The Letter M

[sistermagpie]

It's the letter meme that I'm seeing all over my f'list! fictualities has given me M. The idea being that someone gives you a letter and you list ten things beginning with it, and you explain what these things mean to you.


I might as well start with the most obvious M:

M is for Magpies.
Just last weekend lunacy exactly what was up with the magpie thing, and I had to think to remember how it started. I believe it was a story I wrote a long time ago, which had a Princess Magpie in it, and the name always stuck with me even if the story didn't. It was sort of an impulse when I chose it for a screen name, but one of those impulses that clicked like "Of course!" In the years since I've started identifying with them more and more, and reading more and more about them. They are, like their corvid cousins the crow and the raven, very smart, funny and cool. Latest fun fact learned about them: in the Ghost Dance of the Plains Indians, the crow, the eagle and the magpie were honored. I could go on and on about them--aren't you lucky I won't!

M is for Marigold
Marigold is my roommate's dog, but honors me by acknowledging my presence even though I don't feed her or walk her. (Her personal name for me being "No Can Hands.") She is the most popular living being in a fifty mile radius and has been known to literally stop traffic with her looks. (Whether wearing her fluffy winter coat or shaved for the sporty summer look.) Despite the beauty, she's the kind of girl not afraid to stick her head in a garbage can for some old gum, or make old man noises when she feels like it.

M is for Meditation
I've apparently got kind of a talent for it. You can't do much with a talent for sitting still quietly but it got me a close-up on Wonderama when I was about seven years old. I've tried lots of different kinds, but probably the one I like the best is Vipassana Meditation, which I came to hear about in an odd way. You can do retreats where you spend 10 days meditating all the time, and you don't talk or read or write or eat all that much. The best part? I had these awesome dreams about the ocean. (The worst part: waking up at 4AM in a cold tent--yuck.)

M is for Mentos
When I was in high school I had a bad Mento addiction. I had so many empty Mento wrappers I started compulsively saving them (okay, hoarding them--see M is for Magpie). I don't even know how many I had but let's just say my friends were nice enough to find it eccentric in an amusing way. I am far more mature now, of course, and no longer am surrounded by Mentos. Except for the two boxes in my drawer. And the one in my mouth.

M is for Mercy
I think compassion is the strongest basis for a moral system, and mercy is awesome. I don't mean awesome like “totally cool” but awesome as in truly inspiring a mixed emotion of reverence, respect, dread, and wonder stirred by authority, genius, great beauty, sublimity, or might." When Frodo shows mercy to Saruman, and Saruman says he has grown "wise and cruel?" He's right. Frodo is such a badass there. A well played act of true mercy is like an arrow through the heart.

M is for Mementos and Memory
I read about a kind of behavior in a book once that was one of those "OMG, I didn't know anyone else but me did that! It described that some people feel more connected to those who are absent than those who are present. They have experiences not while something is happening, but when they review their mental slides at home, or look over keepsakes they have as props for memory. These "totems" or mementos can serve as a release mechanisms for reawakening the whole event in their imagination.

Well, that's me. I don't even know how some people manage to be, like, fully present in life. Even when I am fully present it's probably because I'm making myself be that way (see: M is for Meditation). But afterwards I'm all about the memory and I have lots of objects that mean things, a collection of important objects like a lot of little Proustian Madeleines. I wonder if this is why people I know are always telling me I have this fantastic memory. I'll say, "Oh, it's like that time when you..." and they won't remember it. But that scares me, because why don't they remember these things? To me that makes them who they are--why would you not remember something? Of course nobody remembers *everything* but it sometimes seems like people literally do memory dumps when they reach a new phase of life so stuff that was kind of important is just deleted.

