RP: Shadows and Light: a memoir
Date: November 26, 2004
Character(s): Cedric
Location: his tent
Status: Private
Summary: Shadows and light: a memoir drawn of fish in winter, painting, demons, and Etruscan frescos.
Completion: Complete
The water in the pond during winter had the sheen of quicksilver, rippling a little from wind. Fish moved sluggish beneath, as if dreaming, stirring up little swirls of silt in the shallows while fallen leaves choked the edge. They smelled rich and heavy and sweet with rot. Cedric had come out to leave a small ash-wood box that he'd built that afternoon for the banded grass snake that lived near the pond. He'd set it with a warming spell. Winter was no friend to cold-blooded creatures -- no friend to most creatures. It crept with feather-frost into his tent of a morning now and settled in his bones, and his mood. He shivered, dark and haunted. Squatting beside the bullrushes, he looked into the surface to view the water world beneath, like one looked through a painting, tempted to fall into it.
He couldn't remember a time when he hadn't been aware of his mother's art. He'd grown up with it all around him, the smell of potions bubbling, of acetone and turpentine, oils and egg whites, the curious blends of ground minerals and organic dyes -- all bright colors to delight the eye and hypnotize. Canvas and scraped parchment, charcoal and pen knives, the softness of brushes and the intricate lace of calligraphy like his great-grandmother's tatting.
His mother had given him fingerpaint and parchment as soon as he was old enough, and he could remember hours in the summer sun of Tuscany, drawing dreams with her in golds and greens and a brilliant grape. He saw the wheat fields and vineyards, and the twisted pine on the Italian hills around the villa where she'd gone to study. He committed it to paper in wavering lines like the heat that radiated off the earth -- the world in the eye of a three-year-old. His father had been bored, but he and his mother had spent their days with their hands in paint.
She found her first visions in the violent old myths of Greece and Italy, and the light and shadow of the Mediterranean sun. She took him to visit crumbling frescoes adorning the walls of long-empty Etruscan tombs. Those tombs had frightened him. Not because they'd been places of death; he hadn't understood that. Nor had he paid much attention to the robed figures of ancient diners, drunk on Greek wine, or to the men in bright bronze, armed with spears and tall helms and great round shields. No, what he remembered best were the images found in the corners -- the dark, shadowed edges filled with little demons and other mad terrors that had escaped from antique minds. "They were a superstitious people, the Etruscans," his mother had told him. He hadn't understood what 'superstitious' meant, not until much later, but she'd never talked down to him, even at two and three and four.
Sometimes, when he'd had his hands in darker colors, the indigos and violets and earth browns, he'd made his own toddler nightmares on paper and woke in the middle of the night, crying. His mother would hold him against her soft breast until he fell from sobs into hiccups, and sleep claimed him again.
They'd left Italy in the autumn when he'd been barely four, moved to the basalt-stark and impressive landscape of Les Baux-de-Provence, France. She'd continued her studies and for a while, he forgot the fingerpaints of his earliest childhood. His own lessons began -- reading, writing and arithmetic. Exercise for his body too, and some attempt was made to teach him music, until his tutor confessed frankly that he had no ear for it. So he was taught French and Latin instead, and ran wild in the Provence countryside with local wizard boys who counted art as a pursuit for fops and sissies. Cedric took to the broom instead, and listened to Quidditch on the wireless with his father on lazy, bee-buzzing afternoons.
But the shadows hadn't left him. He woke sometimes from nightmares, and suffered vague dreams of dark creatures that hid in cupboards and unlit basements. Sometimes they drove him to crawl into bed between his parents, who indulged him, as he was an only child.
It was at the end of his eighth year that several important things happened to Cedric.
First, his family returned to England, to his father's ancestral home -- to fog and rain and overcast days. After France and Italy, he hated England. The nightmares that he'd kept at bay with bright sun and warm weather now grew like yeast in the dark. It was shadows that drew him here -- the insides of logs and the deep green of forest thickets, the boles of trees and the dim interiors of wooden barns that smelled of dust and disuse and owl crap -- places where light filtered through in gleaming needles shot with dancing motes. He tested his bravery by exploring such places. And he began to take a sketchbook and charcoal in imitation of his mother. What he drew were the half-seen things on the edges: dreams and fancies and myths, gnomes and pixies and porlocks peering out of crevices and dens, spider fingers and sharp fangs and angular bodies.
Nightmares. He caught them on paper, immobilizing them.
Like Muggle art, his sketches never moved.
Second, he met Leonard Whitecalf, and his world grew wider, spanning not only the Channel, but the Atlantic Ocean. He learned about magic that was entirely different from anything he'd known, where power was amoral, and one chose the dark or light by how one applied it -- for the self alone, or for others? "Power is a gift -- like art, like stories, like music. Power is medicine."
