понеделник, 11 август 2014 г.

The Shape of Things to Come - A.S.Byatt's "Ragnarok"

"Бях малко дете, по време на война, което се опитваше да намери смисъл в хаоса."
The thin child walked through the fair field in all weathers, her satchel of books and pens, with the gas-mask hanging from it, like Christian's burden when he walked in the fields, reading in his Book. She thought long and hard, as she walked, about the meaning of belief. she did not believe the stories in Asgard and the Gods. But they were coiled like smoke in her skull, humming like dark bees in a hive. She read the Greek stories at school, and said to herself that there has once been people who brought "belief" to these capricious and quarrelsome gods and godesses, but she herself read them as she read fairy stories. Puss in Boots, Baba Yaga, brownies, pucks and fairies, foolish and dangerous, nymphs and dryads, hydras and the white horse, Pegasus, all these offered the pleasure to the mind that the unreal offers when it is briefly more real than the visible world can ever be.
"Homo Homini Lupus Est"
Then there was Loki. Loki was a being who was neither this nor that. Alone among the gods, he was a shapeshifter...He was intimate with secret places. The Germans believed his name was related to Lohe, Loge, Logi, flame and fire. He was also known as Loptr, the god of the air. Later Christian writers amalgamed  him with Lucifer, Lukifer, the loght-bearer, the fallen Son of the Morning, the adversary. He was beautiful, that was always affirmed, but his beauty was hard to fix or to see, for he was always glimmering, flickering, melting, mixing, he was the shape of a shapeless flame, he was the eddying thread of a needle-shapes in the shapeless mass of the waterfall. He was the invisibe wind that hurried the clouds in billows and ribbons. The gods needed him because he was clever, because he solved problems. He was the god of endings. He provided resolutions for stories - if he chose to. The endings he made often led to more problems.
There are no altars to Loki, no standing stones, he had no cult. In myths he was the third in the trio, Odin, Hodur, Loki. In myths, the most important one comes first of three. But in fairy tales, and folklore, where these three gods also play their parts, the rule of three is different; the important player is the third, the youngest son, Loki.
He had a wife, in Asgard, Sigyn, who loved him, and two sons, Wali and Narwi.
But he was an outsider, with a need for the inordinate.
"We are all born innocent"

"Eastward the old one in the Iron Wood
raises the wolves of Fenrir's race
one is destined to be same day
the monstrous beast who destroys the moon"

"But there is no beginning and no end..."

"...for we all pay our fathers mistakes"


***
Most dreams, the thin child knew, are wispy and thin, can be torn away by a determined sleeper, can be reduced to a peepshow or a puzzle in which the dreamer is a looker-on, not threatened. But there are gripping dreams of real terror, more real than the world the dreamer wakes to, thick, suffocating, full of hurt to come, in which the dreamer is the victim of uneluctable harm.

В миналото бях скалд, дете бягащо от вълци и войн, жадно впил поглед в приближаващата смърт. Изживявам хиляди животи само за секунда и единсвено въображението може да ми е граница.