I've been reading The Book that Changed My Life, a collection of 71 contemporary (read: still-living) authors and other literary luminaries, all contributing one or two pages on the books that have changed their lives. Most of the writers focus on books that made them want to write after a few years of agonizing over the perceived subpar quality of their work.
You should note that I said "contemporary." Not all of them are the type I would read, like Wally Lamb (who wrote She's Come Undone, which, ironically, I did read) or Patricia Cornwell (whom I have, in fact, not read). And then there's Harold Bloom, an (I imagine) ancient gnome in a tiny little corner, with gifts that far encompass his part of the world.
It's thought-provoking, to say the least. All of those people who have somehow managed to do the very thing I've always wanted to but couldn't (write, for the slow ones) have spent their lives reading. Hey, so have I! Most of them have read so much that it's near-impossible to pick just one as their favorite life-changer. Ditto!
So I set to thinking. I have a little trick where, when I'm dealing with a huge amount of knowledge that needs to be sifted through to find a single thing, I set the question, the goal, the whatever--let's call it the kernel--adrift in the middle of what I envision as a whirlwind. Each grain of sand represents a discrete piece of information, and the ones that are relevant will tend to stick to the kernel. At the end, the clouds pull back and the finished product is unveiled.
Wild Seed by Octavia E. Butler. Yes, I cry over the groans, it's science fiction. But it's about so much more than that.
Here, we have what I would consider the complete distillation of humanity into two immortals. One is a woman, Anyanwu, strained out of darkest Africa at the height of the slave trade, with unusual gifts. She can shape herself into any living creature and heal even the gravest of wounds. She lives eternally, always changing but immutable, birthing generation after generation. Her gift runs so deeply that she can even father children upon other women, although only daughters (which makes genetic sense; you can't make a Y chromosome out of a pair of Xs).
The other, Doro, is a man who lives by killing. In order to live forever, he has to die. When he dies, his spirit jumps into the nearest living person--frequently his killer. He wears the body for a while like so many clothes, but he is not Anyanwu; he does not renew. The body decays. He must incite someone into killing him so that he can live forever. This becomes tiresome after a while, so he turns to the obvious alternative: a breeding program of gifted people directly under his control. When his time comes (as it always does), he selects one to inhabit. The gifts that he cultivates are, I would say, deluxe features.
They meet when he, posing as a slaver, buys her and some relatives from, er, venture capitalists. Bringing her to the New World, he shows her the consequence of thousands of years of breeding like to like. Not all of it is pleasant; all of it, nevertheless, wounds her to her principled core. They spend a couple of centuries playing the game, Anyanwu evading, Doro pursuing. He finally finds her in the South, an old black man with many grandchildren. She finally gives in, understanding the cost of immortality: the need for a companion who doesn't die.
But Anyanwu's shock at Doro's manipulation of what he terms "stock" runs deeper than mere morality; after centuries of ugliness, she genuinely believes that people are self-deterministic by nature and by divine right. This is a consequence of both her utter humanity and her sheer nature; she lives surrounded by growth and transformation while he dies constantly in blood and violence.
That was one of the lessons I learned from Wild Seed. More than anything else, though, this book gave me a sense of eternal life and rebirth, death and decay, circling each other endlessly. One can't exist without the other, and a final surrender results in the total abnegation of the two, giving way to a future without either.
Butler is a black female writer with a feministic streak; this explains the clear gender distinction between the all-creating mother and the all-destroying father. Ha ha we get it. But, really, how else can the differences between life and death be portrayed to the human mind in terms we can understand and relate to intimately? Those are archetypes, after all. Another fun little giblet of knowledge, through which I understand the constructs we use to frame our view of humanity as a whole.
Anyway, she turned me on to writers like Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston. Funny thing; The Book that Changed My Life has an author who cited Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, which I haven't had a chance to read, and a line that was included...wow.
"Nuns go by as quiet as lust ... Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup."
