MISC: Analysis, The Waste Land, What the Thunder Said, lines 400-410...

[etherati]

...as loosely related to eventual zombie!porn. D: D: YES I'M GOING TO GO THERE. BLAME LIODAIN. Well no that's not fair. Blame me. It's my freaking AU.  D|

11 lines from Eliot's Waste Land, analyzed, free associated, dumped into the stream of consciousness. Thought it might be of vague interest. If not, feel free to ignore.

Transcribed from paper!journal:

---

"Then spoke the thunder                                                          400
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed."

Eliot is for once (and only once) condoning and accepting our lust and our surrender to it as conditional to existence. Sinful action at least signifies existence, and is therefore better than inaction, which signifies nothing. Reference? Earlier work, covered this already. Moving on.

Moments that hang on past themselves and give a sense of self, of a position within time; surrender to ourselves shows us who we are. I exist I exist I exist. He says 'friend'; contrast this with the anonymous encounter in the fire sermon so roundly condemned. (Ref to Jean possibly? Am I seeing slash in everything?) Is the end goal(life vs satisfaction of base desires) the important part, or is the context more significant - lust wrapped in love rather than more lust. Water a constant theme. Water is a symbol for life all throughout but water is also a common cultural symbol for love. Condoning surrender to emotion perhaps, rather than surrender to physical sensation, with the goal irrelevant.

"Which is not to be found in our obituaries
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor
In our empty rooms."                                                               410

Imagery speaks very solidly - that after we have gone to dust, the existence we have cultivated in the space between ourselves evaporates, with no one ever the wiser - no one understanding our motivations, our reasons, our excuses, our follies. Why we chose to make our home amongst these strewn moments of dissonance and fear. We become bodies in empty rooms and the intangible connections between us do not linger. There is value in these connections, or the language describing their dissipation would not read like mourning.

What have we given? We give the only thing that is ours to give. We give connection, we give self, we give sin and evil and grace and surrender, we give sympathy and control and isn't that the rest of the story? Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata. Give, sympathize, control. We give when we cannot bear to take, accept when we cannot ask. Control when sympathy is not enough to quell the chorus in our heads. Sympathize when control shatters. Give of ourselves and hope that it is enough, that blood shakes the heart in relief rather than fear, that the daring is worth its risk, that the surrender is received as the fragile gift it is, handled lightly, unbroken. That we do not wish to retract it. That the giving does not diminish the greater scope of our existence. My friend. My friend. Blood shaking my heart - "My friend," he says. "Love," he does not say, as friends never do, as no one who really should ever does, because there are too many kinds and only one word and language cows the spirit every time. My friend.

Eventually all the rooms will be empty, all surrenders forgotten with the reasons and the excuses and the guilt - all friends dead and gone. Will it have been worth it? And would an age of prudence have been worth it? At death's door, would any of us ask for the memory of a pure life and in the bargain, trade away a hand, a breath, a voice in the darkness, tears to fall on a numb cheek, arms to die in? These connections hum in our hearts and if the giving is base and vulgar, it is still better than giving nothing at all.

My friend.

---

Yeah, so. THIS IS THE KIND OF SHIT I THINK ABOUT WHILE PLANNING FICS. Brought to you by Bic and Moleskine, and by the letter C. For CRAAAAAZY.

Comments

[tuff-ghost.livejournal.com]

eventual zombie!porn. D: D: YES I'M GOING TO GO THERE

!!!!!!!!!
&hearts

[etherati.livejournal.com]

VERY ELOQUENT RESPONSE.

Heh. I may not have wanted to derail the directed narrative of the main story arc, but that doesn't mean I wasn't eventually going to be tempted to do a little something on the side. XD Here is the thread where I WENT TEMPORARILY INSANE ACKNOWLEDGED THE DRAMATIC POTENTIAL OF BORDERLINE NECROPHILIA gah seriously what is wrong with me (starts with one of liodain's art posts and degenerates rapidly from there, BUT it might make the above nonsense make some more sense: THREAD (http://liodain.livejournal.com/26178.html?thread=175426#t175426)

[tuff-ghost.livejournal.com]

aww, your worry hurts. It's not broken and dysfunctional, you won't ruin the fandom. It's just weird, which is the very best kind of romantic ;)

Your Dan and Ror are so far away from dysfunctional; they're such a good couple. Risking lives for each other, supervising puking at the sink, cuddles and counsel and rescues from insanity...they're a highly functional efficient MACHINE of a couple, so there.

