lensblog

Hmmm? What is a “thought branch”? To me, it’s the phrase I use to describe the way I seem to think sometimes and have observed others doing so as well.

The basic idea is that you start of with a single branch, or idea and while discussing or investigating it, you find similar related subjects and begin exploring and discussing them. These in turn have their own related subjects and so you can potentially veer off the path of your original discussion or investigation, following the branches where your interest takes you.

To give you an idea, something I sat back and looked back at recently while discussing books about folklore with Rozz:

1992 or 1993 (I can’t remember anymore) – A school play, working with Craig and Stuart doing backstage lighting and music, if I recall. Craig was playing a cassette with Enya‘s Shepherd Moons on. I fell in love with the music (having only ever seen the video for Orinoco Flow on Good Morning South Africa as I was getting ready for school in the mornings) and started collecting all of Enya’s music that had been released til then, getting it as birthday presents, etc.

Somewhere along the line I remember getting into an argument with my next door neighbour, Michael, one night when he was visiting (I think my folks and his were at a parents-teachers evening at our respective schools), as I was playing my Enya CD’s on my hi-fi and he asked me to turn it off, as being of a particularly intolerant religion that is rather peculiar in their beliefs, he could not listen to music sung in a tongue he could not understand, in case the lyrics were meant to subvert him and steer him off the path he was on. Oddly enough, the song at the time was ‘Angeles‘ and I explained to him that she was singing about angels, to which he responded that she may be singing about fallen angels or rather devils.

I then took it upon myself to go and translate the lyrics of all the CD’s to prove a point to Michael that there was nothing sinister about her music and in between sitting over 200-year old gaelic- and welsh-to-english dictionaries, I started exploring a) the irish- and scottish-gaelic language and b) the folklore of the gaelic people, especially after the re-release of Enya’s album “The Celts”.

This led me to read about the Celts, celtic history and mythology, to search for books such as the Mabinogion and discover some of my most loved characters in myth and legend. These led me to explore some more fiction author’s works (I was a school librarian then) and found many variations of the Arthurian legends, which, up until then, I had only really read briefly here and there.

That lead me to read “The Mists of Avalon“, by Marion Zimmer Bradley. “The Mists of Avalon” in turn reminded me about Morgana le Fay, or Morgaine as she is known in the book.

That book and the others before it, led me to look into druidic lore and teachings, which taught me about the various deities, one of them being Cernunnos, the Horned God, otherwise known as Herne the Hunter. That in turn, helped catch my attention while wandering through a bookstore one day where I saw the cover for “Greenmantle“, by Charles de Lint.

de Lint’s books grabbed me and I read everything I could get my hands on by him, enjoying titles such as “Someplace To Be Flying”, “Yarrow”, “Forests of the Heart”, etc. “Forests of the Heart” got me reading up about the Greenman.

The Greenman is linked to Cernunnos again, as well as unlikely figures such as Peter Pan, the earliest renditions of Father Christmas, Robin Hood, Robin Goodfellow, Puck and the Green Knight. The Green Knight leads back to the Arthurian legends and books like “The Once and Future King”.

“Yarrow” introduced the concept of energy-vampires, leading me to research more about vampires than is classically portrayed in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This led me to buy books on vampirism that showed a variety of vampire-like stories from pretty much every cultural group today.

Interestingly enough, every culture shares at least two stories… one is The Great Flood and the other is vampires.

Browsing through a second-hand bookstore one day, I saw CJ Cherryh’s Chronicles of Morgaine. I bought it and read it right through, finding it to be a very enjoyable book, describing Morgaine, in essense, as a figure striding across many worlds, appearing here and there in different stories and myths as she goes about her tasks.

Reading through CJ Cherryh’s list of books, I came across “Rusalka“. The word ‘rusalka‘ reminded me of playing Sierra’s Hero’s Quest IV where you as the intrepid bungling hero are stuck in a medieval town where a good many things go bump in the night… in one scene you walk out to a lake and a young woman is in the water, calling to you. If you go into the water, you die by her hands, so talking is about all you really can do with her. We won’t mention the run-ins with the vampiric bunnies though…

So I went out and found a copy and loved the book and it’s concept of wish magic, and discovered yet another entity to research… the “Vodyanoy“, which reminded me of another character in a book, where the author combined a Grendel-like character and something akin to a vodyanoi into a grotesque being called the Fisher King.

I later found the vodyanoi again in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag novels, where the Vodyanoi are an aquatic people skilled in water magics. In Miéville’s “Perdido Street Station“, striking Vodyanoi dockworkers use their water magic to blockade a shipping route.

More recently, the movie, Night Watch, caught my eye and I began researching it a bit more, only recently finding an english version of the books by Sergey Lukyanenko, which means I have some more reading to do.

Another recent study of mine, is about the kabbalistic lore around golems and the lore used to bring them to life and return them to stasis, inspired by two unrelated events… One, playing “Vampire: The Redeption” PC Game and the other, watching “Ghost in the Shell II : Innocence“.

The golem in turn leads back, or rather, on to, such stories as Frankenstein and other avenues of research about creating life such as the experiment by the alchemist Paracelsus with homunculi…

Ok, so after that long-winded story, what is the core of my post?

The main branch shown here is a love of mythology. The branches off that branch that I’ve chosen to follow are a love of celtic and later slavic folklore and mythology. Subbranches of that are vampirism and lycanthropy, fueled by my own roleplaying research. Gaming, music, reading fiction, etc have all had their impact as well, steering my interests at the time down certain paths.

And it all started with some music… (Thanks Craig, it’s all your fault!)

Amazing how something so small can open up a world of opportunities to discover…

Today, the Internet is a vast playground for this sort of exploration of knowledge. And tools like Wikipedia (and Google) make it that much easier, with linked topics, reference sites and all sorts of other avenues of investigation.

I can lose myself out in the ‘Net very easily. Just give me the bandwidth to explore, an unlimited data cap and a topic and let me be…

Sometimes I wish I could just plug in directly and travel the ‘Net behind closed eyes as my body rests and explore.

There is so much out there and so little time to discover it.