Reread Equal Rites recently. I used to think it was about feminism and little girls getting the same opportunities as little boys. Which, it isn’t not about that. But ALSO.
It’s about an intersex kid.
It’s about a little girl born with a staff.
And that’s Not Right.
The adults in the room- her father, the ‘medical professional’- attempt to remove the staff, by blade and by fire. The fresh little baby SCREAMS. So they agree to pretend it doesn’t exist. She’ll probably grow up just a regular little girl.
right?
But just around the onset of puberty….. it becomes apparent, not to her, but to the adults, that she’s not going to be Regular.
The medical professional tries again to rectify matters. She tries to destroy the staff while the girl is unconscious. The girl screams. The adults give in. They aren’t monsters…. but life will be so much harder, so much less foreseen, for this strange little girl….
They try to raise her 'right’.
If she won’t be a conventional woman… maybe an unconventional woman. A Powerful woman- in the way that women can be powerful. Are permitted to be powerful.
But she’s not a woman- she’s a child. What will she be, when she’s grown? A Witch. A Wizard. She can’t be either. She can’t be neither.
(The term 'warlock’ is repeatedly invoked and scoffed. The etymology of 'warlock’ is 'breaker of oaths’. Counter to the covenant. Rulebreaker.)
Granny Weatherwax was often angry. She considered it one of her strong points. Genuine anger was one of the world’s great creative forces. But you had to learn how to control it. That didn’t mean you let it trickle away. It meant you dammed it, carefully, let it develop a working head, let it drown whole valleys of the mind and then, just when the whole structure was about to collapse, opened a tiny pipeline at the base and let the iron-hard stream of wrath lower the turbines of revenge.
“Anyway,” she said, “we’ve got to find the boy now. That’s the next step.”
“We shall look for him directly after lunch.”
“Lunch?”
“It’s chicken,” said Nanny. “And you’re tired. Besides, making a decent search will take a long time.”
“He’ll be in Ankh-Morpork,” said Granny. “Mark my words. Everyone ends up there. We’ll start with Ankh-Morpork. You don’t have to search for people when destiny is involved, you just wait for them in Ankh-Morpork.”
Magrat wondered what it was like, spending your whole life doing something you didn’t want to do. Like being dead, she considered, only worse, the reason being, you were alive to suffer it.
Any writer needs an eye for the double entendre in the same way that the gamekeeper has to have the mind of a poacher. The deliberate double entendre, on the other hand, is not to be sneezed at; I myself once perpetrated a treble entendre, and I suspect that if sufficient grant money could be made available, the quadruple entendre should not be beyond our grasp.
– Terry Pratchett - A Slip Of The Keyboard: Collected Non-fiction
Okay. Say you ask a small child to draw you a house, and they come up with something like this:
ALT
For the purposes of this analogy the child is shit at colouring in, because I only wanted to give the general idea.
So, we can all agree that the child who draws a house probably isn’t trying to communicate anything in particular other than “look at this cool house I drew”, right?
Cool.
So… Why is it seemingly in the middle of nowhere, when most children live in houses with neighbours?
Why is the main body a square and the roof a solid triangle when that doesn’t look like any house that has ever been built anywhere?
Why does it have a wood-burning stove with smoke actively coming out of the chimney, even though the sun indicates warm weather?
Why is the sun smiling? Why is it yellow?
Answer: because the child has seen picture books, and films, and the drawings of other children, and has on some level absorbed that this is what a house is meant to look like.
Face to face, the child almost certainly wouldn’t know where to begin communicating “yellow is a colour culturally associated with happiness and warmth, and two dots accompanied by a curved line symbolically represent a smiling human face, so I have combined these attributes with the sun to convey that it is a very warm and pleasant day”.
Or “historically most houses in my country used fire for heat and cooking, and even though this is no longer the case for the majority of households, most media portrayals of houses are inspired by other, older, media portrayals and therefore include the chimney. I have chosen to follow this trend.”
Or even, “I have poor motor control because of my age, and large, 2 dimensional shapes are easier to draw than anything involving detail and perspective”.
Yet this is all information that you can pick up from detailed study of the house drawing.
Ultimately, it’s not about what the writer intended. That’s what the whole death of the author thing means.
If you think of literature like as a conversation, then think of all the analysis stuff that your English teacher keeps trying to get you to look at as like body language. It’s the stuff that the other person doesn’t even necessarily mean to communicate, but that can tell you a hell of a lot about what they mean.
Also, a poem written by a poet who got high is still a poem written by a poet.
People love to say dismissive bullshit like, “oh, that’s just the drugs talking” but actually, drugs can’t fucking talk! It is always the human being doing the talking regardless of how intoxicated they are. The drugs are not creating the poetry. The poet’s mind is creating the poetry. A person doesn’t stop being a person just because they took something.
“And now she knew where she was. The last piece clicked into place and the knowledge bloomed inside her. She knew if she saw a house just how its windows would be placed, and just how the smoke would come out of the chimney. There would almost certainly be apples on the trees. And they would be red, because everyone knew that apples were red. And the sun was yellow. And the sky was blue. And the grass was green. But there was another world, called the real world by the people who believed in it, where the sky could be anything from off-white to sunset red to thunderstorm yellow. And the trees would be anything from bare branches, mere scribbles against the sky, to red flames before the frost. And the sun was white or yellow or orange. And water was brown and gray and green… The colors here were springtime colors, and not the springtime of the world. They were the colors of the springtime of the eye. “This is a child’s painting,” she said. The oh god slumped onto the green. “Every time I look at the gap my eyes water,” he mumbled. “I feel awful.” “I said this is a child’s painting,” said Susan. “Oh, me…I think the wizards’ potion is wearing off…” “I’ve seen dozens of pictures of it,” said Susan, ignoring him. “You put the sky overhead because the sky’s above you and when you are a couple of feet high there’s not a lot of sideways to the sky in any case. And everyone tells you grass is green and water is blue. This is the landscape you paint. Twyla paints like that. I painted like that. Grandfather saved some of—” She stopped. “All children do it, anyway,” she muttered. “Come on, let’s find the house.” “What house?” the oh god moaned. “And can you speak quieter, please?” “There’ll be a house,” said Susan, standing up. “There’s always a house. With four windows. And the smoke coming out of the chimney all curly like a spring. "Look, this is a place like Gr—Death’s country. It’s not really geography.””
“Vimes found it better to look to Authority for orders and then filter those orders through a fine mesh of common sense, adding a generous scoop of creative misunderstanding and maybe even incipient deafness if circumstances demanded, because Authority rarely descended to street level.”
Okay but you know how you sometimes see an awesome picture and then go “what the fuck you mean this is a painting?” when it turns out not to be a photograph? I legit thought this was one - just one of those absurdly well-drawn talented shitpost art masterpiece paintings of wizards in improbable places. The colour contrast, the composition, the whole vibe. Like I did a little colour adjusting paint-over edit here - you see what I mean?
This definitely is a vibe. I don’t know of what kind, but it is
This definitely
is a vibe. I don’t know of
what kind, but it is
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
ALT
