Other things

I’ve heard writing described by some as cathartic, as artistic, as expressive, an outgrowth, something born of need. For me, writing is an apology. I am walking beneath the streets, amongst the catacombs, and yet, a fine wind is blowing wet leaves of beech trees that line the street like sentinels. I am carrying a small sack of words and knocking on doors in the faintest of light. When the door opens, the light scandalizes me, and I shyly open my bag, letting the words, dusty words, long words, words that have failed me, or remade me, fall out onto the floor, hoping that somewhere in the jumble is a pattern of forgiveness. 

                These houses that I visit are populated by strangers who bear a resemblance to old friends, third grade teachers, dogs from books I read as a child who died at the end, a priest who pulled me from the me from the mud, a girl I once met on a bus headed to New York, and of course, my mother and father, brother and sister etc. And yet, these are not the primary characters to whom I offer my words, my solace, my confusion.

The person who answers every door is a version of myself, sometimes from years ago, pushing Hot Wheels down a driveway, picking strawberries in a side yard, or smacking wildly at a tetherball. Sometimes, the person I meet is from only months, seconds, hours before. I apologize to all of them profusely. I try to explain to them why we’re here, how this all came about. I am a stranger in these houses, a doddering old fool who has wandered in during the middle of the night, just looking for a place to relieve his bladder and mind. 

“It gets better,” many of the younger versions of myself say, as if they have any clue about the future. And yet, I believe them. I believe them because I know that it has been better, will be better, maybe even isn’t all that bad, and why was I spreading all that doom and gloom. Soon I am sitting down to have a glass of brandy, or grape juice and passing the time in an intensely sweet reverie. I say, “I don’t know why I’ve been so sad. Perhaps I’m just confused  about things, and I’m mistaking the confusion for something deeper.”

Soon, depending upon the age of my interlocutor, we are walking the pale streets, painted by black shadows of lamp posts, riddled by bat guano, talking about the video games, the books, the trees, the winks and long summer days that I used to love. And the melancholy is with me again, walking along in the street, saying something of people looking on works and despairing, but I know that he means loves, he means worn book spines, cracked spokes of bike wheels, the face of a grandparent now dead, staring back at you from a photo.  I know that he means, bones and bones and bones, bones stacked in grave yards, on the top of Italian hillsides, in the ditches and trenches of Europe I can hear him saying, this too shall pass.

But look, I said, shaking a very startled version of myself. We must forget this. Eat drink and be merry, or at the very least, not rhapsodize about death when we are living dammit. We are living. I contain multitudes, of which, you are at least one. Let’s drink to that. Let’s drink to everything.  I am reminding myself to smile, and reminding myself, in the process to smile. I remind both of us that there are many things in the world which are worthy of a smile, a drink, a laugh, though I can't think of any just now besides good company.

 .The wind, in response, blew a cold blast, reminding me that I was alive, though in a different mood I would have sheltered from it and cursed existence. As we walked those sooty streets, those drunken streets that turn and then turn again for no reason, streets that sway beneath our feet,  I explain to him that the best way to start is with a smooth inward turn of the knee and then a sharp jerk, like a gun’s recoil as it approaches the inside leg, pulling the knee back outward and locking in place. I hand him another drink as I explain to him just how the whole movement is about letting go, losing sight of the other, the only person paying attention to you with the intensity that you fear is you. This evening, we're Buddhist. We're forgetting the self. 

He reminded me just then, this old prig, that he had never nor danced in his life, not even in front of the mirror when no one was in the house, and I am forced to consider, or reconsider, what I bore I was, or what I bore I’ve become. And I see in all these self-portraits a kind of mosaic, and I want John Ashberry to write me a poem about these encounters with the self, how they might make a kind of picture. I want him to call it, “Self-Portrait in a convex mirror,” and I want his poem to go something like this,

"Francesco one day set himself
To take his own portrait, looking at himself from that purpose
In a convex mirror, such as is used by barbers . . .
He accordingly caused a ball of wood to be made
By a turner, and having divided it in half and
Brought it to the size of the mirror, he set himself
With great art to copy all that he saw in the glass,"
Chiefly his reflection, of which the portrait
Is the reflection, of which the portrait
Is the reflection once removed.”

And it is this finally, the thought of John Ashberry, a thousand John Ashberry’s, one million John Ashberry’s staying up late at night, nibbling on the end of a pen, constructing the poem, Self-Portrait in  a Convex Mirror” that allows me to rest.