Words like these stick to my skin. They engender the sound of paper, an echoing voice in my mind, a vibration in my soul. My eyes want more.
Envision, if you will, a photograph taken on November 25, 1965. In this photograph, an ancient tow truck rests on a vacant lot, surrounded by buildings on a sunny day. Not a single living soul in sight.
The accompanying caption:
The Prince George Hotel once stood on the vacant lot but while workmen were tearing it down, the resulting dust caused Robert Halvorsen some anguish. --Independent Photo
Who, in God's name, is Robert Halvorsen? What was the nature of his anguish? Why was it only 'some' anguish, rather than 'a great deal of anguish' or 'bottomless anguish' or 'a vengeful barbarian queen seeking to end his line by baking them all into meat pies' (read some Shakespeare, why don't you)? Why does this Halvorsen character matter enough for his anguish to be mentioned in the paper?
The caption is almost Far-Side-like in its simplicity; this impression is ruined only by the utter lack of visual context. Perhaps an avoirdupois bespectacle with a buzz cut looking longingly at a bowl of soup with a visible crust of scum. Or even a beehived housemaid in horn-rimmed glasses who has obviously finished putting in some long hours in her employer's inexplicable library of thousands of small 'Precious Memories' figurines.
Of course, I found it extremely hilarious.
In case you're wondering, I came across this photo at work today. Part of my job is the digitization of the tens of thousands of photos accumulated by a newspaper over the course of a century or thereabouts. It never fails to lead me into a world of context deprivation and unintentional absurdity; there are also some really quite interesting items.
For example, today, I came across a photo of a downtown hotel (long since razed, of course) taken in 1935 and taped to a backing of cardboard, which appears to have served some function in the printing process of the newspaper at that time; the cardboard is deeply impressed, it appears, with the content of a newspaper page from sometime in 1935, complete with a slight impression of the photo taped to it. One of the most fascinating things about it: around some of the letters--particularly the headlines--you can see the edges and corners of the individual sorts, sunken into the cardboard.
It's near-psychotically cool in a very low-key way. Spend 45 minutes fingering it, decide against scanning it because it has zero historical or entertainment value, and move on.
In fact, that seems to be the story of my life. Get interested in something, spend way too much time fingering it, and move on.
"Somewhere Niels Bohr walks among us, unobserved and immortal." --Egyptian God Sokar to Kim Ross at Copenhagen Fantasy Interpretation Camp, Dresden Codak, this strip.
Now this, I would believe.
I just had one of those little paces.
By virtue of my ultimate recognition of the true underlying cause of this particular compulsion, I managed to direct the energy to something productive: daydreaming. I managed to hit a million years from now or so before I realized my legs were aching and decided to cut it out.
The chiefest inspiration was Dresden Codak, without a single doubt one of the greatest webcomics ever, ever to grace the Internet. Not only is it absolutely hilarious, it's also fascinatingly graced by an obsession with transhumanism, mixed in with some magical reality adulterated by the best of modern physics and hued by a singular view of history.
Not to mention that it consists of some of the most stunningly beautiful artwork I've ever seen in panel form. All of this combines to create this scarily fixated cadre of technofans who spend weeks after each post dissecting each panel to a terrifyingly impressive level of detail. These people pick apart the tiniest objects in each panel--less than a millimeter long in some cases--and manage to find links to previous comics, the artist himself, or heretofore unexplored aspects of previously-discussed theory.
I strongly, strongly encourage people to pick it up. The earlier strips are more or less stand-alone, and are notable for their extremely creative layouts, which can make them hard to read but also strangely satisfying. Starting around a year ago, however, the artist, Aaron Diaz, embarked on an incredible journey, known only as "Hob."
Since it's a linear storyline, it's a great place to get started. There are 18 episodes in all, and most of them display multiple apotheoses of graphic art, mere stair-steps on the way to the top. Find the first episode here, and read through it.
