ursula-vernon:
Hey, listen. I know the world’s on fire. But listen.
I’ll tell you a thing.
On
the day after the election, when everything was worst and all I could
do was go numb or cry hysterically, do you know what gave me the most
comfort?
It wasn’t the words of Lincoln or Gandhi or Maya
Angelou, it wasn’t Psalms or poetry, it wasn’t my grandmother, it wasn’t
contemplating the long arc of history. It wasn’t even hugging the dog.
It was the Twitter account @ConanSalaryman.
This
is a joke account. It’s somebody who narrates as if Conan was working
in an office. Tweets usually sound like “By Crom!” roared Conan. “You
jackals cannot schedule a mere interview without gathering in a pack and
cackling?!” or “Conan slammed his sword through his desk. Papers and
blood rained through the office. Monday was slain.”
I followed
it awhile back and have found it funny. (I’m not a huge Robert Howard
fan inherently, but whoever is writing these does the schtick well.) But
if it had not posted once that day, no one would have noticed at all.
Instead, Conan the Salaryman posted something inspirational. And then replied to dozens of people replying to him, for hours, in character,
telling them that by Crom! it was only defeat if we did not stand up
again, that the greatest act of strength was to keep walking in the face
of hopelessness, that the gods have given the smallest of us strength
to enact change, that we must all keep going as long as Crom gave us
breath, and tyrants frightened Conan not, but we must look to those
unable to fend for themselves. (“Though by Crom! We must hammer
ourselves into a support network, not an army!”)
I have no idea
who is behind that account. But it was the most bizarrely comforting
thing I saw all day, in a day that had very little comfort in it. There
was this weight of story behind it. It helped me. I think it helped a
lot of people. If only a tiny bit–well, tiny bits help.
I have been thinking a lot lately about Bluebell from Watership Down.
There’s absolutely no reason you should remember Bluebell, unless, to take an example completely and totally at
random, you read it eleven thousand times until your copy fell apart
because you were sort of a weird little proto-furry kid who loved
talking animals more than breath and wrote fan fic and there weren’t any
other talking animal books and you now have large swaths memorized as a
result. Ahem.
Bluebell is a minor character. He’s Captain
Holly’s friend and jester. When the old warren is destroyed, Captain
Holly and Bluebell are the last two standing and they stagger across the
fields after the main characters. By the end, Holly is raving,
hallucinating, and screaming “O zorn!” meaning “all is destroyed” and
about to bring predators down on them. And Bluebell is telling stupid
jokes.
And they make it the whole way because of Bluebell’s
jokes. “Jokes one end, hraka the other,” he says. “I’d roll a joke along
the ground and we’d both follow it.” When Holly can’t move, Bluebell
tells him jokes that would make Dad jokes look brilliant and Holly is
able to move again. When Hazel, the protagonist, tries to shush him,
Holly says no, that “we wouldn’t be here without his blue-tit’s
chatter.”
I tell you, the last few days, thinking of this, I really start to identify with Bluebell.
I
am not a fighter, not an organizer, certainly not a prophet. Throw
something at me and I squawk and cover my head. I write very small
stories with wombats and hamsters and a cast of single digits. I am not
the sort of comforting soul who sits and listens and offers you tea.
(What seems like a thousand years ago, when I had the Great Nervous
Breakdown of ‘07, I remember saying something to the effect that I had
realized that if I had myself as a friend, I would have been screwed,
because I was useless at that kind of thing. And a buddy of mine from my
college days, who was often depressed, wrote me to say that no, I
wasn’t that kind of person, but when we were together I always made her
laugh hysterically and that was worth a lot too. I treasured that
comment more than I am entirely comfortable admitting.)
But I can
roll a joke along the ground until the end of the world if I have to.
And increasingly, I think that’s what I’m for in this life. Things are
bad and people have died already and I am heartsick and tired and the
news is a gibbering horror–but I actually do know why a raven is like a
writing desk.
So. First Church of Bluebell. Patron Saint.
Keep holding the line.
As usual, Ursula is brilliant.
