This Really Makes Me Think. I Always Thought Ofhark As A Bit Likepay Attention. And I Notice That Is

This really makes me think. I always thought of ‘hark’ as a bit like ‘pay attention’.  And I notice that is all these moments someone was paying attention to who Harrow truly was, not how they perceived her to be. 

okay. so i grew up in a church, i heard the word “hark” in the context of a sentence/bible verse/hymn lyric more times than i can remember, my instinctive reaction to “hark” is that an important announcement is about to be made, “hark! the herald angels sing!” blah blah blah. you don’t really have to know the literal definition of hark is “listen” to get the gist. i assumed that tacking on “hark” to two necromantic heirs of the ninth house (priamhark, and harrowhark who’s “hark” was meant to specifically reference her father) was supposed to indicate deep importance, which i’m sure is still part of it, but a few weeks ago i bought the paperback version of gideon the ninth and all its bonus material glory and read about harrow’s name:

‘“Hark” is one of those terrible, portentous words that always preceded an awful time, in the old sense of “awe.” Hark! A herald angel. Hark! From the tombs, a doleful sound.’

so for its usage in the locked tomb, “hark” is meant to specifically draw attention to something bad and/or disturbing. palamedes i believe is the only person to actually use hark as a word rather than a name, and when it’s only usage between two books is to emphasize his fear at camilla - dear cousin, best friend, and cavalier - being injured instead of its normal and literal definition, it’s easy to accept the definition of the word having more negative than neutral connotations in-universe. now to harrow, though.

i noticed like a week after finishing harrow the ninth, in harrow’s final climactic moment she is referred to as “harrow nonagesimus” instead of “harrowHARK nonagesimus”, which struck me as odd. i knew for a fact that she’d been referred to as harrowHARK nonagesimus multiple times throughout both books, usually to put a particular sense of drama into a moment, and at the moment i couldn’t quite place just “harrow nonagesimus” happening any other time than at the end of harrow the ninth (it does- i’ll get to that in a minute), and was like well. with how much thought tamsyn muir appears to have put into the names of all her characters, that feels like it should mean something. so i started rolling with that idea not really sure where to go with it, i did a quick once over of harrow the ninth again to see if “harrow nonagesimus” happened anywhere else in that book, and it didn’t. i also took note of chapter 3 opening with an explanation and brief history behind harrow’s name, and also the “harrow nova” chapter when it’s said that crux is the only person to still include the -hark in her name. like, all that fully convinced me that there was no way the specific ways harrow’s (full) name was used wasn’t important. so i let that bother me a lot for a couple more weeks and then i cracked and decided to reread both books again.

in rereading gideon the ninth i saw that harrow had in fact been referred to as “harrow nonagesimus” a grand total of seven times before the end of harrow the ninth, making it 8 times total. with the previous 7 all occurring in gideon the ninth though that just made me more obsessive over the idea that It Has To Mean Something But I’m Not Quite Sure What.

so i tried to see if there was something all those instances had in common with each other. and the answer there is..... maybe. if you think about it. you might have to squint a little. but i think there’s something there. and let me clarify, harrow is referred to as “harrowHARK nonagesimus” 13 times in gideon the ninth, and 7 times in harrow the ninth. i don’t actually think the usage of -hark in her name is supposed to mean something as much as the deliberate absence of it is. so going off of that, the deliberate absence of the -hark in her name happens whenever gideon has a specific image of harrow in her head, or the formerly cemented idea of a terrible and unchanging harrow is forcibly adjusted in gideon’s mind.

most of the examples in question, just to try and demonstrate so i don’t sound like a lunatic:

‘No murder, sorrow, or fear could ever touch Harrow Nonagesimus. Her tired eyes were alight. A lot of her paint had peeled away or been sweated off down in the facility, and the whole left side of her jaw was just grey-tinted skin. A hint of her humanity peeked through. She had such a peculiarly pointed little face, high browed and tippy everywhere, and a slanted and vicious mouth. She said irascibly, “At the key, moron, not at me.”’ (Chapter 19, pages 202-203)

‘When she opened her eyes again there was a dazzling moment of clarity and sharpness. Harrow Nonagesimus was kneeling by her side, naked as the day she was spawned. [...] Without paint she was a point-chinned, narrow jawed, ferretty person, with high hard cheekbones and a tall forehead. There was a little divot in her top lip at the philtrum, which gave a bowlike aspect to her otherwise hard and fearless mouth.’ (Chapter 20, page 228)

it’s mentioned previously that in all their lives, gideon had never seen harrow without her face paint on. in both of these examples gideon is able to partially or fully see through that mask, and LITERALLY has to reassess the image of harrow she has in her head, because she had not truly known what harrow looked like before now.

