From the light of a different sun

[sauvin]

I should just mention vampires so this post could possibly be related to LTROI.

I'll go you one further by suggesting that discussing definability, certainty, decidability and "'round and 'round she goes, and where she stops, nobody knows!" are very MUCH on topic, given that our perception of Eli's moral standing is practically tantamount to division by zero! A major chunk of this whole forum is devoted to exactly that, and some of it is still piping hot!

[dongregg]

I should just mention vampires so this post could possibly be related to LTROI.

I'll go you one further by suggesting that discussing definability, certainty, decidability and "'round and 'round she goes, and where she stops, nobody knows!" are very MUCH on topic, given that our perception of Eli's moral standing is practically tantamount to division by zero! A major chunk of this whole forum is devoted to exactly that, and some of it is still piping hot!

Eli takes on the questions of what they are and whether they can be happy when a major part of their existence is out of their control.

Chapter Eleven
A Child in Crisis

Two Vampires
The night after Professor Grigor’s visit, Oskar and Eli hang out on their pallet in the attic darkroom until it grows late enough for them to hunt.
Oskar has his head in a book.
"Oskar, we can't push it."
"I know." He doesn't look up, but his stomach rumbles.
"You almost lost it the night Professor Grigor told us he knows what we are."
"I know."
"Let's start near the quarry."
"Sounds like a plan."
"We've got a little time until it's late enough."
"Yeah."
Eli falls silent as she casts about for words she knows she needs to say.
"Mr. Ávila gave us the normal life we yearned for."
Oskar looks up from his reading. "Yeah, Eli, it's great. It's our dream.”
"But, Oskar...we're not normal."
"What do you mean?" He closes the book and sets it beside their pallet.
"We never will be normal. I asked you that night if you think we’re like wolves."
"Yeah, Eli, but I didn't know what to say."
"We're not like wolves, like Professor Grigor said we are."
"Fun to think so."
"But it's pretending. It can be fun to pretend. We love fun, and I thought if we started having fun again, everything would be okay."
"Isn't it? Isn't everything okay?" He feels uneasy and wonders where Eli is going with this.
"In a way. It's a million times better than it was when we got to Örebro. But now I know what you were running from when you took off."
"What I was running from?"
"Yes, Oskar. You were running from what we are. By the time we got to Örebro, we were down to nothing but that."
With their enhanced hearing, there is never complete silence. Eli hears the wind rustling the dead leaves on the trees in their yard. She hears the traffic on distant Limhamnsvägen...a ship's horn far out in the Sund...
"We asked Mr. Ávila for advice because I thought we needed to have a normal life, like we tried to have when we first met in Blackeberg. You know, playing, rolling in the snow, walking around the town center. I wanted it so bad that I put us in danger in Vällingby.”
“You mean by shopping for new clothes."
“Yes. Like a normal life was going to just happen. See, Oskar, I thought you took off because we weren't having fun anymore. When we were together again, I thought I needed to fix that, to figure out how to live like normal kids, but that was just running from what we are."
"R-running from what, Eli?" Oskar asks with a slight quiver in his voice.
"Oskar, I'm tired of pretending we're just two kids with some kind of infection."
Oskar feels as though a weight were pressing down on him.
"Then what are we?"
"We're vampires."
"But..."
"I know, Oskar. I said we are not that. I said we are not like the vampire that infected me. But pretending to be just normal kids with a weird infection is..."
"But aren't we, Eli? Isn't the infection separate from who we really are?"
"I guess I had to think that. I thought I was holding onto the human part that I think is good."
"You are human, Eli! You are good!"
"Yeah, but in a little while we're going out to kill somebody."
"Because the infection makes us do it!"
"No, Oskar, because we live off blood. Our hunger makes us do it, not the infection. It's what vampires do."
"Why are you saying this, Eli?"
"Because I don't think I can go on pretending. I can't be two Elis. I can't be a normal kid sometimes and a killer other times."
Oskar starts to cry. "I know that, Eli. I know we're not two things. But I never wanted you to know it. I wanted you to believe the bad things we do was the infection. I want you to love yourself as much as I love you, to never think bad thoughts about yourself."
"Oh, Oskar, my dear sweet Oskar."
Eli holds him until he stops crying.
