Stories

I watched Avatar last night. It was everything I'd heard it to be: visually stunning and predictable. A friend called it what might happen if you tossed "Dances with Wolves, Pocahontas, Ferngully and various Miyazaki films into a blender and pulsed." That's about right. And yet, I loved it.

Before I get to the meat of this, I have to give the story tellers props for putting me on the most believable alternate planet I have viewed since I first saw The Dark Crystal. I also thought the Na'vi were a believable fantasy race. Sure, they were 75% American Indian with a few dashes of Arab and African thrown in for good measure (just in case we missed apologizing to anyone we've pissed off in the last 300 years), but they worked as well as many races I've read in books. And it's terribly common (guilty too) of taking what we know about this world and altering it just slightly to make it somebody new, so I give them credit for taking the time to develop and show the same sort of background I might find in a book. It made me care...and that's important in a story with which we are all very culturally familiar.

Which brings me to the meat. Avatar was predictable, and this wasn't a bad thing? No.
I'm a tree-hugging, pagan-leaning, anthropologist at heart, and thus the story of progress-against-(in this case literally) Mother Nature and ethnographer-falls for the study subject and becomes more like the subject than the establishment are always appealing.

It got me thinking about something we'd discussed on the first night of class, back in September. There are only so many stories. Just as there are archetypal figures, there are archetypal stories. Certain of these types are always going to work for certain people, so of course I went to sleep last night, making a list of what else will work for me, so long as the story isn't poorly constructed in addition to following a predictable pattern.

I have come up with the following things, and gods help me if a story has more than one of these. It could have flying pink kittens, I would probably still gush over it.

1. The noble savage (agh, kill me now...I am a product of American literature...you win Prof Olson, you win) ;

2. Good ol' Sacred Earth. This, of course, is rarely without the noble savage, but I think I can list them separately 'cause they are not necessarily dependent on one another;

I think I enjoy noble savage/sacred earth stories because it becomes easy to cast one group, or character, as the bad guy, responsible for bringing "civilization" with its accompaniment of pollution and culture-crushing values to the scene.
Cheering against this villain, allows me to feel righteous (as awful as that sounds). Not that I don't drive as much as the next 21st century American (less than some I'm sure, but still...like my car). I don't always do well with not wasting, etc. It's my favorite sort of escapism.
I can also channel my Great White Guilt in these stories. I have taken my ancestors' poor decisions up like a cross. I should really let it go, but it dogs me, and I don't know why. I just always like to see a supposedly dominant power go down in flames for their narrow-mindedness/fear and shallow goal-driven lunacy.
This also sets up a values fight. Almost always: possible financial gain v. things that matter to the soul. It's nice to imagine a world where financial gain isn't always going to come out on top as the most important thing.

3. A redemption story (especially if a character dies to redeem his or her actions, allowing the hero/ine to do what they need to do: RIP S. Snape.);

The reasons for enjoying redemption are a maybe a little more difficult. I have long been aware that few things warm the cockles of my heart more than a "me for him" sort of situation. (And not in a lover/beloved sort of way. That still leaves a wreck of a person behind, and I can't stand to think about it.) If a character who has been a consistent thorn makes a sacrifice, I go all mushy. Maybe I just want to believe in the good in people. I'm guilty of being a Luke Skywalker. "There is good in him. I feel it." It seems like there should be more, but I don't know what it is yet. I've thought about this one for years, and have yet to come to the bottom of it.

4. I also like a good pilgrimage: hero/ine goes away for one reason or another and returns changed and strong. Related to this, there is the story of finding voice and the ability to do what one did not think one was capable of doing.
I love this because I firmly believe in the changing power of an out-of-the-box experience. My enjoyment of this story is firmly rooted in art behaving as life should. (Now, if only my life could move through its current "learning" phase into the "found voice and strength" phase in a classy montage with some uplifting music. I'd like to put in a request for the lovely choral music from The Lion King when Simba is running back to Pride Rock. Thanks.)

(Included as sub-categories of the pilgrimage are the sibling story and the mentor-student story. A split in either important relationship can cause the pilgrimage, and the end point of both--after voice is found--should properly be a laying aside of pride and learning on both ends. It doesn't always happen that way, but then the reader/viewer learns something. That's worthwhile too.)

So thank you, movie with rainforest-dwelling phosphorescent humanoids for reminding me that "predictable" isn't always bad. Sometimes "predictable" just means "archetypal", and that takes a story from boring to important, whether or no the visuals are mind-blowing.

