Dragons
My mother called to ask me why people believe in dragons. I said I ought to be able to help her out since I went to the Renaissance Faire yesterday, but in all honesty, after a total of three visits to two different Faires so far in life, I still have no idea why these places exist. I'm mostly there to stalk the harpist and buy jewelry.
The most likely explanation I could find for the invention of dragons in so many ancient cultures was that komodo dragons with steaming breath in the cold might have inspired some overactive imaginations - makes sense enough in Asia, but what about the Europeans? I don't think there were any large reptiles in Europe back when dragons were more than just an inspiration for bad flash tattoos. Maybe they were entirely fabricated threats to distract from the real threat of human invasion: Visigoths and all that. Maybe people
need an embodiment of evil crawling out there in the dark so they can disown the fact that we're all quite capable of doing horrible things. Maybe we're not up to breathing fire and eating knights out of their armour like silver lobsters, but isn't it so much easier to hate something that is all evil, all the time, than to think your own friends might turn around and hurt you?
This came up last night, long before the phone call, when I sighted an old nemesis at a movie theater. I hadn't seen her in the flesh in seven years and the real drama between us all ended something like two and half ago, but the sight of her made my pulse literally quicken. I turned away so she wouldn't spot me. I was actually afraid of somebody who hasn't even been physically present in my life since the New Orleans fiasco when I was eighteen.
This is how it feels to watch for dragons. So what if she's just a former romantic rival who might not even bear the grudge any longer? All I really know is that a dishonest man we both once loved used to tell me vicious half-truths about her, and I'm sure he told her similar fictions about me. She might envision me breathing fire, too.
On Passion
Scanning through the available streams in iTunes this afternoon, I took a peek at the classical section. I'm usually loath to listen to classical radio because classical DJs are as tasteless as your standard country or rock DJ, forgoing anything interesting to play the blandest music available within their genre boundaries. Sure enough, the majority of the descriptions boasted about how calming their stations were, throwing out the word "relax" so much I thought I was reading the script from
Zoolander.That always gets my goat. Classical music is the least relaxing genre I can think of. What about the ecstatic highs and lows and Orff and Wagner and Beethoven? The use of actual dynamics? The intense scholarship that went into creating the music? The screaming and adultery and passion of opera? I can't understand the common view that classical music is something harmless and subdued, especially when it's compared to loud rock music with absolutely no heart behind it. Classical music is about shock and awe - even on completely acoustic instruments and voices that aren't even amplified.
This line of thinking comes up when I talk about ballet, as well. I know it's a strange old hobby and there's no reason someone from outside the subculture should have a frame of reference when it comes up in conversation between us. But it's odd to hear them assume it's some quaint and timid art form just because it's old-fashioned and obscure. Ballet is, to me, an extremely complex and difficult sport, full of blood and sweat and passion and great leaps across an unforgiving floor. I don't demand impossible athletic feats from my body and spend hours a week to be "cute." The dance forms that are popular now are just too easy - and therefore unrewarding - to attract as much of my attention.
William Faulkner described art and passion in the best way in his Nobel acceptance speech:
"The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid: and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands."
Pop culture's fun, but it's 70% glands.
