"People often ask how I think of names in fantasies, and again I have to
answer that I find them, that I hear them. This is an important subject in this
context. From that first story on, naming has been the essence of the artmagic as practiced in Earthsea. For me, as for the wizards, to know the
name of an island or a character is to know the island or the person."
Ursula K. Le Guin, 'Dreams Must Explain Themselves'
An expression I like, particularly on the lips of young parents on their first infant, is: "Shall we put him down?" It is much better than, "Shall we put him to sleep?", which is presumably just hysterically hubristic to those in the know.
I also quite like the following fragment of flame-skirmish. Scott Lynch tells Jonathan McCalmont: "Ah, yes, the ever-classy 'people with reading habits different than mine only have them because of (insert contemptible moral or social failing here)' argument. But of course they do, Jonathan. Of course they do. Shhhh. Here's your bottle. It's full of scotch. Not a popular scotch, of course. A suitably obscure one. Shhhhh. Good little critic. Nap time."
(Presumably flameskirmish. I didn't encounter it in incarnadine crackling context. Maybe it's just incredibly good-natured banter).
This series is of course about names in science fiction and fantasy. What I like in Scott's comment is that, by a sort of process of mashing and charcoal chip filtration and copper pot distillation, "Scott Lynch" becomes "Scott Lynch" becomes "scotch". Scott Lynch is, in other words, instinctively cramming himself into a bottle, not as a chibi jin, but as a full-bodied scotch. And not just any scotch, but a posh expensive scotch, immediately brazenly squandered into a milky New Orleans milk punch-type cocktail metaphor, as he pipes his frothy and fermented form like very extreme gripewater down the throat of the flytingly infantalized McCalmont critic-figure, in the quite probably forlorn hope of shushing it and, in at least three senses, putting him down.
Maybe there's even more in that metaphor of author as exhausted parent: after Bloom's anxiety of influence, something you could call anxiety of infants. The commercially successful author knows full well they have little to fear from these squirmy, super-needy little rugrats. Yet when the commercially successful author's thoughts stray to posterity, to legacy, well ... and anyways, it's not just any infant here, but the matri/patri-phagic kind: the uncanny whirring little bundle of joy that sucks in your life and poops and pukes it back out, and grinds your milk to bake its bones, and just grows and grows and grows. Truly spoopy.
Provisos:
1) I haven't read Scott Lynch's novels. I read one of his short stories, which was pretty fun.
2) The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of ever-classy struggle.
Hi Jo, what did the name Boaty McBoatface symbolise for you?
Hi Soph, the name Boaty McBoatface perfectly captures the equivocal nature of scientific seafaring in the public imagination. The name has the virtue of reminding us that the object in question is a boat. Yet it also acknowledges our need to personify it, to give it a face. Perhaps on some level we recognize that the ocean is just as scared of us as we are of it: in making our vast machines in our own likenesses, we express our desire to meet monsters and gods on their own terms.
Sure. In the grand scheme of things, was "Sir David Attenborough" a better name choice than Boaty McBoatface?
I think the public are probably ahead of the curve on this one. I'm an academic researching the science fiction work of Iain M. Banks, and I'm intrigued by his approach to spaceship-naming. Different classes of warship are given nasty names - Murderer, Gangster, Torturer - as a reminder that what they DO is nasty. Banks was always suspicious of giving things dignified names. Banks was keenly aware of the complex relationships between exploration, scientific research, and military conquest. In his utopia, which is called "the Culture," spaceships always have strange and provocative names. They're called things like Big Sexy Beast and Unacceptable Behaviour and Very Little Gravitas Indeed and Someone Else's Problem. Whether or they're dignified or not, honourable or not, is a matter of what they ACHIEVE, not what they're called. Maybe on balance it's better to have silly names. I don't know.
I would definitely say that the Sir David Attenborough is probably the worst possible name. Why is nature so weird? One theory is that David Attenborough's gravel-and-syrup voice is so trustworthy, nature itself changes to conform to his delirious ramblings. Have you seen an aye-aye's thumb? I haven't actually. If you had a boat, what would you call it?
I would be tempted by RRS Sir Jo Lindsay Walton. One of its smaller remotely operated sub-sea vehicles could be called Dave in honour of the government's suggestion. In light of the kind of data the vessel is likely to gather, another possibility would be to call it We're Fucked. Or there could be a compromise between sovereign and popular power, such as Davey McDaveface. The point is that every suggestion that I or anyone thinks of off the top of my head is better than the RRS Sir David Attenborough. Although it will probably cheer him up which is nice.
What angers you most, if anything, about the entire ordeal?
Well, it would have been good if they had actually called it Boaty McBoatface. They sure missed a trick.
But what does the government’s decision say about democracy?
As many stakeholder engagement theorists will tell you, it is no good engaging people unless you also empower them -- and you know what, that means actually figuring out how to DELEGATE some power IN ADVANCE. No backsies. I suspect people are especially cynical about government consultations of all kinds. Often the policy direction has been pretty much already decided, and the consultation is just a bit of cheap market research, to figure how best to sell it.
Actually, it can be WORSE than that -- the consultation can start to market the policy, by hinting that they're going to do even more horrific stuff, raising fears, lowering expectations, and mopping up the energy of resistance. Then they can "compromise" by doing whatever they wanted to in the first place. That's why I don't think anybody is really surprised about Boaty McBoatface, except that we probably thought they'd let us get away with a bit of trivial silliness so that we could at least feel empowered.
So what's next for the Boaty McBoatface movement? Is this the end? Or do you foresee more petitions? Protests? Etc.
Tactics must suit the context. In one sense, perhaps a name is a rigid designator which flares into existence at the baptismal moment, permanent and real. In another, a name is just what people call something - never mind what letters are printed on the side of the thing. Think about the Boris Bikes: sorry, Barclays! It's another bank that sponsors them now, isn't it? I can't even remember. Maybe they'll be Sadiqycles soon. The point is, the ship is called Boaty McBoatface, because that's what we'll call it. I'm sure if it comes up again in the news -- if it sinks or something -- VICE will respect the will of the people in its coverage.
OK, thanks Jo.
It's interesting we get this announcement just as the local election results are rolling out. Sometimes when things are opened up to a popular vote, you get bizarre results, like the continued election of Conservatives. Sometimes the public just perfectly nails it, as with Boaty. There is a lot of scary and exciting work to be done on what popular sovereignty means in a digital networked era. We know as a collective we can be brilliant or fucking stupid. To me it's pretty obvious that a secure welfare system and substantive economic equality are totally necessary prerequisites for democracy to even slightly work. Otherwise, everybody is too busy trying to stay alive and sane to work out who to vote for -- except for flashes of brilliance like Boaty, obviously.
'I can't say,' the Gnat replied. 'Further on, in the wood down there, they've got no names—however, go on with your list of insects: you're wasting time.'
