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rathercommon

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From:

rathercommon

Erm - right.

[ Kitty's a clever girl, but at the end of the day, there are some realms in which she's dreadfully ignorant. Many realms, actually. She, after all, only had about six years of education, and those years of education taught her to repair mechanical belts and grease gears and (when she proved herself uncommonly intelligent) how to read ledgers and touch-type. Poetry, the analysis thereof, and the meaning of nom de guerre are all completely opaque to her. ]

Well - for what it's worth, I don't know if you can say that with such certainty. That you're not making yourself small. Not that I think you are, just - the world is always trying to make you make yourself small. To resist that force - that's something you've always got to work at. It's a skill I've not come remotely close to mastering, myself.

From:

elegiaque

( if anyone were to ask gwenaëlle what she is, instead of just listening to her endlessly list the things she isn't and/or refuses to be—

it's a poet. still, always. )

You can't say anything with certainty, but you still should.

( words matter. the story matters. no accident that the poet is so preoccupied with narrative as force. )

Deciding it's something worth making true. Everything in life is just stories we tell ourselves—if someone tells you that you're small for long enough, you believe it. That's one way the world makes you that way. You get given a story. It's a form of resistance to tell your own.

Look at Flint. He understands that.

From:

rathercommon

[ Kitty frowns at that last part. ]

What do you mean?

From:

elegiaque

He's very deliberate. He's aware of his audience; I don't mean that he's false, in what he shows himself to be, but it's a choice made with forethought. He understands telling a story with every part. What that can mean.

From:

rathercommon

I mean - I think he's careful about his image, sure. How's that resistance, though?

From:

elegiaque

It's not big, or impressive, but it's—

We tell stories to teach people how to think. That's one reason why you can't just say something and have it be, that's why it's a conversation and not the end of one when you make a statement that you want to make true.

You think what he is is what he was told to be? I don't.

From:

rathercommon

Well, I don't know if that's resistance, though. I'd say that's just survival, isn't it?

From:

elegiaque

It depends on what you're thinking. Doesn't it? And what you do with that. And what it means.

We don't survive alone. And ideas survive, too. Sometimes longer than people. That's true of good ideas as much as bad ones, or we wouldn't survive at all.

From:

rathercommon

Mm. I don't know, though. I don't know if you can make many good changes while being - you know - false.

From:

elegiaque

Just because a change is a choice doesn't make it false. People aren't—

( a sigh, a grimace; ) People aren't that simple. You aren't that simple. Have you always been exactly what you are, right this very minute? You never had to decide you wanted better than what you had? You never had to change anything about your thinking, ever, in your entire life?

From:

rathercommon

[ A huff of air provides an answer to that question. ]

But where I'm from, they make everyone false, and corrupt everyone's natures. I wasn't any exception to that.

From:

elegiaque

You can't have it both ways.

From:

rathercommon

What do you mean?

From:

elegiaque

Why do you get to decide that someone else making a choice isn't true, but yours was? That someone else improving their life is wrong, but it's all right when you did it?

From:

rathercommon

No - I was false back then. This is who I am. Back then, keeping my head down and saying "please sir" and "sorry ma'am" and licking boots, that was false.

From:

elegiaque

And that means you get to decide whether someone else making a change is true or false because...?

I mean, if I can't change or do anything good, I don't know why you're still speaking to me.

From:

rathercommon

Well, you were the one who said he was telling a story.

From:

elegiaque

And you decided a story is a lie. Everything is a story. Everyone has a story.

Edited Date: 2018-11-23 07:40 am (UTC)

From:

rathercommon

"Telling a story" implies constructing something, deliberately, doesn't it.

From:

elegiaque

Yes, it does. And making a choice is something deliberate, too, they're not mutually exclusive, you don't have to be a fuckwit to be honest or we wouldn't be speaking because you are very honest and you can just ask Darton's cheap slut how much time I have for idiots.

From:

rathercommon

Don't call someone a slut. Life's altogether too short for women to be shaming one another over sex.

[ Also, who the hell is Darton, etc. ]

Anyway, I don't know, I'm not really all that fussed about it one way or the other. At the end of the day, I don't much care about the stories people tell; I care about what people do quite a bit more.

From:

elegiaque

A spade's a spade.

( gwenaëlle. nevermind that, bethany isn't even here any more—not that she's paid enough heed to know it. moving on: )

That's what I'm saying, they're the same thing. Sometimes. Not all the time, obviously, people do actually lie and are fucking awful, but—look, when we're dead, that's all that's left. When you die, what people remember isn't...real, it isn't exact, it isn't...who you were. It's the story you told of yourself. Or it's the story that they told themselves about you. And we all do it, even if that isn't what we call it. Unless you're going up to every single person that you meet and explaining every single facet of yourself as a person to them, you're choosing what you show people.

And it matters. It does matter. Understanding that matters, because how people see things matters. It's so easy to undo the good someone does by having a better story. You can make people hurt themselves believing they don't have a choice, because something else is worse, something else you keep them too afraid to see past, and then they can't organise themselves, because there's no point. You can't counteract that without understanding it.

( it's at this point that gwenaëlle realises she's got slightly carried away, and clears her throat. )

That's just what I think. Anyway. Whatever.

From:

rathercommon

Well -

[ This isn't something Kitty cares about so much. But she can tell that Gwen does, and it's so rare that Gwen seems to care about anything that she'd have to be a real arsehole not to engage. So. ]

Wouldn't it be better if people didn't get remembered? If we focused on - you know - just keeping ideas alive, instead of memories of people?

From:

elegiaque

Well, yes, obviously, ( that's nothing gwenaëlle's going to argue, the idea of being remembered for anything brings her out in hives, ) but that isn't how people work. You can't collectively make everyone in the world not care about other people without making the world worse, probably.

But that's—we don't have to focus on it. No one fucking focuses on it. ( the cussing is pure punctuation, at this point; she sounds rueful, if anything. she knows no one cares about this. she doesn't for a moment believe kitty is listening to her because she thinks this matters. ) It's not a thing that we make happen, it's natural, it's how people are, it's what happens. Whole religions form because people love a good fucking story. That's how ideas survive, people are how, people remember what other people taught them, they remember things that they saw, they act on those things. Someone's brave so a hundred other people are brave, too. The Herald died, and people kept coming to the Inquisition to fight because they had a symbol when the Inquisition didn't have much more than that. And they became what the Inquisition has.

I'm not arguing that it's important to do, or even that every single person has to care about it, it's just...something that's worth understanding, because it's better if someone does. If someone's thinking about it. And paying attention to it. If it's literally only me, that's fine, but just because it isn't what you're doing doesn't mean it isn't important. I can't do the things you do, either.

From:

rathercommon

Mm.

[ Kitty chews a bit on her lower lip. All this is...awfully heady, awfully complex for her, though she'd sooner die than admit she can't keep up with something. ]

But also, empires crush people in the name of wicked men who created their own wicked legend. That's what happened at home.