This my shit

This post has only peripherally to do with The Devil's Garden or writing. Okay, really, it has nothing to do with it.

But it does.

Music has always been inextricably linked with reading and writing for me. If a particular song or album is playing while I read a particularly dramatic scene in a book, those notes always evoke that passage for me. Other times, certain notes in songs give me an overwhelming urge to write, and color the emotion of the piece I'm working on.

When I was a kid, I used to read The Chronicles of Narnia every year around Christmas. The first time I read The Silver Chair, I was listening to a ghastly Christian contemporary album by a group called Share. There was a song about Paul dreaming that he must go to Macedonia, with some slightly eerie-sounding, off-key notes, and dream people crying "come to Macedonia and help us!" The song was called "The Way of the Wicked," with the refrain from Psalms 146:9, "the way of the wicked he turneth upside down." This song began to play as Rillian was tied to the silver chair, during the one time of day that he was himself, begging Jill, Eustace, and Puddleglum to release him. The lyrics "in a dream, I saw your face; heard your muffled midnight cry," played as the Lady of the Green Kirtle strummed her lute, trying to enchant the children and marshwiggle, asking them what the world above was, and telling them it didn't exist, that the Underland, where she ruled and Prince Rillian was her captive and enchanted consort was the one, true world.

As silly as that song now seems to me, it made me weep as I listened to the Macedonians crying out for help while on the page in front of me, Rillian struggled against his bonds. (Perhaps this has something to do with my current predilection for bondage. Hey, thanks, C.S. Lewis!) At any rate, each year when I read that passage, I had to listen to that song, to take me to that same place of hope and despair, and to this day, that is the moment in all of the Chronicles that I love most (although I no longer own that album, and probably wouldn't listen to it unless actually tied in a silver chair and forced).

A few years later, in college, I was working on one of those novellas-by-default that I had begun in high school, and I had the Thompson Twins' Into the Gap in the tape deck, on the song "The Gap," and it suddenly turned my story in a different direction than I had meant to take it, where the heroine finds herself seduced by a sultan of sorts, despite the promises of love she has made to the hero. One might argue that Azena (the very Azena whose story would later become Under Galga) lost her innocence and added a dimension to her moral character because of the Thompson Twins.

So what, in the remotest way, does any of this have to do with The Devil's Garden? Well, it's convoluted, but on Saturday, I went to the music store to get a copy of Gwen Stefani's Love, Angel, Music, Baby because, I am a tad embarrassed to admit, "Hollaback Girl" has me thoroughly hooked. While at the Wherehouse, what should I discover but a copy of the CD Into the Gap? In one of my many moments of true physical nostalgia, I purchased it.

Now, whether my interest in Gwen Stefani has been piqued lately because of thinking about Gwen Araujo, who chose her name because of her admiration for Stefani, or whether my mental image of Cillian/Ume has become Gwen Araujo's face because of my thinking lately about Gwen Stefani, as that song sticks in my head, I have no idea. Maybe neither has anything to do with the other. Who can say?

And "The Gap"? Well, that moment in the early prototype of Under Galga that changed into the seduction of a maiden by a sultan in a desert oasis because of "The Gap" later became the basis of an entirely different book: Anamnesis. And Ume's seduction by MeerAlya is merely another version of that seduction by the mystery and magic of the "East," formed in my head as a child in part by C.S. Lewis's Calormen in The Horse and His Boy and The Last Battle. And the song on Into the Gap that comes before "The Gap" happens to be "No Peace for the Wicked." And it's playing right now. Reminding me of "The Way of the Wicked," which is inextricably entwined with Rillian's escape from Underland, a name not coincidentally used as a pun for the underground-dwelling community in Under Galga.

Uh huh, this my shit.