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The training yard is only fifteen Valdo songs away
And there's nothing I would rather do on this terrible fucking day
Than break, break, break my bones
And feel the pain of self-improvement
Valdo Marx can be called many things (and has been, especially by Jaskier), but he's hardly a one-trick pony (again, as Jaskier especially likes to claim). He writes songs for his flute, and performs them for money. Those songs are, as instrumental music tends to be, long and winding, an aural journey more than anything else. They're written to be performed at events — banquets and festivals and weddings — and, therefore, to take up as much time as possible.
Those, however, are just the instrumentals.
Valdo, like any bard, is also a poet. In his other life, perhaps, that would be an embarrassment. Geralt would never call himself that, nor would he ever try to be one. Witchers don't write poetry, and though many say that the pen is mightier than the sword, he's never used a quill to gut an endrega. Witchers are taught to read and write, but only for utilitarian purposes, such as reading contracts and notices, updating the bestiary, and exchanging written correspondence. It would be unbecoming for a witcher to have an interest in the arts, because what in the world could the point be? What good is anything to a witcher if it isn't fully utilitarian in nature?
That only applies to Geralt, of course, and not Valdo Marx. Valdo is, after all, an artist of some renown. He's written and published poetry before, and submitted some for competitions here and there. He does so because it is expected of him. That said, most of his poems are for him. The things he writes for others are as vague and generic as anything else, and maybe Jaskier has a point when he says that Valdo's art has no soul. If it did, though, he's sure he'd be found out.
(Either that, or Jaskier would burst through his door, practically foaming at the mouth in rage, accusing Valdo of copying him by writing about the life of a witcher.)
The point that he is trying to make is that Valdo writes songs, but the ones that he would consider Valdo songs are not what the rest of the Continent hears. The true Valdo songs can't be more than a minute or two in length, each, were he to actually sing them. If he hummed or whistled a few on his way down to the training yard in Oxenfurt, he'd get there in about fifteen of them, walking at a normal, human pace.
And, fuck, does he want to. He wants to exert himself physically, the way he always has when under stress. He wants to work himself into exhaustion, throw himself at a practise dummy or an opponent, tear this fragile, human body apart and shape it into something better and stronger. However, he knows that he can't, because he is Valdo Marx. Valdo Marx is a troubadour, not a warrior. He knows how to defend himself when need be — in fact, just last week he broke a would-be mugger's nose with the heel of his hand — but there's a huge difference between a street fight and sword training. Even if he pretended to be much worse than he is with a blade, he'd still either be too good and arouse suspicion, or not be able to tire himself out because of how hard he's holding back.
He can't go out and train until his muscles are sore, and self-improvement has always been his go-to when he needs something to ground himself. At first, that was a massive problem for him. Not having an outlet to vent his frustrations, his fears, or his aggressions was particularly hellish in a way he'd never anticipated. He had a bad habit of falling into self-destructive behaviours when he was overwhelmed, because he couldn't figure out how else to cope if he wasn't working himself into a thorough, physical exhaustion. A witcher's life is all he's ever been used to, and a witcher's life is filled with pain, so to be a well-respected human bard was jarring to him at best. It took some time and effort to get used to little things like being smiled at by a stranger, or someone holding a door open for him, or not having to check his soup for piss at the local taverns. As Geralt, he never would have thought that he'd be bothered by human kindness, but once he started to receive it as Valdo, he realised just how uncomfortable it was. It was something he wasn't used to, plain and simple, and he couldn't even vent his frustrations about it or try to work it out with someone because nobody could ever know.
It took an embarrassingly long time for him to realise that, as a bard, he could just write it out.
To his credit, he hadn't considered that a bard can just write things and not share them with others. Jaskier always seemed to share just about everything he wrote with Geralt, and Geralt never bothered to pry into the things that he didn't. Everyone deserves privacy, and it was always a bit of a relief when Jaskier took those rare breaks from his usual oversharing.
Enormous tangent aside, the point is that Valdo ended up at the point where, like every other bard, he can exert and express himself through his music and poetry. Unlike every other bard, he has to keep all of it to himself. Even less like every other bard, it isn't always enough. Old habits die hard, and he still finds himself longing for the kind of exhaustion and satisfaction that can only come from excessive and gruelling physical activity; especially when he's having a shit day. The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and there's nothing he can do about it. He can't even go hit things until he feels better. What's a bard to do? Write a song about it. Thus, here he is.