I just finished re-reading the entire Hob storyline, and my jaw keeps dropping open at the sheer scale, audacity, and absolutely perfect realization of this story.
Anderton: Cut the cute act, Danny-Boy, and tell me exactly what it is you're looking for. Witwer: Flaws. Anderton: There hasn't been a murder in six years. There's nothing wrong with the system. It is-- Witwer: Perfect. I agree. If there's a flaw, it's human. It always is. --Minority Report
An interesting point. After some thought, I happened across something:
What if our existence had a greater purpose? Or, at least, not a purpose but a larger role.
The picture I've got in my mind is a bunch of extraterrestrials landing on our planet, minds a-boggle. They're overjoyed and awed at the ultimate proof.
You see, they've mathematically proven the nature of the universe, but have also discovered that reality itself is a near-perfect system. The only thing that prevents the multiverse from reaching complete perfection is a flaw that appears to be inherent. It's tiny, near-microscopic, not serious at all, but has a tendency to multiply.
This flaw, the aliens have posited, exists somewhere within their khiliocyte, the local sheaf of universes. In order to confirm that their math is accurate, they've set out on a journey across space to zero in on the supposed flaw-point's coordinates. At those coordinates, they find us.
They observe our manipulation of the natural environment and its tendency to decay. Our preference for unnatural surroundings serves to cement their understanding of our nature, and further observations of our influence on local space-time serves to further clarify their final Theory. Our satellites and interstellar probes, the machines we send to see all the way around the sun, our particle accelerators and atomic machinery--those are slowly and steadily multiplying the flaw, and the longer we exist and the more numerous we become, the deeper the crack widens within the gem.
In this hypothetical, admittedly vintage scenario, the only thing I can't figure out is whether or not those extraterrestrials would allow us to continue to exist. If we were built into the system, that choice might not exist, but would expansion be permitted? With our historically imperfect understanding of our effect on our surroundings, our science might be capable of eventually manipulating certain properties of space-time, allowing us to go starfaring and time-traveling, and that in itself could have a much larger destabilizing effect on the system.
We would, in essence have been the fatal flaw. Although, of course, the possibility could exist that the arrival of these aliens alerts us to our larger role, and the course of our own evolution begins to change (ironic, given my views on so-called evolutionary determinism), eventually leading to the custodianship of our own flawed nature and, by extension, that of everything. Sort of like...cosmic librarians. That'd be interesting.
Eh. In any case, I also discovered that I'm a fan of the science-fiction police procedural. Minority Report; Soylent Green; I, Robot; Blade Runner. Noir, as in the case of Blade Runner, is always a plus. You never learn quite so much about a society as when something goes wrong and it needs to be set right within that particular social structure. Of course, given the legal similarities to our time evinced by most of those movies (all of which are set within the next 50 years, although the two recent ones (Minority and I, Robot) are much more strongly predicated on our present), they don't really quite fit the bill of genuine alienness.
And please don't mention Total Recall. I'm a huge fan--I love that movie--but it's more of a comedy than a serious crime drama.
Mm...future cops. They tend to be mavericks, I've noticed, with a dark past. Of course, a strict, by-the-book super-agent would be kind of boring (almost as bad as the supersoldier--in other words, anything involving Van Damme and some with Schwarzenegger), but nobody ever said running to type was unforgivable.
I almost opened this post with "Saturday." Clearly I am still working on the quiet insanity...or lack of sleep.
I watched "Soylent Green" for the first time tonight. A good deal of material to think on. Aside from the obvious environmental message (the catastrophic nature of which has yet to materialize; if I remember correctly the world may actually be cleaner overall than it was around the time the movie was made), there was one particular point that caught my mind.