‘She had to get her to safety. Gideon wanted her longsword and she wanted Harrow. [...]

There was absolutely nothing Gideon could say to this. She needed more firepower than bookcases and antiques. What she badly needed was Harrow Nonagesimus, for whom a gigantic construction of bones would be more fun opportunity than hellish monstrosity, and she needed her longsword.’ (Chapter 25, pages 284, 285-286)

‘And Harrow, telling her to wake up. That had only been the once: the Ninth necromancer sitting in the dark, wrapped in a mouldering duvet like a cloak, her face very naked and blank and shorn of its monochrome skull mural. [...] There had been something very weary and soft about the way that Harrow Nonagesimus had looked at her then, something that would have been understanding had it not been so tired and cynical.

“It’s just me,” she’d said impatiently. “Go back to sleep.”

All signs pointed toward hallucination.’ (Chapter 26, page 300)

in the first of these two examples, gideon is forced to adjust that ‘image’ of harrow again by admitting not only a need, but a WANT for harrow as well. the second one sees harrow actually showing up for gideon for a moment, pulling her out of a nightmare, but gideon is so exhausted that she falls back on her old perceptions of harrow instead of acknowledging that the action and its meaning were real at all.

‘Gideon put her arms around Harrowhark. She lifted her up off the ground just an inch and squeezed her in an enormous hug before either she or Harrow knew what she was about. Her necromancer felt absurdly light in her grip, like a bag of bird’s bones. She had always thought—when she bothered to think—that Harrow would feel cold, as everything in the Ninth felt cold. No, Harrow Nonagesimus was feverishly hot. Well, you couldn’t think that amount of ghastly thoughts without generating energy. Hang on, what the hell was she doing.’

“Thanks for backing me up, my midnight hagette,” said Gideon, placing her back down. Harrow had not struggled, but gone limp, like a prey animal feigning death.’ (Chapter 24, page 275)

‘Gideon braced her shoulders against the weight of what she was about to do. She shed eighteen years of living in the dark with a bunch of bad nuns. In the end her job was surprisingly easy; she wrapped her arms around Harrow Nonagesimus and held her long and hard, like a scream. They both went into the water, and the world went dark and salty. The Reverend Daughter fell calm and limp, as was natural for one being ritually drowned, but when she realised that she was being hugged she thrashed as though her fingernails were being ripped from their beds. Gideon did not let go.’ (Chapter 31, page 356)

these two (my personal favorites) i think it’s pretty easy to call out the change happening here, the blatant and willing and intentional displays of affection. gideon of old never would have granted such a thing to harrow, but their whole relationship is different now, and her actions in these two acknowledge that no matter whether gideon is actually willing to admit it or not.

but i still couldn’t figure out what that MEANT. in the presence of all those changes, why does the absence of “hark” appear to hold so much significance? and that’s when i realized i had just been thinking about “hark” in the context of a name, not a word, and certainly not in the context of what that word means in universe. a predecessor to ‘an awful time’. by taking out the “hark” in “harrowhark nonagesimus”, she is removing the impending doom from her. this is why i think the book is also named “harrow the ninth” instead of “harrowHARK the ninth”, because if anything harrow the ninth is about harrow’s stupid stubborn resilience in the face of her doom, her ridiculous determination to make things go her way. it’s hopeful.

which brings me to the final (for now?) occurrence of “harrow nonagesimus”, in harrow the ninth:

‘Harrowhark found herself asking distantly, “Why did you tell me?”

That rueful smile again, like the shadow of old joy.

