philosophy, psychology and other long words beginning with p. discussion

I had three days off in a row so I wanted to take advantage of the time to read a chapter. I won't give a complete spoiler but I will hint. Joyous reunion!

Chapter 11 Behind the Scenes

Okay, so Lavender and Marigold finally pick up where they left off, which was jumping into the mouth of The Host. They’re not dead, regardless of what the Commandant reported back to Polaris. We realized from Anders and Ylwa’s chapter that they’re not dead, so that solved the cliff-hanger from several chapters ago.

Part of this creature’s original literary conception was little more than to serve as a plot device. Somehow I needed to get the girls off of Canadian soil, and short of having a helicopter waiting for them with the blades turning and a pilot waving them in, The Host was my solution. From there I had to give it purpose to its placement, which was done really in Anders and Ylwa’s chapter. Hopefully with the background given on the creature in that chapter, including the museum Anders and Ylwa visit, the creature seems like it’s almost ‘supposed to be there’ for Lavender and Marigold, rather than just a device to bail myself out from a writing standpoint.

But as for purpose to its placement, there were a lot of opportunities once I did decide to use the creature. For one, it’s a chance to expand on Lavender’s gift. She sees life and death in all its forms, which includes a pale yellow glow on the people inside the creature. Lavender doesn’t know what it means because she’s never seen anything but red or white glows before. I chose the color to represent rot. Although you cannot die inside the host, your mind rots from lack of stimulation.

After killing off Lyell and Ylwa, I felt I had to bring somebody back. I didn’t originally plan on bringing Simon back, but I definitely wanted a ‘hidden chapter.’ It’s hard to do that electronically. In any format, I couldn’t put it in the table of contents, and electronically it wouldn’t work unless I buried it in the text of another chapter. Of all the inserts I tried to do, Polaris’ quatrains, The Good Dingleberry poems, etc., I’d definitely say Simon’s chapter was my ‘big surprise’. Note that it’s “The Account of Simon,” not “Simon’s Encounter.” Family members get accounts; strangers get encounters.

Although Simon is alive, the girls react very differently. Lavender is surprisingly distant while Marigold is very emotional and desperate to spend as much time with him as possible. As the Grandmother narrated in her chapter, Marigold didn’t have much of a father figure. Reuniting with her thought-to-be-dead father is like finally getting a vitamin you’ve been deprived of your whole life. As for Lavender, she doesn’t mean to be distant, but she’s realized some things that have put her in the ‘depression’ phase of her coping. Remember denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance? Those were the five phases of coping with loss, and Lavender is now in the depression phase of coping with her exile. After realizing Polaris sent some men to kill her and Marigold, and that they were lucky to escape into the Host, she realizes that her exile is probably permanent. The Aliments of Life and Death project she and Marigold have undertaken won’t buy their re-entry into York. Not if Polaris just wants them dead at all costs. Marigold explains, “Although she had a flared relapse of anger, Lavender had now progressed to depression in her self-grief. Eventually would come acceptance, likely silently and only in time, when she was ready. We would have peace then, but still be exiled.” To add on why Lavender is so distant, at the end of the chapter she doubts whether or not that really was her father. Marigold convinces her that it was (and it is, it was Simon, their father), but Lavender’s self-doubt is developing to the point that she questions whether or not she deserves normal parents. She just thinks she’s such a freak, such an anomaly that it wouldn’t be likely to have normal parents. Going back to Marigold, she actually flirts with Simon briefly (“I know a handsome man’s voice when I hear one!”) before she realizes it’s her father. Doing two things here. First, I wanted her whole boy-crazy theme to land right in the lap of her absent-father issues as she’s reunited with him. Second, I wanted to create an embarrassing memory, which Simon is going to get into at length when he discusses ‘wandering memory.’

I first heard of Marcel Proust from watching the movie Little Miss Sunshine. His works discuss voluntary and involuntary memory, which are really incredible concepts if you get a chance to look into them. In short, voluntary memory is when we actively try to recall something. What was the name of your fifth grade teacher? To answer that you’d use voluntary memory. Now let’s say you hear a song and say, “I remember when Mrs. LaPorte used to sing that to us in fifth grade.” That’s involuntary memory. It’s triggered by something else, and it’s much more powerful, clear, and accurate than voluntary memory. I still smell something occasionally that propels me back to summer camp, because it smells just like the bunks. Before I know it I’m remembering things attached to it, like names of bunkmates, and other things I could never remember if I were asked (voluntary memory). Smells are powerful; they’re the strongest sense linked to memory. You probably have a lot of smells that you come across occasionally which bring you back to a very strong memory. If so, please share!

