THE MALACIA TAPESTRY, a late 1976 Club review

THE MALACIA TAPESTRY
BRIAN ALDISS
Open Road Media (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$7.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: In a grand medieval city where all change has been outlawed, a roguish young actor tempts fate and dinosaurs, all in the name of love

By law, nothing can change in Malacia—a teeming, eternal city of dukes, players, wizards, merchants, beggars, ape-men, lizard-boys, and courtesans—but that is of no great consequence to Perian de Chirolo. An out-of-work actor and unabashed rogue, he is well satisfied with his lot as long as there’s coin, eager young women to bed, and the occasional adventure. Perhaps it is this thrill-seeking spirit—or simply the lure of noble beauty—that makes Perian imprudently agree to take part in a mad inventor’s illegal experiments, since such foolishness will never be tolerated in Malacia. But Perian’s rash actions will only lead him on to further indiscretions, winning him first fame and then notoriety, causing him to be hunted, hounded, martyred, and trapped in a fight to the death with a razor-toothed Ancestral Beast on the outskirts of the city. And perhaps most frightening of all, Perian de Chirolo will find himself in love.

Grand Master Brian W. Aldiss, one of science fiction’s most able and ingenious creative artists, performs a truly astonishing feat of alternate-world building, immersing the reader in an unforgettable Medieval fantasy realm rich in color, incident, invention, and peril—and of course, giant lizards. Welcome to Malacia.

I USED SWEETIENUBBINS' YULE GIFT CARD ON A SALE FOR THIS LOVELY TREAT. THANK YOU.

My Review: A hangover from The 1976 Club, I had this tee’d up on my Kindle to give myself a bit of backup in case I really hated my chosen title, WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME, and needed to abandon ship. I didn’t like that read too terribly much, but it wasn’t so awful I had to Pearl-Rule it. This book, as a back-up choice, would’ve fared about the same.

I don’t hate it; I’m as drawn to the fantasy of a medieval Balkan city trapped in Time by powerful forces that aren’t christian in the way of our world as I ever was. The existence of Ottomans (a very real branch of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia) doesn’t necessarily mean they’re Muslim…and I didn’t specifically notice but am pretty sure we’re not really made privy to their religious beliefs. (If no christians, then no Muslims.)

I’d forgotten a lot of my skills at navigating heteronormativity. Forty-five years on, living in a world where even the slow-moving laws of the land now recognize my right to marry anyone I choose to, I’d completely forgotten how it feels to have to insert myself into straight stories without recourse to my real home. There are oodles of SF/fantasy stories with men who love men in them now. I don’t *have* to come to the straight-people’s table to get a scrap grudgingly thrown!

And that was worth three stars to me. I’m clear now about how very, very much my world has changed. The flipside of that is I’m also clear on how awful it is for bigots and small-souled withholders to live in this more accepting and generous world…why they’re fighting so hard to close the floodgates that were opened very much against their wishes and desires. It is, after all, Author Aldiss’s primary thesis. The great and the good of Malacia have, in concert with the rest of this not-our-Earth, stopped Progress since they can’t stop Time. My half-formed hypothesis is that (fictional) Malacia and its Byzantium and Duchy of Tuscady and so on are in exact parallel with 1976…just on a different Earth in a Multiverse. Not being a Copenhagenist about matters quantum, I’m pretty sure that’s Reality.

If you need any further evidence for my hypothesis, there’s the continuing existence of dinosaurs aka “ancestral animals” and the presence of actual half-human, half-goat satyrs. But tech is stalled in the sixteenth-ish century, and has been for quite a long time if the internal chat is to be credited:

”Perian thinks the story banal, Papa, Armida said, “flashing me a glance I could not interpret. “He says it might as well have been written a million years ago.”

“An interesting remark. Surely one’s interest in the play is precisely that it might have been written a million years ago. Some things are eternal and must be eternally re-expressed. Those desperate straits of love…appeal to us because they apply as much today as yesterday.”

It is absolutely no surprise at all, having read that…peroration…to learn that Author Aldiss describes the speaker, a nobleman of Malacia, as speaking with “...words {of} a dry quality, as if his mouth had developed a prejudice against saliva.” Oh myyyy, as Takei would say.

