Healing Potions

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

It began like every one of our quests.

We were fighting a marauding tribe of orcs and, naturally, I was the first person to be brought down. It was just like clockwork–the clockwork that I, as an artificer never truly mastered–in that my companions charged into the fore and I was left on the ground with a gash on my side and a deep cut across the flesh of the tendons of my left hand.

Perhaps I was too used to it by now. The captain of the current company I joined at least had the decency to cut down the orc that slashed into me as the repeater crossbow in my hands jammed: as it repeatedly did. I remember the orc lying there: its purple-tattooed green face glaring sightlessly at a man that killed it without a moment’s glance and ignoring my semi-conscious form lying beside it forever.

My fingers were shaking as I reached for my pouch … with my healing potions. Most of my pay often went into buying those concoctions. Sometimes I had enough coin to purchase some raw ingredients, but the cost of the equipment and the process of making them took ages and even more resources to upkeep.

It was amazing that such mundane details were flitting through my mind at the time as I struggled to take out a flask of potion: along with thoughts of how my current commander, like many others before him, wouldn’t even let the company healer touch me: as a pettiness for my fumbling in the heat of battle.

So I had to keep stocked up on healing potions and my own food or I wouldn’t have survived even half as long as I already had. My hands were so numb and cold as I forced the potion to my lips. I could feel the familiar burning warmth of the healing fluid churning down my throat, heightening my sense of my surroundings followed by a deep coughing fit coming on.

I feel this so many times. It is a pure, cleansing fire in my blood. And then I finally coughed. It was a long racking cough that splattered out some of the potion I was trying to keep down. I couldn’t even swallow a healing potion right, it seemed.

But then my self-disgust was interrupted something else. To this day, I am not sure how I even noticed it. Perhaps it was the heightened state of regeneration that I always felt when I drink a healing potion: a thing that temporarily augmented my eye sight, or cleared my brains enough to focus on minutiae.

Half of the liquid I spewed out had splattered on the orc: or, more specifically, on its severed arm. I hadn’t noticed that my commander had amputated my attacker before killing it. As far as impromptu battle amputations went, it was fairly utilitarian: in that it wasn’t a clean cut. I saw the ripped pieces of ligament and flesh on the cut part of the limb. It was an ugly and jagged hack-job: one that I was glad none of my limbs had experienced as of yet.

But I didn’t expect what happened next.

Allow me to clarify, if you will pardon the pun: for I had not, in fact, drunk a Potion of Clarity. My powers, such as they were then, did not come back to me: especially since I hadn’t even had time to use any of them before being cut down. That was why I could see so clear-headedly at that moment. Maybe I had one too many healing potions over the years and I’d built up a tolerance. Certainly, the little tinctures I drink every day now help me deal with the headaches. To be honest, I’m actually surprised that I never noticed what I saw sooner.

The mutilated flesh and sinew on the ragged end of the orc limb was slowly, and very gradually, knitting itself back together. I just … looked at it. Maybe there was a time where I might have thought it a trick of the eye or a hallucination from trauma. I might have even considered that the dead creature could have had some troll blood in him. But it was like watching fleshly grass growing back, creeping back, at a steady and accelerated rate. I remember not knowing what to think, but being utterly fascinated by it. Yet it didn’t last long. Then.

It must have been only a few seconds at least. Now, this in itself might have–again–proved nothing to me: just some bizarre residual effect of a substance that perhaps all apprentice healers and alchemists may have learned about in their respective guilds and academies, or at the knees of their masters. But then…

It twitched.

At the time, I still had doubts. I knew enough of healer-craft to know that there was enough blood and energy in a limb–if freshly cut–to still have a brief semblance of life. As it was, I didn’t even know how long ago the commander had cut it off: with everything still feeling like it was in this heavy kind of eternal present.

I immediately started looking around at the corpses now littering the field: afraid that the orcs were being led by a dark priest or a necromancer. But none of the other bodies stirred. Just the arm. And when I looked back, it had stopped moving.

But that sight never left me. I looked down at the empty flask in my hand, at the limb, and back again. And I experienced more … clarity.

I quit that adventuring company with little money to spare, but I joined many others. The transition was not as difficult as some might believe. As an artificer, you learn that there are mechanisms that function well and smoothly due to the interconnection of different parts. I kept up my skills in making devices and imbuing power into artifacts, but my main focus had shifted to surround the art of alchemy.

I stayed out of combat: save when my company was often finished with the initial assaults. Eventually, I saved up enough coin to study under an alchemical master or two. Though my skills as an artificer were poor in battle, they were invaluable in maintaining the equipment of my teachers, and I could effort to continue my studies with them.

I also began to observe healers: not the ones that solely drew their power from the gods, but the ones that practised surgery and medicine. Selling them custom-made equipment and supplies–which I could make now as a working apprentice in the Guild of Alchemists– also made them a lot more forthcoming.

I’d never been so focused or so motivated in my life. I’ve also always been a solitary man and thus had no other obligations aside from my livelihood … and my other work.

So, as I said, healing potions are very expensive. It did help, however, that I was not getting injured as often and so when I did buy them–or make them–I could use them for other matters. Sometimes I missed the bitter medicinal tang on my tongue and that uniquely therapeutic burn in the pit of my stomach, but that had been replaced with another form of simmering passion.

I still had my tinctures for my usual body aches and now actual Potions of Clarity to help me with my Great Work.

I realized it was all about the amount of dosage. And on the adventuring assignments that I still undertook on behalf of my tutors, my comrades made enough corpses for my initial studies. My companies didn’t suffer for it either. I sometimes functioned as the healer of our group when there were no priests or paladins among our numbers. And everyone knows that the healer is a vital part of an adventurer group. You can literally hold the power of life or death over your entire group as a healer. Not that this had ever really occurred to me.

I had far loftier goals.

I eventually learned how to make a severed limb move by itself. I definitely began to see evidence of twitching and movement. Most of these limbs were taken from orcs and goblins: generally beings with small cranial capacity. But I did have occasion to deal with some human matter even then. And my preservatives helped make for good flesh-grafting material.

But the real work began after I retired from direct adventuring and my apprenticeships to invest in a potions cart. It helped that I joined the Alchemist Guild as a full member and became licensed to carry–and examine–various alchemical substances. I travelled through many towns until I settled down to make my Potions Shop. I realized after a time that the limbs I reanimated could only function for so long before succumbing to inevitable decay without some kind of more self-contained environment.

So I crafted and invested in vats and various apparatus. I learned how to make Regeneration Potions: essentially more augmented versions of my favourite healing concoctions. They are hard and even dangerous substances to make. Even the Guild only reluctantly makes them available to the public, with more of them being sold bootleg by rogue alchemists and I learned that healing potions are actually a scaled-down version of the substance sold at exorbitant prices in order to make a profit and prevent said danger.

I began to understand what made the Guild so afraid. I’ve always found it easier to work with orc parts. Some say it was because once, long ago, a powerful wizard made them: crafting their flesh from something else altogether. It was an incredibly vague myth and very few outside arcane circles even knew about it beyond just those simple words. But I know that I began to wonder.

Most beings believe that we were all inorganic matter before the gods gave us breath. By comparison, I was doing something far more crude. It is like trying to construct an artifact of an older era by taking it apart and attempting to reverse-engineer it. But the problem was that I was still thinking like a traditional artificer.

Finding components–and yes sometimes I still use an artificer’s terminology–was not difficult. Although I wasn’t on campaigns or battlefields anymore, my shop was in a city. In this world, brawlers and warriors of different races die all the time and their bodies are usually thrown out into those garbage pits known as public graves anyways.

Yet before I began using human material, I had to fine-tune it.

Once, I was curious about something. I knew that there are some plants in the world whose cuttings could grow roots in the right substance and become whole new plants. I began to wonder what would happen if I put even a tincture of blood or tissue into one of my vats of Regeneration Potion.

The plant analogy was an apt one, and not merely because of the cuttings. Certainly limbs were easier to use but the … things that resulted from them are limited in scope. As their brains develop, they are more used to obeying commands drummed into them than making decisions of their own. Most of these were like animals that barely lasted a day in any case. No, the best element about the flora analogy is that in every drop of blood and piece of flesh there are the seeds for something … more.

