story-shaped
Some people have been confused by the way I put things here, by the seeming lack of order or narrative. I suppose fragments of thoughts or single adverbs or a picture of a dirty, curled-up flesh-colored water hose or a quote from a book can be confusing when there’s no overarching plot structure to hang them from. So I’ll try a more traditional blog-type thing now:
In a strange turn of events involving a hired car that I did not hire, an aging American hippie who seemed rather out of place (and out of his right mind), and an unfortunate-faced German woman (a recurring theme in my recent life), I spent a morning touring an island fortress and an evening in a mountain fortess in Maharashtra, India. I don’t know the name of either place - everything was written in Hindi, which I don’t read or speak. I don’t know the story of either place either. I had a guide at each location, but they only spoke Hindi, so I can only base my assumptions as to what happened there on gestures, speculation, and the incessant jabbering of my travel companions.
Language is funny that way, how it sometimes makes it impossible to communicate.
Like I said, I’m not sure of the dates that these things were built or occupied, or their intended purpose. I assume that they’re old and that they’re fortresses, but now that I think about it, it’s hard to tell. Especially after a certain point...
I will try again.
Once there was a princess named Lillywheat. She lived long enough ago that it doesn't matter how long ago it was because after a certain point it’s all the same, isn’t it? She was not a very beautiful girl (most princesses, due to the incestuous tendencies of royalty, aren’t) but she was royalty so people liked her anyway. She knew a lot about geology and geography and she played the recorder in her spare time (and princesses have a lot of spare time), but she was royalty so people liked her anyway. She often wore a two-sizes too-big floral-printed caftan, belted high above her natural waist, with terribly sensible dun-colored shoes, but she was royalty, so...anyway. If you just saw her without knowing her story (her story being this story, since I made her up out of spare parts and odd experiences having mostly to do with a German travel companion) you might think she dressed like a girl who had never known a mother, and you would be correct, because she didn’t.
Soon after she was born her parents sent her to an island fortress with a quartet of eunuchs, a dog, and three caboodles full of makeup. I mean, full. So much makeup, it makes you wonder about the load capacity of the human pore. And then you wonder if it’s just a cultural thing, but it probably isn’t. I mean, that’s really just a convenient thing people say when they just don’t understand something. Anyway, a long time ago (I mean, relatively. Man, it’s all relative, man) a nasty old king named Marlberryorsomething...I don’t know man...anyway, he had built this island fortress, but it was actually a mountain fortress when he built it. I know this is indisputably correct because a man I vaguely know told me a story about him.
and I quote:
A long time ago (I mean, relatively. Man, it’s all relative, man) a nasty old king named Marlberryorsomething...I don’t know man...anyway, he had built this island fortress, but it was actually a mountain fortress when he built it. He ruled his people from the tallest mountain in the land. This mountain, by some freaking miracle of geography, was surrounded by, like, seven valleys. And this king was paranoid as hell, probably because he smoked out all the time, ‘cause kings can do that and shit, man. They can do that, man. It’s the kings who set the rules and the rest of us are just ‘aposed to follow them. Man....man.
From here, I will paraphrase.
The paranoid king began to hear murmerings of unrest from the seven valleys, so he stocked his fortress with the finest minds in the land and then sealed it on all sides. Twice a day the giant gates of the fortress would swing open to accept and release petitioners and suppliers to the king - once at dawn and once at dusk. Every day a milktress, carrying a clay pot of buffalo cream on her head, made her way up the steep slope to the fortress every morning, singing a song as old as time as she went:
Boys, boys, all type of boys
Black, white, Puerto Rican, Chinese boys
Thang thang thanga thanga thanga thang
Girls, girls, get that cash
If its not a foul shakin that ass
Ain't no shame ladies, do your thang
Just make sure you ahead of tha game
Is it worth it? let me work it
I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it
It's (I put thing down, flip and reverse it)*Backwards 2x*
If you got a big [elephant noise], let me search it
To find out how hard I gotta work ya
It's (I put thing down, flip and reverse it)*Backwards 2x*
-Missy Elliot, Work It
This milktress was, unlike our princess, very lovely (peasants don’t mind to mix it up a little). She sold her cream to anyone who would buy. The guards and the sentries, the fatted economists and middle managers, the liveried stable boys with livery lips, IT professionals and computer programmers at the service of the king - they all, in turn, had their share. (Author’s note: don’t judge her now - if you do, you’ll be sorry later.) Every evening she made her way back down the slope, singing as she went.
