[books] pretty sure I still don't understand Fire and Hemlock

[kaberett]

It probably doesn't help that -- well, between (i) the state of my mental health and (ii) the magnificent crescendo of the book, I was up until a little gone 2 last night, finishing it off, which in practice means that I once again hit the part that feels most complicated and incomprehensible to me at a point when I was at best ill-equipped to try processing it.

I've gone back and reread rushthatspeaks' posts (alternative, with more formatting) on the topic, and while they've helped a little I still find myself worrying away at this. I can't tell to what extent I'm doing a counterproductive autism; I can't tell how much I want things to be definite where the magic lives in the spaces that they aren't.

I think there are two interlinked points I'm still struggling to wrap my head around.

The first is the pool, of the way upward and the way downward. I tentatively understand, I think, the idea of the void as potential, as wellspring of ideas and cradle of creation, and that one moves toward it through creating. I am wrestling, though, with the extent to which the pool is both dead end and wellspring, and yet it appears to be only creating -- only love & friendship & music -- that moves one toward it. If it is truly two things (on their own, and both at once) then, surely, as Tom moves closer to the void-of-inspiration Morton, his mirror, should move closer to the void-of-nothingness? Or is it precisely that it isn't, actually, both-at-once -- that Laurel has constrained its nature, at least temporarily?

And the other is the coda:

"Yes, and if it's not true nowhere, it has to be somewhere." Polly laughed and held out her hands. "We've got her, either way."

This, and its immediate preceding. I can't make the thoughts-behind-the-words come into focus, the things-that-aren't-said, the agreement that isn't made.

I want to grasp it. I'm sure it's there. I just don't know how to turn it around so it'll fit.

(I'm also pretty sure I need to do some more background reading in order to understand quite how the bargain, with the photograph and the lock of hair, worked. But that at least feels like it's simply a gap in knowledge, on my part, rather than a fundamental gap of understanding.)

Explanations very much welcome.

Comments

[madgastronomer]

...I clearly need to reread the book.

[white_hart]

I love Fire and Hemlock. It's probably my favourite book, and I have read it very many times, but I still don't understand it, though I understand different bits in different ways each time I read it (in exactly the same way as I understand and don't understand Four Quartets each time I read that).

[rushthatspeaks]

I'm pretty sure that Laurel has constrained the nature of the pool, because she's made up and set the rules for the entire contest between Tom and Morton.

And why she can do that, and why it works the way it does: in the original ballad, the fairies pay a tithe to Hell, specifically. Well, they aren't doing that here. Theological concerns are outside the novel's remit. The tithe, the human sacrifice, is specifically to extend their own lives, Laurel's life when the sacrifice is female, and Morton's when it is male. They take over and vampirically appropriate the lives of their sacrifices.

So a lot of the book is about Laurel pushing Tom into Morton's position, in life generally and, literally, in her bed. Tom is the only person we see behaving much like a husband towards Laurel, and they were I believe briefly legally married, though of course everyone knows Morton has always been King. Tom-and-Morton are therefore readable as (an attempt at creating) one entity, which is then going to chop off part of itself in the interests of living longer.

This is where we get to the book's three levels of reality again. In HERE-NOW, the workaday world, Morton and Tom are successfully blurred; they share each other's roles, and in fact Tom is slowly being pushed out of his everyday life. In NOWHERE, which is Fairyland itself, the role exists of Laurel's King and Consort, although we don't actually see either Tom or Morton fully in that position. In WHERE-NOW, the level of the story Polly and Tom tell each other, Morton does not exist at all.

Now, the three levels of reality can also be named as follows: HERE-NOW = the real world, life as we know it; NOWHERE = the immortality of art and fairyland, the numinous space beyond time and place where archetypes are real and myth is the same as experience; WHERE-NOW = the liminal space of human art, which draws from HERE-NOW as it aspires to understand and communicate NOWHERE. What Laurel is trying to do is take Tom, a HERE-NOW human, and make him transcend into NOWHERE, the archetype of the Year-King, by manipulating him and his story in WHERE-NOW. Humans become immortal via art, but they can't both do that and stay human at the same time.

Basically, the process overall is as follows: Laurel and Morton, immortal, archetypal Queen and King, find a human sacrifice. Morton slowly steps down into being human, pushing the sacrifice away from the everyday world at the same time, and leaving the role of King existentially open. Laurel forces the sacrifice through a story which ends with him becoming that King, thereby causing the sacrifice to lose his humanity. Morton then steps back into his role as King, becoming the personality in charge of the archetype again (and this is probably an interesting power struggle, though not one we see in the book, because nothing says Morton's personality has to win).

The story which ends for the sacrifice in this loss of humanity can be either a tithe to Hell, as we see in the original ballad, or, as we see with Tom, something rather like the transcendence of the knight who attains the Holy Grail. What would happen to Tom if he fell into that pool wouldn't be bad, necessarily, he just wouldn't be Tom anymore. (And I bet he'd eat Morton for breakfast before going off and being an Unattainable Being Of Light, and it would be sad but also satisfying, except for the part where he'd still be married to Laurel.)

So think of Laurel's instructions to Tom as the equivalent of: Tom, you can use anything that pushes you towards transcendence. Because what she is banking on is that Morton does not fucking want to transcend anything. He already did that, some innumerable number of times or perhaps amount of time ago, and for Morton as a personality specifically I bet it was the tithe to Hell version, too. Morton is not pushing towards darkness, weakness, hellfire, but towards humanity and the human world, towards HERE-NOW. Moving away from transcendence, is, paradoxically, what he needs to do to keep his rule as King.

Laurel probably wanted the pool to be a tithe to Hell-- it's much easier to control people who can be sucked down by their worst impulses. She spends a lot of the book trying to get Tom to be pulled down by whatever bad impulses he has. However, Tom is an incorrigibly decent person, so she had to try to push it the other way. Note that Morton was not happy about this either.

I... hope this makes sense outside my own head? For an attempt to explain how I think the second thing works, see next comment, as this one is already very long.

[rushthatspeaks]

The second thing you mention is a careful double negative. Laurel's said they can't be together anywhere, i.e. in HERE-NOW. Things that aren't true in HERE-NOW can be true in NOWHERE, since one of the purposes of NOWHERE is making and explaining and arriving at truth. They can get to NOWHERE via WHERE-NOW, pulling in elements of NOWHERE by making art together as they always have.

Alternatively, if the truth is that they can't be together in NOWHERE, and that's how Laurel has defined it, then, well, look at the word NOWHERE. That's the double negative, 'not NOWHERE' = somewhere in HERE-NOW, if they can figure out where.

So either they need to come up with a new shared story (what a hardship), or they can just go live their lives once they figure out what's out of Laurel's reach in HERE-NOW (possibly just a plane flight, honestly). Either way, Laurel's power over them is broken.

[kaberett]

More to follow, but quickly -- THANK YOU for these; I think they are going a very long way toward untangling me.