"writhe." an erasure. original text by Z.

[whynot]

I suspect one of my friends has discovered fandom. She's summer-binging on Buffy, Angel, HIMYM, True Blood. It could all be a coincidence, of course, but it kind of reminds me of the time I searched for the Merlin DVDs on Amazon and the "Others who bought this item also bought" list included Torchwood, Dr. Who, Supernatural, and Smallville.

Anyway. The following is an erasure of zempasuchil's Merlin OT4 fic, Rewriting the Old Language, which I loooove. Funny that we both ended up erasing each other's Merlin OT4 fics. It's not like we told each other beforehand which fic we were doing, but I guess the siren call of polyamory was just too great.


writhe
an erasure. original text by Z.


In short,
according to this
I will be here
after they are gone.



the very stones settle
and man shakes the earth, relieved

any lifted gaze can pass you by, can remember
and the face of the years will decide
She wasn't empty
she reared her head
her hands in everything



if magic is real There's no such thing as love
nothing like trust and knowing
she tries not to laugh
she’ll know the language
she’ll be around
"Do you know how?"
"I can figure it out."

somehow It's a veil torn away



father, father, take up the life he'd never known
he doesn't know a thing
you know how it works because
you built it yourself

never forget
no greater thing than earth confirmed
the hardest life and the simplest
real living; real work
he saw his own eyes
his heart, if not his father
the heartland, the earth, the sweat of his brow

the abstracts were their own lives
he could reach out beside him
below him
above



as strange as her dreams must be
something says, I don’t know how. There’s so much
trapped in buildings, in this city, in this country,
You’re right,
you’re right
it's all right
everything is all right

or changed.



she can beat him
It doesn't take much



suddenly "No,"
"Yes. you got your
little victory." But
he's already inside

all those years
do better, be better. victory hasn’t won her a thing.
to become something that she earned
she broke halfway between spitting and tears
it doesn't matter
walk down the street
Get something to drink

Look, this is how it is.

for years she explains
men and women, brothers and sisters,
you have to fight
that's the problem.
this strange new world held first the audience the wolf the open mouth

there is no invitation
but come anyway



sit
switch
avoid
there isn't much change
The threat is distant, the satellites unmarked,
the stars without a war fought in the right direction.

forget them. bring them up
get quietly angry because there's nothing he can do
he's only the son, only the father and
just the nation, enough to serve and protect

every word demands a continuation of tradition.
these accidents without casualties
these lines as simple as closing the door
it's not criminal
but from the start, he knows

keep above the tide
More is not the solution
less is not the solution
she's been part of the revolution
long enough to change

long enough to turn the tables. She says, Every chain link cracked
understands, understood
that words will wrap around and
swallow.



She appreciated the morning light
bright against her skin, and loose about her shoulders.
a discarded summer, pale, mentioned in the place of love;
"it's more than that.

You know how to speak; to keep your words
when you pause You make them want what you want."

They forget to remember together,
and he learns

where the city
where the fields
They explore, fall and get caught
and laugh
and laugh
and she thinks they might be the only people left who clamber down ravines
to forget about the rain



They are looking for satellites
for all the wrong reasons.



She bites terror from both sides.
He rests his fist by his father
slowly, as though this is just occurring to him,
as though by saying it he is coming to himself
to everything

on the roof with the stars and satellites
The sky smells like summer and life and sweat
they dismiss it, and it floats away on a tendril of smoke



It's as simple as
a fool going to meet a universe
its own time a whirlwind of moments until he arrives
He can't describe it.
His body holds memories more solidly than his mind
he feels every toss and pull and plunge long after his body
reveals to him white sun and crisp sky, golden fields;
the world blinds him with all he remembers
a late afternoon
a rhythmic motion
their bodies reaching, burst.
They dig and dig easily
It's so easy, here, when the afternoon is warm
and the sunbeams meet each other
where a secret is ready
to light up.



at night, the signals vanish.
the storm-fresh air looks up at the sound
and reaches for the morning
and hears the lights and the fear.

everything is bright and clean
usurped and appropriated
crumbled and glorious

the outstretched hand will speak in tongues



expect visions

Comments

[zempasuchil.livejournal.com]

sdldfsjkdsf cycles of dominationnnnnn! they make me cry :(((

You know Lance would be out there in Indonesia in the thick of it, writing the rare letter to the gang (mostly Merlin of course, no tensions between those two) telling them about what's going down.

