:: a toe in the water... ::

:: Monday, April 21, 2003 ::

A drabble, or in my case, a few paragraphs that spilled out and don't really go into anything I'm working on

He buries himself in her, of course. Eventually, when he's hauled himself up from the Slough of Despond, back into the painfully weird life he inhabits these days. Half Lost in Space, half Star Wars.

He sinks into her, face buried in the soft side of her neck. Skin salty sweet against his lips, hair cool cornsilk against his cheek. He sinks into her and whispers her name, and she wraps her arms and legs tight around him, so tight he could almost break. He knew she would, knew she would be like this long before she was, the other guy's memories surfacing in his brain. He doesn't care how they got there anymore. It's all part of the World According to Crichton; he takes the good -- the memory of Aeryn loving him freely, fully, without the fear that made her run for so long -- and throws the rest away.

After, when he's done, when she's all but bent him backward with her own release, he lies in the semi-darkness and watches her sleep. She won't admit she wasn't well enough for their little tiptoe through the tulips on Katrazi, just like long ago she wouldn't admit she wasn't up to a one-woman assault on a heavily guarded Gammak base. Different reasons, outcome the same; Officer Sun by his side, keeping the real live walking talking pulsefiring demons at bay.

He didn't get to make love to her that time, but this is how she slept. Flat on her stomach, all but unconscious, one hand curled beneath her chin. He knows this because he sat beside her most of that night, listening to her breathe, hoping it would make him feel safe enough to edge his own way into sleep.

He thinks of this, tracing patterns in the sweat still glowing on her bare back. He thinks about love and war and how they are both so huge and cruel, so incomprehensible that they almost balance each other for triumph and pain.

Aeryn shivers in her sleep and John pulls the covers up, lays a kiss on the sharp tip of a shoulderblade. Surprisingly, she wakes, blinking up at him as if she can't quite remember who he is, or why he's lying naked beside her. It's not the way she looked when she woke on Talyn, soft and sated, eyes wide with trust. He's still waiting to see her look like that again.

She smiles but she still looks troubled, and if he thinks about it, she's been looking troubled all night. At least the part of the night where he didn't have his face buried in his arms, or against her throat. She reaches out and holds her hand against his, as if they're moving away from each other again, instead of closer. Palm to palm, her hand looks thin and delicate, so much that his own looks like a baseball mitt pressed against hers.

"John," she says softly, and he pulls her into his arms, kisses the next words from her mouth. If he has to weigh the balance he may find there is none. He may find that there is nothing else left, and so this has to be enough.

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:: fialka 12:35 AM [+] ::

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I've been avoiding politics on the blog because that space is public, and it's my sandbox or my pond or whatever, but definitely the place I stick my head in and hide from the nonsense of this world (not that tormented space was that much less nonsensical this year, but that's another kettle of mixed metaphors entirely). So...let me talk about Madonna.

Yeah, Madonna.

I lived in New York in the very early 80's, when Madonna first started and everyone thought she looked so cool and different. Well, if you looked around the East Village at that time, she looked pretty much like everyone else, including me (and I've got the pictures to prove it - ack!) I mean, yeah overall Madonna looked a lot better in those clothes with the foofy scarf tied round her head than I did, but you see what I mean.

So, Madonna with her sped-up voice and her happy dappy dance tunes and I've never been quite sure if I admire her for being herself in the most public manner possible, or if I think she's just the crassest money-making machine around. I'm a fairly private person, so the idea of someone turning themselves inside out and putting all their inner workings out there for the public to see is both appalling and somewhat awe-inspiring. Agree or don't agree, but yeah, I do admire the mivonks.

Musically, hmm. You know, I don't buy the albums and never have, but there is something I like about the music, more and more as she gets older and sharper about what she wants to say. I tend to view a Madonna video like a short piece of auteur cinema, since it's obvious that every image is carefully selected to tell a particular story, to drive home the point of the song rather than just a glorified commercial for the latest album. And often, more often of late, the videos are dangerous. Far more than the music. Acoustically, Madonna's not particularly disturbing. Add the images and suddenly those songs are really not for the complacent. The videos often aim for the places where society is most uncomfortable. They make us look at things most people don't really want to see.

And I don't think it's purely for shock value, either. At least not lately. Whether you like her or not, whether you agree with her or not, in her own mind Madonna has always thought she had something pertinent to say.

So...American Life. It's been pulled I hear, and having seen it, I can sure see why. 'Disturbing' doesn't begin to cover it. Pertinent, absolutely. Made just before the present war, but it's as deeply unsettling as watching John Crichton turn into a nuclear terrorist. It turns all your knee-jerk reflexes into kicks in the head. It makes you think in ways you really don't want to find yourself thinking. About a television character you love, or a pop icon you never took that seriously.

