*Transcendental *Logic

Yesterday was a day of chocolate, books and pyjamas; a wonderful day, but maybe not without consequence.  Today it feels like something’s been woken, by all the thoughtless revelry maybe, or by dragging up too many memories without having a care for how sharp they are.  And whenever you wake something that’s been a long time slumbering, it’s not too happy…

The Dark is Rising was probably my *favorite* book when I was younger.  I read the whole series numerous times, but always kept coming back to that second volume, probably the first tale of psychological horror that I ever came across. 

It’s nice to know that I appreciated good writing, even then.  So often one drags up a precious relic of childhood and thinks, "Mm.  Well, I can see why I liked this when I was ten…"  — Not so, this series.  It remains an impressive piece of art and a jaw-droppingly well-written tale … This I can tell, even though I chewed through the first book in two sittings yesterday, and am a good three-quarters gone with the second (I’m desperately trying to slow down so it doesn’t end so quickly).  It says something when you’re grown and writing a book of your own, and you can still be in awe of your childhood author-heroes.  Twiceover, even; both as the stunned writer and the breathless, in some ways still juvenile, reader.  Her sentences, man!  You can’t fake that kind of rhythm, nor that penetrating eye for detail.  *wowfangirly*

Over Sea, Under Stone (the first book) was decent, a good kid’s adventure-mystery; can’t wait to read it to my daughter.  I liked it then and now, but even then I knew it wasn’t quite my type of story.  The Dark Is Rising, though — gods, what an effing marvelous title! — now that was my dish.  Is my dish, I guess.  Real heroes, unimaginable power, inconceivable evil that rarely deigns to peek beyond the natural world, leaving you reeling at glimpses of it in snow, darkness, flights of rooks … heck, this story was where I got my fascination with ravens and their ilk, and reading it again, no wonder!

And the mysterious ignorance of childhood revealed perfectly; revealed to be as massively creepy and important as dammit, you knew it was … when passing people say things like "The Walker is abroad" and "This night will be bad…and tomorrow will be beyond imagining" and they turn out to mean exactly what the darkest parts of you knew they did, when you were ten.

Revisiting this state of mind at thirty:  More than a little eerie.  There’s an icy mist on everything today, a freezing fog that swirls and seems to have hands; and my cat’s meaningful stares seem to have less and less to do with food.  Part of the mastery of The Dark Is Rising — the whole series — is that age doesn’t disprove a damn bit of it.  The carefully neutral terminology — Light, Dark, Old Ones, Walker, Rider, Signs — keeps itself thoroughly friendly with metaphor without losing a smidge of its own reality; and what’s more, the story itself is snuggly enough with triple and quadruple meanings that, if you woke up at thirty with a broom in your hand that turned out to be a Staff and you were suddenly thousands of years old, the books would be snickering gently on your shelf and it would all make perfect sense. 

Madness, then.  Stories this good breed a kind of madness, scarier because the saner you are, the more likely you are to welcome it with laughter and caroling.

We all know adults are prone to this sort of thing — hell, there are fantasy stories out there now with huge fan-clubs of grownups, support-groups protecting each other from the social consequences of believing wholeheartedly in a story-book world.  I bet you know which ones I mean.  The only reason–the only reason–there isn’t a huge following of Dark Is Rising "believers" is that the game of life hasn’t made enough of them into a big enough clump to stave off the laughter of others (who then go home to recite their own fictional litanies).  Certainly the one story is at least as good as the others, and with far less plot-holes.  (Or maybe it doesn’t happen because the Dark doesn’t let it…)

And face it, damn you, there is a grain of truth in such things; or why would we so enjoy reading them?  The world is a big mishmash of details that we can safely ignore as children; true.  But it’s just as huge and mysterious as it seems at ten; the smallness we perceive later is the illusion.  The mystery is true.  The existence of good and evil is true — few of us make it to thirty without looking dead in the face of at least one of them, personified and living and undeniable, however subjective their initial origins. 

The agelessness of our souls, and their deep ineffable power, is true.  "You are an Old One" is just as much something that Buddha would say as a craggy old man who appears in your town out of nowhere.  Always, though we try like hell (!) to ignore it, is that nagging feeling that we have so much power that we cannot see or touch, because we’re simply not looking at things from the right angle.  If only someone would come along and…show us the way…

Yes, it’s silly to act as though you know your true nature as a Magician when you don’t; people who run around acting like Glinda the Good or Harry Potter or whateverhaveyou when they’re old enough to know better make us wince for good reason.  BUT they are no more wrong than the people who assume that, because they don’t know their nature, can’t see the whole thing, then it must not be there; nothing must be there but the tiny slice of the world that presents itself easily.  That’s just as stupid.  Holiness would be knowing, the great, the huge, the mystery.  Both refusing to acknowledge the possibility of it, and pretending it is what you want it to be, are ignorant and profane.
 
The closest to holy us ignorant types can get is to remember what we don’t know — Socratic holiness, I suppose; or Erisian divinity — and as we pay the bills and sweep the floors and vote and ache and sleep, remember that somewhere, in some sense, there are Things of Power.  There are the Old Ways.  There is the Dark, and the Light.

And however huge the actual story is — the story that all the powerful childhood tales are little reflections of — we’ve all got a part in it, or we wouldn’t be here.

…This is how good fantasy makes me think.  It doesn’t answer the question it carries in with it:  Is this more sane, or less?  Healthy, or a symptom of some modern malaise?  Mostly, though, I figure I’ll just grab my sword and play my part, and let the author work that one out…  ;)

This entry was posted 11 months, 1 week ago on Wednesday, December 26th, 2007 at 12:17 pm and is filed under aesthetica, cool thing, logos addict, psychology, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.