Update: Oh that's not working right, is it? I mean to link to the gnat scene after about fifteen and a half minutes, and the knight scene after about fifty-six and a half minutes! The bit about whether Alice would have to obey her governess if she had no name, and the bit about nested names: the name of the name of the song (or in the movie, tale. From the bits I've seen I really like that adaptation. It seems to use a lot of Carroll's dialogue. Meanwhile, this year, Tim Burton falls down the reboot hole).
Kat Brown has a really great bit on names in her "How to Write a Dystopian YA Novel in 10 Easy Steps" article over at The Telegraph. Here it all is:
4) Names
Forget plot, the majority of your planning time needs to be on your characters' names. What are you hoping to achieve with your protagonist? Whatever, it needs to be intriguing, aspirational and sound a million miles away from school.
Ideally you will be aiming for something that evokes sullen determination with a tinge of glamour. You can do this by taking a regular name and swapping the letters around, or by putting a y where it doesn’t belong.
S sounds are also good: think Tris, Katsa, Jace, Alysse or Katniss. If you get to Tristophé you have wandered into an episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and need to stop procrastinating and write your damn book.
If in doubt, google "Victorian households": Clarissa, Tobias, Magnus, Bram. This can also apply to surnames, although opening a dictionary and choosing the first adjective you see works just as well. Precious stones or exotic items are also good, although be wary of heroines called Beryl.
Bolt on an adjective, or an intriguing misspelling. Don’t miss the opportunity to eke out a few extra syllables. Compound words together. Freestyle it. Everglade Tannerbrook would be a terrific father figure who also runs a farm while forging weapons out of tree sap.
Names with meaning are good, especially if you have read a lot of baby name books or are aiming for a story with "layers". Caleb, meaning loyal, is a good choice if you have a romantically unexciting male best friend. There are a lot of variants on Kat, possibly because Katherine means pure. Sidenote: Kat Brown means Pure Brawn. You are all supporting characters in my own dystopian universe!
Spoilers for New Year special. Also don't get me wrong: despite having a go, I enjoyed the episode, and especially Cumberbatch's performance. See also Maureen K. Speller's post at Paper Knife.
Benedict Cumberbatch is the actor who has portrayed, among others, Martin from Cabin Pressure, Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness, Smaug and a young Sauron in The Hobbit,Alan Turing, Stephen Hawking, TS Eliot, Vincent van Gogh, the apprehensive young business manager 'Robin' in Nathan Barley, and himself. His Doctor Strange and Shere Khan are forthcoming. He does not play The Doctor, but you can be forgiven for forgetting that.
He also plays Sherlock Holmes in the BBC's Sherlock. The 2016 New Year special episode was entitled "The Abominable Bride." There can be no doubt that the abominable bride must be Benedict Cumberbatch himself. Look at him: there stands the Abominable Bride. That is a truth you can drink up with your first glance. So you have the rest of the day to work out why the story has gone to such lengths to hide the fact that Benedict Cumberbatch is the true Abominable Bride. Also: what actually is an Abominable Bride? (It is a kind of Benedict Cumberbatch, we know that much). And when you work that out, you may spare a thought for how you knew all along that Benedict Cumberbatch is the true Abominable Bride.
This is a post about Benedict Cumberbatch's name, his whiteness, and why he is the Abominable Bride. But first let's manage expectations. In case you have stumbled in looking for an "explanation" of the episode, puh-lease! This isn't some paltry explanation. An explanation would stoop to explaining things. An explanation would explain, oh, I don't know: It Was All A Dream. (See Note 1). This is not an explanation of the Sherlock Christmas special episode. It's about something hopefully more interesting.
Although it is significant, for a reason I'll mention in a moment, that there is a kind of dream logic at work in the episode, where two anxieties can be conflated, blended, run together into one complex anxiety. It's a poetic form of truth, as some idiots might put it. Or perhaps, there are two kinds of dream logic. It was all a dream, but it was a dream with two theories of dreaming struggling for mastery: from the Freudian side, things repressed by the unconscious are worked through via fantasies (the glitches); from a more cognitivist, bio-computational angle, there is important data mining, enriching, consolidating and so on going on, plus window dressing (the cold case solving).
But what's more interesting is: finally here is a Sherlock which admits that a Benedict Cumberbatch, like an Engelbert Humperdinck or a Cubbi Gummi Bear, is one of those fay presences which bounces comfortably through our mundane plane maintaining rich relationships here, while quite obviously never being anchored here in the long term. And a Benedict Cumberbatch steals different identities. It seems unfair to single out just one actor for the shapeshifting of the whole profession, but there you go.
If you felt you had a history of somewhat sexist writing and were determined to Do Better, one of the things you could do to make it a bit easier for yourself is set bits of your episode in Victorian England. That setting allows such easy equivocation. You can recruit a bit of internet-era snark into the service of some now uncontroversial struggle, like votes for women: it shouldn't be too hard to pitch these confrontations so that a contemporary liberal feminist feels a sense of triumph, and a contemporary radical feminist, a sense of trajectory. You can portray a Victorian woman outwitting a Victorian man, despite having the odds so stacked against her, and you can portray the Victorian man's mouth opening and closing and his moustaches flaring like a windsock in a big old flabber-gust.
This seemed to be where the episode was going, with some neatly polished banter from Mrs Hudson about how the handsomely walrused Watson was writing her out of history, and a sense of suffragist alacrity and activism bristling away beyond the blinkers of our supposedly ever-vigilant superman.
But oh no. That's not where it was going. It turns out that that stuff was, unfortunately, pertinent to the plot: because the Feminists Did It. The Feminists did it, and then they put on pointy hoods and chanted about it in Latin afterwards, because that's what Feminists do. The story concedes that they were "right" to do it, and Mycroft Holmes, spokesman for the patriarchy, very graciously consents to "lose" to them.
Abominable is not a common word. When it does come out in public, it is usually accompanied by one of its close friends. Abominable weather, abominable treatment, abominable service, abominable mess. It can just about slot in wherever atrocious can: I'm an abominable tennis player. Or perhaps it arrives in a Wodehouse-ish flourish, accompanied by some of term of comparable just-gone-over archaism: abominable perfidy. It's a word of bumbling, genteel apology, a bit like devastated. Occasionally it may be an intensifier: abominable cheat.
The strongest collocation, however, is abominable snowman, the elusive, apelike cryptid of the Himalayas. The God of the Hunt, perhaps. But also something to be hunted. "The game is a Bigfoot," as Sherlock might say, running together two distinct anxieties into one complex anxiety, and accessing a poetic form of truth.
Snowman, I hereby aver, connotes Cumberbatch. He is white af. Or more like: Abominable Snowman Bride connotes Sherlock Benedict Cumberbatch. "White as death, mouth like a crimson wound," is the Bride's description. Cumberbatch is professionally pale. He is beyond the pale. He has blown the lid off pallid. He is a consummate pallid-an at the height of his powers. His skin is bridal silk. Perhaps Cumberbatch's lips aren't all that crimson, but he does have a hearty mouth. It is a Nirvana mouth: heart-shaped botox. The snowman's carrot admittedly is neither here nor there. Perhaps you could pull one from a cabbage patch or a cumber batch, but probably not. There is the pipe: Sherlock is as fond of his pipe as any two gigantic snow boulders piled in an 8.