This took too much time, however, and most of these experiments happened only on a limited basis. It didn’t take much to fake my own death and destroy my old shop. People were beginning to notice that I wasn’t aging like they were and sometimes my creations became more … vocal: even in the basement of my Shop.

I managed to take all of my coin and buy new resources. There is an old tower on the farthest island off the main continent that suits my privacy and that of my creations well. I have enough vats of potion to keep us going for quite some time.

Nowadays I am less interested in cobbling together old creatures and things derived from said beings, and far more intrigued by other prospects. It is said that a long time ago the gods forged us from cold clay and stone. It has been some centuries since I placed those imbued drops into my Generation Vats. I watch marrow grow from nothing into bone with coils of nerves and sinew creeping along … and the first layers of flesh will spread over them soon …

And so I continue to drink my own delicious, home-brewed healing potions, curious to see how what comes from them will live in the land that I give them.

How to Get Attention: Or What My Readers Seem to Like

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 6 Comments

I thought it might be interesting to play in traffic today … or, more specifically, look at which topics of mine tend to get the most reader-hits.

I admit: I spend a lot of time looking at my Stats and guessing at who has viewed what and from where based on some pretty bar graphs. So now that we have established that I have very little in the way of a life (though I strongly suspect there are other people who are doing the exact same thing even as I write this out of pure morbid fascination), I want to look at what seems to really “work” in terms of attracting readers on Mythic Bios: and possibly other Blogs.

Well, my first observation is that the recording of Life events really tends to get a lot of attention. It seems as though readers really want to know more about a Blog writer’s actual life beyond, mainly, what they actually record down. For a while I avoided doing that as much, but I recognize the value in occasionally dealing with that part of my self and some of the milestones in my own life offline. I guess the fact that people are interested in other people and specifically people whose writing they follow isn’t that much of a surprise in retrospect.

It also isn’t surprising that there are a lot of hits with regards to my posts on Creativity and the Creative Process, or to be more “nice and accurate” about it: my own thoughts about them. It isn’t as though my thoughts are particularly original, mind you, but I have to be precise in stating that these are my opinions and experiences with the above. Whereas with my Life I tend to find moments where I really need to express or share something, my writings on Creativity are mainly me pretty much talking out loud but–unlike the actual times when I talk to myself (a lot)–I actually want to take readers through something of my process: to outline a bit of my own mind and how it works.

Unfortunately, it also isn’t that surprising that when I wrote my post on Depression, I got  lot of hits for two days afterwards. It is a very common topic–especially in this day and age–and it also feeds back to the idea of the “personal being publicly popular.”

In a lot of ways, all of the above are pretty much the electronic Mythic Bios’ bread-and-butter, as it were. I know that if I talk about these topics or choose a day where the new Dr. Who episode or the latest movie comes out to talk about it, I will get some traffic there. It’s good to know what works and what needs work.

I have some specialized posts that do not always get as much traffic, but they are relatively consistent in their own way. For instance, I find that I get a fair bit of views with regards to my What is FV Disco? and my Worms and Bicycles articles from Eastern and Central Europe due to the fact that I am touching upon an art movement and style that originated in Slovenia, and that–at least at the time I made them–there seemed to be few articles talking about the subject online: never mind with regards to the comics medium.

Speaking of comics, I have been getting some modest traffic with regards to my reviews of comic books like Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum and anything I’ve written on Miracleman. I try to put a little of everything for Geek readers and otherwise: though really it depends on my mood and where I think the flow of the Blog is going at that time. What I mean is: I try to maintain some kind of continuity with regards to which article I place after the last.

And I am really happy to see people reading my stuff: especially my articles on, and my stories based from Video Games: of which my only claim to expertise is the fact that I’ve played some of them and even loved them. It also makes me happy to see the occasional view of my article on my experience with Gwendolyn MacEwen and The Vampire Sex Bar too. I obviously find that my articles on mainstream subjects or things that have become so such as Creativity, Superman, The Doctor and what-not to get more attention while some my more obscure and original articles get less: though it is very satisfying when this last does get some views.

But I think the most gratifying moments for me are when someone reads some of my samples of fictional writing. It just makes me happy to see people reading my most original or at least creatively derivative work. Yet I have to say that, in the end, I am just satisfied to see that anyone reads any thought, poem, review, story, or opinion of mine here. It is the closest I have to bringing you into the world that I created for myself from all of this and my own essential self.

Sometimes I feel like I am not always that interesting and much of what I write on here isn’t that important when you really think about it. But writing and writing to one’s audience is more than statistics, or whether or not you get paid, or how much attention-whoring you do. Writing is about getting yourself out there and expressing it in such a way where you don’t dumb yourself down, but the same time you are not trying to be inaccessible and superior.

I am still trying to find the line between what I want here and what I may want elsewhere. But in the meantime, I have a better idea of how to continue. For instance, I know that if I want to get Freshly Pressed the best way to do it is to write about a topic that is universal or very popular (such as a strange pseudo-serious and somewhat creative meditation on the nature of cartoons), make it short, but also make it stand out by cramming a lot of ideas and resonance into so small a space. An appropriate graphic also helps. Of course I also understand that there are other factors to consider too: such as what the staff of Freshly Pressed is looking for that day or that week and there is only so much you can control or predict.

So I will just end off this post by stating that ever since I started Mythic Bios a year ago, I have a much better idea of figuring out what my current and prospective audience wants to see and how much of that is determined by my skill and my circumstances. But there is still a lot of things I do not understand and you all continue to surprise me in what it is that you like to see. My video game and some of my shorter comics ones come to mind there. And then sometimes–very rarely but very sweetly–I see that some of you go on Google and type in the name of the particular article of mine that you want to see. And that, my friends, is what makes me the happiest of all.

Practicing Ideas and Dress-Rehearsal Stories

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 7 Comments

There is a character in Sandman who gets to the point where he has so many ideas in his head that he can’t write them out, or express them, fast enough. In my case, I have all of these ideas and they each vie to be worked on first: using the energy that I have to focus on one at a time. You know: that energy. It is the energy of vital immediacy and enthusiasm.

The way I think of it, each idea is like a facet of some interesting inorganic material or small components of living substances that need the immediate energy that is inside you to develop them further: to give them the spark of life and order.

And while I do believe in multitasking, it is far easier to multitask when you are doing several different things as opposed to many of the same. At least, that is what I find for myself. I will also admit that there are times when it is more ideal to be able to make the space and time for one particular task as opposed to several others at once.

Of course, there is the other side to it as well. There are the ideas that need time to grow, or those that remain in a kind of fossilization or stasis until enough future energy and knowledge is built up in order to activate it later on. Which brings me to something else I’ve been thinking about lately.

I think one difficulty that I have as a creator is that my mind acts as a kind of cache: I have all of these ideas that I either need to use, save somewhere else in the hopes that they will be activated again one day, or discard completely. If I have too many ideas that I want to work on immediately, I will either slow down or get paralyzed. It also doesn’t help that I have lately been trying to focus on works to send out to places instead of the larger work that my mind is slowly gravitating towards: regardless of my wishes in the matter.

Me and my Head

It does help when I look at the articles and stories that I write on this Blog. I think of them as not only vessels to contain my ideas, but also as “dress rehearsals”: practice sessions of stories that will either become other stories or whose ideas will be added to make something larger and more complex.

Mythic Bios was intended to not only hone my ideas down and let me express and make things I wouldn’t ordinarily have a space for, but to let all of you also get to see as much of the process as possible. I don’t know how successful that might be, but that was the idea anyway. It also occurs to me that once I write my insights about writing and specific works, I tend to forget about them beyond the gist of them. I do classify them to look at later, but I need to find the time to do that.

But I do think I am on to something here and there will be something larger made as a result of all of this: if there isn’t already in some form. Anyway, this is the end of my “thinking to myself” phase online. I will keep you posted, if you will pardon the pun. ;P

What I Did On the Anniversary of My First Blog Post: The Toronto Comics Arts Festival

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

This is going to be a late entry as I have been recovering from the last three days of attending–and volunteering–at the Toronto Comics Arts Festival. The first time I ever went to the Festival was when it was still at the University of Toronto: back in those days when I was still in Undergrad and working at York in 2007.

