Amuse Us Muses!

I always could see gods. They are shadows, vague shapes, but sometimes they’ll take the form of something from my memory. If they are dangerous, they’ll take the shape of something that frightens me. If they benevolent, they’ll take the shape of something that comforts me. They each have their own personalities too… some are mischievous, some are shy, some love attention and being doted on. They like to live in statues and shrines. Other’s care little about humans. They have important jobs to do, like moving clouds and making goats mate. 

I was eight years old when I realized I was seeing gods. I was traveling with my family, taking fresh wool from the herders on the mountain, to the River City. We stopped to pay homage to the local gods, as one must do when traveling through their territory. (if you don’t, they might become vengeful) and I saw a man who looked like a king that I’d seen a glimpse of being carried by a dozen slaves. He wore bangles and fine skins, and jewels were everywhere on him – even strung on wires that ran through his skin. When he saw us coming to pay homage to the great statue, he became very excited, and started kissing the dying flowers in the offering bowl. To our amazement, the flowers came back to life and blossomed anew. My grandmother, who also is our shaman, told my father that this was a good omen. This god would protect us through its land. We gave it offerings of dyed wool. 

I thought differently.  Hadn’t they seen the king-magician kissing the flowers? While they told me there was no such man, and that the king I spoke of was far, far away from us, he stepped between us to stare at me. Instead of hunching over to get a better look, he simply shrunk to my height. 

“I look like a king to you?” he asked. 

I nodded. My grandmother took it as a sign that I’d been corrected, and they went about getting the great ox to move again. 

He puffed out his chest and grinned wide. “Most people see only my house,” he said, pointing at the statue.

I looked at my parents, who were busy snapping at slaves. They still didn’t notice him. 

“It’s solid wood,” I whispered, turning away so they couldn’t see me talking. “There’s no space for someone to live.” 

“I don’t need space,” he said. Then he slipped into the statue, and out of sight. I could still feel his presence though. “I am Nagoy, the Road Guardian!” he shouted in his most mighty voice. “I give flowers their perfume!” 

“How does that help guard the road?” 

“It doesn’t,” he popped his head out of the statue, “but it’s fun.” 

“Does this mean that you are the god of the road then?” I asked. 

“Of course I am! I live in the statue, don’t I?” 

“My family is traveling through your land, will you take care of us?” 

He paused a moment, and chewed on his lips. “I might miss more offerings. And my home is here, not the entire road.” 

“What if I gave you a new home?” I scurried over to the cart with the bag full of woolen dolls from the mountains, and pulled out a doll with wool jewelry stitched into it. “It looks like you.” 

His eyes widened with glee. “You’ll carry me with you? Will you show me lots of flowers?” 

“We travel everywhere. My mom says that we have traveled to every place with a name in the world!” 

With that, he left his wooden statue and jumped into my doll. “I am Nagoy the Caravan Guardian!” he shouted in his mighty voice. “I give the flowers of all of the named places their perfume!” 

Never had we had a sweeter smelling journey.



Index | Next Chapter

So, I just watched The Season of the Witch.

I’m still trying to hash out what I think of this movie… but I’m pretty sure that I don’t like it.

The first thing I noticed was that the music was all wrong. The music is a bombastic, heavy, orchestral, with screaming choirs (imagine listening to the Nazgûl theme from LotR for 97 minutes) and very much NOT 1300s sounding. It’s hard to put my finger on why exactly it bothered me so much. Maybe it was because it didn’t match the emotions on screen, and never tried to build a setting. There should have been at least a little madrigal music in there, but there wasn’t. The music was flailing its arms and yelling, “This is epic, dammit!” but the problem was – it wasn’t.  “Epic” is thousands of orcs attacking Minas Tirith. It isn’t four guys and a girl in an abbey.

The dialogue I could forgive for not being archaic. English at that time was pretty unintelligible to us. The catch phrases, I couldn’t forgive. “Tonight, you’re buying!” was repeated way too much, and I was left gritting my teeth every time I heard it. I get it. These are Men Of Action. I can see they are kicking ass. Can’t they do it with less banter? Also, the smell joke was really lame. It’s a supernatural horror movie set in the dark ages. They wouldn’t be making modern observations about the smells that they lived with daily.

I don’t know why, but I really wanted this movie to be good. I heard that it did poorly and that the critics didn’t like it, but I wanted it to have been good. It feels like it could have been. Maybe with a different score, and a few more months working on the script so it wasn’t so holey and hokey.

To give it an arbitrary value, I’d say that it’s two out of five. Parts of it were entertaining, but the excuses for the entertaining parts were so badly flawed that they drowned them out.

Also, WTF is with the title? Seasons had nothing to do with the story at all!