In Regard to Chapter's Fourteen Through Twenty-Four of Walter Mosley's Blue Lights

Nesta was a smart woman, into everything. And she was black. The significance of her blackness was reinforced by her chosen alias "Ebony". On the other hand, and maybe it is because of my youth, her blackness was so easy for me to overlook. It wouldn't occur to me to question the validity of a smart, adventurous, black woman; maybe that's progress. Only when the issue was pointed out to me did I see it.

And only then did I realize that I've never met such a woman. I've met intelligent blacks and intelligent women, but never someone who was both. The closest I've come to meeting such a woman was reading an advertizement on Love@AOL from a woman down in Georgia. She wasn't my type (that's a communist verse capitalist thing -- I'm a would be Sanyassi and she's a would-be Queen) and the distance was too great to really consider the match much, but I wrote her a letter telling her of my admiration for her writing ability.

But I suppose in all fairness, I must state that most real life people don't impress me much with their intelligence, and I never have much problem suspending disbelief when it comes to that aspect of fiction, so long as there is nothing particularly contrary within a work itself.

Was Nesta a mother Mosley invented for himself? I don't know. I'm not a big Freudian. I won't deny the possibility though.

Nesta's creation story was interesting. It reminded me (as mentioned previously) of emanations as explained by ceremonial magikians, particularly in discussion of Qabala with it's "Light in Extention".

Also the discussion of life living off the star and not each other is reminiscent of plants and chlorophyl. Why haven't animals evolved that can photosynthesize? But then, if we could, why would we have remained mobile when plants didn't?

I was struck by a potentially incestuous connotation with regard to Nesta. What was Mosley saying about Nesta's relationship to her grandfather? Is it significant that this was after the blue light? Is this a statement about love? About culture? Is it significant that these characters were black and thereby perpetuating black stereotypes?

Did the old tree somehow represent the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. I don't know. I didn't really see that. I thought more in terms of Tolkien's Ents. Even then, I'm sure some would argue the Ents come from the same mythology. The tree was definately enlightened. It definitely bore fruit. I don't really see the parallels going much deeper.

I didn't think so much of it exploding to save the life of the ranger... I wasn't even sure that's why it exploded. It was doomed at that point anyway. I just saw it as a sore loser tactic that might allow it's "pups" to escape by attempting to destroy Grey Man. The ranger did not seem significant, especially as she was never seen again - I'm not even sure she lived.

Individual cells have life. True. We are colonial organisms. True, and? Cells have set functions; memory is not one for most of them.

I won't speculate on the connection between Nesta and Claudia... aside from both being "blues" befriended by Max and both evoking Chance's sexuality, I didn't see much in common between either of them. Maybe those two specific things should say something to me, but they don't. The two characters seemed very different and I can't recall them ever actually meeting.

I didn't think much of either Chance or the Children developing to and at Treaty... either characters develop or the story goes on without them or the book ends. And most good stories need character development. As it was, I thought the development was a bit shallow, as were the one dimensional characters themselves.

The children going through the woods and arriving as adults did have a fairy tail quality to it, evoking memory of the Hobbits visiting the forest of Ents in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. But beyond a lack of originality, this didn't say much to me.

Alicity with the bears was interesting. I don't know if that whether that was an allusion to the reference that it wouldn't happen by what's-her-face or just a chance coincidence. Felt kind of sorry for the bear - rather perverse since I enjoyed most of the people dying off, except Orde (as previously mentioned). I don't know whether it's the way the book was written or just my own disposition towards humans and animals. I'm one of those people who feel certain that the police were wrong to kill that escaped Tiger in Jackson.