The tale’s a solidly crafted one. It is, I confess, a bit of the read’s pleasure that it rides the rails already laid down by generations of tale-tellers gone before. What I enjoyed was the worldly setting, the worldbuilding that Author Aldiss chose. His zahnoscope, that not-quite-daguerreotype means of photography…do pardon, mercurization...described in it outlines so the reader can see in their own eye the end results. The careful and wordy descriptions of clothing…after all, a first-person story told by an actor would dwell on surfaces and details!...the same with the ceremonies, the hurly-burly of Malacian life, the small and immediate circle of roving player Perian de Chirolo’s eyesight. It also establishes reasons for Author Aldiss to make snide remarks like the director of the story being told in the new photographic process “moving us about like chairs” and Armida, his love-light, being snappish with his faithless self so he observes, “We bit our tongues—being unable to bite each other’s…”. That’s the fourth star right there.

Then the lumpen-ness endemic to Aldiss's expository writing obtrudes.

”Beware of all things fair, my son, whether a girl or a friend. What looks to be fair may be foul under the surface. The Devil needs his traps. You should regard also you own behaviour, lest it seem fair to you but is really an excuse for foulness.” And so on.

That last is Perian making it plain Author Aldiss knows he’s moralizing and in a tiresome way…a suitable ironic distancing from the fact that he means it. How can I say that with such certainty? Because this is merely the first iteration of the same “shiny surfaces do not cover great depths” message. The second, more beefily stodgy, is the plot of the play that Perian and his Armida are part of in this new mercurization zahnoscope technology: It is literally, beat for beat, the plot of the book we’re reading. You’d have to be insentient not to Get It.

Therein the lack of that fifth star. While I agree with the reviews of the time that this is a good entertaining story, I don’t think…and didn’t then, because of my lack of memory of anything except the broadest strokes of it…that this is a Great Work, a Classic of the Field.

Good read, though.

#The1976Club: WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME by Marge Piercy...well titled indeed ***SPOILERS***

WOMAN ON THE EDGE OF TIME
MARGE PIERCY
Ballantine Books
$13.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Hailed as a classic of speculative fiction, Marge Piercy’s landmark novel is a transformative vision of two futures—and what it takes to will one or the other into reality. Harrowing and prescient, Woman on the Edge of Time speaks to a new generation on whom these choices weigh more heavily than ever before.

Connie Ramos is a Mexican American woman living on the streets of New York. Once ambitious and proud, she has lost her child, her husband, her dignity—and now they want to take her sanity. After being unjustly committed to a mental institution, Connie is contacted by an envoy from the year 2137, who shows her a time of sexual and racial equality, environmental purity, and unprecedented self-actualization. But Connie also bears witness to another potential outcome: a society of grotesque exploitation in which the barrier between person and commodity has finally been eroded. One will become our world. And Connie herself may strike the decisive blow.

THIS READ WAS PART OF A LOOSE BLOGGER READ-A-THON CALLED THE 1976 CLUB. THERE ARE SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING BELOW.

My Review: I began this read eager to know why I've owned several editions of this book over the decades...one from my bookstore-having sister in the Seventies, one from my Manhattan years in the later Eighties, a British one from the Aughties...but never remember reading it! And now that I've read it again, I remember why I don't remember.

What a disappointment.

The ending just...isn't. The sense of resolution, of the fit between story and ending, is unsatisfying to me. And it took over sixty pages to get there.

You know from the publisher's synopsis that Connie Ramos, our third-person-limited PoV character, is a mental patient. It's the 1970s and psychopharmacology wasn't as advanced as it is now (I'd argue it's still roughly where surgery was in the pre-Lister 1840s). Much that is wrong with Connie is situational, and it's utterly unsurprising. She's "treated" by the standards of the day, which is to say confined and contained and circumscribed so she can't act out her acute agony. She's in need of psychotherapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy; she gets diagnosed as schizophrenic and the full machinery of experimental psychology gets to work on her.

But are they wrong? She claims she's been to the year 2137. And the world is....

Off we go! Luciente reaches her to show her a beautiful, granola-and-grown-out-hair Seventies egalitarian-hippie-commune future that I loved. "Gender" roles? Umm...what is per (their all-purpose pronoun, love that!) talking about, Luciente? Sex is biological...what is gender role? Part of the false dichotomies we've left behind.... What *wasn't* left behind was the of-the-time disrespect for sex work and workers, equating them to slaves. Reductive, shown to be inaccurate, but very feminist-70s. What isn't left behind is the disrespect of the future for the past. Luciente and all per people in Mattapoisett seem to know less than a US grade-school child about their own history. Connie says things that dumbfound these folk regularly...did all the books and digital records get destroyed? Then find a way to tell me so! (Goodness knows Author Piercy isn't afraid of infodumps.)

