lolol cracksquee and my english assignment?
Well, sometimes you have to be happy just because you can't take the angst anymore, yeah? :) It feels good to be happy.
I've got straight As at the moment, guys. Solid As in everything but French, 94.8%. I'll fix that, though. I'm quite pleased with myself, considering. Yes, well.
I've decided to write about Tori Amos, for the human rights shiznit. Her music, firstly, but then her work with RAINN and all that business also. That's good. That woman is heroic.
Oh right, my English assignment. Basically - convey an abstract idea through concrete details. My abstract idea is something like, at what point does the importance of a cause surpass that of self-preservation and individual well-being, as well as what justifies strong belief. Anyway, I'm quite pleased, I did get a 50/50. I wish to put it here for posterity, for it has the French Revolution and tinier hints of incest than I would have liked and a tiny bit of blood involving Madame Guillotine (OMG my favourite song :D) but yes, you can definitely tell where I got sick of writing it. xD Here 'tis:
The ink stains his fingers, grey over velveteen skin with splotches of deepest black. It runs along the lines of his palm, tracing the outline of his destiny, and she doesn’t have to be one of the gypsies shivering beneath the bridges outside to know what it reads.
She believes this disruption to their normal life, this, this revolution, he calls it, was painted quickly, a scene of human drama depicted in watered-down, running colours over some unknowable canvas. When they bleed together, deviate from the artist’s calculated strokes to combine at some undictated point, they are recognisable, even strong. When they run diluted across the canvas, traversing bare emptiness off into horizons of plain air and nothing, and do not meet, then there is no sight to be witnessed.
Wet paint is risky to lean against, and so she does not. Her attitude toward these beliefs for which her father would and at times seems to want to give his life is, at best, pessimistic.
But his hand pressing the type to the page, the same one that created her every bit if not more so than that of God did, this is the hand that has always put bread on their table and will supposedly remedy their life, assign some physic to the entire nation and raise it from the depths of the lowliness into which it has descended. “Louis must die,” he tells her, sitting by the fire with steepled fingers, looking more into the cold darkness of their tenement than at her, and perhaps this remark should frighten her but it does not. She has learned not to question him, not now.
-
She holds her father’s hand, or rather, allows his bony yet strong fingers to keep a firm hold on hers, maintaining the interlacement as they meander through the Parisian streets. “Where are we going, Papa?” she asks, but he does not answer, does not bother to smile to assuage her concerns. Papa doesn’t smile anymore, so she doesn’t either.
Her father has been educated, not like the blind man they pass, not like the painted harlot loitering beneath the tavern’s swinging, weathered sign, not in the streetwise ways of the obligated, but like Robespierre, the light of the Revolution, like Louis himself. Papa knows what he is doing, she tells herself, but she cannot help but frown to see him give a conspiratorial nod to the butcher.
She knows he thinks (with his typical melodrama since Maman died) he has come to Paris to die, and she fears for her father. She thinks sometimes he forgets he still has her to live for.
-
There is an excitement growing among the people, a fuse set waiting to spark.
The papers circulate through the Parisian streets, a cancer to the monarchy, inciting action in French blood. They poison the public mind, riddle it with a disease against the old authority, bid it find its own cure for its ills instead of settling for the diagnostic hand of its trying parent.
There are words the priest uses, to bring infants under the loving grace of God, to bind one soul to another in matrimony, to ensure that the dead are properly cared for. These are words that govern the people more directly than Louis ever did, with a softness of direction formed of the people’s communal will to be governed.
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Signals of the hands carefully crossing the chest, traces of smoke to traverse the light filtering in through the windows. Every head is bowed - in reverence? in shame? - before the crucifix, the wood dripping with waxen blood. Amen.
Papa cannot hear these words anymore, or alternately, pays them no mind, these ones used to see his wife off to Heaven. There is a buzzing in his brain she can almost hear, undoing his former deific loyalties and censoring thoughts of God from his ears. He believes in something higher still; she sees it reflected in the glassy sheen of his eye, the one chill tear marking his grime-smeared cheek.
In the name of Mother Patria. By the grace of Madame Guillotine.
-
Their room is small, but bigger than her old one at home. That’s not home anymore, she chides herself.
She had tried to wash her father’s hands once, had sat him down on their bed and tried to clean them, in a bowl of water - the water had been stained grey, like the rest of their life. There were splotches that would not come out, no matter how hard she scrubbed them. Cold water trickled over her wrists, prickling the skin into gooseflesh.
Her father had paid her no mind, hadn’t tried to help her, only stared out the window with a lightness of expression she has not seen since Maman was alive. He scares her when he gets like that, when he pays the world at large more mind than her, obsessed with how to rectify it. She says nothing to try and bring him back to her own world, because she imagines that the girl called Joan must have scared her family, also. She is quietly accepting that she has lost him.