Variations on a Theme in G Major: Winter Waltz

So Here I am...not actually being abducted by aliens in the middle of the Siberian wastes, but strolling through my neighborhood after a concert. I went to hear the Rose Ensemble sing carols from Elizabethan England. I made friends with the woman who sat next to me. She was somewhere between my mother and my grandmother in age, and she agreed the sound of music from the 16th century was transporting and just the right thing to do during this Solstice season.

For some reason the carols that moved me the most were those tunes that were cradle songs for the infant Christ. I think they do well to convey the hope and peace that is forgotten in the rush of Life this time of year. It's the solstice today, so I've been thinking about darkness and light. The long dark is peaceful and deep, but can also be oppressive. On the other side of the longest night, there is lengthening day, hope that everything that now sleeps will bloom again, and I feel that my mind understands that cycle well.

The church I grew up in always included a call and response portion of their Christmas Eve service; the responses were all things like "And celebrate a new birth of hope/light in our lives." There's a reason I always enjoyed going to these services, even when I didn't give a fig for Christian dogma. Christmas is one of the only times they really get it.

In one of my fictional worlds, Longest Night is the most contemplative of holy days. It is a time of fasting, meditations and visions, followed by the second biggest party of the year. I gave it that significance because that is what our solstice holidays should be. It's also very reminiscent of the Christmas Eve/Christmas structure my life had when I was little. Christmas Eve was for going to candlelight service, viewing Christmas lights in the city and opening presents as a family. Christmas Day was a day of excess...food from the moment of waking up. Cookies for breakfast if we wanted (within reason), and then Grandma and Grandpa's house...where we could bounce of the walls and eat more. (I can smell the ham and cloves now.)

Anyway...I realized that I felt absolutely nothing for the upcoming holiday week, and that needed to change. I took it upon myself to become both contemplative and festive. The music was wonderful. I met a kindred spirit from another generation (always a blessing), and the winter night was wonderful for light-gazing.

The iPhone doesn't do so well with evening pics, but here are a few...

This is the church ceiling. I kept looking at it. The upside-down boat structure is even more pronounced in this church than in most I've attended, and the whole building is really designed to draw the eye upward. I kind of like it, even if it does have that most-Catholic of icons: Christ suspended on the cross, flanked by his sainted parents. (I've never been a fan of the crucified. I like empty crosses in my churches, thank you. I am, at least, that Protestant.)

This doesn't capture the radiance of the light coming through the snow at all, but it's still cool.

These are the footprints of Duke the Newf-Bernard who lives across the street from me. He's a gentle giant, and the quiet of his snowed-over footprints struck me as significant.

Markers leading up to a jolly holiday gathering.

One of my favorite local trees. It's enormous. Someday, I'm going to catch people in the act of putting lights on one of these monsters. Do people really hire bucket trucks?

I flopped into the snow underneath the great big tree to see what multi-colored stars look like.

I walked home and decorated my own little tree. I hope people driving by are cheered by it.

"Safe in my frame" or in which I provide context...

...and quote a lot of Tori in order to connect some dots.

This is related to the last post. My brain is on fire with its longing to be just what I need to be.

Here are some things.

When I started this blog, I was very angry at DB for needing someone to inspire him....and that the someone inspiring him wasn't me. I whined around in my brain about having to put myself out as a Muse for Hire. Now however, I'm beginning to think that's not the point. Why should I inspire anyone but myself?
It sound very lovely and romantic to inspire someone else, and maybe that can be part of it, but I should start at home. I must inspire me. I am my own muse. I shall reflect my quirks, my spirit, my Shakti.

The "parasol" bit in the blog URL is a reference to Tori Amos' song "Parasol", which she writes about in Piece by Piece as follows: "I saw a painting by Seurat - Seated Woman With A Parasol - in a book on Impressionism. I was drawn to it and I started to think about Victorian women and then some women today, the type of women who don't want to intimidate their partner and so allow themselves to become reduced so the other person can feel confident."

Gods. That's the more important part here. It's not the Muse for Hire bit. It's the Parasol part.
I have very nearly become that seated woman "safe in my frame/in your house/in your frame". No. This is not the girl I was. She would hate that with all the fiery passion only a 16-year-old is capable of. This is not the woman I am seeking to honor and resurrect as of late.