Pure as the driven snow. Sherlock: The Abominable Bride does bring up the question of Sherlock's virginity. Benedict may suggest Benedictine monasticism and perhaps a monk's chastity. It may also hint at St Bernard, lolloping through the snow all jowls and salvation. What is important here is the monstrous bride, hungry, shaggy, and almost indistinguishable from the ferocious nature -- a blizzard, it so happens -- which she inhabits. The other suppressed word, partly via snowman, is Bridezilla.
If the shadowy many-hooded dénouement was cringey, one contributing factor might be this: it replicated the logic and perhaps even rhetoric of anti-suffrage writers of the late Victorian era and early C20th. To be schematic: first-wave feminism concentrates on entry into the great mass of more-or-less rational humans, as reflected by formal, procedural equality of civil and political rights. That is, voting, owning property, speaking in town meetings, bearing witness, standing for election, and so on. A common strategy to undermine first-wave feminism was to insist that women already had their own sphere and forms of influence which, though subtle and discreet, potentially outweighed men's altogether. Women operated in the private sphere on sons and husbands, and through them, on the public sphere, the Empire, etc.
Of course, that antifeminist rhetoric hasn't gone away. We still see it in the stereotype of the ferocious woman who dominates (henpecks, pussywhips) her man, a stereotype which flourishes in part because it can sometimes blur into good faith celebration of a woman's power.
The cringey shadowy many-hooded dénouement of Sherlock: The Abominable Bride may or may not have been salvageable. Other contemporary anti-suffrage arguments swirled around the notion of women as constitutionally unfit for full citizenship, because they were constitutionally adverse to violence in defense of the realm. You know: tender. So maybe there is potentially a story to be told with these badass cowboy ninja warrior monk suffragettes. If only they had used their fists in a scientific fashion:
But if you were trying to salvage the premise, a good place to start would be refocusing the badass cowboy ninja warrior monk suffragettes' campaign away from cheating husbands and no-good sexual scoundrels, and toward the public sphere. Less emo vengeance, more assassinations. Less of this spooooky mode of influence which requires you to kiss goodbye to rationalism, more of the deliberate and considered violent uprising of the oppressed.
Which brings us back to Benedict Cumberbatch, the abominable bride. Why abominable? An abominable bride might mean someone who is truly terrible at being a bride. "Sorry everyone, I'm an abominable bride. I'm male, and I don't even get married." Though Sherlock goes around being-a-dick and encumbering everyone with his batcheloryness, it's clear that Sherlock: The Abominable Bride actually positions Benedict Cumberbatch as the sexist cliche of the Bridezilla, the ravenously demanding bride-to-be, stuck in a world of her own and making it everybody else's problem. He is at once, in a patriarchal paradox, the apotheosis of bridal, and pathologically, wrongly bridal: he's so brutally bridal he's bad at being a bride.
Mycroft, you might say, is bad at being a best man, the man who is primus inter pares. "The virus in the data." "Mycroft! This is not the time and place for such language!" He tackles the whole wedding spread solo. His instinct to eat, live and grow is pathologically hypertrophied into a death wish, so that both personally and as chief man dude -- "we must lose" -- the best man is the worst man, fit only to burst.
This is a story about perfection. Sherlock's Memory Palace cannot simulate a material totality to such a fine grain that it becomes empirically investigable, any more than a Bridezilla and her minions can foreshadowingly simulate, and then materially realize, a Perfect Day. Wedding plans represent, rather than pre-create-in-ideality, wedding days. Wedding days instantiate, rather than transpose-to-materiality, wedding plans. Wedding days and wedding plans are not ontologically isomorphic. The myth of the Bridezilla is in part the myth of the woman who is calling the patriarchal bluff, unlocking and wielding some of the violence implicit in the translateability of ideality and materiality. Do you always cry at implicit violence? I always feel like I should.
This is a story, after all, mostly in Sherlock's head. It is entirely organized around the conceit that everything must be exactly how Sherlock envisions it, and yet things never are quite the way he envisions them, and that discrepancy is terrifying and threatening. Sherlock: The Abominable Bride is filled with the little slip-ups of the kind that can ruin a perfect day: the gauche and untimely choice of words, the label in the wrong place, the wrong person under the bridal veil. It all hints at the possibility of a wedding that isn't even a wedding: it's a weddingfail, it's the guests, the get-up, the bridal silk, but without the legal ink.
Benedict, by the way, may mean "a true and established bachelor who has recently married." Compare Shakespeare's Benedick.
Bridezilla. Think Godzilla with veil and train, of course. Where else in the episode's language do we find the superimposition of a furious, carious mythical creature with ostentatious formal ceremonial garb? There is this: Cumberbatch. Cummerbund. Bandersnatch.
Sherlock, a bit like Who, is the kind of work that puts an enormous premium on being clever. Constantly slick, bantery, cozy, polished, expertly paced, and clever: if it fails to be those things, then it probably fails altogether. (Tom Stoppard might have a lot to answer for, for this premium on cleverness). What is Sherlock if he's not clever? Some sort of low-functioning sociopath?
And perhaps it is not really a style of writing that suits mass production, episode after episode, season after season. And I wonder if the Bridezilla, with a kind of dream logic, runs together two anxieties. First, the endlessly demanding character of Sherlock, who takes and takes and takes your one-liners, your ripostes, your detective fiction deductive conceits, churning through them at a breakneck pace without showing the least gratitude. Every episode is the Bridezilla's wedding day: it must be perfect or it is ruined. Second, the fans. The endlessly demanding fans, something Doyle knew about too. You've given them women being written out of history; you've celebrated women's suffrage; you've even had a woman Watson more-or-less crack the case, before whisking us off to a waterfall where bromance between two men wins out over a superman's insecurity psychically represented as a rivalry between two supermen. You've done feminist. What more do they want?
TL;DR: Making fun of people for their names isn't nice.
Note 1: Sherlock wanted to figure out if Moriarty could have shot himself in the head and still survived, right? So he absorbed all the data on a comparably patterned case, and withdrew to an inner simulation in which to solve it. Obviously that's the most straightforward way to solve a mystery: pick one that's a bit like it from a hundred years ago and then think about it while on drugs. How very algorithmic governance of you, Sherlock. That's what an explanation might say.
An explanation might even furthermore stoop to clarifying and revealing that Sherlock did indeed solve the cold case (yes, Lady Carmichael killed Sir Carmichael), only his simulation was beset by glitches. Mycroft's anachronism "the virus in the data" was one. The little tag saying "Miss me?" which magically appeared was another. And of course the unveiling of the Moriarty-bride was another. Why were these glitches there? Because even Sherlock isn't perfect. It all starts to crumble toward the end. Possibly Sherlock did "really" exhume Mrs Ricoletti, but I'm inclined to interpret that whole scene (not just the magic bit at the end) as a continuation of Sherlock's inner simulation. So's the bit at the waterfall.
