camwyn | Letting my brain off its leash...

People have made a joke before of 'I let my mind wander and it didn't come back'. I've never really had that experience. In my case, it's more like 'I let my mind wander and it eventually came back covered in mud, wagging its tail furiously, and dragging what looked suspiciously like the arm of the Swamp Thing in its teeth, plus I'm pretty sure I heard the roar of the arm's owner somewhere in the distance'. One prominent example is that of the time when I was sick and formulated a fairly coherent hypothesis linking the universality of the human religious impulse to the probable evolutionary origins of the human species as scavengers. (Look! A powerful thing that can smite me dead has gone off and left me food! And it has killed my enemies! I must make nice to it!) That being said, I'm currently having the urge to take the tether off and see what it comes up with.

I have a CD of some of my favourite uptempo/up-spirited MP3s on a player here in my office. ("Forever Young", by Alphaville, is an example of the latter. V. slow, but more conducive to a good mood than many a fast-paced tune.) One of the songs is Sting's "After The Rain Has Fallen", which I consider to be a natural-made Credits Tune. You know the kind; some songs are just made to play as the credits roll up the screen. Usually the closing credits, but some of them work all right for the introductory lot. This one, for all that the verses introduce and tell a story, is clearly a Closing Credits tune - the trouble is, I don't think it's for the movie whose events are described in the song. I'm pretty sure there's a character lurking in here somewhere and that it's her or his life that's the subject of the movie. Go here if you want the full lyrics (and beware of the pop-ups!), but this is the important part:

After the rain has fallen / After the tears have washed your eyes / You'll find that I've taken nothing, that / Love can't replace in the blink of an eye

After the thunder's spoken, and / After the lightning bolt's been hurled / After the dream is broken, there'll / Still be love in the world / Still be love in the world

I don't know what it is. I think, to a certain degree, it has to do with my fascination with shattered prophecies. I do not think it is spoiling VicMage.Asia too much to say that one of the central images is that of a badly broken prophecy...

See, when I was eight years old, my father decided I'd shown enough interest in The Hobbit to move on to The Lord of the Rings. Not the movie - although I did watch the Return of the King movie, as I can remember Schmendrick and Nodwick's cousin the Minstrel of Gondor singing the Frodo Ninefingers song. No, Dad gave me the boxed set of the books, and I read that. Great stuff, wonderful writing, just the thing for a growing third grader to cut her teeth on. Had that neat little prophecy about the Ring and the Bane and the halfling forth shall stand and all that rot. A year or two after that I got a boxed set of David Eddings' Belgariad books. Prophecy was just coming out everyone's ears, baby, and when I got my hands on the Pern books that didn't help at all. Oh, come on, tell me that the Question Song wasn't a thinly disguised Prophecy That Must Be Fulfilled!

Anyway, these things were Good. I had grown up Catholic, after all, and the central figure of Catholic - of all Christian - iconography is a Prophecy That Must Be Fulfilled. Yeshua bin Miryam is the Christian Moshiach, and the Church spends a major chunk of the liturgial year flinging prophecies about the Messiah's coming at us. As I got older, I got taught about how the Jews reacted badly to Jesus because he didn't fit their profile for a Messiah, which official Church teaching (as I was taught it, anyway) chalked up to mis-interpretation of prophecy. No, I am not getting into debate about that now, I am just saying that this is what got put into my head... somewhere in high school I was taught that the Jews are still waiting for the Messiah to come along, and that as far as they're concerned, the Biblical prophets are still valid, they just read 'em differently from the Christian version. It was an interesting idea, but I didn't think about it much.

Maybe I should've, because by that point in time I had added another set of archetypal variations to my brain. In fifth grade I read Dune, the original Frank Herbert novel. I was unaware of its relationship to the historical Mahdist Revolts, or of Herbert's politics and sympathies; all I knew was that I was reading a story about a guy who was the Fulfilment of Prophecies, and who had l33t p0w3rz. True, the prophecies had been planted originally by highly cynical women as a failsafe against stranding on a godsforsaken planet, but they seemed to work pretty well - especially since the rest of the galaxy had prophecies about the guy, too, eagerly awaiting the Kwiszatz Haderach as they did. The idea of breeding for a Messiah was a novel concept, but hey, whatever works, right?

