In which we hear our first Stone Age joke.
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Page 15, Paragraph 2:
The wall around the aurochs has a lot of entryways with wooden gates on them. In the next ring outside of it, across the wall from the aurochs, are pigs. There are a lot of them, with chickens scratching around their feet. My belly makes a noise; it hurts.
Paragraph 3:
The outermost ring (the one outside the pigpen) is narrow. Although they're not as numerous as the animals, there are several people walking around in it. Some of them stand and talk to one another; they look little below me. I can't imagine how many people are working in a place like this, because it's so big.
Paragraph 4:
Across and down from the little hill, aways off from the building I've been looking at, I see many pointy-topped huts, on the banks the river. There are [about] twenty of them; many plumes of smoke rise from this area. I figure all of this is the work of settlers to keep their animals, yet it's hard for me to imagine that there's a settlement this big in the whole world.
Paragraph 5:
I don't understand why they've built this hamlet by a river bridge, where the dirt between the worlds is thin - even a baby would know that's not a good idea. Why, maybe they don't know about the shagfoal and creatures like that, because I hear that settlers aren't any smarter than babies. My people have a lot of good jokes about settlers, like this: one guy says, "How does a settler-man get a mate?", and the other guy says back, "Why, he waits for her to catch her horns in the briars."
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It's interesting - Stephen King writes a lot about places "where the dirt between worlds is thin", too - I'm particularly thinking of his Cthulhu Mythos story "Crouch End" here, as well as the "thinnies" in his DARK TOWER series.
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There's also the whole Voudon and/or Candomble thing about crossroads: many a blues player was said to have gone to a crossroads at night to trade his soul for the ability to play the guitar, or so the legends went. (You might recall such a scene from the film "O Brother Where Art Thou", if you saw it.)
ReplyDeleteVoudon even has loa (spirits? demigods? mental abstractions?) that administer crossrads and bridges, where the physical crossing is just a symbol of the spiritual connection between the physical world and the spirit world. It is custmary to approach these loa first, to ask them to opoen the way, before trying to contact whomever/whatever you seek in the spirit world.
I learned these things from very diverse sources: Maya Deren, who wrote _the_ book on Voodoo, and William Gibson, who realized that while in the ole times it might be a bridge or a crossroads that brought the separate worlds together, in modern times it is more likely to be an electronic bridge or router that separates the worlds. This doesn't mean we should forget to be respectful or that the old gods don't matter any more... it just means that things have evolved, and our definitions have evolved with them.
Sorry, it's late and I'm babbling. Think I got the point across tho.
'There's also the whole Voudon and/or Candomble thing about crossroads: many a blues player was said to have gone to a crossroads at night to trade his soul for the ability to play the guitar, or so the legends went. (You might recall such a scene from the film "O Brother Where Art Thou", if you saw it.)'
ReplyDeleteMuch like Robert Johnson, whom I mentioned in an earlier comments section. Another fun (albiet somewhat dated) cinematic version of this myth is the Walter Hill film CROSSROADS, which is worth a look if you're interested in this kind of stuff.
'William Gibson'
I have a copy of NEUROMANCER that's been sitting in my attic for about 3 years. I'll get to it one of these eons. :)
'Sorry, it's late and I'm babbling. Think I got the point across tho.'
It's all good. Always nice to hear from you, bro.