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Get outta Tashbaan
Jan. 11th, 2014 04:49 pmAnother day where I ignore the notes I have on Things to Write in favor of something that hit me today. Yeah, well, I'm going through some stuff.
I was feeling really down. I've spent far more of my life not working than working. And when somebody asks me why I can't work, if they ever do, what can I say? "Just call me schizophrenic and leave it at that."?
I had a job once that I partly liked, but I hated what I was building. I somehow went from quitting that job to feeling like the Devil, or God, or the Universe, or just my own spirit, somehow, wanted me not to work for any employer. That I had to chase some other dream that I keep changing, or backing away from. That was a while ago, and I have suffered greatly for it. But in some mad way, I feel even more strongly now, as my life is falling apart, that I don't want to be hired by anyone. I want to be listened to, and that is entirely different.
I'm very poor, and have some health problems associated with that, and I would rather come online and write under fake names where I hide my real problems then actually get a job, or even really deal with my problems. It's a kind of madness.
And today, I was imagining a situation where I try to beg for medical care so my teeth don't fall out of my head, and imagining trying to explain, feeling very low and speaking very high and squeaky, and saying I don't remember what but it was about how something all around me was against me. And then another part of me, an unbowed and red-maned part of me, said in a deep voice, "You gotta get out of Tashbaan."
I have been reading a lot of Narnia fic.
I think that for a long time, especially as a child, I thought of myself as like Digory, a kid in a more or less decent culture, who may have had adventures in Narnia, but was to grow up and fit into the culture he was born into.
But really, part of me is Aravis. It's been so long since I actually read the books, that I don't remember making this connection before. But yeah. I have felt for a long time disillusioned and even betrayed by the culture I come from.
People talk a lot of smack about The Horse and His Boy. I will grant that Lewis's cultural biases appear in a big way, and Calormen is a nasty sort of fairy-tale land with some dystopian qualities, and if you try to associate all of this you can get a picture that's insulting to people who, say, eat a lot of garlic or something.
But I think that showing a fantasy society as messed up in an over-the-top way can be a useful thing in fiction. Satire can exaggerate and make explicit things in our own lives. Brobdingnag and Lilliput are not wholly unlike England, and believe it or not, nor is Calormen. We all live in imperfect societies. There is injustice in my own country, and that injustice is properly ridiculous, and to learn to see brutal authority as ridiculous in a fairy-story helps us learn to scorn it when it is in forms we find subjectively normal.
My country is so corrupt that corruption barely registers as abnormal; it destroys its natural resources like a petulant spendthrift going broke out of spite; and I screamed about this when I was young until I gave up and lost my own mind. I live in a country as mad as Calormen, just one with less literal ritual arse-kicking.
And right now, I think maybe I am living in a place that poisons me, and I have to get away. How this metaphor actually works, I don't know. Is it my family? Is it my polluted hometown? Is it more abstract than that? Even something in my own mind?
And remember that Aravis had to leave not just Tashbaan, but Calormen entirely. Whatever that means.
Maybe it's all just nonsense.
Some would say that really, I'm like Rilian, with the internet my Lady of the Green Kirtle. I spend so much time online that it sucks away time to physically do and be. But that's an unhelpful metaphor, given that it is online, with my masks and fake names, that I am most myself, even if I often bite my tongue (and delete whole paragraphs) to keep up the mask. And at this point, the friends I most care about are largely my online friends, even if I am always half-hidden from them.
I have been reading a lot of Narnia fic; but more Susanfic, with the theme of learning to live outside Narnia, and the idea stewing that Susan was really the lucky one; no Aravisfic, actually.
But! I have just been reading a fic that presents a dystopian Telmarine culture out of an SF novel. So that's where it's coming from.
Still, while it is fair to say that my major problems are from my own faults, I feel that I am also responding (however unhelpfully) to a madness around me. And what I have been reading pulls this awareness out.