That, I think, may have been the beginning. There was a quietly bubbling cynicism about messianic figures in Herbert's work, one which for some reason I did not notice - even as I read God Emperor of Dune, where the destiny of humanity came essentially under the control of a giant frickin' messianic sandworm with l33t pr3zc13nc3 h4xx0r p0w3rz. Messiahs could and did lead their people to greatness, but the greatness would not necessarily be permanent - Leto did, in the end, get blown to bits. And the world went on without him.

God Emperor of Dune was the first book to provide a counterpoint to the prophetic theme that ran through so much of the fantasy I'd read. It had Siona Atreides, the product of yet another human breeding programme, this one implemented by ~~Mr. Worm~~Leto. Siona could not be seen by prescient vision. Between her and Hwi Noree, who was born in an Ixian no-room - a room constructed in such a fashion that presicence was incapable of seeing what went on inside it, if I recall correctly - Leto's control of humanity got shattered, and so did the predestined future of humanity. Which was apparently what Leto had wanted all along, or something; I don't really remember, it's been ages since I read the book. The idea that a written-out Destiny might be a bad thing had occurred to me long ago, when I figured at the age of seven that it would be very boring to live life with the power to see the future (you'd never be surprised), but I'd never really considered it in any depth. This was an interesting idea, and when I fell to reading more Eddings - the Elenium series - it cropped up again. Sparhawk was an interesting figure in the first series because he had something going for him that nobody in the Belgariad did: he was the Man Without A Destiny, the guy who wasn't in the prophecies. Him, Siona, and Count Fenring, who I think was severely underemployed in Dune. The Gods couldn't predict his actions, because he just wasn't anywhere in their prophetic foo, and that was what made him the Hero. He was cool because he was outside their conception of How Things Ought To Be.

Then came the Tamuli, and I nearly threw the books across the room. The map was basically the map of Asia and Europe, the various races were based on Terran stereotypes (God, I never want to see the Rendorish idiots again!), and it turned out that Sparhawk did have a destiny after all. It was just hidden by that stupid rock. So he was basically like everyone else in the world, except that his wife was sterile and had given birth to a goddess who felt sorry for her. Yee frickin' haw. I read it all the way to the end and gave up on Eddings for a while after that.

But the ideas were still there. . .

I got to college, and there was DuneMUSH. Paul was Emperor, the Jihad had been and gone, and I was brand new to roleplaying. I created House Raichur and tied it to my own interpretation of 1984 (it involved Thought Police who were telepaths), linking the ancestry back to the man who ultimately brought down their system because he'd had an accident that left him unable to be detected by telepathy. That would've been enough of an homage to Siona and Sparhawk if it hadn't been for one of the other players, who pointed out how annoying it was that plots against Paul had almost no chance of succeeding. Paul could, after all, see everything that might possibly happen. And he had the Fremen, who could come to your planet and Kick Your Ass if you did something or plotted something or considered something that might lead to his overthrow. Suddenly the prospect of a future that could be seen was not so much boring as creepy. And frustrating, because even though I had no particular urge to overthrow Paul, any urge I might ever get to do so would be almost automatically thwarted. Suddenly, prophecies sucked. Big time.

At about the same time, I became extremely interested in Judaism. I'm not sure why. Sudden powerful interests run in my father's side of the family; I assume something came down on my paternal X chromosome that poitned me the same way. I read about the history of the Jews, about their languages, about their varying cultures and factions and interpretations of this Scripture or that rule. And I read about their heresies, in rather more depth than I had ever read about Christian heresies - and among those heresies there lay the false Messiahs. Simon bar Kochba and Shabatai Zvi were foremost among them. Here were people who had apparently fulfilled prophecies, and then had failed - or people who had manipulated prophecies so that they seemed to speak exactly the way they wanted.

Somehow the idea of deliberately mucking with a prophecy when you knew damn well that it didn't refer to you had never really occurred to me. It should have. The Missionaria Protectiva in Dune should have been my tip-off, it's just that Paul and Jessica somehow managed to actually produce the right results despite their prophecies' cynical origins. (I wasn't quite clear on Jessica's collective unconscious schtick; it seemed to me that she was opening up and tying into the actual prophetic foo the Fremen were hoping for. C'mon, I was ten.) So what, exactly, would have happened in all those fantasy novels if the prophecies had gone horribly wrong? What would have happened if - say - the Demon King of Hell had put his hands on both stones in the Malloreon, and both Prophecies had ceased to exist? Ooo, spacetime rent never got repaired, humanity still living under chaos. What would have happened if Jamis had succeeded in gacking Paul before he got into Sietch Tabr - would the Bene Gesserit have gone back to breeding until they got the right person again? (Probably.) If Lessa had gotten lost Between on the way back to four hundred years ago? If Richard Cypher in the lone Terry Goodkind book I'd read had died or wandered off early in the book? The idea of prophecies not being fulfilled now was relatively easy to contemplate. The idea of someone trying to hijack a prophecy was novel. As far as I had been concerned, prophecies were something you found out about after the fact - or something that you found and then went about trying as hard as you could to fulfill, but without cutting corners or lying, because the Universe would get you good if you did.

