"Melancholy comes in patterns, and the vile humours enter one's mind through certain doors, wounds specific to an individual's constitution. Our souls bear these wounds either from birth or because of what we have suffered during our lifetimes. And thus, each wound becomes a doorway into further suffering. These doors may be opened by seemingly innocent, everyday things such as certain people, certain news, certain topics; this is why even the wisest of people find themselves constantly besieged by the forces of melancholy, for they have not recognised these doors. The truly wise have learned where their doors lie and bolt them shut on those days when they are too exhausted or otherwise not sound of mind: they keep those doors open only when they must." aaawww this paragraph was incredible! Is it inspired by some actual medieval book or is all yours?
No. I would not have you lie, but acknowledge you do have power over... not necessarily what you feel, but how you react to what life throws at you. That knowledge will, in the end, make it easier to keep the reins slipping from your hands This whole scene is sooo interesting, I'm really loving all this dialogue! And this was... aaww, Jaffar. I'm feeling half like the Princess and half like Jaffar, I tend to think like them both, it depends on the days!
"Perhaps you should think of yourself and the world itself as your audience, and the benefit as yours. That you are playing to make yourself feel better, to bring beauty and kindness into the world. Your frowning does not increase anyone's happiness, but your smiling might. You are the entertainer of your own audience, the singer of your own song, and it is in your power to choose between the masks of comedy and tragedy. After all, what are emotional states except reflections-- each reflection showing merely how rusty or distorted the mirrors of our own souls are, how unreliable they are when it comes to accurate representations of objects? How it is said we must scour and polish our souls to better reflect God, his beauty and his mercy?" THIS WAS BEAUTIFUL. And I'm sure I'd cry with this if I weren't this tired! Truly beautiful, so touching!
"I still have another cushion left and will not hesitate to use it." You can never have enough of this kind of lines!
WHAT WHAT EWHAT WHAT WTHAT WHAT!!!!!!!! NO NO N O NO N O!!!! FUCK HEELL THIS CAN'T BE!!!! YOU DIDN'T!!!!! WHAT!!!!!! WHAT THE FUCK HAS HAPPENED OH FUCKING HELL OMG FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FYUCK FYCK!!! HOW CAN YOU END A CHAPTER LIKE THAT!!!!!!!!
And the worst is that I think I can't read more, I'm so tired omg. This is unfair! I hope tomorrow I can read the least!
...wow, Ao3 really has a wonky way of tiering these replies/comments; I have no idea why it doesn't just show each of my replies under the comment it's a response to. But anyway.
The door metaphor was my own, but the concept of various intrusive triggers and miseries and needing to learn how to dodge them is more or less drawn from Buddhist thought, although it exists in most mystical traditions. The Barmakids were a clan of Buddhist priests before they converted to Islam (only a couple of generations before Jaffar), and they never stopped gathering and keeping and passing on knowledge from all religions and sciences, so it would make sense that Jaffar would know of this stuff. It was because of this love of knowledge that the Barmakids were such good ministers. Many of the concepts still exist in Buddhist thought and mindfulness practice today, and you saw some of that in Falcon to begin with--the whole thing about being alive in the present moment and all that. There's a lot of overlap with Sufi thought, of course. The idea of the soul as a mirror that needs to be polished to better reflect God is an essential idea in Islamic mysticism--if you are here as God's reflection, you would do well to clean yourself from impurities and reflect what's important--beauty and love and good things like that.
Same thing with thoughts being players--if your thoughts--the actors in your head--constantly want to put on miserable, tragic plays, one should remember that they do this for one reason only: because there's an audience. So if you refuse to come in, they'll stop. I once heard a Hindu monk describe it as like a compilation tape of all your miseries, but that people feel so helpless they don't realise they can take the tape out of the VCR and put in a comedy instead. Because they own the VCR. (Yes, I know, the metaphor is a bit dated, but still works, right?) And the same thing goes for emotions; you have less control over what you *feel* when something bad happens, but how you *respond* is the thing you do have power over--even if you are pissed off, you still have the power to choose whether you'll lash out or just stay quiet or turn your focus on something else. At first it may seem like you're faking and forcing yourself to be happy, but eventually it starts working and everyone, especially you, will feel less pissed off. So you've got the power to stop the cycle of negativity right there. This is all stuff that was around even in medieval times and it's this rich core of "Eastern" spiritual thought that I wanted to use in this fic because it's about depression and healing. It didn't really exist in Christendom at the time. So what you have here is a combination of Sufi and Buddhist and Baul thought, something that reflects Jaffar's family heritage and his belief in free will and one's ability to influence his own fate/spiritual development. Whereas the Princess herself is more conservatively Islamic with her faith in fate--again, worldviews that coexisted at the time.
Yet I wanted to show that this wasn't some miraculous healing she was going through, nor that he was perfect either, because that would've been cheating. He's still got some of the murderous bastard tyrant within himself (even if he's mostly channeling that into wild hunting trips and evil sex right now) and she still gets miserable at times, no matter how much he loves her. It's wrong and the thoughts are absolutely horrible, but that's how the human mind works--it's hard to make it not feel miserable if you've got repeated trauma from being misunderstood and rejected by the people who should love you most. No matter how much spiritual wisdom you have at hand, it won't do you much good if the circumstances conspire to mess you up, and a divorce is a shitty thing to go through for anyone. They've both lost a lot and hurt a lot, so they both still stumble at times. And that's why they need the furious BDSM sex and the magic to balance things out.
And MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Yes, I am evil. It was all going a bit too well for them right there, so of course an evil tragic plot twist was needed. What did I just say about things not being easy? *g*
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Nuraicha on Chapter 2 Mon 23 Sep 2013 07:12PM UTC
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Snowgrouse on Chapter 2 Sat 28 Sep 2013 03:51PM UTC
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