Namely, it was the reference to people as objects: furniture and books. Furniture are essentially women who are contracted to a dwelling and perform services for the tenant, which run the gamut from maid to nurse to companion...with 'whore' falling somewhere in there. There don't appear to be any strictures against emotional involvement--the furniture that appear in the movie seem to be fond of, and loyal to, their tenants, to the point of risking death for assaulting law enforcement officers. Books, on the other hand, seem to be former intellectuals who, in the face of overwhelming unemployment and poverty, have sold their academic talents to public service. They appear to spend their lives in service to the police officers who ensure a relatively reasonable quality of life.
This, plus the treatment of the poor as trash through riot-control techniques that involve scooping them up with earthmovers and moving them to unidentified locations, certainly seem to be symptomatic of the ultimate message: corporate personhood cheapens human life.
Certainly interesting.
On a different hand altogether (not the 'other' hand, as that would seem to imply a strong relationship between the two), the problems with agriculture in the Soylent universe made me think of a recent discovery, almost serendipitous from the viewpoint of my damnable curiosity: biodynamics.
I first got wind of this field by committing a federal crime--I won't disclose its nature for fear of government scrutiny (up yours, spooks and all)--and truthfully, it sounded interesting. Sort of a mixture of science and spirituality, liberally sprinkled with esoteric jargon that used the names of common herbs in ways I couldn't quite identify. Curious...and tantalizing.
Alas, it seems to be a mixture of pseudoscience and witchcraft. Stuff a tincture of this herb and that into [insert harvested animal organ here] and bury for x period of time. Et voila, profligate milk and honey, to say nothing of superior health to the consumer due to improved mineral uptake in the crop of your choice.
The witchcraft bit is kind of obvious--I still can't figure out what the rationale is behind the idea of throwing together some herbs, stuffing them into cow intestines, and burying the whole mess in a corner of one's property in order to improve soil health. Compost, I can understand, certainly, but that doesn't figure in the whole biodynamic theory as prominently as it perhaps ought to.
The field--and I use the term "field" loosely with absolutely no consciousness of irony--has been around for, alarmingly enough, eighty years. This would seem to prove that pseudoscience has a much stronger basis in history than I would have thought, even past the Church's blind acceptance of geocentricism to Galileo's eternal chagrin (presuming the afterlife, if it exists, is predicated on the Pope's opinion), among other instances of willful ignorance.
It's almost as bad as the quackery that passes for paganism nowadays. It's the Happy Meal of nature-worship polytheism. Burn a few candles, tie a few ribbons, think happy thoughts, and time, space, and the human soul bend to your will--except, of course, you would never ask them to do that, that would most certainly not be kosher.
I took off early from work so I could catch the last hour of the book fair.
So stupid.
The warmth released itself when I picked up the table. Then a scrim dropped.
Squiggles. That's all they were. Blue and red and black squiggles, done with little art.
It made me think of a particularly teenage poem I wrote once, which opened with: The clouds obscure/The Sun of Meaning...
I capitalized a lot in those days.
Panicky and slightly desperate, I scrabbled through the pile of matted leaves. Some were beautiful, but out of reach; others were strictly adequate, but affordable.
I said no.
Later, I found katebeaton.com. Kind of funny and kind of odd, but always sharp. And I found myself thinking...what if I were to do the same? Not so much with the comics because what little talent I have for drawing mostly consists of odd little doodles that don't tell much of a story. Jellyfish with human eyes, cloven-hoofed women, things of that nature.
I've been dreaming lately. More than usual. Things like inch-thick eye gunk caked on either side of my nose or naked people with an unfortunate chromosome. Not what I would call Zombiepocalypse material, but I feel prompted.
I feel like a lump of just-seared steak being allowed to rest on the cutting-board before serving. The juices are redistributing.
Ideas bloom constantly, like spring. Rather than pruning, a trellis might be needed.
It was a revitalizing experience. I walked into the Coliseum, that fine old grande-dame of small-town gatherings, and breathed in the booky air and my eyes opened wide and took in the world and the people in it.
My kin.