YOUR ANALOGY SDFKLDSFK If I were drinking anything it would be spurting out my nose onto my laptop, thank god I'm not (instead I am making weird noises and probs disturbing the plumbers). But yes you are right about that - university so he is actually in a place where moral grey areas are going on, where he has friends still who remind him of these revolutionary ideologies without actually getting him into the revolutionary political dirt (so he doesn't get in trouble).

Isn't Ahmadinejad:homosexuality also a denial of its existence within Iran? It might be more like Uther:magic::Fundies:homosexuality? uhhh, I dunno. But I like your analogy, it does work - Uther thinks of magic as the supernatural rather than the natural, but the lines between the two aren't so clearly drawn. magic is belief, after all; even if most people don't think feng shui does anything people still practice it with the belief it does so it might as well do something. eh I dunno I'm babbling. but you are so right, magic/superstition has no real division. Like politics lie on a spectrum and you can be LBJ and have a Great Society without being a red. Like the government has to have its hands in people's business otherwise there's no government and there's anarchy.

[twoskeletons.livejournal.com]

LETTERS FROM LANCELOT. And maybe he can talk about the rain and the sun and the constant smell of clove cigarettes and his shitty cramped lodgings and how he has become accustomed to the constant noise outside his window, and there are food spatters on the letters sometimes, which he draws an arrow pointing to and writes "fish sauce, tasty with glutinous rice" AND LIKE, the atrocities committed by both siiiiiiiides. The houses burnt and the people pulled off buses and beaten, the graffiti scrawled on walls and benches. He has friends who were raped and friends who were sent to labor camps. He has friends who have been shot and thrown in mass graves. He has learned how to use a machete and hopes he never has to use it. One time he called Gwen just to hear her voice, thirsty for the English language, but there were lags and crackles on the line, which made the conversation awkward and frustrating.

It is a strange thing to see -- Indonesia grows stronger, but the very thing that makes her stronger will also be the weapon used to destroy her. If you're interested, "Terlena" is a documentary about the communist purges of the 60s in Indonesia. made me cryyyyyyyy. Communism is practically nonexistent in Indonesia, in name. I mean, the administration actually has a lot of technically socialist tendencies, but the word 'communist' itself is like, a dirty word.

Yeah, Ahmadinejad denied its existence in Iran, but then when the election protests broke out, homosexuality magically appeared again. He was like, "It's those bothersome gays/Israeli spies/Americanized youth! Not REAL Iranians." Maybe Uther also becomes an international laughingstock, with this magic thing. Seriously, does Uther/Ahmadinejad have no PR team? And how strict is Uther's anti-magic/superstition thing. Is he against, like, good luck charms? Rabbit feet and such?

Maybe I'm overthinking the communism=magic thing, but what's stopping magic-users from calling upon mystical creatures and forces to quash non-magic-users? Will there be the magical equivalent of the Cold War? OF THE BERLIN WALL? MR. GORBACHEV, TEAR DOWN THIS ENCHANTMENT.

[zempasuchil.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow. wow. Have you written anything like this? because I think you *should*. lance or whoever, do write about indonesia. I'd really like to see "Terlena", I'll look for it.

Uther's got to have a PR team. He's a big jerk - I watched the Mordred episode again last night and jeez, how do you justify the execution of a little kid? His tyranny was probably typical of the time but yeah, I wonder how his anti-magic policy sits with other kings and in other kingdoms. If he has enough power he probably manages to work that into treaties!

Rabbit feet seem innocuous enough, as "good luck" charms they're pretty vague and a lot of doubt can be cast on them. I think when it starts getting specific or obvious is when it starts getting dangerous - poultices under the pillow to cure illness, Merlin moving things with his mind, seeing the future. Also, anything Gaius can explain away with his special brand of "science" is pretty safe.

No I think you're right, they could and that's why Uther's trying to stamp them out (also they all seem to have it in for HIM particularly. I wonder why.) And I think the magic users are really in hiding after his purges and are mostly too scared or feeling too weak to band together. I don't know why Nimue was always working on her own... And I doubt that just one of them could control a magical creature. Merlin didn't have any power over the griffin directly (but he probably wouldn't know how). Bringing this into a commie!AU, I think probably magical creatures have been mostly killed off? But the USSR (Union of Soviet Magical Republics?) (oh god what would that be, a Nimue/Stalin chimera???) would be that distant yet near threat. WOW A BERLIN WALL OF ENCHANTMENT I love this. Of course it would be Arthur demanding the removal of the wall because Uther would be freaking Star Warsing and arms racing the whole time he's doing everything. you know, the pendragons probably should be presidents like I originally thought.

