What Seems Them

The Cult of the Raven King, part 4

Note: This is the fourth full piece (or fifth if you count the interlude) in this series. These can each be read separately, but they’ll make much more sense in order.

I.

There’s a recurring experience in dreams I have in which I’m overhearing a conversation. Two or sometimes more people are talking, discussing some question or matter of great importance. As with listening to a conversation in a foreign language you’re only beginning to learn, I can only understand bits of what’s being said. I’ll catch a few words here or there, sometimes an entire phrase, but never the full meaning of their discussions. Also, as with listening to speakers in an only partially understood language, I get a sense of the general mood and can judge by the cadence and tones how serious, or intimate, or urgent the matters being discussed are.

What’s strangest about these dreams is that I’m being talked about, negotiated over, and advocated for. The feeling’s a bit like being a child and overhearing one of your parents discuss complicated matters about your health with a doctor or your education with a teacher. It’s also a bit like when my husband is speaking Letzebuergesch to some administrator or worker here on my behalf, using the native language I barely understand to get me a better deal on some purchase or a quicker resolution to some bureaucratic problem.

In other words, one of the participants in the conversation is always acting on my behalf, defending my best interests, and bargaining hard for my benefit. But, like an ambassador or a business negotiator, sometimes things are discussed about me out of earshot, things I’d never willingly divulge nor immediately consent to reveal.

That seems to be the reason why I’m not actually privy to what’s being said. My advocate needs me not to be fully involved in order for the deals being made to actually succeed. Were I directly participating in these conversations, I’d likely overreact in some way, missing the subtleties of high-level diplomatic negotiations, and even perhaps get quite offended by what’s being said about me.

These dreams recur not so frequently that I can predict when one will happen, but often enough that I can expect another will soon arrive when it’s been awhile since the last. The mornings after they occur, I wake both frustrated and calmed.¹ I’m a bit agitated not knowing what precisely’s been said, but also reassured that someone better skilled in such things took on such work for me.

What actually happens, though? I don’t know.

II.

I only know what it seems.

“Seems” comes from old Norse, I’m told. The word was once soema, meaning first “honorable” and “befitting.” It’s easiest to see where it became what we mean by it now by looking at a parallel word, “seemly.” In old Norse, that was soemleitr, meaning a person or a thing fine to look upon because of its honorable nature.

Something that seems fits, like well made clothing that honors the shape of the body. A tight-fit t-shirt on a well-worked torso gives honor to the muscles beneath it, just as well-cut hair honors the shape of the face. There is thus an art and a great responsibility in seeming, creating an explanation which befits and gives honor to the events which actually are.

The seeming of these discussions is as I’ve described them. It’s the explanation which most fits and most honors the conversations, the best description I can craft for what I experience only in fragmented post-dream memories.

Sometimes, it seems a woman is speaking on my behalf, someone who seems to be an ancestral spirit.² Other times, it seems an old man is my advocate,³ someone who is me later or is me before. There are others too, those I cannot quite easily describe in ways sufficient to honor them. These are very, very old, and very unlike the human parts of me. One seems to be an animal, another a warrior skilled in and comfortable with great, world-ending violence.

And they all know me, often better than I know them. Sometimes, they seem to be a war council, at other times mutual friends who know each other through me. Sometimes, they seem to be family, related to each other not by blood but by marriage, distant branches on the tree of my soul.

But again, this is only their seeming. These descriptions fit and give honor to them, but my words do not tell you who they actually are.

And I never really know what they’re actually up to.