Oh, when I first picked up those medieval Islamic astronomical tables, I felt a thrill skitter through my spine. Poverty is nobody's friend; mine even less so. The things were actually affordable, which is what killed me about it.
I just stood there, manhandling the mylar sheath, drinking in the script, awash in history.
If it were not for the brilliance of Muslim scientists during the long, dark feudal age of the West, it is conceivable that the wizardry that so defines our time would not exist. The Muslims created algebra, and they placed the zero in its rightful place in the canon of global mathematical thought.
Without this important innovation, Newton, Leibniz, and other mathematicians of the later period would have had a tough--if not impossible--go of developing calculus as we understand it today, and the field of physics would have been near-irreparably crippled. Einstein would never have left the patent office, Riemann would never have left the confessional, and Feynman would have expired in a puddle of booze, women, and piss at a young age.
They named most of the stars we see from this planet, and those names survive today. The bastardly nomenclature in use in modern astronomy deserves to be burned.
I'm angry. I'm deprived. I'm desperate. I have an inkling seeping through my consciousness--an ATM will be separated from its contents, and my bank account will develop a new acquaintance with the greatest mathematical thought of human history: zero.
Every so often, as I relax here in my apartment, I get an urge to move. My response to this urge is to generally pace up and down, traversing the entire length of the apartment, repetitively clenching and unclenching my fists while my mind whirls. Sometimes I gesticulate wildly to myself.
During these times, and during others, I feel as though I'm thinking better than I've ever thought before. It's all coherent, insuperable, stunning in its brilliance. I can see the future. An hour later, I come back to myself and realize that I've been walking back and forth and muttering to myself while flailing, and the glorious illusion collapses.
Oh, my God. I'm crazy.
On the other hand, I have moments--much rarer than my bag-lady episodes--where I lie in bed and continuously review slices of my recent life and begin to feel as though my world is collapsing in on itself like a dying star. It can be bad, but there's a detachment that insists on coinciding with, and indeed prolonging, the experience. There's something savory about utter depression, something substantial about that darkness, and it fills the soul. You learn to enjoy the sweet taste of hopelessness while wallowing in your self-inflicted misery.
I had one of those last night, which lasted nearly an hour. It was pretty terrible, really, and I realized that this was probably not a normal thing. In an effort to snap out of it, I got out of bed and onto the Internet, where I discovered cyclothymia on Wikipedia. As I read through the articles on hypomania and dysthymia, I immediately felt the dark cloud over my head go snap.
I laughed. Loud and long. To hell with the late hour and the new neighbor. It might be hideously wrong, I could be overreacting, I could be certifiable, but I felt great.
I'm usually relatively stable, mood-wise, but I have had times where I was just really thrilled, totally happy with the world, it was a great place to be and a great time to live in, I didn't care if I got on my co-workers' nerves for being such a Pollyanna because they could just go fuck themselves if they really wanted to be miserable bastards; and I'm pacing back and forth and feeling as though I can tease out all the individual threads of the whole of human history.
It apparently only takes one episode of hypomania for a diagnosis. God knows how many over the last few years. Since I was 19 or so--I used to walk all the way around the RIT campus at 3 a.m., pate a-boil, for no particular reason.
The Internet, I think, is very possibly and quite literally the greatest thing to happen to, and be invented by, the human race. It might be painfully inaccurate, it might screw lives up like tomorrow doesn't exist, but I can only imagine the mass suicides that might occur if someone killed the Internet.
And I get to write. And think. Gibberish, ranting, self-absorption...ahh, sweet music.
A fat angel, clothed in white, bringing the storm.
Standing under the bookstore awning, cigarette poised in his left hand, the clouds breathed.
Standing under the flickering fluorescent of a fast-food restaurant, eyes full of stars, short and brown and tall and pale, they were seen in the sky.
I've always noticed how, after seeing a good movie, I feel that I can take on the form of someone who belongs in it. A character, imperfect creation, born for his time and place. There was a me-shaped hole in the universe and I was born to fill it.