We walk home in silence, pacing our thoughts. He with his: which concern the past, worries of college, of classes, of friendships, of women we no longer know. And me, with the answers to all those questions, not wanting to spoil anything, not wanting anything to ruin this moment, the two of us walking together, stride for stride, not talking, under the silver light of a now risen moon. 

Writing

Wasted afternoons, spent beneath low slung clouds, mirrors posing as water to large swaths of cerulean skies. Long, tepid afternoons, on the front porches of strangers, trading gossip, swatting mosquitoes, sweating in the stifling heat in the throes of cheap whiskey.

Afternoons in the apartments of girls, sweat stained sheets after discussing Proust, of whom I’ve not read a single word. The lazy fly buzzes the window and we trade metaphors and meaning as the light skips through the window making lattices on the floor.

The beginning of a certain evening in Paris, in Pigalle, wandering the streets in search of a guide book to take me home, streetlights like lighthouses, streets dusted in pollen and moon. Resisting the temptation to switch to you, to utter the word that hovers over all our gestures.

Trailing down a street glittering with green glass, the hem of a skirt brushing along the ground.  In the morning, swans trumpet and starlings make elaborate shapes beneath obsidian clouds. They seem to say, “nothing has changed.”

I painted a mural of the sky in the middle of my ceiling. On the outside, I put all of the things that I used to be, an astronaut, a diver, a teacher, a mid thirteenth century philosopher who held that the world was comprised entirely of my failures, an auto mechanic in Sydney Australia who specialized in kangaroo engine clean up, a Rhodes scholar. In the end it looked nothing like the Sistine Chapel, or anything else painted on a roof during the Renaissance if that’s what you were expecting. It looked like a flock of crows, flying west, away from a burning sun, the bottoms of their wings tinged with green. Don’t ask me to make sense of it. Don’t ask me to make sense of anything. 

Monet

During the day we painted terrible watercolors. We’d watched, or half-watched, a lengthy documentary about the work of Monet. Like most people, we didn’t just want to see something beautiful, yellow streetlights wavering on dark masses of water, we wanted to personify it, to create it, and in some way justify our own existence, which, when compared with Monet’s up to this point, probably wouldn’t be resulting in any documentaries.

The hardest part about the painting is that I was terrible at it. I had no eye for color, or shapes, the play of different dimensions in space. In truth, the only thing that I can do well from an artistic point is draw a very small bird, primarily using semi-circles and frown emoticons that I learned how to do from a children’s book. My painting didn’t even end up looking like a cheap imitation, which is the best we could have hoped for. Really, we were hoping that it would at least bear some resemblance.

I’d devolve here, if I had the patience, into a lengthy discussion of whether it was hubris or entirely within the realm of human effort to assume that I would have been good at painting Monet. I’ve since learned that Picasso is the easiest to copy, perhaps I’d have had more success there. Relatedly, whether any human being has the ability to transcend the conventions, tracks, paintings, tracts, sermons, afternoon walks through gorse by Irish seas that have been lived and laid out before them, which is to say, would it have been better to have been doing an original painting poorly, or imitating a master and failing utterly? Such is the human condition for those of a religious bent, destined to fall short of the master, unable to escape that infinite shadow. This is all relatively immaterial as it pertains to the real crux of the story. My apologies.  

The difficult part came after Sarah left. I stood at the window for a moment, watching some cedars and juvenile oaks trembling in the wind. It was the sort of time that I wished that I smoked, if just to have something to do with my hands as I watched the streets and the clouds scuttling across thin blue skies. I walked back to the paintings and looked at Sarah’s, and what I saw immediately stunned me. I could see a certain artistry in her strokes that was absent in mine. The copy was clunky, sure, but within it, among the derivative shades of blue and pictures of wildflowers I detected, in a line above the women’s nose, the shape of the right side of her bottom lip, the underside of the clouds, an aesthetic, an eye I suppose that outpaced anything I’d achieved during the exercise.

