Carabas

Scotland sometime in the 1700s, I'm in the stables brushing a horse and speaking with a young man I've just been riding with. He's about to inherit some position from his father and he's extremely uncomfortable about it, particularly about how little education he's had - less for its own sake, and more to do with how others will see him. The conversation's wandered around a bit on the subject of education, and I've just mentioned Jim, a servant I grew up with in the American colonies who's devoted to learning, more so than anyone I ever knew. Brilliant man. The man I'm talking to asks how much schooling he'd had - none. I feel vaguely ashamed about that, for my home and for myself for not thinking about this when we were younger - Jim certainly would have wanted to go to school and it had never occurred to me to think about that. If he'd been white, he'd almost certainly have gone to a college.

Two dull scenes I'm noting for the character who appears in both - at the end of the previous scene I went to sleep and "dreamed" of a long-haired old man who was a teacher in a modern classroom, who said that the two times are only nine steps apart, so it's silly to make such a fuss. At this point I was fully aware the classroom scene was a dream and had modern memories, but didn't believe the Scotland scene was a dream - I considered the classroom dream a way of communicating with this man while I was in the past. Woke up (really), went back to sleep, and some scenes later I was forging a series of swords - masterpieces. The same old man appeared, this time as the master of the forge, and was so impressed that he insisted I destroy one of them by peeling back layers of metal so he could see the core, see what I'd done.

(Woke up. Back to sleep.)

I'm reading a letter from an old friend. She's telling me she's spent the last six years in Vienna, and that she's devoting this lifetime (meaning however long this particular identity lasts her) to the study of music. She uses a word that specifically means playing instruments rather than singing, and she says she's giving her voice a break after "those swan songs" in Canada. She's studying the piano, which reminds her of me - she asks if I remember the old spinet I used to play for them.

Scene changes when I think about when and where that had been. There's an image of a little room, dark for just a second, then lit up with this golden light in shapes created by a lantern - this incredibly intricate fantasy scene, silhouettes of people and leaves, and an impression of bars, as if inside a birdcage.

There's a woman having a sort of Cinderella transformation - rags to ballgown - but she doesn't seem in the least bit impressed by it. I'm vaguely annoyed at her lack of reaction, but on with the show. She enters a throne room and asks something of the king, who says "But first answer me this. When did you become the Evil Queen?" She doesn't know what to make of this. She says, "I'm not a queen." "Your father is dead," says the king - her father was also a ruler, she became queen the moment he died. The king here holds out a collection of brown papers. He says it's something her father had been putting together the night he died - last night - something urgent, something for her, since she'd been away on this mission.

I'm looking at a book containing a moving image representing En - a small boat on a river, stylized lotus flowers, a lot of gold paint. The color's faded and chipped in places, but still beautiful.

A musician's writing a letter to a friend of his, trying to comfort his friend, and he's thinking about how limited words are, how it can't replicate the sort of things he'd do if he was there in person, even the simple act of putting on a familiar tune. He goes to the gramophone and puts on the tune he was thinking of, and sits to listen to it before he continues writing, thinking that perhaps the feeling he gets from this song will come across in his words.

A couple. A blonde woman is laying out cards on the floor in five columns, representing the guy's past relationships; he's lying on his back next to her, not looking. She observes that his two longest relationships followed the exact same pattern: lasted the same amount of time, ended the same way, with the same warning signs beforehand. She says based on that pattern, if (event) happens at (time into relationship), he might as well bail immediately.

One of the shorter columns is unique in that every card represents things going well, and she wonders why he'd split up with that guy. Privately, she's realizing that he ended things shortly after he'd had some non-romantic encounter with her, and she's wondering if she was the reason for the split. But out loud she just points out how odd it looks that they broke it off considering it seemed to be going so well. He teases her, saying "yeah, I'm starting to miss a bit of swordplay" - part of the joke here is that the guy in question also did something involving literal swords - and she hits him, lightly, on the arm; then she puts the cards down and straddles him, and says something along the lines of "Not like that. I mean, you had a different dynamic than you did with anyone else. Not in a good way. I mean, I liked him, when he was alive - oh, god." He's laughing at her. What she'd been trying to say by 'not in a good way' was that although the two of them clearly got along, they hadn't seemed really emotionally attached, but she's stumbling over this conversation. He assures her, yes, the guy in question had indeed been great when he was alive - teasing her about her reluctance to sound disrespectful of the dead - he was lovely and wonderful and all that, and she's also lovely and wonderful and all that. There's a lot of laughing from both of them over how ridiculous this conversation is.