[etherati.livejournal.com]

Bizarrely enough, that makes me feel like such a hack. D: Like I'm not writing them correctly unless they're miserable and broken and always on the edge of someone getting socked in the face. I didn't actually INTEND for a zombie apocalypse to improve their lives, it just sort of happened. D: And now it alters the entire course of the original story, and it probably screams 'horrible fangirl fixit crap that totally misses the point of the original text because the point was that he was broken and crazy and alone and LOL DESCONSTRUCTION.'

and all I can think is... did the articulate and intelligent person pre-Roche who really just wanted to help people actually deserve to fall that far? Is it really fangirlish and wrong to want to give him something better? Post-Roche Ror might have been hard to justify having much sympathy for but that wasn't always who he was. :\

OKAY TOO MUCH SERIOUSNESS: ZOMBIE!PORN ZOMBIE!PORN

in which i invalidate any serious points i may have made above

[tuff-ghost.livejournal.com]

PS: zombie boners are extremely relevant to my interests

Re: in which i invalidate any serious points i may have made above

[etherati.livejournal.com]

SEE THREAD LINKED TO ABOVE IN REGARDS TO SUCH MATTERS. D:

[brancher.livejournal.com]

OMFG YOU ARE GOING TO WRITE MORE ZOMBIE FIC

AND PORN


ILU FOREVER

[etherati.livejournal.com]

I was ALWAYS going to write more Zombie!fic haha I have two separate non-porn pieces in the works right now with other ideas stewing in my head. It's just the porn thing that's new D:

BTW: Triage. WHEN WILL IT BE UPDATED. D:

[brancher.livejournal.com]

I'm working on it! Rorschach is being recalcitrant.

[tuff-ghost.livejournal.com]

hahahaha I am so freaking glad you asked that because I was too scared to

non-author can't ask authors such questions

[liodain.livejournal.com]

I HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE HAPPY TO TAKE THE BLAME FOR SOMETHING :D

[etherati.livejournal.com]

*HEAPS BLAME THEN*

REALLY THOUGH. You drew something unbelievably hot and then made a completely offhanded joke that made me unable to see anything other than zombie!porn in said image because I'm pathetic and sad like that - TOTALLY YOUR FAULT. ALL OF IT.

(end self-deprecating sarcasm)

[liodain.livejournal.com]

Haha, you say it was a joke, but I was halfway through drawing the damn thing when I realised that it was insidiously becoming zombie!porn. A few spatters of blood on Dan's face and sequentially it could come right after the chapter 10 sketch.

YOU SEE IT BECAUSE IT'S THERE :D

[etherati.livejournal.com]

That's. More awesome than I can communicate. Because when I first saw it I thought... guh that would work so well in the AU but not gonna say anything because I don't want to seem OBSESSED. And then when you made the joke I just about died. in a good way of course.

Of course, if that did follow on directly from the chap 10 sketch, poor Dan probably WOULD have wound up bleeding on the ground. D: Because Ror had absolutely shit for self-control at that particular moment.

BUT I DON'T CARE. There must be a version with the spatters added. FOR MY UH. PRIVATE COLLECTION. *coughs* If you want to, I mean.

[xiangru-yan.livejournal.com]

Hello! Like many others, I have read and loved your Zombie fic. I know many others have said it in lengthier words, but I found your fic very heartwarming. What I would like to ask is, how do you plan your fics? I want to write some, also for the Watchmen fandom, but so far I only deal with drabbles as more lengthy fics tend to go awry along the way.

Be waiting for your future ficlets for the Zombie AU =)

[etherati.livejournal.com]

Ehhhhh to be honest, the zombie!fic was mostly written linearly on the fly without a lot of planning at first. I had a collection of scenes in my head that I started stringing together in a way that made sense and about halfway through the rest of the story had pretty much come together in my head, so I was able to start foreshadowing and backshadowing and sidewaysshadowing and using extended metaphors etc etc but there wasn't a lot of formal planning; mostly just a lot of thinking. And sometimes for fic I do stuff like what's posted here; pick apart a quote or a segment from another source that resonates with what I feel like I'm trying to do, break it apart into WHY it resonates and use that to source imagery and themes. WOW THAT'S PRETENTIOUS. SORRY.