What I mostly didn't love was the way Connie, my PoV!, didn't look around and note things! But...well...this is a story about an abused and frankly impoverished and ethnically othered, therefore expendable, woman. All of those things are still stigmas, but they were a great deal moreso in the Seventies, and as Luciente's world (is Mattapoisett a Utopia, really, because war and societal conflict still exist there and then) bleeds into her own reality the Seventies Bellevue staff become less and less empathetic, more and more afraid of and for her, and act with more controlling behavior. It wasn't a joyride for Connie before but, as the life with Luciente recedes and Connie becomes mired in the mental hospital's horrors, the way she copes is...awful.

The aforementioned sixty-plus pages. I didn't like 'em. I did, however, recognize 'em. The months I spent in a locked ward in 2014 were a real eye-opener for me, and this might be why I didn't much enjoy the ending. My roommates were schizophrenic men. I had a really strong introduction to the hopelessness of schizophrenia and its utterly ineffective treatments. I think a big part of my getting my own brain back under my control was my sense of deep, abiding gratitude that I don't have *that* problem.

But does Connie? Is that really what's going on here? In her records, which we see, it says her intelligence is "Average" and is this detailed, consistent fantasy really something a person of average intelligence could come up with? It was here that I began to think the ending, besides just not being to my taste, actually missed a trick. What occurs isn't unrealistic. What it is, though, is without nuance. It asserts that Reality Is Reality. That's what we've just spent over three hundred pages interrogating! Taking that tack over quite an extended ending is...well...why not keep the interrogation, is Connie mad? is Connie telling us the truth? is Connie ever going "home"? going, that is, back to Mattapoisett. Instead the story ends with a THUD. And that wasn't at all on my Bingo card.

Author Piercy's prose is adequate.

“Never in your life have you been helpless—under somebody’s heel. You never lived where your enemies held power over you, power to run your life or wipe it out. You can’t understand. That’s how come you stand there feeding me empty slogans!”

Luciente bowed her head. “You crit me justly, Connie. Forgive me. I’ll try to see your situation more clearly and make less loud noises in your ears.”
–and–
“Only in us do the dead live. Water flows downhill through us. The sun cools in our bones. We are joined with all living in one singing web of energy. In us live the dead who made us. In us live the children unborn. Breathing each other’s air, drinking each other’s water, eating each other’s flesh, we grow like a tree from the earth.”
–and–
Every day was a lesson in how starved the eyes could grow for hue, for reds and golds; how starved the ears could grow for conga drums, for the blare of traffic, for dogs barking, for the baseball games chattering from TVs, for voices talking flatly, conversationally, with rising excitement in Spanish, for children playing in the streets, the Puerto Rican children whose voices sounded faster, harder, than Chicano Spanish, as if there were more metal in their throats.

Never that I saw did it get better than that, and those are peaks that I've chosen. They're good, they're good, before someone says I'm saying otherwise. What they aren't is...tingly. That feeling you get when someone writes something that spears you with its sounds and feelings. I never got that in this read...and I'm pretty sure most others didn't either. What I saw praised, when I read the reviews others had written of the book after I finished my own read, was the ideas Author Piercy presented for the future, the cold analysis of the present...but not the prose. It's fine! It's not awkward, or lumpen; it's...fine.

But that's all it is. And that, I think, is my best summation of this read: It was fine, it had much to recommend it, but its heights weren't all that high and its lows weren't low.

It was fine.

THE 1976 CLUB...not a title, an Event

I periodically participate in the Internet-wide read-and-review year-based "Clubs" that some book bloggers do. This one coming up is The 1976 Club.

First Alfred A. Knopf edition, 1976
I decided to read Marge Piercy's feminist SF time-travel classic, Woman on the Edge of Time. It's been on my TBRadar since ~1977, has come so close to being read that I have purchased it at least twice, but somehow hasn't made it to the top of the pile...until now. If not for Neglected Books, Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings, and Simon from Stuck in a Book (linked above), who knows when/if it'd ever have happened.

                                   My 2016 Del Rey Books edition
So, anyone else want to try something from 1976? Look at your library on your cataloging site (on LibraryThing, a free site, you can sort by copyright dates!). Wikipedia has a handy-dandy listicle of "notable" things published that year; the various awards given all have their honorees listed by date, eg the World Fantasy Award lists annual winners at this link and it includes multiple categories! There's no reason to limit yourselves...read a/some/all the novel(s)/story(s)/poem(s) on the Pulitzers list, or any other list of Awards/Prizes/Medals given in 1976 at the Awards Archive.