As a pallet cleanser after the drag that was Outlander, I read The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. What? Yes. Yes and more yes. This book brought me back to a time in my life when everything was bursting with potential. I was coming into myself (more than I realized) among strong girlfriends. We didn't date. We had no time for such Tom-foolery. We didn't need it either; we had each other. And I think that's still where my strength lies--between me and the women I have known since we were girls. Sometimes, I think it's no wonder we're having a bit of man trouble. It takes a certain sort of guy to stand in the midst of Us, and not feel intimidated by the bonds that remain.

But...the Pants. This is a book about four friends (ages 15-16) who separate for a summer (camp, relative visits, etc.) and share amongst themselves a single pair of jeans (that magically fit them all beautifully). The Pants are not to be washed; they must travel, carrying the summer stories of the friends with them. What they're really doing, however, is carrying the strength and support of the far-flung friends to each other--from Greece to Baja California. I'm not so far from any of my buds, but that these girls get how important they are to each other mattered to me. It made me remember the pieces of my younger self (who I have so often written off as having nothing important to say) that may have known more than I know now. I'm still sort of parsing this, but I think this book was a very necessary piece of whatever Growing I'm doing at the moment.

So, what did my 16-year-old self know that I need now?
Back to a Tori song from that time that I loved to belt as angrily as I could: "Professional Widow"
I didn't really get it at the time, but I did understand that there was a lot of indignant girl rage in this song.

Tori on "Widow": "[Professional] Widow is my hunger for the energy I felt some of the men in my life possessed: the ability to be king. I wasn't content just being a muse. I was the creative force. I was in relationships with different men where if they could honour that, they couldn't honour the woman, and if they could honour the woman, they couldn't honor the creative force..."

My 16-year-old self was hungry, and very few people had yet to tell her no. Ok. She was never going to be a stage actress under the bright lights of New York and London theaters, winning praise worldwide. She was never going to be a concert violinist either, but her mind was strong and full of good things.

I wrote more between the ages of 15 and 18 than I think I ever had before (or perhaps since). I had confidence in that writing that allowed me to share with people to whom I had hardly said three sentences before I handed them a manuscript. Maybe it was not so much the confidence in the writing, but confidence that I was not alone in feeling hungry. The young women who read about Armina all understood "the energy...the ability to be king."

I wrote it out very literally, true. Armina of that time was a warrior for her goddess, destroying false kings and her father--very subtle that, haha. I poured myself into that other young woman...all that desire to have all the pieces of myself recognized and honored.
Reading journals from high school is a little scary, but under the bravado--the statements of myself being fit for glory--was that desire to have the creative energy and the woman honored. I just wasn't quite sure how to get there.

My younger self also knew that it was ok to be herself. Loony, off-the-wall, different. I was always a little over the top. It is important to be a simmered-down version of myself at this point, but I knew something then about self-loyalty of which I may have lost sight.
"Self-loyalty" is a phrase which I rebel against for sounding too much like selfishness, but it's different. It's a matter of giving the best of yourself--to yourself and others. The ability to check in and say: Are you just afraid of something different or does this dishonor you? ...and make a decision from that point.

I think a lot of the friends I made, back in the day, I made because I seemed a little fearless. I stood on tables and gave recitations. I wore pleather pants and fangs to a formal dance at which I was another girl's "date." Some of this, certainly, is the strength of friends. "You want to be bizarre and out there--I'll be right beside you, laughing with you about your lunacy--just lead on, Oh Crazy One."

Sure, I can throw a lot of this in the "please please please notice me" pile, but that would only be telling part of the story, the part I've been telling for a long time. It dishonors that young woman I was. I've stepped out of my frame and into another frame...that I don't think that girl would recognize. Parts of it are good, but parts of it could stand to put on a little hot pink glitter, some rainbow socks and remember how to "Psycho Laugh" at exactly the right moment.

Being Woman

As I was writing my "spiritual memoir" for class, I came—belatedly—to the realization that so much of my spirituality was tied up in frustrations with my own femaleness. We are “made in the image of god”, but god was “god the father”. My young brain couldn’t wrap around that any easier than my more "mature" brain can. I don’t accept it. What I do accept is that I am part of the collective that makes the world full of meaning and sacredness. That sounds mad and more than a bit fluffy, but it doesn’t have the affect of divorcing me--in my body--as something that is the image of a god.

