Many things that I am needing to keep me singing

[sovay]

I have awesome friends. A few days ago, deadcities_icon sent me his stunning cybersexpunk calendar del.ici.ous tension: a digital romance, and today in the mail I received a packet of decaf masala chai from strange_selkie. Oddly enough, I feel better already. You guys rock.

I'm re-reading Tanith Lee's Sung in Shadow (1983), which I first discovered in late high school and which has slunk into my subconscious from time to time since then. I can't shake the feeling that, as a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, it's drawn more from Zeffirelli's 1968 film than from the bare play itself—particularly in the contrasts and relationship of its Romeo and Mercutio, the dark and beautiful Romulan Montargo, who is more innocent than he likes to think, and the older, fair-haired, sardonically unstable Flavian "Mercurio" Estemba. If so, I suppose it's nice to know that I wasn't the only one who fell in love with John McEnery's Mercutio.

"Why not anticipate? What else have we of free will but anticipation?" Mercurio, arguing for the discussion's sake, questioning nothing, believing very little, mesmerizing the guardsman as a matter of course, smiled gravely at him. "A man, young or old, may go to bed healthy, wake at dawn with a pain like a knife in his side, and be laid in a box by sunset. Or a man may cut his thumb on an awl, a scratch no bigger than a cherry pit, and he may sicken of that, and take that road to a box. Or the earth may shake, as it did here, ten years past, stones fall on your noodle and brain you. Or a plague may breed in the very air. Who can outrun plague? Oh, all roads lead to boxes. It is a chancy business, life. And so, my friend, we kill each other on the streets, the pith of the thing being Surprise! Amazement! My Lady Death, we are before you."

"Death's a woman, then?"

"Love and death, women both. Trust neither."

The grinding, soaring street cry of the whores wafted up again from over the walls. Mercurio, taking it as a bizarre accompaniment, began to sing a courtly love melody of the Higher Town.

"Dance with me while time is yet slow,
Clocks run faster far than you know;
Wear your rose flesh like a glove
For roses wither. Fear it, love."

His voice cut through all like a gold wire, through time, place, dust, heat and faith. A girl on a balcony averted her eyes from him superstitiously, among the terra-cotta pots of flowers. Romulan looked at him, entranced. None of them had heard a verse sung better, or a love song more like a knell.

"A rose will bloom; it then will fade . . ."

Comments

[norilana.livejournal.com]

For me, the first of hers was The Birthgrave. Since then she has become my goddess.

[sovay]

I didn't read The Birthgrave until relatively late: I think I found it sometime mid-college (after I'd read Vazkor, Son of Vazkor, which a friend had gotten for me). It is, however, a phenomenal novel. If you describe the plot and the setting, it's a very characteristic science fantasy of the late 1970's, such as Andre Norton might have written—but the language is something else.

[norilana.livejournal.com]

Indeed it was the language that stood out so much that I think it impressed me like a brand. Till this day, I feel some kind of impact in the back of my head, a tangible shiver when I think of that book. Of course then I found all her others... :-)

In addition to the language, it was also the beauty and the grace, the elegance of the characters. They really are beautiful, all of them. And proud, unlike anything...

[sovay]

Till this day, I feel some kind of impact in the back of my head, a tangible shiver when I think of that book.

That's what happened to me with The Secret Books of Paradys. I'd seen The Book of the Dead for years in the local library, but I'd never read more than the first few pages in fragments; I'd picked up the paperback reprint of The Book of the Damned in a bookstore, but hadn't read more than the first few pages of "Malice in Saffron." But sometime in my senior year of high school, I became curious: so I ordered them all through interlibrary loan and read the entire quartet in two days.

I remember sitting on the couch, fascinated, reading The Book of the Damned in a sort of absorbed trance. (To be fair, Robert Graves' I, Claudius had the same effect on me.) I still can't pinpoint quite what makes the books work for me as they do. It's not only the language, it's the whole atmosphere of the world and its smoky mercury-shadow of transgression, boundaries that shift and slide, twilight always falling and nothing stays the same when you look at it again. And the characters, who are human and recognizable among all the shadowy, fever-burning strangeness. Sexuality and liminality. If you want to stay within Decadent terms, it was Dorian Gray's "poisoned with a book." I was so happy.

[norilana.livejournal.com]

How true! Reading Lee does something to put you in a trance, especially the first time you discover her, and the mind makes a comparison to other authors' books you might have read recently and how they all suddenly pale into drab insignificance by contrast!

I think it's the combination of very aprt characterization, haughty beautiful people, elegance, grand style, a true evocation of wonder in the ancient sense, and just everything working together so well to make a cabochon jewel that is so smooth on the outside and holds a mini-world in its smoky depths.

Must... stop... posting! :-)

[sovay]

Must... stop... posting! :-)

You could always write an essay for your own journal. Then I could come and comment. ; )

[norilana.livejournal.com]

Hah! Don't give me ideas now.

Ok, next week.

Oh crap, now look what you've done. :-)