From Samuel R. Delany's review of Star Warswhich appeared in Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy in 1977:
"Etymologists take note: the relation between Lucas and Luke is obvious. But note too that the name George comes from the Greek work [word] georgos: farmer, i.e., "earth man," or "earth walker." George Lucas / Luke Skywalker, dig? The film is a blatant and self-conscious autobiographic wish fulfillment on the part of its ingenious director.
[...]
"In addition to the play Lucas makes on his own name to generate Luke, the very texture and play of the film tells us Lucas would like to live in the future. Whatever the lessons this future has to teach us, about good and evil, about growing up or accepting courage, no matter how painful or unpleasant those lessons, this future is seen as a good place to learn them, a place where one will have a chance to apply them. It is not the future so many sf films depict, where things are so inhibited that, even if we learn something about life, we never have a chance to utilize that knowledge -- short of the place's falling completely to pieces within seventy-two hours of our learning it. And assuming we are lucky enough [to] survive. In short, there are many ways in which Star Wars is a very childlike film. This is to the good.
"[...] wouldn't that future have been more interesting if, say, three-quarters of the rebel pilots just happened to have been Oriental women -- rather than just the guys who didn't make it onto the Minnisota Ag. football team. [...] In the film world in the present, the token woman, token black, or what-have-you, is clearly propaganda, and even the people who are supposed to like that particular piece of it smile their smiles with rather more tightly pursed lips than is comfortable. In a science fiction film, however, the variety of human types should be as fascinating and luminous in itself as the variety of color in the set designer's paint box. Not to make use of that variety, in all possible combinations, seems an imaginative failure of at least the same order as not coming up with as interesting sets as possible.
In any case, Star Wars is a delight. (For those people who like literary parallels, it brings the sf up to about the Lensmen stage.) But perhaps the most delightful thing about it is that it brings so forcefully to the imagination the possibility of sf films that are so much better in precisely the terms that Star Wars itself has begun to lay out."
I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,
Of April, May, of June and July flowers;
I sing of youth, of love too, and I write
How roses first came red, and lilies white:
I write of groves and twilight, and I sing
The court of Mab, and of the Fairie King.
-- Robert Herrick
I guess what I'll do is this. I'll send the British Royal Legion a donation, along with a note explaining why there's no way I could wear a red poppy, and that's a shame because I'd quite like to. And I'll ask them to please, please team up with the white poppy people (they're called the Peace Pledge Union apparently), and both sell both kinds of poppy. Because if two charitable organizations (I'll say) who both agree we ought to support veterans, commemorate all those who have lost their life in war, work constantly toward peace, and never glamorize, romanticize, or celebrate war, if they can't get along and work together for a good cause, then what chance do any of us have?
Or just swap, one year. You sell red and I'll sell white, kind of thing. There are some economic obstacles. One brand is worth a lot more than the other. Hmm. Got to think it through.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
There is a kind of garden growing through the names of Between Two Thorns (2013), the first novel of Emma Newman's Split Worlds urban fantasy trilogy. You know: a serene spread of plant color, neatly bedded to belie its rooty intrigues for nutrients and choked struggle for sun.
We need a little background here. Catherine Rhoeas-Papaver ran away from Nether to Mundanus in hope of leading a normal life. But now she's been found, forcibly returned to Nether, and betrothed to William Reticulata-Iris without so much as a by-your-sepal. And if you think that's unceremonious, get this: Nether society is itself agitated, what with the arrival of the Alba-Rosa family in Aquae Sulis, a city supposed to be free of Rosa influence, and the mysterious disappearance of the Master of Ceremonies, the very person Aquae Sulis desperately needs to keep the peace at a time like this.
A Master of Ceremonies is (as Mundanus-dweller Joseph Moser put it around the turn of the Nineteenth Century) obliged to at least:
[...] introduce regularity into large assemblies, to keep order, to repress the ebullitions of passion, to banish, if possible, that contraction or thrusting out of the lips which Shakespear calls duckface selfie; to prevent violent suffusions or flushings in the female countenance; to keep the ladies from tossing, and their noses from turning up, when precedence, partners, and people that nobody knows, with a hundred other serious circumstances, excite those emotions. He has also annexed to his office something clerical, it being his business to join hands: but he goes still farther, he frequently procures partners, who sometimes under his banners enlist for life [...]
OK yeah it's "pouting" not "duckface selfie." Sorry.
It's not precisely clear what the Nether Master of Ceremonies does, but he does seem to be more of a big deal than his Mundanus namesake. He emanates an aura of authority, security, and law and order, perhaps more in a Confucian harmony-through-cultivating-virtue kind of way than either a despot or a highest court of appeal kind of way.
Meanwhile, back in Mundanus, sinister and bloody events are unfolding ... but I don't think we don't need to get into that gargoyle stuff now: that's enough background.
So let's stay with Catherine Rhoeas-Papaver, who has a fancy-pants name, as befits the highborn Fae-touched, although often she's just plain "Cathy."
In a moment, I'll think about why double-barrel names are so fancy-pants. But for now, what might that name remind of, at first blush? Rhoeas could suggest a corrupted rose, perhaps an English rose, and the word papa is discernible as an ominous gardener or florist looming over her. Maybe it would be easy to tease and wind up Catherine Rhoeas-Papaver by calling her Catherine the Corrupt and Papa-Averse English Rose?
But rose may also be a little misleading here: really rhoeas is just "red" from the Greek and papaver is the Latin word for "poppy," perhaps from the root pap, to swell, and/or pappa, food or milk. And in fact Rhoeas-Papaver is, unmistakably, a re-working of Papaver rhoeas, which is the taxon of the common poppy, aka the corn poppy, the corn rose, Flanders poppy, or the remembrance poppy.
I say "unmistakably," because Between Two Thorns has a pretty systematic naming convention for its Fae-touched characters. Catherine Rhoeas-Papaver is one of the Fae-touched, from one of the Great Families that populate the Nether, an interstitial worldlet betwixt Mundanus, where you and I live, and Exilium, where the powerful pixies live. For somewhat nebulous reasons, the fairies are actually supposed to be exiled to Exilium, although this containment strategy seems to be having mixed success.
Anyway, all the Fae-touched go by the about-faced technical terms for flowers. Every Great Family is superintended by one of these terrifyingly potent and trans-moral patrons -- or perhaps, less kindly, puppeteers -- and you can tell immediately which family goes with which fairy, simply by their name.
Lady Rose is the patron of the Alba-Rosas and Gallica-Rosas.
Lord Iris is the patron of the Reticulata-Irises.
And so on. This is the main way in which names work in Between Two Thorns. These relatively legible power relationships re-create an archaic connection between name and status, the sort of thing a good edition of a Nineteenth-Century novel might include in the footnotes, making seemingly pointless conversations suddenly light up with connoted cut-and-thrust. Such names also vouchsafe a sort of pre-liberal sense of being utterly embedded in the fate of your lineage. To keep this sense sharp, the rising and falling fortunes of kin become transposed, in Between Two Thorns, into the favors and furies of the pixie patrons.