When I’m having a good dance night, I have no doubt that I am made in the image of god[dess]. It is easy to think “What if the world was danced into being, rolling off the undulating spine of the Creator?” In the power of a really talented belly dancer’s muscles, I see the flex and flow of all the possibility that women have.

If I may digress for a moment: I think that is why belly dance is unlike any other dance, and it drives me absolutely bats when people reduce it to “ohmigodsexy”. It is that. I’m certainly not going to deny it. I, and zillions of other people worldwide I’m sure, want to lick Sharon Kihara’s abdominals, but it is more than that. It is challenging. It is the body glorying in itself, expressing the potential of creation as it accents the most biological bits of a woman all the while melding them into the whole. It is the mind working with the body; it is very controlled. Belly dance is not reductively sexy. It is empowering—more about the dancer than the audience. And in spite of this, I have met so few conceited belly dancers. That, I think, is testimony to the power of dancing for oneself. No justifications, no false pride, as woman tries to reconcile herself with an activity that is not for herself.

Reaching this place with myself has been hard-fought. It is obvious, when I think of my younger self, that I have always wanted to get here. She was an angry girl. She wanted to be a warrior for women everywhere. She would, like Erik Draven in The Crow, find every perpetrator of violence (physical or otherwise) against women and beat that person to a bloody pulp, take away their power and their agency. (You dare make me uncomfortable in my body! I’ll show you uncomfortable!) It is amazing, just writing those words, how easy it is to still feel the rage of that young woman. I spent a lot of time cultivating that anger.

It was a false sense of strength, but I used it. I lashed out in words, thinly veiled diatribes in fictional form, but my words gave pause to other young women in my class who were feeling similar things. I shared this writing with girls in my high school, and for a time, I was a mini-celebrity among the other frustrated young women (and a few young men) of my class. The anger was not useful, but the outrage may have been.

For a long time, I forgot this part of me. In the arms of a good relationship, I grew a bit complacent, I think. I had a hard time connecting with the righteous anger that I needed to rewrite young Armina. When I was once again introduced to anger at a man who was directly in my life, and also a young woman who seems to desperately want to be a young man, I remembered myself as a young woman...so desperate herself to just be comfortable in her body. I, too, wished to be a boy when I was little. I would tuck my hair up under a baseball hat, trying to imagine my feminine roundness away. (And I was a round 7 year old.) I thought, perhaps not consciously, that the answer to being comfortable in my skin was to be a boy. That faded, of course, but my discomfort in my femininity did not.

I’ve only just now started referring to my peers and myself as women. This is not so much an age thing (though we are nearing our venerable third decade), as it is a desire to leave behind a diminutive. Woman, with all its baggage of disenfranchisement and inequality, is also the strongest thing to be, and I’m embracing that anew…or perhaps for the first time. It blows me away that humanity is still alive and kicking sometimes, and that is women. My ancestresses have pushed through feelings of unimaginable frustration, feeling love for their families, but perhaps equally boxed in, without other options.

I always (somewhat) laughingly think of myself in the 50s, drinking martinis until I float as soon as I’m alone in the house, or 1890s me with a glass of sherry, struggling to find meaning in being a mother, valiantly staying away from the opiates that I kept on hand for dosing sick children. And that’s just the recent memory stuff. The women on my walls have possibly had those feelings, though my IL grandma was employed all through raising a family. She had to deal with my grandfather telling her that she thought more of the job than she did the family. “It must have seemed that way to him, but I didn’t,” she told me. It was for the family that she worked so hard.
It is these women I join. My grandmothers are living evidence of sacred femininity. They have lived, loved and worked through times that could have diminished them even more than this one has tried to diminish me. We have struggled with similar things, and I hope to finally banish shame, discomfort and guilt from the blood of the women in my family.

The following poem was written not quite two years ago when my therapist was trying to drag me out of another period of being uncomfortable in my skin. I turned to Tori Amos' writings about archetypes and the divine feminine and decided to play with them a bit myself. I offer it up again in thanks and because I need to keep reminding myself...

“Archetypal”
They say that Cleopatra wasn’t Liz Taylor gorgeous.
It was her boldness and wit that drove Caesar mad.
In the stacks of the library at Alexandria,
they couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

A continent away, Caesar’s men chased down Iceni daughters.
Their milk-pale, freckled bodies broke under the onslaught of centurion spears.
Their Mother-queen rode into battle,
bringing the night-dark wings of the Morrigan down on her enemies.