It's not your job to make everybody happy
You don't have to answer to anyone or anybody
Just stick, stick, stick to your guns
And don't quit until you feel like changing them
Personally, whether he's Geralt or Valdo, he can't stand guns. They're a gnomish invention, like so many technologies are. Unlike most gnomish technologies, however, they're absolute fucking garbage. A sharpshooter with a crossbow can shoot an apple off of somebody's head at fifty paces. A sharpshooter with a flintlock pistol would be lucky to hit anything at any amount of distance.
For some reason, there are still people — mostly fringe academics who haven't ever seen a weapon in their lives, and obsessed collectors — who insist that guns are the future of warfare. They envision a world in which swords are a thing of the past, and witchers will shoot silver projectiles at monsters from their firearms. While the idea of a small, portable ballistic weapon is certainly enticing, it just isn't realistic. He's seen the way that these things fire, which is to say, "barely, and with a negative amount of accuracy." They're unwieldy, impossible to aim, and inconvenient to reload, not to mention how much coin one would have to spend replacing their ammunition. They're also loud and let off an acrid smoke that stinks like fuck, so it's not like they could ever be used for a stealth attack even if they weren't otherwise complete shit. It's like a crossbow, if a crossbow was worse in almost every conceivable way. The only way that he can see guns being the weapon of the future is in a future without a need for weaponry.
He's also not the only person who thinks so. In fact, this is one of those rare subjects on which most of the Continent agrees with him. Collectively, almost everybody thinks that guns are absolutely useless. Thus, the phrase stick to your guns came to be. While most people have never even seen a gun of any sort, everyone knows how impractical of a weapon they are, and thus everyone who agrees with that sees the futility of insisting that they are the future of warfare; and yet, the fringe academics and mad collectors with more coin than sense still do just that. They stick to their guns, and nobody is going to convince them otherwise.
In this instance, he supposes it's a bit tongue-in-cheek. The origin of the phrase implies some level of absurdity. Guns are not a sensible weapon, so sticking to one's guns implies holding onto something even if it has no true sense or reason. Even so, in the very same breath, he is telling himself (because who else would be taking these words in? They are for his benefit, for his eyes and ears alone) not to give it up.
There's this concept, amongst certain circles, of something called positive affirmations. The idea behind it, more or less, is that if one says something enough, one will tend to believe it. Saying, "I am confident," into the mirror each morning is likely to produce a more confident person, because even if they don't believe it at first, they will become convinced of it the longer they reinforce that idea. The reason he brings it up now is that, well, it's sort of what he's trying to do. He doesn't necessarily believe that he has no obligations, that he has nobody to answer to, that the happiness of others isn't his responsibility, because it goes directly against everything he'd ever been taught.
It's just that, well, now he knows that he's been taught wrong. Not entirely, mind, (he knows the right way to hold a sword, or brew Kiss, or collect harpy feathers, or—) not in any of the skills he needs as a witcher, but when it comes to being a person... well, that's the problem. He was always taught that he could never be a person to begin with. It's one thing to recognise it, though, and another entirely to unlearn nearly a fucking century of what Jaskier has succinctly dubbed Witcher-style Self-Repression.
That's where his poems, and the little Valdo songs that he writes for himself, come in. Even when he can't bring himself to sing them, to vocalise the words in any capacity, just the simple act of writing them down gives them strength and meaning. He once wrote a song that he has never quite managed to sing in its entirety. It starts mildly, perhaps, with I hope I can forgive me for having the nerve to exist, and ends on, You don't know your own power. You don't know what you're worth. You don't recognise your valor, and until you do, nothing you do will matter. It begins where he can stand to start, and ends where he one day hopes to be.
This song has a similar point, really. He is more than an object, more than humanity's tool in the fight against monsters. He may be a mutant, but he's still a person, with thoughts and preferences and morals and feelings. Even if it isn't always safe to admit that, just because the world is cruel to even the best of us, that doesn't mean that it isn't always the truth. It's just something he hasn't finished learning yet. It's something that he needs to remind himself of, when he can.
And it's a sin and a shame
To keep yourself from knowing
The things that make you beautiful and complete
When we lie to ourselves
We can feel our insides rotting
When the world should be bowing at our feet
At our feet
It's not as though he particularly likes admitting that Jaskier was right, but he can't exactly deny it when it's the truth.