There is nothing that delights me more than failing at something in good company. If I’m honest, watching myself fail while my companion succeeded felt a bit like drowning as they swam past, and I was thereby placed in a strange kind of dilemma, whether to tell her that her eye was something that should be cultivated, admitting in the process that my own was not, or whether to let the afternoon pass, to try and talk her into a walk down forty ninth among the pines, or a short jaunt to the park to throw bread at pigeons, ignoring in the process, the fact that she had done something of merit and thereby rendering it obsolete. Or near obsolete. (I’m not even sure what obsolete means in this context. Is a piece of art or a skill made obsolete if it remains unacknowledged? What of the works of Kafka had been destroyed, or if the world’s greatest write left all of his manuscripts locked away in a chest beneath his bed? Perhaps it is only in inaction that the skill or art is useless. I don’t know. I prattle. I prattle. At parties, I drink too much and say things that I cannot possibly mean).

Years later I ran into Sarah at an opera in a city that reminded me of Vienna without the ostentation. She was standing in the foyer, beneath a white marble pillar, fanning herself, and looking out into the droves of people standing around, looking intelligent and bored, as if she knew someone. I recognized her at once but thought at first to avoid the interaction. We had not parted on strange or unpleasant terms. I’d found work in another city, reviewing second rate theater shows for a small newspaper, and neither one of us had ever expected our relations to last beyond the point when their convenience was exhausted.

We started talking that evening, after getting through some polite formalities, reminding one another who we had once been, who is to say what went through her mind, if she had the same flash of recognition, of a thousand moments, the moment of our parting flooding her mind as she politely smiled and told me of her husband and children. Maybe she thought nothing of it at all. As she talked, I was that she had grown conventional in her old age. Not nearly as much a crime as it might sound. It has happened to a great deal of my friends who once were interesting and would stay up half the night drinking wine and debating the merits of the socialist state. Clods now, most of them, who are lucky to make it past ten before they begin nervously checking their watches and talking of wives, or children or girlfriends or work obligations.

I found myself profoundly bored as she talked to me of her children and husband, what they were doing now in school, an upcoming vacation to see family in Idaho. And yet, I must say that a heavy weight of something, guilt I suppose, sat in the forefront of my mind. She had grown conventional, not amounted to anything more than someone else’s wife and someone else’s mother in a thoroughly conventional city. What part had I played in that decision? I found it impossible not to wonder, not to wonder if I’d consigned her to that life all those years ago, when she’d wandered back into the room, bits of blue paint on her high cheekbones and a flush in her cheeks of youthful excitement, “Let’s go feed pigeons,” I said, handing her a light jacket and wetting my thumb to wipe away the paint from her cheek. “These are terrible anyway.” And we’d walked down the street and never talked of painting again, and three months later I’d be leaving.

Her husband eventually arrived, a run of the mill sort of guy, neatly parted hair, a job and a 403b. We shook hands and soon parted ways. I looked over my shoulder as I left her that once promising woman, bent at the waist, whispering something now to her husband, talking furiously, fiercely, as she’d once done with me. 

800

Up the coast and over the next rise was a vast expanse of ocean. She said, “nothing should be that color.” The color she was referring to was blue or green or aquamarine or something else, something fancier that, as far as things I’ve seen, has only been mimicked properly by eyes. I suppose it’s a long hand way of saying that the ocean was pretty. We’d been driving up the coast for what felt like days, though it had only been hours. The kids were crying in the backseat, or reading books, or complaining about the sun getting in their eyes, or doing whatever it is that kids do on long car trips that drive you bat shi- crazy.

Years ago, it’s hard to imagine that now. My but the years do slip by now don’t they, like wind through reeds of grass and yet, if one peers in a mirror they lie so heavy with me. Years ago I read about an expedition to Antarctica. I don’t remember what they were looking for, probably in search of the Northwest Passage. There was a period of time in the world when everyone wanted to discover the Northwest Passage. We don’t have the equivalent now, perhaps the far out reaches of science, Higgs Boson etc. The point is, they were looking for something and decided to sail north. The strange part about the journey is that the food they’d brought with them, smallish tin cans, contained  enough lead to eventually poison them. Apparently you can suffer from synesthesia and megalomaniac thoughts when in the grips of lead poisoning. It’s easy to picture these Englishmen, stark naked, skipping across the ice proclaiming themselves kings of this world and of that to come.

The water is beautiful. I’ll give her that. And the freeway is but a thin strip overlooking those waters, while the mountains loom to the right, no more than twenty feet away, red clay that it’s easy to personify as some sort of proud parent, watching the development of their only child, the sea. It was pretty in the way that all things can be pretty,  a smile, a shaft of light through the window, a piece of a stamp held up by a toddler and called a treasure. I don’t really mean it. To mean such a thing would be a sign of insanity, a sign that I was traveling north on board a ship sailing for the Northwest passage, locked in ice, waiting for a warm light that is never to come. 