She is accepting of his ideas (his lunacy) because she has no choice, and so she turns over his hands in her own for lack of any other way to be close to him, scrubs at the inky marks of his ideals until she can no longer see them for the tears in her eyes.
Papa will never love her as much as he loves France.
-
Papa’s fingers are hopelessly black again.
She thinks of the town where she was born (the name of which she has forgotten, living worlds away from it now), of the rotted abscesses blighting each potato her father pulled from the ground, the swishing tails of the cows and mules, the graying dishrag they had pulled over her sister’s, then her brother’s, then her youngest sister’s languid, unseeing eyes; thinks of the dark dress she did not own and thus could not wear to her mother’s funeral. She imagines that the rest of their family all have black fingers now, too.
There is a sadness, a tiredness tingeing eyes that have read the same lines over and over for hours, printing enough copies to wallpaper their entire room several times over.
She doesn’t know what to do.
She spreads her arms to him, allowing her threadbare shawl to fall to the floor. It lies grey over the splintered wood, over her pink feet, useless and inconsequential, like the blood of the common man. She is offering him the comfort of humanity, of family, of the only remaining human being who shares his blood. She offers him a comfort uninvented by idealism, but rooted in flesh and blood.
Papa tears himself from his work, and she bites her lip to see how it pains him. He presses her, his daughter, to his body, at once pressing a kiss to her hair, and she rests her head on his shoulder, nestling in like rain over April violets.
-
Papa went a little funny when Maman died, like her brother had gone a little funny when he’d caught the fever so bad Maman had had to hold him to feed him, clothe him, bathe him, before he died. Before she’d caught it herself.
It is almost manic now, how Papa will lay the paper over the press and stamp the meaning onto the page. He is prodigious in his passion, like any other man might be about learning, the Church, alcohol, even. There are pieces of parchment mostly identical to these ones pilfered from those better off than them, brought to them via dubious suppliers; Louis and Marie read from paper just like the kind Papa is using to bring about their demise.
She stands by the window, and says nothing.
What will be the result of her father’s small insurrectionism, she wonders. She doesn’t want to know.
-
“Liberté,” her father breathes, his yellow-teethed grin glinting in the guttering light thrown by the lantern. The panes of glass are tinted enough with lampblack that they temper the light with edges of dark, renders the black letters set over the page all the more black, and he does not notice the seas amassing behind her eyes.
Liberté, she thinks. Where is yours, Papa?
-
The direction of the winds of change fluctuates, and no one is safely cemented in Fate’s favour.
How they had found her father, she does not know, cannot care, being wholly distracted by the fact that she is an orphan now, or will be, once Papa’s headless body stops twitching. Soon, she prays. Let it be soon.
Madame Guillotine is no mistress, and the Revolution must adhere to her every fancy, even if this wish is not so much her own as the one most popular among those in power at the moment.
She hadn’t been able to look, not she, but she watches the blood pours forth now, until the fabric of his shirt clings, sodden, to the platform. His cravat is heavy with it.
She watches, transfixed, the jostling and dim roar of the crowd belonging to some other state of being than the one her mind inhabits now. Is this, this crimson deluge dripping, the mark of her father’s life? The definitive manifestation and symbol of his very life, pouring forth that he might leave this most deplorable of realities for some other, less horrific one? Heaven? A perfect France? Or is this blood not his life simplified into red splashed over moldering wood, but the knowledge that was supposed to save France, could still save her if it were not wasted, slathered over an unforgiving slice of steel?
She turns toward Versailles; at least, in the direction she believes the palace to be, pulling her shawl across her face. She shudders, shakes, shivers. It is June. Her eyes meet those of a gendarme, standing by the steps leading up to the scaffold. He smiles at her. She returns the smile, her teeth firmly set in the flesh of her cheek until she can taste blood, the same blood dripping from the shining silver of the guillotine.
They will all be wading ankle-deep in blood before this is all over.
-
She walks, for lack of anything more productive to do, straight past the tenement where she had lived for, what, all of two months? Two years. It holds no more life for her.
-
A paper catches her eye. Lost, like a child, wandering the streets of Paris, much as she is. It has been dropped, carelessly, perhaps, or with intent, with disgust, by a bourgeois.
She kneels, slides her fingers between the chill cobblestone of the Rue Montparnasse and the back of the paper, lifting it to better see the letters imprinted there. The words come more easily to her lips now that she must read them for herself, now that they are infused with a meaning that could not touch her before.
“Liberté. Égalité. Fraternité.”
