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The usefulness of vertigo
Sep. 26th, 2004 01:45 pmI had a cool idea this week: ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kijjohnson has been posting, periodically, that she has been suffering from vertigo. I have had it myself a few times. It's dizziness, of course, but what I particularly remember about it is that perception of angles is bothersome. I feel hyper-aware of how I perceive shapes and angles; everything which ordinarily seems comfortingly present and solid seems oddly off-kilter. So anyway, here's the idea: in Tim Powers' Fisher King trilogy, his characters experience what they call "bar-time" when magical events start happening, or if, for lack of a better term, they enter a magical field. What happens is that they know something is going to happen a split second before it actually happens; ergo, you pick up the phone because you know it's going to ring, and somebody's on the line.
Winter magic is about the solid, summer magic is about the spaces in between. So what I thought is that when Solveig the architect is experiencing something like this, a sense that magical "stuff" is going to happen, she perceives it as "vertigo." Angles seems peculiar, and she has difficulty walking down a straight corridor without running her hand along the wall to keep her oriented. Of course, as an architect, it would both weirdly affect her perceptions in her chosen field and, simultaneously, drive her mad. it also works because vertigo is a mysterious condition, which comes and goes with absolutely no warning and no explanation. It simultaneously warns her ("weird stuff is going to happen") and handicaps her.
Anyway, I was pretty proud of that and I'm going to use it.
Another detail realized this week: Agnes, the putative putative summer magic expert (she's a summer queen, an ex-Princess Kay of the Milky Way) has a bird feeder in her back yard. Fish are the magical totem animal for winter magic, and birds for summer magic.
kijjohnson has been posting, periodically, that she has been suffering from vertigo. I have had it myself a few times. It's dizziness, of course, but what I particularly remember about it is that perception of angles is bothersome. I feel hyper-aware of how I perceive shapes and angles; everything which ordinarily seems comfortingly present and solid seems oddly off-kilter. So anyway, here's the idea: in Tim Powers' Fisher King trilogy, his characters experience what they call "bar-time" when magical events start happening, or if, for lack of a better term, they enter a magical field. What happens is that they know something is going to happen a split second before it actually happens; ergo, you pick up the phone because you know it's going to ring, and somebody's on the line.Winter magic is about the solid, summer magic is about the spaces in between. So what I thought is that when Solveig the architect is experiencing something like this, a sense that magical "stuff" is going to happen, she perceives it as "vertigo." Angles seems peculiar, and she has difficulty walking down a straight corridor without running her hand along the wall to keep her oriented. Of course, as an architect, it would both weirdly affect her perceptions in her chosen field and, simultaneously, drive her mad. it also works because vertigo is a mysterious condition, which comes and goes with absolutely no warning and no explanation. It simultaneously warns her ("weird stuff is going to happen") and handicaps her.
Anyway, I was pretty proud of that and I'm going to use it.
Another detail realized this week: Agnes, the putative putative summer magic expert (she's a summer queen, an ex-Princess Kay of the Milky Way) has a bird feeder in her back yard. Fish are the magical totem animal for winter magic, and birds for summer magic.