#when the Byzantine Empire is RIGHT THERE and NOBODY EVER TALKS ABOUT IT

[shroud-of-empire]

Those About To Die is okay, but every time they show the chariot-racing factions I just really wish they'd do a Justinian show

[stones-x-bones]

Mind Over Matter || Dani and Bex

TIMING: Current PARTIES: @surmamort and @inbextween SUMMARY: Dani is worried for Bex when she realizes they haven’t talked in a while. They decide to go to Al’s to catch up, but someone else has other plans. CONTENT: Domestic abuse, medical blood 

Dani felt as though she had the right to be worried about Bex. She had seen people disappear. Some came back, some didn’t. She didn’t know if they shared any mutual friends, so it wasn’t like she could ask them if they’d heard from her. Dani had only become worried after three days of silence. It wasn’t like her, Dani thought. Bex loved to talk. Had Dani fucked up during their last meeting? Had Bex had a little more time to think about it and decide that she didn’t need, or want somebody like Dani in her life? Dani thought about what Morgan had said that day in the thrift store, and after that, the way she-- No. She couldn’t think about that. She refused. What she had to do was find Bex. Hadn’t she mentioned being in pre-law? That was a good start. 

Due to her patrol, Dani felt as though she knew the campus like the back of her hand. Though, her memorization skills were unneeded once she spotted her friend. “Bex!” Dani didn’t feel anything different from her. She hadn’t been turned, or bitten, or-- Dani swallowed her anxiety. “Hey,” She said as she walked over, dreading the idea that Bex might get up and leave without so much as a hello. “I’ve been texting you, you didn’t…” She didn’t know what to do with her hands. What was she supposed to do with her hands? She didn’t want to look threatening. Dani forced as natural of a smile as her muscles would allow. “I was worried--” No, that wasn’t it. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.” Human? Alive? Not mad at me? She carded her fingers through her hair. “But you look fine-- Great, even. Do you feel great? Sorry.” She forced out a laugh.

The agreement Bex had made with her parents had been a simple one-- drop all of the people in her life who she’d let drag her into the supernatural world, and they’d let her keep studying history instead of law. She would still take over the family business one day, but she’d probably have to marry into another family of lawyers. Her parents were figuring that part out, though. It wasn’t a fair trade, but at least Bex had one thing in her life to look forward to. Most of the people she’d already told she couldn’t talk to them anymore had respected that wish, despite the pained glances and the horrible, horrible feeling in her stomach as she’d watched the realization dawn on Mina’s face. It still made her entire body feel like lead. 

The only person she hadn’t told was Dani. Dani was on the fringes. Her parents didn’t know about Dani. Dani was just a school acquaintance. And if she kept it that way, maybe she could keep her, too. Maybe she could have something good, too. She’d ignored the texts, she hadn’t meant to, but she didn’t know what to say. And when Dani called her name and trotted towards her, she still didn’t know what to say. “I’m, um-- yep!” she squeaked, swallowing hard. “I’m totally fine! Sorry, I haven’t texted, I’ve just been-- so busy. End of the term and all and the whole uh, major shifting thing. So much work! But I’m fine, really. I’m--” her voice cracked and wavered and she had to stop and clear her throat. “Sorry. I’m okay. See?” she held her arms out as if to put herself on display. “I’m alive.”

It was reassuring to see that Bex was alive. But Dani knew that in a town like White Crest, being alive could mean that you were barely living. When Bex showed her arms, Dani couldn't help but laugh. “Stop that,” she reached out to tap her friend’s arm, but her arm fell instead. She dropped her hand into her lap again and looked down at her shoes. “I guess I get the whole studying thing. You know, for somebody who… actually studies.” She worried her lower lip with her teeth before she looked down at her phone as it lit up with a text from Lauren. Deep breaths, she reminded herself. She didn’t feel like sticking around campus. Not that she ever did, but still. She quickly shot a text back to Lauren explaining she’d be home a little later than expected. 

“How’s studying?” Dani asked. She didn’t care, not really. But she wanted to make sure that Bex was okay, and she felt as though only a few seconds would not clear that up for her. “I haven’t started. Honestly, I’m thinking of just taking the failing grade and getting that job as a janitor you recommended.” It was a joke. She actually had been doing some studying. She had already received a C+ on a paper she did entirely on her own. It was about the fall of the Trojan Empire instead of the Byzantine, but it had counted for something. “It’s good to see you haven’t fallen entirely off the face of the planet though,” She commented, looking Bex over for any bruises, any cuts. So she was… living a perfectly normal existence. Or Dani had hoped. Nobody else needed to be sucked into the bullshit that crept through this godforsaken town. 

Bex was glad she was sitting for the moment, shuffling to move her broken, casted foot away from a quick view. If she could help it, she wouldn’t have to show Dani. She still didn’t know what to tell people except that she “fell down the stairs”, but then people would look at her more worried and ask if she needed help and really, she just needed it all to stop. She swallowed and looked back over at Dani, lowering her arms. “I would rather not have the W or the F on my transcripts, yeah,” she agreed, nodding, “if I wanna get into a good master’s program, I have to study.” And she did want to. And maybe she’d go somewhere far, far away from White Crest, away from Mina, so she could clear her head and just be normal and forget about the pain that was stuffing itself into her heart. “Sometimes you do just have to take the L, though, huh? I-If you need help studying, though, I’ve um-- heard that I’m pretty good at that.”

She shuffled the papers around on the table. “Nope, though I might’ve considered jumping into our abyss a few times,” she teased back, but, really, sometimes, it didn’t sound like such a bad option. At least if she was falling forever, she wouldn’t have to go home every night and wonder what the next day would look like. “How um-- how are you? I see you haven’t bit the dust pulling some heroic maneuver.” She motioned to the spot next to her. “You can sit, if you want. I’m almost done.”

It was obvious that the two of them were on entirely different paths. Dani had been certain that their talk at the falls had cemented that fact. Bex was smart, well established, and seemed as though she had a lot going for her. Dani, on the other hand… She was strong and capable, but all in opposite ways. Even though she had lied about not studying, she still felt a pang of guilt for not trying harder in school. Though, what was the point? Dani hadn’t ever dreamt of a master’s program. Not like Bex was. “Yeah, it’s probably important you do decent in class, then.” She knew that for many, escaping White Crest was the end goal. For Dani, the thought had never occurred. Even with everything that had happened, it still wasn’t something she could ever seriously consider. The town needed her. The people in it needed her, whether she was close to them or not. She wasn’t sure what she could do for them, though, when she had already failed so many. Dani forcibly cleared her throat, pulling herself from her own thoughts. “Oh, no. Don’t worry about me. Wouldn’t want to waste your time.” It would be pointless, Dani thought. 

Bex’s words caused a crease in Dani’s brow to form. She refrained from telling Bex that it wasn’t funny. She instead wrung her hands together and took a seat at Bex’s guidance. “I’m fine,” Dani smiled. She wasn’t dead. She was still doing her job, even if it felt heavier since her run-in with the portal that had opened and swallowed her whole. But still, she was there. Living, breathing. It was all she could ask for until she wasn’t. “It hasn’t taken me yet, so…” She shrugged. “Looks like I’ll be around for a bit longer.” Maybe, she didn’t add. She looked down at her feet, and then towards Bex’s feet. The boot was hard to miss. “Yo, what the fuck happened to your foot?” She asked, eyebrows raised. “You held out your arms and everything, I thought you were good.” Dani scooted close, but not too close, remembering the way that Bex had recoiled from her the night that she had been saved from the vampire in the parking lot. Still a decent amount of space between them, she pointed at the boot with an outstretched finger. “You’re gonna have to let me sign the cast.” She froze for a moment, Milo’s face flickering before her. She shook it off easily and crossed her fingers. “Swear I won’t write anything weird.” 

“Probably,” Bex agreed quietly, but the future was something she hadn’t considered anymore. Not since it was taken from her. Not since the one thing she did want had been taken from her. No, not taken. Abandoned. Bex had been the one to leave, not Mina. She folded up her papers and crossed her arms in front of her, leaning against the table. “It wouldn’t be a waste,” she said, looking sideways at Dani as she stretched her legs out. “I like helping others, so even if you ended up failing, it wouldn’t be a waste.” It was one of the few things left in life that brought her joy. She wished she’d never left, but there was no going back. Wishes were for fools.

“Well, good,” she said, glancing sideways at her. Maybe this could be okay. Maybe she could keep Dani. Maybe Dani could be her one connection to the world she longed to be a part of. Aside from Eddie, she was all she had. She could barely even bring herself to talk to Kyle, and he had nothing to do with all that. Well, except the werewolf thing, but they didn’t really talk about that. Not when it was still...raw. Bex glanced around and found the study hall getting emptier, and her heart began to squeeze. She liked being in full rooms now, where it wasn’t just her and one other person. No one could take her if she was in a crowded room. Her gaze dropped to her feet. Shit. “I--” was kidnapped and chased barefoot through the forest while my ex hunted me down and tried to take me away, “I’m pretty clumsy, remember? I just tripped on a tree branch and twisted it real bad. Stupid me…” She tucked her legs back in and fiddled with her papers. “Hey, you um-- wanna get outta here? Maybe go grab a milkshake or something?” Not that she could drink a milkshake, but she really didn’t want to be here anymore, and maybe she just wanted something good. Just one thing, please.

“Well, if I fail, I’ll make sure not to blame you.” Dani knew it was pointless. Truthfully, even if Bex didn’t find it as a waste of time, she knew that she would. She’d rather Bex focus on more important things, like whether or not her dress matched her shoes, or if she had enough time to grab a coffee before her next study session. Dani didn’t need to be involved in that, she didn’t need to take up somebody’s time, not when Dani knew her truth of where she’d end up. 