I shall return in a bit (maybe), because I am feeling quite chatty today. :) Lucky you!
I've got straight As at the moment, guys. Solid As in everything but French, 94.8%. I'll fix that, though. I'm quite pleased with myself, considering. Yes, well.
I've decided to write about Tori Amos, for the human rights shiznit. Her music, firstly, but then her work with RAINN and all that business also. That's good. That woman is heroic.
Oh right, my English assignment. Basically - convey an abstract idea through concrete details. My abstract idea is something like, at what point does the importance of a cause surpass that of self-preservation and individual well-being, as well as what justifies strong belief. Anyway, I'm quite pleased, I did get a 50/50. I wish to put it here for posterity, for it has the French Revolution and tinier hints of incest than I would have liked and a tiny bit of blood involving Madame Guillotine (OMG my favourite song :D) but yes, you can definitely tell where I got sick of writing it. xD Here 'tis:
The ink stains his fingers, grey over velveteen skin with splotches of deepest black. It runs along the lines of his palm, tracing the outline of his destiny, and she doesn’t have to be one of the gypsies shivering beneath the bridges outside to know what it reads.
She believes this disruption to their normal life, this, this revolution, he calls it, was painted quickly, a scene of human drama depicted in watered-down, running colours over some unknowable canvas. When they bleed together, deviate from the artist’s calculated strokes to combine at some undictated point, they are recognisable, even strong. When they run diluted across the canvas, traversing bare emptiness off into horizons of plain air and nothing, and do not meet, then there is no sight to be witnessed.
Wet paint is risky to lean against, and so she does not. Her attitude toward these beliefs for which her father would and at times seems to want to give his life is, at best, pessimistic.
But his hand pressing the type to the page, the same one that created her every bit if not more so than that of God did, this is the hand that has always put bread on their table and will supposedly remedy their life, assign some physic to the entire nation and raise it from the depths of the lowliness into which it has descended. “Louis must die,” he tells her, sitting by the fire with steepled fingers, looking more into the cold darkness of their tenement than at her, and perhaps this remark should frighten her but it does not. She has learned not to question him, not now.
-
She holds her father’s hand, or rather, allows his bony yet strong fingers to keep a firm hold on hers, maintaining the interlacement as they meander through the Parisian streets. “Where are we going, Papa?” she asks, but he does not answer, does not bother to smile to assuage her concerns. Papa doesn’t smile anymore, so she doesn’t either.
Her father has been educated, not like the blind man they pass, not like the painted harlot loitering beneath the tavern’s swinging, weathered sign, not in the streetwise ways of the obligated, but like Robespierre, the light of the Revolution, like Louis himself. Papa knows what he is doing, she tells herself, but she cannot help but frown to see him give a conspiratorial nod to the butcher.
She knows he thinks (with his typical melodrama since Maman died) he has come to Paris to die, and she fears for her father. She thinks sometimes he forgets he still has her to live for.
-
There is an excitement growing among the people, a fuse set waiting to spark.
The papers circulate through the Parisian streets, a cancer to the monarchy, inciting action in French blood. They poison the public mind, riddle it with a disease against the old authority, bid it find its own cure for its ills instead of settling for the diagnostic hand of its trying parent.
There are words the priest uses, to bring infants under the loving grace of God, to bind one soul to another in matrimony, to ensure that the dead are properly cared for. These are words that govern the people more directly than Louis ever did, with a softness of direction formed of the people’s communal will to be governed.
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Signals of the hands carefully crossing the chest, traces of smoke to traverse the light filtering in through the windows. Every head is bowed - in reverence? in shame? - before the crucifix, the wood dripping with waxen blood. Amen.
Papa cannot hear these words anymore, or alternately, pays them no mind, these ones used to see his wife off to Heaven. There is a buzzing in his brain she can almost hear, undoing his former deific loyalties and censoring thoughts of God from his ears. He believes in something higher still; she sees it reflected in the glassy sheen of his eye, the one chill tear marking his grime-smeared cheek.
In the name of Mother Patria. By the grace of Madame Guillotine.
-
Their room is small, but bigger than her old one at home. That’s not home anymore, she chides herself.
She had tried to wash her father’s hands once, had sat him down on their bed and tried to clean them, in a bowl of water - the water had been stained grey, like the rest of their life. There were splotches that would not come out, no matter how hard she scrubbed them. Cold water trickled over her wrists, prickling the skin into gooseflesh.
Her father had paid her no mind, hadn’t tried to help her, only stared out the window with a lightness of expression she has not seen since Maman was alive. He scares her when he gets like that, when he pays the world at large more mind than her, obsessed with how to rectify it. She says nothing to try and bring him back to her own world, because she imagines that the girl called Joan must have scared her family, also. She is quietly accepting that she has lost him.
