Last evening when I returned home, I was somewhat surprised to see a mallard of the dowdy female variety standing on my front stoop. We live across from a park, as you may know, and therefore ducks are hardly an uncommon sight. However, ducks are in the park. Welcome mats are on the stoop. This is the way it has been, and was to be, world without end.

I eased my car quietly into the garage, wondering whether perhaps the Mallard, staring intently at the swamp across the way and standing in heroic posture over evidence of her long stoop occupancy, was injured. I snuck out of the garage. We surveyed each other equanimously. I crept up to the kitchen and got some of the frozen stale duck bread out of the freezer. It occured to me this might be a bad idea, might teach her that posing for a umbrella handle on our stoop was a good idea. So I decided to use the bread to draw her across the street.

Truly, a healthy duck reluctantly plopping from one step to another of a spiral stairway in pursuit of food is comedy gold. I laughed more than a little. She was very lazy, refusing to pursue crumbs more than one step and one foot away, and eventually I had to admit to myself that crumbs and humorous remarks would not enveigle the duck back to her park home very quickly. So I charged her.

With a discomfited squawk, she hopped through the railing of my stairs and onto the barkdust slope where I was not very inclined to follow (in my sandals, no less). Returning to my bread crumbs, I tried to enveigle her off the slope. Her laziness was insurmountable. Throwing caution to the winds, I hopped onto the slope and stomped towards her again muttering, “House for humans. Park for ducks! House for humans! Wrong side of street!” Taking to her wings, she alighted on my driveway and plotted a leisurely course towards my open garage. Patience well and truly gone, I pattered loudly towards her, sandals slapping loudly against the concrete. At last she worked herself aloft and sailed over the street to sit with ruffled dignity in the grass of the park.

I stared at her for a moment, and a male mallard flew from the pond directly at her. With great squawks of distress, the lady duck flew off, her suitor in hot pursuit. Perhaps I was unkind, I thought. Another mallard drake flew by, and another, and another, and two more, all in hot pursuit of the hen duck and her first assailant. I sighed. I have truly failed a fellow female in her hour of need, I thought. But she was just a duck, I added, and hosed her droppings off my stoop.

Do not touch my pretty files,
Their color-coded ranks defile!
Do not prod and pry my things
Lest you find my ruler stings!
Inquire, it please you, to my face
Where is the errant paper’s place.
Do not run afoul of me,
As to your office I’ve a key!

The rain drummed on the wooden deck and splashed down the wool of Carys’s cloak, and she stared at the glassy play of its rivulets off the partial shelter of the boards overhead. Her abstraction broke at last as she felt her sister sob against her, and she pulled aside her sheltering cloak to see the tears on Eirian’s pale face.

“Hush, child,” she said, as if she were fifteen years, not five, the senior.

“Do we have to go there?” asked Eirian, blinking rain and tears from her blue eyes. Her sister looked towards the city, greyer than the weathered boards of the ship’s deck, its square silhouette obscured by smoke and fog, and held the little one closer.

“Yes, dear,” she murmured, “we haven’t anywhere else to go. Somewhere we have an aunt and uncle in all that fog, and we will make a home with them.”

“We had a home,” grumbled the seven-year-old, burying her face in Carys’s skirts, and giving up the fight even in her plaintive words.

“Hush,” Carys said again, almost unconsciously, and, petting the chill of raindrops from the soft dark curls, sang softly,
“Rings the great bell
Comes the swift rain
All will be well
When my babe’s home again.”

With a dull grinding, the Alcyone moved into its berth in the dark water of the city harbor.

The Grey City II

I am a sponge to language, completely permeable. People laugh at me sometimes for my attempts to avoid knowledge of new and improved vulgarities… they do not understand, perhaps, the distress of finding something added to your vocabulary that lessens it and drags down the tone. I have the same attitude, in part, to other things—if we are collections of our experiences, part of the formation and preservation of our identity and character is in regulating the experiences in which we take part.

But language, specifically, has always been a medium in which I am particularly interested and vulnerable. I have a tendency, which happily I am aware of (unlike my mother) to acquire the accents of those with whom I talk—I constantly strain, for instance, in talking with my Australian boss and my Carolinian boss, not to acquire their respective tall vowels and soft drawl. I still have a distressingly Midwestern tendency to find that the floor “needs swept”, and while I have successfully refrained from much “reckoning” in the wake of Firefly-watching, I have descried “all manner of” verbal tics from that source.

It should be no surprise, then, to you all, and certainly may explain a certain round-about prolixity not always evident in my posting here, when I tell you that both Charles Dickens and Jane Austen have a huge effect on my speech, and especially my composition, whenever I peruse a book of either worthy’s making. I find myself attending to my usual correspondence with no want of delicate phrases and genteel circumlocution. I find myself wishing to ‘shew’ and ‘chuse’. These are all, of course, the influences of the amiable Jane—Boz, on the other hand, only encourages those habits of whimsical oververbiage which are already deep-engrained in my heart, soul, and language center. I have recently revisited Pride and Prejudice, A Tale of Two Cities, and Mansfield Park, as well as encountering for the first time Barnaby Rudge and Bleak House, and therefore I am steeped in the words and attitudes of my two literary friends.