But. . . well, Eddings kept claiming that human choice was the most important thing. That any little thing could have gone wrong and tipped the whole thing to one side or the other. And somehow, some way, I looked back at his work. . . and realized that this was bullshit. Every time something could conceivably have derailed his Prophecy, the damn thing popped up inside Garion's brain and announced to him in plain English that Something Had To Be Done. Or it took over his speech apparatus and announced to everyone around him that Something Had To Be Done. Or someone discovered that the supposedly impenetrable Mrin Codex was in fact only slightly less comprehensible than the menu at a Chinese restaurant if you just sort of glanced over it properly. If the Prophecy of Light didn't do this, the Prophecy of Dark did - there was that patch in Melcene where the unedited copy of the Book of Torak included a lucid patch saying 'yo, Garion, your kid could be a problem'. You know, just in case Garion didn't get the message from all the other talk about becoming Child of Dark? That part. Impenetrable prophecy, limited to what humans could comprehend and do of their own free will, my ass. I've had Feng Shui GMs whose plans were more impenetrable!

Prophecies existed to march people along in neat little lines to tidy little endings, to turn human life into a pre-set story with a predictable outcome, to obviate human choice. As long as there was a Grand and Overarching Prophecy, the only people in the entire world who mattered were the ones who were part of it. Other people could live and die by the scores of millions, but the ones mentioned in the Prophecy were the only ones who could affect destiny. The Bene Gesserit view was right - there were People, and there were Humans, and only the Humans mattered. People who didn't fit the criteria could just fade into oblivion and only the Speshul Onez would be remembered, ever.

Blow that. What good was living in a world like that? You might just as well be a Muppet for all the control you had over your own life. When all was said and done, you were basically an empty sock in someone's drawer.

Intruding into this there came the song "American Pie". No, hear me out; I had heard the song something like six times on a single trip from home to college (it was an eight hour drive), and had had time to learn the lyrics. There was a verse that managed to lodge itself in my head:

Now for ten years we've been on our own / and moss grows fat on a rollin stone / but that's not how it used to be
When the jester sang for the king and queen / in a coat he borrowed from James Dean / and a voice that came from you and me
oh and while the king was looking down / the jester stole his thorny crown / the courtroom was adjourned / no verdict was returned
and while Lennon read a book of Marx / the quartet practiced in the park / and we sang dirges in the dark / the day the music died. . .

Something had been promised. Something had been expected. Something went horribly wrong. . . the prophecy had been broken, and chaos and blind chance ruled. It seemed a terribly, terribly novel idea, and I wanted more out of it. I toyed with it off and on over time. So many, many possibilities! Most of them revolved around people in a standard magic-laden fantasy universe trying to get the prophecy back on track before things went completely to hell, because it was the only way to make sure things came out Good - but was that really such a good idea? Couldn't they just try to make things come out Good, and hope for the best?

I never really embodied any of the possibles that came up from listening to American Pie. But the idea, the prospect, was still there. Someone who moved outside of destiny, or someone who shattered destiny, or someone too unimportant for destiny to notice (hi, Gollum!) who delivered the coup de grace. . . lot of possibilities there. And then VicMage came along. Asia had been sunk by a terrible earthquake, but there was still some of it left in the form of islands. There were a few handfuls of nations vaguely like the ones I remembered. It was a land of devastated people, and devastated people will cling to any hope they can. So. . . well, I pestered

cadhla about the local history and she gave me that part of the world to work in, and I finally got to put down in words what I had been wondering for so very long:

What happens when the prophecies are right, and then go wrong? Here is your Messianic king, your prophesied and hoped-for dream leader, who can make all things right. What do you do when you lose him?

What does the flock do when the shepherd is struck down?

I think that's what the Sting song is speaking to, in my brain. After the thunder's spoken, after the lightning bolt's been hurled, after the dream has broken - what becomes of us? What goes on when the story is mangled beyond repair ? How do we pick up the pieces and carry on?

I guess it's not a character song after all; it's something in the way of a song for an entire world. I just wish I could actually do something with it.