So, no, I'm listening to this, even if I have long since forgotten what it is to run like a young thing avoiding marriage to an old toad: I gotta get out of Tashbaan.
I was feeling really down. I've spent far more of my life not working than working. And when somebody asks me why I can't work, if they ever do, what can I say? "Just call me schizophrenic and leave it at that."?
I had a job once that I partly liked, but I hated what I was building. I somehow went from quitting that job to feeling like the Devil, or God, or the Universe, or just my own spirit, somehow, wanted me not to work for any employer. That I had to chase some other dream that I keep changing, or backing away from. That was a while ago, and I have suffered greatly for it. But in some mad way, I feel even more strongly now, as my life is falling apart, that I don't want to be hired by anyone. I want to be listened to, and that is entirely different.
I'm very poor, and have some health problems associated with that, and I would rather come online and write under fake names where I hide my real problems then actually get a job, or even really deal with my problems. It's a kind of madness.
And today, I was imagining a situation where I try to beg for medical care so my teeth don't fall out of my head, and imagining trying to explain, feeling very low and speaking very high and squeaky, and saying I don't remember what but it was about how something all around me was against me. And then another part of me, an unbowed and red-maned part of me, said in a deep voice, "You gotta get out of Tashbaan."
I have been reading a lot of Narnia fic.
I think that for a long time, especially as a child, I thought of myself as like Digory, a kid in a more or less decent culture, who may have had adventures in Narnia, but was to grow up and fit into the culture he was born into.
But really, part of me is Aravis. It's been so long since I actually read the books, that I don't remember making this connection before. But yeah. I have felt for a long time disillusioned and even betrayed by the culture I come from.
People talk a lot of smack about The Horse and His Boy. I will grant that Lewis's cultural biases appear in a big way, and Calormen is a nasty sort of fairy-tale land with some dystopian qualities, and if you try to associate all of this you can get a picture that's insulting to people who, say, eat a lot of garlic or something.
But I think that showing a fantasy society as messed up in an over-the-top way can be a useful thing in fiction. Satire can exaggerate and make explicit things in our own lives. Brobdingnag and Lilliput are not wholly unlike England, and believe it or not, nor is Calormen. We all live in imperfect societies. There is injustice in my own country, and that injustice is properly ridiculous, and to learn to see brutal authority as ridiculous in a fairy-story helps us learn to scorn it when it is in forms we find subjectively normal.
My country is so corrupt that corruption barely registers as abnormal; it destroys its natural resources like a petulant spendthrift going broke out of spite; and I screamed about this when I was young until I gave up and lost my own mind. I live in a country as mad as Calormen, just one with less literal ritual arse-kicking.
And right now, I think maybe I am living in a place that poisons me, and I have to get away. How this metaphor actually works, I don't know. Is it my family? Is it my polluted hometown? Is it more abstract than that? Even something in my own mind?
And remember that Aravis had to leave not just Tashbaan, but Calormen entirely. Whatever that means.
Maybe it's all just nonsense.
Some would say that really, I'm like Rilian, with the internet my Lady of the Green Kirtle. I spend so much time online that it sucks away time to physically do and be. But that's an unhelpful metaphor, given that it is online, with my masks and fake names, that I am most myself, even if I often bite my tongue (and delete whole paragraphs) to keep up the mask. And at this point, the friends I most care about are largely my online friends, even if I am always half-hidden from them.
I have been reading a lot of Narnia fic; but more Susanfic, with the theme of learning to live outside Narnia, and the idea stewing that Susan was really the lucky one; no Aravisfic, actually.
But! I have just been reading a fic that presents a dystopian Telmarine culture out of an SF novel. So that's where it's coming from.
Still, while it is fair to say that my major problems are from my own faults, I feel that I am also responding (however unhelpfully) to a madness around me. And what I have been reading pulls this awareness out.
So, no, I'm listening to this, even if I have long since forgotten what it is to run like a young thing avoiding marriage to an old toad: I gotta get out of Tashbaan.
