#httgatbaecoua

ask me about a title (of a series, fic, or chapter) and i'll explain.

yess let's go.

both there is so much that is growing and "hallelujah to the grace, and the body, and every cell of us all" come from "i sing the body electric; especially when my power is out" by andrea (or andrew) gibson.

andrea is one of my favourite poets, most of their work is available for listening on youtube, i have "about the weather" memorized, and wrote a whole essay analyzing it.

anyway, the poem is about a lot of things, including chronic illness and being queer, so it obviously has a lot of personal value for me. my favourite quote:

for the record, if you have ever done anything for attention, this poem is attention title it with your name

which just. yeah.

but i digress, why those two passages?

well, let's start with "hallelujah" (i'm not typing the whole title out again and even the acronym is long) since that was initially the only fic planned.

this is the ending of the poem, and "hallelujah" is a fic about holly, jay, and lion passing their warrior assessment. the whole ending is about the parts of us that don't work. i don't want to quite say self-love, because while it is generally self-love, it's a bit more specific: gibson is using religious imagery to invoke a higher power in the unacceptable.

they say, "bless your body" because our bodies have failed us, but they are still holy, they still deserve to be blessed. (catch when i slipped into full media analysis mode.)

actually, right before the passage i quoted, there was another line i almost used: "hallelujah to the ache / to the pull / to the fall / to the pain"

which, first, you can see there's a lot of allusion going on here. first, the song "hallelujah" (leonard cohen) has a verse "the minor fall, the major lift / the baffled king composing 'hallelujah'", and later, in the same melody, "it doesn't matter what you heard / the holy or the broken hallelujah."

i'm not entirely sure if this is intentional, but i have always viewed it as at least relevant. there's also, as mentioned, the poem is partially about queerness, specifically in regards to homophobia.

while gibson focuses on authority in general when they address queerness, religion is a major part of the poem itself. i think "hallelujah ... to the fall" is reminiscent of the idea of fallen angels, of falling from grace (something that is backed up by the line that follows this passage being "hallelujah to the grace").

(and of course, the whole title of the poem is an allusion to walt whitman's "i sing the body electric," a poem that's also about queerness. the astute may even notice that i have an affinity for a particular line, "to be with those i like is enough," but i digress.)

i chose not to use that passage for the title, because i didn't think it worked out of context. but the religious imagery, specifically of defiance, was something i liked, especially knowing that starclan is an important part of a warrior ceremony.

so i chose to use the ending line. in my mind, "to the body" is the most important part of the title. "hallelujah" is narrated exclusively through jaypaw's perspective, and his relationship with his own body is a narrative through line: what he can and cannot do on his own. but in the end, they are all valuable, all equal, even though hollypaw does not have a power and jaypaw is blind.

"hallelujah ... to every cell of us all" indeed.

as for there is so much that is growing, this also comes from the final stanza. the context leading up to this is more of a relationship with a failing body, but the line immediately before is the most transient to me:

you are so full of rain

which just. is the kind of line to make a man cry. i, again, have my own personal meanings that i bring to this. the rain is something valuable to me, something i crave. it brings relief from heat, pollen, it quiets the world and makes colours vibrant. it creates beautiful noise, dampens light, and it feels cold.

so naturally, this line is something i am attached to. but once again, that meaning requires personal context and context of the poem, something i avoid in titles. if i wanted to establish rain as a metaphor, perhaps, but i didn't.

but i think "there is so much that is growing" conveys the idea of the au quite well. it's supposed to be a happy au, one with life and joy and good things. there is so much that is growing.

last, but certainly not least, "cardamom pods and vanilla beans" is not a quote. i think this one is the most reliant, ironically, on my own understanding of the world, or at least, of poppyfrost.

in all of my poppyfrost-centric works ("what catches the ear; what catches the eye", "breath like sweet dream smoke", and "cardamom pods and vanilla beans"), the concept of sweetness is associated with poppyfrost and honeyfern, and to a lesser extent, cinderheart.