The strangeness of certain rivers

The story begins, well, it's a narrative contrivance, no story ever really begins or ends. It's an arbitrary mark in the long stretch of sand that comprises TIME. And the mark itself is non-descript, indecipherable, the sound of an ancient language in the ear of a modern day listener.

I've gotten side tracked though. The story, if a story it is, isn't really important as a vector of explaining the irrationality or strangeness of time. Was it Borges or Augustine who said something along the lines of, I live by time all day long, checking my watch, knowing when to eat, when to sleep, when to read a book. And yet, when I stop and think about time it confounds me. It was Augustine, though if you've a disinclination toward religiosity credit it to Borges.

We were young boys then, home for the summer from colleges with different names. Some of them were located in beautiful cities, wreathed in emerald green water, where we'd spent the year unlearning our accents, our hair color, our old names for things that we'd loved.

Others of us were going to college in rural settings, biking around campus and waving hello to everyone like we were fu-ing born to it. Like we'd been riding around on bikes since the dawn of time. These bikes were like camels, and sometimes they would bite us, and we'd wobble on the street when we were waving to a pretty girl from French class who didn't seem to know our name though we were sure we'd told it to her. We'd sit in hot classrooms, flies circling lazily, aimlessly, seemingly knowing that their lives would be brief and so why spend it eating one's own innards? These were the thoughts of the flies mind you. We were arguing about the viability of the socialist state, about opening up our borders, developing fiber optic cables and using the internet to free the people.

Still others of us, Tomas and Rin were going to school in the mountains. At there school there were no formal classes, merely discussion groups conducted in worn cabins. It was the sort of place where the teachers all had scraggly and unkempt beards, wild eyes, and they slept with all the pretty girls. They told us that most of the semester was spent in silence, contemplating the world through the eyes of Plato or Aristotle, seeing the way the world might have been and sometimes trying to talk the pretty girls into sneaking away with them for a night, though they knew that ultimately they'd lose out to the wild-eyed professors who had done enough things already in life to be content, sitting on a mountain, talking about Hippocrates, Thales, Cicero, Rorty and sometimes sleeping with their students.

Two others, friends of mine since we took baths together as three year old's, went off to college in the city. There, they worked at jobs, at smoking cigarettes, at cultivating the right way to shape their mouth when blowing the smoke from a cigarette, or smiling at a woman from across a bar, defending, in just the right terms, capitalism, and their choice to intern at banks, to buy expensive drinks, and pretend to have always been from that city, to lay claim to new origin stories, stories that put them in the bowels of the city, born behind wrought iron fences beneath large and ornate gabled roofs.

There were eight of us that morning, standing in the shade of chestnut trees, somehow still alive, wildly inappropriate given our climate, probably imported. We'd spent the night before talking around a fire. It's amazing the capacity that fire has for truth. It awakens something primordial in us, and we all could see, though we weren't looking at one another beyond the brief second that it took to pass around a bottle of Tequila that we were shotgunning together, that what we had in common was boredom. We all knew that we had made the wrong choice. That two of us in the city were frauds who belonged in the mountains, debating Descartes, not footing bills for 19 dollar Manhattans. The two from the mountain belonged in the rural community. Shi-, those two guys had been biking to school since pre-school when they'd ridden the two blocks on Big Wheels. We'd done everything wrong.

The sun was high, and we stood at the edge of the water, stripped down to our underwear, already shivering from the thought of the cold water invading every part of us, changing the very constituent parts of our being as only water and liquor and certain women could. We'd never swam this particular river. In fact, Arturo didn't remember the river ever existing, though I seemed to remember hearing about it from my father while I was growing up, though I thought it was supposed to be at least twenty miles east of where we were. And yet, when we'd awoken in the morning, the realization from the fire and the tequila still in our hearts and bellies, and we saw that river that we must have been camping next to all night, though none of us could remember hearing the water, we knew that we had to swim across.

Jon was the first one to start running, and I followed him, shouting, screaming, and then all of us were screaming something like, "Death to the city, or, to be alive is to in pain, or, living this way fills me with dread,  or To be alive is the greatest gift of all." To be honest the words were really jumbled, and I was near the back, watching the sun splash off the calves of Ricardo who was the second one to hit the water.