It’s an understatement to say that it has long expanded since. I came back to it in about 2011 while still in Grad School and then last year before my official Graduation. I mentioned in another post that it is about this time of year, specifically the month of May, where things have ended for me. Actually, this post is being made two days past the Anniversary of the online Mythic Bios: namely, this whole Writer’s Blog.

So let me celebrate this missed anniversary by telling you all a bit about my weekend at TCAF.

On Friday I reported to my set-up shift. I haven’t really lifted heavy boxes or tables in a while, so my arms are still all sore from that. But the company of my fellow volunteers was totally worth it. We all wanted to be there and, for me, it is a novelty to be able to talk with people with similar Geek knowledge and interests. Really, for that alone and working together with like-minded people on straightforward tasks it was totally worth it. I got my bright blue volunteer shirt along with everyone else, and then headed home to attempt an early night to wake up earlier the following day.

Well, after failing to go to bed early I woke up the next day and somehow found the Marriott Hotel without getting lost where Art Spiegelman was going to be doing some signings. So I naturally brought both of my volumes of Maus with me and waited in the line to meet him. It was only after a while that the volunteers on duty that day informed us that Spiegelman would only sign two books, and one of them had to be one of his new ones. I will admit, I was annoyed. Like I said, I had the old version of Maus that was divided into two volumes and I had been keen on having them both signed. I also didn’t see any of the new books that I was interested in.

At first.

I was tired and hungry and I almost left the line until I decided “What the hell, I’m getting to meet Art Spiegleman.” Then I found Breakdowns: essentially a large collection of his earlier work that I had either only seen excerpts of, or only saw references to in text books for my own researches. Some of these comics had led to the creation of Maus as well and also shed more light on his family life and his own experiences. In fact, some of the comics in there have that very 1960s to early 80s Underground Comix feel: specifically the pieces that really share Robert Crumb’s wobbly, sometimes vulgar but very iconic aesthetic.

By the time I got to see Art Spiegelman, he was sitting across from his wife–the stately Francoise Mouly–and the artist Frank Viva. He looked like someone’s elegant Viennese Jewish grandfather. I know he doesn’t come from Vienna or Germany, but that is about the only way I can physically describe him. I told him that it was a great honour to meet him. He seemed pleased to see that Breakdowns was one of the books I had and he described it to me as something along the lines of a building with which he keeps adding renovations. At one point he joked about whether not my name had changed by the second piece he was signing and I told him, “Not this time, but usually I change the number of Ts in my name just to mess with people.” He found that (very untrue joke) very amusing. Then I shook his hand and left with my prizes.

I just have to reiterate that Spiegelman’s work really influenced me. I originally encountered him in my Literature of Testimony course in my Grad Program at York. A lot of the literature made my own first-person narratives stronger: increasing my voice and its depth. But Spiegelman in particular not only taught me that symbols be used to represent literal things and ideas, but that this same order can be subverted to either destroy their meanings or through doubt on them. This is a very sophisticated technique and one that definitely will affect at least one work of mine. That is one major reason I really had to meet him: to meet one of the masters of what I’ve tried–and am trying to do–in my own writerly way. So yes, it was awesome to finally meet him.

By that time, I made it back to the Reference Library and got a few more books. It was there that I met Hope Larson for the first time and her sign her adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time for my Mom in honour of Mother’s Day and her birthday. She apparently found that cute. I chose that book because my Mom loves Madeleine L’Engle’s series and she used to read them to me when I was much younger. So it was kind of a bridge between our interests. Later, I remembered that I had read Hope Larson’s Salamander Dream and Gray Horses when I worked for the Clara Thomas Archives.

But I couldn’t make it upstairs as I had planned. I was tired and dehydrated and apparently there was a line to get into the suite with more of the vendors that I wanted to visit. I met a friend and we ended up going for a meal of some kind, or I did, and then went on our way to Bento Miso for its own Bit Bazaar. Bento Miso is a place where games–electronic and analog, as well as many start-up businesses–are made and they were opening for the Festival. It was a nice sunny day in downtown Toronto as my friend and I tried to circumvent the ridiculousness of the TTC shutdown from Bloor to Union Station and went to Ossington and walked with tons of stuff in my arms to Bento Miso for the first time.

I met a few people there and got to play some games: including one game called Bijouxred: which is essentially a game that combines the strategy war game mechanics of Fire Emblem with the rough brawling moments of Streetfighter II. And that is just a simplification because the fights themselves have some elements reminiscent of Final Fantasy–with its Combat Options, and even Mario RPG with regards to having to press a button to simulate blocking, charging your energy, or even chaining attacks together. It was really cool. I met Rene Shible–Director of Development–and Lead Animator Michal Szczepanski: who were quite friendly and directed me through their game.

The Bit Bazaar itself was awesome. There is a very Underground feel to it: a combination of grit, digitization and nostalgia along with a lot of geeking, friendliness and adventure. A few of the games from the second Comics Vs. Games collaboration were being shown and played there as well. It is still something I want to do with an artist programmer one day. 🙂 I got a Steamkey to Spooky Squid Games They Bleed Pixels: which I ranted about a really long time ago as also being awesome. It came with its own small black envelope and a simulated red wax seal. That was a very lovely touch. I also got to meet a few people and a friend of mine I hadn’t seen in a while. I think I will visit there more often soon. So by the time I finally got home that night, I was bloody exhausted.

But it wasn’t over yet.

The next morning I woke up even earlier. I gave my Mom her present before leaving and made it again to the Marriott just in time to observe the Art Spiegelman Spotlight panel: with Seth as its moderator. It was a very eye-opening exchange between the two cartoonists and it was this interaction, combined with reading some of Breakdowns that gave me a little idea as to why Spiegelman wanted people to read his new work and not focus as much on Maus. I mean, first of all there is the creator perspective of it: in which an artist doesn’t want to be solely determined by one creation–no matter how great–that they did in the past. But another, more personal reason, is when you consider the content of Maus and just how much Spiegelman had to delve into some dark and personal spaces: some of which were not even personally his own, but affected him just the same. This article from the Toronto Star might explain it a little better and might have made more sense had I read it before meeting him. Having that long shadow cast over you can be brutal. I also learned that Breakdowns has been reprinted twice with new work or “renovations” added.

Then I went to the Library, got some Hope Larson comics for myself, met some cool new creators, and made it to the upper level where I met Maurice Vellekoop with his elegant, airy lined and water-coloured comics: often portraying erotic and adventurous content. I got something and had him sign it. Then I went around that level and left to eventually get to the Bryan Lee O’Malley Spotlight panel: where in a strange game of “Guessing the Answer Before Asking the Question,” I answered, “No,” and asked if he had ever intended the character of Mobile in Scott Pilgrim to actually turn to be Gideon. Suffice to say, I was right and I don’t think I was the first one to ask this question.

Eventually the Festival was closing down and I went to my next volunteer shift: the tear-down phase. This was the shift I covered last year and it had been my only one at the time. I got to say hello and goodbye to some people I met and then I wandered home in the suddenly cold with hail balls coming down.

And that was my TCAF.

So, there is one thing I want to mention before I wrap this long post up. Some of the artists I was talking to were commenting about how awesome TCAF is and how people from all over Canada and the world come here. They were talking about what makes TCAF different from other conventions. Well, I have my basic two cents on that matter.

The first thing to consider is that TCAF is free. It has no entry fee and all you have to do is come in and bring money to buy work, or simply come to the panels. It is also a festival and it is spread around a few locations. But I think the second element of TCAF that I like is that the barrier between artists and readers is somehow thinner here: or at least far more permeable? You can interact with many artists as you would any other person or vendor. It also helps that many artists are in fact fans of other artists. There is just this positive enthusiastic energy around all of that just makes me happy. What really makes me happy is that so many younger people come to this Festival and are so enthusiastic about the comics medium and what they like.

It’s some of the few times that I am proud to have lived in Toronto and still do some business in it. And this event was what I needed lately. I feel more inspired to just do things and get things done. It’s like I got recharged, if that makes sense. I also finally decided to make a basic business card that I can give to people that is linked to this Mythic Bios site. And I made more connections. It was a truly rewarding experience and I would like to thank the Festival Staff, the artists, the vendors, the fans and my fellow volunteers for making this time exist every year.