Anyway, I thought Proust’s contribution to the psychology world was wonderful. Sure, we would have figured it out eventually, but he came up with it just by being in tune with himself, and he brought it to the world by writing a fiction book. I thought that it was worth a shot, so I theorized about ‘wandering memory.’ The setting is when your mind is blank and has no outside stimuli, like what would trigger an involuntary memory. This isn’t very often, but does happen occasionally. You’d either have to be in The Living Cave (like Simon, who describes this theory) or really tuning out the world in the moment. Then it hits you, whatever it is. The random wandering memory pops into your head. Unfortunately I doubt this qualifies as a third type of memory. I think Marigold’s right; it’s probably just that your mind is wandering from one triggered/involuntary memory to the next until something gets its attention, like a painful memory, or an ‘uh-oh’ moment, like, ‘I was supposed to go to the dentist today.’ You don’t remember the memory before it, which was, ‘my tooth feels funny,’ and you only think the dentist appointment was out of nowhere. So it’s probably just a variety of the involuntarily memory, but it does have its trigger, which is the quiet memory before it. It just feels like it’s out of nowhere.

Simon describes a fruit, “The fruit itself is oblong and often egg-shaped, any color between green, orange, and red, and I am also told edible and delicious.” He’s talking about a mango. He says that the vines and prunings (from the mango tree) are stocked in Fort Alert. A mango tree really will give you a bad reaction if you touch the sap or burn the wood, then inhale the fumes. Fort Alert is laced with these prunings so that if the Siberians attack and burn it, their skin would be too irritated to take the next fort to the south. Unfortunately for Simon and everybody in Fort Alert, the first fort likely to be invaded, the whole design is for it to self-destruct if necessary. This leads Simon into the thought, “Fighting fire with fire makes the whole world burn.” This is an adaptation of Gandhi’s, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” The quote was adapted to fit Ancient Canada’s themes. Polaris is fire. Fire bad. And frankly I never understood fighting fire with fire. Neither does Marigold. The more upset you get with her, the more she’ll smirk and wink. We’ll see more of this theme later, in Agrippin’s chapter. But back to the mango. Yes, there are mangos in Ancient Canada. I didn’t want to give away too much here, so Simon calls it “a specific fruit-bearing tree.”

In Simon’s account we hear the term ‘Thule’ for the first time. (Pronounced too-lee). Thule was a term used in classical European writing meaning the top of the world or the far north. Eventually it became synonymous with Greenland or Iceland. I use it for Greenland, but there’s always the map in the beginning of the book if you forget. You’ll also see that Emberland is Iceland, and you can get a good idea about the Siberian geography Simon’s talking about early in his account (he lays out a lot of geography, which is difficult to follow without the map).

The goodbye between the girls and their father is supposed to have a bit of a contrast. Lavender’s sterile reaction vs. Marigold’s outflow of emotion. But what I remembered about this while re-reading it was how flat Simon’s farewell originally was. I forget exactly what he said, but it was short and sterile. I didn’t want his emotion to match Marigold’s, so I had to keep his goodbye a little subdued. In the end I added, “I will remember you here, in the light.” I thought that fixed it, because of the words ‘remember’ and ‘light.’ He’s going to go back into the darkness and deal with those painful wandering memories again, but he’ll have a new, fresh, good memory to take back with him.

After Lavender sees Simon, she wonders about her genetics. Why does she have dark hair and Marigold has blonde? Marigold teases, “I always just assumed I was meant to be the pretty one.” Marigold’s joking. But this may be about as close as I get to saying whether or not Lavender, Marigold, or both are pretty or not. I deliberately avoided that because I thought it introduced an anxiety that I didn’t want in the story. Marigold is just making a blonde joke, not a joke about either of their looks.

If a publisher asked me to split up the book into two, I would end the first one here. There’s no great stopping point, but this is the closest thing I’d have. It’s roughly the halfway mark, and the girls are about to start a new journey on Svalbard. They just met their thought-to-be-dead father, so they and the reader are a little emotionally drained. The next chapter is The New Princess, which isn’t as dark or heavy as some recent chapters. The girls take a small role in that one, and actually play a fairly minor role in the next chapters until Marigold’s next interim. They get this break so we can get some variety before the final stretch, when they resume their role as the lead characters.