“Because I wanted you to know all the truth,” said the dead daughter of the Seventh. “The whole, unpackaged, slipshod truth. Truth unvarnished and truth unclean. Pal and I were always zealots, in that line. I got told so many lies over my life, Harrowhark, and I didn’t want to go back into the River having myself committed the murder of the white lie. Please understand, I’m being selfish. But I wanted you to know.”

When she looked into Harrow’s face again, and how it had changed, she said simply: “I’m sorry.”

“There’s a difference between keeping a shred of dance card,” said Harrow Nonagesimus, “and saving the last dance.”

[...]

Harrow’s heart was beating as though it never had before. She thought it could not beat in truth; she was her own dream, and her heart’s whirring simply another fantasy of the subconscious. But nevertheless, it hammered, hard.

She said aloud, “No. I’m getting out of here.”’ (Chapter 53, pages 501-502)

i’ve talked before about the real difference between, as harrow says, saving a shred of dance card and saving the last dance, is that the first is passive and mournful. you save that shred of dance card because you fully believe and accept you will never have anything else, and you don’t feel you have the right to ask for or reach for or keep anything else. but saving the last dance is active, it’s sheer perseverance, it’s being willing to throw everything away on the small hope, or even the knowledge, that one day you will be reunited. the usage of “harrow nonagesimus” in place of “harrowhark nonagesimus” here just shows so much to me how much harrow has grown and changed not only in gideon’s minds eye, but in her own person as well, and is honestly one of the biggest reasons i’ll be going into alecto the ninth more hopeful than anything. i mean, if harrow is, why shouldn’t we all be?

🎶 I see the moon and the moon sees me 🎶 

Me: “Oh, hello moon.”

Moon: *Lingers*

Me: *sighs longingly* “Not going to lie to you moon, legit a quarter of my desire to be a werewolf is that I can spend dark nights together with you.”

Does anyone else feel an intense, soothing sense of recognition and peace when they look at the moon? Or is my brain being weird?

Gideon The Ninth

*Warning: light spoilers for Gideon The Ninth*

*Really, no more than you’d get in an average review because I’m only half done it.*

Reading Gideon The Ninth is like being enticed out to dinner with Necromancer aesthetic and *wiggles eyebrows* lesbians. Only to figure out halfway through dinner that this is, in fact, a murder mystery dinner theatre.  While everyone else was putting clues together you were contemplating what the door prize in the locked tomb at the entrance was. Now you’re wondering if there even is a door prize and feeling really dumb that you didn’t know why those random people stood up and loudly declared their names once everyone was seated.

“but you privately see your idealized gender goals as “has a sword and a sense of dignity and a Quest””

... is that not how idealized gender goals are supposed to work? Because that sounds amazing.

[hand hovers over crystal ball] when you were a tween you got really into Arthuriana and you thought the aesthetic idea of questing knights was really cool but the religious and patriarchal aspects of medieval chivalry bothered you so you coped through swords and sorcery fantasy fiction and went through an obligatory phase where you looked into Wicca but discovered that it had no appeal to you and for a while you wanted to change your name to Rowan because it was earthy and gender-neutral but when you got older you decided against it and either kept your original name or switched to something ambiguous or masculine of center and maybe you described yourself as butch or non-binary or trans but you privately see your idealized gender goals as “has a sword and a sense of dignity and a Quest” which doesn’t make any sense really but as an adult you channeled your misplaced knight errant fantasies into a passion for environmental justice or ecology or wildlife conservation and picked up a diagnosis or two that explains why you are weird at parties

First gif: Lexa waits patiently for the door to open and nods a greeting to Clarke.

Second gif: Clarke wanders into Lexa’s room where she’s sitting with her eyes closed. Clarke glances back to ensure no one is coming on to stop her from disturbing Lexa’s mediation.  Third gif: Clarke wanders into Lexa’s room. She proves she has been somewhat house trained (having now lived in actual house for some time) by closing the door behind her. Lexa resigns herself to giving Clarke a treat because good behaviour should be rewarded, even if it’s just an incremental improvement over bad behaviour.

otp: well-mannered hoe™ x rude hoe™

“You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw - but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of - something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clapclap of water against the boat’s side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it - tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.” We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”

— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain