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Date Posted: 22:27:18 10/10/05 Mon
Author: fresne
Subject: Sleep to weave the raveled sleeve of care (Spoilers Serenity)

Ravel. Unravel.

I don’t know how many of you sew…have ever run your fingers across the weave and the fraying edge. Watched a garment come undone as threads pulled away. Perhaps it’s the pyromaniac in me, but my favorite method to bind a frayed edge is a match. The edges curl and fuse and bind. Well, that or don’t let things fall apart.


The Alliance aims to make a garment. A corset of steel and bones and hidden seams. Fray checked. Bound with a chord.

The Operative, nameless, soft spoken. Some hidden tailor, killing three with one blow. A juggernaught. Naught. Self choosing golem. Given if not a number, then certainly thrown away his name. A believer. Building better worlds. All of them. Bringing civilization to the frayed edges. Weaving fabric with the point of a sword.

And if some parts of the fabric are cut, so to they must be to create the garment.

He knows that what he does is monstrous, that he will never enter the land of milk and honey, but he does not comprehend. His eyes are too dazzled by the glory of what he sees. He thinks he's trading an eye for wisdom, enabling some promised land, but in the end, he's Saul on the road to Damascus. He's Daedalus watching blinding Icarus wheel to the sun. Having given away his name, he is nothing and no one. Having cast stones at sin, he sits bleeding in a shattered glass house. An empty husk of which nothing remains to see. Left to rattle in the wind.

Breath. Words.

And the hot house air blooms out into the glare of the too bright sun.

Clean. Spare. Antiseptic. Dead.

The Alliance doth murder sleep. Children. Dreams.

As the somnambulant public lies not dead, but sleeping and the puppet theater plays on.

There is the truth that history goes to hide and there is the truth of the signal. That lone thread of life. Faint. Fractured. Sleeping.

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
When he himself might his quietus make.

A bullet to the brain pan. Squish.

And they all lay down.

Stopped breeding and eating and being.

No longer kings of infinite space, the black. Not suffering bad dreams.

Except the Reavers. They never lay down. Their sleeves of care unraveled and frayed at the edges as they sliced at their own flesh. Perhaps to know they’re alive. To let the pain pearl to the surface of the skin, rather than five full fathoms lie. Lie in the words unspoken. Screamed. The constant screech of their space as they tear things, themselves, apart. As they devour the flesh of their own kind, perhaps in the hopes of becoming what they consume. Destroying what they were. Making themselves a desecration of humanity. If anyone would acknowledge that they are/were human and not some stray dogs (not wolves, but feral animals) kicked from the car and left to roam some cold graveyard.

Roaring like Caliban on his beach, as Ariel obediently weaves fantasies. As Miranda, the magician's daughter, lies down in the dreams her father creates.

Reavers. Rift of self.

River. Riven from self and home.

The first time we see River, she’s a girl in a box. Asleep. Sleeping Beauty. Snow White. Not wakened with a kiss, but huh and cold. Shivering, coughing up the poisoned apple pip and held to be reminded of love. Her brother, Simon, for the saint who hears. The message in the bottle. The jokes they never made. The parties they never went to.

Is he speaking to Miranda? No, of course not. It's not that simple.

Because River understands, but she does not comprehend. She isn't blinded by the light of conviction. Like leaf Wash, like Simon who never planned, like Mal, she’s rudderless so that if the wind blows north, she goes northerly.

Adrift.

Dreaming.

Waking.

Aye, there's the rub.

There's voices in her head not her own. Horrors that she did not create. Old men drowning the water girl in blood. Blood thicker than water.

Dreaming, the Alliance created her. Cut away to suggest. Control. Bind.

And yet, there’s love alight, thicker than blood.

The episode Ariel ends with River afraid that her brother will put her to sleep again, that sleep of false death as he tells her that it is time to wake up. And he so wants and with tricks he tries.

But not yet. In the series, the alarm had not yet rung. The somnambulant sleep. Or perhaps it was merely that River could no longer perceive the difference between the waking and the sleeping. They merged, as they will when too long awake. When in a waking dream.

As Delight becomes Delirium, in a less innocent age of the world.

Is she a child in a classroom, a young woman being freed by her brother, an illusion of light for a nameless man to muse upon? The riddle of a labyrinth onion. A Venn diagram. The weapon and the girl. The bloodied Albatross. Good fortune and weight.

Water, water every where, but not a drop to drink.

Oceans and rivers. Helpless girls and superheroes.

If I go crazy, will you still call me Superman.
If I’m alive and well, will you still be there, a holdin’ my hand.

And perhaps it’s just me, but I find it amusing that the images that are playing in smashed to stop loop, when Mr. Universe is talking to the Operative, is a clip from the 1930s Fleisher Superman cartoons. A mad scientist creates robots that ravage Metropolis. A giant lizard crashes across the cityscape. Lois Lane’s face, symbolizing, if anything. a heedless quest for the truth, from some wisecracking Girl Friday world of protecting the little guy. The dinosaur mindless destroys. The girl reporter pursues. Clark Kent runs across frame to change his clothes. But Superman never arrives.

Serenity isn’t that sort of world. The Alliance doesn’t perceive itself an evil empire. Mal doesn’t imagine himself the plucky hero and that is not incense raising a prayer to heaven. Dear Buddha, please bring me a pony.

And the Alliance isn’t really an evil empire with a cackling emperor Ming. Merciless. It’s not Lucretia’s despoiled virtue, falling on a sword with exhortation. It’s old men drowning in blood, but they don’t see it. It’s raveled sleep and not caring. It’s the truth that won’t unfold its steps. Hard to get to, that’s the truth.

It’s a word. Like God or Belief or Shepherd or Empire or Love are a word. Words. Breath. Dreams. And the princess falls to the ground. Well, she would be tired.

Miranda does not choose. Prospero speaks his words and she sleeps.

In the end, River chooses. It is her turn to keep her brother safe. Simon Magus has lost his bag of trick. So she chooses to become the whirling dervish. One arm up. One arm down. Like the Magician tarot. To become Shiva, in whose destructive dance the world will be reborn. The whirlwind. And yet, for all that she's whirl and the wind, she is not a machine. Not a Reaver. She's thrown against the wall and looks startled as the grapple pierces the wall.

The salvation at the end isn’t that the Operative, the Nameless One is converted, it’s that he speaks and River doesn’t become him.

To defeat the Reavers was I think a necessity for River’s cleansing of the burn in her mind. So, too was it necessary not to destroy the Alliance troops. More innocent, but in this case un-scorched and un-frayed. Not needing the world-wind, world-serpent devour, but stand down.

Blood drips off the blade and away and Serenity is rebuilt. Battered. Suffering firecrackers and stone of loss. As dream separate from night and its elder sister death.

The albatross aloft on the wind. Not a dead weight around a mariner’s neck, but light as a feather. The hope of the world. Pass through the storm, even if some bits will do fall away.

The midsummer night dream as soon as mended, for we did but slumber here, dreaming not of smart, but of the love that holds the world together and moves the sun, the moon, the stars, the verse.

Verse.

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