Rumor has it, both Cleo and Boadicea died of poison.
They might have talked strategy together,
red head, bent to dark one.
“Horses, my dear?”
“Oh no, elephants, like Alexander.”

And I really think that Jesus’ mother would have wept
to see her power consigned to her virginity.
“Why, Miss Magdalene can you go about with your hair unbound,
and I must smile benignly from beneath my halo?”

Hildegaard understood this.
Her Virgins went with their hair loose, under the sheerest of veils.
The bishops tut and tsk, and still the ladies of Bingen sang:
“How very hard it is to hold out against whatever tastes of the Apple.”

I would bring the apple to Hildegaard’s cell
and tell her of maidens whose bows shot snakes
that turned into herons.
“What crawls on its belly can also learn to fly,” she would say
and draw a mandala that would make it all very clear.

Mixed Feelings

I started reading a "fluff" book over Thanksgiving break. Other than Pratchett, I haven't had time for a lot of light reading lately, and--honestly--if everything I read made me examine the depths of my brain, I might go off the deep end. For this, I'm enjoying myself. On other levels, not so much.
This book I'm reading (Outlander by Diana Gabaldon) has strong characters and strong writing, great sense of setting, but holy stodgy plotting and no editing Batman! I can't really stop reading because its a well-constructed book, and when Gabaldon does get to the plotty bits, I'm really sucked in. However, there's a mountain of filler which amounts to:

Hero: I want you.
Heroine: I want you more.
Hero: You couldn't possibly.
Heroine: Wanna bet?
Hero: Let's find a [haystack, barn, pile of leaves, stream, bed if we're feeling civilized] right this very moment, rest of the world be damned.
Heroine: Oh you manly hunk of manmeat, you!
Scotland: I'm even prettier than both of you, so shut up and include me as a third partner.

(Gonna read the rest of it over a Friday night with some strong alcohol and see how trashed I get if I drink every time they boink or Scotland is awesome.)

One would think that a man outlawed, who has a whole lot of issues with a certain gentleman of the English army, whose uncles may or may not want him out of the way would be feeling a little more pressure to either get himself out of the country (I hear America was really nice in the late 18th century) or resolve things in court. He's got the potential favor of another English gentleman (who incidentally tried to prod his bum with something hard and heavy when the hero was just a "wee laddie"...but that's sometimes the best sort of favor to have, right? right.) His uncle's solicitor seems to like him. There are several ways we could be wrapping this up....or at least start in on some Jacobite uprising and start slaying people, so he winds up lord of the manor 'cause his uncles die heroically at Culloden, etc etc. Something's gotta give. Gabaldon's set up about six potentially interesting conflicts, but she's acting on none of them.

I've read romance novels; I've read historical fiction with a romantic component. I write gritty (realistic?) fantasy with a romantic component. I kinda dig on that sort of thing in my books apparently, but it's a matter of balance!

In a romance, there may be other external conflict, but the main conflict/question to be resolved is "will they get together"? That works for me. I'm not going to hate on it.

In the books I most often read, the conflict often goes: There is Political Unrest. Normal Person (and Friends) is sucked into said Political Unrest. There is growing. There are consequences. People die, people love, people betray, etc. The world may or may not be saved, but the ride was worth it somehow.

This book is neither one or the other so far. It resolved the romantic tension too early, so it can't be a romance. It's not hitting up any of the possible political conflicts, much to my great annoyance. There are so many good characters on the fringes with plottings going on. I want to SEE them! (Difficult when the story is first person, I know, but there are ways damnit.)

I completely understand how difficult it is to drag out a love interest for a whole book and not resolve it. As a writer, I often want to get to the juicy bits. Also, as a writer, I'd love to spend all kinds of time with my characters frolicking through fields and having nice days, but ah, I know that I should give these scenes purpose if they're going to there. You can't just hang out with your characters. That is the difference between the novel and real life.
I sit at my desk and yammer at people pointlessly all day and it's not world-altering, I know that, but in a book, the moments you can write like that are (or should be) VERY limited. Give your readers a few warm fuzzy scenes if you like, but don't give in to the temptation to write their most minute interactions just because you LOVE them.

I don't know that I'm always successful at this, but I'm aware of it. For example: I send Rak on a sleigh ride with a crowd of his "friends". This could all be picturesque "dashing through the snow" and singing and mulled wine, but it's not.
I use it to finally throw out some background on some monsters we'll run into later. I introduce a personality conflict that will grow into a political conflict, and also introduce a character for the readers to wonder about. (Is he sinister? Is he just a jackass?)