The water was icily cold, and immediately our manhood abandoned us, leaving us gasping for breath as we struggled to reach the other side, which had seemed much closer when looked at from a chestnut tree in the shade.

The water was inestimably cold, but I suppose I haven't told you the strangest part. I don't know why I mentioned anything about Arturo or Jon, because they don't go by those names anymore, none of us do. When we emerged on the other side, young, and therefore we'd been told beautiful, bodies dripping water, a strange feeling came over all of us. It did not happen piece by piece. It happened in a rush, like a floodgate opening. Suddenly, just like that, our selves,s our souls were gone.

Arturo now had memories of killing many men, and a few children during a border raid in Guadelajara. Jon remembered sacrificing someone in Tenochtitlan, and being wed to a woman, giving her a necklace made entirely of gold. Me, I remembered now that I had spent the last fifteen years as a naturalist, watching birds from small hovels, frantically scribbling down the names, snowy owl, peregrine falcon, ivory billed woodpecker, of birds that I thought might one day be gone. I could go on and on.

The strange part is that we arrived on the other side of the river as new men. This was not a metaphorical journey. No. Our selves, our souls were gone, displaced by someone else. We walked around in our new and strange bodies, waiting for the tattoos that we know we'd gotten to start appearing, for the nose rings and tufts of dark hair. Two of us, it turned out, were waiting to die. Tomas said he was now a child playing on the street of Nagasaki, but he knew now, that he was going to die. He started saying goodbye to us, reminding us all how much he might have loved us if he'd had more time.

And then we, whoever we now were, turned around and looked back across the river. There he stood, stupid Andres, waiting at the edge of the water, staring at it in fear because the bastard had never learned to properly swim. And the seven of us, stood silent for a moment, contemplating him. And then, practically in unison we started to yell

Game of Thrones Finale

Game of Thrones Season Finale:

The final episode of this season of Game of Thrones was not as eye catching as its predecessor. However, like its predecessors it did a good job of wrapping up the main themes of the season while giving us some momentum going into season three. While not, in my mind, as successful as the finale episodes of seasons 1 and two, the episode did, (taking advantage of the extra ten minutes they were granted) manage to touch briefly on the primary concerns that we’ll be seeing in the next season while once again pointing rather ominously North.

The episode begins with Roose Bolton peering down at the destruction of the last few Stark banner men. Arya, not quite out of the woods yet, gets a view of her headless brother with a wolf sewn on in its place. It’s a nice touch in that it recalls the beheading of Eddard Stark in season one. The Hound saves Arya again, grabbing a banner of the Bolton side to appear harmless.

This part of the episode and show gets interesting. Arya, pretty much psychologically damaged goods at this point, heroine or not, decides to stab an unsuspecting soldier to death after overhearing him claim that he sawed the head off the wolf. The Hound winds up saving her by killing off the other three soldiers. The interesting part is that Arya acquired the knife from the Hound and used it on these random soldiers. Is there hope for her yet? She flips the coin and calls for her friendly assassin, which indicates that she may shortly be taking a trip to Bravos to learn some tricks of the trade before returning as an avenging angel.

It’s clear that she’s going to be one of the heroines, so I’d like to see her start to show a little intelligence and spare the rather good hearted Hound. I think it’s also imperative, and somewhat problematic that the events of the world are turning her into a cold little revenge machine. I for one will not feel the same sense of justice served if Arya loses too much of her humanity in the quest for blood. I think it’s somewhat important that some of the heroes remain, if not unstained or uncomplicated, at least leaning towards good. In fact, it’s these sorts of narratives that we create for ourselves that define us. I don’t want things perfect. The history of the U.S. is instructive in this case, touted as the wonderful deliverers of Europe, enders of the Holocaust, the “Good War” etc, all of which are a lot more complicated when you take into account the dropping of two atom bombs on a civilian population. As asides go, this is pretty tangential, but I’m merely pointing out that I’m not asking for a lessening in complexity, but I am asking for something approaching a good character. It appears that Arya’s family will be comprised of assassins and King’s Guard, I just hope they take good care of her before she comes back to murder everyone in Westeros.

Our other resident “good character” and relatively poor actor, Jon Snow returns to Castle Black in style, dragged on the back of the horse with three arrows sticking out of his body. Well, we’ve all had nights like that lad, said the blind old caretaker. Well, maybe he didn’t. The conclusion of the Jon as wilding arc is concluded, but I’m still interested in the role that the massing wildling army will play.

