.”

“Isn’t it?” he agreed.

We sat for a moment, listening to the song’s catchy melody and brilliantly executed vocal runs. I thought about how impressive it was that a girl around my age was able to write and produce such high-quality music. Despite having numerous musician friends who also regularly release music, the reality of writing and releasing something so personal to the world continues to astound me.

As the song faded out and into a new one, I turned to my friend and asked, “If one day I released a song and it was really bad, would you still like me?” He rolled his eyes.

“Obviously I would,” he said.

“Yeah, but you’d definitely tell me it was bad, right?” I continued. “And you’d probably think a little less of me as a person? Or at least as an artist?” This elicited another eye roll and a swig from his mug of Hawaiian punch.

“Yes, I would tell you if I didn’t like your song, but that doesn’t mean I would think you’re untalented. Art is subjective, not everybody is going to like what you create and that’s just how it works.”

This night, which occurred just over a week ago, is emblematic of my entire complex as a creator. I repeat my friend’s words to myself every time I sit down to attempt some sort of creative project, whether it be a song, a poem, or just a piece of writing for a class.

Art is subjective. Everybody creates bad art sometimes. The only way to get better is to at least try. These and a million other cliché statements swirl around in my head every time I find myself stuck and staring blankly at my laptop, with a mug of coffee or tea beside me to help “get me in the zone”,cooling off at an alarming rate. Logically, I know that both my friend’s words and my own inner monologue are correct. A writer is someone who writes, not someone who perseverates and procrastinates to the point of never putting words down on a page. Yet Imposter Syndrome sticks with me. As much as I console myself I question myself: Who cares about what you have to say? What makes you think your words are important?

I recently visited my childhood home and attempted to clean out the bin of old composition notebooks stashed behind my desk. Flipping through the pages, I read countless beginnings to unfinished novels about middle school drama, talking cats, and haunted houses. It made me remember that I used to be the kind of person who could start an idea even if I didn’t know where it was going or realized it was a little bit stupid. I don’t know exactly when I transitioned from someone who would write anything to someone too scared to even start most of the time, but I know I want to try and return to that former mindset. Because for every clunky section of dialogue, or melodramatic description, there was a scene that even now, I was genuinely impressed by.

As a wannabe creator struggling with stifling feelings of inadequacy, I know that I’m not in the position to be giving any sort of advice. To be honest, there’s nothing I can really say beyond the aforementioned clichéd statements. That being said, I feel it is helpful to recognize the fear inherent in being creative. Although it doesn’t necessarily solve the issue, it at least gives me something to write about.