Is it worth it? let me work it
I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it
One evening she was running a bit late (things happen) and the fortress gates slammed shut as she approached them.
She begged the gate keepers to let he out.
They would not be moved.
She had a kid at home with nothing but Dynasty reruns to keep him company until her return.
They bet she did.
And he had the diabetes? (which is what they called it back then, ‘the diabetes’ - which, if you don’t think about it too hard, explains why old people always put a ‘the’ in front of things)
They didn’t care.
She begged for mercy.
They told her she would have to wait until sunrise when the gates, by order of the king, could be opened again.
So she prayed to Apollonia, the keeper of the sun and one-time lady companion of Prince. The gate keepers watched as she broke her clay pot and raked her arms with the shards, calling down curses on them and entreating Apollonia for divine intervention, asking her to change the course of the sun. But the sun would not be moved. Around moonset (which no one ever notices these days because the sun is so strong now, what with global warming and all, but back then they were more in tune with nature and noticed such things) she receded into the darkness, exhausted and distraught. The guards were astonished to find her waiting outside the gates the next morning. Only this morning she had no song and no cream to sell. Instead she carried on her back the body of her dead child. (Author’s note: I told you you’d be sorry). She demanded to see the king.
To this day, no one knows how she got out. Some People said Apollonia did, in fact, help her. Other People would later twist this story into a demonstration of the irrepressible powers of a mother, claiming that the thought of her dying, diabetic son empowered her to tear a hole in the stone walls with her bare hands. Or jump really, really high or something. Most People, because Most People desperately want to believe the worst, said she was a witch. She was brought before the king, who didn’t care about the dead kid, but did care that his impregnable defenses were, in fact, pregnant. Pregnant with a dead kid and his singing witch of a milktress mother (although the king was royalty, he prided himself on being Most People). The king, now feeling uneasy behind his defenses which were apparently so easily thwarted, decreed that every man in the kingdom should die, just to be on the safe side. It was the only sensible thing to do. So every man was slaughtered on the large red-stained stone table that still sits at the gates of the mountain fortress. The blood of the men ran into each of the seven valleys until they were half filled.
Still, the king felt uneasy. But he was as wise as he was vile. Knowing that what the blood of men cannot accomplish, the tears of women can, he threw an elaborate funeral for his dead countrymen in his mountain fortress. There was black silk crepe and there were deep red roses with symbolic thorns still attached (roses which still climb the battlements today). There was heavy, symbolic poetry (which was later collected and published under the title Beowulf, copies of which can still be found lying about the low walls of the fortress). There were moments of delicate silence punctured by desperate sobs. There was Amazing Grace played on the bagpipes. And the widows wept - wept streams of tears that flowed into the seven valleys and filled them up until the newly formed sea of tears and blood lapped hungrily at the gates of the once-mountain-now-island fortress. The king reigned happily over his island kingdom of widows until he died in his sleep of natural causes at the age of seventy three. After his death, the women took to the seas (probably because, as women, they were more in touch with the moon and tides and stuff, you know - cycles) and settled in a foreign land that they called “Pittsburgh.”
So anyway, princess Lilywheat lived on this island. Like I said, she had a lot of free time on her hands, so she discovered a new kind of geography that explained how seven valleys actually can surround a single mountain and then she died without much fanfare, but the point is, why does everything always have to be story-shaped when almost nothing in life actually is?
In a strange turn of events involving a hired car that I did not hire, an aging American hippie who seemed rather out of place (and out of his right mind), and an unfortunate-faced German woman (a recurring theme in my recent life), I spent a morning touring an island fortress and an evening in a mountain fortess in Maharashtra, India. I don’t know the name of either place - everything was written in Hindi, which I don’t read or speak. I don’t know the story of either place either. I had a guide at each location, but they only spoke Hindi, so I can only base my assumptions as to what happened there on gestures, speculation, and the incessant jabbering of my travel companions.
Language is funny that way, how it sometimes makes it impossible to communicate.
Like I said, I’m not sure of the dates that these things were built or occupied, or their intended purpose. I assume that they’re old and that they’re fortresses, but now that I think about it, it’s hard to tell. Especially after a certain point...