Really, this was a very long ramble to proclaim: Write with purpose people! Make us as fond of your characters as you are, and we may not mind a few pages of lovefest here and there. Make your stories full of action, and the moments of calm will be that much more appreciated!

Thank you and good night. :P

Immitation...

...is the sincerest form form of flattery, OR possibly a quick trip to the top of the "Do not publish, has no original content" pile, you decide.

I'm struggling with beginnings and finding a voice for Dane--a young male character who has lived hard, but has hit it off with a mentor 'round about age 11. The mentor, Rak, will have cleaned up Dane's language a great deal by the time he's 16 and narrating for me. Problem is, I don't want him talking like "an aristo", i.e. me, Rak, their employers. (Even Rak isn't really all that "aristo"...'cause he's also lived it a bit rough and has the bitter vocab to make it believable.)

Hitting the correct balance of 5 years of good, solid language training and "I lived in the streets, slept anywhere but home, and my step father was a sailor" is difficult.

Also, as I write this kid (leaving him rough for the moment), I find myself thinking of Sarah Monette's character Mildmay the Fox. Others have done this, I'm sure, but she's one of the only ones I've read who uses a character with real street grit in his words as a narrator. I love him (for her first two books). It's difficult not to think of him when I'm writing Dane. Mildmay is also a renaissance man of a thief, grew up in unsavory circumstances, etc. They don't have a ton of commonalities, but they have enough. (I can talk my way around this by saying: anyone who has grown up in similar economic circumstances is going to have certain commonalities with one another--even certain lingual markers...phrases like "lingual markers" not among them. yikes.)

I'm struggling with my desire to write a story with alternating first person narrators who need to be markedly different so the reader knows whose part of the story we're in without trying, and that niggling feeling that I'm doing exactly what someone else has already done. The story is, of course, remarkably different, and that might make all the difference in the world, but I'm still concerned.

Also, I know I'm just supposed to let things go as I'm writing a first draft and worry about other things later, but I feel like finding a voice for Dane, as one of my primary story-tellers, needs to happen before I can really dive into drafting.

Here's some context. Monette's introduction isn't a great example, but since what I'm going to quote of my own writing is also introductory, I thought it might be fair.

Sarah Monette/Mildmay: (from Melusine, pg. 2, Ace 2007.)

“So there was Porphyria Levant. And there was Silas Altamont. Silas Altamont was annemer [ordinary], a guy who’d been the favorite of Lord Creon Malvinius, a then when Lord Creon got married, Silas Altamont was out on his ear, and scared shitless of Lord Creon’s wife, who was way better connected than him, and was rumored to have three or four hocuses [wizards] on her string to boot. And she was poison-green with jealousy, because she loved Lord Creon like a mad thing, and everybody knew he didn’t give a rat’s ass about her. So Silas Altamont goes to Porphyria Levant—who was powerful enough to protect him from Lisette Malvinia, no matter who she had running her errands—and begs Porphyria Levant to do the obligation d’ame [binding]. And Porphyria Levant smiles and says okay.
Now, the thing about the binding-by-forms, the way my friend Zephyr explained it to me, is that it lets the hocus make you do what they want. Except for kill yourself. They can’t make you do that.”

Me/Dane:

"After my mam left Marfal (circumstances not her fault), I learned the stories of the Sibraldin streets. Old Sib tells you a whole lot of stories, none of which really have ever had a lot to do with the Fortanato Empire. Sib, Jewel of the South, stands alone—a monument to art, music and prosperity or blood, shite and crawling, depending on who you ask. I had a lot more of the latter as a kid in the streets of Eastside, though I did well making the whole city my backyard. I slept in the cities of the dead, in the eves of the great cathedrals, on the roof of a museum once. Gods, that was a good one. I fell asleep listening to the music of a chamber orchestra, playing for aristos dancing in the courtyard below. My mam used to be part of that world, and I remember a sort of warm blur of music and soft clothes. ‘s funny what changes with a man’s fancy. She didn’t even fight it really, just sort of rolled over and took it. I guess she was probably used to things working out that way between them.
That’s rotten to say about your mam, people always said to me, but that’s part of the story East Sib tells you. It’s you and you alone. Those fuzzy connections what get poets hard, that’s got no place, or you’re gonna be skewered sideways and bleeding out before you know it. "

Thing, is, Dane keeps talking to me in this voice, and I just don't really know how to achieve balance between his formative-language-developing years and where he is currently. In this, Dane is very different from Mildmay. Monette's narrator is a man by the time he has any contact with anyone from a different socioeconomic bracket. Makes things somewhat easier to decide on voice, I imagine.

