Celine Kiernan's Blog, page 15

The Hollow Men – T.S Eliot

Today is the first time I’ve read T.S Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men in its entirety.It feels fresh and raw and somehow entirely appropriate in the light of recent events. I hope it resonates with you as much as it has me…

The Hollow Men
- T. S. Eliot

Mistah Kurtz—he dead.

A penny for the Old Guy

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

*punches air in triumph*

I’m so horribly behind in answering my fan-mails. Seriously I should be shot. I can only apologize (again), and promise (again) that I’ll catch up soon. BUT I got two separate messages this morning that so filled me with glee and pride and triumph that I had to pause what I’m doing and very quickly share.

First was an e-mail from a fourteen year old Australian reader (Madeleine) who wrote to let me know that, due to how Christoper speaks to Wynter in the Moorehawke books, she now has ‘very very high expectations of boys‘

Second was from a reviewer in America who wrote to tell me that her daughter had come home and told her:

“So this kid in my class was being sexist… he said I’m a girl so I either have to get married and have babies or be a crazy cat lady. So I told him, ‘I am not a slave to my belly, so f**k off!’ And you know where I got that from? Moorehawke!”

I was so proud of my girl  Thanks for the positively feminist influence on my preteen!

I can’t tell you how thrilled I am with these messages. Wynter and Christopher’s support for each other and the concerted effort they continue to make in understanding and accommodating each other’s differences through out the books was so important to me and to the underlying themes of the Moorehawke trilogy – it thrills me when I find I’ve done it right.

We all want what we want from a fictional romance and there is no ‘one size fits all’ but in Moorehawke I wanted to portray two very different people who bring their own disparate yet complimentary strengths and experiences to a relationship and in so doing improve each other’s lives.  In so many stories of young love there is what is, for me, an unfortunate tendency to portray romance as being heightened and improved by conflict. It is as if the only way to prove that two people like each other is to show them fighting. As if somehow conflict and a struggle for dominance rather than support and communication are the vital ingredients in the recipe for true love (I dislike in particular the trope of a patient and accepting woman ‘reforming’ a surly male character into a ‘good husband’) To me conflict is naturally part of any relationship, its just not a ‘romantic’ part.

Wynter and Christopher’s love is based on their compatibility. It doesn’t manifest itself through displays of  jealousy or prove itself via struggles over who can take the most abuse and keep on coming back for more. It is – as I have said – all about two very different people learning from each other’s experiences and combining strengths to build a relationship which not only nurtures but also supports and encourages the growth and changes necessary as they move forward together through their often difficult lives.

That, of course, and teasing, and kissing, and hugs, and sex and laughter and all the truly great stuff that comes when you’re comfortable and happy with the person you love and trust. Hurrah for true love, hurrah for supportive partners, hurrah for romance! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!

What Does Addiction Feel Like…?

My son found this on reddit. It is a reply to the question’what does addiction feel like?’. It’s so powerful I had to re-blog. For the original go here

 

“Ok. I’ll try. It’s a bit rambling because I should have gone to bed a while ago. And it kind of starts in the middle because there was another bit before what I wrote but I was copypasting stuff around and it all ended up a bit of a mess but I hope it gives some sense of what my experience was.

So the only reprieve you have from crappiness is to get into the drug. People call it getting high but I think that’s one of the most misleading words associated with drugs, I always think of drugs as like going and sitting in this room where everything is alright, the rooms are different but they all serve that same purpose. Of course not when you first start, at first you want to see the room, all the cool stuff, it’s so interesting, amazing look that! Wow man, can you dig it? Yeah bro. It’s nice. Reaallly nice man, like the best everrrrrrrrr.

And that’s fucking cool. And if you just visit a few times that’s what you remember. But if you stay in the room too long you get used to it in there, how nice and warm it is. How interesting it is. How much you like everyone while you’re in there. And the more time you spend in there, the colder you notice it is outside, how the lights start to hurt your eyes and everything is a bit too garish and discordant and all that stuff people want you to do and the people themselves… well they just start to grate on you and seems now you can’t wait to get away from them, back to your cocoon. That’s all you want, more than anything, if everyone would just leave you alone and let you do that then there would be no problem, and guess what? You get your wish.