Dani barely looked up at the sound of shuffling footsteps. She could see everything. At least, for the most part. She could hear it, too. She might not have supersonic hearing, but she had learned from an early age how to listen for things, for disturbances. For now, there was nothing. She didn’t anticipate there to be, even with the depleted crowd. Dani could tell that Bex was trying to figure out how to explain her foot and she felt a pang of frustration. Had something happened to her to make her this way? She forced herself to wait for the explanation, rather than jumping to conclusions. If she did that, who would it help? “A tree branch…?” Dani stared at Bex a beat of a second too long, eyebrows still furrowed. “Okay…” If that was the story Bex wanted to go with, then Dani would go with it. Hell, maybe it was true. Maybe Bex was the one person to trip over a tree branch instead of having some terrifying and traumatic experience that bent and broke her bones. Just maybe Dani could have one person that avoided all that shit. Save for the vampire attack, but Dani had taken care of that. Bex’s pause made Dani’s expression soften. Her offer stuck out like a sore thumb, like a cry for help from the amount of studying she’d been doing. Dani smiled. “Switch that to smoothie and you’ve got a deal.” Fuck lactose intolerance. She got to her feet and tugged at her own bag as she waited for Bex to gather her things. Did she offer to hold her bag? Probably not. Bex would probably hate that. “Where were you thinking? Al’s?” Dani asked, looking down at her fingers. Black nailpolish immaculately laid out in a matte fashion against them. 

“How sweet of you,” Bex replied, rolling her eyes a bit. A feeling crept up her spine, like she was being watched, and she glanced around the room once before focusing back on Dani. “Yeah, yep, a tree branch. I went for a--” desperate bid for my life-- “hike through the woods and just wasn’t paying enough attention and caught my foot right on a root sticking out of the ground. Clumsy me,” she grinned, trying to hide the pain in her voice. “Luckily someone was with me--” my ex who was trying to kidnap me-- “so it all turned out fine.” Fine was the exact wrong word about how it had all turned out. Frank taking her had ruined everything. It had ruined her relationship with Mina, and it had ruined her home with Morgan and Deirdre, and it had ruined any chance she’d had at being happy. He hadn’t succeeded in taking her, but he’d done what his parents had wanted him to-- he’d taken everything else and left her with no choice but to leave. She swallowed again, feeling her heart beginning to seize up again. “Smoothie’s work better for me, too,” she agreed, smiling, “Al’s sounds perfect.” She stood up and grabbed her bag, stuffing her papers in, eager to get out of here and away from the feeling of being watched. “You’re driving,” she said as she brushed past Dani and hurried towards the door. This place was getting suffocating-- everywhere was just so suffocating.

Dani decided to take Bex’s explanation as the truth. She didn’t have a reason not to. She did however notice the way that her friend glanced around the study hall. Dani mirrored Bex and cast a few quick glances, but didn’t see anyone, or anything out of place. For the most part, everyone had their nose in whatever the hell it was they were studying. “Maybe you should stay out of the woods,” Dani offered her a lighthearted laugh and stretched her arms above her head. “But it’s good you didn’t get too wrecked.” The woods were dangerous, but something told Dani that she didn’t need to remind Bex of that. Once Bex got to her feet, Dani followed after her, not expecting the brunette to rush out the door. Something was off, but she couldn’t place it. Dani left the study hall with one last look over her shoulder. Nothing. She gave a concerned look to the back of Bex’s head as they walked out into the sunlight. “Truck is this way,” She pointed towards the opposite parking lot, not too far from where the study hall was. Dani made sure to stay a few inches or so behind Bex. Her movements were abrupt, careful, anxious. It was so different from the girl that had hung her legs into the abyss. Dani took a deep breath and shoved her own anxieties as far down as they would go. Once they got to her truck, Dani rounded the side to the passenger door and unlocked the vehicle from there. “The driver’s side is busted.” A lie, but Dani couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. She waited on the other side for Bex to slide over and unlock the door for her, making a show of how the keys wouldn’t go into the keyhole. 

Bex didn’t remember that from last time, but she didn’t really stop to question Dani. She didn’t mind having her close until she crawled into the truck-- with a little trouble thanks to her boot-- and sidled over, unlocking the driver’s side. She’d closed her own door, first, glancing out the window as she scooted back. Nell hadn’t just taught her how to feel magic, but after everything that happened with Frank, she taught her how to understand her instincts. And they were screaming at her to get out of this place. She looked back over as Dani crawled in. “No new stains, I see,” she said in as much of a light-hearted tone as she could. She grinned. “Is the radio working yet?” she fiddled with the dials as the truck sputtered to life, only giving a sigh of relief when they’d pulled from the parking lot and were on the road. No one could hurt them out here. She leaned back in her seat and let her head rest against the back, closing her eyes a moment. She was going to be fine. This was all fine. She pulled out her phone and fiddled with it, wondering if she should text Eddie. She looked over at Dani. “Thanks for uh...hanging out with me.”

Dani hopped into the cab. “Nah, it’s been awhile.” She had plenty of run-ins with different things, but none that had her creating new works of art with her wounds on the upholstery. It took her no time to pull out of the parking lot. She checked the rearview, as well as sideview mirrors. “It is, but we have to hit a certain part of town for it to actually be clear.” She glanced over at Bex, immediately noticing the way her features started to soften. Yeah, something was definitely not right. She held her tongue despite the questions she wanted to ask. It wasn’t a far drive to Al’s, at least. Soon they’d be tucked away in a booth, and then maybe she’d ask. Would Bex instead feel cornered? Would she feel cornered now? Dani was pulled out of her thoughts once Bex spoke up. “Oh, yeah. No problem.” The hunter didn’t correct Bex about how she had practically seeked her out. Instead, she reached over to the dial on the radio and began to fiddle with it. A staticy pop song filtered through the speakers and she looked over with an apologetic smile. “Sorry, this might be the best you’re going to get.” She continued to drive until she hit the turn that’d take her down the main street to Al’s. While they drove, she continued to look at all of her mirrors. Nobody seemed to be following them, but Dani still couldn’t shake Bex’s appearance from before they left the school.

The song jumped to life on the radio and Bex tried to let the sound of it relax her. She didn’t actually like the song, but it was better than the silence that let her remember how the forest had sounded, how the leaves sounded, crunching under her feet as she ran. Her body shivered in the seat and she shook it off, looking back over at Dani. “It’s fine,” she said, smiling, even as the hairs on her arms stood on end. No, it would be fine. It would be. There wasn’t anyone following her, it was just her own paranoid mind. She’d been thinking about it too much lately, she needed to just relax. Besides, Dani was capable. She could let herself relax here. They pulled up to Al’s and Bex turned to look back at Dani. “I am sorry,” she said suddenly, “for-- for not texting you back. Things have been...complicated, lately. But I swear it was nothing about you! Or on you. It’s uh-- more a me thing.” She figured Dani deserved the truth about at least one thing in her life. Her throat felt tight, but she felt an almost obligation to tell her. She hoped she understood. “But I’m working on it! And I...really appreciate you not, um, being mad or anything.” She felt the inside of the car growing smaller, suffocating her, just like the study hall had, and she reached for the door handle. “Shall we uh-- milksh-- smoothies! Head inside?”

Finally, Dani pulled into the parking lot. She glanced around before, checking her mirrors once more. When Bex apologized, she held a hand up and shook her head. “Don’t apologize. You obviously had your reason or whatever.” Dani didn’t go into how she thought Bex had gotten hurt, or how maybe she’d gotten sick of her. What would it matter if it were the latter? One less person to worry about outside the context of her job. Still, ever since having seen Milo’s end, the fear that everyone close to her would suddenly up and die was eating at the back of her brain. “But I appreciate it.” Dani smiled at Bex. She meant to reach out, to give her friend a reassuring pat on the shoulder, but the passenger side door was being ripped open by somebody she didn’t recognize. “What the-- Who the fuck!” Dani yelled, trying desperately to grab onto Bex’s arm as the man pulled her out of the cab. 

“Yeah, but I just want you to know I appre--” Bex had started, but in the next moment, her door was being thrown open and someone was ranking her out of the car. She’d been facing Dani, she had no idea who it was. A dread had filled her up and she let out a scream and whoever had been holding her was thrown backwards into the car a few spots behind them. They hit it with a crunch as Bex’s magic exploded from her and the windows of all the cars around cracked-- some shattered. She fell to the ground, palms scraping against asphalt as she scrambled to push herself back to her feet, into the car, towards Dani-- anywhere. Her mind was dragging her back into the forest with Frank and she couldn’t breath, and her hands grasped at leather of the seats and she tried to hold herself together so she didn’t explode even more. But then hands were on her again, and she had enough time to turn her head to see who it was and-- “Frank!” she screamed, kicking out at him, “Let GO! LET GO! FRANK!” she screamed and kicked and she saw his missing hand and felt his arms wrapping around her again and she screamed. “DANI!” And she didn’t even feel metal slipping between her ribs, as her body fought against the shock of what was happening. What was happening again.

Dani acted quickly. She didn’t care that it was bright out, or that they were in a parking lot, and that anybody could see them. What she cared about was Bex being dragged away. She slid through the cab out of the passenger side door. Using her own would be too risky, it’d take too much time. The windows of the car next to her truck exploded and Dani barely flinched. Any action to save herself was inaction for Bex. “Bex!” Dani yelled. She didn’t know who this man was, or what he wanted from Bex. What she did know was that he was not undead, which meant that she couldn’t be certain if he was human, or some other god awful creature. What mattered most was that he was hurting her friend. She could see the fear on Bex’s face and it fueled her fire. Bex seemed to recognize him. Frank. Who the fuck was Frank and why did he think he was allowed to touch Bex like this? Dani threw herself forward as soon as she saw the knife, but she was a second too late. She saw it plunge deep into Bex’s side. Dani let out an animalistic cry and reached for the hand that was around the knife and snapped it backwards. He only had one good one. From this angle and with everything happening, Dani was unsure where the knife had gone through. Pulling out could risk bleeding out quickly. If it stayed inside, then she had a fighting chance. One arm supporting Bex from falling too far to the ground, the other still on the man’s broken hand, Dani craned her head back and slammed her forehead into the man’s nose. Pain exploded in her own face, but hopefully it’d be enough to distract the man with the now broken hand. 

