Sometimes the World Works

Perhaps it was the hint of rain in the air, but this morning I did things in the front garden instead of what I'd usually do. The moss and ferns (largely unwanted on the one hand, struggling on the other), reminded me of a terrarium -

The first writer's organization I was a(n associate) member of was SFWA. (Sometimes the world works in very strange ways.) From the early '80s to the early '90s,LOSCON was local and we went to it every Thanksgiving. For 2 or 3 years during the late '80s there were wonderful terrariums in the dealers' room, fantasy castles on moulded plastic cliffs, and wizards with staves topped with orbs of opalized or coloured glass in among ferns and mossy things; they were small and whole fantasy worlds, made with real, living plants from this one. You could look into them and find them surrounding you.

And at work there was a young lad who'd come to study in the Library every morning before his first class, always awkward and overwhelmed. One day his mother came in with him, bringing his lunch in a brown paper bag, and urging him to do well. She was badly dressed and missing some teeth: they were clearly very poor and the boy was both the apple of her eye and the family's great hope. His frailty and burdens worried me. I wanted to tell him about the terrariums in the dealer's room; I knew the plants would comfort him; but I didn't know him well enough to talk to him about anything at all.

I suppose he graduated; he stopped coming in in the mornings. In the brutal way of the daily grind I forgot him.

Some years later I was walking back to the library from the cafeteria (I worked there a very long time), and I saw a tall young man talking to some students. I bristled and asked him if he needed anything, unknown adult male on campus, talking to a group of quite young girls. He replied that he was talking to his sister. Naturally I wasn't convinced. And then he said, "Don't you remember me? I'm Carlos."

And yes, it was Carlos. More than 6 feet tall, in fatigues (name-patch at the join of clavicle and shoulder), out of the Army now, studying to be a Forest Ranger.

Reading

Nemesis by Chalmers Johnson.

The great relief he gives comes in two flavours: things have indeed changed, changed utterly; he has a name for the disease, and it accounts for all the symptoms we see around us now. The disease is militarism (the worship of war and its weapons and accoutrements, its headlong destruction), and it has always been the deadly enemy of democracy.

And, as occasional relief from the austere comforts of Johnson, I am also reading The Red Queen*, by Phillipa Gregory. She's very good – and the covers of her Tudor novels have delicate lacework of red or silver foil tudor roses in a kind of Moorish arch across the top. They gleam when you tilt the book and the light glances off them. Whatever else falls, light still falls.

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*Which is something of a tour de force. Gregory takes this vain, ambitious, cold, narrow woman – cabin'd, cribb'd and confin'd by her gender and circumstances, married off at 13 to Owen Tudor, half a country away, whose circumstances do not enlarge or gain in freedom until the Battle of Bosworth – and makes us see her. We pity her at times. Often, in fact. But in her cold, narrow, unlovely way, Margaret repels our pity. She is, finally, the mother of Henry VII and grandmother of Henry VIII - as far and overtly above our pity as she always thought she was.

Gregory is very good. And no slouch at power relations.