This is a chance to read something unexpected, read something new to you, read something exactly like/opposite to your usual preferred length, category, genre. Or embrace your guilt, choose something you already own that was published that year. Do it, in other words, however the heck you want...and still have a special time period to do it in (or by, if you read slowly)...with as many or as few others you'd like to tell about this fun Internet Event.

Sounds pretty much can't-lose-ish to me.

THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF, forty-seven years old and still speaking to the essence of selfhood

THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF
DAVID GERROLD
BenBella Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$11.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: This classic work of science fiction is widely considered to be the ultimate time-travel novel. When Daniel Eakins inherits a time machine, he soon realizes that he has enormous power to shape the course of history. He can foil terrorists, prevent assassinations, or just make some fast money at the racetrack. And if he doesn't like the results of the change, he can simply go back in time and talk himself out of making it! But Dan soon finds that there are limits to his powers and forces beyond his control.

My Review: Danny's been livin' the high life, thanks to a bequest from his mysterious old uncle. One day, the gravy train ends, and Danny has to make his own way. With a belt. A very special time-travel-enabling belt.

An exploration of adolescent exceptionalism, a meditation on the establishment, building, and defense of identity, and an astonishingly rare representation of gay maleness in science fiction. The author, who penned "The Trouble with Tribbles" for the original Star Trek series, tackles all this heaviness in less than 200pp, and never makes it feel like any tackling is being done.

Deft and timely even now, Gerrold's unapologetically gay Danny is mildly surprising even in the modern SFnal world. The ewww-ick-they-do-WHAT? homophobes need fear nothing, there's no raunch in Danny's journey of self-discovery (of a sort I've never seen again).

For my teenaged self, this book blew into my life at a time when I was under emotional siege from the forces of Jesus. It was a lifeline thrown from a grown person to my too-young-to-run self. If he could write this book, there was a world that didn't loathe me, because here was something written, published, and sold with me in it! I endured many a screaming, hectoring, sermonizing hour thinking that thought.

If you suspect some youth of your acquaintance might be struggling to think positively of himself because he's probably gay, think about giving him this book. It can't hurt, and it might do him a world of good.

ETA a few musings and a quote. In going back over the 2003 edition of this book, I thought to compare it to the 1973 edition that blew my mind wide open when first read (I was not going to sleep a peaceful night until I found a room full of men having sex with each other and diving in). Gerrold has done a light but thoroughgoing job of making alterations to the book that reflect thirty years' growth in himself and the world. It was lovely to see, and BenBella Books deserves our thanks for making room in this timeline for it to happen.

I've pushed my rating to five stars because, thinking back on it, any minor quibbles I've made vanish in the arc-light of this novel's originality in a musty, stuffy, conservative genre. And world.

I've said in other reviews (see my review, then compare to Received Opinion about Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand) that re-reads of the peak experiences of bygone days are hazardous to one's ego. I've always praised Gerrold's book as a well-written, risk-taking, genre-expanding chef d'oeuvre by a writer whose fame came early. I was right then, I'm right now...this book's genre-bending continues because, despite the presence of many other QUILTBAG characters in current SF/F, the main character of this book remains unique and speaks with an evergreen honesty. The frame has been dusted and re-gilded to keep the portrait sharply focused. It takes nothing away from the central and beautiful idea of the book, the inner life of an infinity of people contained in one-many-same-different body-brain-spirit.

I worked and worked to make that sentence make sense and I think I was only marginally successful, but I don't know how to make it better. If I figure it out, I will change it.
^^^
That there's a better review of this book than any I could have dreamed up before.

And that quote:

My body has not experienced its years in sequence. But it has experienced years. And it has aged.
And my mind has been carried headlong with it—this lump of flesh travels through time its own way, in a way that no man has the power to change. ... Perhaps I'm not a mind at all. Perhaps I'm only a body pretending the vanity of being something more. Perhaps it's only the fact that language, which allows me to manipulate symbols, ideas, and concepts, also proves the awareness of self that precedes the inevitable analysis. ... I have spent a lifetime analyzing my life. Living it. And rewriting it to suit me.

HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN, a mythopoetic extravaganza that still moves me to tears

HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN
THOMAS BURNETT SWANN
Out of Print
various prices from $9 plus shipping

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Cyclops and sirens, halfmen and godlings...that of which myths are made and that from which worship arises—these are the materials Thomas Burnett Swann weaves together in the fantasy-historical tapestry of this new novel, which he considers to be his most important work to date. For the author of Green Phoenix and The Forest of Forever now tells of a Queen of ancient Judea who was more than human, of her son who became legend, of their Cyclopean nemesis whose name became synonymous with Colossus, and of loves and loyalties and combats fixed forever in the foundations of human society.

The ever-growing audience that Thomas Burnett Swann has gathered for his unique novels will find How Are the Mighty Fallen a new fantasy fiction experience.

My Review: When this book came out in 1974, the publisher had to fight with its distributor to get it onto store shelves. The topic, gay male love in Biblical times and, in fact, between two men whose friendship *ahem* has survived the millennia in myth, was treated frankly as falling in love and being a couple. Yep, that's right, David and Jonathan were doin' the nasty in Swann's fantasy universe. And much like our own time, even more like the times 43 years ago, they had to avoid religious nuts and disapproving fathers and nosy old bats with more time on their hands than is healthy.

Like all the great love stories between men that have come to our own time, the idiotically squeamish have seen fit to reinterpret the tales as being examples of friendship. After all, friendship is sexless! And that means we don't have to think about men gettin' all naked and sweaty and touching each other with lovers' hands! Couple things wrong with that, hypocrites: 1) If your spouse isn't your friend, I feel very very sorry for both of you. 2) You have, by your squeamishness about man-on-man action, demonstrated that you're already thinking about other people, all other people, in sexual terms. Which is considered deviant sexuality in theraputic terms. Sex therapists teach that all sexual thoughts which do not involve the prior knowledge and explicit consent of the subject thereof are deviant. So every time you pleasure yourself thinking of Nick Jonas or Taylor Swift, you're a deviant!

Ha ha ha, deviant. That's the price of being a mere human!

But David and Jonathan paid the price that's demanded of all those who love transcendantly: Loss. It's not as though all of us mortals don't lose, it's that the stakes aren't as high for us. The great ones always excite envy in the lesser. Then the burden of life in the muddy mess of the world is lifted from them by their love and, well, that's more than can be borne by the small-souled:

Saul looked to Elim. "What do they say?" Deeply religious, he had not lost faith in Yahweh; rather, he feared that Yahweh had lost faith in him.

"Let the king discover and punish the transgressor."

Saul sighed and the years seemed to rest on his shoulders like a mantle of snow. Was this the ardent man she had loved at the well in Endor, he who had left his fields...to unite a divided country? It sometimes seemed to her that...he hardly possessed the energy to sigh. It was her one satisfaction that he could no longer be an impassioned lover to Rizpah [his mistress].

The great one here is Ahinoam, a Siren, a winged Queen of her people exiled from their happier exile on the abandoned Crete post-Minoan times. She and her son Jonathan swam to Judea from Crete in an escape from the Cyclopes, whose attentions great queen Ahinoam has been fleeing since her people first fled the great northern lands in fear of the Goddess. She, creature of the sky, found love and sanctuary with an earthy, earthly man of rough ways and deep passions, Saul the reluctant farmer-king of his people. Ahinoam and Jonathan are his, his alone, and none was happier with this than Saul himself. The wars roll past, the queen bears Saul sons and daughters, and slowly loses her Siren's powers even as she keeps her Siren's perfect beauty. Of course this beauty becomes her curse, loses her the beloved Saul to a manifestly inferior being as his mistress, and sets in motion the loss that all who dare to love, really love, face.

Jonathan grows up knowing nothing, except what's whispered near him, about his genesis. Saul loves him as a son. That's what Jonathan knows. He behaves as a king's son must behave in Saul's world, learning war and battle as the noblest accomplishments. He is, when the book opens, wounded and recovering when he and his one great love meet. David is a young man of great vigor and surprising depths of creativity. He is the son of a nobody, he has older brothers who are larger and stronger than he is, but he has a golden talent for psalmistry. I think we'd think of him as a rapper today. His lyrics have survived in the Torah and the Bible because he wrote beautifully. He sang beautifully, too, and it was this that brought him to Jonathan's bedside at his mother's behest. She thought to comfort her son, though Swann loads her actions with foreknowledge. David sees, really sees, Jonathan and that is doom for one who is primed by otherness for passionate love:

He discovered too a surprising weakness in the famous young warrior. It was neither moral nor ethical; it was not a shifty eye or an averted gaze. Rather, there was a fragility about him; he was like a purple murex with its delicate spines and its exquisite dyes. He is too beautiful, David decided. He has about him the transience of perfection. Being already perfect, he cannot be improved, he can only be broken.