[twoskeletons.livejournal.com]

HMMM, hey, what do you think of this idea: if you rework the fic, I'll write Lancelot's letters from Indonesia for it?

lol Gaius's special science. Hmm, maybe ppl still look askance at good luck charms, and the line between "they're wary of it because they're genuinely wary of magic" and "they're wary of it because Uther overreacts to everything and they don't want to be accidentally implicated" is getting blurry.

Yes, too weak after the purges! Like maybe Uther ordered a huge autodafe of grimoires and other magical artifacts, and then mowed down the writers, intellectuals, teachers, and philosophers of magic, which greatly handicapped the magical community. Knowledge is power, and Uther just destroyed a lot of it. Their books, their tools, and thus essentially their identity.

OMG WHAT IF THIS IS WHERE GAIUS'S DUBIOUS MORALITY COMES IN. Gaius is the magician Uther hires to find counter-enchantments to undo the spells that protect the magic books, artifacts, whatever from destruction. Gaius also breaks Fidelius spells, so to speak, so Uther can find insurgents in hiding. Up to what extent Uther trusts Gaius though, I'm not so sure.

Maybe this is all why Nimueh ends up working alone. "We rely too much on books and wands and other trinkets. We entrust too much of ourselves and our power into them. The oldest magicians needed no such things. Our ceremonies have made us lazy. Our rituals have made us weak. We need to go back to the source." So essentially, Nimueh = Martin Luther. She begins to talk of an ideology of magic from within, free of intermediaries. Her disciples grow in number and they spread her gospel across the land, through drunken debates in speakeasies, through pamphlets hidden between the pages of books passed from one revolutionary to another.

And maybe this is why Nimueh is dangerous. She wants magic free of symbolism and avatars, and so what can Uther strike but the magicians themselves? His own citizens, still his subjects, subversive as they are -- but if the body is the weapon, then you must destroy the body. It would be an autodafe of people -- a massacre. Uther would be condemned internationally, and he may be bull-headed, but he is not that stupid. (Or is he?)

[zempasuchil.livejournal.com]

That would be AWESOME. I am so excited! So excited I don't know where to start, aahh, this road trip is getting in my wayyy. Maybe I will print this out and work in a notebook.

I like that approach to the charms a lot!

And you know there's all sorts of surveillance and breaking up of the groups that meet (sedition!) - this sort of thing went on with the IWW too before WWI gave the government a real excuse to regulate the workforce. Yes! the pressure put on university presidents who put pressure on their faculty to stfu about this red stuff, whole files of blackmail keeping them in their place, bans and ruination upon their name, etc etc - there would be an extremist group that Uther wasn't technically involved in but he turned a blind eye when they burned mountains of books of questionable morality. I don't know if Gaius could stand to actually give these people up to the authorities; his specialty seems to be turning a blind eye. Maybe he is just working for NASA or whatever (what was it we said? in a University? and working on a govt research grant w/ Nasa maybe) and not actually using his magical powers to fight his own kind but he's fully aware of the purges going on around him and how he could save them but he can't, and he doesn't. so it is morally dubious and tragic.

oh my god, if Nimueh is Martin Luther then Uther is running the Inquisition - yes yes autos de fe! :OOO She's a witch! or a heretic! or a greedy land-grabber (as Spain figured when the accusations of witchcraft started leaking in from France. in France they were all mad about witches but Spain had been fighting the infidel Moor and Jew for a long time now and thought this magic hubbub was nonsense.)
But yes! the source! no ideas but in things! She says, these books and writers were not causes but consequences, and we can get more in touch with the real source of our power if we don't rely on the translating medium of a text, a manual, an facet, an idea.

I would love to write about subversive books. It makes me think of the story I heard from my aunt's Romanian friends, who were Christians in Romania under Ceauşescu, about the terrible danger of smuggling bibles and hiding them and not knowing who to trust. Code phrases whispered at speakeasies or bookhouses that seem innocuous but are really lines from Das Kapital or Lenin or 1800s Arthuriana that mentions Nimueh.