Also, thank you all for continuing to read and Follow me. I know that this particular post was a very long one and I feel in some ways that I did this event more justice in my own personal written journal, but I did what I could and I underestimated just how much happened in three days. These three days made this part of May a good beginning and I have plans now. And I can’t wait to begin the process of implementing them.

The Storyteller

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 9 Comments

An old story and an appropriate one given what I have been reading lately. You can tell what some of it was inspired by and I hope it can be appreciated for what it is. Enjoy.

He was the Oracle of Stories.

I didn’t know what was meant by that … at first. The man, if one could venture to even call him a man anymore, sat in a dark corner of a great library. Yet for all the library’s magnificence, the Oracle had chosen long ago to be placed in one particular part of the chamber. It was what seemed to be the oldest part of the structure, and you had to travel through a few smaller rooms and wings, and down a set of stairs before you came to the place.

I suspect it wasn’t so much that he chose to remain down here, as it was that whatever powers he possessed or had influence over him made him sit there, and not get up again. The Oracle sat on a stool on a wooden platform in the shadows between two book shelves. I didn’t know what to expect from him. To be honest, I had heard tales of other Oracles but I hadn’t had the privilege of meeting them. It was said that each one had been human at one time, but through a gift or a curse, they had mastered and eventually personified the great artistic pursuits they dedicated their lives to.

So when I met the Oracle of Stories, you have to understand that I had many expectations in place. Some of them were very much fulfilled, and even expanded on. The small figure sat there, surrounded by mounds of paper. At the time I first saw him, I saw his gaze: glassy and sightless from years of doing nothing but writing in the dimness of the room he chose to sit in. I knew that others came in, respectfully, to take his writings and add them to the library. They were beautiful, luminous works that branched into all areas of human understanding: of good, and evil, and all the places between and beyond.

He sat there, mutely, and all I could hear was the scratching of his pen. I had studied everything about the Oracle that I could, in hopes that one day I could even begin to approach his level of craft. I was just an acolyte then, a novice scribe with a mild smattering of talent: but just enough to attract the notice of my elders, and get this very rare chance. I remember them almost seeming to restrain their excitement, though I didn’t know why. There were a lot of things I didn’t know back then.

For instance, I knew the Oracle was old. His hair was long and silver, and almost covered his entire face. His form, though erect was thin and the flesh I saw lined. But it wasn’t wrinkled or infirm. I remember his face most of all. Despite the many years he had been down here, by choice or condition, the only sign of his great age were the lines on his forehead, and around his eyes and the flat eternal line that was his mouth. His hand, unlike the rest of his immobile body was a flurry of activity, moving across the parchments he was given like a crazed arachnid seeking to spill its blackened blood and secrets to be augured and divined over by the other adepts.

That was the only movement I and most others ever saw of him. Yet these details were only witnessed or helped by those adepts and masters closest to him: as anything could be close to him in this world. But I get ahead of myself.

There was no expression on his face at all. It was almost as though he was asleep, or lost in a very different place from you or I. I observed him, and his faded robes amid the books and volumes and scrolls around him. He had not spoken in centuries. So when I heard him finally speak, his voice was barely even a whisper.

“How can someone who makes stories be an Oracle?” he asked, so quietly that even in my shock I had to strain to hear his words, “How can anyone who makes stories–anyone who writes or tells them or passes them down–be telling the truth?

“I used to wonder that myself.”

He gave a raspy chuckle, “Nothing is constant, except for the written word. It’s true that when you first write it, when you first envision it there are many possibilities. And when you first read it, you can only guess where it will lead you. I suppose that’s what I found books to be my most trustworthy friends. My only friends. They were the ones that stayed true. Yes, books are a lot like old friends, only truer. At first they might surprise you, or maybe even disappoint you. But when you read them once, you only discover new things about them as you read through them again and again …

“Once, before I gave everything to my stories, I loved to hear, and read, and witness the stories of others. I loved to experience those of others more than experiencing my own. My own stories, those I lived were awkward, reluctant things of necessity and survival. More often than not, they were painful things. Ugly things with petty hopes that are sometimes never requited. Life is not as neat as a narrative would have it. Yes,” the voice droned gently, “I would have given anything to be rid of the burdens of the body, and the self to be able to immerse myself in the stories of everything.

“And I did. I’m not sure whose stories I tell anymore. Whether they are mine, or those I make, or those that have happened, or have been lost, or have yet to be, or are still happening, or could be happening. Some stories I tell would have it that the person I was met a Muse–perhaps Calliope herself–held captive and I let her go. Sometimes, I remember asking one favour of her. Or she granted me a boon for my deed. There may have been nothing that tied me to the world I had even then. Or perhaps I lost something already, and long ago. Maybe I lost something that I never found to begin with, and never would.”

Those last words were almost wistful as he continued, “But I think: when I am myself and not the stories that I make. When I am not the young woman wondering what to do with her unwanted child, or the couple happily united and ready to wed, or the young man cut down as he reached the zenith of his life, or the broken ruin who wasted all of his potential into the dust … When I am not the tyrant gaining sole satisfaction from the lives I crush gleefully into blood and pulp onto the cruel twisted curvature of my lips, or the child discovering it all for the first time … I think …”

He paused for a few seconds, with a look of befuddlement twitching on his features, “I think I …”

He stared blankly and sightlessly through the shelf in front of him for a very long time. Then, finally, he spoke again:

“I think I refused her power. I think I wanted her to be free. I think, when I was an ‘I’ that I saw a beauty in her that none of the world had, and I would never have again in my lifetime. But I didn’t want that at the price that her former slaver put upon her. I think … I know that I felt great revulsion over the things that he did to her, to make her give him her power and her blessing.

“And I think that what gave me even greater revulsion was that I was tempted too.

“So I turned her away.”

https://i0.wp.com/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Calliope%2C_Muse_of_Epic_Poetry_by_Giovanni_Baglione.jpg

He paused again, “But she knew my heart then, when I had a heart. When my heart was just my heart. And as she left, she told that she would never leave me. Ever. And the hole in my heart, that was my heart for my entire life was filled and went beyond that fulfillment. And it was glorious, and it was power, and love, and pain of others until there was nothing but them and the stories …

“And I felt the need to write them down. All of them down. And I kept writing. Even as her parting kiss on my brow remained, I kept the stories flowing. I became them. I am them, everyday and for the rest of my life.

“And to this day they wonder how I do it. How can I sit here and molder in the stacks and continue on and not feel pain, or sadness, or hope. And I think … I believe I do feel these things still. But then I remember the sleep. I think of Sleep, the younger sibling of Death and I let these feelings go into Sleep. Sleep will always be there for me. No matter what may happen to this form. I will be in it forever. And, whenever the feelings gather, and cannot be swept away, I will tell them. My body will be the channel, and my mind and soul will contain only the stories. I will be the Oracle of Stories. I will be the Storyteller. The Storyteller will the story of the Storyteller once at a time. Until the teller becomes the Story and the Story …”

Then his words trailed off, and his hand began to twitch, and grasp his quill. And the writing resumed.

Just as mine finished.

I wrote his story down that day, for the many hours it took. I still don’t know to this very day if it was his actual story or just one of the ones that had taken over his mind and body. But it both awed and frightened me in its scope. And as I myself near the end of my life, of my story, I can die happy: having my own question answered.

All stories are true, as many wise storytellers have said throughout time. And I will always know why the Oracle of Stories is sometimes called the Storyteller.

A Place Where Writers Come to Write Upon the Revenge of the Sixth

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

May generally hasn’t been a very good month for me. It’s not so much that bad things tend to happen to me so much as it is a time when things end: and end hard.

So I will tell you now that there was lead-up to this weekend and that what followed didn’t just happen from nowhere. It started slowly and gently as I’ve begun taking out books from the Thornhill Village Library. And not just ordering books, but actually walking across the main road in the good warm weather to pick them up. It may seem like such a small thing, but it isn’t.