So if I seem, my friends, more than usual verbose; if my language seems more than usual complex and stilted; if I betray genteel confusion and shock at the most common instances of vulgarity and unkind speech; in that case, talk to the books, cuz the faerye don’t care.

The other day I was wasting time on internet fora, as is my wont, when for some reason - someone addressed a comment directly to me, or what have you - my attention was drawn to my handle, ‘Eilonwy’. I was sure in college when I played on a MUD under that name that should someone call, “Eilonwy!” in a crowded room, I would certainly turn and respond - now, I think, it is even more certain. It is a very curious thing that I should become so used to a name I’ve only adopted in the last few years - but perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, as I’ve taken quite quickly to my married name, as well…

I finished rereading A Tale of Two Cities last night. (Yes, yes, to those of you keeping track, I just finished Barnaby Rudge and am midway through Bleak House. I love my Dickens! You can’t keep me down!) When last I read it, I was a sophomore in high school, and my impression of certain aspects of the book have changed a great deal since then. At the time, I thought Dickens quite despised the French Revolution. Now, perhaps enlightened through the medium of Barnaby Rudge as to what Dickens describing a mass political movement he despised looks like, I am amazed I saw it in that way. Dickens, keenly sensitive to any injustice or cruelty, felt very strongly that the French people were reacting to the most heinous provocation in an understandable, nay, inevitable manner. He also felt, it is clear, that in the strength of their feeling the human virtues of mercy, compassion and empathy were lost in favor of bloodlust and hatred.

Realizing this has brought my musings back once more to the French Revolution. The Revolution has always fascinated me. As far as I can recall, my two first exposures to it were these: watching Casablanca as a child, and asking my parents what that song was, that everyone sang it together so movingly to the Germans’ discomfiture; and, probably later on, watching the Leslie Howard Scarlet Pimpernel - a story scarcely calculated to arouse sympathy for the Revolutionnaires. But somewhere along the line, in the strains of the Marseillaise or the image of Liberty Leading the People, I was infected with a fascination with the Revolution. I read Simon Schama’s book Citizens in high school, and would love to reread it if I could find it among my effects. All the literature and lessons about the period that were brought to me through French class I lapped up eagerly. I searched persistently for a text of the collected letters and writings of the Desmoulins. I perused the Declaration of the Rights of Man. I embraced both the thrill and the horror of the events.

In truth, I agree with Dickens. The fire of the Revolution was vicious, indiscriminate, and of course culminated in the holocaust of the Terror. But I cannot help but look before the fall, and see the ideals that burned before those flames. To read about the Revolution is to believe that individuals and their emotions matter, that a sum of individual human beings can indeed be far greater than those component entities.

It was the curse of the French Revolution, I feel, and probably the curse of most revolutions, that those expelled from power do not vanish. We lucky little Americans could push the Brits back across the sea - where could the French push their aristos? Into their palaces and castles? (And let them remain intact, and in the hands of those who built them on our backs?) Into foreign courts? (And let them raise armies among their kin and kind?) Into the commonfolk? (And let them scheme at our backs?) No. The terrible logic, and the terrible weight of so much hatred, doomed the Revolution, like so many others, to wallow in blood. It is not only the martyred patriots who water the tree of freedom—and blood spilled in hatred does not raise a healthy tree.

Ah, Spring. Not too long ago it was that we moved into our house under the veil of Winter, and I slowly trained my paranoid brain to succumb to sleep despite the many creakings of the settling abode. Not that, of course, an apartment complex does not incur the same creaking and settling; but in an apartment, where from time to time the sound of Hindi pop music or the Mormons next door arguing drifts across one’s consciousness, one can never entertain the pleasant suspicion that one is, in fact, alone. Not so in a house, where the presence of an unaccounted person is a matter for alarm and the preparation of bludgeoning weapons; and therefore it was with great difficulty that I reined in my active imagination in those first few months in the house, and kept it from painting bogeymen and burglars at every ominous sound.

This task done, the Spring arrives, the friendly white noise of the rain subsides, the morning sun creeps into the sleeping hours, and plagues the house with cacaphonous thermal expansion. The squirrels get frisky and express it with freefall jumps onto the roof above my head; the occasional raccoon takes it into his head to make sinister scrabbling and digitigrade noises across my deck or shingles. I lie in bed, re-training my mind to ignore the multitude of sounds it insists are a matter of life and death. Minutes tick by, creaks fade into ominous footfalls, a branch scratches a window somewhere, a hollow thump sounds from the deck. Perhaps I’d sleep better with a scimitar by the bed.

Matt’s new pride and joy is up and running, if partially on borrowed technology. The new projector is beaming its enormous picture onto our family room wall, and the Very Important Speakers are enshrined on their custom-purchased pedestals. Therefore it follows that we had to venture out of our charmingly appointed cave and rent a movie to watch. We ended up inaugurating the system with 28 Days Later.