Or, in simpler terms, love at first sight. Ahinoam, as the Siren that she is, knows what time it is, and has no problem with it. Her people and so many others, those who follow the Goddess, place no limits on love. Yahweh, jealous and angry god of a small people in a larger world indifferent to their fate, decrees the sexual love of like for like to be a sin (a concept lacking in Goddess worship) because the attraction is too powerful and will prevent Yahweh's people from making babies and thus perpetuating his worship:

The Goddess never decreed that men should lie only with women. All of the races which worship her...accept the love between two men as one more affirmation of the divine plan, the tide which rises and falls to the moon's compulsion, the inevitability of the seasons, the certainty that those who love will meet, after death, in the Celestial Vineyard. A man’s love for a man is neither more nor less than a man’s love for a woman, it is only different.

Loving each has its joys. Loving both has its pleasures. But sooner or later, a choice gets made, and it's not yet possible, like a Gethenian, to pick and choose one's physical state. I suspect that, when we're honest, each of us likes sex enough to give any old thing a whirl. Love is usually a little choosier. Falling in love is Game Over for all the others.

He is still in love with her, but Rizpah is comfortable, and the old need comfort more than passion. It is hard for advancing age to confront eternal youth. (italics in original)

I understand this, but I guess it means I'm not old yet because I ain't ready to say "buh-bye" to passion. Maybe this is why I find myself in relationships with younger men. Thank goodness there are one or two still ready to think of me in that way. Ahinoam chose, in Saul, the path of love; Saul lost himself to the immense gravity of a great love, a once-only full-being involvement. Such a thing can't last for a lifetime and, since his one true love is the very definition of Otherness, what else can he be expected to do except flee to the ordinary when he can't sustain his passion?

David is set to discover the same tragedy. Jonathan, in his illness, can't do battle with Goliath the Cyclops who has stalked his mother since the halcyon days on Crete ended. David the rapping shepherd, a young man of great strength who slew a lion with his bare hands, is still too young, too untested, too small to fight such a creature as a Cyclops, says the voice of consensus. The consensus fails to take into account the fact that a man in the grips of his one true love isn't limited by practical, realistic considerations. He will amaze everyone with his seemingly miraculous abilities:

"I will not die!" The words were a trumpet call.

He fitted his last stone, Jonathan's tourmaline, into his sling and somehow, propped on his other arm, flung the stone awkwardly upward and toward the bewildered eye.

I have missed, he thought, or done him no harm with so light a shot. He stands above me frozen like an Assyrian statue. Stone; stony and heartless. No welt has appeared on his brow. His boot will complete its descent and grind me into the flowers.

The earth exulted with Goliath's fall.

The power of love is terrifying.

But so is the price. David, in his deep passion for Jonathan, becomes more than a hero to his people, he becomes a legend. He is the name on every tongue, his psalms are sung by every voice, his lover Jonathan the royal prince is beautiful beyond compare...the very priests of Yahweh say he is the next king after Saul, beloved of the whore Rizpah.

NEVER threaten a woman's one great love. She will rise up and smite those who are stupid enough to do so. If a mother is the most dangerous opponent on the planet, a woman in love is next down the list, and both are far, far more dangerous than polar bears or sharks. Rizpah might be a whore, but she is a whore whose one great love is a king, and she does everything in her not inconsiderable powers to protect him. Including destroying his son, his son's lover, and to the extent she calls into motion the powers of war, her man himself.

Great love will always exact its price.

David survives the battle that destroys Saul and Jonathan. David goes on to found the greatest royal house known in Israel's history. David lives. What a curse it is, outliving your great love...alive but not yours anymore, like Ahinoam's Saul, the lover is allowed a painful comfort in knowing the beloved still lives. David's Jonathan, as Swann tells us, is in No-Land; his body is unburied so his spirit is trapped between worlds. Alecto the Siren calls Jonathan from his shadowy non-place to tell David how to release him into the afterlife. Naturally, David does this for the one love that exceeds all others, saving his Jonathan yet again, just as he did when he stood down Goliath.

Alecto should, I think, have the last word. She speaks these words to Jonathan when he visits her to lose his virginity with women. It isn't his desire to do so, he does this to please his David, but Alecto calls forth the shadow of love from him and he gives her his child. Her gift to him is to distill the nature of love into a memorable phrase:

There ought to be laughter in love. But there also ought to be wonder.

#LoveIsLove