In other words, to be a Rhoeas-Papaver is to be connected to the fate of your family -- okay, whatever, we get that -- but it is also to be inescapably, suffocatingly connected to the wonderworkings and the whims of Lord Poppy. A concrete agent, not a vague abstraction like "the fate of your family." Someone from the Great Families, particularly a woman from the Great Families, does not write her own history. She is trapped in fate. "Of Flowers, so much has been said and sung, that it were impossible to write any thing new," as Francis S. Osgood writes in The Poetry of Flowers and Flowers of Poetry.
Fairy is probably from fāta, the Fates. And as it happens, the personality of Lord Poppy -- if personality is the right word? -- recalls the more louche and unpredictable of Neil Gaiman's Endless, or possibly Loki at his most jaded and frivolous, or perhaps the Ancient Greek pantheon at their squabbliest and most squee-tastic-est, just as they're really getting stuck in around Troy. I want to go further: there is also a sense that Poppy's capacity for boredom is the radical unknowability of fairy, imperfectly translated into something mortal minds can deal with. Lord Poppy is, like Fortuna, the the vicissitudes and vagaries of what's coming, personified and given an uncomfortably intimate grin.
What first strikes us as fairyland's "radical unknowability," of course, might be developed into a critique of our customary modes of knowledge, and perhaps eventually an expansion of their limits. At the same time, even this early talk of constructive criticism in hope of an upgrade, and thereafter to increased technical capacity and newly conquered territories, feels inimical to any fairy way of knowing. That is, perhaps even to talk of different ways of knowing is already only a metaphor for whatever it is fairyland demands of us. One might compare Michael Marder's Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013). I have added words like fairies:
Because fairies do not appear, they bestow on us the problem of representing them both in the theoretical sense of representation faithful to their ontology and in the strictly political sense of representation as delegation, claiming the right to speak as though bewitched by fairies. Perhaps to encounter fairyland without distorting it through the mangles of mortal hyper-familiarity, it becomes necessary to take up some trick, cheap glamor, or changeling substitition. By means of this clinaman, whose status is that of thievery, or of the forged or deliberately misleading, our encounters with fairies are temporarily jogged from their justifiable trajectories. Because the absence of visitation by fairies does not proclude their spatial, material self-expression: it only poses additional hurdles to the ethical treatment of fairyland.
If ethics, understood à la Levinas, is the relation to the other, then it must be rooted in the ontology of fairy life, heteronomously defined by a striving to alterity. The heteronomous decorum of fairyland, or more precisely, the heteronomous decorum of the Seelie Court, is therefore a kind of homecoming, a harkening of ethical discourse back to the domain of life wherein it originated. On the one hand, the open-endedness, or the essential incompletion, of wish-granting and of other fairy functions subtracts fairies from the logic of actualization they have been often called upon to illustrate. On the other hand, the infinite possibilities of fairyland correspond to its countless ends.
Honestly though, brushes with fairy can be stressy.
To a lesser extent, the same flowerbed of names, Rhoeas-Papaver, Californica-Papaver, Alba-Rosa, Gallica-Rosa, Reticulata-Iris, and so on, also advertizes horizontal associations: the Rhoeas-Papavers and the Californica-Papavers are not only tied by a common fairy patron, but also likely more closely-related to each other than the Rhoeas-Papavers and the Alba-Roses, for instance. Such blood ties are more understandable, since they involve only mortal power-differentials, rather than fealty to something nebulous and numinous. But these blood ties are also ambiguous and flexible in their own little ways. Close names connote close histories, but tell us little about what those histories are. Are the various Papavers more likely to be allies and kissing cousins? Or is whatever forked the dynasty in the first place still lodged there, wedging the lines apart?
He looked down at the wedding ring. “That’s one of the things that happened whilst you were missing.”
“Who…”
“Lucy Californica-Papaver.”
“A Californica? I don’t understand.”
“It was to end the feud.”
Then there's Catherine.
The name Catherine is at once queenly and unassuming. Catherine is a name ready for any weather, ready to boom at bad guys down two barrels -- or wielding some suitably grand identifier by the ligature of an "of" or a "the" like a cat-'o'-nine-tails -- yet ready too to grin and turn out nuances of cheerful competence as Cathy, of glamor and rubby intimacy as Kitty, or of wayfaring and subtlety as Cat. The name may even go all mousy, by some mysterious dialectics of cats and mice, although always the mousiness of a brave mouse, always the mouse of a Mouse-cat-teer, of a mouse that is probably really just a mini-cat. Remember Katherina Minola, the titular shrew of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew. Catherine is a name at home among crenels or taking tea. Shirley Jackson's Mary Katherine "Merrikat" Blackwood has always lived in the castle. There are Jane Austen's Catherine Morland from Northanger Abbey and Catherine "Kitty" Bennett from Pride and Prejudice -- women with whom Catherine Rhoeas-Papaver has some context in common, being like them stuffed into impractical pouffiness and somewhat aggressed by fairylands. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights has Catherine Earnshaw and she has Cathy. It seems remarkable, an oversight, even an outrage, that there is no Catherine Pevensie. It is the name of a midfielder, a captain. It is is a name that holds the centre, it contains the letters "c-e-n-t-r-e" and in English it is an intuitive core to a cloud of cognates, the Karens and Katyas, Caitlins and Catrinas, the Ecaterinas et cetera.
Catherine comes from the Greek Αικατερινη, "Aikaterine," to which is grafted the Greek καθαρος, "katharos," meaning "pure," as in cathartic as purifying. One intriguing source for Aikaterine are five nymphs, the Ἑκατεριδες, "Hekaterides," or their dad Ἑκατερος, "Hekateros," whose name roughly connotes "each of two" or perhaps "with both hands." There is some intricate finger-related stuff there, but for the sake of Between Two Thorns, in which places in the Nether are anchored in Mundanus, so that London is mirrored by Londinium, Bath by Aquae Sulis, it is mostly the doubling that is interesting. Another intriguing derivation is from the Greek αικια, "aikia," meaning unfair, unreasonable, unjust, an insult, an outrage, an affront, suffering, torture.
Like the purr of a cat, the purity of a Catherine is a throaty sound, ribbed and knurled with harmonics and overtones. I'm not being funny, but the term pure is mixed in its meanings: what counts as pure alters according to context and purpose, so that there can be no pure pure. The heroin which comes to you from a poppy may be pure as regards adulterants, but impure as regards consumer ethics. In economics and finance, in particular, pure profit must be calculated by consulting a recipe with several ingredients. In Scotland pure is an intensifier hospitable to anything and everything: and though ma heid's pure mince the day, I wonder if there's even a little connotation of "ex nihilo, sine causa, just because" about the Scottish pure, like "just totally" or like the South African sommer. Collocations like "vengeance, pure and simple," or "pure chaos" or "pure mayhem," or "pure outrage" or "pure rage," -- one of the few instances of the word in the novel is in "pure fury" -- all bring to mind complexity, obscurity and cloudedness, like the conflating, concealing and co-mingling dust clouds of cartoon punch-ups.
Tanners used to use an infusion of pigeon, hen or dog poop called pure or puer to strip away fur. Papas on the topic of daughters' purity are often full of shit, as we can see as a piece of it escapes Polonius: "Affection! pooh! you speak like a green girl!" Brothers are not much better:
"Look, when I went up to Cambridge, you didn't think Father trusted the chaperone and the minder, did you? He put a curse on me, to make sure I didn't lose my market value."
"Catherine! What a way to speak of your own purity."
"Oh, please. I'm not stupid, that's what it comes down to, isn't it? Have to guarantee the goods are pure and unsullied when selling them off to the highest bidder."
Do unicorns count frotting? I wonder if the later novels reveal anything about the no-doubt hugely heteronormative fae algorithm glowing within Will Reticulata-Iris and his father's virginity-detecting gizmo.
Exercise: how would you program such a thing, pixies? I see most of you have gone for, "If she believes she is a virgin," which is a solid B+. Who handed this one in, with the tech-tree diagram? It hasn't got a name on. And whose is this, stating "And the commoditie be valued as chast within the market, it is the Opal's duety but to giue confydence to mens' iudgement"? You lot are weird.
Above all, no matter what the regime of measurement and control, pure and innocent are far from synonymous. Innocence conveys untried and untested. Purity equivocates between the purity of isolation and the purity of homeostasis: between being sheltered, and being experienced but incorruptible. Our sense of this distinction may be confused by a certain kind of strong innocence, which filters evil at the outermost fringes of experience: such innocents may come through trials not only uncorrupted but in a certain sense untried. Sometimes this filtering is something we can do for or to each other.
Roses may also be symbols of purity, especially through their association with the Virgin Mary. William Blake wanders through worlds of purity, of innocence, and of experience, in search perhaps of other worlds, in his Songs of Innocence and Experience, which includes the fruitfully resilient poem of corruption "The Sick Rose." The fairy lord Harold Bloom even more-or-less manages to make the rose into the corrupting factor, a worm-tease possessed of a "jealous lust," although he's being a bit contrarian. What I find odd is that there appear to be two worms in the picture:
You can try out "innocence and experience" as the plaintext of Blake's "rose and flying invisible worm" respectively. I sort of think that, whatever else is going on in that poem, Blake is proposing airborne microorganisms as a vector of plant blight. I think that all the ingredients were available to him: the notion of human diseases carried by infinitesimal spores; the notion that insects were responsible for plant disease; the homunculi and animalculae of preformationism; the scattering of panspermism.
If rose customarily denotes earthly beauty and fragility, mortality, corruptibility, and inevitable decay, it is also a word which can intimate recovery, return, or even resurrection, in its five red petals' correspondence to five wounds on Christ's body, and in the faith "that He was buried, that He rose again on the third day."
In the Child Ballad 166A, the rose that is thoroughly trampled and rooted out by a wild boar, representative of the House of York, is a hardy plant that finds its way back:
Wend away, messenger, with might and maine;
Itt’s hard to know who a man may trust;
I hope the rose shall flourish againe,
And haue all things att his owne lust.
Then Sir Rice ap Thomas drawes Wales with him;
A worthy sight itt was to see,
How the Welchmen rose wholy with him,
And shogged them to Shrewsburye.
I like that: "How the Welchmen rose wholy with him." Just one more thing about roses. Listen to this creep fucking neg:
There is something of the rose about Catherine Rhoeas-Papaver. The poppies of Between Two Thorns are pepped up, glamorous poppies. "In Mundanus the red poppy was scentless, but in Exilium it smelt divine." In a way, they are a bit like red roses without all the hokiness of red roses. They are stealth red roses.
I've talked too much about roses. I've talked a bit about poppies, and I'll talk a lot more about them soon. But it's worth emphasizing that her name is not Catherine Rose, or Catherine Poppy, or Catherine Papaver Rhoeas. Her name is Catherine Rhoeas-Papaver. What difference does that make?
Rhoeas-Papaver. Stare at it long enough, it starts to look like an articulated lorry trying collidingly to reverse into a space -- reverse, as in the swappage of "Papaver" and "Rhoeas" to make "Rhoeas-Papaver"; reverse as in the word reverse, a word almost audible among the incessant pa! pa! of the heavy duty vehicle reversing alarm -- but the really important bit isn't that swappage, it's the hyphen.
Double-barreled surnames have long been an affable compromise between class-based domination and gender-based domination: if a chap married up, he couldn't very well lose his name, but he wouldn't want to throw away a boon like his wife's (father's) name. Alternatively, a chap with only daughters, the poor chap, might have insisted no chaps should marry those daughters unless these chaps agreed to double-barrel, thereby carrying on his horrible illustrious name. Double-barreling also became an affectation of the upwardly mobile middle classes, particularly in Victorian Britain as the law around name-changes became clearer and more forgiving.
So double-barreling usually suggests aristocracy, although perhaps -- with the current spate of couples who double-barrel out of an urge to merge non-hierarchically -- it is on the verge of losing that association.
(That, and the coming bloodbath. Anyway, we'll see!)
What is interesting about the Rhoeas-Papaver double-barrel is that it suggests a marriage, some time in the past, between, let's say, Goodman Joseph Rhoeas and Mistress Josephine Papaver. Now, I'm not saying that the novel wants us to think that this has literally taken place within its story-world. I'm speaking strictly non-canon now. But the suggestion is there -- because that is how double-barrelling normally works -- even if it's a suggestion that eventually gets obliterated by seething bolts of worldbuilding.
Yet the name's unmistakable meaning -- if we simply flip it to Papaver rhoeas -- suggests an altogether different taxonomy, and an altogether different history. That is a history whose dominant event is the split, not the merger. Papaver is the genus, and Papaver rhoeas is the species: the common poppy. A rhoeas is not a rhoeas is not a rhoeas: taxonomically, a rhoeas always implies and is contained by its genus. My imaginary couple, Joseph Rhoeas and Josephine Papaver, are impossible: they can't have met, because they are just different ways of slicing the same evolutionary story.
You can say the same thing about Catherine's fiance, William Reticulata-Iris: although his name suggests some past union of the Reticulatas and the Irises, the Iris reticulata is the netted iris, a plant with its own evolutionary history. It's not something you get every time you cross a net with an iris. Taxonomy is not just synchronic nomenclature, not just a snapshot of distinguishing features at the present moment: taxonomy has a relationship, albeit a fraught one, with phylogeny; in other words, it conveys, in an uncluttered and imperfect and highly reductive way, the ramified structures of cladogenesis and anagenesis, it hints at the reproduction and reshuffling and flow and drift of genetic material, clumped more-or-less into organisms, stretching back millennia.
There are a lot of ways we could go from here. In imagining the reconciliation of this contradiction, an image of supreme nominocracy, rule by names, could be teased out: as if the Rhoeas and the Papaver families had to unite on the social plane, because they had already emerged co-evally on the biological plane. That might be a particularly intriguing incarnation of the fateful power so often welded into names in fantasy narratives. I'm not sure.
