Order Only - Hols and Legilimency

[alt_hydra]

I'm sorry I'm only just now writing about this, only none of it seemed really useful to the Order. If it were, I would have told everyone straight away, of course. But I already did share a little at Tea Appreciation, so most of you know that I spent much of hols going to MLE with Mummy. I was hoping to learn something top secret, of course, but nothing like that happened. She was busy a great deal of the time and then I would just end up reading in her office. I thought about having a snoop around, but that would be a bad idea. She's not the sort to leave anything incriminating out, and I'm sure she has all varieties of monitoring devices, too.

What I did learn, which might be useful (if obvious), is that a lot of people who work for MLE aren't very happy. Much of the time they're afraid, but often they assume that since everyone else seems fine, they shouldn't show it or talk about it. And of course, most of them don't like Mummy. That doesn't bother her. I think she likes it, even.

She wanted to test my legilimency skills, so she would summon some lower-level worker to her office and ask me what he was thinking. We tried different methods, like having me look into the person's eyes, or having them turn their back to me. I didn't notice a very big difference between the two. What was interesting was that we sometimes saw different things. Or, more rightly, Mummy tended to pick up on one strong, singular image and thought, while I would pick up on several at once. Mummy said this is because I'm inexperienced, and that with more practice I will learn to filter through the "insignificant noise" and get to the truth of a person's mind.

I asked her how you could be sure of the truth of a person's mind. A person's mind has an imagination in it, after all, and if I've had a fantasy about stealing from a shop, that doesn't mean I've actually stolen from a shop. Sometimes we also have hateful, fleeting thoughts, too, that we don't really mean.

Mummy insisted that there was always a truth, that you just had to learn how to pull it out of a person.

I just don't know if it's that simple. But if it is, I suppose I need to learn. How to get to the truth of a person's mind, I mean.

Comments

[alt_alice]

I wonder.

Perhaps when someone thinks in absolutes, that is what one sees?

There are so few people who are truly as talented as either you or your mother -- it may very well be that there are different strengths to either approach, and that the way you currently see things is equally valid and just as useful -- simply more nuanced.

[alt_severus]

Interesting.

That is not at all my experience in using Legilimency; of course, I do not have the natural talent to rely upon, and must cast the spell anew for each attempt to probe someone's thoughts. It may indeed be different for those who do have the ability as natural gift.

But when I am viewing someone's thoughts with Legilimency, it is highly dependent upon the individual, and on the way in which their mind stores and processes thought and memory. Some people think in images, some in words; sometimes I see memories in full, as though they have been recorded like a film, and sometimes I see them in fragments stitched together and indexed by colour, or scent, or by no means I could perceive and in no usable fashion. Sometimes I perceive words or phrases, or a snatch of song that triggers a seemingly unrelated recollection, and once I found someone — an experience that left me distinctly unsettled — whose thoughts were so alien I could not make useful sense from them.

When we were both present for an interrogation, Bellatrix and I frequently argued about the interpretations of what we had seen; she was always convinced there is an absolute truth to the individual impressions from someone's mind, while I was more convinced the truth of what had been read rested in a more metaphorical direction. It sounds as though she has grown even more certain. I suppose it is a method that has proven fruitful for her in the past, or else she would not hold the conviction so firmly, but I always believed the human mind was a more complex notion.

[alt_justin]

Hydra,

Have you asked her what her colleagues think? It might be instructive to gain the perspectives of other legilimens, what, such as that Penderyn chap.

-Justin