The commotion was already drawing the attention of those just trying to enjoy their day in the restaurant. Bex didn’t notice any of them, because her mind was focusing on staying here, in this moment. She stumbled back and the ground turned to leaves as she blinked. Leaves and mud and twigs and she should run. She needed to run. Except she couldn’t run. Someone was holding onto her. She cried out again, trying to shove them away. It was Frank, he was back for her, he had found her, she hadn’t gotten away in time. WIthout any control of her mind, her magic reached out and it wormed its way into Dani, and all the fear and the all anger and all the pain Bex had felt from that day rushed through it. She yanked her arm away, reeling backwards, falling to the ground again. She backed herself up until she hit the car. The pain in her side began to spread, but the only thing she saw was a forest and trees and Frank.

And something-- something wasn’t right. He was already missing a hand. He looked so angry. He hadn’t been this angry before. Bex’s gaze stuck on him. Something was wrong with him. She heard his bones snapping but he just kept going. He barreled into Dani and brought them both to the ground and started hitting her. “S-stop it,” Bex stuttered, “Stop it!” Louder, ears ringing. “STOP IT!” Windows blew out, car alarms went off. The pavement beneath Dani and Frank caved in and tossed them apart. She should’ve let Nell kill him. She should’ve let her kill him. Kill him. 

Dani’s heart was loud in her ears. This wasn’t Milo’s situation, but she saw Milo’s face. But Bex was awake, she was alive. For the most part. From what she could tell. Dani grunted as the man shifted his focus from Bex onto her. She used the skills she’d learned from her mother, from the Quinn’s, from watching Adam, from just about anyone who had a hand in training her. She shifted her feet slightly, avoiding the first knock from Frank, but then something happened. Something changed. She felt anger seep into her bones, cracking and reverberating around inside of her chest. She could feel it in her throat. Deep, terrible, hungry. She barely noticed Bex falling to the ground. All she saw was Frank, and how she wanted to wrap her hands around his throat until there was no life left. Before she could, however, she was being thrown to the ground. The man was on top of her, his only, slightly broken hand coming into contact with her already broken nose. Dani reached up with her own hands, thumbs coming to the base of his throat, starting to squeeze. He choked and spluttered, but he didn’t stop hitting. 

Dani could feel the blood running back past her ears, from her mouth and her nose. Blood dripped from his face, too. Carnage pooled around them and individuals stared on. She kept her hands tightly around his throat, envisioning the way that he might succumb to her grip. It was the only way she could make Bex safe. Before she could dig her fingers into his skin even deeper, he was being pulled off of her from the force of something beneath them. Dani continued to see red, it twisted her insides. She felt everything. Dani wanted to continue, she wanted to squeeze until the light left this man, the man who dared to hurt her friend. Somehow, she managed and turned to look at Bex. There was blood blooming at her wound and she looked dangerously pale. Fuck. Dani pushed past the anger, it felt like drinking poison. She hurried over to her friend and checked over the wound. From the angle, it didn’t seem to hit a major organ, but Bex was still losing a lot of blood. “We need to go,” She said coldly. 

Bex blinked and she was in the parking lot and the trees were gone and she wasn’t barefoot in the forest. She was in the parking lot. And Dani was on the ground and she was bleeding and Frank was on the ground near her and he was also bleeding. Her body felt cold, hot at the same time. She was trembling. Her side hurt. She pulled her hands away and found them stained red. It was draining down her side and onto the pavement and felt nauseous. There was something sticking out of her. She wrapped her hands around the handle and pulled it out and she screamed as a ragged edge tore through her skin. Oh no. Oh no. She shouldn’t have done that. She shouldn’t have done that. Mina had taught her about knives. She should’ve known. Of course his knife had been serrated, it made for better tearing, it made it harder for a wound to heal, to close. “D-Dani…” Bex stuttered, looking around bewildered. The girl was coming towards her now but something was different. She looked so angry. She looked ready to kill. Maybe Bex should just let her do it. Her eyes fell to Frank. He was unmoving on the ground. People were rushing towards them. A siren sounded in the distance. Bex squeezed the knife in her hand. It would be so easy. She could walk over there and finish what Nell started. No, she couldn’t. She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t do that.

Dani’s voice was chilling and Bex shivered again. She looked up at Dani with unseeing eyes as the world began to blot away. There was so much blood on her hands. She barely registered being lifted back into the truck. Her head lolled to the side. Wasn’t this all supposed to stop? This was supposed to stop. That’s why she’d gone home. If it didn’t stop, then what was the point? What was the point? Why had she suffered, why was she suffering? The engine roared to life and Bex sagged against the window. She was so tired. She wanted to sleep. She remembered how it felt after Kyle had mauled her. Knife in her side, just like claws on her chest. She scrambled to find some sense of preservation, like she had in the alley. She’d fought against the ebbing tide of blackness for Kyle. For Mina. For Morgan and Nell. She’d had something to fight for, then. Now, she had nothing. Even here in Dani’s car and with Kyle’s promise and Eddie’s hand, she had nothing. She closed her eyes.

Dani watched as Bex removed the knife and a silent scream bubbled in her throat. The anger she felt, it bloomed and bit at her, little pin pricks of what if’s scattered in her head. What if I killed him for doing this, what if I used the same knife he’d used on Bex, what if I-- She could see the blood more clearly now. Bex’s entire shirt was covered in it, so were her hands. Everything was red. An angry, sickly red. She felt her heart in her throat as she moved. The pain that blossomed in her nose, in her head-- all of it was forgotten. With Bex there, bleeding out on the ground, Dani knew she needed to work quickly. If she didn’t, her friend would die. The anger she felt still splintered and crackled across her skin. It took everything in Dani’s power not to turn around and stab Frank with the knife he’d used on Bex. She couldn’t do that. He was human. She’d have to let the authorities-- the human authorities deal with him. Walking away was painful, she soon realized. 

But still, Dani managed to get Bex into the truck. Robotic in her movements, she ran to the driver’s side door and threw herself in. The engine roared to life and Dani peeled out of the parking lot. Dani looked through her side view mirror to see Frank trying to get to his feet, but the onlookers pushed him down as the police swarmed in. It took everything in her power to not reverse the truck, to-- Dani noticed the silence and immediately looked over to Bex. Eyes closed, her chest barely rising and falling. The blood continued to blot her shirt and Dani’s seats. One hand on the steering wheel, the other pressing into Bex’s wound, Dani drove, ignoring all stop signs and lights. The roar of the engine was the only noise to her ears. “Bex!” Dani yelled. She looked between the road and her friend. “Bex, you have to wake up! Wake the fuck up.” Her hand was covered in Bex’s blood now. It was hard to tell what was her own, Bex’s, or Frank’s. It seemed like a lifetime ago that she’d been wheeled out of the hospital by Nell. Now, she was back, and with an injured friend in tow. It was something she never wanted to have happen, but now it was-- was it her fault? She hadn’t acted quick enough. She had let Bex get stabbed, and now… Dani fought the urge to scream as she threw open her door with one hand. She awkwardly maneuvered around the cab, her hand still against Bex’s wound to try and quell some of the blood loss. She wasn’t sure how well she was doing. Bex looked lifeless. “Come on,” She breathed, pulling her friend out of the cab. Bex sagged in her arms, but Dani used all of her strength to carry her friend inside, having to release the pressure she held on her side to do so. “Somebody help!” Dani screamed as she ran through the doors. Immediately, Bex was removed from her hold and placed on a gurney. Dani tried to follow, but was being pulled back by a nurse who insisted she needed to be checked for injuries too. “Don’t let her die!” Dani screamed after them. 

Someone was calling her name. Was it Mina? She hoped it was MIna. Bex didn’t move as someone pulled her from the car and cradled her in their arms and rushed into the building and Bex watched the world passing by above her. Clouds and sun turned into burning white light. Tiles. Her head lolled over and she was set on a bed. Faces appeared and Bex realized it wasn’t Mina. They started rolling her away and she turned to look back at who had carried her in. It wasn’t Mina. Dani. She looked so upset. She was yelling at the doctors, even as they struggled to pull her away, to look at her face. Her face was bleeding. Frank had done that. Anger roiled through her body again and she couldn’t stop it. She should’ve let Nell kill him. She should’ve let Nell kill him. She might bleed out now because she hadn’t let Nell kill him. 

Why was this all still happening? Wasn’t she supposed to be safe at home? Why had Frank come after her again? What was wrong with him? Her mother had said she was safe from him. She had lied. She had lied. Her mother was always so full of lies. The doctor’s pulled her onto another bed and looked down at her and said something to her. She didn’t hear them. All she could think about was Frank. What was wrong with him? Why was he doing this? What if he hurt someone else? He’d already hurt Dani. WHat if he hurt Mina? Or Nell? She tried to reach up to them, to tell them she needed to go, she needed to find them and warn them-- but her arms wouldn’t move. Someone was hushing her, telling her not to move. She groaned, she needed to move. “Mina…” she managed to squeak out, “I need to--” There was something cold in her arm. She looked down to try and see but it was too late. In the next moments, sleep overtook her and she fell back to the bed.

Bex woke up to the calming sound of a beeping meter next to her. There was someone in the room with her, a blurry figure hunched in a chair. “Mina?” Bex called, but she blinked, and the world came back into view and her side was bursting with pain despite the I.V. in her arm and-- it wasn’t Mina. It was Dani. Bex tried to hide her look of disappointment and looked back up at the ceiling. “Sorry…” she muttered. She should probably text Eddie, he’d want to know about something like this. She was trying to figure out how she’d get out of here before her parents were called. She didn’t want her mom to show up. No one else needed to see that.