Because people will try a bit at the start, maybe your girlfriend will make a bit of a drama about it, maybe some people will have some sympathy for you or try to intervene but pretty soon they’ll all move on, but you won’t.

Because now you’re stuck, you and your little hidey hole, only it’s not so warm and cuddly now. Partly because the chemicals aren’t as effective any more, partly because you’re starting to deteriorate physically and partly because you probably are starting to have real problems holding your life together. When you’re not ‘high’ now you feel ill, nauseous, weak and shaky like someone has sapped all the energy out of the marrow of your bones. And it’s not just physical, emotionally everything is just bleak and shitty, nothing is worth anything and even if it was you feel too shitty to do anything about it anyway. And you’re trapped in this cycle, no-one trusts you, you’ve fucked everything up and the only people you have contact with would sell you out to get hold of drugs, and you’d do the same to them. Not because you’re nasty or they’re nasty but you all understand that everything else is secondary, you’d probably be nice and have friends if you could but it never works out that way, so you end up with kind of accomplices, temporary alliances based on mutual suspicion. You literally have no-one to turn to.

and you know the feeling where you’ve been out in the wet and cold all day and you’re just really tired and hungry and you’ve gotten home and eaten a hot meal then had a warm shower and you get into your bed under a big fluffy blanket and you can hear the rain ouside and everything is just so snuggly and warm that you wiggle your toes and smile to yourself. Well now that’s just a little packet of white powder away. And that’s why you can’t stop, not just because the drug is so great, but because everything else has turned to shit. By now you’ve become a living paradox, you would do anything to get your drug and at the same time your most heartfelt, soulful wish that you would trade anything for in the the universe would be for that drug to be extinguished from existence. All the normal people you see going to school, work, catching the bus, you would give anything just to have their normal constant life free from the hold of this thing. You are so jealous of them. It is all so unfair. You look out from the secret little hell that you’ve made for yourself and envy all the people in the other world, their obliviousness. Just to be without this knowledge would be the greatest blessing you can imagine.

And even if you stop taking the drugs that stuff doesn’t go away, the effects linger for years and years. It must knock something out of balance in your brain or hormones or something because you never seem to fit in again properly after that. There always seems to be stain on you that drags you down, separates you from normal life. Black depression, fantasies about how things could have been, if only… all the potential, all the beautiful people lost in that mess..

But then, ten years later, it all seems like a bad dream. A half remembered hazy different world like a movie I watched somewhere while I was falling asleep and never really grasped the narrative. I feel like I escaped it, but only just, I don’t think I had much left in me before it would have completely swallowed me up and been the rest of my life.

I honestly think it has taken me 15 years of abstinence, meditation and self reflection as well as just normal living to throw the shadow of this stuff off. And probably I still haven’t, it’s always hard to tell except in hindsight. The thing that always gets me though is the huge waste of time it’s all been. I’m talented. I’m good at stuff and yet half my life has just been frittered away on meaningless bullshit. I’m lucky if I’m back to square one.”

Sorry for the Silence…

I’m deeply absorbed in my animation portfolio at the moment and everything is getting neglected. ( I haven’t written a single word in weeks and am raddled with guilt. It’s the first time in decades that I’ve not been writing on a daily basis)

I hope to get the Wyn & Chris animation finished in the next fortnight and then (hopefully) all will be back to normal. Until then apologies!!

Moorehawke animation work in progress…

(still can’t post swfs to the blog so click on the pic to see the animated scenes)

This will be the last time I post this project as a WiP ( I’m going to wait until entire movie is completed before posting anymore.) But I had fun with it this weekend, and I really like the way the music* comes in here, so thought I’d share it 

No snow falling as yet, and no fog drifting in BG of first scene… will put those kind of EFX in when entire movie is done.