The episode actually begins on a tender note, with Tyrion and Sansa finding some common ground, plotting how best to take care of the people who mock them. The tender Tyrion, perhaps as Varus suggests when he tries to buy off Shea, the best hope of a good leader in Westeros is making good headway, but is unfortunately truncated when Sansa discovers the death of her brother and mother at the hands of the villainous Walder Frey. No children anytime soon. And besides, Roose Bolton is now the Warden in the North. (Not that that seems like it will last long. He’s got Bran telling stories about treachery and a bunch of pissed of Iron Born sailing upriver to reclaim Theon. As an aside, though we’ve not seen much of the Greyjoy clan, I was delighted to see his sister ready to sail upriver. It was both a mercy, and daring, which continues the theme with Arya and Dany of empowered female leaders).

Tyrion’s bad news continues as his father reminds him again that he’d have liked to have killed him at birth but held himself off for familial reasons. This guy is not going to win world’s best father anytime soon. (His prize scene does come when he sends a chastened Joffry to bed without supper. I’m unclear if the two of them are headed for a showdown at some point or not). Tywin has now consolidated power, but he seems blissfully unaware of the dragons and ice zombies knocking at his gates. The game he has won feels a bit useless.

The Theon story mercifully seems to be coming to  close, though I hope and pray that the name reek doesn’t stick to Theon. I’ve seen enough movies about someone being broken and changing their personality to know that it’s true, but it’s also the point that I’ve seen enough movies. I’m fine with him just being a penis-less Theon. In fact, I’d rather he went by, “Penis-less version of Theon” as opposed to reek, but I haven’t read the books. However, his liberation would continue my pet theory of he and Arya joining forces to wreak pun intended on the new Warden of the North and his rather disturbed son.

Bran has a brief scene, long enough to recount that no host should ever harm his guest before running into a fleeing Sam and Gilly. This tender and much needed scene includes Sam calling Bran his brother before showing him the way to certain death. Okay, not really. I’ve no earthly clue what the three eyed raven holds north of the wall, but I’m hoping that it’s a horde of dragon glass. The revelation that dragon glass, presumably made by dragons is the one hope of defeating white walkers, was the one red herring pointing to a Dany vs. ice zombies conclusion with some Starks thrown in for support. In fact, at this point the show is operating on two levels, King’s Landing machinations vs. supernatural going’s on.

The one person who seems savvy enough to notice this is the Red Woman, who upon hearing of White Walkers clearly saves the life of the lovely Sir Davos. Davos is the voice of reason. And even if he helps Gendry escape certain death, it certainly seemed that he would die in his place. And yet, because of the whims of what the Red Woman saw, or pretended to see in the fire, he lived. Davos is really quite a lovely creation, and his interaction with Gendry, recounting his poor past and how his desire to help his son eventually lead to that son’s death were carried out extremely well. He’s basically the Ned Stark of Stannis’ men, which means he’ll get beheaded sooner or later.

The last major storyline was carried out across the sea at the gates of Yunkai where the slave population swarmed out to surround Dany, calling her Myhsa, meaning mother. Then the whole crowd gathered round chanting her name and touching her like a holy figure, which, outside of movies about Christ, always feels a bit staged and awkward. I think it was enough to have the people chanting her name. I’m not sure I needed the crowd surfing. (it did provide a nice counterpoint to the conversation that Tyrion had with Cersei, in which he asked how long the fighting would go on and she basically said, forever, because they keep creating enemies. Dany is showing a different way by freeing people and fighting with people who love her. Lord only knows where the bit players like the Starks are going to fit into this equation. I also wrote a whole post ignoring the reunion of Cersei and Jaime, which is downplayed because of the incest, but hey, as I've said before, this is the most interesting and complicated family in Westeros). 

My hope for the upcoming season of GOT is that the storylines continue to move at the accelerated pace. I worry that it’s going to take the Iron Islanders eight episodes to get to Theon and just as long for the Wildling army to mass and Bran to find a raven. I also hope the show, maybe even apart from the books, finds a way to continue to pare away story lines and characters in the hope of achieving some continuity. I’ve heard that books four and five are digressive, and I’ll be watching closely, though it’ll be three years from now (shakes fist at time) to see if they keep paying attention to the most memorable characters. All in all, I don’t feel any differently at the end of this season than I did before it started. GOT remains the most exciting show on television. Not the best, but still the most exciting. 