It’s a very interesting film. From the little advertising and buzz I had heard about it, I thought it was a zombie movie. I was mistaken — the bogeymen of 28 Days Later are actually fully living humans infected with a virus. This has the laudable effect of making them easier to stop in their tracks (it is a notable characteristic of zombies that they take a licking and persist in ticking) and the horror-intensifying effect that the characters in defending themselves are slaughtering real living people. At the risk of giving too much away, the movie revolves around a man who spent the 28 days of the title, the 28 days from infection, unconscious in a hospital, and now emerges to discover the world along with us, and attempt to find fellow survivors and safety. All this is fairly in line with the hypothetical genre of the movie, ‘survival horror’. However, you’ll hear people tell you that Resident Evil is ‘survival horror’, and now we see the fuzziness inherent in the system.

The characters in 28 Days Later are not trained fighters, not a unit, and not, for that matter, screaming nubile teenagers. They are a cross-section of lucky normal Britons (oh, yes, the movie is set in Britain) thrown together by virtue of luck and resourcefulness. And where the normal ‘survival horror’ story, if I understand the genre correctly, focuses on the transition from the struggle to survive to triumphantly destroying the infestation, or the transition from survival to escape from the situation, this one more eloquently focuses on the transition from struggling to retain life to struggling to retain humanity. It’s a deeper theme, and one which ensures that this movie will stay with you longer than any bop-the-zombie fluff piece, however beautifully executed. I am still intrigued and moved by this movie now, though I watched it on Friday night.

As to the execution, it was excellent — a flat, stark lighting scheme increased the ‘realism’ of the movie at the expense of more staged beauty. The plot, after the initial fantasy of the Infection is accepted, flowed quite logically indeed, resisting expectations and forming a very credible narrative. The characters were not caricatured or static, and no one person had the monopoly on stupid ideas — as is, after all, the case here in the Real World. The music was lovely, very minimalistic, and varying between spare atmospheric instrumentation and ethereal renderings of traditional hymns for the moments of hope and release. The level of blood and graphic violence is indeed high, but not overdone — enough to horrify without reaching the level of camp, desensitization, or pretty pretty blood painting (not that there isn’t a place for that, but this was not it.)

9 out of 10. Bottom line: A tight, well-executed, well-acted piece about the strengths, weaknesses, and fragility of the human animal. Tense, atmospheric, and deeply satisfying.

It is a transcendently splendid day outside. It is Friday, rich with Spring, warm and lovely, blue and fresh with a flowers’ breath breeze. I feel small again every time it touches my face—running whooping through the grass chopping at dandelions with an improvised sword, attempting awkward somersaults, swinging from whippy maple boughs, wounding the bees for our bee hospital. I return to the glee of captive skippers, enshrined in the paper pagodas left from Independence Day; the incomparable, uncomfortable joy of reading a good book up a good tree… fumbling a daisy chain for the fourteenth time. Am I such a grown-up? Never on such a day. On such a day I bubble under my skin, laughing at it all, and waiting to burst out running, screaming, crowing, flying. On such a day I am young, and wild again.

Why yes, I AM a nut. Film at 11, or consult Matt for details. But he’s not allowed to tell you ‘bout Atlantis.

Gnaeus Dexius, called ‘Cogitatus’, faced his sparring partner across the bridge of their shining gladii, and called to the dubious old men in their purple-trimmed robes, “You have seen the awesome potential of this weapon fired en masse upon the open field of battle, as a volley of ” he parried and pressed the advantage, “ arrows would have been in the past. Now you see…” he bound the gladiator’s blade with his own and pulled his pistolis from the leathern holster at his back. Its dark wood was burnished to a rich gleam, its fittings cast with a crude rendering of the regimental eagle. In the chamber, the ball lay, ‘SPQR’ stamped into its lead.

The shot ran around the circular walls of the palaestra, the slave’s confusion and consternation melted into dripping death, and a flight of birds made their hurried way to some other, calmer roof. Cogitatus stepped back, wiping the splatter from the barrel with a towel. ”...its usefulness in hand-to-hand engagement as well,” he finished. He looked eagerly at the many clean-shaved men, standing in various stages of sturdy old age, dissipated decrepitude, or waning prime. “How many workshops shall the Senate fund for the glory of Rome, gentlemen?” The men before him shuffled like a sheaf of papers in the wind, and exchanged looks.

“We shall see,” said Septimus Valerius in a kindly, avuncular manner. “We shall see, young Cogitatus. As you know, our great civilization births many wonders, and not all of them…is the world ready for.” The old men began to shuffle out, their sandals slapping loudly on the stones in the shocked silence.

“But…who cares what the world is ready for! The world is ours, or will be!”

A few senators tsked slightly, and they all filed out, leaving the shattered confusion of Cogitatus behind them.

Maybe continued someday…