M is for Magic
I've been thinking about this recently because I've been writing something with magic in it. Up until recently I've totally avoided writing about magic. I said it was because I felt self-conscious, but I now realize that was because I find fictional magic an incredibly intimate thing. That is, it's hard to write about it without revealing something of yourself. I see it in HP fanfic when people deal with magic in their fics. Often HP writers won't deal much with magic at all, but when they do it's almost always off. Not always in a bad way, it's just that as soon as people start creating new magical ideas they start revealing something of themselves that isn't the author. Sometimes they create rituals, which don't exist in HP. Or they create these great Gothic-y stuff that I *wish* were in the Potterverse when I read them. Or they'll create some big system of calling on gods or fairies or elementals or whatever. For me, magic immediately lets the fic author's voice come through more than anything else.

I don't know what it says about the person, exactly, but it says something.

M is for Macabre
I've always been into the macabre, from before kindergarten, and I'm not sure why. I'm thankful that my parents were okay with this. I remember my mom once saying something about how she hated this stuff but if I didn't have nightmares and I wasn't showing any signs it was disturbing me she couldn't think of a good reason to forbid it. Last year she gave me this nice little picture from the shop where she works that's a sketch of a graveyard-looking place--how far she's come! Horror movies, graveyards, ghosts, memorial photography, everything with darkness. (I could have included Mother, Moon, Monsters, Mystical, Mystery, Murder...) I think it kind of connects somehow to the mementos and memory, since I can remember a lot of times where I've thought I had to remember this really well because everyone would get old and die.

M is for Meta
In the fandom sense of course. Is there a word for people who compulsively Meta? I like taking it apart, seeing how it fits together, seeing how every strand of thought comes together or makes things happen. Probably it's just the way I feel comfortable in the world in general--if I can understand it, I can handle it. Which is weird because I at least claim to have a healthy respect for chaos and know how important it is. No growth without it, etc. But that's probably a little bit of a fake-out because if I put chaos in its proper place it's not much chaos.

Comments

[strangemuses.livejournal.com]

I've always been into the macabre, too, since early childhood in fact. Some of my earliest memories are of watching old Universal horror movies with my dad when I was around five.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

I swear the first movie I remember seeing was "Willard" on TV. It's funny when people assume that kids have to be disturbed by them. Some kids are, of course, but it's just a story. It's not like you think movies are real whether they're happy or scary or sad.

[strangemuses.livejournal.com]

I believe it's possible that young children may believe that that characters in movies, tv, stories, etc., are real, though in a slightly different way that they know the "real" (tangible, physical) world to be. Particularly toddlers and really little kids, though I've even known older children (8, 9, 10) to still be accepting of the possibility that movie/tv characters are "real" in a strange way, even 'obviously' fake movie characters, like Godzilla. A couple of years ago I was watching a Godzilla movie with some kids (aged 4-9) and they asked if Godzilla was real. Just kidding, I told them yes, that Godzilla and the other big monsters and their families lived on Monster Island, which was close to Japan, and that they would go and film movies once in a while and then go back to their houses on Monster Island. Every one of those kids believed me! Their mother called me a week later in a sort of half amused/half annoyed mood and told me that she had to explain to her (now very disappointed) children that Monster Island wasn't real and they couldn't go there to see Godzilla and Godzuki and the other baby monsters. :)

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Whoops--that is a good point. I honestly can't ever really worrying that monsters etc. were real in the real way. Err..what I mean is, I of course worried that they were at times, but I have no memory of, like, thinking these things were factual instead of a movie. But my memory might not be perfect here. It's hard to put yourself into a mindset where you believe things you don't know.

However, if an adult told me something was real I might be much more inclined to believe it.

[strangemuses.livejournal.com]

Yeah, especially considering adults tell children lies about "fictional" people all of the time. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy...

*refrains from adding dieties of any religion to this list*

I do know that when I was really little, I was absolutely terrified of the Frankenstein Monster. I had nightmares about it until I was in my teens. No amount of telling me that it wasn't real prevented me from having those nightmares. Didn't stop me from adoring horror movies though. One of my earliest childhood crushes was on poor Renfield from the Universal Dracula movie. I always felt so sorry for him.