The bard (as he will always be to Geralt, even when Geralt is Valdo) had been trying for decades at least to convince him of the very thing he's now trying to teach himself. Valdo thinks... well, he can't help but wonder if Jaskier had the right idea, but not the right methods. He was in the general area of "correct" but just missed the mark. The point is, he had only been looking at the issue from one perspective: his own.
Not that he can really be blamed for that, of course. He's only ever been himself. Leaving his old life as a viscount to become a bard was something that he could do more easily than Geralt could; not that it was easy for him, or that Geralt couldn't at all, because clearly neither are true. Geralt was able to become Valdo, and he's heard bits and pieces of what Jaskier's family was like (and probably still is, but fuck if either of them are going to go visit and find out). Their situations were similar enough on the surface that he almost can't fault Jaskier for not seeing how different they are.
He's tried so many times and so many ways to get Geralt to retire, to stop putting his life on the line for people that will sooner throw stones at him than pay him for the service. All it ever did was piss Geralt off, because witchers don't retire. It's what he'd always been told: the only retirement for his kind is on top of a funeral pyre. If he quit, then every time someone is killed by a monster, he would feel personally responsible, because he didn't do a thing to try to stop it. Even if he was able to convince himself to lay down his swords, what could he pick up in their place? What kind of trade could a witcher take up? What human would suffer a mutant as their neighbour, let alone their huntsman, farmer, butcher, baker, trader, blacksmith, or innkeeper? Not enough to make retirement a viable option.
That's why, every time Jaskier has pushed and poked and prodded and pressed and even nearly pleaded for Geralt to just quit while he's ahead and live a quiet life, it only ever upset the witcher. Did Jaskier just think that this was something he didn't also want? It isn't the same as being a viscount; no matter where he runs to, people will always look at him and see the Butcher of Blaviken. Even those who'd never heard of him before would see him as a mutant and want him far, far away from them.
Then he got the magic ring, of course, and now he's Valdo, and now he can finally start to consider all of the things Jaskier said that he never let himself really think about before.
Because, the fact of the matter is, he does have preferences, and likes, and dislikes. He has had hopes and dreams and desires, things and people he's cared about, interests and hobbies, and all of the things any person has. As Geralt, he has to hide that — perhaps not as much as he does, but he's long since learnt the importance of being careful and holding his cards close to his chest — but as Valdo, it would be strange if he continued to do so. A human bard, after all, has no reason to claim he doesn't feel, or desire, or love. A human bard has friends, preferences, hobbies, loves and hates, and all other manner of things that Geralt always had to keep to himself.
Simply put, he had to learn the hard way what Jaskier had tried to teach him all along.
Before, he'd never had to consider how he would lead a "normal" life, because it was never an option. Thinking about it could only hurt him, so he did his best not to. Dwelling on what-ifs and could-have-beens has cost some their lives, and he has always categorically refused to be one of them. For the first time, now, he's looking at himself from Jaskier's perspective. He has the witcher's perspective that Jaskier doesn't, but now he has the bard's too. He sees all of the things that Jaskier saw, all of the worrying shit, all of the red flags, and it's up to him to figure out how to fix it.
Like he said, it's one thing to know the difference, and another entirely to actually learn it. And, like he said, the first step is simply acknowledging it. He can work on believing it later.
The way he feels as a witcher, when he insists that he has no feelings, is terrible, to put it lightly. He suppresses the self part of himself so that he can best present himself as the type of non-person everyone expects a witcher to be. He's done it for so long that he... he forgot how to stop. He can't just turn it off, like he's casting igni at a lit candle. He became that unfeeling machine full-time.
And yet, the person in him, the person that he still was, didn't go away; hid, perhaps, but never left. He was a shell of the man who first left Kaer Morhen all those decades ago, and everything inside that shell was slowly rotting away. He let the world beat him down, even as he told himself that the silent way he bore it all was strength. He wants to say that he's better now, and in a way he is. Even so, he knows that he still has a very long way to go.
That's alright, though. He isn't giving up any time soon.
Stick, stick, stick to your guns
And don't quit until you feel like changing them
Stick, stick, stick to your guns
And don't quit until you feel like changing them
Stick, stick, stick to your guns
And don't quit until you feel like changing them.