death to capslock

Indestructible Intermezzo II – Etymological Excursus

While preparing the next post with our other set of miscellaneous cards and thinking further about Severus, I started playing around with an etymological dictionary to see what hidden meanings I might uncover for the terms of our discussion. To see what sort of a resonant background layer I could piece together, if you will.

I found some interesting things.

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I'm working on writing up the other set of misc cards for my "Indestructible" series, and planning out the Severus-centric posts, where the real meat is. In those posts I'll be looking more at the books themselves again and quoting or referencing various chapters. There are sets of parallels and oppositions scattered throughout the books, and I'll be tracing some repeated imagery across them. So, for the sake of clarity and keeping things organized, I thought I'd give you a cheat-sheet of chapters and images to refer back to, if you want, as we go through the rest of the series.

This isn't a final list - I might end up finding further references as I write - but the major pieces are here.

Also, as I was pulling this list together I noticed an interesting bit of foreshadowing between POA and DH that I've pulled out for you at the end, to think about and play with.

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So, I'm pulling together the concluding pieces of my "Indestructible" series, in order to lay out my two readings of Severus' arc in HBP and DH. And I'm not sure which one to finish up and post next - some of them are a bit like independent cards that can go in any order, though others need to stay together.

So I figured I'd toss the question out to all of you: which piece would you be most interested in seeing next?

The cards I have left to lay out are:

A - Occlumency - its nature and how Severus uses it (probably not a hugely long post)

B - Some assorted brief explorations of love, purity, and the Tower and Cave opposition, etc. (probably all in one post)

C - A three-card set that has to go up either in order or as one very long post (which will take a while to finish):

  1 - Severus' fundamental values and character, and how he ended up a DE

  2 - Severus' boggart

  3 - Severus and Voldemort

D - Our necessarily final card, tracing out the exact course of Severus' arc in my dual readings

Thanks for reading, and being so patient everyone! I hope this is interesting to you all.

[Poll #2019681]

Indestructible – Part VI – Dark Marks and Dark Arts

Ok, let’s get back to talking about the books themselves for a bit, shall we?

We’ve talked about Albus, and alchemy, so perhaps we should skip ahead in the alphabet a bit and head on over to D. D for Dark; D for Death.

Dark Marks, Dark Arts, Dark Creatures, Dark Lords… Death, and Death Eaters.

Then we can get to occlumency and to Severus and Voldemort.

I should note at the outset that ‘dark’ is something of a fuzzy term to use when talking about moral and spiritual things and about that big ball of wibbly-wobbly vaguely-defined magical stuff we get in the Potterverse. In general, ‘dark’ should not necessarily be taken as a strict synonym for ‘evil’ – far from it. Darkness is natural and necessary and a part of life and it has great lessons to teach. Nor is ‘light’ the same as ‘good.’ Severus – our resident Dark Wizard – would be the first person to tell you that. For all that the HP books, and even Tolkien, like to conflate the two spectra.

But. Darkness does make it easy to do evil, because it allows one to hide. From others, and from oneself. Spiritual blindness, ignorance, forces that overwhelm one and prevent true sight or perspective… Things can be hidden to good ends or bad, and while sometimes we need to close our eyes, we also do need to open them again, as we see and see anew.

Right?

Ok. Onward.

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This is a long one, so I've broken it up into sections. There's an introductory section, section V.1 on the principle of Ma'at, section V.2 on the gravity assist, and a postscript.

There a HUGE amount I could have included here but didn't, for the sake of length, but I'll get to it at some point if I can. I promise it all eventually has to do with dear Severus, metaphorically at the least.

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Indestructible V – The Wheels of Heaven

Circles.

Circles are fundamental. When you start looking for them, you can find circles everywhere. Literally, metaphorically, conceptually…everything sooner or later can be related to a circle. I think the circle might be the closest thing there is to a base form for the universe, a single fundamental truth from which to derive all others.

From the tiniest particles to cells, to the planet we live on and the movements of that body and all others in the cosmos, orbiting together, in everything we can find circles, seen from different angles, in different dimensions.

A point: a circle shrunk down to no dimensionality. A sphere: a circle expanded to three dimensions. Expansion and contraction. A spiral, and other such curves: a circle seen in motion through time. Even its seeming opposite – the straight line – is really a circle in disguise. According to the laws of perspective geometry, a line is just a circle taken to infinity. Our finite perspective of something infinite. And so, even things appearing to be made out of straight lines, like triangles and so on, can be understood as just the finite bit we can see of infinite things intersecting.

Circles are also paradoxical. Including while excluding, a symbol of all while – by – selecting and containing a small portion of the whole. Having no beginning, and so being endless.