[samaranth.livejournal.com]

Most little kids can't make that distinction quite so easily. The ability to delineate between fact and fantasy kicks in properly by about age 7 (depending on the child.)

Going on my own experience with kids and TV the things that frighten them aren't the obviously macabre ones, (although you might be asked 'did this really happen?')it's the things that possibly could happen to them in their own lives - war, violence in the home, parental discord, that kind of thing. They're more bothered by news bulletins than by stories/movies, usually.

(Although I had nightmares about The Blob for a very long time.)

[serriadh.livejournal.com]

I always knew that movies weren't 'real', but I had a bigger problem with books. Except I knew they didn't exist in my world... it more like, when I was reading the book, as though I were existing in their world and it was a bit odd to come back to this one.
I remember my Grandma telling me a story about how I was reading a Narnia book for the first time (I must have been 5 or 6) and she interrupted me to tell me dinner was ready. Apparently I was completely fazed - I had no idea where I was, what she was doing there, etc.
After that, she alerted my parents and my other grandparents and they didn't interrupt me like that until I was much older - they made lots of noise walking up to me and coughed and stuff so I gradually came back to them.
lol - but maybe I was just too into it all. That hardly happens to me at all any more (I'm 21 now), though I can still be reading a book and not hear anything else.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

It's funny when people assume that kids have to be disturbed by them.

The movie that scared me the most... or was it one of those televsion serials like Outer Limits?... involved some ice demon or monster or whatever terrifying an outpost in Antarctica, I think it was. I was scared silly as the tension mounted. The one Brave Scientist went out into the blizzard to check on the people in the next building. Then there was a knock at the door, and they opened it to find {{{A Faceless Eskimo!!!}}}

This is when my mother turned it off. I was five, it was near my bedtime, and it was obviously scaring the goodness out of me.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. That bothered me more than The Crawling Eye, or THEM!, or any of the Draculas, or Frankenstein, or the Wolfman movies. {{{Not Knowing!!!}}} if those poor scientists were thrown through walls and blanched by radiation just bugged the heck out of me for decades. I finally caught it just within the last couple of years and watched the entire scene. My tastes have changed, and as soon as I found out that

SPOILER

the 'faceless Eskimo' was the scientist who had gone out into the blizzard and got his report, I switched over to something more interesting to me now.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

OH yeah--and the thing is you never know what's going to disturb a kid. I remember a TV movie where a woman had a dream about a clock in a desert and that image always scared me. Why? Who knows? When I was working in publishing I once got a letter from a mother complaining because our Spot books had a TV show based on them. On the TV show the animation didn't give the dog family mouths. So they'd just walk up and sort of move their heads and speak to each other (iirc in polite little English accents). For some reason this freaked her toddler out. And she wrote a letter like we'd done this on purpose.

[seductivedark.livejournal.com]

Yes, we never do know what goes on in someone else's head. Or even our own. THEM! was just another sci-fi film for me, but the beginning of it always got me. The way that kid screamed out the title was certainly memorable. That, and we had a drain outlet in the vacant lot near our house that looked *ahem* eerily familiar.

I always tell my kids, and now the grandkids, that these are just movies. They're made for fun. Godzilla is an actor in a suit. I think kids understand that concept. They always go off later on to pretend they're the monster, or the army guys, or the scientists, even if parents don't mention the play-acting.