I see that the tale cannot be told in this way. But how can it be told, this tale of a unique journey, of a unique communion of minds, of such a wonderfully exalted and spiritual life?...I feel like the old surviving servant of perhaps one of the Paladins of Charles the Great, who recalls a stirring series of deeds and wonders, the images and memories which will disappear with him if he is not successful in passing some of them on to posterity in word or picture, tale or song. But in which medium is it possible for the story of the Journey to be told? I do not know. Already this first attempt, begun with the best intentions, leads me into the boundless and incomprehensible. I simply wanted to try to depict what I have remembered of the course of events and individual details of our journey. Nothing seemed more simple...Instead of a fabric, I hold in my hands a bundle of a thousand knotted threads which would occupy hundreds of hands for years to disentangle and straighten out, even if every thread did not become terribly brittle and break between the fingers as soon as it is handled and gently teased out.
I imagine that every historian is similarly affected when he begins to record the events of some period and wishes to portray them sincerely. Where is the center of events, the common standpoint around which they revolve and which gives them cohesion? In order that something like cohesion, something like causality, that some kind of meaning might be revealed and that it can in some way be told, the historian must invent units, a hero, a nation, an idea, and he must allow to happen to this invented unit what has in reality happened to the nameless.
If it is so difficult to relate connectedly a number of events which have really taken place and have been arrested, it is in my case much more difficult, for everything becomes questionable when I consider it closely, everything slips away and dissolves.
-H.H., Journey to the East
I imagine that every historian is similarly affected when he begins to record the events of some period and wishes to portray them sincerely. Where is the center of events, the common standpoint around which they revolve and which gives them cohesion? In order that something like cohesion, something like causality, that some kind of meaning might be revealed and that it can in some way be told, the historian must invent units, a hero, a nation, an idea, and he must allow to happen to this invented unit what has in reality happened to the nameless.
If it is so difficult to relate connectedly a number of events which have really taken place and have been arrested, it is in my case much more difficult, for everything becomes questionable when I consider it closely, everything slips away and dissolves.
-H.H., Journey to the East
I will try again.
Once there was a princess named Lillywheat. She lived long enough ago that it doesn't matter how long ago it was because after a certain point it’s all the same, isn’t it? She was not a very beautiful girl (most princesses, due to the incestuous tendencies of royalty, aren’t) but she was royalty so people liked her anyway. She knew a lot about geology and geography and she played the recorder in her spare time (and princesses have a lot of spare time), but she was royalty so people liked her anyway. She often wore a two-sizes too-big floral-printed caftan, belted high above her natural waist, with terribly sensible dun-colored shoes, but she was royalty, so...anyway. If you just saw her without knowing her story (her story being this story, since I made her up out of spare parts and odd experiences having mostly to do with a German travel companion) you might think she dressed like a girl who had never known a mother, and you would be correct, because she didn’t.
Soon after she was born her parents sent her to an island fortress with a quartet of eunuchs, a dog, and three caboodles full of makeup. I mean, full. So much makeup, it makes you wonder about the load capacity of the human pore. And then you wonder if it’s just a cultural thing, but it probably isn’t. I mean, that’s really just a convenient thing people say when they just don’t understand something. Anyway, a long time ago (I mean, relatively. Man, it’s all relative, man) a nasty old king named Marlberryorsomething...I don’t know man...anyway, he had built this island fortress, but it was actually a mountain fortress when he built it. I know this is indisputably correct because a man I vaguely know told me a story about him.
and I quote:
A long time ago (I mean, relatively. Man, it’s all relative, man) a nasty old king named Marlberryorsomething...I don’t know man...anyway, he had built this island fortress, but it was actually a mountain fortress when he built it. He ruled his people from the tallest mountain in the land. This mountain, by some freaking miracle of geography, was surrounded by, like, seven valleys. And this king was paranoid as hell, probably because he smoked out all the time, ‘cause kings can do that and shit, man. They can do that, man. It’s the kings who set the rules and the rest of us are just ‘aposed to follow them. Man....man.
From here, I will paraphrase.
