tamquam alter idem

reading extremely loud and incredibly close (absolutely devastating, highly recommend) and i can’t stop thinking about this passage in connection to the dreamer trilogy/maggie stiefvater lore:

i don’t know how i know this (i know it is in some respect true although i may be misremembering details) but i remember maggie talking about how one day she was driving to some mundane place — the sort of place you go everyday, the sort of drive you don’t even think about because it’s become second nature — in one of her unusual, maggie-like cars and coming toward her on the other side of the road is her same exact car, and driving that car is a person that looks, from a distance, an awful lot like her. and in my recollection she was so shaken in this moment — essentially having this intense feeling of seeing herself duplicated, another version of her driving around her life — that she turned around and went home. and that this experience is what inspired the dreamer trilogy.

the idea of a doppelgänger, or a twinned self, is so embedded in the dreamer trilogy so knowing this origin story makes it all the more interesting to me. in mythology a doppelgänger is often a bad omen, a bringer of bad luck, like an evil twin, but that’s not really the case in real life or tdt. in the case of hennessy and jordan, niall and the new fenian, mór and aurora, they are all literal copies of one another — a face, a body copy and pasted. the pairs are mirrors of each other living parallel lives — in many ways more different from one another than similar. at least one of them is constantly wondering, am i the imposter? have you gotten it more right than i have?

declan and ronan are mirrors — constantly forced to recognize their father in one another and themselves. and this — the moment when ronan first sees the new fenian and thinks is that me? — feels more the like universal human experience than the true, exact copies do. that moment is the experience of maggie seeing someone with her car and changing course, turning the mundane to the extraordinary. it’s a wake up call. it’s a nudge from the universe.

it’s the moments of recognizing ourselves in others, others recognizing themselves in us. of walking around the world looking like your mother, your father, your sister, your brother, and every stranger you’ve never met.

so very raven boys :’-)

but we grow up.

breathe in. breathe out. i love you. i’m glad we share a sky and an ocean and a whole world.

[the anthropocene reviewed by john green / hunt for the wilderpeople / we love you on tiktok / the dream thieves by maggie stiefvater / anne with an e / aftersun]

6:21, how very circular. an ending as a beginning.

actually life is beautiful.

i do have time.

happy mother’s day to mother gansey. i hope the child you and ronan adopted together made you a nice card. maybe picked you flowers.

the raven cycle is looking at the lines in your hands, the lines in your grandmother’s hands and seeing tree roots, seeing rivers, seeing the veins of leaves. interconnected. separate, but together.

ok so you know how people say that everyone in your dream is you?? well. i’ve been thinking about that in connection to the idea that maybe ronan’s dreams are all just different versions of him. that matthew, in all his goodness, his unfiltered, unrelenting joy, is ronan or a part of ronan — an extension of himself. that ronan’s night horrors — these terrible, unreal, creatures that only want to kill him — are really just an extension of him. that opal in her orphaned stangeness is just ronan, the part of him that feels orphaned, full of childlish wonder but also so much terror. that bryde — a dreamt teacher — is just a part of ronan that ronan can’t admit he has access to. that everytime ronan dreams of his dad or adam or declan, it’s really just ronan and ronan and ronan.

it feels like haunting your own life.

in the dream world, ronan cannot escape ronan — every version of himself, weather past, present, or future is meeting and existing and coming into the waking world all at once. in a way it’s a living record of ronan’s life, subconscious, & past selves.

blue is the stars. gansey is the sun. adam is the moon. noah is the wind. and ronan is the earth beneath them all.

hope this makes sense.

a collection of things that are the raven cycle but are not the raven cycle:

thinking about the lynch’s false mirrors.

declan as a mirror to niall. a son made in his father’s image.

ronan as a mirror to niall. a father choosing to model a son after himself, after his brother.

matthew as a mirror to his brothers, to his father. ronan manifesting a kinder, softer mirror of declan’s face in a brother that would be better than either of them, for both of them.

ronan having to look at declan after niall’s death, seeing his father’s face, not just in the mirror, but in a brother that is not his father, not his idol.

declan having to look at ronan after niall’s death, seeing his father’s face, not just in the mirror, but in a brother all too like his father, dangerous and horrible and lovely.

the dreamer trilogy makes my artist heart very happy. it talks about art in metaphor — dreaming being a metaphor for creating art and dream objects being a metaphor for artwork — but it also mixes in so much art history AND has literal artists, jordan and hennessy, creating, for the first time, work that is Theirs. making, not in an effort to copy great work, but to create great work themselves, for themselves. one of the Points to me is about who artistic creation — in any form — is for and Why we continue to create. it’s declan collecting art, art that makes him want to goddamn cry, and putting it in his attic, just for him, just because. it’s ronan loving light, creating balls of light that just float around, for no other reason than his love of light. it’s hennessy’s “of fucking course” waking up the mouse. it’s jordan painting declan. it’s adam’s dreamt watch. it’s the mirrors that show your honest self. it’s all of it, all of it.

there’s something to be said about the fairy markets, these exclusive, somewhat dangerous, dream black markets, being a metaphor or representation for the institutions of the art world. because that really is what it’s like in so many ways. the fairy markets are taking something magical, pure, and creative — dreamt objects that are made by dreamers simply for the joy and horror of creating — and turning it into a commodity, something that is inaccessible to most and must be hidden away behind barriers and armed guards.

the dreamer trilogy says so much about the value of art and art objects. their ability to reflect their creator. the necessity of art objects not just for artists but for other makers, for everyday people, for the world and for our culture.

I LOVE ART, I LOVE THESE BOOKS!

here’s to being there.

[the anthropocene reviewed by john green / stranger things / the raven cycle by maggie stiefvater / käthe kollwitz “the people” / ted lasso / in memoriam by alice winn / sex education / frog and toad]

the agenda in question:

i propose that we celebrate gansey’s rebirths/returns from death in the same way we do jesus on easter. we can have eggs and candy on gansey day(s) as well if that helps sell the idea.