In a sense, isn't that what all our stories tell us? People are made for their age; all have roles to play. All of our religions, myths, tales, books, movies, all of them tell us the same thing: that the universe is a vast door with an infinite number of keyholes. Who, or what, then, is the locksmith?
This is what our life and science is about, perhaps: striving to find that void for which we were struck, fitting in it, hearing that cosmic click, and the door of meaning swings wide.
In this case, what is the meaning of my supposed angelic nature? For I am the angel, covered in white, watching and free of good and evil, and I discovered something I find often: total engrossment in someone else's story makes me a vessel, the container and bearer for someone else's dreams. I wonder if that isn't part and parcel of my ultimate nature, shifting shape and form to become what is called for.
But I know that's a lie: I am always and only forever myself. I have no wings (not that I would wish the ungainly things upon myself), halo, or even the slightest note of the ineffable; the only things in my eyes are dust and rain, and storms come whether I want them or not.
Blame Neil Gaiman's Sandman--the silent angel Duma set an angelic riff dancing on an antique cirrostratus, and I began, again, to watch.
Watching, I think, is one of the tumblers in my lock; alienation or a latent twinge of my millenial agent-of-change sensibility, perhaps, but we live (it feels like) in such a stormy age that my generation seems to feel responsible for shepherding the last out the door and ushering in the next (like my niece), bringing them in to face either life or death--we are the transition.
And some, like me, may feel compelled to simply watch, and by watching, change that which we observe. I read and look at things--I've said that before. It's why I call myself "Audience Member #1"--all the world's a play, and I have no primacy; there is only one and nothing--there is no Audience Member #0, that space is reserved only for those who don't see. But so much goes into the looking, the understanding, the becoming, that all I am is in process, and doesn't what I look at become changed by me? It has now become something that I have observed, and is eternally altered thereby. I saw a funeral, a daughter crying for a father gone, and nothing happened to me--but something happened to the funeral. I saw a young businessman and his eyes slyly examining the lovely young woman smoking next to me in a pink blazer, and his deed was augmented by mine. The watcher watches the watcher.
It seems almost self-reflexive, self-referential--am I mirrored in that young man? He's looking at someone of interest; so am I. Have I turned him into a looking-glass? For all of his actual presence in my life, he may as well be a thin layer of quicksilver, a familiar shadow. The simple act of living then becomes a piece of our highest art, a dynamically self-conscious postmodernist sculpture of a single moment in a single day in a single life.
A single life; I liked Gaiman's Maze of Destiny; always a choice with every turning, but once the choice has been made, the path behind collapses into a single way, while the path ahead twists wildly, convoluting such that Jormungandr might envy. I may write a story about it, starting thus:
Argh. I had just awakened, was freshly showered, and had been preparing to have a nice cigarette. Instead, I feel the need to rant about one of my pet peeves, which can be found on this podcast (transcript available) from SciAm.
The quibble? The very first sentence: "For worse or for better, humans are changing the course of evolution."
This is, as a famous writer once said, stool approaching critical mass--a total lunchbox. As far as I'm concerned, it's not possible to "change the course" of evolution. Evolution is a random process that selects for certain traits that ensure the survival of species. Those traits are often the product of completely random mutations--it all sort of looks like bushy logic, where individuals of a particular species are taken down differing but parallel paths to their logical conclusion--the branch that leads to yet another bush is a successful one. Evolution therefore, as such, has no "course."
It's dynamic! It's alive! It can be affected by environmental factors, and there we can play a significant part, but in the end, it's like saying the entire roulette table's been rigged, when all we did was give the ball a little spin.
I have to admit that I'm utterly amazed at the progress of the human species in recent centuries.
Yeah, no, I'm not talking about technology and sanitation and shit like that.
What I'm really talking about is the nature of scientific study. For example, my newest addiction is The Language Log, which I discovered through Dictionary Evangelist, which my sister sent to me a couple of weeks ago.