Game of Thrones Season 3 episode 9: Red Wedding

Writing about an episode, nearly a week after it set Twitter on fire is akin to arriving at a party while the host is washing up the dishes and discussing with his significant other who was pleasanter than they remembered, and what they thought of everyone's new boyfriend. And yet, it hasn't been a week yet. It's not entirely unreasonable to have spent a few days devouring the content made available on the internet about The Red Wedding before sitting down to write about it.

It seems imperative to say that my experience of the episode, unlike the death of Ned Stark, was unspoiled, and thus, a surprise. And, as I don't watch slasher flicks, the sheer gore of the scene was shocking, and the outcome was verging somewhere between horror and Shakespearean tragedy. As has been noted, Cat Stark, ably played by Michelle Fairley, was a ball of Shakespearean fire in the moments after her son's death and before her fateful, or depending on your belief structure, entirely meaningless slaying of Walder Frey's innocent young wife. Cat, standing, completely ruined, believing that all of her children are dead or captives of the Lannisters was the most heart wrenching and well acted turns of the season. This show, despite the shortcoming of a couple of major players, most noticeably the actor playing Jon Snow, is pretty much staffed by a bunch of professional folks, which benefits the show a great deal.

I never hesitate to point out when I'm right, and I noted during the episode when Robb cut off his bannermen's head, against the better advice of his wife and mother, was pretty much a harbinger of his coming doom. However, I didn't know exactly when or how it would arrive and this more gruesome and heart wrenching than I thought it would be. GOT, whether it be budget or Martin's rather grim view of human nature, tends to have its most important deaths occur in this manner, backstabbing, bloody, performed, not heroically on the battlefield, but executed through intrigue and back door dealings. In some ways, Red Wedding, is both the culmination of the Stark dowfall, (which is a pretty brilliant turning on the head of the traditional fantasy structure. The show opens on a scene of familial bliss, Bran shooting arrows, father and mother watching tenderly) and the coda that the GOT universe has shown, power and money trump all. The honorable die more easily than the evil. Relatedly, the mistakes made by Cat Stark, beginning with the kidnapping of Tyrion are too numerous to recount. Lost in the shuffle of her mistakes is the fact that Jaime did push Bran out a window and Cersei hired an assassin to finish the job. Her mistake was insisting that these deeds be repaid and not seeing the whole picture. A similar fate would seemingly await Arya, but she, besides Tyrion, is about the closest thing we've got to a hero, and she keeps being saved by swordmasters, strange assassins, or The Hound. (A man who she better learn something from is she doesn't want to end up like Robb. The game is more nuanced than simple revenge).

The Red Wedding is certainly the most shocking scene that we've seen on GOT thus far, but I'd submit that the shock was mostly visual. In fact, the death of Ned Stark was the real shock of GOT, the moment that turned everything on its head. Pun intended. With this simple act, the parameters have been established. And, once Robb goes from Wolf King to bumbling statesmen it was clear that he would most likely be reaching an untimely end. That said, it was still both gruesome and surprising. I also think that Robb and Cat, and Talisa were not as beloved as Ned, despite their longer time on screen. We saw that Ned always intended to do well. Once his flaws were revealed when we saw Cat and Robb exhibiting worse their deaths were not as viscerally shocking. In a strange way, the show has taught us that they were more deserved. The heroes of the show, at least as to what I'm seeing them develop seem to be: Arya, Jon and Dany.

If you asked me to wildly speculate at this point in time I'd say that Theon and Arya wind up traveling the world as avenging angels wreaking havoc on the Lannisters and Boltons. We still don't know who is holding, Theon, but we do know that he acknowledged that his real father was Ned Stark, and thus his brother would have been Robb. This would set up for a nice plot of him returning like a Dark Knight to rain vengance down on Lannister and Bolton alike. And, if the world we've been shown so far is to be believed, perhaps it is time for the people like Arya to start exacting their revenge individually, slyly, not at the back of armies, but in back alleys and pubs.