"I didn't know, Oskar. I didn't know what it was costing you to help me live in a fantasy. But Örebro showed us the fantasy doesn't work. Not for either one of us."
"I can sort of see that, Eli. Like when I was bullied every day, it wasn't about getting beat up; it was that I couldn't be Oskar. Whenever I raised my hand in class, I knew what I was in for after school."
"I guess that's what I'm starting to understand," Eli says, and she gives Oskar a hug.
"In a weird way," Oskar continues, "I felt like that again in Örebro. You were spending so much time taking care of us, it didn't leave room for me to show you I can take care of myself, that I can just be me. I guess you’re saying by then it's all we had left."
"Yeah, that's what I'm saying. We were just living like two vampires in a story. The year that passed after we had to get out of Gothenburg real quick turned into that kind of life. By the time we got to Örebro, there was nothing left for me to do but make sure we could survive—to hunt and not get caught."
They grow quiet. After a minute, Oskar says, "Eli, are you saying you’re okay with being a vampire?"
"No! I'm not okay. But I think I have to learn to be. Living like I’m not responsible for what I do—That makes me unhappier than anything I can think of."
"Eli, if you can learn to be happy being this way, then I'm happy," and he grabs her and tries to tickle her.
"Stop it, you big goof! Stop it, Oskar! Gyah, you really are just a big happy kid."
"A big happy vampire kid."
"Right, Oskar. I want to be who I really am, and I don't have that figured out yet."
"Okay, I can get into this. How about we start with we're not 'wolves or some other magnificent predator,' like Professor Grigor called us."
"Yeah, Oskar, we're not. I mean, we're predators, but wolves have little wolves. There won't be any little Oskars and Elis running around the house and growing up to be good little vampires. The only thing that gets passed on is the infection."
"If we let it. Which we don't."
"And maybe that's the first thing we can say is good about us."
"Okay, Eli, we're not wolves. Too bad. And we don't spread the infection, and that's good. What else are we? We’re two kids who kill people and drink their blood."
"Yeah, Oskar, that’s mainly what vampires do, whether they’re 12 or whatever. In that way, we're no different from Rakel."
"But we're way different from her in other ways, right?"
"Yep, and one way is, Rakel hated other vampires." A mischievous smile plays about Eli's lips. "But we looove vampires."
“Right, Eli! We love each other. Oooo—vampire love.”
“Ha ha! That’s so silly! Hey, I know what! Let's make this into a game, okay? Naming stuff we are and stuff we're not. What else we are is strong as an elephant and all that other stuff. Like we can grow our teeth and claws. Like we can grow wings."
"But we haven't for a long time. Now the nights are longer and darker, I want to fly with you over the Sund."
Eli smiles. She hugs Oskar and mashes her lips against his cheek.
"Okay, here's the game. Once a day, we each say one thing we are and one thing we're not. We can write it down in our notebooks."
"This is a good game, Eli, but we can’t write it down."
“Why not?”
“Same reason we're not in the cast photo. We can’t create a forensic trail.”
“Oh. I knew that. Duh. So let’s take time each day to just say the list and then add to it.”
Oskar's stomach rumbles again. He hopes they are at a good stopping place.
Eli gets it. "Let's check out the area between here and the quarry."
As they pull on their black sweats and sneakers, Eli wonders about sharing all of this with the grownups.
I guess we need time to sort this out before we talk about it to them. I mean, Mr. Ávila and Professor Grigor know what we are, don’t they? Oskar knows. Maybe I’m the only one who kept thinking about it as something separate from us.

[dongregg]

Oskar and Eli are both stuck with the moral precepts they learned as young children, including "Thou shalt do no murder." In Set Me As a Seal, this becomes the central issue in several meetings in the chapter, "A Child in Crisis."

[dongregg]

Delete the long quote.

[PeteMork]

yeah, this is a moral conundrum most of us on the forum, and especially those of us who write FF, have not dealt with successfully IMO. We come close, but....

[dongregg]

My friend Lila, who has written O&E vignettes in Paris, says their murderous life cannot be changed because they are a metaphor for all of us. Things die so that we may live.

I could not have conducted the prickly family meetings if you and I had not fought over the issue for more than a month. Now I'm starting to doubt the wisdom of switching them to a steady medical source in Barcelona. La condition humaine metaphor will not survive, but the journey/quest metaphor might surface again.

