throbbing light machine

Then the naming meme:

1. My username is ______ because ______.

lotesseflower, because it always has been. I picked Lótessë as a name for myself back on the TolkienOnline.Com boards, when I was maybe thirteen. Sometimes I think about changing it, because it's a bit girly and flufftastic as a representation of who I am now. But I like that it links me to Tolkien: I don't talk about him much anymore, but he was my beginning place, and he's lodged all deep down in my heart.

2. My name is ______ because ______.

"My heart is like a singing bird," from the Christina Rossetti poem "The Birthday." Virginia Woolf uses this poem in "A Room of One's Own" to talk abut the purity and the joy of love poems before the war, the uncapturable perfect happiness of the past. I'ma post the excerpt, actually, because it's beautiful:

What poets, I cried aloud, as one does in the dusk, what poets they were!

In a sort of jealousy, I suppose, for our own age, silly and absurd though these comparisons are, I went on to wonder if honestly one could name two living poets now as great as Tennyson and Christina Rossetti were then. Obviously it is impossible, I thought, looking into those foaming waters, to compare them. The very reason why that poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have (at luncheon parties before the war perhaps), so that one responds easily, familiarly, without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now. But the living poets express a feeling that is actually being made and torn out of us at the moment. One does not recognize it in the first place; often for some reason one fears it; one watches it with keenness and compares it jealously and suspiciously with the old feeling that one knew. Hence the difficulty of modern poetry.

3. My journal is titled ____ because ____.

"Isle of Gramarye." It's a quote from a Tennyson poem, but my association is actually with T.H. White - the poem is his epigraph to the first part of "The Once and Future King." White is another thing I don't talk about much, but he was my first in every way that matters. My daddy read OAFK aloud to me when I was five years old, and it was my first Arthur story, and it was the first time I really thought about good and evil, love and death, and it was the first time I thought like a philosopher. I'm a pretty big King Arthur buff, though the stories sit quietly at the back of my heart and don't burst through into speech all that often. I picked the quote as a name for my fannish home-base because T.H. White has always meant home to me.

4. My friends page is called ____ because ____.

"will the circle be unbroken," from the folk song. Expresses the concentric circularity of conversation and community on eljay, speaks to happiness and connection and again, for me, home. My grandma used to sing this song with me at bedtime.

5. My default userpic is ____ because ____.


A new one, actually, from the Waterhouse painting of Miranda, with text from Neruda. Miranda's one of my babies right now - I'm working on a bit of (publishable!) derivative fic with her in it. I have a pet reading of "The Tempest" that exposes the tension between Miranda and Caliban as the propagandistic lie that it really is, the black male rapist narrative that both demonizes black men and at the same time deprives white women of any access to their own sexuality. Um. The Neruda because I love him, and because I'm living away from my big water right now, and because like Sam Gamgee the sound of the sea has sunk down deep into my heart, and I can never be free from the longing of it. So the icon as a whole means the sea, and wanting things, and rebellion, and hope, and naivete, and new chances.


And a poem. Leonard Cohen counts as both songs and poems.

Hunter's Lullaby

Your father's gone a-hunting
He's deep in the forest so wild
And he cannot take his wife with him
He cannot take his child

Your father's gone a-hunting
In the quicksand and the clay
And a woman cannot follow him
Although she knows the way

Your father's gone a-hunting
Through the silver and the glass
Where only greed can enter
But spirit, spirit cannot pass

Your father's gone a-hunting
For the beast we'll never cannot bind
And he leaves a baby sleeping
And his blessings all behind

Your father's gone a-hunting
And he's lost his lucky charm
And he's lost the guardian heart
That keeps the hunter from the harm

Your father's gone a-hunting
He asked me to say goodbye
And he warned me not to stop him
I wouldn't, I wouldn't even try

...which is my spn happy place at the moment.