The moment that Bex was rolled out of sight, Dani fell to the floor. Every bone in her body hurt. She could taste the blood in her mouth, and every time she tried to speak, she could feel her skin pulling and stretching against the dried iron. The nurses in the emergency room fussed over her, leading her to an examination room. It felt like hours. Cotton swabs, tweezers, butterfly bandages, and stitches. All to put her back together. All to make her presentable for the outside world. With every few minutes, Dani had asked for updates on Bex. Was she alive? Was she awake? How much blood had she lost? She had offered her own, but found out they were opposite blood types. Then again, she wasn’t too sure how that worked with things the way they were. The anger she felt in the parking lot floated like an ember in the center of her chest. She wanted to find out where Frank was, she wanted to drive the knife through his chest. In the back of her head, she knew that was wrong. He was human. Even the undead did not deserve harsh, demented deaths. They deserved to be relieved from their suffering. But Frank? He deserved to suffer. She wanted to watch the light leave his eyes. For some strange reason, the thought did not scare Dani. Instead, it simmered. 

Eventually, she was led back to Bex’s room after constant insistence. Who’d be able to prove they weren’t sisters? She’d been asked multiple questions about what happened and she had told them honestly. Somebody named Frank had decided to stab Bex. That was all she knew. She hated the idea of them asking Bex more questions, especially when she’d already been through so much, but Dani knew that it’d happen regardless of the details she’d be able to give. She waited in the chair for some time, every beep of the machine beside Bex’s bed loud and jarring, as if taunting Dani. You were too late. She’s gone. It’s your fault. Except, Bex woke up. She looked disappointed, but Dani pushed past the hurt that bubbled in her chest. Bex was alive. Dani didn’t give a fuck if she wasn’t the one who was supposed to be there as she woke. Dani rose from her seat, catching her reflection in an adjacent mirror. Bruises had already begun to form under her eyes and she had butterfly bandages peppered like freckles across the bridge of her nose. “Hey,” Dani said quietly, holding onto the side of Bex’s bed to keep steady. “Are you…” She looked at her friend. She was alive. Dani could cry! She wanted to reach out, to touch Bex’s hand, to hold it. She withheld. Her own bandaged hands, rough and wreaking of death didn’t deserve to ghost against somebody like hers. Bex was good. Innocent. Damaged, but who wasn’t in this fucked up town? Dani thought about how she had let this happen. How Bex had nearly died because of her. “I’m sorry.” She said, and it was quiet, barely above a whisper. She looked into her friend’s eyes. The anger burned hot, the tendrils of its flame licking at every muscle, every blood vessel. Just seeing Bex in the hospital bed made Dani want to leave, to find Frank. She steeled herself against the thought. “Is there… Is there anything I can do?” She asked. Fuck, she wanted to reach out, to show herself that Bex was okay, that she was real. That this wasn’t some new fucked up portal she’d fallen through. But that’d be selfish. Her own comfort was not what was important here. The fact that Bex was alive was what was.

Dani’s face was littered with bandages and butterfly tape and Bex was suddenly angry that she’d just gotten away with one little stab wound. Well, one big one, she supposed. And scraped palms, but that was about it. She held up her other hand to look at it, picking at the bandage with the other. Dani was apologizing and Bex didn’t know what to say. “Don’t apologize,” she mumbled. She was trying to remember what had happened, wondering if the bruises under Dani’s eyes were her fault, too. She could remember Al’s, and being in a car, and then being yanked out and dragged to the ground and-- “Frank,” she said, and her voice felt urgent, raw in her throat. She swallowed. “Where-- where is he? Did he get away?” Had the police shown up? She didn’t remember. All she could see was grass and mud and leaves and trees, curling over above her, blocking the sun, casting shadows of hands reaching to grab her, take her, steal her away. They’d won, hadn’t they? The trees. Bex pressed her palms to her eyes and tried to let the gauze on her wrists soak up the tears before they fell. “I’m sorry, you shouldn’t have been caught up in that, I--” she shook her head. “I’m sorry.” 

She didn’t know how to explain it. Not in way that didn’t make everything sound stupid and horrible. She wondered if Dani would ask. She didn’t want her to ask. She looked back over at the other girl and saw the bruises and cuts and bandages again and reached out as if to touch her face, letting her hand hover just inches from it. “I’m sorry you got hurt.” 

Dani could hear the ticking of the clock that was centered above the door. That, in combination with the steady beep of Bex’s monitors began to sound like a lullaby. She blinked past the exhaustion that had settled and reached up to tenderly wipe a blood clotted strand of hair away from her own face. They’d done a shoddy job of cleaning her up. Then again, she hadn’t really let them do more than bandage her up. She’d broken her nose enough times to set it herself, and the look on the doctor’s face had shown visible pain at the very act, but she didn’t care. She was fine. She wasn’t the one who’d been stabbed, she wasn’t the one who had lost all that blood. When Bex asked about Frank, she felt a pang of guilt. Dani had bargained with the idea of having stayed, of having watched life leave him for what he’d done, and though that anger grew hot in her stomach and felt like iron on her tongue, she knew that she shouldn’t feel that way. He was human. Or appeared human. The idea of pretending he wasn’t had also flitted across her mind, but Bex’s blood loss had been too hard to ignore. If Dani hadn’t gotten her out when she did, her friend would be dead. “I think they stopped him. I can’t be sure.” Her voice was low, barely audible over the steady rhythm of the hospital lullaby. 

Bex was crying and Dani wanted to reach out, to comfort, but she didn’t know how. The rouge on her bandages from her split knuckles had already begun to peek out. It’d only be a matter of time before her cuts were worn over from her self-healing. She looked down at the way her injuries bloomed beneath the ace bandages and shook her head. “I’m okay, I’m not that hurt.” She smiled and looked up at Bex’s outstretched hand. She should take it. She knew she should. Instead, she reached forward and settled it down from where it’d come. She patted it twice, and though her fingers itched to linger, to feel the way Bex’s pulse vibrated beneath her fingertips, she pulled her hand away. This was a weakness. Caring the way she did for Bex like a sister. The question at hand being Frank, and if he’d gotten away, if he’d find Bex again-- it was too much for Dani to push away. “Do you need anything? Do you want me to call someone for you?” She straightened up and looked back behind her by the door. If Lauren knew that she was here, there’d be hell to pay and she knew it. “I told them we were sisters. I gave them a fake name.” It’d been quick thinking, and really, she wasn’t sure why she’d done it. “Mostly so they’d let me in to see you.” She took a deep breath and it felt like her chest was going to cave in. She needed to find Frank, to make him pay for what he’d done. But with Bex laying there, her deep brown eyes wet with tears, Dani wasn’t sure if she could make herself leave. 

Dani only thought they’d stopped him. She couldn’t be sure. Bex closed her eyes and tried not to let the thought send her into another spiral. She was safe here. She remembered how angry she’d been .She remembered watching Dani pummel Frank. Bex ran her hands through her hair, wincing as a pain in her arm reminded her of the IV in it. She looked back at Dani and she couldn’t explain what she was feeling. She had no idea. She was feeling everything and nothing. She wanted to scream again, she felt like she was going to explode. Dani didn’t take her hand, because Dani wasn’t Mina and Dani wasn’t Morgan and Dani wasn’t Nell. She curled her hands into fists and tried not to protest against the drowsiness too much. “No, no, I’m fine,” she muttered, laying her head back on the pillow and staring up at the ceiling. But when Dani mentioned calling someone, Bex’s blood turned to ice. They would have called her, wouldn’t they? It was on her emergency forms. Bex sat up straight and started pulling at the cords on her. “I need to go,” she said hurriedly. The soft beeping turned to a loud drone as she ripped off the electric patches on her chest. If her mother got here before she left, if her mother knew, if her mother saw, it would all be so much worse.

A nurse came bursting in only to see the scene, rushing to the bedside, pushing Bex back down. Bex winced and cried out, the pain in her side blossoming all over her body. “Relax! I need you to calm down!” the nurse turned to look at Dani sharply. “What happened? What’s going on?” Her voice hushed slightly as she returned her attention to Bex, struggling against her uselessly. “It’s okay, your mother is on her way, she’s almost here.” Bex froze, dread drawing on her face. “No, no, no. No, she can’t see-- no. I have to go, I have to--” But it was too late. It was always too late. Her mother always got there first. Her mother always found her first.

The pain and fear was recognizable on Bex’s face. Dani hated that it was there. She wanted to ease it, but she wasn’t sure how. She flexed her fingers. The air felt heavy, it felt like she was drowning in it. Her chest felt heavy. There had been fear, but then there was panic. Bex was suddenly thrashing in her bed, pulling at the IVs in her hands. It was the only time that Dani reached forward, trying to still her hands. “Bex--” Dani said, her voice coming out softer than intended. But it wasn’t any use. Bex was lost to the panic and she was spiraling. Dani didn’t know what to do. What had she done? Had she said something wrong? 

Before she could reason with Bex, a nurse was coming through the doors. Dani was pushed to the side as the woman began to smooth her hands over the cords and IV that were attached to Bex. The woman snarled at her and Dani steeled herself. So she had done something wrong. Anger boiled inside of her, it coated her throat. She wanted to yell back at the nurse, to tell her that she’d only been trying to help. Bex was still panicking and she was trying her best to get out of the bed. Dani watched with a pained expression on her features as Bex begged to leave. Something about not being able to be seen? By her mother? Dani’s eyes widened slightly, and just as Dani was about to explain that she could take care of Bex, she was being ushered out of the room, the feeling of the nurse’s fingers digging into her bruised arms and back. “Hey--” Dani protested, trying to grab the door, “Bex-- BEX!” Dani felt another hand on her wrist as she was being pulled away from the room. “Bex-- Hey! Fuck off, stop it!” She cried out at the feeling of the man’s pressure on her wrist. He wore a hospital uniform, something about security. She was being escorted out. Why? Why? Dani could easily break this man’s hand, she could give him the same broken nose, it’d match her own, but he was human, she couldn’t do that. He was just doing his job. “Bex!” Dani yelled again as she lost view of her friend’s room. Something was wrong-- far more fucked up than she had originally thought. 