That was a crazy lady, the one with the toddler who was scared of the mouthless dogs. She could have told him or her that dogs can read each other's minds (the only thing I can think of offhand). But, to each her own, I guess. And so many people are just lookning for a reason to believe someone's out to get them and theirs any more.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

From the way she reacted I wonder if she even bothered to *talk* to the kid about what bothered him so she could make him feel better herself. Much better to just write an angry letter to the American publisher.:-)

Oddly, we had another book that used to freak kids out--and sometimes they'd like it and then it would later bother them. Whichever the way it was this one picture that kids always focused on. It was in this book about a zookeeper where the animals all follow him home. There was a page where he goes to sleep and he says "good-night" to his wife and he hears all these "good-night's" from all the animals. He opens his eyes in surprise and the picture is all black with just the eyes. That was the page kids focused on. Sometimes they'd think it was hilarious and then grow to be afraid of it. Sometimes the opposite. But that picture fascinated them. A lot of kids referred to the book as simply, "The Eyes."

[sunnyskywalker]

I know exactly what you mean about liking to take things apart, and handling things you understand better! I think people notice that trait in me mostly with regards to bad books and movies - I can't just not like them and let it go; I sit around and obsessively analyze why I didn't like them, and what I would have preferred, and why I would have preferred it...

And it's weird, since I'm usually pretty sunshiny in my tastes, but I do have a bit of a macabre streak. Probably related to my uncle telling me Edgar Allen Poe bedtime stories when I was five.

That's a good point about the magic. So many people completely change the feel of the magic in HP. I'm not sure quite what it means either. I'll have to think about it.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

LOL! I've had that same thing with my friends. One person I know has a long running joke about me and the movie Grease 2. I must have wound up watching some of it on TV once and it made no sense to me. She was like, "Stop trying to analyze it so it makes sense! It's just a bad movie!" But it's so hard for me to do that!

[yourpoison.livejournal.com]

Hehe, I am always reassured by how similar our value systems are :> :> (That is such a weird thing to say, I know.) Mercy was a word I was really fascinated with at one point-- just the sound of it; 'like an arrow through the heart', yeah. I think some of the major frustrations in my life is people insisting on 'justice' while forgetting mercy; it's worst because people keep thinking justice = find the 'bad guy' and blame him for everything, case closed. That really pisses me off, but what bothers me more is that most people don't see anything wrong with it. Of course, it's also bothersome when my definition of 'compassion' diverges from other people's; like, for me it's more a question of empathy & understanding-and-letting-go, whereas for a lot of people it's justice again, somehow, with 'only compassion for the right (victim) person in the right (justified) manner'. That whole 'deserving it' thing. Annoying.

MAGIC. Yeah :> Reminds me of the last panel of Books of Magic, the mini-series, where Tim says that word. It might be my favorite word (and concept) in like, the universe :D Better than art, better than poetry, better than nature, better than love. MAGIC. I know what you mean about the intimacy of it in fanfic; I haven't used it much in fic 'cause I don't write plotty stuff much, but I think if I did finish my more fanciful stories, they would've been revealing. I think in original stuff, I do write about it -because- it's so intimate & revealing of self, a mirror of desire-- if one uses writing in a cathartic manner, magic rivals dreams as a way to symbolize one's subconscious self. I think writing dream sequences gets a similar effect but is often 'too obvious' in a different way; magic is active rather than passive (dreams), also, and has the power of desire manifest, so it's dangerous in that sense, addictive & beguiling. I think a lot of people show how unimaginative or predictable their dreams are by the fact that their magic is boring.

I do the experiencing-through-memory thing too, though I use writing rather than mementos; meaning, I write it out, one way or the other, if it's important to me. I can be fully present, though, but yeah, when I try to be or when I'm not emotionally threatened by the presence. Like... how would you say you were when we were talking recently? I'm curious about this :> I think there are percentages; not 100%, but somewhat present. I don't think I've ever -really- been 100% with another person, but then it's just sort of difficult because another person muddies my emotions & reactions a lot.