Opinions very much asked for.

My kinda town...

I'm reading Terry Pratchett...slowly, creeping on through this book that took DB two or three days to read. I think my creeping has more to do with the amount of other things I have going on right now than the book itself, but there is also the matter of Ankh Morpork, Pratchett's fictional city.

I never really want to leave this city when I'm in it. Even if it's admittedly dirty and smelly like the worst version of early Victorian London you can imagine, I love it. It makes me want to run around in my big fictional cities and make them into places that are as visceral as Ankh Morpork. Thus, I find myself wondering what it is that is so brilliant about Pratchett's vision of a big, crowded, diverse city.

He has taken the time to make it seem real. This seems obvious, perhaps, but I think, so often, fictional cities are little more than collections of buildings that characters pass through. Pratchett has given his city class strata, and we get to know characters from each end and all the in between.

Related to this, he has recurring characters that are never main characters, but faces everyone in the city would know.

I'm thinking of a woman I used to see in the mall regularly when I worked at Crabtree. She's wire thin, clutches her purse tightly to her chest, has this back swept beehive of white hair, and she tends to yell at people only she can hear. She once came into my store and brandished a bath brush at me and promptly stalked out again. I still see her in various places around the city and wonder if she walks everywhere or if she becomes the crazy bus lady from time to time.

My sister tells me New Haven is full of these interesting individuals, who make everyone wonder after them: "What's your story?"

Unlike what you might think if asked "What makes a fictional city real?" Pratchett doesn't really give his readers much sense for the geography of Ankh Morpork. There's a bridge and a river and a university and the Patrician's mansion and all these landmarks, but I couldn't really tell anyone which was north and which was south, nor really what the construction of the place is like. What he has done, is give the reader details, so that one can feel the city. Maybe it helps that I've been in cities that have gone through six or seven incarnations since 1000 CE, but I get that when you dig in Ankh Morpork, what you find is more Ankh Morpork. I understand the streets that are not grid-system perfect 'cause they're avoiding a river. The buildings are close together, and the feeling of community (not necessarily in a good way) is more intense in the working class areas of town.

It is helpful, at least for this writer, to have a map of the city in which one is working, but I'm not so sure it's necessary for the reader. I kind of prefer to just sort of feel my way around a city...which is so completely opposite to my real life passion for my iPhone map function. (Seriously, so many panic attacks have been averted thanks to that little device.)

The other thing Pratchett does to make his city feel real, is make it multi-ethnic. Granted, in Ankh Morpork, we're mostly talking dwarves and trolls and Igors, but he does throw in other countries, often giving us obvious reference points. Otto Chriek, the vampire photographer, comes to us with an Uberwald accent that is pure Deutschland. I believe it is Klatsch that gives us very spicy food reminiscent of a curry. The dwarves come in many varieties that anyone living in today's West headbutts the Middle East over and over again society can recognize. Some of them are ok with human culture (i.e. the women won't shave their beards, but they at least want to be feminine), and some of them refuse to come above ground, and find the feminizing of their women to be immoral and terrible.

There are also zillions of conflicts that have come from other countries all trying to live cheek by jowl with each other in the crowded streets of Ankh Morpork. He doesn't shy away from the real conflicts that happen in the ethnically and economically diverse metropolis.

I love it. It's gritty. It's real. Anyone who's lived in or been to a large city (a really big one) gets Ankh Morpork.

My challenge now is to take this "checklist" (and anything else I observe because this is by no means complete) and apply it to Sibraldin, Norfine, Marrowfort, Embrinessa and Fiyoness. The last two haven't yet had the time to become crazy-big, but trade with other countries is certainly happening. The middle class is on the rise, and all those things that gave birth to Europe's first large cities are starting to occur in Ni'Essla as Armina and her friends are living there. Rak and Dane live in a time when rail travel is well-used. Empires have been born and died and left their bits and pieces everywhere. My opportunities are certainly available, and I'm excited to reassess with this new perspective.

Musical Memories

Today is apparently Gordon Lightfoot's 71st birthday. He's one of those artists that I always forget about, but there is something in his Summertime Dream album that just puts me in the best mood. It's moody. It's upbeat. It's a little twangy, a little nautical. I love it.

