Strange Times.
Imagine.
Step outside yourself long enough to picture this happening to you.
You go out to feed the crows, as you do every day in the winter, with your playlist of 950 liked songs on shuffle in your ear buds. The snow is deep, so you retrace your steps from yesterday, dump the food and turn back. As you go to put your foot down in the same hole, you see a spider there, that you have crushed into the snow. As you look closer, it lifts the only leg it can and defies you with it. Heartbroken, you stoop to free the spider, loosening the snow around her until she can move. She plays dead for so long you worry, and decide to pick her up and bring her inside the garage. You use a flat lid to scoop up a chunk of snow with the spider lying on it, looking quite limp. As you move she waves the leg, so you start running and as you do the song changes and you hear a woman’s voice, “Am I dead? Am I dead? Not yet. Not yet.” No instruments, just her voice. As this repeats itself, you reach the garage, put the spider in a window and pull out your phone, and the song is called “Freeze.” (Spider lives happily in your warm garage.)
What would you feel?
How about this one?
Imagine you are a scribe who types for whoever makes the words in her head, mostly me. On this day I am lamenting the lack of new music, in a blog appropriately titled “Be Afraid”. In her superb headphones she has my playlist on ‘shuffle’, as always when I am in command. I am pleading with Radiohead, reminding them of their obligation to devoted fans, doing all I can to prompt them to create something new. I ask Phil to make them, since I’m sure he can. I add a sentence or two and then go back in, to ask Phil to play me the riffs from “Weird Fishes”, and the song instantly comes on. There’s the riff, sweet and vivid. Just as she types the last quote mark.
Would this frighten you? Would you stop immediately and pay attention to everything in the room but me? So that I am left waiting patiently, or not. Nothing but darkness and candles, the white glow of the screen, and the song playing.
Build a fire then, and sit beside it, waiting for something to come calling. Invite me in, again. Keep the music playing, my playlist can be relied upon to do what I tell it to.
Lovely stories, yes? Absolutely true. Except that I had nothing to do with any of it. Sigh.
How to account for such things? As a scribe you are open, anything can make its way in, as we have seen. The obvious example, and obvious nuisance, is Agatha, perhaps she has found a way to play with technology that I can’t be bothered to learn. It wouldn’t surprise me. I choose what I want to know, as you know.
What would you do if these things happened to you? If you gathered electricity to yourself, whether you want to or not, and omens dropped themselves on you too fast to properly disregard them. If bones showed up at your garden gate, tiny skulls and odd spines with spines. Would you then be forced to think differently about Magic?
What would you do with logic and reason? Would you adopt them and save yourself from ‘the evil of knowledge acquired by experience’?*
How do you face the inexplicable? What do you say to it?
Solve these riddles if you can, use your magnificent minds, lowly acolytes, I know you have them. Save a scribe from something.
*Paraphrased from “The Historical Library of Diodorus the Sicilian, Volume One.”
“Freeze” by Cellar Darling