[another-sonic-blog]

Meeting at Night (Pt.3) Love After Love

Meeting at Night

Pt.3

Love After Love

“Thank you, I like you too Shadow”

“Wait? You do, you-you like me back?”- Shadow’s excitement could be noticed by Amy. Who smiled at him.

“Yeah, I believe you are a great companion”- Amy said as she patted his shoulder. Shadow signed.

“Amy, I don’t mean it that way, what I mean is that I like you as Knuckles likes Rouge...I want to be more than just a friend to you”- Shadow looked at her straight in the eyes and Amy damn it all. Of course, she knew what Shadow meant, however, she didn’t want to make it awkward between them. Amy loved Sonic but she didn’t want to hurt Shadow’s feelings by telling him so. Even for her, loving Sonic was hard. After losing her dearest friend, Maria, she knew for a fact she didn’t to feel that pain again. Only after the event of the ARK, she was capable of gaining the confidence of herself and her will that no matter what, she will protect the people that matter most to her. He was so straightforward, he knew what he wanted and he would do anything to have it.

“Shadow, I am sorry...but I don’t think I am capable of loving you the way you are asking me to”

“That’s alright!”- Shadow smirked at her and was honestly surprised by his reaction. He held her hands and kissed them dearly.

“I will chase after you and I will try to win your heart...it doesn’t matter where you are...I will always be there for you...just don’t push me away”

   Amy’s heart was beating fast, not because she had changed feelings for Shadow, but because she could feel he really meant his words.

“And besides...whether you like it or not...in this dimension...WE GOT MARRIED, SO YOU ARE MY WIFE NOW!”

.

.

.

   Shadow and Amy had been walking for a while now. Shadow was in a good mood and Amy really could care less. They left the tribe early in the morning after thanking Tiberius and the Kush tribe for letting them stay. They even gave them some provisions.

“Hey, Shadow”- Amy said as she began to notice a smell.

‘Yes, my wife?”

“You are taking the whole marriage thing way too seriously, stop it now”- Amy was getting annoyed now.

“But, why? I-”

“Look it's the Bosporan Kingdom, we made it!”- Amy said enthusiastically. They walked down the hill, the Kingdom was like no other. It was like a mixture of the old with the new. From afar they could see that there was a rich and poor side of the city just like everything else out there. Houses, businesses of all kind and churches were all part of the enormous city. As they both adventure in the insides of the city, Shadow began to notice that people passing by them were staring at them. Amy could also hear them talk very clearly.

“Are those...hedgehogs?!”

“They most are of royal blood”

“What are they doing here walking without security?”

“Maybe they are cousins of the Queen?”

“I believe we should notify this to the Royal Knights”

   This was some of the comments that they were whispering to each other. Amy didn’t want to get any more attention.

“Shadow we need to look for a refugee and plan our next move later”- Amy informed Shadow as she held her hand. They walked faster and faster looking out anywhere where they could be safe. Five minutes later as they were walking down the street, as they were making a turn, Amy bumped into someone.

   He was a green Echidna. Amy and he made eye contact and were fast to stand up.

“You two...are not from here...right?”- The Edquina asked as Shadow stood in front of Amy in order to protect her.

“That’s none of your business”- Shadow wanted to leave but was quickly stopped by the green guy.

“Are you both from Mobius?”

“Yes...are you-”- Amy began but was cut off by the green Echidna he put his hand over her hand. Note to herself: cut his hand off later on when no ones were watching.

“We can’t talk here...follow me”

   Shadow and Amy had really no other option. They followed the green Edquina. Mostly fascinated because they have never seen one besides Knuckles, who they believed he was the only one left of his kind. The Echidna took them over the outskirts of the city, a small flower shop in which on top of it seemed to be a small quiet house was in front of them as the green guy opened the door for them as they were both quick to enter. Everything looked like a normal flower shop, which Amy enjoyed.

“We must be safe here...how can you tell me how two Mobians came here?”

“You dragged us here, you answer our questions first”- Shadow said firmly.

“Alright, shoot”

“Who are you? Why did you take us here?”

“My name Zeno the Edquina I came from the Byzantine Empire. And right now leader of the Resistance against Queen Titania”- Zeno was quick to say in which Shadow questioned quickly.

“I thought the Byzantine Empire was no longer more”

“Yes, ten years ago, Flavia Titania destroyed our Kingdom. She killed all royal family and left us with nothing...in an act of ‘kindness’, she let us stay in her kingdom. However, they treat everyone horribly. Many of us are slaves and the young girls suffer the most...every once in a while, Royal Knights come looking for suitable girls for the Queen’s son...Son who we have never seen his face”

“What happens once the girls are picked?”- Amy asked Zeno.

“They take them to the palace...after that, we really don’t know. They are probably slaves for the Queen’s son, none of them have ever come back...they might kill them as well”- Amy noticed that this topic seems hard to talk about for Zenos, she then changed the subject.

“How did you know we were from Mobius?”- Amy asked once again.

“Byzantine mythology says that our people were magically teletransported here by 7 magician stones, we are from a ‘magical’ place called Mobius, a place where all animals co-existed in peace and where Echidnas like me lived in a flying island, meant to protect all 7 seven stones and the master stone as well from powerful monster called ‘Chaos’...you both are hedgehogs, your clothes, the way you both smell...its completely different from ours...so I just thought you might be from there”

“Why didn’t the Echidnas race never came back to Mobius?”

“We were never able to find all seven maginal stones...nobody knows where they are. A long time passed since then, so even if we were to find them, my people would not want to go back to an unknow world. This world in the only place we know as home”

“Now...its time for you to answer my questions”

.

.

.

“Ok so to re-cap, your name is Shadow the Hedgehog and Amy Rose, you were both sent here to save your friends Sonic the Hedgehog and Tails ‘Miles’ Prower who are held captive at the Queen Titiana’s castle, also to stop whatever evil plan she has.  And the 7 magical stones of my people are actually called ‘Chaos Emeralds’ and you have two and the other five you suspect the Queen or your captive friend has them...did I miss anything?”- Zeno acted as calm as possible it was too much information but nothing he couldn’t handle. Shadow and Amy just nodded in their seats.

“Alright then, I’ll help you out...I want to free my people and everyone else who live as slaves...you are more than welcome to stay at my place...upstairs, of course, meals will be provided and tomorrow I will introduce you to the resistance”

   It was a quiet night after that. Shadow’s room was next to Amy’s and he couldn’t really sleep. They were in a dangerous place, he knew Amy was more than capable of taking care of herself but what about him? He could only do so much, only run and hit the villains... the last thing he wanted was to be a burden for her....

.

.

.

   Big steps woke up Shadow, he smelled something different, three different kinds of animals coming towards them.

“YOU ARE TRESPASSING MY HOUSE THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE, I HAVE NO FEMALES TO OFFER YOU!”

   Shadow recognized Zeno’s voice coming from downstairs quickly making his way up to the stairs following whoever was coming closer to them.

“The Royal Knights got a report stating you seemed to be accommodating a unique pink...hedgehog..our Queen request her princess”

   Shadow quickly got up from his bed and headed out of his room and was quick to enter Amy’s room. He could smell her, she was hiding in the closet before he could reach to her, the Royal Knights slammed opened the door and found Shadow standing in front of them.

“Another hedehog...how unusual...black with red stripes”

“Just like our deceased emperor...”

   Shadow took a quick look at the Royal Knights. Three of them, one was a squirrel, a lemur, and a fox. All wearing a blue cape, a strong type of metal covering their chest in order to protect them from injuries and strong swords accompanying them. Shadow knew that he could use his speed to get himself and Amy out of there, but that meant leaving Zeno behind, betraying him was unthinkable. He still couldn’t use the power of the Chaos Emeralds at the same potential like Amy and even if he did, it will cause the Royal Knight to alert the Queen that they have the remaining 2 Chaos Emeralds and everyone will haunt them down

“Its only me in here...please leave this residence at will”- Shadow had a serious look.

“If you are the only one here you won’t mind us to look around sir”- The fox asked as he walked around the room and as he was about to open the closet, Shadow punched him the face. Under his dead body, they were going to take Amy away from him. The other Royal Knights also joined the fight and Zeno also wanted to kick them out of his property, but the Royal Knights were forced to soon use their swords. Shadow was fast and really didn’t get hit, everything was going well but then...

“Stop it! I’ll come with you”- Amy said as she came out of the closet, everyone stopped their movement and the Royal Knights were fast to approach her. They quickly handcuffed her.

“Stay away from her bastard!”- Shadow was about to throw another punch at the Knight but Amy stopped him.

“No, Shadow...I’ll go with them...I am more than honored, I will be serving the Queen”- Amy presented and the Royal Knights believed it all.

“But Amy...I won’t allow this!”- Shadow promised to protect her but couldn’t do anything.

“I know for sure I will see you soon”- Amy smiled to him as the Royal Knights took her out of the flower shop. Shadow saw how two Knights put Amy on a Royal Carriage and closed the door. The last thing Amy saw was Shadow telling her not to leave...

“I’ll be nice and won’t tell my Commander about this accident, if you interfere with our jobs one more time, I’ll make sure I put you both in a dungeon forever”- The lemur Knight warned them as he left the shop. Shadow couldn’t really think of anything else to but rescue Amy at the moment. After Zenos made sure that there was no Knights left around he broke the news to Shadow....

“Part one of our plan is complete”

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.