Circles and lines also describe time, or our perspective on it rather. We have linear, ordinary time – shooting ahead of us, extending behind us, on and on. And we mythic time, circular repetitive time in which everything old is new again, the same things happen over and over, or are always happening at the same moment even, the same situations and stories and figures encountered again and again. Put them together and we get the spiral, progression (or regression) by returning again and again to the same place but from a new angle, in a new form. Reincarnation, history repeating itself, psychological integration, evolution, the paths described by every orbiting body in a solar system or galaxy…there are a thousand places to see this pattern.

You get the idea.

We have repetition, and repetition with difference. Static and dynamic forms of the same fundamental pattern, lower and higher incarnations of the same essence. Stillness and motion. Everything is both always the same, and always changing. Perspective is key.

So to give us a slightly different perspective on matters, permit me a brief excursion to that place the Weasley family chose as their vacation destination before I get back to work on the wheels here. That is to say, let’s go to Egypt for a moment.

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Part IV - Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Our first – and only overt – glimpse of an alchemist in canon came in the person of Nicholas Flamel, who flickered before our eyes together with his wife Perenelle in the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. They gave Albus the stone that was meant as bait to entrap Voldemort and his slave Quirrell, that Harry in trying to preserve from him nearly unwittingly gave to him, and that Albus says he's destroyed with the Flamels’ consent.

This Stone we saw openly: hard, crystalline, blood-red. Its fruits – gold, the elixir of life, the cure-all panacea – we did not directly see and had to infer, though one of them – the promise of life – was desperately desired and sought at any cost by Voldemort. That is, by the hollow husk of the boy Tom Riddle, nurtured in error and inflicted on everyone by Albus Dumbledore.

During that quest, in his childlike attempts to understand and solve the mystery and save people, the boy Harry Potter saw, in the forest at night, Voldemort, through his slave, keeping himself alive – in a terrible half-life – by feeding on the silver blood of a murdered unicorn. This was our first image of what Voldemort was capable of and willing to do in pursuing his particular brand of evil.

Keep this image in mind.

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Having looked at the list of topics and ideas I still want to get to in my Indestructible series, and seen its length, I figured a masterpost of links to the parts in order might be nice to have. I'll add to this as pieces get posted.

Background stuff to read that might be useful, since I draw on the ideas implicitly in some essays, are terri's metas - especially Greater Love, her analysis of the Unbreakable Vow scene over at snapedom, and her writings on Albus - terri and swythyv's writings about the Birdbath of Doom and Merlin's test, and perhaps jodel's essays at redhen.

In-progress pieces are listed with tentative titles and numerals - the final breakdown will be determined as the posts are written.

Last updated: September 14, 2015.

Indestructible

Introduction and Part I

Part II

Part III

Part IV - Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Intermezzo

Part V - The Wheels of Heaven

Food For Thought (some references that keep occuring to me as I work on all this - not an essay)

Part VI - Dark Marks and Dark Arts

Poll (closed)

Part VII - Miscellaneous Cards I (Flight, Immortality, Love)

Notes for Indestructible - chapters of interest and a patronus tidbit

An Addendum on Flight

Intermezzo II - Etymological Excursus

Eating Death? - a brief note on yew trees and deer

Part VIII - Miscellaneous Cards II (Occlumency, Purity, Tower and Cave) [in progress]

Part IX - Considering Severus Snape [in progress]

Part X - Wolfsbane: Severus' Boggart [in progress]

Part XI - Faithful Servant: Severus and Voldemort [in progress]

Part XII - my two readings of Severus' arc [in progress]

Or, a multi-part meditation on Severus Snape, moral struggle, and love.

All that thinking about terri's Greater Love and the fic I'm writing has prompted me to blather on a bit about how I see Severus as embodying the more complex aspects of moral struggle that work their way into the HP books, despite JKR's refusal to let him openly come into his own on the page. I’ll be posting the parts of this as they get written (that is, in between writing sections of my dissertation, sigh). It’ll be more a sprawling web of related pieces than a single long argument, I think, so I’ll just post whatever feels complete enough at the time. This is an introduction of sorts to the theme, and to my view of Severus. It’s a view heavily inspired by our own terri and mary, as well a few others over on Snapedom and elsewhere.

I suppose my view of Albus is somewhere between terri’s Fool Albus and marionros’ Narcissist Albus, with a large helping of swythyv’s Well-Intentioned Moral Failure Albus. When I’m being generous.

(Hey! I can be as cynical and petty as any potions master too, you know – no claiming perfection of spirit here. XD )

My view of Voldemort… Well, we’ll get to that, in time.

Onward.

* * *

Indestructible – Part I

"You’ve got to hide your love away…” sang the Beatles.

Well. I don’t think they meant it quite this way, but looked at from a certain angle it’s an apt theme song for our dear Professor during the most spiritually trying phase of his struggle, and the war, that we see.

And no, I don’t just mean the surface fact of hiding from Voldemort, even under torture and Legilimency, any memory that might betray that he, in one way or another, loved and loves a girl named Lily. Or even a boy named Harry, or a man named Albus.

That’s the easy part.

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