Popular culture cuts across all the artificial divides, it's where our post-postmodern collective human mythos is being created. Yes, there's a real divide between the haves and have nots, and a further divide within the haves between the seen and not-seen. But sometimes, in an increasingly conservative and corporate-dominated west, it's the only place truly subversive statements can still be made.

I can't really summarise the video -- a listing of images won't do it justice. All I can say is I hope it circulates, though like most banned works it'll probably be seen only by the choir. And these days, that's just not enough.

I can see why she pulled it, but what a shame Madonna's mivonks failed her now.

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:: fialka 8:44 PM [+] ::

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John and Aeryn woke this morning, brushing fluffy cloud-bits out of their hair and wanting to know why their place in my head was suddenly occupied by these lesser immortals, these creatures of my own imagination.

Heaven forfend.

I told them to go away and do whatever it is they do when they're on hiatus together, at which point Aeryn quite icily reminded me that they've never *been* on hiatus together before and while it's all nice to do the lovey-dovey (okay, she didn't say that, I did) unbothered by passing Scarrans and other stray critters (like Noranti), as an ad infinitum activity it becomes much of a(n albeit yummy) muchness and where in the hell did I hide her prowler?

Then I had to smack down Landau, who wanted to know what all the noise was about -- too much of an eye for dark girls in leather to be let loose while Aeryn is stomping around (and if I'm not careful Ries' hair is going to straighten out and she's going to wind up born in Australia, not Israel.) I tried to placate Aeryn with the 'dodging asteriods' portion of one unfinished fic, but then John started digging around for golden elixir and humming U2. Meanwhile, back in the back of my head, Ries was beginning to have um, interesting thoughts about John's um, weapon and Landau was getting pissed off because he can't even get her to look at him, and his butt (in his mind) is much, much cuter (even if it is clad in denim and not leather).

It was chaos, I tell you. Simply chaos. And all very weird because it seems to me that it should be Ries and Aeryn hieing off into the sunset and not giving a ropy dren about John and Landau. Oh, and -- cofax can vouch -- Landau was a wisecracker and Ries my raven-haired heroine long before I ever met John and Aeryn. So I do understand why they are pissed off about finding all that chakkan oil on the sheets before they ever got their chance to use them.

So here's the deal. If anyone here has any interest in listening to the moans and groans of someone trying to finish their long-unfinished original novel, you'll find that stuff over at the Live Journal I've had for months and never used. I promised John and Aeryn that this space would remain theirs, and I would get Aeryn out from the underground bunker and sober John up sometime in the next week or two if they would abdicate their place in my head to Ries and Landau. I think they're okay with that. At least they seemed okay when they wandered back to their cloud, pushing each other's shoulders like teenagers. I knew I shouldn't have given them the golden elixir. And I think John's taught Aeryn a few new (ahem) words, too.

For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about (and I'm sure you don't), don't worry. I'm fine, just fine (she says as her head spins around).

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:: fialka 7:58 PM [+] ::

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no place like

Ten days was not enough -- it feels like it took almost the entire time for my head to clear from the last six months. Clarity returned about an hour before I got on the plane home. Too late for all the words I couldn't find while I was there. Ah well. A reason to return (not hard to find those). At least I was more coherent than in November.

So. Old friends seen, new ones met. I flew home with a head full of ideas, entire worlds birthing themselves as I stared out the window. I imagined John and Aeryn blissfully asleep above the Rockies, snuggled together among the clouds. It felt right to leave them there, at least for awhile. The only analogy I can come up with is somewhat over the top, but...it feels as if I've been mourning since September, fighting so hard to hold onto someone whose health would not improve. The way the show ended was a perfect dovetail, fiction meeting life, and it's both a terrible grief and a terrible relief to have it over at last.

I never say never -- if some Farscape character taps me on the shoulder with a good tale, I'll tell it -- but for now I'm glad to have those voices quiet. In a week or so we'll start Retro-FS over on The Wormhole, I have a couple of vids I want to make (plus I still need to get that first one small enough for download), and the Annotated Farscape to design. Plus a couple of other things I'm not ready to talk about yet. More on that as it gets sorted, but the upshot is: I'm still here and I'm sticking around, even if I've made a conscious decision to put my energy into telling my own stories for a while.

I do believe Farscape will be back, as I believe John and Aeryn will eventually wake and speak to me again, but for now they're silent and I'm content to leave them on their cloud. Making room for others; characters from the real novel, characters from this...thing...that's growing more vivid by the minute. It's not "moving on from the fandom" -- quite the opposite. It's freeing myself to do other things within it. Canon is closed for the moment; John and Aeryn have found their moment of grace. It's a good time to let them go, to let their story rest. Time to stand away from the campaign and pay homage to the show itself. To share it with others in any way I can. To stop mourning the Death of Farscape so I can celebrate the life of it instead.

Ah, yes. There is certainly time for that.

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:: fialka 9:14 AM [+] ::

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