The paranoid king began to hear murmerings of unrest from the seven valleys, so he stocked his fortress with the finest minds in the land and then sealed it on all sides. Twice a day the giant gates of the fortress would swing open to accept and release petitioners and suppliers to the king - once at dawn and once at dusk. Every day a milktress, carrying a clay pot of buffalo cream on her head, made her way up the steep slope to the fortress every morning, singing a song as old as time as she went:
Boys, boys, all type of boys
Black, white, Puerto Rican, Chinese boys
Thang thang thanga thanga thanga thang
Girls, girls, get that cash
If its not a foul shakin that ass
Ain't no shame ladies, do your thang
Just make sure you ahead of tha game
Is it worth it? let me work it
I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it
It's (I put thing down, flip and reverse it)*Backwards 2x*
If you got a big [elephant noise], let me search it
To find out how hard I gotta work ya
It's (I put thing down, flip and reverse it)*Backwards 2x*
-Missy Elliot, Work It
This milktress was, unlike our princess, very lovely (peasants don’t mind to mix it up a little). She sold her cream to anyone who would buy. The guards and the sentries, the fatted economists and middle managers, the liveried stable boys with livery lips, IT professionals and computer programmers at the service of the king - they all, in turn, had their share. (Author’s note: don’t judge her now - if you do, you’ll be sorry later.) Every evening she made her way back down the slope, singing as she went.
Is it worth it? let me work it
I put my thing down, flip it and reverse it
One evening she was running a bit late (things happen) and the fortress gates slammed shut as she approached them.
She begged the gate keepers to let he out.
They would not be moved.
She had a kid at home with nothing but Dynasty reruns to keep him company until her return.
They bet she did.
And he had the diabetes? (which is what they called it back then, ‘the diabetes’ - which, if you don’t think about it too hard, explains why old people always put a ‘the’ in front of things)
They didn’t care.
She begged for mercy.
They told her she would have to wait until sunrise when the gates, by order of the king, could be opened again.
So she prayed to Apollonia, the keeper of the sun and one-time lady companion of Prince. The gate keepers watched as she broke her clay pot and raked her arms with the shards, calling down curses on them and entreating Apollonia for divine intervention, asking her to change the course of the sun. But the sun would not be moved. Around moonset (which no one ever notices these days because the sun is so strong now, what with global warming and all, but back then they were more in tune with nature and noticed such things) she receded into the darkness, exhausted and distraught. The guards were astonished to find her waiting outside the gates the next morning. Only this morning she had no song and no cream to sell. Instead she carried on her back the body of her dead child. (Author’s note: I told you you’d be sorry). She demanded to see the king.
To this day, no one knows how she got out. Some People said Apollonia did, in fact, help her. Other People would later twist this story into a demonstration of the irrepressible powers of a mother, claiming that the thought of her dying, diabetic son empowered her to tear a hole in the stone walls with her bare hands. Or jump really, really high or something. Most People, because Most People desperately want to believe the worst, said she was a witch. She was brought before the king, who didn’t care about the dead kid, but did care that his impregnable defenses were, in fact, pregnant. Pregnant with a dead kid and his singing witch of a milktress mother (although the king was royalty, he prided himself on being Most People). The king, now feeling uneasy behind his defenses which were apparently so easily thwarted, decreed that every man in the kingdom should die, just to be on the safe side. It was the only sensible thing to do. So every man was slaughtered on the large red-stained stone table that still sits at the gates of the mountain fortress. The blood of the men ran into each of the seven valleys until they were half filled.
Still, the king felt uneasy. But he was as wise as he was vile. Knowing that what the blood of men cannot accomplish, the tears of women can, he threw an elaborate funeral for his dead countrymen in his mountain fortress. There was black silk crepe and there were deep red roses with symbolic thorns still attached (roses which still climb the battlements today). There was heavy, symbolic poetry (which was later collected and published under the title Beowulf, copies of which can still be found lying about the low walls of the fortress). There were moments of delicate silence punctured by desperate sobs. There was Amazing Grace played on the bagpipes. And the widows wept - wept streams of tears that flowed into the seven valleys and filled them up until the newly formed sea of tears and blood lapped hungrily at the gates of the once-mountain-now-island fortress. The king reigned happily over his island kingdom of widows until he died in his sleep of natural causes at the age of seventy three. After his death, the women took to the seas (probably because, as women, they were more in touch with the moon and tides and stuff, you know - cycles) and settled in a foreign land that they called “Pittsburgh.”
So anyway, princess Lilywheat lived on this island. Like I said, she had a lot of free time on her hands, so she discovered a new kind of geography that explained how seven valleys actually can surround a single mountain and then she died without much fanfare, but the point is, why does everything always have to be story-shaped when almost nothing in life actually is?
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