Unthinkable Wings

Give me the title of a story I've never written, and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first sentence, the last sentence, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got posted, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I'd been able to salvage, or something else that I want readers to know.

Exciting meme from lizbee!

Hum. Having been unable to get the wifi to work in the Bod - except it does now, God have mercy on me - I ought to have been productive.

Well I have, sort of, only of rather bad poetry, rather than of, say, dissertation, or research pertaining thereto. IT'S ALL MEISTER ECKHART'S FAULT.

All speech is a stammer, each word
Misses its meaning, I can write or tell,
Picture the library which surrounds me,
But you'll not see it; you'll only recreate
What I said from your own word-hoard.
My words and words of words float above
Their objects, un-tethered tethered balloons,
Trailing their meaningless cables.
There is no truth in words, at most a likeness.
And yet we long for truth, thirst for it,
Starve for meaning, stutter and try to speak
The right word at the right moment
Re-twist the knot of meaning,
Say all we mean to one another, moor us fast.
But we cannot. The only Word with power to do so
Speaks itself, speaks us, but how shall we take
The Word in our mouths and speak our speaker?


A very rough draft, and probably not that good anyway; still, I suppose writing something is better than spending an hour looking at lolcats (or whatever), right?

Oh well. I may not have managed to do anything for my thesis this evening, as was the plan - but I have written 3000 words of fanfic. It's the Oxford HP one I started ages ago, which has taken off in a somewhat unexpected direction. Like most of the fics I have been working on recently, a vicar has ended up being important. My subconscious is, I see, still as subtle as a sock full of sand. (Top signs you are reading a tree_and_leaf fic: i. Priests, or at the very least cassocks. ii. Quotations from the BCP, iii...) Anyway, hopefully I shall be able to post it before too long. Gen, a mystery of sorts, with Theo Nott, Hermione Granger, and an unexpected shadow from the past falling over a peaceful Oxford quad....

I'm trying to condense the draft of an article for presentation at a colloquium in a couple of weeks. It also has to be translated into German, which is increasing the time/ work rather greatly.

It's sadly predictable, then, that having looked up a paper I gave two years ago, to remind myself how many pages equal twenty minutes, that I got distracted by fic. You see, the paper was on Der Saelden Hort (the treasure of salvation, more or less), which among other things is a life of Mary Magdalen. It posits, in line with many other mediaeval commemntators (though oddly enough, the idea doesn't appear in the Legenda Aurea), that Mary Magdalen was supposed to marry John the Evangelist, until he left her to go off and follow Jesus, at which point Mary, understandably fed up at being dumped, went thoroughly off the rails, until she heard Christ preach and repented. Apart from the detail that the dumping was supposed to have taken place at the marriage at Cana, which on this theory never actually took place - which I think is absurd - I find this story strangely brilliant, and I would like to write about it myself (well; aparently I did, as the paper is followed by a scene of dialogue, which fortunately I didn't read out at the colloquium!). So as well as the distraction of the internet, I'm also spending far too much time thinking about Mary Magdalen.

At any rate, it's a more interesting take on her character than the 'Jesus/MaryOMGTHEIRLOVEISSOGNOSTIC!!!1!!!!11' school of thought, which I have to admit I find terribly boring, quite apart from my theological views (although it might have been OK in 'The Last Temptation of Christ,' which also focused on the 'vocation versus ordinary happiness' aspect, if they'd actually given their interpretation of Christ a personality and a backbone. Conflict is good dramatically, constant indecisive angsting less so.)