Third, and last, he began to realize his mother was famous. After all, she was just his mother, she fed him, played with him, scolded him, put him to bed at night. Her art was a constant; he'd watched her paint from the cradle. There was nothing mystical about it. So to realize she was not just his mother but also the Lucretia Diggory ... that she'd studied with masters and her own work hung in the London Gallery -- it was a slow recognition, parceled out over months and years and understood in half-listened-to conversations held between adults.
As he aged, he began to see her paintings differently, looking through them, as he looked now past the surface of the pond. And he saw darkness ensnared in her paint, unfolding in a measured march that she dictated -- telling a story. Controlled, contained, constrained in flashes of crimson and claret anger, cobalt sorrow, pomegranate and wine depression. Onyx evil. She let it out onto the canvas, bled herself dry of it. Art provided her with emotional leeches.
Cedric remembered, too, when he'd given up drawing. It was just before his second year at Hogwarts, a few weeks after he'd returned from his summer in Canada. He'd gone to the London Gallery with his mother for the unveiling of something-or-another. He couldn't even remember the painting now. Her shows slid together in his memory, congealing into a parade of public appearances in fancy robes, face scrubbed and hair combed. But she'd been occupied talking with patrons while his father had played the doting husband, and Cedric had been left on his own.
Bored, he'd left the gallery where his mother's art hung, slipping down dark-and-light marble hallways into other rooms dimly lit after hours. There he found Assyrian genii and Babylonian bulls frozen in bronze or jewel-tone glazed tile. They'd glared at him from candlelit alcoves while ancient tablets with cuneiform incantations to Erishkigal rested under glass. Finally, he'd found himself in the small Greek and Italian sections. Most of those ancient magical artifacts resided in other places, but a few had made it to London.
And all along one wall had been painstakingly assembled an Etruscan fresco.
Arrested by memory and frozen by fear, he'd stood there several minutes, his breath coming short, his heart pounding. Torchlight had flickered over the figures, giving them motion ... until he'd realized it wasn't torchlight. These paintings did move. They were magical -- like his mother's. An ancient man and woman laughed at a wedding, onlookers eating a feast of olives and figs and brown bread, baked fish and roast boar and aged cheese. Women danced, men sang to the lyre. And in the corners lurked fanged demons, wound in snakes and sporting ram's horns -- unseen, unheeded but there.
Turning, Cedric had fled the hall, racing back along white-and-black marble, feet pounding out a rhythm like an Indian drum. Choose, choose, choose . . . Sun or shadow, day or night, others or the self, joy or terror .... Medicine or sorcery.
Arms windmilling, hair all a mess, he'd exploded back into the posh, candlelit gallery with its chamber orchestra and neatly robed witches and wizards nibbling at fancy finger foods. All civilized, like the ancients at the wedding in the fresco. They'd stared at him in astonishment -- a wild-eyed demon escaped from his corner.
And there directly in front of him, hanging high on a central wall, was Ragnarök -- his mother's most celebrated piece. The death of the powers.
Even gods could die.
And he'd understood with a painful finality that left a hollow under his breastbone -- he was not his mother. She tamed the darkness. She turned it into story and art. Into beauty.
He just fled from it.
He'd put away his notebooks and his pencils and his chalks that evening and never got them out again.
Now, looking through the glittering pond surface at the swirling silt stirred by sluggish fish, he thought again about her paintings, and shadows. Only one of her paintings had survived the fire-choked death of Diagon Alley, and the burning of the London Gallery.
Ragnarök.
Even gods could die. And Dark Lords. And he'd seen death now, he'd died and come back from it. It held no fear -- and no demons. Death was a veil, a passage between. Like Orpheus, he'd been to Hades and back -- but he had no music in his soul, no ear for sound, no lyre or voice for singing. He had only his hands and eyes.
Rising from the side of the pond, joints creaking, he headed back through the autumn-blanched underbrush, climbing a fence and jogging across the main lawn towards the barn. There, he threw open the door to the tackroom and knelt to extract a trunk that he'd shoved under an old black-walnut desk. Digging inside, he came up with an oilcloth bundle that he unrolled on the ugly carpet of the makeshift kitchen of his former shelter. Inside were brushes and charcoal and parchment notebooks, pen knives and quills, mini-cauldrons, and the dried residue of oils beside leftover tints, extra gilding, and ground minerals . . . the unwanted flotsom of a Master Painter, left behind in the rush to save her only son.
Taking the charcoal and a knife along with a notebook, he rewrapped the rest and carried the lot out into the field beside his tent. Levitating a chair from inside he sat it on the brown grass, plopped down, opened the book and began to sketch. He drew open fields and winter-stark English oak, dark twisted yew and elegant ash beside fieldstone fences stitching it all in. Black lines on pale parchment.