But can we bring it back to those poppies? On the one hand, Rhoeas-Papaver seems to be the outcome of Rhoeas plus Papaver; on the other, it seems to be the outcome of the evolution of Papaver rhoeas and other Papaver species in different directions from some likely common ancestor. In other words, the name Rhoeas-Papaver expresses a struggle about different ways of reading the past, or of rendering the past legible in the first place. In other words, it expresses a struggle about remembrance.
The semiotics of the lapel poppy are disastrously, dishearteningly jumbled and impure. We wear red remembrance poppies to honor and commemorate those who have died in war. We remember all those who have died in all wars, but particularly we remember the servicemen and women of Britain and of the countries of the former British Empire who have died since 1914. We honor those whose acts incarnate a kind of courage whatever bravery or fear or otherwise may have filled their hearts, and many of whom died.
POPPY THOU ART SICK.
Perhaps Remembrance Sunday should have a tidge more War Awareness Day to it. Commemorate is a funny word. The closest synonym is remember, and of course remember is equivocal. Most people don't recall, for instance, fighting in World War II. Some people recall hanging out with somebody who did. Maybe hanging out with them on Remembrance Sunday. A sense of strengthened continuity with ancestral suffering springs up around Remembrance Sunday. Suddenly personal reflective nostalgia gets ambiguously blurred with restorative nostalgia violently fixated on a mythical golden age. And/or (usually or) personal reflective nostalgia gets ambiguously blurred with a righteous fixation on reparations, or some form of restorative justice, or at least accurate, appropriately publicized history.
From the little I know about my ancestors, I suspect they were usually committing the massacres.
And a sense of humble prayer hangs over Remembrance Sunday. Specifically, the sense of a performance before the divine that is oddly evacuated of meaning, because even though you attach significance to its symbols, whatever significance you attach is subsumed in what the Almighty knows those words to really mean.
This year, the Royal British Legion suggests, "Take a photo of yourself with a poppy held to your lips," visually reflecting, of course, the paltry two minute silence. It should be two days. But it is also, I think, a subtle borrowing of a semiotic idiom associated with pacifist, radical and/or Leftist protest.
The quality of silence itself has changed in recent years -- silence now exists visually on Twitter, for instance -- and this year, it seems like the British Legion is experimenting with adapting to more recent versions of silence. In particular, the poppy-to-your-lips campaign feels like an allusion to activist art and protest which seeks to draw attention to oppressive silencing. Asylum seekers have sewn their lips together, for instance. The undercurrent of this campaign can't be anything but: we will not be silenced!
And that in turn implies: "It's those Guardianistas, those authoritarian metropolitan elites, those ivory tower trustafarians, those Political Correctness fetishists, those head-in-the-clouds attention-seeking crusties, those foreigners (like, idk, Greeks) or spawn-of-foreigners with their weird perspectives, who are trying to silence the poppy and everything it stands for. They are the appropriators, they are the revisionists, and they have the cheek to call me that! But they're the ones trying to erase the sacrifice of our parents and grandparents. Try telling them a simple fact about Britain's sacrifice standing up to the Nazis, and they'll derail the conversation, with something about Britain and British colony's 1% killed against the Soviet Union's 12%-13%. Or even worse, something about British colonial administrators shipping grain out of India and outlawing relief efforts during the late 19th century famines that killed more people than either world war. It's not that it's not true or anything: it's just, that's not what this is about. They can barge in with their agendas the rest of the year, but not November: not while we're mourning."
By the way. The presence of Maharaj Kumari Rani Nucifera-Nelumbo in Between Two Thorns is a little mysterious. Her appearance is a status coup for the Alba-Rosas, of course. "The Albas brought an Indian princess to impress the Censor into letting them in." And I suspect it may be of some intertextual importance, setting up the character for the sequels, or perhaps calling back to some of the earlier Split Worlds short fiction. Nevertheless she dangles a little, conspicuously enough that I almost want to say her real function in the novel is to raise in a more explicit way the theme of empire.
Yet ... having a pop at the poppy still feels like a trap.
That is, to articulate the despoiled symbolism of the red poppy, which does not mean what it officially means, feels like walking into a trap.
That flash of red is the red of red-bait. That is the flapping red corner of the matador's cape. Without constant vigilance and creativity, the voice which leaves your lips will default to the voice of the Left as the Left is imagined by the Right. You become your own stereotype. Almost anything that you don't "agree" with is something that "offends" you and something that you want to "ban." You are a strain of paranoid, sneering and sniveling refusenik, crossbred out of Vyvyan and Neil from the 1980s sitcom The Young Ones. You think you are the only one who sees what a hard world this is, and you can't help but ruin the few things about it that are good. You pretend to care about everyone to conceal your inability to care for those closest to you. You trample the poppy because your flower is the narcissus. At the very best, you have no tactics or common sense either: even if you're not really authoritarian, you'll come across that way (meta: you'll come across as someone who will come across as authoritarian), you'll alienate the people you need by your side. Also, you're a bad Kantian, because the maxim you're acting on isn't universalizeable: when somebody (militaristic racists for instance) appropriate a symbol, do you just go ahead and surrender it to them? Where would it end, hmm?
What is the title of Between Two Thorns about? Any between-ness immediately suggests Nether, suspended between Mundanus and Exilium, but I don't think it's about that. I wonder if the Alba-Rosas and the Gallica-Rosas can each lay claim to one of the title's thorns. Alba-Rosa and Gallica-Rosa suggest respectively the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster (or Gallic rose). Perhaps Between Two Thorns -- or at least, the Nether version to which it is tethered -- re-stages the War of the Roses as the War of the Poppies, red and white.
Civil war in England!
There is, of course, another remembrance poppy. The white poppy.
The white poppy was introduced by the Women's Co-operative Guild in 1933, about ten years after the red poppy, and is now mostly sold by the Peace Pledge Union. The motto of the Peace Pledge Union is, "War is a crime against humanity. I renounce war, and am therefore determined not to support any kind of war. I am also determined to work for the removal of all causes of war." I've never worn one. Maybe I'll start, even though -- well, I don't know. It also feels a little bit like the semiotics of the white poppy are, "Debate me bro!"
Turns out there are purple poppies to remember animals killed at war! But not in a big way.
And in Between Two Thorns this is the story: neither side is the good guys. The Gallica-Rosas seem to be good guys, but they're actually in league with the bad guys. Pretending to feud between themselves, they conspire to attack on two flanks: the Alba-Rosas with arrogance and aggression, the Gallica-Rosas with persuasion and seduction.
Can you see where that might be going, with respect to poppies? Maybe?
And yet, that just seems like such a smug, dialectic-er-than-thou, academic Marxist bro thing to say: that the white poppies are the problem as much as the red poppies! Like, oh my God. Who can really believe such a thing? Believe that there is no special or unusual hypocrisy, or complicity, in wearing the symbol whose non-appearance on a lapel is most energetically criticized and policed by the same people who want to violently repel people who are fleeing from war?