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[misscrawfords]

11, 12, 16

Sorry for the delay in answering @cinquespotted and thank you for asking! :) Been a manic couple of days and I needed to think about non-fiction books about classics because that’s not so easy to answer when I haven’t been in academia in the subject for almost ten years. (Yikes…)

11. recommend a piece of non-fiction about the classical world

I was thinking about this on and off for a couple of days and then the answer hit me. Adam Nicholson’s The Mighty Dead. I’m not sure that “non-fiction” is quite the right way to describe this utterly brilliant book. It’s a lyrical, imaginative, semi-fictional investigation of Homer’s influence and power, as simultaneously oblique and direct, beautifully written and πολυτροπος as one of Homer’s heroes. 

I also pulled out my undergraduate dissertation bibliography which was the last time I read classical scholarship seriously and I remember being blown away by some of the things on it. (Unlike many students, I absolutely adored writing my dissertation - I was very lucky.) Here are a few of the academic books I read which I recall enjoying even at the distance of 9 years:

-  Chew, Kathryn. “The representation of violence in the Greek novels and martyr accounts”-  Frye, Northrop. The Secular Scripture: A study of the structure of romance (not classical per se but brilliant and influential - I read more Frye for my masters and I’m a big, big fan)-  Konstan, David. Sexual Symmetry-  Loraux, Nicole. Tragic ways to kill a woman-  MacAlister, Suzanne. Dreams and Suicides: The Greek novel from Antiquity to the Byzantine Empire

Yep, my dissertation was basically about sex and death. (What else is fiction about?) No, I didn’t do it on purpose…

12. who is your favourite poet? why?

(Oh how nice, this meme was created by someone writing British English. How delightfully unusual!)

Am I allowed to cheat and give two - one Greek and one Roman? Good! :P

On the Greek side, I have to go with Homer. I mean, I honestly feel he (he? As if we know!) might be my favourite author. Or at least sit up there alongside Austen. I guess at the moment I’m in more of a Homer mood than an Austen mood. Polite tea drinking and elegant sniping in a ball room really isn’t cutting it for me at the moment. (YES I KNOW THERE IS MORE TO AUSTEN THAN THAT. SHE’S MY FAVOURITE AUTHOR AND I’VE WRITTEN A DAMN MASTERS DISSERTATION ON HER. I’m just having a reaction against that kind of writing atm. I don’t know why. I don’t know what to do about it. I feel sad. But that’s another post.)

HOMER

I mean, where does one start? I’ve always loved The Odyssey from reading Book 6 for Greek GCSE and tittering over Odysseus covering his naked manhood with a fig leaf (lines inexplicably missed out from the Bristol Classical Press’ edition for fear of offending the sensibilities of school children, clearly not realising that by missing them out there is no indication that Odysseus isn’t stark naked in from of Nausicaa the entire scene lololololol). I did a final year paper involving reading the whole poem in Greek (spoiler: I failed, but I read about 2/3rds of it missing out the many books of recognition in Ithaca and it was a wonderful experience reading 100s of lines of Homer and getting a feel for the vocabulary and the rhythm of it all. I wish I had been a more dedicated student and had actually completed the whole thing.) It was my favourite paper. Professor Simon Goldhill (who looks and sounds like Zeus) opening the lecture series by booming, “The Odyssey is all about how to be a MAN”. ανδρα μοι εννεπε. First line of the poem. I get shivers thinking about it. Odysseus - his character. WHAT A GUY. (I don’t mean to say you have to like him or approve of him - that’s not what appreciating fiction is about, you clodpoles, but you have to admit he’s an amazing, amazing character and concept.) We actually had Professor Edith Hall come to my school today and she gave a talk on Odysseus as a hero and ngl I actually almost teared up at one moment. I just can’t believe such a great character exists and over 2000 years later, he still speaks to us and we can trace SO MUCH in Western culture back to these texts. Actually, while I was nursing a raging crush on Odysseus (I was 20 okay), it was Penelope who was the revelation to me in that paper. Did Penelope know her husband was back before the recognition scene? This had never occurred to me before and I was plunged into debates on the stability of the text and characterisation and feminism and narratology. I mean, it was just amazing! And whatever nitty gritty you might go into with it, I was just struck by this wonderful, admittedly overly romantic idea, that Penelope was absolutely Odysseus’ equal. That in this ancient epic, we had a woman who bested a man at his own game, that she was playing him - and he loved it. These two tricksters, separated for too long, finally getting their happy ending. And I know it’s not about that. But it also is. Emotionally, that’s what I got. And it made me so, so happy. Because, honestly, I don’t have a problem studying works written by, for and about men if they’re good, but there are SO FEW opportunities studying classics (at least traditionally; the approach is changing now which is great) to grapple with amazing female characters or figures - and here I had Homer’s hero and Homer’s heroine. I mean, there are many other things I love about the Odyssey but this is already long enough.

I always joked about the fact that I managed to get a classics degree from Cambridge without having ever studied the Iliad. (Ikr, it’s crazy!) And youthful, hubristic me was okay with that. I was an Odyssey girl through and through. I’d read the Iliad and it was all battles and death and the catalogue of ships. YOU FOOL. So the first time I really had to deal with the Iliad was when I found myself teaching it to A Level Classical Civilisation. And it was an absolute revelation. I’m teaching it for the third time at the moment and it’s not getting old. Every time I see something different, every time the students find something new, every time I cry quietly in class when we are reading. The places vary but the moments that are guaranteed to set me off are Achilles’ grief over Patroclus, him putting on his armour and his final unbending towards Priam. Why the armour? I’m not entirely sure. I think it’s something to do with this sense of inevitability of the approach of the end, of imminent climax (somehow more significant than the climax itself). It’s like how the lighting of the beacons in LotR is such a powerful scene. It’s not that the thing itself is particularly full of pathos but because of everything it signifies. I can’t altogether explain it but it always really affects me. When my uncle died the other year, I was reading the death of Patroclus with my class at that time and my mum came to visit. I didn’t know how to talk to her or talk about my uncle’s death and we had this absolutely awful walk around a country park in the rain (I am never going to be able to go back there for the memories it triggers) but somehow the only way I could articulate something of what I felt was by clinically and factually describing Achilles’ anguish and explaining to my mother how the ancient world mourned its dead and what Patroclus had meant to Achilles and what blinding grief and rage would drive him to do. And she gripped my hand and we both wept, silent tears, and we walked on in the rain talking about the Iliad. I’m actually crying again, writing this, right now. I am not sure there is ANYTHING in literature more powerful than Achilles’s rage and anguish.

If Odysseus is the hero of romance and comedy, a clever hero whose very wiliness makes my heart sing and my academic brain bounce up and down looking for mythic parallels, Achilles does something else altogether. I’ve been thinking about him a lot recently - partly because I’m teaching the poem and once again we’ve got to Book 16 and Achilles’ tragedy is becoming the focus of the remainder of the poem (if it wasn’t before) so it’s literally my job to think about his character - but also in the context of my recent obsession with SW, Reylo and Kylo Ren’s Episode 9 possibilities. I’m not trying to be trivial here but it saddens me SO MUCH that people have the nerve to police interest in that character, one of the most fascinating and complex to grace the screens of a fantasy blockbuster series in - well, honestly, I can’t think of another one. What a treat we have. Nobody has a problem loving Achilles’ character and weeping over him (and making soft pastel shipping graphics of him and Patroclus…) but he was objectively speaking an awful person in many ways. A violent, unpredictable, psychopathic overgrown adolescent who holds an awful grudge. But of course, that isn’t the full story and it’s not the purpose of this post to educate the internet on the nuances of Achilles’ character and his profound tragedy. I’ve got emotional enough, but honestly, we NEED Achilles. We need that larger-than-life expression of all our deepest fears and regrets and violence and destruction - and also wit, compassion, sense of justice and deep love and loyalty. I think someone once said that everyone should read the Iliad at least once in their life. Whether they did or not, it’s true: everyone should.

Okay, so I was also going to talk about how much I love Ovid too but that would be literally going from the sacred to the profane, the sublime to the ridiculous and I have spent way too long on this already. So, yeah, I really love Ovid as well.

16. Cicero - love him or loathe him?

I unironically love Cicero. 

Okay, so I started along this journey from the worst of reasons. The first guy I ever liked in high school was obsessed with Cicero. At the time, I’d never read anything by him, so I decided to like him because liking the same things as your crush is an A+ way of getting him to notice you and like you back. (Spoiler: it failed.) Along the way, I got really inspired by Cicero’s wife Terentia. My first internet handles were Terentia. (I WONDER IF HE KNEW I HAD A CRUSH. lol he did. it was awful. I cringe.) Anyway, Terentia was fabulously wealthy and responsible for financing Cicero’s political career, married twice more after Cicero’s death, including to the historian Suetonius, and died aged 103. What a BAMF.

So first off, I love Cicero’s Latin. He’s my favourite Latin prose author to translate. Even if his speeches are sometimes on the dull side (we had De Imperio as an AS set text a couple of years ago and it was such a snooze-fest), the actual style of writing is so lucid and balanced and satisfying I can forgive him the content. I love all the rhetorical devices and how you can still see them at work in (good) political speeches today. I just get tremendous pleasure from translating him. It annoys me no end that the prose unseen author at A Level at the moment is Livy. I have no patience for Livy’s Latin; it doesn’t thrill me at all.

But I also kind of like Cicero the man. He lived at one of the most fascinating periods of history and although you can’t altogether trust his bias, he was a really important figure in that history and documented so much of it. I wish we had more sources to sit along side as I think he definitely puffs himself up, but nevertheless he’s invaluable. I even quite like his arrogance. He’s the ultimate self-made, intellectual man in Rome and I think he has reason to be proud of what he achieved. He must have been formidable to listen to.

Thank you for letting me ramble on about classics and literature like this. I miss writing on tumblr and not just reblogging pretty things.

Ask me about classics (or anything else obviously)

[topmixtrends]

I.

“IF I AM out of my mind, it’s all right with me,” announces the narrator of Saul Bellow’s Herzog. Moses Herzog’s personal life has gone to pieces and having a PhD might be part of the problem. His study of Romanticism — “eight hundred pages of chaotic argument” — molders in his closet.