Shadows and light.
Character(s): Cedric
Location: his tent
Status: Private
Summary: Shadows and light: a memoir drawn of fish in winter, painting, demons, and Etruscan frescos.
Completion: Complete
The water in the pond during winter had the sheen of quicksilver, rippling a little from wind. Fish moved sluggish beneath, as if dreaming, stirring up little swirls of silt in the shallows while fallen leaves choked the edge. They smelled rich and heavy and sweet with rot. Cedric had come out to leave a small ash-wood box that he'd built that afternoon for the banded grass snake that lived near the pond. He'd set it with a warming spell. Winter was no friend to cold-blooded creatures -- no friend to most creatures. It crept with feather-frost into his tent of a morning now and settled in his bones, and his mood. He shivered, dark and haunted. Squatting beside the bullrushes, he looked into the surface to view the water world beneath, like one looked through a painting, tempted to fall into it.
He couldn't remember a time when he hadn't been aware of his mother's art. He'd grown up with it all around him, the smell of potions bubbling, of acetone and turpentine, oils and egg whites, the curious blends of ground minerals and organic dyes -- all bright colors to delight the eye and hypnotize. Canvas and scraped parchment, charcoal and pen knives, the softness of brushes and the intricate lace of calligraphy like his great-grandmother's tatting.
His mother had given him fingerpaint and parchment as soon as he was old enough, and he could remember hours in the summer sun of Tuscany, drawing dreams with her in golds and greens and a brilliant grape. He saw the wheat fields and vineyards, and the twisted pine on the Italian hills around the villa where she'd gone to study. He committed it to paper in wavering lines like the heat that radiated off the earth -- the world in the eye of a three-year-old. His father had been bored, but he and his mother had spent their days with their hands in paint.
She found her first visions in the violent old myths of Greece and Italy, and the light and shadow of the Mediterranean sun. She took him to visit crumbling frescoes adorning the walls of long-empty Etruscan tombs. Those tombs had frightened him. Not because they'd been places of death; he hadn't understood that. Nor had he paid much attention to the robed figures of ancient diners, drunk on Greek wine, or to the men in bright bronze, armed with spears and tall helms and great round shields. No, what he remembered best were the images found in the corners -- the dark, shadowed edges filled with little demons and other mad terrors that had escaped from antique minds. "They were a superstitious people, the Etruscans," his mother had told him. He hadn't understood what 'superstitious' meant, not until much later, but she'd never talked down to him, even at two and three and four.
Sometimes, when he'd had his hands in darker colors, the indigos and violets and earth browns, he'd made his own toddler nightmares on paper and woke in the middle of the night, crying. His mother would hold him against her soft breast until he fell from sobs into hiccups, and sleep claimed him again.
They'd left Italy in the autumn when he'd been barely four, moved to the basalt-stark and impressive landscape of Les Baux-de-Provence, France. She'd continued her studies and for a while, he forgot the fingerpaints of his earliest childhood. His own lessons began -- reading, writing and arithmetic. Exercise for his body too, and some attempt was made to teach him music, until his tutor confessed frankly that he had no ear for it. So he was taught French and Latin instead, and ran wild in the Provence countryside with local wizard boys who counted art as a pursuit for fops and sissies. Cedric took to the broom instead, and listened to Quidditch on the wireless with his father on lazy, bee-buzzing afternoons.
But the shadows hadn't left him. He woke sometimes from nightmares, and suffered vague dreams of dark creatures that hid in cupboards and unlit basements. Sometimes they drove him to crawl into bed between his parents, who indulged him, as he was an only child.
It was at the end of his eighth year that several important things happened to Cedric.
First, his family returned to England, to his father's ancestral home -- to fog and rain and overcast days. After France and Italy, he hated England. The nightmares that he'd kept at bay with bright sun and warm weather now grew like yeast in the dark. It was shadows that drew him here -- the insides of logs and the deep green of forest thickets, the boles of trees and the dim interiors of wooden barns that smelled of dust and disuse and owl crap -- places where light filtered through in gleaming needles shot with dancing motes. He tested his bravery by exploring such places. And he began to take a sketchbook and charcoal in imitation of his mother. What he drew were the half-seen things on the edges: dreams and fancies and myths, gnomes and pixies and porlocks peering out of crevices and dens, spider fingers and sharp fangs and angular bodies.
Nightmares. He caught them on paper, immobilizing them.
Like Muggle art, his sketches never moved.
Second, he met Leonard Whitecalf, and his world grew wider, spanning not only the Channel, but the Atlantic Ocean. He learned about magic that was entirely different from anything he'd known, where power was amoral, and one chose the dark or light by how one applied it -- for the self alone, or for others? "Power is a gift -- like art, like stories, like music. Power is medicine."