i think the best illustration from this is an (admittedly long) passage from "what catches the ear; what watches the eye", which takes place when poppypaw is almost dead.

and she knows the truth of it for a moment; she tastes it on her tongue, the way things seem slow and sweet, honey, her sister, like she is swallowed by it, time moves strangely; poppies are for sleeping: that is what they give her mother; honey and poppy, she drinks down her daughters like they can freeze time, but they can't; it just drips; down and down and she tastes an old scent one like family and familiar and she thinks she'll follow it, the water doesn't seem so scary anymore;

so i'm not going to go full media analysis on this, nor am i going to explain how i use sweet in reference to what i think cats would consider sweet (e.g., a mild taste, something soft and pleasant and tender), but i just wanted to take a chance to use this as a microcosm of my broader tendency to use herbs as symbolism. (for a macrocosm, read "running out of rosemary".)

sorreltail is given "honey and poppy [seeds]" to make sure she can sleep, but poppypaw phrases it as "drink[ing] her daughters ... [to] freeze time", i.e., prolonging the inevitable. poppypaw knows "the truth", understands that she is going to die.

she views her mother, in turn, as trying to avoid this. honeypaw is alive and well, sorreltail can see her and know she is alright, and poppypaw is asleep. poppypaw makes this comparison quite literal by reminding us "poppies are for sleeping".

so honeypaw, sugar, becomes a distraction, and poppypaw, sleep, becomes a false hope.

what's my point with all this?

well, cardamom and vanilla are both seasonings associated with desserts. but neither of them are actually sweet. cardamom is a very warm flavour, and vanilla is rich.

vanilla especially can only be added in small quantities, or it will overwhelm, but the flavour is obvious, even if you don't notice it. we call vanilla ice cream plain, but that is not the taste of cream and sugar.

we have so thoroughly understood the taste of vanilla as the taste of sugar that you cannot provide someone sugar without adding vanilla to it.

that's a bit extreme, but the point holds.

and in "cardamom pods and vanilla beans," we get a short counterpart to the scene from "what catches the ear; what catches the eye", when jaypaw is worried about poppypaw, knowing she is close to death.

He smelt something sweet, and he prayed that she didn't die, he prayed that Molepaw didn't wait for her to join him; he smelt something sweet, like Poppypaw, how she always smelt of summer, and he prayed and hoped and he heard her stop breathing — just for a moment — and he heard her gasp for air.

here, sweet is associated with poppypaw, but also death. but poppypaw's scent is clarified as time passes. she smells "of summer", and later, "of morning [and] of rain". she is developed past "sweet." she is richer, more complex.

as for the other three, their connection is far more obvious. (or at least, i don't have other fics to do entirely excessive self-analysis of.)

their relationship is borne from conflict, from the heat of fighting, and is only resolved when that is tempered by hollyleaf and lionblaze agreeing to work together.

(it's worth noting that while poppypaw is descibed as smelling "of summer," something hot, that is, too, tempered by her cooler scents.)

in other words, cinderheart, lionblaze, and hollyleaf rely on sweetness to temper them, while jaywing and poppyfrost develop past sweetness.

(in fact, their arc is about moving past the easy affections and into something more serous.)

the directness of the concept of sweetness is left out of the title, mostly because honeyfern consistently represents "pure" sweet in my fics. she would be sugar cane, in this metaphor. but honeyfern is not pivotal to their relationships, she is a background to it.

her first appearance is when hollypaw and lionpaw first fight, where she mostly serves to contextualize the fight. she doesn't know why they are fighting; they have insufficient sweet.

her second is when poppyfrost returns to her in the nursery, after confirming her relationship with jaywing. poppyfrost must leave her (must leave the ambiguity of sweetness) to do this.

so honeyfern is herself a narrative device, a representation of sugar, and therefore, does not belong in the title.

and finally, cardamom and vanilla are represented in their base forms, not their usable ones, because this is a fic about getting together.

hallelujah to the grace, and the body, and every cell of us all