Stories...

I made my way through the most current book of The Chronicles of Elantra.  As nutty as it might sound, I then opened to the first page of the first book to read them again.

The last four books are, for me, the least enjoyable.  Only I do savor them because the relationships between Kaylin and the others in her immediate circle have changed ... grown ... deepened.  No where is this more evident than with the dragons.  In particular, the Arkon at first incredibly distrustful and dismissive of Kaylin voices, at her request, the why of his now implicit trust of her.  It was not her abilities as a Hawk or even the True Words writ on her skin or her position as Chosen.  It was her intent that he trusted.  Her plans were crap ... impulsive and reckless and ill-advised.  Really, just about every condescending adjective could be used.  But he had come to recognize in a mortal (perish the thought!) a sense of duty and a desire to fight for and protect others, even someone she abhorred.  Isn't that an odd thing. I don't trust you; I trust your intent.  Could it be he was trusting her soul?

Okay, let's be honest ... what the heck is a soul anyway?  It is just another one of those words I realize that I actually do not know and that realization is torturous.

Belief.
Faith.
Forgiveness.
Trust.
Love.
Soul.

The two books are so ... etherial, for lack of a better word.  Not much time passes within the pages of each, although I believe a few weeks pass between the two stories.  Maybe theoretical might be a better word.  Or ethereally theoretical?  I am three times through the last book.  Four times through the one before it.  I can barely follow the last book and I understood more of it this time through than I did in the first two times.

I am certain these posts about the books and about True Words are probably pretty confusing ... if not merely boring.  Of course, I think most of my posts might be considered boring.  Some hold thoughts ... or at least the writing about which I remain proud of ... nightly so.  But a lot of the latter ones are just my fumbling to capture my life, to record the things I am forgetting.  After all, I do not have anyone playing the role of rememberer for me.  I suppose you could say that is the main reason I weep over The Dixie Chicks' "Silent House."

I will not write copious amounts of back story here.  If you read here, you know about Kaylin.  If you do not, you probably do not care.  The setting of the passage below is that she is, once again, trying to save Elantra because some idiot arcanist has thought up yet another disastrous way to achieve immortality.  Now, for an immortal, that seems a pretty fool thing to do.  But he was trying to shed the bindings to his True Name.  To try to keep his life and his soul without being tied to a True Word. In short, he wanted to be a god.

Funny that.

In our world, God spoke the world into being.  He breathes life, bestows life.  And when we threw away our own immortality, for something we thought better, God created  a way to have eternal life once more.  But, gosh, does man ever do a good job of trying to make eternal life of our own.

There are a couple of interesting passages that I had not yet really pondered.  In brief, there is an ... a being ... who was created to keep time linear, to repair anomalies in time.  He sets encounters a Barrani outside of his own time and, after many decades, learns to listen hard enough, to make himself small enough to see that single life.  The being, blithely named Gilbert by a child, comes to have ... compassion ... for the Barrani and seeks a way to return him to his time.  The arrogant STUPIDITY of that arcanist actually provides a tear in the fabric of time through which Gilbert can travel to Elantra to see if he can find a way to return the Barrani without killing him.

Gilbert meets a young girl and saves her a few moments before her death.  They travel back in time a bit and enter Kaylin.  [See, I am learning the story.]  Near the end of the story, when so much is finally being unraveled about the danger Elantra is facing, the young girl pipes up at one point that Gilbert is lonely.

Kaylin snorts.  She immediately dismisses the idea that this powerful being could possibility be lonely, especially since he was never meant to even see individuals, much less meat them.  The irony is that had the Barrani not been thrown out of time, when the anomaly was detected, Gilbert would have corrected it with a warrior's sword, not a surgeon's scalpel.  Meaning that Elantra would have perished in the correction.  The however many thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives lost would not have even crossed his awareness.

Yet Gilbert met one life.  Then another.  Then more.  And he was lonely.  Or maybe it is more accurate to say that he discovered that he was lonely without ever really knowing what loneliness was.

Kaylin wondered why the Ancients would create a being with loneliness.  And then she wondered if loneliness was simply a part of being in the universe.  And then she realized that all life was meant to be connected.  No life was meant to be in isolation.

Anyway, at one point, at a very dire point, Kaylin finds herself thinking dour thoughts of the ancients again, before she realizes something.

     She had a thing or two to say to the Ancients, none of it particularly polite. Why had they chosen someone to speak the remnants of their old stories when that person couldn't speak the language? 

I found this slightly humorous and yet it also reminded me what Kaylin has been learning about True Words.  That speaking them is not something that you necessarily do aloud.  And yet there is this very understandable frustration that she has True Words written on her skin that she is supposed to use to ... heal, restore, preserve when she doesn't speak or write or even know the Ancient language.