This episode was dark enough to illicit articles from USA today on whether someone of a Christian faith could watch GOT. I'm here to remind you that yes, you can watch it without too much trouble. However, I would agree with some people who will want a finer balance, as there is in the world, of a mixture of good and evil. In fact, evil and ruthless folk do not always run things, they are often betrayed by people who aren't too fond of that evil and ruthlessness. As the story goes forward it's probably time for Arya and Jon to step into larger roles, for Joffry to meet some kind of end and for the wheel to continue to spin. It seems unlikely, given the death of Ned and Robb and Cat, that the possible heroes, with the exception of Sansa, would fail to begin to understand the game. In fact, Jon's abandoning, if that's what is was, of Ygritte was the first good sign we've seen from a Stark in a while. Pick your battles wisely.

The episode also gave us a brief outline of the sacking of Unkai (sp?) with the help of her future lover, the man who would be her lover, and the leader of the unsullied. Credit to GOT, this was the closest thing we've had yet to a good action scene. Yes it was brief, but I was impressed at the choreography of the fight scene. (One blogger compared it to the quality of the History channel's the Bible, but if that's the quality they are churning out than I'll probably start DVRing the whole thing). The sacking of the city takes place with the budgetary disclaimer that money had been spent elsewhere and takes place off screen, consequently leaving it to feel, though interesting, a bit of a let down. The highlight of the season for Dany was freeing the slaves and burninating the cruel master of the Unsullied.

The sage of Jon Snow kicked into high gear with the attempted slaying of an innocent horse breeder turning into a fight for his life, a betrayal of Ygritte, and an almost reuniting with Brand. (This acted as a nice parallel with the missed reunion of Arya with Robb and Cat as well). Jon's run as a member of the Wildlings wasn't all that believable, and I've heard that the death of Corn Half Hand is better played in the book, and so his exit wasn't much of a surprise. Part of the surprise, or tragedy, is that he's headed towards a Night's watch full of traitors and trailed by White Walkers. Lord only knows how we're going to turn that rotten fruit into lemonade, but, as I said before, it's probably time for that sort of balance as the show goes forward. Mind you, I'm not asking for people with unstained honor riding about the countryside bringing justice, I'm just saying that Tyrion in season two, and Jaime in Season three, (who now faces a rather sticky wicket what with his promise to return Sansa to the now deceased Starks and the complication of her marriage to Tyrion, which I suppose sets up for a showdown with Brieene one day on the battlefield after he learns to use his left hand for sword fighting). Anyhow, the nuance given to these two Lannisters made them more interesting. The GOT universe needs some more nuance as well, and I'd like to see it play out, as it seems it will, with Arya in particular as Maisie Williams appears to be our best bet to dispense justice while being acted capably. I don't know if I can say the same for Jon Snow or Dany.

The other plot line that seems to have played a minor role in this episode is that of Stannis. Stannis' leach letting ceremony has already resulted in the death of Robb, and apparently Joffry and Greyjoy are next.

The last subplot was Bran developing the ability to Warg, though I imagine his trip in Hodor wasn't all that exciting, though I think we all want to see a possessed Hodor riding through battle hewing down everything in site like the mountain reincarnate. This is his destiny. (It's also interesting that Gareth was able to stay alive by warging into an eagle, not sure what this means for his future, but it was a nice note). Anyhow, I'm excited about the potential of the warging only if it results in a lot of Hodor fight scenes. Osha, traveling with the little Stark in the correct direction is also nice, and I've found her, like the Onion Knight, to be one of my favorite characters on the show. They are two sort of marginalized people who seem to believe very different things about the world, but are both loyal, and loyal to their vision of the world. I'm hoping for future romance.

This episode, as the ninth episode of the previous seasons, was the real shocker. The reminder as to why GOT is just about the most exciting show on television. I recently concluded watching Mad Men, and though it's almost unquestionably better, it's certainly not as exciting. Red Wedding, though not perfect, continued to remind us why we all keep coming back to Westeros despite its amorality.

I'd also submit, though I think this may have been the weakest of the three seasons, though not by much that I also thought it was time to start winnowing characters. The death of Cat and Robb does precisely that. I've heard that the next two books continue to digress, expand etc, but I hope that the television show creators are smarter than that. I hope they zero in on the interesting stories and characters and find a way to cut back on the background noise. I've actually been a huge fan of the last episodes of the prior two seasons, and I feel they've done an excellent job of wrapping up some stories and setting the table for others. I liked the tenth episode of last season better than Blackwater. And therefore, once again, the show has pulled me in. It's still the most interesting show on television.