Night before last, I got to the part where
Jon Snow, a brave
knight of the Night’s Watch, and his knight brothers are camped on the Fist, a
hill that rises like a fist that is a ringfort.
It is singularly creepy.
One
brother “smells” the cold, and Jon’s direwolf Ghost refuses to go to the top of
the Fist.
Ghost is known for sensing a
lot more than everyone and helping Jon out of many scrapes.
The landscape is describes as dark and
foreboding ~ standing on the top of the hill, the ancient dark forest goes on and
on, and it’s wet and rainy.
What we know
from before that here past the Wall are the Others, an army of zombie-like
people who haven’t really surfaced in the narrative but who loom over it like
dread from the very first page.
I don’t do it justice in my description. But I tell you what, it creeped me out like
any good horror novel. I’d just been reading
that part when I had to go downstairs for something, and I kept looking around
thinking, “We have far too many windows in this house. Far too many.” I turned on a lot of lights as I did my
errand, I can tell you, which is silly because then anything outside can see
in.
Then, last night, I was reading along, a lot about weirwoods
and the old gods and the magic returning because of dragons, about omens and
portents and what the future brought.
Again,
I had to go downstairs for something, but I didn’t turn on the lights. Our back
door is glass to let in the light, and through it I saw moonlight bouncing off
the tin roof of our garage and the black outline of our cottonwood tree.
I walked over and looked out.
There was a perfect halfmoon shining brightly
and illuminating the small and narrow groups of cirrocumulus clouds that
crowded around it.
The lights and faint noise
of trucks whizzed by on the interstate next to our house ~ never wall to wall,
but persistent, enough to remind you how busy we are as a species.
And then as I watched the blinking lights of
a small plane popped out from the clouds, disappeared into the moon, and then
popped back out the other side.
In my frame of mind, I couldn’t help but think of portents
and omens, of metaphors and signs.
I’d
just been reading about the red comet in the sky and everyone interpreting it
for good or ill ~ mostly ill ~ and what it meant that the wargs and direwolves
were much more plenty and so much more.
So as I watched the moon and the plane I immediately thought of omens
and portents and metaphors.
The small
blinking lights of the plane merging with the overweening light of the
moon.
How small we are and how above
ourselves.
We think we have these mighty
machines yet the comparably weak light of a halfmoon has such power as to obliterate
our evidence.
And the scurrying along
the interstate ~ all this busyness to mask our baser natures, and our higher
ones.
And the black outline of the tree,
usually ignored and taken for granted, yet there it is, it always is, patient
as death, as plants always are.
Usually I’m a good rationalist, scientific method and all
that, but then I thought, what are portents and omens but just another form of
metaphor. What are metaphors? One thing that stands in for another, so that
by comparison its characteristics are illuminated. They may be small and clever in literature,
but I have long thought that science and religion too are nothing more than a
huge structure of interconnecting metaphors.
Useful ones to be sure, but they are simply structures to help us
understand the world around us.
So why can’t omens and portents be thought of as the
metaphors of people much closer to nature?
They would not simply be based on guesses, but instead be based on long
study like science. Sure, they weren’t
backed by the scientific method, but our instincts and our guts tell us many
things that our heads won’t, and we express those in metaphors. They show ourselves to ourselves.
Not only that, but omens are a grasping at trying to predict
the future in a thoroughly unpredictable world for people who had much less
control over it and much more dire consequences for the lack of it. It gave an illusion of control, which we all
need.
It was not an altogether unpleasant feeling, this reminder
of the ineffable.