     Because, she thought, speaking it wasn't necessary.
     They were simultaneously her words, and yet not.  She was part of the their telling, but they were not, had never been, her story.  She didn't need to be anything other than what she was... (Michelle Sagara, Cast in Honor, ch. 29)

Again, I am not sure why the whole concept of True Words captures my attention so fully, but it does.  When I read this, for the barest moment, I thought about when reading the True Words of the Bible, when encountering those stories, especially in the New Testament, the inclination is to put ourselves into the story.  But they are words for us but not ours.  We are part of the telling of Jesus' story but is it not our story.  Error starts when we try to make the story of the Bible ours.

Another way to look at it is that Kaylin is invoking the power of True Words.  She is not giving them power.  She is speaking them so that they can give her their power.  Not for her to use the power as she pleases, but to tell a true story.  In her speaking, then others can hear and in hearing they are healed, restored, preserved.

Now, we don't need Chosen to speak the True Words of the Bible.  But it almost seems like we do because it is so much more popular to have other words spoken, other words used to heal, restore, preserve.  Our wisdom.  Our comfort.  Our ideas of life.  Balderdash really.

There is another part, that was just around here, but I cannot find it again, when Kaylin is agonizing over a word she needs to speak in order to defeat the arcanist.  She starts to rage over not knowing it as she stumbles to speak it.  And then she realizes that it is a True Word that she has heard before.  When Lord Sanabalis spoke a story.  When the Arkon did.  Not that exact word so much as its nature of being a True Word.  She realized that when she hears them speak, it is somehow recognizable.  I wanted to say, "Yes, well Kaylin, Truth is like that!"

It is naive of me to think that if you bathe someone in enough of the Word of God then that person will come to recognize its Truth and thus have a leg up against the lies that swarm around us?  We spend oh so much time consuming the words of the world in myriad fashions, across myriad media.  Why is it so difficult for Christians to give at some measure of time to the Word of God each day?

Yes, I still feel such the freak for reading the Bible and the Book of Concord the way that I do.  For hungering to hear the Word of God.  You know, I realize that I have adapted to the Christians around me.  By that I mean when they visit me and there is no mention of reading the Bible, I fall silent too.  I keep my freakish desire hidden because I do not think to ask to read ... to be read to ... is socially acceptable.  SIGH.

Earlier there is this lovely exchange with with her familiar, whom she acquired three books ago.  In order to anchor him in her world, she had to name him.  When she finally does, it is this True Word that means, in simple langue, hope.  He is, in form, a translucent dragon.  And in that form she cannot understand him.  I mean, he speaks a language she cannot recognize, though she generally gets the gist of what he is saying.  So, she mostly calls him Small and Squawky, since Hope feels a bit pretentious.

When she slips sideways of a sorts, out of her plane of existence (something that is not at all frequent), Kaylin can hear him.  It is one of those conversations I find delightful.  A good chuckle, I mean.  There she is, trying to heal Gilbert, who is in not humanoid in any fashion and whose injury threatens the existence of Elantra, although at this point no one yet realizes what the arcanist is doing, and she digresses without thought to what's at hand.

     "...I'm just thinking of all the old stories."
     "Stories?"
     "The Barrani.  The Ancients.  The True Names.  True Words."
     "They're more that just stories.
     "I didn't say they were just stories.  But...they are stories."  She hesitated and then added, "A lot of our actual experiences become stories.  Things we tell other people.  Things we don't tell other people.  It's not just about the words.  But...sometimes words are what we have.  They're not everything; they have to be enough."
     "Even the words that you don't understand?"
     She looked at her arm.  "Even then.  Because words are part of me.  Maybe if I used them enough, I'll understand them so well I can say what I really mean with them."
     "What do you really mean, Kaylin?"
     Kaylin blinked.  "I'm not talking about right now.  But—in general.  I can't always say what I mean.  No, that's wrong.  People don't walkway hear what I thought I was saying. I mean, they hear what I actually say."
     "Ah, so you feel you choose the wrong words?"
     "I must.  If I'd chosen the right ones, they'd understand me."
     "I do not think it is ever that simple."
     "It would be if I could speak True Words."
     "Ah, no.  Because anyone with whom you might converse so earnestly wouldn't hear them."  (ch. 14)

That's Kaylin.  She has power enough to make the world weep and doesn't want it.  She's talking about the ability to create life, to create whole worlds in the ability to fully speak the Ancient language and all she really wants is to be better at expressing herself at work and with her friends.  I just love that!  But, too, I love the exchange because, in the past few years, I find myself less and less able to speak the things I wish to say.  SIGH.

The more I read the series, the more I find myself in the story without it being my story, the more my awe of the Word of God grows, the deeper I long to hear the Word of God, and the more I savor the quirky craftsmanship of Michelle Sagara.