Thursday, October 25, 2007

Unseelie

I have a recurring dream/fantasy/what-have-you where I am a DJ for a small, low-budget radio station -- perhaps it's college radio, perhaps it's fiercely indie -- but it's of the "painted cinderblock walls and reel-to-reel tape machines" aesthetic.

In this dream, I host a program from 3 to 5 am called Hour of the Wolf. Adopting a soft German accent, I spin selections of goth, techno, trance, EBM, and synthpop music for an audience of about a dozen listeners. As the music plays, I dance alone in the studio, convulsing to the music as the moisture from my breath clings to the walls.

There's something strangely hypnotic about the deep of night, a dark room, a disembodied voice, and that kind of music. When I would dance at my goth club in Washington DC, I recall experiencing a form of ecstatic disassociation where my mind would feel like it was on the sidelines, watching my body from a distance of several feet away as it thrashed about.

In that moment, I understood what it is to be fae: a darkling spirit, all thoughts banished and all impulses indulged, consequences be damned. It is the complete annihilation of the superego as the id comes out to play. It is complete, ritualistic abandon. It is the zen no-mind paired with cathartic exertion. It is the cool, damp cloth of Not Giving a Shit laid across the fevered brow of I Am Me And I Am In This Moment.

It is the utter abandon of pure infancy.

The darkness is your mother's womb, the rhythm her heartbeat, the voice HER voice. These are the sounds of your universe for the first nine months of your life; no wonder they trigger such a primal reaction in us. That I am consistently thinking about being the DJ in this analogy means I am in all likelihood trying to reconcile an increasingly strong urge for motherhood with the equally strong belief that I would be a horrid mother.

What makes faeries horrifying is that they combine magical power with all the impulse control of a five-year-old. As long as they like you, all well and good; but the moment you irritate them (or worse, they decide it would be amusing to torture you) -- I'm thinking that an eternity of middle school gym would pale in comparison.

Babies are like that, and their magical power is that you must care for them. Because the whole world loves babies, right? And if you don't, you're some kind of monster, never mind that children may essentially be nothing more than a massive stroke of ego: "What this world needs is MORE of me!"

Apparently my reproductive organs and I are having a disagreement. How else to explain the mutually exclusive desires of wanting to have children, yet not wanting to go through the trouble of actually raising them? The implication that I am, psychologically speaking, a cuckoo is profoundly disturbing to me.

If children are unseelie fae, then I must be the freaking Queen of Air and Darkness.

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Now playing: Christopher - You're So Sexual
via FoxyTunes

1 comment:

  1. I've always been partial to and felt an affinity towards the Seelie Court rather than their darker cousins.

    ReplyDelete

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