Tag Archives: AW Blog Chain

Fire and Ice [AW Blog Chain for August]

08 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by in Musings

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I have to admit that this title had me stumped. I really could not think of anything to comment upon that had happened in the world or had to do with the craft of writing which involved the concepts of fire and ice… I spent a while pondering possibilites – talking about opposites, for example, and how plots in stories often need these to create tension. However, nothing I could think of really inspired me. I mean, what has been happening in the UK recently that has involved a large flame?

Oh yeah…

Danny Boyle performed a massive ritual a week and a half ago which, according to many of my friends, transformed The Shire into Mordor and raised a massive, flaming eye above the stadium so that Sauron could get a good view of the Olympics.

How the hell could I have missed that?

Luckily, this massive ritual seems to have been successful. Not only did Sauron get his premium seat in the stadium but he seems to have blessed team GB with success. Because, suddenly, as if by magic, we are apparently good at Olympic sports*. That is some serious mojo there because, for as long as I can remember, we have always been rather middling at all sports. Plus, it cannot be denied that the Olympics, including the rather exciting wins we have had, have been a great boost to morale in the UK.

Personally, I there think that whatever sacrifice Grand Magistar of the Great Ritual, Danny Boyle, made to the Dark Lord Sauron to achieve this was definitely worth it.**

So, yes, the Olympic flame. It is actually a very powerful symbol supposed to commemorate the theft of fire from the gods by Prometheus (possibly the first theft in the same way as Cain performed the first homicide…) and is also an example (possibly the only existing modern example?) of what is known in religious/spiritual terms as an eternal flame (feel free to insert an appropriate joke about The Bangles here…). That is, a flame which is kept constantly tended and, rather than being put out and relit is passed on from vessel to vessel.

In fact, the modern Olympic flame is lit on Mount Olympus by eleven women representing Vestal Virgins using the light of the sun and is transferred to the new host country using torches lit from that original flame in one hell of a long relay race (which did pass very close to my house at one point, I think they got lost on the way as we are a few hundred miles north of the direct route between Athens and London).  There is a hell of a lot of symbolism inherent in that set up, not least the ideas of continuity and eternity. My point? Well, I joked that Danny Boyle was performing a massive magical ritual as part of his opening ceremony but in reality he actually was. The whole Olympics, from the opening ceremony to the closing ceremony, is packed with magical and religious symbols and whether you believe in gods, magic or whatever or not these symbols still have an affect on the human psyche. Psychologically, we have been programmed over our entire evolution to put significance on these things and respond to them with the appropriate level of awe. Fire is one of the strongest of these – Olympic flames, burning bushes, burnt offerings, all have been instrumental in our beliefs throughout history.

The scars in the path here were caused by flood damage. Photo taken on Monday 6th August 2012 at Drinkwater Park, Prestwich

What about Ice? Ah, you thought I had forgotten about ice…. Well, no, I hadn’t and my Olympic theme holds true. No, I am not talking about the Winter Olympics (which does seem to get forgotten in this country, not really been talked about much since the days of Torville and Dean and Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards) but about the strange thing that happened the day after what has been described as our greatest Olympic day (Saturday 4th August, when we won oh so many medals). A massive storm raged over Manchester causing massive flooding in my local area. Now, summer storms are not unusual and flooding has been known to happen on occasion. However, the really freaky thing about this storm was that it hailed. Yes, hail. Lumps of ice fell from the sky in August on a day that had been very warm. Now, I am no expert on the weather but I think I am right in thinking that this was a somewhat unusual occurence. Clearly, whatever Boyle did had side effects which affected the weather… Maybe the powerful symbol of fire needed the equally powerful ice to balance it amd restore equilibrium to the universe?

So, there you have it… Fire and Ice, important psychological symbols which still impact us in the supposedly more secular and less superstitious modern age. Whether you are writing fantasy, horror, science fiction or even a simple contemporary romance you can use such concepts to induce potent emotions in your readers. Just as the Olympic flame has induced a great passion for sport among people who would not normally care.

* Yeah, ok, we were good at Beijing too but this year we are better… Of course, despite actually being third in the medals table behind the USA and China, according to the British media we are still apparently ‘winning’ the Olympics…

** Ok, yeah, I do not deny that all our athletes are incredibly talented and have worked hard at their sport. But we seem to suffer from bad luck a lot… missing out on gold by mere inches. This year, that bad luck has evaporated and it is about damn time it did.

Ok, Blog chains… this is how it works. You ‘ve read this one so now you are legally bound to read all the others. There is a special server in the MI5 building set aside *just* for tracking who reads what on this blog chain so they *will* find you out… If you fail in this task, the IOC will have to take all the gold medals away from whichever country you are from so the honour of your country depends on this! The list of participants is below….

Participants and posts:
orion_mk3 – http://nonexistentbooks.wordpress.com (link to this month’s post)
Ralph Pines – http://ralfast.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
areteus – https://lurkingmusings.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Catherine Hall – http://theelephantinthetemple.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
bmadsen – http://www.bernardmadsen.com/ (link to this month’s post)
pyrosama – http://matrix-hole.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
magicmint – http://www.loneswing.com/ (link to this month’s post)
meowzbark – http://erlessard.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
tomspy77 – http://thomaswillamspychalski.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
BBBurke – http://www.awritersprogression.com/ (link to this month’s post)
writingismypassion – http://charityfaye.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Proach – http://desstories.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
randi.lee – http://emotionalnovel.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
BigWords -http://bigwords88.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)

[AW Blog chain post] Independence and slavery

18 Wednesday Jul 2012

Posted by in Musings

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Independence has tumbled out of the Topicatorium for this month’s blog chain post. I think it has something to do with some celebration some country somewhere is having about something that happened a while back. I think there was a King involved, one of the Georges. And some tea party in Boston, wherever that is.