She is accepting of his ideas (his lunacy) because she has no choice, and so she turns over his hands in her own for lack of any other way to be close to him, scrubs at the inky marks of his ideals until she can no longer see them for the tears in her eyes.
Papa will never love her as much as he loves France.
-
Papa’s fingers are hopelessly black again.
She thinks of the town where she was born (the name of which she has forgotten, living worlds away from it now), of the rotted abscesses blighting each potato her father pulled from the ground, the swishing tails of the cows and mules, the graying dishrag they had pulled over her sister’s, then her brother’s, then her youngest sister’s languid, unseeing eyes; thinks of the dark dress she did not own and thus could not wear to her mother’s funeral. She imagines that the rest of their family all have black fingers now, too.
There is a sadness, a tiredness tingeing eyes that have read the same lines over and over for hours, printing enough copies to wallpaper their entire room several times over.
She doesn’t know what to do.
She spreads her arms to him, allowing her threadbare shawl to fall to the floor. It lies grey over the splintered wood, over her pink feet, useless and inconsequential, like the blood of the common man. She is offering him the comfort of humanity, of family, of the only remaining human being who shares his blood. She offers him a comfort uninvented by idealism, but rooted in flesh and blood.
Papa tears himself from his work, and she bites her lip to see how it pains him. He presses her, his daughter, to his body, at once pressing a kiss to her hair, and she rests her head on his shoulder, nestling in like rain over April violets.
-
Papa went a little funny when Maman died, like her brother had gone a little funny when he’d caught the fever so bad Maman had had to hold him to feed him, clothe him, bathe him, before he died. Before she’d caught it herself.
It is almost manic now, how Papa will lay the paper over the press and stamp the meaning onto the page. He is prodigious in his passion, like any other man might be about learning, the Church, alcohol, even. There are pieces of parchment mostly identical to these ones pilfered from those better off than them, brought to them via dubious suppliers; Louis and Marie read from paper just like the kind Papa is using to bring about their demise.
She stands by the window, and says nothing.
What will be the result of her father’s small insurrectionism, she wonders. She doesn’t want to know.
-
“Liberté,” her father breathes, his yellow-teethed grin glinting in the guttering light thrown by the lantern. The panes of glass are tinted enough with lampblack that they temper the light with edges of dark, renders the black letters set over the page all the more black, and he does not notice the seas amassing behind her eyes.
Liberté, she thinks. Where is yours, Papa?
-
The direction of the winds of change fluctuates, and no one is safely cemented in Fate’s favour.
How they had found her father, she does not know, cannot care, being wholly distracted by the fact that she is an orphan now, or will be, once Papa’s headless body stops twitching. Soon, she prays. Let it be soon.
Madame Guillotine is no mistress, and the Revolution must adhere to her every fancy, even if this wish is not so much her own as the one most popular among those in power at the moment.
She hadn’t been able to look, not she, but she watches the blood pours forth now, until the fabric of his shirt clings, sodden, to the platform. His cravat is heavy with it.
She watches, transfixed, the jostling and dim roar of the crowd belonging to some other state of being than the one her mind inhabits now. Is this, this crimson deluge dripping, the mark of her father’s life? The definitive manifestation and symbol of his very life, pouring forth that he might leave this most deplorable of realities for some other, less horrific one? Heaven? A perfect France? Or is this blood not his life simplified into red splashed over moldering wood, but the knowledge that was supposed to save France, could still save her if it were not wasted, slathered over an unforgiving slice of steel?
She turns toward Versailles; at least, in the direction she believes the palace to be, pulling her shawl across her face. She shudders, shakes, shivers. It is June. Her eyes meet those of a gendarme, standing by the steps leading up to the scaffold. He smiles at her. She returns the smile, her teeth firmly set in the flesh of her cheek until she can taste blood, the same blood dripping from the shining silver of the guillotine.
They will all be wading ankle-deep in blood before this is all over.
-
She walks, for lack of anything more productive to do, straight past the tenement where she had lived for, what, all of two months? Two years. It holds no more life for her.
-
A paper catches her eye. Lost, like a child, wandering the streets of Paris, much as she is. It has been dropped, carelessly, perhaps, or with intent, with disgust, by a bourgeois.
She kneels, slides her fingers between the chill cobblestone of the Rue Montparnasse and the back of the paper, lifting it to better see the letters imprinted there. The words come more easily to her lips now that she must read them for herself, now that they are infused with a meaning that could not touch her before.
“Liberté. Égalité. Fraternité.”
I shall return in a bit (maybe), because I am feeling quite chatty today. :) Lucky you!