You're the fisher king who saw the hanged man

[sovay]

There were two and a half sets of Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising Sequence in the house when I was a child, one mixed set of British paperbacks and hardcovers and one later set of American paperbacks and then a couple of duplicates because you never know when you will need to lend one out. I grew up on them from the time I was eleven and received the Collier paperback of The Dark Is Rising (1973) for my birthday. Their number diminished slightly over the years, as a couple of the copies we lent out never came back; recently my mother has been loaning the spare-er survivors to the children across the street (and then carefully isolating them for a sufficient number of days on return). I myself seem to own copies only of Greenwitch (1974) and The Grey King (1975), which does not help when I want to re-read the entire sequence because I cannot clear my head of the line "Tonight will be bad, and tomorrow will be beyond all imagining." Are we at some kind of midsummer rising, all the more dangerous because it is happening in the bright days where everyone can see it plain and clear as pieces on a chessboard? I keep thinking of Silver on the Tree (1977) where the Black Rider is finally joined by the White, two inhuman figures of extremes because the shades of grey are where the Light gets in, as opposed to the poles of the Dark where humans turn "blinded by their own shining ideas or locked up in the darkness of their own heads." If there is a Rider abroad, it must be the White Rider, mantled in that treacherous killing purity. Caradog Prichard could never have been a poet, but I am beginning to think we got him as President.

Comments

[julian]

This post makes me reverberate like a tuning fork.

[genarti]

Yeah.

[alchimie]

Yes, this.

[sovay]

This post makes me reverberate like a tuning fork.

*hugs*

[coraline]

....you are so right and that is horrible (and beautifully written, because it is you.)

[sovay]

....you are so right and that is horrible (and beautifully written, because it is you.)

Thank you. I'm sorry.

[selkie]

*seal-throat-noise*
It’s a real test living in a revolution.

[sovay]

It’s a real test living in a revolution.

If I knew how to call Tethys, I'd do it. I hope that's not what the rising seas are all about.

[selidor]

I have a well-worn Penguin sequence edition that is the same age as me; its cover a stained-glass window of drowned land and tree and protagonists. Opened to part of Silver on the Tree and Stephen was taking on a racist neighbour, "the channel down which the powers of the Dark, if they gained their freedom, could ride in an instant to complete control of the earth". For all that this scene and so much of the rest ends in hope, sometimes as a writer she saw far too clearly.

[sovay]

Opened to part of Silver on the Tree and Stephen was taking on a racist neighbour, "the channel down which the powers of the Dark, if they gained their freedom, could ride in an instant to complete control of the earth".

I remember that scene.

For all that this scene and so much of the rest ends in hope, sometimes as a writer she saw far too clearly.

I have no doubt it was useful to be taught at a young age how many different shapes the Dark could take, and how many of them could look quotidian or beloved. But I am still left feeling like nothing I did knowing what was coming changed it.