Of course, I know lots of people don't care half a hoot if I wear a red poppy or not, but the ones who care the most -- who in a certain way care much more than the Royal British Legion actually care -- are definitely the ones who are happy with refugees drowning. On balance, they're happy with that. Starting wars is fine and dandy, so long as it's Over There.
Surely that must count for something? I think those guys are wrong about drowning refugees, should they nevertheless be my self-appointed sartorial go-to guys?
The earliest known stem-word of rose is, funnily enough, the Parthian wâr.
And can I really believe -- oh, I'm not sure how to put this -- can I really believe that there is no special or unusual hypocrisy, or complicity, in commemorating the sacrifice of those who fought fascism by using literally the closest thing these isles have to a living fascist symbol?
Perhaps not that close, but closer than anything else. Top of the leaderboard. The swastika is too niche and anyway it's German af. St George's Cross is never noticeable by its lack, the way the red poppy is. All those eagles with lightning beaks and whatever are too frikkin awesome to be properly fascist. The poppy is the closest thing there is. And of course it is still entirely justifiable to wear a red poppy, 110% justifiable, I could justify it for you right now. But I don't want to. But I could. But I really don't want to.
Given all that, why would the white poppies be problematic, as much as the red? Because ... I forget. I am ensorcelled into forgetfulness by all this remembrance. Poppy may also suggest poppet or puppet. The Fae-touched are referred to, rather dismissively, as puppets by the Arbiters and Sorcerers, those charged with defending Mundanus from the fairies of Exilium.
Puppetry and pageantry. Well, the white poppy might be a problem because -- even though it forswears it, as much as the red poppy forswears its racist militarism -- the white poppy represents the hectoring arrogance of the Left, our incapacity to accommodate meanings other than our own.
No, that's not quite right! The white poppy represents the Left's inability to set that something free, to set free that red spark, or whatever it is, that red spark of something so necessary and so good, that goes swimming around somewhere inside the red poppy, that goes trickling around inside all its solemnity, and sorrow, and joy in community, and sense of history, and sense of kinship, and sense of place, and resistance to being told what things mean, and all those memories of childhood, or of a lost grandparent or parent or brother or sister, and all that willingness to link your sorrows to larger sorrows, and the ferocity of your love to a larger ferocity and a larger love, and all that pride, and defiance, and nationalism, and patriotism, and jingoism, and er xenophobia, and er justifiable national security concerns, and er racism, and er fascism-ish er empire-ish genocide-ish. Can't blame us, but can't not blame us, for not seizing that strange red spark. The Left's inability to encounter racism in its most triumphant of all outfits, the one it wears when it drowns vermin while dictating exactly the expression you should adopt while you watch it drown vermin, the Left's inability to encounter that and be all like, Wait, I mustn't blow this. We have stuff in common. We can figure this out.
No, that's not quite right! The point would be, I suppose, that the very practice of contesting the meaning of the red poppy -- "It's you being racist," "No, it's me thinking about my granddad" -- ends up being a kind of pageantry whose sum total effect is a kind of nil, that is to say, a kind of default to the status quo, which is a preference for mass murder, over the risk of slight loss to personal material advantage or slight adjustment to personal worldviews.
But can I really believe that? Do I really believe that those who ostentatiously support pacifism, and those who ostentatiously support whatever multifarious and muddled but broadly nationalist referent the red poppy is about ... that these two factions are in practical terms in league with each other, working to sustain and strengthen imperialist and capitalist patterns of domination, oppression and mass murder ... only they're too hazy-headed to recognize it?
Nah.
Maybe.
Nah. Papaver somniferum, the opium poppy, is responsible for associations of ensorcelled slumbers and fey reveries. From poppies (mostly the seed pods) you get opium, from opium you get morphine, codeine and (with a synthetic sprinkling of two acetyl groups) heroin. The opium poppy might be a reminder of imperialism: the British Empire used to grow opium and sell it to China, and when China tried to kick the habit, Britain invaded. I believe David Cameron was asked not to wear a poppy during some Sino-diplomatic shenanigans, but he did anyway? China lost a few chaps in World War II too, so no doubt they forgave him. Nowadays Afghanistan is totally blanketed with poppies.
Does Cathy have a poppy held up to her lips?
It could be helpful to think about the story that Between Two Thorns is not. It's not the story of an ordinary girl who -- after first brushes with fairy, and a confesh to her BFF that she might be going maaaad! -- enters an enchanted alternate world, a world filled with fairies, wishes, curses, and danger, a world where little is as it seems, a world that exists on top of and set somehow also alongside the mundane world, a world which reflects and estranges the mundane world, and which in certain weird ways satirizes and clarifies it.
It is not the story of this girl discovering that the society of this enchanted alternate world, despite its marvels, is trapped in the past, and is, in particular, way sexist. It is not even the story of an ordinary girl finding out that she is not so ordinary after all, for fey blood rushes in her arteries, nor the story of how this not-so-ordinary girl's secret tyrant extended family tries to embroil her in their fairy affairs, and their (un)seelie sexism, insisting that she wear stupid clothes, speak in florid circumlocutions, fulfill her destiny and marry a fairy dickhead.
It is not about this not-so-ordinary-girl's klutzy early attempts to fit in, nor her masochistic micro-ecstasies when she does fit in, nor her outbursts and decisions to be true to herself, nor her wit and fury poured in the pointy ear of pixie patriarchy, nor her thought-provoking encounters with her oppressed and repressed fairy sisters, nor the virality of her simple, unpretentious everyday feminism. It is not the story of the eventual transformations and syntheses and compromises and reconciliations, which promise that even though fairyland cannot be beyond the remit of the modern liberal West, loosening the laces on those whaleboned-in ribs does not have to mean total disenchantment: it is not the story of ultimately, through courage and a strong personal brand, having it both ways.
Why not? That sounds awesome!
Because it is something more uncomfortable than that. Sometimes, when you're in two minds about a story, homing in on the thing that is discomfiting you or failing to satisfy you, and taking it seriously as itself, rather than a crushed version of whatever you want it to be, can set off chain reactions throughout your experience
First, because there are three worlds, not two.
Second, because this is not a portal fantasy. It is a petal fantasy. Cathy is not the us-among-the-aliens, not the ingénue enveloped by strangeness, not the alchemical additive that catalyzes worldbuilding into storytelling. If anyone fulfills that role, it's the mortal bloke Sam, for whom Cathy plays Mr Exposition.
Cathy has always known fairyland. She is a fish-out-of-water not on dry land, but there in the sea.
But ... I don't know, actually I'll think I'll leave it there. A few loose threads, but this thing is long enough as it is.
One last loose thread. I suppose I'll write to the British Legion every year, and to the other ones as well. They seem to be the ones best-placed to do something about it all. If the Royal British Legion would consent to sell the white poppy alongside the red ... well. And in the meanwhile I'll wear the white, or nothing, and if it does spark off any little chitchat, try to wear my wokeness lightly, and laugh it off, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha. ha.
