So I promised some friends I would write them love letters.
Actually, I promised to write this story I have an idea for but haven’t started writing yet. They’re all really excited about it because we’re anthro majors and it’s a fictional ethnography which basically means some theoretically justified science fiction / fantasy. But I’m calling them love letters because I wouldn’t write anything on my own. I’m doing it out of this odd compulsion… it’s almost like… could it be? Peer pressure? Mm, let’s call it love, to be polite.
You people had damn well better leave comments. Adoration, scathing criticism, I don’t care! write something! pull in theories; I want to know what you think. I’m going to be fleshing out, drafting, being deliciously tentative and imperfect and unclear, and – yes - fuzzy (as Amanda and Emma would say).
So here we go.
Working Title: Behind the Knotted Veil: Life, Love, and Liminality among the _______
The blank is because I don’t know what these people would call themselves yet.
Description:
A collection of four stories interspersed with critical explication (I love fancy words), on the topic of marriage as practiced by the Bluff People. It would probably be shelved in a bookstore as “fantasy” due to the use of alternate physics in the world that the bluff people inhabit (along with many other cultures, whom we may meet eventually). It’s magic, based on kinetic energy, so you use movements to cast a spell. As of the time the fictional ethnographer would have stayed with the Bluff People, they probably didn’t use it for much outside of household tasks. Later on in their history they would develop industry based around this kinetic magic… but that’s a different story.
So here’s a bit about the Bluff People as of the time of the story. This is mostly copy-pasted from a description of an assignment for digital art class.
They live on fantastically tall, isolated mesas, and communicate by messengers who travel by hang glider. They don’t usually travel down the mesas because, firstly, it’s a long way down and there’s not always a safe route and they don’t have readily available metals to put pinions and footholds in the steep parts; secondly, the bases are buried in a thick mist that covers a deadly (but potentially lucrative) bog… and further out from land it’s just mist. Their origin stories speak of a time when they lived among rushing river valleys and carven mountains somewhere to the west, but they’ve been adjusted to life on the mesas for many generations at this point.
The Bluff People’s initial method of encoding spoken language was to knot leather scraps in distinctive ways to represent words. These could be tied onto the messengers’ clothing and read while the messenger was still recovering from the wind and cold exposure from flying so high. Eventually the Bluff People invented a paper equivalent and used that to write instead, though their glyphs are still reminiscent of knots. However, the leather knotting tradition lives on as a decorative art. One of the purposes is to decorate those about to be married. The partners in a marriage are called the “windblown” and “pillar” partners instead of “bride” and “groom”. These two roles are not strongly connected to gender identity. The windblown partner can also be called “seed”, referencing the fact that most plants that grow on these mesas depend on wind for seed dispersal, and by analogy the “pillar” can be called “earth”.
Matches will often be made for alliance and trade. The partner deemed more dominant, wealthy, or important to their family will be the pillar and set up a new household on their home mesa. The windblown partner is uprooted from their family and travels (often their first time making a long-distance journey) to the pillar’s home. They go through a transition period for a few weeks to up to 3 months (equivalent time; their calendar is different). During this period the windblown wears a decorative veil provided by the pillar’s family over the upper half of their face. This veil is delicately knotted thin leather strips (thinner than shoelaces), and its oldest parts are often an historically important message carried by a family ancestor, and incorporating the family motto. There is only one veil, so there can only be one windblown marrying into the family at a time.
During the liminal period the windblown may only speak using words knotted into the veil. This is viewed as part of the process of becoming a member of the pillar family. Like Chinese and Japanese script, each knot/glyph may represent more than one word; additionally there may be an archaic word that the glyph used to represent but is no longer in common use. A creative windblown may thus have a vocabulary of hundreds of words from a single knotted one foot square… but it’s still rather limiting and often has the effect of forcing the windblown into a submissive power dynamic. It is also the job of the pillar family to get to know the windblown despite these restrictions, so questions and answers during this period may often be cryptic and poetic. The pillar family may have annals that describe clever responses from past windblowns who have married in; thus a history of codes arises which it is the windblown’s task to learn if they are to assimilate successfully.
On larger mesas windblowns marrying into different families may live together in a “blown-over/blown-together house”, also known in some areas as a “seed bramble”. This reinforces their liminal status before they join their new families, but often also creates community between the individuals staying there at a given time. Friendships formed in the blown-over house may be strong and last the rest of an individual’s life, but have also been the seeds of intra-mesa drama.