Sometimes something like this can mean all the world. Also, have I mentioned that the Thornhill Village Library is purportedly haunted? So of course it is one of my favourite places. You can read a story of mine where I make mention of it.

I’ve been feeling very argumentative lately and as such I have been in “Geek overdrive.” One major site of this resurgence of fiery spirit has been on Sequart: a non-profit site that publishes and promotes scholarship on the comics medium.

You can find the Link to their site on my Blog as well, but what I want to say is that Julian Darius had a look at one of my comments and suggested that I interact more on Twitter and email.

It was then that I didn’t so much realize what I had to do as I felt like I needed to act. So I went on my Twitter account and linked Sequart and Julian to some of my Miracleman articles. What followed was Julian replying back to me and asking why I wasn’t writing for Sequart. So, at some point I am going to be doing some writing for the Sequart Research & Literacy Organization. I have been told that re-posting is not an encouraged practice, so I will be making some original articles for the site and, I have to say, I have a few ideas. I always have a few ideas.

So after this exchange, more people started adding me on Twitter: including Gregory Guy Gordon whom–among many other things–was one of the producers for the Los Angles Sacred Fools Theater Stage version of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere that I’d been hearing about lately. At this point, I went on Facebook and started telling people that I had gotten more Twitter Followers. And that was when a few friends, who didn’t know I had Twitter, added me: including someone really special who hadn’t talked with in a while who told me in response that she, “Finally Found the Place where Writers Come to Write.”

I can’t put into words how much that means to me.

And then the weekend began. On the weekend, two things happened. First, I got my schedule for my Volunteer Hours at the Toronto Comics Arts Festival. I did mention that I volunteered last year as well: which led to me meeting and writing about Sarah Powell’s comic, among other things on this Blog. I look forward to seeing what I will find this year at panels, events, and booths. But the second thing that happened this weekend is I did something I hadn’t done in a while.

I went downtown for more than a few hours: specifically to go to G33kpron’s Second Anniversary Event.

It was the first time I ever took the streetcar from Queen Station down past Queen and Spadina: at least from that direction. I was a bit lost–for a change–until I ran into a Lethan (red) Twi’lek, her female Darth Maul companion, and their photographer friend. I decided following them was the wisest course of action. I even managed to make some conversation: though given my companions everything I was saying geek-wise was neither that novel nor so insightful on my part. Even so, it was strange and nice to walk through Downtown Toronto under the light of the Summer Day-Star again.

So we talked with some people and then I danced for a while–something I have no done in a bloody long time–and I watched people also dance and I wished I had a lightsaber like most of them seemed to. I felt kind of naked without one. That said, when some of that music came on, it felt like my Imagination and Enthusiasm Stats Modifiers were increasing through the roof. I felt this raw power coursing through me and … some other emotion too. To be honest, I felt like a fucking god.

However, I still have a flesh body. After a while, I started to get tired. I forgot that when you dance and you are around a lot of people that you can get really tired and dehydrated fast. I also realize that I’m not exactly in my middle or late twenties anymore. It started to feel about that time and I was about to leave until, finally, the feature event happened.

I was coming back up the stairs when I heard a remix of Palpatine’s voice issuing his fateful edict around the same day he became Emperor.

And that was when I saw the Nerdy Stripper perform burlesque for the first live time ever.

Yeah. Suffice to say, I will never look at Order 66 the same way again. Many Jedi died happy that night. 😀

It was at this point that I realized that my mission had been complete. I was glad to see so many people having so much fun again. I said goodbye to one of my new friends–whom I never really gave my name to, and whose names I did not ask for, because who am I kidding, I am still shy–and walked to the streetcar in the night almost-summer air.

So I had a good weekend and I am in a better mood now. It’s like I Regenerated in the distant golden light of Thornhill’s old places. I realize I don’t just carry my Hell with me, but something else as well: something warm and infusing. I’ll have plenty of time to be a bitter old man at some other point. Maybe there is still hope for me yet.

And before anyone comments, I happen to like Revenge of the Sixth as a turn of phrase. I do not understand why it has to be the Fifth for some people and I am sure they have a perfectly good reason for it, but I think it is perfectly acceptable to call it such today: as acceptable as any pun is anyway. So expect to see some new links from Sequart and such here in the near-future. But here is my Twitter Account in case you are interested in looking me up and seeing some really random thoughts: I’m MKirshenblatt.

As I said before, May has traditionally been a time of endings and near-endings for me. But perhaps this time around, it will become the start of some new beginnings.

Picture0025

ETA: After this event, I realize that I really need to find a good costume again. Or get some good makeup.

Contains Language: Reader’s Discretion is Advised!

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 2 Comments

I know the above title is a low blow for attention, but I really couldn’t resist.

Whenever I write something on Mythic Bios, I try to make the language and the content as accessible as possible. I know I don’t always succeed, but in the case that I don’t my hope is that I have a little something for everyone that I am also interested in writing about.

In my later years in high school and throughout my early years at University I was really interested in Philosophy. I liked writing that made me think and that also played around with ideas of varying kinds with regards to, well, pretty much existence. But even then, before I realized how didactic–how dry and rambling it could get–I had one other issue with Philosophy and texts that purported to be as such.

Sometimes, they would reference subject matter that I wouldn’t understand or, in my case even worse, begin to quote a language of what I was not at all familiar. And it annoyed me. A lot. To be honest, it still does.

Philosophical texts are not the only culprit in this non-crime of course. Many literary classics–novels–do this exact same thing: at least from the Modernist era. And, finally, there are comics that do the exact same thing from time to time. Take Alan Moore for instance. Alan Moore is a genius. He creates multi-layered plots that start off very slowly but ultimately become very epic and grandiose. And even though his characters have tended to lean towards the cynical side of humanity, his characterization is very human and excellent.

But I will tell you now: when he has whole passages of From Hell and Lost Girls in German, or I believe Punjabi in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 1910, or even … freaking Martian in the second Volume of The League I start to get … annoyed.

Don’t misunderstand: I like the authenticity he brings to the characters and the fact that you can clearly see how his well-read nature and research is paying off in the background. Now I am not just talking about his appropriate use of other languages, but his many, many literary and historical references that make me feel very under-read as a reader and overwhelmed as a writer. He simply makes so many references and allusions that I can’t always keep track of them, or even know what they are. I can see how other people would really have difficulty relating to this. I guess it’s like what Austrian Emperor Joseph the Second purportedly once told Mozart: that his work has “too many notes.”

I know that when he has used other languages, I feel a bit … cheated: because I want to know what the hell the characters are saying! It’s that simple. Likewise, I want to get all the references. I’m greedy like that and it feels like I’ve reached a certain level of understanding, and then I hit a wall.

A language is another perception of reality. Really, another language is a different world. This leads me to the other perspective on the matter. Anna Anthropy has said a few times that one of the issues with regards to video games is the very exclusive culture or subculture that has developed around them. More specifically, she talks about how video game design and dialogue around it becomes this interaction of in-jokes and references that people outside the circle do not always get. I would imagine that this is something, especially with regards to games as an expression of art–of language–is something that Anthropy believes we should watch out for.

On the other hand, Anna Anthropy is also one of those who wants to allow for a different voice or perspective in the medium of video games. For Anthropy this seems to have been in the form of making games for different genders and practices outside what was–and still is–the social norm. Essentially, and others like her, use this chosen medium to subvert it and change it: to reveal its full potential through a new perspective.

Alan Moore did something very similar. He, and others like Will Eisner, took a medium that became very associated with superheroes and some two-dimensional character development and morality and injected a whole different kind of perspective into it: using comics to talk about scholarly, metaphysical, philosophical, sexual, and realistic matters as well as still telling a story. Eisner and Moore are known for bringing the idea of the novel to the comics form and–eventually–leading to a place where a larger audience could access and relate to the stories being made in this medium.

In a way, they were making a new language as all languages are made: through innovation of an older dialect.

Anna Anthropy seems to believe that video games still need to “grow up” and deal with these matters as well: with gender and sexuality and life experiences in an accessible way. And one of these ways is to make the audience for games grow by trying not to make so many exclusive references within a game’s structure. Geeks by their very nature are exclusive in that they tend to know many obscure facts and bits of knowledge and trivia, and I don’t think that is a bad thing.