What you're saying about the body is an awful lot like Foucault's description of medieval punishment. Like, the King has his body and violations against the law and kingdom are considered attacks against his person (this is soooo evident w/ Uther) and so the criminal is punished bodily, drawn and quartered publicly etc. but you can't do that these days - you can't destroy, you have to have incarceration and rehabilitation etc. but you can't deal that way with terrorists. Uther would, well, have a secret wire-tapping plan and a Guantanamo Bay.

[twoskeletons.livejournal.com]

weh! So I'm rereading this and I missed the part where Lancelot's letters are to Merlin. So far all four have been addressed to Gwen. EH. I'm screwing up the timeline pretty badly too, which is maybe okay for these purposes? You're drawing on the pre-WWI, but then the Indonesian purges happened in the 1960s. Then again, there is also Martin Luther, so maybe whatever.

Yes Uther's blind eye and university pressure! I would like to hear what you write on subversive books. Maybe you can write excerpts from these books, or write newspaper articles about these magic purges. Maybe you can write some of Morgana's poems? Which are possibly just erasures of the Manifesto arharhar. That is pretty fascinating about your aunt's Romanian friends, and also that the LINES MENTION NIMUEH. WHAT. whaaaaaat. awesome. the world continues to validate the way I participate in fandom.

Have you read "Confessions of an Economic Hitman"? That memoir ('memoir'?) that only enables my worst fears about the neocolonial international development situation. I have to get my hands on it. It also sounds pretty relevant to these interests.

It sounds like Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" because we read that toooooooo. seriously wtf our classes! yesss Uther IS THE NATION. It's why he's such a despot. AND THEN, depending on how much one is drawing on magical realism, to what extent does the land reflect the king?

[zempasuchil.livejournal.com]

oh fpsh Lancelot writes many letters :))

timeline? timeline??? dsljk; I have been putting that off, hoping that I can get by with compounding elements of any revolution and any controlling government and any kind of magic I want into this setting. I don't know if I can write something with characters that aren't modern, you see. I have not read enough literature from that era to get a sense of the world. So "whatever" is sort of my motto on this. And maybe one day I will be serious about this and map out what is and what isn't, but for now I am just using what I find exciting and interesting. consistency is my bare minimum.

Oh wow I would LOVE to write parts of this literary canon they hand around! And Morgana's poetry of course! aaahhh yay!

I think I wrote those sentences very badly because I did not mean to connect Romanian Christian subversives with the subversives that used code phrases from communist texts or Arthuriana - they were subversives under a communist regime sadly and so lenin was a scourge :(

wow! I just read the Amazon summary of it, and holy cow, it makes me so paranoid. it makes me think of The Poisonwood Bible, which we had to read for 12th grade English, where Barbara Kingsolver pours her heart out about how the West just uses and abuses Africa. there's a part in there where a character talks about the World Bank loan to then-Zaire to build power lines, which were never finished and so sat useless while the country was forever in debt to it. I could swear there are actual articles we read about this sort of thing - I'm sure you've read them - I want to find them again. ohhhh why did I quit the International Studies major. it had such good stuff.

WTF OUR CLASSES! It... it must be destiny, lass XD big shiny academic fannish destiny.

I have always been enchanted by the body of the land. Is the king the land or is the king married to the land? I think they are thesis and antithesis. and then the synthesis... the people?

[twoskeletons.livejournal.com]

SO SHINY. Seriously, us/homework OTP! We are like two sides of the same major. My fannishness cannot truly hate that which makes it EVEN GEEKIER. Zeeeeeee.

The soul is a prison to the body. What if the people are the antithesis, and the land is synthesis?

re: Economic Hitman, Zaire. Here is my knee-jerk beliefs: IT'S TRUE. The colonies gained independence, but in name only. The power structure isn't as overt. Europe made its wealth on the colonies, so they're not going to let all these resources completely break away. They have to engineer a new ways to keep their fingers in the pies, how to perpetuate vulnerability and dependency. So they're all, "We'll only give you this aid package if you do the following things that are advantageous to us, and also to you of course, um," and now there are tractors rusting in Uganda that the people they're supposed to benefit don't know how to fix or where to get spare parts from, and even when Australia and New Zealand gives little Oceanic countries grants, it comes with the concession of exclusive trading rights. Why is a country like the Philippines the #4 importer of rice? Why do archipelagos get development plans from the multilaterals that don't account properly for their coastal resources? Structural adjustment and neoliberalism is round peg into square hole, and they KNOW THIS, but that's okay, 'cos they're not actually trying to fix that much. omg debt. argh.