08-Nov-2001
Notes and Warning: This is completely MINE. It doesn't borrow any names that belong to anyone else, and while it works with certain GW characters in mind, it's also a new thing unto itself. So basically, it's fully my intellectual property, and if I you mess with it I'll kill you. I mean that in the most impersonal way possible.
A word sketch of a character. I have no idea where it came from; it just came.
Tekka: And *I* didn't do it this time.
It's not prose or poetry. So I'm calling it a word sketch.
Farside dreams.
Of you and me and all the pull of space,
these images of you like flashes streaking behind my
eyelids at night, farside dreams...
You were too much to handle, too quicksilver, too
livewire for these two hands to hold, hands
that before tonight had never held one like you
in shadows. But when you flashed, you flashed
dark. Now a colony away my eyes darken with you and
I wonder, wonder whether everything about me could
change enough to streak across the sky to find you--
Not to hold you. I know I could never hold you like
the dark can, the dark spaces between the stars that
call to you like something in your core.
But if I could bring you something, some proof to make
you see me... if I could change the world for myself
and this farside dream of you... this part of you that
feels all the pull of Earth and space...
You found me. You found me, now claim me. You found
the part of me that pulls and the part of me that's
always wanted this sweet fall, this danger and then
fire and then nothing.
I know where you're going and I want to go with you, I
want to get there first.
I want what you can give me, what I never knew about
myself until you waltzed into my life with a pocketful
of explosives. I want to be like I was before,
never as alive, never as alive as I am
in these farside dreams of you and me.
The End
For some reason, this entire exercise wanted to be followed by the epitaph: "I love you like a thousand sisters." (Which is a barely- recognizable ripoff of a line from a poem by Anna Akhmatova.)
::shrugs:: Sometimes I just don't know.
Yes, I did have a specific narrator and subject in mind, and if you can tell who they are, I will be extremely impressed... somehow even my specific poetics always turn out vague.
For those of you who like to have a little explanation after the fact when you read poetics/wordsketches, and for those of you who'd like to know which narrator I was thinking of, etc., you can find it here:
I am a proponent of the theory that whatever you get out of a wordsketch good for you. So whatever you thought it meant, was trying to say; whoever you thought was speaking is good. And different people will interpret differently and they'll all be interesting ideas. What's better than an idea?
But people sometimes tell me they're curious about what I was thinking while writing this. So, for what it's worth, here's what the baby inherited from my side of the family:
I had Hilde in mind as a narrator for this sketch, and in my mind she was speaking about Duo. I had visions of her having a "thing" for him, sure, but this was exploring my thoughts on how things couldn't be as simple as Hilde "just in love" with Duo. I mean, I think that part of Duo's reason for fighting is that darkness *pulls* him, and I think in some ways he wants to die, even if he doesn't know it. That's what allows him to sometimes take "crazy" risks. He believes in life, too, but he's pulled in *both* directions. And I think that maybe Hilde sees this in him and it calls to the part of *her* that's pulled in both directions. Maybe she wants him, maybe she loves him, and maybe it's one hell of a crazy ride--one that she wants to take with him all the way to hell. So that bringing Duo that disk when she did was her way of helping the cause, getting his attention, and just maybe getting killed too. Maybe she wants to beat Duo to it. Maybe Hilde would have Duo alive to watch her die, to make him suffer for his inability to love her more than he loves the dark. His inability to pay the attention to her that he does to all the other shit.
Maybe Duo is like heady wine for her. And maybe when she met him, and got the idea of defecting from her side, all those death risks (and his quicksilver mind and body) made her feel more alive than she ever had before.
At least, those were some of the half-formed thoughts running through Cutter's mind and into the keyboard late one night.
(:./cutter/farside)