But I would argue with Anna Anthropy–at least with regards to knowledge and not necessarily that sense of shared social experience–that if a player doesn’t understand one element in a game, there are resources online and elsewhere that they can access to understand what is going on. And I suppose that is why, with regards to Alan Moore, there are so many Annotations of his works out there. I do think that it is more than okay, especially with regards to continuity and art, to make references that a reader doesn’t always understand: provided that there is enough that they do understand and enough impetus for them to go and learn something new.

It is strange how my knee-jerk reaction to seeing other languages in a primarily English language comic is a feeling of exclusion and also this annoyance: as though the author is trying to be pretentious and show how smart they are instead of telling a story that I can relate to. Sometimes I feel it to be very elitist. This is the same with references at times. On the other hand, I know–especially with regards to the latter–that I do the same thing regardless of how well I might explain it, and that I should really take it as a challenge.

I don’t want to be talked down to, but I also don’t like it when things go over my head. And this is me as a reader and–as such–I need to keep it in mind as a writer too. I also, as I said, don’t always succeed.

I like to think that Alan Moore doesn’t write in different languages in his works for the sake of being clever, but he actually does it to keep his characters in character and to maintain a continuity in his world-building. Granted, he could <do what some other creators do and but triangular brackets around dialogue to indicate a different language like so>, or make a different font for those words, but it would not be the same. There is no real solution to that, I’m afraid: not for me anyway.

But there is something that my studies in Philosophy also taught me. Whenever I do come across things I don’t understand, as I said I look them up, or I try to find a speaker of the language. I can tell you that it was enjoyable having a German-speaking friend of mine translate some words to me as I typed them out to her so long ago. And when I don’t get a reference, I consider it a real challenge and it is like an easter-egg hunt that allows me to reread Alan Moore’s text and graphics all over again. And sometimes, I find something new I didn’t get in the first reading.

I would never bring up any of this at a signing–should Alan Moore ever come to Toronto one day and I can access the line–because that is not the time or the place. But I do have this place to talk about it. Alan Moore helped take a medium that people did not always take seriously and made it into some serious literature: and as long as “serious literature” is always questioned, always makes you think, and can function on its own merit– and can take you into another perspective–then it is definitely a past-time, and a calling, that I want to continue for my own: because there is always room for growth.

So hopefully this made sense. My Mythic Bios is another world itself and perhaps a language of differing ideas sometimes reaching critical mass, or becoming exercises in poetry. Or it’s that fine line between talking down, and or being the wind over someone’s scalp. I’ll leave that up to you, my awesome readers.

Depression

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 9 Comments

Warning: This post contains angst. If you want to read something better, witty, geeky, creative and otherwise far less personal, any of my other posts will do. Reader’s discretion is advised.

Do not say I didn’t warn you.

Me and my Head

In 2005, I started writing in this notebook. This was long before I began writing my Mythic Bios notebooks and I was in a very different, uncertain, and unpleasant place in my life. In this particular notebook were a series of fragments, thoughts, aphorisms, and a whole lot of bitterness, anger, and bile.

I called that notebook my Dorian Grey: because that was where I placed most–if not all–of the ugly parts of myself at that time. And it wasn’t enough.

It was never enough.

After a while, I stopped writing in it. I just didn’t want to see it anymore and, eventually, after much bitching and angst I moved past it and turned those fragments into more and more unified stories in my Mythic Bios.

I wanted to forget that first notebook so much that I eventually did. I thought I buried it somewhere else, though later as it turned out it had been in my room at my parents’ house–on my closet shelf–the entire time. I vowed, after a time, to never get into the position where I would write a notebook like that. I promised myself never to create another Dorian Grey again.

That is one of the main reasons I’ve tried not to talk about my personal life on my Writer’s Blog. Even oblique mentions of it seem to verge on breaking my own personal code. But I also realize this might be helpful. It might even show others that, in the immortal words of the Face of Boe, “You are not alone.” So here it is.

I am depressed.

This doesn’t come off as too much of a surprise, I would imagine. I have alluded to it. In fact, in a really dark mood, I once wrote this entire even longer post on what my depression actually entails. But I’ve decided to do something else instead. I’m going to describe what it has been like in a Choose Your Own Adventure style of “You,” instead of “I.” But you don’t get to make decisions: seeing as this isn’t a Twine game. Also, I am going to italicize it: to make it distinct from the rest of this post. So if you have difficulty reading a whole series of paragraphs in italics, please skip this or read something else I wrote on this Journal. Anyway, here goes nothing.

You don’t remember how you got like this exactly. There is one memory, though, that stands out at you. You were young: literally a child. You were at your grandparents’  near the entrance to the house, sitting at the old rickety table and its rotary dial telephone with the living room not that far away. You are pretty happy: because when you are here you are actually safe and it is a refuge from that cold place that is school and other children that you don’t really understand.

And then, as you are waiting–perhaps for some chocolate cake with coconut sprinkles that you have to eat in the kitchen along with the tea and milk you were once able to actually drink without being sick–you feel this … pang go through you. It is a strange feeling: like a reverse orgasm. It is not comfortable. It’s what you will later on know to be a painful moment of clarity: of realization.

You understand that this–all of this around you–is going to go away one day. And there is nothing you can do about it.

That is the earliest memory of the shadow and its melancholic length beginning to stretch down throughout the years to where you are right now. You start to bury yourself in old tape-recorded movies in a futile attempt to keep the past present. You immerse yourself in old books and keep them as friends: for they will be more constant and understanding than any flesh and blood companions you will ever have. You try to ignore your teenage years out of existence through books, said tapes, and video games. But the one thing that none of these elements can save you from is loneliness.

You make friends and somehow they keep moving on with their lives faster than you do. Your family tries to shelter you. It doesn’t help that they are religious and have food restrictions. Nor is it particularly helpful that you were born … different, as people keep telling you: in addition to the ethnicity thing. You don’t learn things the same way that people do and later you strongly suspect that you don’t experience things the same way either.

So you already have this predisposition to not trust the outside world at all. And you will be fighting this impulse with varying degrees of success for the rest of your life. You also are both drawn to people because you do not want to be left behind, and you are repulsed by them because they are not you. But those differences also intrigue you: a lot. This is going to be a running theme for the rest of your life: among other things.

So let’s fast forward this a bit. Finally you manage to gain enough inner strength to move out of your parents’ home: though you do need them for more practical matters from time to time. You get into Grad School with the aid of some people who care about you. You feel like you are making progress. You are slowly subverting and breaking free of all of those self-imposed and outwardly imposed restrictions.

But then there is this to consider. You are an introvert and this particular set of relatively simple and straightforward characteristics as set out in this link describes you very well. You now really have to deal with bureaucracy and its complete and utter ineptness. You have not been raised to deal with it really, and it galls you that you have to let it rule a portion of your life. This is the adulthood that you have unintentionally been fearing and loathing even before you knew about it: when you were so immersed in books and films and games in the vain hopes of trying to avoid it. The very frustration and cold reality that your family and school has been trying to shelter you from relatively until now when, suddenly, you have to deal with this shit a lot on your own.

But you persevere despite it. You even make new friends and new lovers. You get to go anywhere you want relatively at any time that you want. You get to dance. You get to hang around with people without curfews. You are working. You have something not unlike an adult life. 

You realize after a while that the depression is not chemical: as much anything in human behaviour isn’t the result of biochemicals in some way. Your depression is really situational and the results of a personal cycle of behaviour. You get into situations where the person you are trying to be is not the person that you are acting like. You begin to emotionally, as opposed to intellectually understand, that people are not constant beings. It’s not so much that they lie–and some of them do–but they aren’t always the same person. Their lives change too.

You’ve always internalized emotions and what you are feeling now is a lot of anger, sadness, stress, anxiety, resentment, and outright hatred. You’ve been led to believe that it is unseemly to display these emotions: as though it is somehow more mature to be in agony all the time but continue to express that socially acceptable mode of behaviour known as adult irony. You’ve always had headaches and migraines. Your stomach bothers you. You have always been really over-sensitive–hypersensitive–and in the worst case scenario the stress only makes it worse: to the point where your muscle-memory has memorized your anxiety and tenseness, and you’ve realized you have actually been having panic attacks.