(*music is opening bars of Hoppipolla by Sigur Ros)

The only blog post I’ll make re Steubenville

The Steubenville rape trial has provoked a lot of excellent discussion in which I’ve partaken to some extent privately elsewhere online. In short, the best articles I think you can read on the matter are Laurie Penny’s wonderful article in the NewStatesMan and Lauren Nelson’s excellent examination of rape culture over at rantagainsttherandom (please note those two links come with a VERY STRONG TRIGGER WARNING)

The only thing I would like to add to this is in reaction to the number of discussions which I have seen hijacked by the ‘why did she get so drunk?’ and ‘young girls should learn to defend themselves’ type of comments. Look,  I get where these kind of sentiments are coming from – as the mother of a teenage daughter I absolutely do – but I’m actually quite invested in us all getting out of the habit making those types of comments as part of a discussion of rape. Why? Because when a discussion of rape is immediately (and inevitably) followed by ‘young girls should learn to protect themselves and not get into situations of vulnerability’ it does several things:

It becomes a conversation about self defense and not a conversation about sexual violence… this immediately deflects the focus onto ‘what could the victim do to prevent this’ and away from ‘why do so many people think this violence is ok/inevitable’. It also implies that most rape is avoidable if only you do the ‘right thing’… in fact most rape in the world is not avoidable, in the Republic of Conga (as one sad example) it’s widely believed that more women have been raped than have not (and repeatedly). Woman are raped at home, in school, on buses and in work; they are raped while sober, while ill, while pregnant. They’re raped by strangers and trusted relatives, by soldiers and policemen, teachers and doctors. They’ve been raped because they wore a burca, because they didn’t wear a burca, because they were black, jewish, white. Because they couldn’t fight back, because they tried to fight back.

You get what I mean? There is no one reason. There is no one type. The only consistent fact is that there was a rapist.

During a conversation on rape the focus should not be about the victim, but the perpetrator. Always the perpetrator. Why? Because then maybe we will stop thinking (no matter how subliminally) that rape only happens in certain kinds of situations to certain kinds of women, and will begin to ask ourselves why does it happen so often, in so many different ways, to so many different types of person.

BG Art: scene one

The background art for scene one of the Moorehawke animation I’m working on.

Palmerstown Community School Graphic Novel Project. The final round up.

When I first sat down with the students of Palmerstown community college and explained the process we were about to embark on, I told them that finishing was entirely up to them. I wasn’t there to crack a whip over them. I wasn’t there to check that they had ‘done their homework’. I was there to help, that was all, I was there to advise. If any student fell by the wayside, if they gave up, that was their problem, I sure wouldn’t be running after them to persuade them to soldier on…

READ THE REST OF THIS POST & SEE PHOTOS OVER AT YAPS

Wyn & Christopher (slightly) animated

(I can’t upload swfs to the blog, but if you press the pic you’ll be taken to my DA account where you’ll see the animation)

So these are the finished character designs for the Flash Animation I’m hoping to updating my portfolio with. Chris, as always, is being a shameless nudist so Wyn is (not so successfully) doing her best to preserve his decency.

This was super fun! All that’s left to me now is to animated the wee movie I want to do with them. I’m hoping to use this lovely song as the sound track : Hoppipolla by Sigur Ros

Wynter Moorehawke (slightly) animated.

I’m working on updating my flash animation portfolio. I thought I might as well have some fun with it and so I’m doing  a scene with Wynter and Christopher. I just finished Wynter’s character model today (the character designs always take me a while to do. Once I have Christopher done I’ll get the scene animated in no time.)

I though you might like to see what I’ve done so far. I wish I knew how to embed swfs in wordpress, alas I am a computer troglodyte so if you want to see the animation you need to press that wee drawing to the left there and it will bring you to my DA account where Wynter’s cloak and hair are fluttering about in the breeze