|
||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Why Do You Pull Your Magical Punches?
Fortune and Fate by Sharon Shinn. (Ace Hardcover, November, 2008.)
Self-help books often point out how fear of success can vitiate the force behind your punches. Martial Arts trains your reflexes so you can move without conscious thought, get in the zone, focus. Sports coaches rant about “follow-through” and “centering.” All these activities are exactly analogous to what a Magician must do to channel magical force into the world. Training in any or all of these disciplines will increase a magician’s ability to walk the world lightly and without collateral damage, to carry power and use it wisely. But magical force delivery is different from physical force delivery. It’s done almost entirely with the spirit, the body acting as a channel. What causes the spirit to choke off a move, to abort without follow-through, to get knocked out of the zone, to fear an intended result, to pull a punch? There are a lot of cures for the problem of chronically aborting magical acts. Most of the cures target the symptom with behavior modification, with meditation, with initiation, or an amazing tool called “tapping”—an acupressure point system of vanquishing emotional storms that are often the source of physical ills (www.tapping.com). But vanquishing the symptoms might not address or cure the problem. There can be as many sources for pulled punches (magical ED?) as there are souls exhibiting it. After you’ve tried all the cures and have improved your life, how do you know if you still have the problem buried inside your soul, immured in the walls of your being? You have to test yourself. The trick is not to test yourself to destruction. First you must analyze your life, and discover how messy it is compared to what it could be (not what others’ are). If your magical force is splashing, or not delivering cleanly to your target, you will notice how life in general tends to fight back, to deliver fretful counter-punches, or in Microsoft jargon, to “produce unexpected results.” Or no results at all. If you see that your force output is not cleanly targeting your objectives, or is counter-productive, you still have a problem buried somewhere. If you’ve built walls inside yourself with your cures for the symptoms, you don’t necessarily want to destroy those walls. You want to explore what’s behind them. Take an ultrasound image. The best way I know to explore what’s behind the walls we build within ourselves is to read fiction and note the emotions, dreams or nightmares evoked. Science Fiction and Fantasy are extremely effective but safe tools. I have here six novels that explore in theme and in character only one of the many common, and most debilitating, sources of the pulled magical punch, guilt. Guilt fires grieving into a life-devouring furnace, sometimes resulting in a revenge driven life that becomes purposeless once the objective is achieved because the guilt is still there. Guilt magnifies negative self-esteem into self-hatred and twists that into hatred of others deemed the source of all problems (i.e., prejudice against a group), but because they aren’t the source, even genocide doesn’t cure the problem. Hidden guilt can twist fear of success, or fear of failure, into self-destruction. Guilt is the voice of conscience whispering hoarsely and forever a mantra of shame that only you can hear. Even hidden within the subconscious, Guilt can control your life. It can burst out into power abuse for which you can find all manner of righteous excuses and no reasons. Guilt is the stuff of high drama such as I’ve discussed in two blog posts on Pluto being the “ruler” of vampires (aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2008/12/astrology-just-for-writers-part-5-high.html). You can carry guilt and not know it until a Pluto transit blasts your walls to rubble, revealing what you’ve buried. If you can find a novel that evokes your guilt via a character you identify with, that novel will trigger a huge emotional response you can’t name. Your magical acts will become more elegant once you analyze and deal with guilt revealed in reading novels.
Fortune and Fate by Sharon Shinn is a sequel to Reader and the Raelynx, Book 4 in the Twelve Houses series, but Fortune and Fate is clearly enjoyable on its own. It tackles the theme of guilt and how it manifests in life. The Rider Wen, a woman charged with protecting the king who was attacked and killed in the earlier novel, has made a new life for herself, and it’s going very well—she insists. Sharon Shinn has produced this cleanly crafted novel with a relentless pace and grand depth of characters and relationships. It reminds me of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Spell Sword of Darkover, which I recommend. Sharon Shinn deals with guilt in a different way, peeling away the mental walls layer by layer, culminating in facing a new life choice.
The Fetch by Laura Whitcomb is a “supernatural romance” about a man, Calder, who after his death, becomes an escort of the dead from our world to the next. It’s a job of exacting discipline and distant rewards, but none of the strictures really bother Calder. Yet one day, he sees a problem and reaches out to solve it with compassion—and becomes trapped in a body on our Earth where he must cope with the Imperial Family of Russia, right before the Revolution—including Rasputin. His adventures fill in some of the historical record and show us a spiritual face of guilt and another possible solution. Wencke Braathen appears to have self-published Sex on the Altar, which was brought to my attention by Guy Spiro, the publisher of The Monthly Aspectarian. This is a very readable and mildly erotic romp, but don’t let the self-published aspect stop you if you want to read about the Catholic concept of guilt from a well grounded Neopagan perspective. God Himself is a character in this novel, but it’s Isis and her priestesses who must release God’s wife from the prison of Earth where she is held by widespread guilt over sexuality. The magic is depicted with verisimilitude and the expository lumps are well crafted enough to be marvelously fascinating to Neopagans.
Black Ship, a Novel of Crosspointe, is the story of a man who has cut himself off from allies and friends and has enraged an enemy. He is “sold” to a mysterious master. Through injury and death, he opens his hands and heart to forge new attachments and discover that he has found his place with the love of a strange woman who ought to be only an enemy to his people—but becomes an ally. Crosspointe is a universe where magic replaces technology. The deep sea and certain trees are the source of magic. It’s a well built fantasy world, but the characters outshine everything with their intricate relationships.
Death of a Musketeer is the first in a series by Sarah D’Almeida, a fantasy alternate history mystery series taking off from the famous Four Musketeers. I met the author at WorldCon in 2008 and asked to see this series—and I’m not disappointed! This fantasy uses no magic except the nuanced depths of the characters’ angst. In this first novel, Athos faces his guilt over killing his first wife for the sake of his family honor. Laura E. Reeve starts a new series from RoC about Major Ariane Kedros. I believe we’ll be discussing Kedros novels for quite some time. The first book, Peacekeeper, gives us guilt in all its glory and illuminates the place of revenge in guilt ridden lives. Ariane is known as Ari. She was the pilot on the first interstellar warship to destroy a sun—and the sun had a colony in place. The destruction obliterated an interstellar warp-point node so all contact with that solar system is cut off until either a generation ship reaches it to plant a new FTL node, or the light from that sun reaches civilization. So now, nobody knows whether everyone on the planet died. The FTL nodes are the product of an alien civilization—or maybe not. Maybe the aliens found leftovers from a prior civilization. Ari’s current life involves her in the discovery of an ancient alien ruin that may give humanity the ability to make new nodes, not buy them. Ari’s former life, though, isn’t over. She’s a reserve officer ordered to help dismantle the weapons system that can destroy suns—because the destruction of a sun destroys the FTL nodes and ships in transit. Therefore a truce has been signed contingent on dismantling the weapon. With so much rich background material to handle, Laura E. Reeve (memorize that byline) has focused in cleanly on the guilt elements of the theme, laying the foundation for sequels of expiation, and a recreation of human-nonhuman civilizations.
Send books for review in this column to: Jacqueline Lichtenberg, email jl@simegen.com for instructions. |
||||||||||||||||||||||
All content and articles copyright ©2009 by Lightworks Inc except where noted. All rights reserved.