On this blog is sheer amazement and wonder. Although I have to admit that all the A&W actually comes from me, given the detached-yet-passionate erudition of the blog's contributors, I can't help but have a sneaking suspicion that there lies an undercurrent of thought underneath American culture that studies, observes, examines, and experiments in a subversive manner.
A large proportion of the entries I've read so far serve to refute other writings, frequently with the conclusion that those other writers are idiots, the victims of junk science, hasty assumptions, and selective understanding. Others are simply cases where the contributor in question discovers something linguistically anomalous and investigates, such as the case of will need never, in which the author admits that the increasing usage of this construction indicates a greater likelihood that it's simply a new one being born.
How do you like that? A linguist, a member of the master race commonly thought to rant and rail against the degradation of the English Language, sits there and observes, with classic detachment, that the language's evolution proceeds apace.
Speaking of evolution, linguists alone do not people the Language Log. For example, Mark Liberman examines several papers on the Theory of Mind, which seeks to clarify the process by which individuals determine their own selfhood and that of others (more or less). It appears that the ToM (as it's referred to) displays a significant amount of genetic variability (thank God for twins willing to be experimented upon), suggesting that this human ability is still evolving.
The phrase that really got me: "And as Cosma notes, genetic influence on a variable ability is also consistent with evolution in progress."
Evolution. In. Progress. What a thrilling, beautiful phrase. How is it possible that we, as a species, are capable of examining ourselves and coming up with proof that evolution is real and living with us today, and still insist that the Bible should be an academic textbook? It boggles the mind. Perversely, it also offers some hope--the vocal Jesus freaks (okay, that's unfair--let's include fundamentalist Muslims, if only because the destruction they provoke is equally as real, regardless of whether or not it's of a physical, cultural, or intellectual nature) represent only a portion of the human population.
In the meantime, we have these brilliant, brilliant people who perform wondrous maths and and know exactly what they're seeing when they look in a mirror. All I can do is read and read and read and wish I were as smart as they.
I read part of The Mabinogion last night, and a passage in the tale of Branwen struck me square between the eyes.
It's when Bran hears of Branwen's abuse at Mallolwch's hands (and those of the Irish people as well) and decides to invade Ireland with a conquering army. The story tells of how the weight of all those people on the two rivers that once separated Wales and Ireland is responsible for the sea that lies there now.
The fatty most responsible is Bran himself. As the army approaches the Irish shore, a man reports to Mallolwch that the people have seen a strange thing: a new forest on the water, accompanied by a mountain with a high ridge dividing two large lakes, and it's all moving. Perplexed, Mallolwch decides that Branwen is the most likely person to explain this new phenomenon.
Interestingly enough, Branwen says, the forest is indeed a forest after all--however, the trees are dead, stripped, and mounted upright on all the boats available in the British armada. The mountain is Bran's head, the ridge is his nose, the lakes are his eyes, and he's looking right at you.
What a beautiful image.
I'm minded of Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, where the main character is the get of a mountain and a washing machine, and his brother is an island.
It isn't a truly magical world without people being mistaken for mountains or being related to them. For example, I'm overweight. I used to be bigger. How much bigger? Bigger than the sky! Whereupon I would regale my coworkers with tales of how I defeated the hundred-handed Hecatonchires or put down the seven-eyed beast of Arduin or killed the baby-eating Hag of Beara.
As is often the actual case, though, were I to say, "Bigger than the sky!" in the real world, I'd get more than a few pitying glances and at least one nonplussed moment while the listener slowly tries to decide how to shift conversational gears. I blame it on the satellite cloud around the Earth--every inch of the planet has been seen and mapped, and there are no living mountains to be seen.
Funny how the technological wizardry that tells us precisely how large the world is serves only to make it even smaller. Information overload fairly behooves us to shut out all that doesn't relate to our ever-shrinking specialty in life--including might, magic, and international relations.