This is absolutely not a picture of the Boston Tea party.

Yet again, I demonstrate how much the education system in my country bothers with things that happen outside the UK… that or how well I paid attention in History…

Seriously, this month we have decided to talk indepenence and slavery and, until the Americans finally figure out that the Revocation of the Declaration of Independence* wasn’t actually a joke but a serious Royal Declaration, July the 4th will remain a day of Independence. My words today will be about slavery and, in particular, some very personal anecdotes on the subject.

My story starts in a pub in Birmingham. I was there for a social get together with some friends and was having dinner at the pub in question. I ordered my food and paid by card and the barman noticed my name. “Oh, that’s the same name as my grandfather’, he said. I was momentarily confused as to why ‘David’ was a noteworthy name. I mean, it’s not that uncommon. Then I realised he was talking about Lascelles which is, I have to admit, an unusual enough name. We talked for a while and it turned out that it wasn’t his grandfather’s surname that was Lascelles, it was his first name. Apparently it was quite a common name among some West Indian communities. We pondered at this for a while then shrugged it off as a strange coincidence. I ate my food, drank some beer and chatted with friends and went home thinking nothing more about it.

Fast forward a few years and we decided to attend an interesting looking exhibition at The Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The exhibition was about the life of Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who made a name as an author and whose autobiography was significant in the cause of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. There were artifacts and information panels about his life, his writings, the other members of the society (especially those members who were also members of the Lunar society which was a local club of intellectuals) and the slave trade in general. A lot of it was very sobering.

However, the big shock came at the end of the exhibition where there was an info panel about slaves being freed and the ways in which it could be achieved (being freed by the owner, buying their freedom, etc). Amongst all that information, it was mentioned that freed slaves often took some aspect of their owners’ name as their own. Prominent among the examples was the name Lascelles.

So, there was the explanation for the ‘mysterious coincidence’ noted in the pub that time. At some point in the past few hundred years, a family with the name Lascelles had owned slaves in the West Indies. Since they seemed to be noteworthy enough to be mentioned in a museum exhibit, they probably owned quite a few of them. The barman’s Grandfather had been named because of this tradition**.

The Battle Roll showing the knights who fought with William at the Battle of Hastings. This is not a high enough resolution copy to see it but the name is there…

Now, I have no way of knowing if the Lascelles’s who were owning slaves in the West Indies were related to me in any way. In much the same way as I have no way of knowing if I am related to the Lascelles who charged into England at Duke William’s back in 1066 and was guilty of ‘causing affray’, ‘accessory to regicide’ and theft of land (crimes they have yet to be called to account for and are unlikely ever to be). I haven’t done the geneology and don’t have the patience for it. However, seeing your own name connected with such a serious historic and social issue is rather ground shaking. I have to admit, I felt incredibly guilty, even though I personally had never condoned nor participated in the trade. I suppose the slave trade in general tends to incite strong feelings in many people, especially if you have a modern liberal outlook, and a personal link, however tenuous, makes it a hell of a lot more immediate.

This guilt was assuaged slightly in a more recent time. One of my many casual acquiantances online is a woman whose family were also involved in the slave trade. In her case she knows this involvement for definite because she has it from history passed down through the generations that several of her ancestors were slaves. We happened in the course of a long e-mail conversation to stray into the slave trade (it was quite organic – we somehow ended up on the drunken antics of Benjamin Franklin and it moved on from there…). I mentioned the above story and her comment was that, from what she had seen of the history of the trade, if a freed slave took the name of a family it was generally out of respect to the family because they had been well treated. So, I feel slightly better for that. Not much, but I take what I can get.

In many ways the slave trade was an example of how politics and economics together can cause something quite evil to be perpetuated. Greed and opportunism caused it to come into being in the first place but governments pandering to economic lobby groups and refusing to change the law for so many years was what kept it legal long after many people (like Equiano, Wilberforce, Clarkson and more) had pointed out the cruelties in the system. If there is a moral to this post beyond the obvious ‘slavery is bad’ then I think it should be to be aware of how business and governments together can conspire to create great harm. It happened with the slave trade but it is by no means a matter of history – it is still happening now.

Blog chain time again… you all know the rules by now. Read these blogs or else… er, I’ll come to all your houses and throw gravel at your neighbour’s window and claim it was you wot dun it…

Participants and posts: orion_mk3 – http://nonexistentbooks.wordpress.com (link to this month’s post) knotanes – http://knotane.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post) meowzbark – http://erlessard.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post) Ralph Pines – http://ralfast.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post) randi.lee – http://emotionalnovel.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post) writingismypassion – http://charityfaye.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post) pyrosama – http://matrix-hole.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post) bmadsen – http://hospitaloflife.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post) dclary – http://davidwclary.com (link to this month’s post) Poppy – http://poet-slash-writer.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post) areteus – https://lurkingmusings.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post) Sweetwheat – http://gomezkarla.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post) ThorHuman – http://knikriverstatic.com/ (link to this month’s post) Tex_Maam – http://tex-maam.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post) MelodySRV – http://createamelody.com/ (link to this month’s post)

* Yeah, that version is very out of date. They need to update it with the new PM. Tell you what, you give us Obama and you can have Cameron and Clegg. Two for the price of one offer, can’t say fairer than that. I think Obama would much prefer governing here, we already have the medical health care system he wanted and no one will claim he is an illegal alien because he comes from Hawaii. Just to check, though: Obama does come with the entire US government budget, right? Cos, you know, we could do with that money right now…

** I very much doubt he himself was a slave, given the timings involved, but these traditions do get passed along family lines and it is possible he was named for his Grandfather or Great Grandfather.