In fact: do you remember the characteristics of introversion in the link above? Imagine them magnified even more so. You get to the point where you don’t feel comfortable going outside. You feel ill thinking about being in a social function where no one is giving you that “in” to speak and so you don’t go anymore. And between you and others bashing your personal beliefs–which were rosy yet flimsy things at best–you just stop opening up altogether. You used to like travelling around, and you had a certain degree of confidence. It erodes as you sit and you no longer move.

And this is before you realize that you have been eating up your girlfriend’s money by not getting a job, that you’ve been selfish as fuck, and it is hard to relate to anyone anymore. And those books and the Internet are no longer taking the edge off from reality. You can’t escape anymore: or at least not as well as you could when you were younger.

You realize that there is a terrible consistency in telling certain people that you feel as though they are a part of you when you know–deep down–that you have begun, or you are resuming, to hate yourself. You don’t say what’s on your mind to anyone: not really. You begin to believe that no one has ever really understood you and it is less an element of adolescent angst and more of a matter of fact.

Then you run out of money and you have to move back in with your parents. Your privacy and peace and quiet becomes compromised. But you don’t really leave the house like you used to. You don’t like to go out and you have withdrawn from most people: save those small few who come to visit. It is as though you have spent years trying to overcome your introversion and now you are paying the price by not wanting to move at all.

You are in debt because of your Degree. And after getting a Master’s Degree, you have to go on welfare. You realize that the given moralities of hard-work and debt are things that should be questioned in society rather than simply being accepted. You become dependent on a computer again to socialize and then it breaks down and you need to use the public desktop. You will not go anywhere unless there is an accessible restroom of some sort nearby. Your clothes begin to fray and you neglect yourself because, on some intrinsic level, you don’t give a fuck anymore.

You begin to resemble outside what feel like inside. You remember moments of joy and they become poisoned by what happened after. It is hard to remember actually being happy anymore. People keep intruding on your space and asking the same tired old questions over and over again: despite the fact that you are clearly trying to keep busy. Some others, when you talk to them, say that you are over-exaggerating your “complaints,” and they make you feel like others have it worse than you and you should shut up.

You are looking for work and sending in submissions–and you know that is important–but there are days when you wonder if there is any point to it. Because then the depression really starts talking. It tells you that you will never be “this good,” and that this is “too difficult,” “too much work,” and “too confusing,” and that everything you have ever done does not matter–and never mattered–a damn.

It really gets bad at night. You start to miss people a lot: people you will never really be able to speak with again the way you did. You start to feel tremendous resentment towards the people you wish you had told off. You wonder how many opportunities you let pass by you in your brain fog. You have memories of past life: when you were more confident and more assured and then you look at what you are now. The screaming you feel inside you everyday gets much louder at those times.

It is safe to reiterate two facts: that in those moments you hate the world, and you hate yourself.

Of course, there are the fantasies too. Of going back in time and telling your younger self to do this instead of this, or not to to do this ever. That is, also of course, when you don’t fantasize about going back in time and killing yourself at that moment in life when you were truly happy so that you never, ever have to know about the partially self-made hell waiting for you in the future. At the same time, you also know that were a certain TARDIS come to visit you, you would leave without question or regret: that those people who don’t appreciate your complaining or have gotten tired of it and they can keep their precious world.

You basically feel like you are in a prison. Your therapist flat-out calls you on describing it as thus. And if you were to summarize this long, rambling thing into one sentence: Depression is is a prison of your own making where you only remember dancing, only remember contact, only remember fun, you feel like you lost or are otherwise losing everything you ever cared about, where you suffocate on your own inaction and sense of failure, where you are disappointed when you actually wake up the next morning, where you punish yourself, and anyone that you attempt to meet and socialize will see that cycle of self-entitlement, spite, grief, self-recrimination, and self-absorption you’ve found yourself spiralling into–ingraining itself into your bones–and will politely run for the hills.

Because no one likes a person who does not like themselves.

So, I’m going to end that there because it is way past the whining mark and these things tend to wind out of control once you keep writing about them. It is paradoxically this thing that I have been trying to avoid. I’m not trying to glorify it or make myself out to be this innocent victim of circumstance, but it describes kind of some days in a lifetime, I guess? I guess I just feel like I failed myself in some ways and that I have no one to blame–or perhaps more appropriately hold responsible–but myself.

It isn’t all bad though.

I am seeing a really awesome therapist. And I have a 250-word tax to keep fulfilling and at least a half an hour quota of going outside to remember. I keep filling out a worksheet of places I send work to and to seek employment at. I am researching some free-lancing opportunities. And I also speaking with some people from my past again.

I guess I am ironically making a routine for myself: something I sorely lacked when I lived on my own. If I learned anything from my girlfriend before I had to move out, it is that routines can be our friends. As such, I don’t like to deviate from it much. I don’t like to be pushed, or trapped in a small space with someone who likes to control things but to go about matters at my own pace. I’m also working on sleeping better and I am eating better too.

There is another positive even in the negative. I just finished reading Paradise Lost and remembered that part where Satan realizes, even when he escapes Hell, that he carries Hell with him: inside of him. After having the occasion to revisit some of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, I realized that we all do the same. And this fact, my personal hell, gives me the power to motivate and keep making things: to create some kind of … meaning out of all of this. Someone once told me that I create beauty and pain is an excellent material to craft beautiful things from as any kind of creator might tell you. It is one of my sources–if not my central source–of power.

But there is one more thing I want to mention: something that I specifically want to leave you all with. During the period of the Dorian Grey, I was talking with a counsellor at my University about something job-related and she also flat-out called me on being depressed. She told me to make a point of writing about three constructive things that I do in a day. And eventually, after a while, I realized that helps too.

So Dorian Greys can be necessary when you need to purge things out of you, or begin to unleash Hell on Earth, but remembering the useful things you’ve done–the positive and affirmative things you’ve done, no matter how small they seem to be–can be just as invaluable: if not more so.

ETA: If you’d like, please read this link about the care of extroverts. It seems that this world is becoming, or has always been, difficult for the both of us.

Be Careful What You Search For: The Doctor as Psyche

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ Leave a comment

Disclaimer: There be spoilers here.

I’m not going to go into an indepth analysis and look at a particular Doctor Who episode. The fact is: it is an exhausting process and I know I will be missing something from it when I’m done. But there is one theme that has really caught my eye and is really, aside from the weird and zany adventures with elements of grandiosity the central focus of The Doctor as of right now.

The mystery of Clara Oswin Oswald or, in The Doctor’s own words, “The only mystery worth solving.”

So there we are. The scenario is already set and clear: as much as any Doctor Who plot really is. And now I am going to make a mythological allusion: mainly talking about what this quest and its potential results actually reminds me of. It is only fitting that in the last episode of Doctor Who “Hide,” that The Doctor said something to the effect that, “It isn’t a ghost story after all — it’s a love story.” And when he said, I said under my breath, “Yes, Doctor. It really is.”

So is the Myth of Psyche and Eros. There are many variations of the myth itself, but essentially what happens is that there is a princess named Psyche who–through various circumstances–ends up married to the love god Eros (or Cupid as he is better known): though she does not know this. In fact, until her fateful decision, she never even sees what he looks like. Not really. One of the admonitions that Cupid gives her, in fact, is that she is not allowed to look at him.

Don’t blink.

Of course, as I and many others have stated with regards to “The Snowmen,” this myth too sounds an awful lot like a fairytale: and indeed a lot of myths and parables in various ages do. There is always that one thing the character is told not to do, or is made difficult to find and of course–human and sentient nature being what it is–the character eventually seeks it out. As something of an aside, I also think it is very remarkable in that Psyche’s myth may be one of the few in existence where a mortal woman has a recognized heroic quest–complete with various tasks–in pursuing a male deity as opposed to the other way around.