I'm glad you liked the fic. :)

[xiangru-yan.livejournal.com]

That's a great idea, especially for writing songfics and stuff aha. Source imagery and themes as in to reharsh the ideas in the original source into your own fic?

[etherati.livejournal.com]

Nuuu not rehash (though to be fair, if you look up Eliot's notes for the poem I'm analyzing above it reads like a freaking bibliography or all of the images/themes HE rehashed from other people's work haha) more just wheedling out the basic human themes that make the piece mentally 'work' in the same way as the thing you're trying to write. Break it down into its constituents and start building from there, and build something that is new and not a rehash but still has that thread of common human experience running through it.

Again, I am aware of how pretentious this all sounds. I'm not trying to be.

[22by7.livejournal.com]

Possibly I will sound drunk, I apologise, I just looked at the threads preceding my comment here, and. And. Watchmen has always had this air of seductive, defiant difference around it: it's the Original Serious Gritty Philosophical Comicbook Graphic Novel. But yknow what. It's a text. It's a piece of art. It wakes up a little more every time you poke at it and turn it over and maybe inside out. I don't know, hence the drunk!warning, being in this fandom has made me ferociously optimistic about imagination and art and ridiculously huge things like that, because it's pure play, but there's also all this touching conscience, and really what I get from this particular combination is (not that I don't get this from other fandoms, just more intensely here) that people are creative, texts are meant to be played with, and Rory and Dan BFF T.S. Eliot, Amiri Baraka, Alexander the Great, zombies and Nazi costume fetishes are getting down and dirty on the same plane and LOVING IT. Sweet, beautiful bricolage. It makes me happy. Now somebody step in and tell me to take a deep breath and get a life, because it's just the internet. But that's the thing, it's not just the internet. It's YOU. Really you. It's really us, making this crazy shit. AND THAT'S GREAT. Oh god, what was I actually trying to say? Yeah, I was trying to say that... that I totally agree with brancher about the weirdshit kinkery giving rise to fucking fantastic fanfics, and that this fandom is so constantly full of surprises that in it I do not think, 'That would NEVER EVER WORK. Ever.' without reading the fic in question first. I will try anything, and more often than not I will be happy I did. I was on the fringes of Harry Potter fandom ages ago, should probably have learned my lesson there, but this one burns brighter and crazier, somehow.

Ok, I think I lost all track of what I was trying to say. But... zombie!porn? Go there, for we shall follow.

ferociously optimistic about imagination

[tuff-ghost.livejournal.com]

Take a deep breath and keep going, you are exactly right :D

I'm really proud of this fandom.

[etherati.livejournal.com]

This post is full of win. Will reply comprehensively later. For now it is time for ice cream and catching the train to get home.

[etherati.livejournal.com]

Okay so:

I agree on basically everything you said. I love how the fandom can be so inclusive of influences from every which way; that there is enough depth there to support the hardcore literature and enough irreverence to support the crack and usually all at once, blended together into this bizarre ... thing... (my words just ran out of steam completely there) ... that feels completely honest and surprising and real.

Because as you said, it is real, it is real people doing it, and the internet is not some monolithic 'thing' that instantly reduces the significance or importance of anything that passes over it. It's just another communication medium, another way real people talk to other real people, and there's just as much serious beauty to be found in those human connections as there is to be found through letters or over a telephone or face to face. It's just people. We are all just people putting ourselves out there and I think that the medium helps, but yes. It's just us, making crazy wonderful shit. And you're right. That's wonderful. XD

Jury's still out on whether zombie!porn falls into that category though. With the exception of the image liodain just posted HOLY CRAP WOW.

And thank you. You don't sound drunk to me.

[lampsh4de.livejournal.com]

God damn it, I agree completely.

I love you people.

[etherati.livejournal.com]

Wow now you're starting to stumble into my unindexed ramblings XD

[lampsh4de.livejournal.com]

:D I think my favorite part of your writing is your philosophic ramblings. So even if those ramblings aren't centered around characters, they still make me happy.

(HURR HURR I'M A CREEPER. D:)