TotD: Written On the Body
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Reading, Relationships, Thought of the Day
I’d never heard of Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson (or of the author, at all) until I was browsing through some of the quotations at Gaia1 a while back. This bit is too long for my quotations file, but I love it too much to just delete it.
“You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it’ is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it’s The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to? I’ve thought a lot about death recently, the finality of it, the argument ending in mid-air. One of us hadn’t finished, why did the other one go? And why without warning? Even death after long illness is without warning. The moment you had prepared for so carefully took you by storm. The troops broke through the window and snatched the body and the body is gone. The day before the Wednesday last, this time a year ago, you were here and now you’re not. Why not? Death reduces us to the baffled logic of a child. If yesterday why not today? And where are you? Fragile creatures of a small blue planet, surrounded by light years of silent space. Do the dead find peace beyond the rattle of the world? What peace is there for us whose best love cannot return them even for a day? I raise my head to the door and think I will see you in the frame. I know it is your voice in the corridor but when I run outside the corridor is empty. There is nothing I can do that will make any difference. The last word is yours. The fluttering in the stomach goes away and the dull waking pain. Sometimes I think of you and I feel giddy. Memory makes me lightheaded, drunk on champagne. All the things we did. And if anyone had said this was the price I would have agreed to pay it. That surprises me; that with the hurt and the mess comes a shaft of recognition. It was worth it. Love is worth it.
After reading about the book, I was surprised to find that it isn’t about the obvious sort of loss. The novel is described as an erotic homage to a lover’s body, but one of the intriguing aspect is that the author never gives the narrator a gender. I’m going to try to find it to give it a read.
1 Yes, I’m TechnoMom there, like most places.
Tags: grief, Jeanette Winterson, loss, Love, pain, TotD, Written on the Body
TotD: Robin Laws on Roleplaying Games
Posted by Cyn | Filed under RPGs, Thought of the Day
I hadn’t ever thought of it this way, but I think the man is on to something.
“One of my pet theories about the popularity of roleplaying games goes like this. Roleplaying is fantasy shopping for guys. That is, men would, as a group, be more interested in shopping if a) it meant never having to leave the house and b) they were shopping for super-powers. In that case, the typical roleplaying rulebook is like a Nieman-Marcus catalog for super-powers. Depending on the game system and character type, these extraordinary abilities might be called feats, spells, schticks, disciplines, skills, high tech gear, psionics, or whatever. For lack of a a better all-encompassing term, I refer to these things as crunchy bits.”
Robin D. Laws, Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering
Tags: Fantasy, Gaming, high tech gear, Robin D. Laws, Robin Laws, roleplayiing, shopping, TotD
TotD: Bruce Chatwin on Possessions
Posted by Cyn | Filed under Thought of the Day
And do we not all long to throw down our altars and rid ourselves of our possessions? Do we not gaze coldly at our clutter and say, “If these objects express my personality, then I hate my personality.” For what, on the face of it, enhances life less than a work of art? One tires of it. One cannot eat it. It makes an uncomfortable bedfellow. One guards it, and feels obliged to enjoy it long after it has ceased to amuse. We sacrifice our freedom of action to become its privileged guardian, and we end its imprisoned slave. All civilizations are by their very nature “thing-oriented” and the main problem of their stability has been to devise new equations between the urge to amass things and the urge to be rid of them.
But things have a way of insinuating themselves into all human lives. Some people attract more things than others, but no people, however mobile, is thingless. A chimpanzee uses sticks and stones as tools, but he does not keep possessions. Man does. And the things to which he becomes most attached do not serve any useful function. Instead they are symbols or emotional anchors. The question I should like to ask without necessarily being able to answer it is, “Why are man’s real treasures useless?” For if we understood this, we might also understand the convoluted rituals of the art market.
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Bruce Chatwin Anatomy of Restlessness
Tags: Bruce Chatwin, clutter, possessions, Thought of the Day, TotD, treasures