In Bellow’s fictional worlds, being cultured and crazy often go together. The narrator of The Adventures of Augie March is Sancho Panza to a string of Quixotes. Augie can’t resist illusion-chasing screwballs — from his brother with his get-rich schemes to a lover’s ambition to train eagles in Mexico. Toward the end of the novel, Augie’s warship is torpedoed and he finds himself in a lifeboat with a self-described “psycho-biophysicist” named Basteshaw as his sole companion. Basteshaw confides that he has managed to create living cells from inorganic matter and prophesies that his research is on course to discover a serum which will finally end human ignorance, strife, and suffering. “If he wasn’t a genius, I was in the boat with a maniac,” reflects Augie. When Augie tries to signal to a passing allied ship, Basteshaw wallops him with an oar. The psycho-biophysicist would rather drift toward the Canary Islands, to be interned on neutral Spanish territory, in order to continue his research. They struggle, Augie prevails, and they are saved. What’s more, they were never anywhere near the Canaries: “This scientist Basteshaw! Why, he was cuckoo! Why, we’d have both rotted in that African sea, and the boat would have rotted, and there would have been nothing but death and madness to the last.”

After the rescue, Basteshaw is decidedly cool with Augie. “The power of the individual to act through his intellect on the reason of mankind is smaller now than ever,” opines the lunatic.

In his earlier books, Bellow took down the intellectual life playfully. From the 1970s on, he came to examine madness as a political rather than a purely personal phenomenon. To be deluded was more than a foible in a supposedly cultured world capable of genocide. Did intellectuals and writers bear some responsibility for the disaster that had befallen Europe? Or were Pound, Heidegger, Hamsun, Céline, and all the others just sideshow clowns, fundamentally irrelevant to the great events that unfolded, and perhaps interesting only as examples of a general malaise?

Bellow had been wrestling with these questions for decades, even if they were not immediately reflected in his fiction. During his time in Paris between 1948 and 1950, he heard firsthand about life under the Nazis and the deportations of Jews, and read Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s “crazy, murderous harangues, seething with Jew-hatred.” In 1954, when William Faulkner led a group of writers petitioning the United States government for the release of Ezra Pound from a mental institution — had Pound been judged sane, a death sentence for treason for his collaboration with the Axis would have been mandatory — the dissenting voice was Bellow’s. He wrote to Faulkner that treating Pound’s advocacy of “hatred and murder” as eccentricity rather than insanity was symptomatic of the stunning indifference to recent events: “[B]etter poets than he were exterminated, perhaps,” wrote Bellow. “Shall we say nothing on their behalf?”

  II.

In 1945, Europe was threatened by famine and epidemic disease. Millions of refugees had to be resettled and ruined cities and infrastructure rebuilt. The postwar denazification policies imposed by the occupying powers in West Germany focused on rehabilitating all but top-level administrators in order to create a viable state that would be a bulwark against further Soviet advance west. It was not until the 1960s, with the return of prosperity and a semblance of stability in international politics, that the subject of genocide began to be addressed. The first steps in a historiography of the Nazi Final Solution were taken in the United States, most notably with the appearance of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961. That year also saw the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, the logistician of the Holocaust. The proceedings, under the scrutiny of television cameras and the world press, included dramatic testimony from survivors. Hannah Arendt covered the trial for the The New Yorker, and recast her articles for the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). In Germany, too, a new mood took hold. For the first time, the West German state tried concentration camp administrators and others who had assisted in the massacre of civilians.

“Eastern Europe has told me a lot about my family — myself even,” Bellow wrote in 1960 after a journey he made the previous year. “[W]hat I saw between Auschwitz and Jerusalem made a change in me.” Among the stories he heard from survivors were those told by his own relatives:

Cousin Bella […] tells me of one of our cousins who now lives with her husband in Geneva. During the German occupation of Riga this cousin and her sister were slave laborers in a factory that made army uniforms. Before the Germans retreated they exhumed thousands of bodies from the mass graves and burned them. A sudden sensitivity about evidence. The two young girls were among the hundreds forced to dig up putrid corpses and put them in the flames. The younger sister sickened and died.

  III.

Solomon Bellows was born in Montreal in 1915 to orthodox Jewish parents from the Russian Empire. In 1924, the family moved to Chicago. Yiddish was the language of the home. For the adolescent Bellow, religion was immigrant baggage to be ditched on the road to American modernity. He became a Trotskyite. At university, he studied the radical new social science of anthropology. The publication of argotic, freewheeling Adventures of Augie March in 1953 marked him out as a literary innovator.

By the 1960s, however, America had changed. The Chicago of Augie March no longer existed. Poor but dynamic neighborhoods had transformed into an inner-city wasteland of drugs, crime, and despair: “The slums, as a friend of mine once observed, were ruined. He was not joking.” Bellow began to reflect on what had been lost, turning back toward Europe and the Jewish world.

Bellow’s detractors identify Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970) as the point when the young literary rebel became a middle-aged champion of the elitist culture of dead white males. He was called a misogynist and even a racist. And the depiction of the United States through the eyes of Artur Sammler, a Polish Jew and refugee, is certainly provocative: “New York was getting worse than Naples or Salonika. It was like an Asian, an African town […] You opened a jeweled door into degradation, from hypercivilized Byzantine luxury straight into the state of nature, the barbarous world of color erupting from beneath.” Sammler sees a generation seeking “the free ways of barbarism” while protected by a civilized order, wealth, technology, and property rights.

Sammler has landed in the middle of a cultural revolution where nobody over 30 can be trusted. On the shores of this new world, it means nothing that he has lost his eye in the war, that his wife has been killed by a racist regime, or that he has known the foremost intellectuals of interwar London. His voice is capable of speaking of an Eastern Europe buried under communist totalitarianism, of an Ashkenazi-Yiddish civilization obliterated by genocide, and an extinct interwar intellectual order. But nobody wants to know. It is as though none of it ever happened.

Sammler cannot relate to the stew of politicized thinking around him not because it is too radical for his tastes but because it is hopelessly innocent. If America is unable to comprehend what has happened not 30 years earlier on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, then America is incapable of talking sense. Social breakdown is Bellow’s theme, but Sammler is not — solely — about the United States. In depicting countercultural America busting its mental seams through the eyes of a Holocaust survivor, Bellow is widening his lens in an attempt to take in the recent history of the planet. If in his earlier novels he was happy to study individuals who were “nuts” or “cookoo,” now he ponders the reality of insanity as a collective phenomenon.

Intellectuals deal in reason, but their subject — human life — refuses to act reasonably. “Like many people who had seen the world collapse once,” Bellow writes, “Mr. Sammler entertained the possibility that it might collapse twice.”

  IV.

The idea that modern life makes an impossible demand on the individual mind is one of Bellow’s great themes. “Too much of everything,” says Augie. “Too much history and culture […] too many details, too much news, too much example, too much influence […] Which who is supposed to interpret? Me?” Augie has no clear idea of his own what this world is but he has a strong intuition that there are as many ideas of the world as there are human beings, that each is provisional, and that all are competing for recruits. Life is a project, reality an individual projection. In this, he sees to the heart of modern — American — life. He surfs the confusion of this world, freestyle; in place of trials and anxiety he has adventures.

But by the time Bellow came to write Sammler, he had a less thrilling take on the effect of so much freedom:

The many impressions and experiences of life seemed no longer to occur each in its own proper space, in sequence, each with its recognizable religious or aesthetic importance, but human beings suffered the humiliations of inconsequence, of confused styles, of a long life containing several separate lives. In fact the whole experience of mankind was now covering each separate life in its flood. Making all the ages of history simultaneous. Compelling the frail person to receive, to register, depriving him because of volume, of mass, of the power to impart design.

The idea that modern man recoiled in despair before meaningless choice and a deluge of information was one Bellow shared with Mircea Eliade, a colleague at the University of Chicago. Eliade had been a famous novelist in interbellum Bucharest and was widely acknowledged as the intellectual leader of Romania’s younger generation of writers and thinkers. He had settled in Chicago in 1957 and, as a philosopher and historian of religions, had enjoyed huge success with the English-language publication of his book The Myth of the Eternal Return, which had sold over 100,000 copies in various editions. Bellow had come to know him in the years prior to writing Sammler.

Eliade argued that man is religious by nature, and that the fundamental feature of religious thinking is the distinction between the sacred and the profane. The sacred is all that is unchanging and essential, the profane is all that is provisional, historical, and subject to decay. The basic characteristic of all religions, Eliade maintained, is that man makes sense of the world by cultivating an awareness of the sacred, and seeks through ritual to recreate it and participate in it. Mythical thought is an attempt to reconstitute the world of the sacred, which all cultures conceive of as a prehistorical Edenic era. Traditional societies impart meaning to existence by being centered on sacred time. Modern rationality recognizes only historical time, producing “spiritual aridity” and an anxiety that Eliade called “The Terror of History.”

Eliade was Bellow’s kind of European intellectual — polyglot, intensely erudite, with more than a dash of religious mysticism thrown into the mix. Bellow’s fourth wife, Alexandra Bagdasar, whom he married in 1974, was a Romanian expatriate from an old and very cultivated Bucharest family, and the Bellows and Eliades frequently socialized. Bellow and Bagdasar divorced in 1985. Eliade died in 1986, and Bellow delivered a reading at his funeral. At this point, Bellow must have believed that the “Romanian” period of his life was over. But rumors had long been circulating about Eliade’s association with Romania’s wartime fascist Iron Guard, and they became undeniable with the 1988 publication of Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots, 1907-1945 by Mac Linscott Ricketts, which uncovered a series of articles Eliade had written for the Romanian fascist press in the 1930s.

  V.