Any way, they may dump a body or two in the Seine, but they will do no murder once they get to Barcelona.

[PeteMork]

My friend Lila, who has written O&E vignettes in Paris, says their murderous life cannot be changed because they are a metaphor for all of us. Things die so that we may live.

I could not have conducted the prickly family meetings if you and I had not fought over the issue for more than a month. Now I'm starting to doubt the wisdom of switching them to a steady medical source in Barcelona. La condition humaine metaphor will not survive, but the journey/quest metaphor might surface again.

Any way, they may dump a body or two in the Seine, but they will do no murder once they get to Barcelona.

I suppose in some sense they are a metaphor for all of us, but in their case it's a lopsided metaphor. The things that die for them are a lot higher up on the food chain than those that die for the rest of us. I guess my position has always been that if there was no other way for them to survive that didn't require the killing of others, they could never truly be pure of heart -- which was a goal I desperately wanted to attain in my FF. And in the case of Eli deliberately infecting Oskar, being fully aware of the ramifications, that goal becomes even harder to reach. Ah well...

[sauvin]

Oskar isn't really a metaphor so much as a mirror in whose image too many of us see themselves with uncomfortable clarity.

Eli, however, is a metaphor, but it'd take a far finer mind than mine to pin it down. She has a condition that mandates other people die if she wants to live, and she has chosen to continue to live through a couple of centuries. The only evidence I can remember that she acknowledges her moral position is in the novel where it's noted that the will to live is stronger than the pangs of conscience; otherwise, she's something of a poster child for utter infantile selfishness. Depending on whom you ask, she could be a stand-in for ambulance-chasing lawyers, pimples on the collective backside of public welfare programs, bank robbers, drug addicts, tax collectors and/or some poor sod's mother-in-law.

She does this much more brilliantly than does Dracula in some ways. She's not only not a living historical footnote, she's just never been noted at all. She doesn't spend the centuries dreaming of the forgotten glory she never had and isn't apparently dead on the inside. She can feel the loneliness, isolation, estrangement and despair her condition imposes on her. I suppose one could say that while Dracula represented rot from without (at least for the English of bygone times) where Eli represents rot from within no matter where you're from.

[PeteMork]

Oskar isn't really a metaphor so much as a mirror in whose image too many of us see themselves with uncomfortable clarity.

This is certainly the case for me. As a result, I have yet to decide how much sympathy I can afford him .

Eli, however, is a metaphor, but it'd take a far finer mind than mine to pin it down. She has a condition that mandates other people die if she wants to live, and she has chosen to continue to live through a couple of centuries. The only evidence I can remember that she acknowledges her moral position is in the novel where it's noted that the will to live is stronger than the pangs of conscience; otherwise, she's something of a poster child for utter infantile selfishness. Depending on whom you ask, she could be a stand-in for ambulance-chasing lawyers, pimples on the collective backside of public welfare programs, bank robbers, drug addicts, tax collectors and/or some poor sod's mother-in-law.

She does this much more brilliantly than does Dracula in some ways. She's not only not a living historical footnote, she's just never been noted at all. She doesn't spend the centuries dreaming of the forgotten glory she never had and isn't apparently dead on the inside. She can feel the loneliness, isolation, estrangement and despair her condition imposes on her. I suppose one could say that while Dracula represented rot from without (at least for the English of bygone times) where Eli represents rot from within no matter where you're from.

I think JAL sums up this inherent contradiction with this bit of wisdom, when Eli is lamenting the fact that she has to leave Oskar behind:

"God. God? Why can't I have anything? Why can't I..."
It has been brought up many times before, this question.
Why can't I be allowed to live?
Because you should be dead.

[dongregg]

Not so fast, sauvin. We're animals who kill other animals to live. So do lionesses. Elevating human beings to a special place in the chain of life doesn't change that. Beyond the "in order to live" part (which isn't strictly true), we are animals who kill human animals just because. WWII and the lead-up to it slaughtered millions. Five million starved to death in the Ukraine on Stain's order, for example. And the slaughter goes on.

I'm not willing to let Eli off the hook for the sake of the metaphor. "Set Me As a Seal" begins with two journeys and quests--Oskar yearning for home and finding that his home is wherever Eli is. Eli seeking to find and protect Oskar. If journey/quest are to be a viable metaphor for the tale, I have a lot thinking and work to do. Any ideas?