Back where we started.
***
Page 12, Paragraph 6:
My people say that there's no good in making markings. Markings take their shape from trees and dogs and so forth and say, "This is 'tree'", "This is 'dog'", yet they're nothing but markings.* If a man looks at them his thoughs all become crazy, so that he can't understand what's real and what's a marking. I've heard it said that many markings are so old that they were made by Urks and people of that kind back in the Ice Age. Now the Urk-kine are no longer in the world, yet many say their descendants** are below [at the bottom of?] the hills, deep in their caves, where they hide to catch those of us above. It's not good to look on markings.
Page 13, Paragraph 1:
I close my eyes and take another way around the open grass and the stone. I trip on a root and scratch my face on briars, but I don't open my eyes until the stone is far behind me.
Paragraph 2:
I come out of the trees, and walking up a hill with the sun like fire behind it, I see the pigs, and I run down now and the pigs become logs, and here I am now, sitting on them, with no other times to think of.
Paragraph 3:
I scratch the scab on my knee and look up in the sky. Night is coming as I sit thinking, so I can't see the sky-beasts now, yet I can see their little eyes, bright up there in the dark. I'm cold all over, and I lie behind the log, out of the wind. I shut my eyes, so that the darkness will come to me as it has come in the world.
*Ceci n'est pas une pipe, anyone?
**I think this is what he means by "little people"
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His 'little people' sure have taken on the qualities of The Fey... associated with standing stones, left the surface world but some of them dwell in the hills and will do you harm if you meet them. Britain has a long tradition of believing "there's something in the hills", and they've made many barrows and mounds of their own. Somewhere, King Arthur is supposed to be ensconced within a hill, waiting for a time when he is needed to rise and save Britain again.
ReplyDeleteI love that darkness hides the sky-beasts but not their bright little eyes. So much of our narrator's world is alive... except for the parts where "pigs is come to logs".
"His 'little people' sure have taken on the qualities of The Fey... associated with standing stones, left the surface world but some of them dwell in the hills and will do you harm if you meet them. Britain has a long tradition of believing "there's something in the hills", and they've made many barrows and mounds of their own."
ReplyDeleteY'know, this whole business about little people and mounds and rocks and subterranean beings has been driving me crazy - I knew I had run across a reference to all these things in some book I had read recently (besides Tolkien) and I couldn't remember which one... until I pulled an H.P. Lovecraft omnibus I had picked up at Barnes & Noble off the shelf and found this passage in his essay SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE, where he's talking about the Welsh writer Arthur Machen:
"In the episodic novel of The Three Impostors... we find in its most artistic form a favourite weird conception of the author's; the notion that beneath the mounds and rocks of the wild Welsh hills dwell subterraneously that squat primitive race whose vestiges gave rise to our common folk legends of fairies, elves, and the "little people," and whose acts are even now responsible for certain unexplained disappearances, and occasional substitutions of strange dark "changelings" for normal infants. This theme receives its finest treatment in the episode entitled The Novel Of The Black Seal; where a professor, having discovered a singular identity between certain characters scrawled on Welsh limestone rocks and those existing in a prehistoric black seal from Babylon, sets out on a course of discovery which leads him to unknown and terrible things."
Sounds kinda familiar, doesn't it?
'So much of our narrator's world is alive... except for the parts where "pigs is come to logs".'
At the risk of sounding like an eco-terrorist (or a hypocrite), the narrator's world IS more alive than ours is, since it hasn't been fucked up by thousands of years of "progress". Of course, his mind is much more alive to the possibilties of things as well - every waking moment (and some of the sleeping ones) holds the potential of some new mystical portent.