Now, Psyche and The Doctor are not that alike at all. There are different circumstances, goals, influences, character genders, and fears involved on the surface. Psyche is “sacrificed” to a “dragon that harasses the world” due to a vision that an oracle gave her royal father of whom she would marry. There are gods involved. Cupid likes Psyche as well: after being sent to punish her by his mother Venus (the Roman Aphrodite). Psyche is relatively inexperienced with regards to the world and marriage. She is innocent. And it is only when others ask her who her husband is and if he is attempting to deceive her by masking his “hideousness” that she attempts to look at and potentially kill him if she doesn’t like what she sees. So literally, Psyche and Cupid, and The Doctor and Clara are entirely different situations.

Figuratively though …

The Doctor from the very beginning knows that there is something very odd about Clara Oswin Oswald. She should not exist. She was made into Dalek in “Asylum of the Daleks” and then she died, and then she was a Victorian governess in “The Snowmen” and also died. He then realizes that she can potentially exist in another timeline as the same person and species. There seem to be forces that are getting him to find her after some of his own recent losses. He is both fascinated and afraid to find the truth of her. Perhaps when, in “Hide,” the psychic tells Clara that The Doctor has “a sliver of ice in his heart” she is really saying that there has been so much grief that he has a certain level of objectivity and dispassion as a result of that. Remember, in “The Snowmen,” it was a Christmas episode with the TARDIS in the clouds and The Doctor living there away from all people. Even the interior of the TARDIS looks like a cold metal form of ice.

That “sliver” could be fear, but it may be one of those forces that influences him to “figure Clara out,” while trying to maintain a distance. At the same time, The Doctor always loves to solve mysteries and this is one he cannot resist for a variety of reasons: not the least of which being that this “mystery” seems to like him back. A lot. And there are gods involved in the Whovian Universe–although they are known as different things like Eternals, and “sun parasite-gods”–and The Doctor, like Psyche, has had some adventures into the Underworld: not the least of which being his Regenerations and some of the other places he has found himself in.

Psyche had a lantern and a knife to take with her into the Underworld. The Doctor has his own tool.

I do hope though–probably in vain–that this loose comparison ends here. That when The Doctor finds and brings the metaphorical lantern to see Clara in the darkness that, well … it doesn’t end as badly for him as it almost did with Psyche. But knowing The Doctor’s track record and what the Universe likes to do to him: I am a bit concerned.

Because Clara could be a lot of things. She could be, as some fans have posited, The Dalek Emperor reformed by Rose as the incarnation of the Bad Wolf to be a companion for The Doctor as she predicted her importance and absence from his life in that brief time she absorbed The Heart of the TARDIS. She could be a Dalek or alien-made replicant. Maybe she is another aspect of The Great Intelligence. She could also be an avatar of the returning Eternals for all we know. She could also be Romana: the Time Lady that The Doctor once spent considerable time with. Or, when The Master was disintegrating towards his confrontation with the Time Lords, the resulting closure of the time-warp could have fractured and Regenerated him into a new form existing throughout time and space: and we know now that Time Lords can change sex and gender.

Or, much worse:

Clara Oswin Oswald could very just well be Clara Oswin Oswald in the way that she is–human–and existing in different time periods and places. And by dissecting her mystery, The Doctor could drive her away from him and leave him right back where he started. Alone.

And then maybe he will search for her, as Psyche did Cupid, and go through another adventure or so. Or may be I am just reading too much into this. Perhaps that “sliver of ice” might grow again into something more awful in that isolation. We all know that The Doctor cannot be alone for too long. And imagining that shard of ice becoming a glacial heart within the being of The Valeyard … is not too far off the mark when you wonder just how much more hearts-break can The Doctor take before he completely loses it.

Of course, this is as always mere conjecture and as Doctor Who stories go, it will be something completely unexpected. But The Doctor might want to remember something else. As Neil Gaiman has written in Sandman, there is a difference between a secret and a mystery. A secret is a truth that is waiting to reveal itself. A mystery is something–or in this case someone–that just is. And I hope more than anything that he takes a mystery to be someone and gets to know Clara as she is and that the beautiful knowledge of it does not destroy him and leave him alone in the ashes.

ETA: As an aside, the following is a teaser photo from the episode “Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS.” I’ll bet you all Whovians will want to read this.

It’s too bad it probably won’t be in chronological order.

Observations of a Part-Time Poet

~ matthewkirshenblatt ~ 2 Comments

Believe it or not, I don’t make poetry often. In fact, poems like Berserker and Necromancer usually come very rarely to me and it is even less often these days that I will post them up publicly for other people to see.

Poetry is not easy for me. It is neither easy to force out nor easy to ignore. It can even be harder to read.

Most of the time when I read prose, I read it silently or skim sentences to absorb the whole and get a greater picture to form in my mind. It is hard for me to explain that in any other way, but that is how it is.

Then there is poetry. I used to avoid it like the plague. I once thought that it was all supposed to be formula and rhyme and iambic pentametre all the time. I only rhyme when I want to be clever, make fake prophecies, or when I am exhausted beyond belief: which is more often than I’m going to talk about. I also used to think it had to be sappy and sentimental and all about those dreaded, diabolical things known to and feared by all humankind as … feelings … ;P

Of course, the wonderful thing about poetry that I had the privilege to learn is that it is the ultimate experimental game of language. You can crystallize whole nuances and depths of thought and emotion into as fewest words as possible. If you are really good at it, you can describe a world in a sentence, discover the rhythm of a very catchy phrase or aphorism (a one-line philosophical quote or word of wisdom to make you look smarter than you really are), actually turn a phrase like a musical note, and word-smithing: actually create entirely new words and meanings from old and strange and wonderful things.

I’ll also tell you this: I’m not sure when I started talking as I write or type, but it helps to catch that rhythm and make things sound far less clunky: though I still manage to ramble and not always make sense anyway. Maybe in some part this is because of some of the poetry that I was encouraged to write and then occasionally have to give vent to.

When you write and read poetry, you really have to read it out loud. That is what I have been doing with John Milton’s Paradise Lost so far. Sometimes it feels like I am chanting from a magical tome and somehow making the energy I find in there mine. What really gets to me is that a lot of the time, aside from the fact that some poetry can be very highly metaphorical and charged with so many symbols verging to the point of attempting to record the speed of thought, feeling, observation, and experience is the structure of a stanza.

You know what I’m talking about: stacks of compact, small sentences stacked above each other and separated by line breaks. You can look at my poem above and see that I gave it a stanza organization: though this one doesn’t rhyme and is more free-verse. What I mean by free-verse is that it is not a form poem: I’m not trying to make a sonnet, or a haiku, or a limerick. As an aside, I’ve been told that my form-based poetry is actually better than my free-verse. I’m also told, and I can see that I use a lot of heightened diction. What I mean by that, and what my former teachers also meant is that I use a lot of big words. Either way, I’m just trying to communicate.

But for some reason I know that I myself will be tempted to try and gloss a narrow stanza-arranged poem like I would a piece of prose and my mind will just not get it. Reading a poem like prose can feel like a real chore, and I know I can get frustrated by this seemingly deceptive short piece of writing that you sometimes think you can just scan through and is actually much denser than its “light-weight” stanza arrangement leads you to believe.

So yeah: in case you’ve been skimming past terms like “stanzas,” and such in this post, maybe what I’m saying is that poetry is like Mithril or Valyrian steel: deceptively slight but it packs a punch when it lands a hit or a graze to the mind.

I would definitely not like to get hit with a psychic conceptual weapon made of a poem: though I would definitely like to make one. Take from that imagery what you will.

I’m actually a fan of poetry that shapes itself like prose into sentence structures. You still have to keep reading it very closely, but it just seems more charged and potent for it. The line between poetry and prose is very blurry and I suspect that the first came well before the second.

When I actually think about it more, I wonder if that is how our minds work: if our thoughts are images and impressions that function on a kind of intuitive continuity. And I like that word: intuition. Maybe poetry is from that time when the words were just forming from the symbols and images in our heads that attempted to come into being through our voices and our scrawling. Maybe we dream in poetry and that is why sometimes it takes certain states of mind to understand it differently from one day to the next.

It can be primordial, or mathematically-precise, or the fragments of a life, or whatever it is you need it to be. I tend to think of poetry as a state of mind or perception of reality that can help you write, speak, and express yourself better. But whatever it is, I think is part of the root of creative writing and the clay of expression and as such it is very important. So you may see more of my poems on here at some point. We shall see.