Ricketts, a devoted pupil of Eliade’s, was interested in his master as a philosopher and literary figure. The section on Eliade’s political writings in the 1930s takes up a few dozen pages in a two-volume work of over a thousand pages — almost as though Ricketts had accidentally tripped over a bundle of newspapers while on other business — but the contents of these articles is stunning in the context of Romanian politics in those years. In them, Eliade comes across as another Basteshaw, theorizing manically while the boat drifts the wrong way; the serum that will end the ignorance, strife, and suffering of the Romanian nation, he proposes, is nationalism.

Eliade believed that democracy was inherently unsuitable for Romania, and that democratic politics was wearing itself out with its fixation on un-Romanian “abstractions” such as the rights of minorities and freedom of political expression. And when democracy wobbled, he argued, it tended to wobble toward anarchy and communism. Only a sense of national greatness and purpose could unify the nation. In a 1936 article titled “The Democracy and the Problem of Romania,” he wrote:

Whether or not Mussolini is a tyrant is a matter of complete indifference to me. Only one thing interests me: that this man has in fifteen years turned a third-rate state into a leading power […] In the same way, I’m completely indifferent to what will happen in Romania after the liquidation of democracy. If, in overcoming democracy, Romania becomes powerful, national and well-armed, and aware of its powers and destiny — history will judge this act.

Eliade was intensely anxious about the dominance of minorities in parts of Romania and about a presumed “invasion” of Jewish immigrants spilling in from the north. His concern with the physical decline of the national stock was among the intellectual banalities of the era; in one article he proclaims that Romania cannot assimilate foreigners as it did before because the peasantry was weakened by pellagra (from a change of diet), alcoholism, and syphilis — all, he observes, due to foreign influence.

Eliade fantasized of a coming spiritual revolution. By 1936, he was projecting a transfiguring “mystical spirit” and “Romanian messianism” on the Iron Guard, while writing for its press and being seen as its leading ideologue. Perhaps Eliade found the national dream so beautiful that he was willing to overlook the violent anti-Semitism of his fellow fascists. Or perhaps he had accepted that the Jews would have to absorb the inevitable collateral damage in the creation of a national state in which every Romanian had a sense of “belonging to a chosen people.” By 1938, he was convinced his country was on the brink of transformation and claimed that the fire of Romanian Orthodox Christianity was about to “dominate” Europe with its spiritual light.

In 1937, Eliade told his friend Mihail Sebastian that he supported the Iron Guard because he had “always believed in the primacy of the spirit.” Sebastian, who was Jewish, recorded in his diary: “He’s not a charlatan and not demented. He’s just naïve. But how is such catastrophic naiveté even possible!”

“I believe in the future of the Romanian people, but the Romanian state should disappear,” Eliade told Sebastian in October 1939. In September 1940, Eliade’s wish was fulfilled: Romania became a National Legionary State, with the Iron Guard ruling in alliance with the Romanian Army. By this time Eliade was abroad, having been appointed cultural attaché to the Romanian Embassy in London in April 1940, then to the embassy in Portugal in February 1941. In June 1941, Romania began fighting alongside the Wehrmacht. At this point, Eliade turned to nebulous theorizing on the common “Latin” character of the Portuguese and Romanian peoples, and the creative and civilizing destiny of the “Latin” race. In 1943, he wrote The Romanians, Latins of the East (a slim volume that Ricketts describes as “cultural propaganda”), in which he extols Romania’s historical destiny as the protector of the fringes of Europe from Oriental barbarians. The war in the east, Eliade says, in defense of “Christian European values” — Romanian troops were at this point fighting alongside the Germans to take Stalingrad — was the latest chapter in this glorious narrative of self-sacrifice.

Ricketts’s academic biography, curiously, never mentioned that the wartime Romanian state was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews. But a compelling 1991 essay in the New Republic by expatriate Romanian writer Norman Manea clearly connected Eliade with Romanian fascism. A second New Republic essay by Manea, in 1998, focused on Mihail Sebastian’s Journal (1935 to 1945). The Journal, which documents Romania’s slow slide into fascism, was published for the first time in Romanian in 1996. Along the way — as in the extracts quoted above — it records Sebastian’s sadness and perplexity at the deterioration of his friendship with “Mircea,” as Eliade’s commitment to the Iron Guard intensifies and his public expressions of anti-Semitism become more marked.

It must have occurred to Bellow by the late 1990s that Eliade had reasons of his own for feeling “a terror of history” when he asked rhetorically, in his best-selling book, how man “can tolerate the catastrophes and horrors of history — from collective deportations and massacres to atomic bombings — if beyond them he can glimpse no sign, no transhistorical meaning.”

  VI.

When I met Norman Manea in 2014, on one of his trips back to Romania, I suggested that knowledge of the Holocaust as a Romanian phenomenon was not widespread in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s. “Absolutely not,” he agreed. “And this was another shock [for Bellow]. And Eliade was this great intellectual, praised in America.”

Manea and Bellow met on several occasions in the 1990s but the subject of Eliade was tactfully avoided, though Bellow certainly knew what Manea had written about Eliade. (In a letter to Philip Roth in 1997, Bellow asked for a copy of Manea’s article, remarking, “You do well to direct me, or connect me, to Eliade.”) “There was no mention of him and there was certainly at the beginning a reluctance, on his part, to meet me,” said Manea. “He was a very close friend with Eliade, he knew a bit about this story but not enough. And suddenly he felt that he was in a kind of story where he may be also partially guilty, because he was friends with him. Philip Roth used to tell me, ‘Look, Saul smells an anti-Semite a hundred miles away.’ Well, this did not occur in this case and it’s not by chance. Eliade was a refined intellectual.”

There is an additional reason why Bellow may have had difficulty discussing his friend with Norman Manea. In 1942, while Eliade was serving the regime in Lisbon, Romanian Jews were being deported to camps in Romanian-occupied Ukraine. The five-year-old Norman Manea, along with his family, was among those expelled. Over a hundred thousand of the deportees died in the camps, on the road of cold, famine, and disease, or from incidents of random violence. It is estimated that around 400,000 Jews were killed by the Romanian authorities in Romania and in the area of Ukraine under Romanian wartime occupation.

In December 1999, Bellow appointed Manea to interview him for the Jerusalem Literary Project, over the course of three two-hour videotaped sessions. But Bellow resisted Manea’s attempts to draw him out on the subject of Romania and made no mention of Ravelstein, which was months away from publication.

Almost certainly, Bellow had been learning of the contents of Sebastian’s Journal while working on what was to be his final novel. And he must have been aware that the publication of an English edition was imminent. Manea had known about the diary even before its Romanian publication — fragments had begun to appear in English in the late 1980s — and Roth had taken a great interest in its contents. “Some fragments appeared, much before, not about Eliade, exactly, but from the diary, and yes, we discussed this […] I’m presuming Philip said [to Bellow], ‘Look! You see! Here’s the real proof of everything Manea was saying before but didn’t have the documents [to prove].’” As the US publication of Sebastian’s journal drew closer, Roth was promoting it vigorously behind the scenes.

It is not surprising that Bellow, a Nobel laureate in his 85th year, should have wished to account for the fact that he had been sipping tea and conversing with a Mircea Eliade — much as Mihail Sebastian had, half a century before. And so, Bellow included a fictionalized portrait of his relationship with Eliade in what was to be his last novel, Ravelstein.

Both Sebastian’s Journal and Ravelstein were published within months of each other, in 2000.

  VII.

Manea’s remark that Bellow “found himself in a kind of story” is particularly telling. Ravelstein is a roman à clef, in which Bellow set out to become the master of his story once again by presenting a version of his friendship with Eliade. The Ravelstein character is based upon Bellow’s close friend Allan Bloom. Eliade appears as a secondary character, the academic Radu Grielescu, who gallantly opens doors and pulls out chairs for the ladies, remembers birthdays and anniversaries, engages in hand-kissing and bowing — and had once written of “the Jew-syphilis that infected the high civilization of the Balkans.”

Bellow (“Chick” in the novel) goes along with the charade because the Grielescus are “socially important” for his Romanian wife. He banters in French with Madame Grielescu and never probes Radu about “people he might have known slightly with the Iron Guard.” Grielescu fidgets with his pipe and does most of the talking, the subjects ranging from yoga to Siberian shamanism to marriage customs in primitive Australia:

How could such a person be politically dangerous? […] I suppose I said to myself that this was some kind of Frenchy-Balkan absurdity. Somehow I couldn’t take Balkan fascists seriously […] But what is one to do with the learned people from the Balkans who have such an endless diversity of interests and talents — who are scientists and philosophers and also historians and poets, who have studied Sanskrit and Tamil and lectured in the Sorbonne on mythology?

Ravelstein’s judgment on the historian of religions, the theoretician of myths, is more down to earth: he asks the unworldly Chick to remember when the Iron Guard hung up Jewish corpses on meat-hooks in a slaughterhouse in the pogrom in Bucharest in 1941. “The Jews had better understand their status with respect to myth,” he says.

Why should they have any truck with myth? It was myth that demonized them. The Jew myth is connected with conspiracy theory. The Protocols of Zion for instance. And your Radu has written books, endless books, about myth […] Just give a thought now and then to those people on the meat hooks.

Bellow had criticized Hannah Arendt on several occasions since the 1960s for having been enamored of Heidegger and what Bellow called the “eros” of German culture. Now Ravelstein was reproaching Chick for a similar error.

Mircea Eliade — with his ability to make lucid sense of myth and at the same time to disappear into an unmoored world of fantasy when touched by real events — resembled a character Bellow might have created at any stage of his career as a novelist. And in his last book, Bellow himself becomes one of these foolish characters, entranced by a veneer of culture, the charm of ideas, and a world of intellectualism that reveals itself as shoddy and inadequate when set beside the brutal facts.

¤

Philip Ó Ceallaigh is short story writer as well as a translator. In 2006, he won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His two short story collections, Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse and The Pleasant Light of Day, were short-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He lives in Bucharest.

The post “The Terror of History”: On Saul Bellow and Mircea Eliade appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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