Third, and last, he began to realize his mother was famous. After all, she was just his mother, she fed him, played with him, scolded him, put him to bed at night. Her art was a constant; he'd watched her paint from the cradle. There was nothing mystical about it. So to realize she was not just his mother but also the Lucretia Diggory ... that she'd studied with masters and her own work hung in the London Gallery -- it was a slow recognition, parceled out over months and years and understood in half-listened-to conversations held between adults.
As he aged, he began to see her paintings differently, looking through them, as he looked now past the surface of the pond. And he saw darkness ensnared in her paint, unfolding in a measured march that she dictated -- telling a story. Controlled, contained, constrained in flashes of crimson and claret anger, cobalt sorrow, pomegranate and wine depression. Onyx evil. She let it out onto the canvas, bled herself dry of it. Art provided her with emotional leeches.
Cedric remembered, too, when he'd given up drawing. It was just before his second year at Hogwarts, a few weeks after he'd returned from his summer in Canada. He'd gone to the London Gallery with his mother for the unveiling of something-or-another. He couldn't even remember the painting now. Her shows slid together in his memory, congealing into a parade of public appearances in fancy robes, face scrubbed and hair combed. But she'd been occupied talking with patrons while his father had played the doting husband, and Cedric had been left on his own.
Bored, he'd left the gallery where his mother's art hung, slipping down dark-and-light marble hallways into other rooms dimly lit after hours. There he found Assyrian genii and Babylonian bulls frozen in bronze or jewel-tone glazed tile. They'd glared at him from candlelit alcoves while ancient tablets with cuneiform incantations to Erishkigal rested under glass. Finally, he'd found himself in the small Greek and Italian sections. Most of those ancient magical artifacts resided in other places, but a few had made it to London.
And all along one wall had been painstakingly assembled an Etruscan fresco.
Arrested by memory and frozen by fear, he'd stood there several minutes, his breath coming short, his heart pounding. Torchlight had flickered over the figures, giving them motion ... until he'd realized it wasn't torchlight. These paintings did move. They were magical -- like his mother's. An ancient man and woman laughed at a wedding, onlookers eating a feast of olives and figs and brown bread, baked fish and roast boar and aged cheese. Women danced, men sang to the lyre. And in the corners lurked fanged demons, wound in snakes and sporting ram's horns -- unseen, unheeded but there.
Turning, Cedric had fled the hall, racing back along white-and-black marble, feet pounding out a rhythm like an Indian drum. Choose, choose, choose . . . Sun or shadow, day or night, others or the self, joy or terror .... Medicine or sorcery.
Arms windmilling, hair all a mess, he'd exploded back into the posh, candlelit gallery with its chamber orchestra and neatly robed witches and wizards nibbling at fancy finger foods. All civilized, like the ancients at the wedding in the fresco. They'd stared at him in astonishment -- a wild-eyed demon escaped from his corner.
And there directly in front of him, hanging high on a central wall, was Ragnarök -- his mother's most celebrated piece. The death of the powers.
Even gods could die.
And he'd understood with a painful finality that left a hollow under his breastbone -- he was not his mother. She tamed the darkness. She turned it into story and art. Into beauty.
He just fled from it.
He'd put away his notebooks and his pencils and his chalks that evening and never got them out again.
Now, looking through the glittering pond surface at the swirling silt stirred by sluggish fish, he thought again about her paintings, and shadows. Only one of her paintings had survived the fire-choked death of Diagon Alley, and the burning of the London Gallery.
Ragnarök.
Even gods could die. And Dark Lords. And he'd seen death now, he'd died and come back from it. It held no fear -- and no demons. Death was a veil, a passage between. Like Orpheus, he'd been to Hades and back -- but he had no music in his soul, no ear for sound, no lyre or voice for singing. He had only his hands and eyes.
Rising from the side of the pond, joints creaking, he headed back through the autumn-blanched underbrush, climbing a fence and jogging across the main lawn towards the barn. There, he threw open the door to the tackroom and knelt to extract a trunk that he'd shoved under an old black-walnut desk. Digging inside, he came up with an oilcloth bundle that he unrolled on the ugly carpet of the makeshift kitchen of his former shelter. Inside were brushes and charcoal and parchment notebooks, pen knives and quills, mini-cauldrons, and the dried residue of oils beside leftover tints, extra gilding, and ground minerals . . . the unwanted flotsom of a Master Painter, left behind in the rush to save her only son.
Taking the charcoal and a knife along with a notebook, he rewrapped the rest and carried the lot out into the field beside his tent. Levitating a chair from inside he sat it on the brown grass, plopped down, opened the book and began to sketch. He drew open fields and winter-stark English oak, dark twisted yew and elegant ash beside fieldstone fences stitching it all in. Black lines on pale parchment.
Shadows and light.