Hee. Meta-addicts; yeah... something like over-intellectual? It's almost on the tip of my tongue, ahhh.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

The compassion thing drives me crazy. As soon as people talk about earning compassion I'm like...that's not compassion. It's supposed to be, like you said, feeling for the other person. You can't help but yourself in their shoes. If you're just granting leniency because they've earned it by doing something you approve of, that's looking at justice again. Also you're not supposed to be getting points for yourself. So whenever people talk about how great it is that X character, like, doesn't kill somebody in a scene it's like...um, you don't get a medal for doing the right thing just because you could do the wrong thing.

think in original stuff, I do write about it -because- it's so intimate & revealing of self, a mirror of desire-- if one uses writing in a cathartic manner, magic rivals dreams as a way to symbolize one's subconscious self. I think writing dream sequences gets a similar effect but is often 'too obvious' in a different way; magic is active rather than passive (dreams), also, and has the power of desire manifest, so it's dangerous in that sense, addictive & beguiling. I think a lot of people show how unimaginative or predictable their dreams are by the fact that their magic is boring.

Yes! And I love the way different writers obviously compare it to different things. Like Susan Cooper gets nothing out of the performance of magic, but she's really into the idea of knowing how to talk to things or understanding everything. It's based on something totally different than say, an author who makes magic about sacficing something to make something happen. In HP it's kind of connected to...I don't know how to explain it. It's about personal power, I think. Not always in a bad way, but the way that when Harry learns new magic it's like he's developing as a person, he's becoming competent. For other people it's communining with forces beyond our control, stuff like that.

Like... how would you say you were when we were talking recently? I'm curious about this :> I think there are percentages; not 100%, but somewhat present. I don't think I've ever -really- been 100% with another person, but then it's just sort of difficult because another person muddies my emotions & reactions a lot.

I think I was pretty present! *pats self on back* But probably because I was interested in the conversation and it was one-on-one. Like when I'm doing Meta I'm very focused on that, and the best conversations for me are like that, where I'm actually interested. So I wasn't, like, drifting off.:

[slinkhard.livejournal.com]

an author who makes magic about sacficing something to make something happen.

I've not read a lot of fantasy, but I'm partial to the old ideal of 'three times three' of whatever energy you send out, you have to be prepared to recieve it back.
With HP, I always prefer the even numbered books, one of those being CoS, which everyone else seems to hate; but in particular, I'm fond of the broken wand. It's just a great tool for true (and cruel) justice, which isn't present often in the series. No bias, you just get back what you put out.
(I suppose there are little hints of the rule in other parts of the books - the wands locking, Harry and Draco cursing each other's friends in GoF, the train hexing reversal in HBP, the SNEAK hex..., but it's all pretty exaggerated and infrequent.)

[slinkhard.livejournal.com]

it got me a close-up on Wonderama when I was about seven years old.

That's adorable! LOL.

I've always been into the macabre, from before kindergarten, and I'm not sure why.

Teeny goth!Magpie. ;)

Yeah, me too. I got to pick an outing for my 9th birthday, and my grandparents were horrified that my choice was The London Dungeon.
(Plus I'd get a bit of stick from teachers at school, since it was Church of England and some of them would get funny over me reading Point Horror or whatever.)

I'm thankful that my parents were okay with this. I remember my mom once saying something about how she hated this stuff

My mum says the same. But oddly enough, she's really into 'emotional porn' type angsty films/books, which would disturb me much more. Nothing suits her better than settling down with a book about a terminal illness!

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

Heh--the magazine where I work we often describe as porn because yeah, it's the same thing. Build up, climax, release...just instead of sex it's something else.

I so love that you went to the London Dungeon. I love that place! So goofy! And getting more elaborate over the years. Not like the old days when you just walked around and looked at people dying of the plague. *shakes cane*

Re: my Wonderama experience, I was picked with a bunch of kids to stare at a guy while he sang something. We were told to, like, look like we were really interested. I can't remember who the guy was, but when they introduced him they said he'd played at Woodstock. So if anybody ever saw the clip they should know that when I look fascinated I'm staring at this guy trying to figure out what he had to do with Snoopy's friend the little yellow bird.

[samaranth.livejournal.com]

The London Dungeon is the destination of choice for the discerning 9 year old...