Dear Zacky
and a little flash fiction
I wouldn’t normally go to Zack Snyder for relationship advice. I respected his take on Watchmen, and even agreed with most of the changes he made for the screen. But what little I’ve seen of his dark DC ouvre has not overmuch impressed me.
But what do I know? I just rewatched all of Stargirl.
Twilight of the Gods
This, on the other hand, seems like a perfect fit for Snyder.
These are not super-heroes, as we think of them (though they are all wearing capes). They have powers, but they are bad people, making bad decisions, which have bad consequences.
In episode 5, “The Scapegoat God,” Leif, gray-streaked sidekick king of the Volsungs, is trapped in a vision where a withered sick-bed ghoul lunges at him with a sword and snarls,
You laid hands upon your father,
and he died the next day!
Loki, the purple worm in the poisoned apple, is trapped inside the vision with him, but he knows the story of Hoenir, a Prometheus figure trapped himself in a divine coma1, and he offers a bit of perspective.
Hoenir will woo you with woe and regret.
He will offer absolution.
But you cannot alter what is already done.
As they climb the spiral stair of Hoenir’s spinal column, Loki gives a quick lesson in Wyrding magic:
A man’s past is prophecy. What he’s done determines what he’ll do.
Wyrding is our deeds, woven, all at once.
Which resonates with the story below, written years ago.
And in the next episode, we hear the tale of Sleipnir, Odin’s eight-legged coffin-horse, in which
The gods learned that Loki was willing to fuck even himself,
if it was to his advantage.
All of this feels very relevant to me right now. I happened across a few little pieces of paper in my sock drawer, all that I have left of my older brother, who killed himself2 a dozen years ago and more. There was a contact list with my name on it, and my phone number, though he preferred to write letters. On the back was a list of bank balances from a couple years before.
He had been laid off, which probably did precipitate his action in some way. That’s not what killed him, though, not really. Like Thor and Loki both, he hated our father. Where my sister argued with Dad, and my younger brother stayed to run the farm, and I just left to live my own life, my older bother moved in a sort of decaying orbit — leaving for periods of time, but sooner or later, by decision and circumstance, spiraling back and splashing down. In family dynamics theory, they call that a failure to launch. He and Dad blamed each other for those mishaps. He wouldn’t let go of that hatred. He swallowed it, and it poisoned him, long before he finished the job with cheap wine3 mixed with something more immediately deadly4.
My brother left a will with specific instructions, but as it was scrawled on notebook paper and not notarized, our father felt free to ignore it. I spent most of the week of my brother’s funeral in a state of dissociated numbness. I did not push back against the violations of his will, and I have always felt guilty about it. But as Loki said,
Hoenir will woo you with woe and regret.
He will offer absolution.
But you cannot alter what is already done.
Coincidentally (or synchronistically) about a week later I got a letter from a lawyer in Kentucky, asking me to sign a waiver of my rights to my mother’s estate, sight unseen. I should have received an inventory of those assets, but for some reason I had not, and this made me angry. Into this turbid pool of emotions dropped Twilight of the Gods like a blood-splashed stone. I watched one episode a day, as medicine, while my mind tumbled scenarios and strategies, ultimatums and dramatic speeches.
So, thank you, Zack Snyder, and Hans Zimmer5 (who did the music), and all the actors and Vietnamese animators, for showing me how not to handle my family affairs.
In that spirit of Ragnarok, here’s a little bit of unsold fiction, just in time for Season 9 of the Lunar Awards. As a little boost to them, I include a link to The Sample, an automated newsletter referral service.
Enjoy.
Odin and the Futhark
by Randall Hayes
Odin hung from Yggdrasil, the World Tree, pinned in place by his own spear. Sacrificing himself to himself had seemed clever at the time, the kind of closed loop that drove the skalds to distraction, trying to make sense of it, to solve it, and that fed his legend. But this was day nine of Odin’s blood watering the roots of this monstrous ash, and his head was spinning with its loss. The broad blade of the spear driven through his belly pushed up on his innards, made breathing against his own weight difficult.
Blood trickled down the rough bark of the ancient ash in complicated patterns — branching, beading, curving, congealing. Odin stared at them. They seemed pretty but pointless, like the cracks in burnt bones that the dying ones of Midgard used to spy the future.
Odin’s gaze followed one iron-rich thread down to the roots, and then inside them, below the ground where they connected the nine worlds. He realized that the roots branched like the limbs above, like his fingers branched off his hands, like veins branched under his skin. He was shocked; the tree grew only from its tips, out of its past and into its future. Each node of a branch, each ring of the trunk, was like a kenning, a phrase in an epic poem. Memories of choices made and dooms fulfilled, different in each realm it touched. The same roots wove different patterns on the loom of Fate.
It wasn’t the individual roots that mattered. It was the patterns, and the patterns within patterns! Looking backwards was looking forwards, when events repeated as seasons did. Memory was prophecy. Those with longer memories could look further into the future. Odin’s ravens Thought and Memory were ill-named, in that way. They flew far and fast, bringing news, but only what they saw or heard in that moment.
Odin blinked his dry eyes back to the present and looked down again at the branching blood-patterns on the trunk. Where it had been, where it was likely to go. This was a record of the past nine days. He began sketching small pieces of the pattern with his fingers, dipping them in his blood. He named them Pain and Thirst and Spear and Tree and Blood and Squirrel, and so on until he ran out of patterns.
This would not work. He needed patterns within patterns. Threads that could be woven into cloth that could be cut and sewn. And then he had it. He could arrange his blood-runes in groups that would mean different things. He could name anything.
Odin drew on the ash haft of the spear, as he wrote, Gungnir, Out, and tumbled to the ground as it came loose from the trunk. Wound, Heal worked just as well, except that it stanched the blood-flow. He would have to find something else to write with, but that was easy. Right now he needed some water to cool his parched throat …
Snyder borrows other Homeric tropes, like swift-footed Achilles dragging Hector’s dead body behind his chariot.
This “scientific obituary” recounts that story for IGMS, and muses (more Greek!) not on the combinatorial properties of language as the story above does, but on the ambiguity of words as compared to numbers, and how that relates to prophecy / prediction.
I think it’s one of the better pieces I’ve ever written.
“Riunite on ice — is nice.” I remember Orson Welles saying those words. But it’s not true. Welles shilled for Paul Masson, and Vivitar cameras, and G&G whiskey, and Nashua photocopiers, but not Riunite.
He would have made a great Odin, don’t you think? Too fat, maybe.
Probably antifireeze, though I don’t really know. I never had a chance to read the toxicology report.
and who I clearly had confused with Harold Faltermeyer, because this has been playing in my head all week.