I used to sit in the basement, in a big faux leather recliner, listening to my parents' records and writing. The lighting was terrible, either because I was relying upon the sunlight from the narrow egress windows near the ceiling or because I had turned on one lone lamp, orange-shaded with fringe. It really was the perfect mate to the pop-scratch of the records, that ancient green chair and my 15-year-old's sense of the dramatic. I think I had an Anne Shirleyian "What the Writer Should Look Like While Practicing Her Craft" image in my head, and I was determined to live it.

I still find myself doing this from time to time, and it amuses the heck out of me when I realize it.
I can't listen to "Summertime Dream" or "Protocol" and not remember exactly what it feels like to be 15 and dreaming of authordom...and Gargoyles.

So thank you, Mr. Lightfoot, for always bringing me back to this point.

Here's "Summertime Dream". Watch the band sing the "shaaa-hup"s lookin' like frogs. It's awesome.

Deserving of Happiness

I just read this sentence in a book: "As is the case for many, the story I told myself for years was that I didn't deserve to be happy."
And I thought: I have never told myself this story. I have always thought: I deserve to be happy. Why the hell am I not happy?

Is this the problem? Do I expect too much? And if I have been expecting too much, is it only that I am not driving enough of the process myself that I am not happy?

I know I can't be dependent on other people for my happiness. I know I can't just wait for things to work themselves out. Contentment is work. (Though I think I might just now be coming to a more full realization of that statement. Thanks summer of wake-up call.)

I kind of feel like a self-centered ass admitting that I think I deserve happiness, but I think that's cultural somehow. Humility is the prize right now for some reason, but so often it has a tendency to come off sounding false. You know, the starlet of the moment saying:"I don't understand why I'm a sex symbol" after she's taken her clothes off in six movies or "I'm not really that talented. I was just in the right place at the right time." That may be true, but come on! Take some credit for yourself!

I also wonder if people who believe they don't deserve to be happy wind up happier because they don't have high expectations to begin with? I lean towards not. It seems like work to me to constantly be convincing yourself in a happy moment: "This isn't going to last. I don't deserve this."

I've been livin' side by side with bipolar disorder for probably most of my life, but for ten years, it's been more obvious (and I've only had a label for three). I should be the queen of the "This isn't going to last because I don't deserve this" line of thinking, but I'm not. I can't stand it.
I think that, more than anything, is why my low points bother me so much. When I get low for no apparent reason, then I think: "I don't deserve this! Why on earth is this happening to me?"

In side note:
I will admit to moments, when DB has been right there with me through the storm of it, that I've thought: "I don't deserve you. Why are you here?" And I've asked often enough, that I think there is some blame for this summer's fall-out on my toes. (Just like the person who convinces him or herself that they don't deserve happiness, I did my work convincing DB that I didn't deserve him and that everything was irrevocably fucked in my brain.)

Well I'm done. 'cause it doesn't fit with my usual mode of operation. I have recently spent a lot of time with friends who have known me forever. The expereince has been more amazing than usual. It's helped me remember who I am.

Certainly, a combination of things has brought me here, and I have to work to maintain it, but it was quite lovely just now to realize that "I told myself I didn't deserve to be happy" does not resonate with me at all. Gave me enough pause that I had to stop reading to "scribble" some stuff down.

I like it.

Thinking about writing

It's National Novel Writing Month, and I have thought about doing this every single year for the last four.
I have yet to do it.
I still won't be doing it because I wrote just over 2000 words today and realized midway through that I was actually writing two different things. This is the trouble I run into. I have such a hard time making myself plow through things, just to get to an end.

Now, what I think I have, is actually two essays about me. One essay will be about girlhood and womanhood, and the complicated relationship I have had/continue to have with both. I have gone from being a girl who spent time stuffing her hair under her hat and trying to imagine herself as a boy to being a woman who takes great delight in her body (most of the time). That's a heck of a trip.

The other, which I initially thought was sort of the same topic, covers sexuality: the good, the bad and the ugly. I hate thinking about it, but that is why I have to write about it. It shouldn't be over thought. My secularism wars with my Lutheran upbringing wars with my intermittent paganism and I have a knot as I relate to this thing that should really just be an "in the moment expression". (Thank you Miss Cortez.)

As I started thinking about these things and really turning them into more than the half-finished stuff of a blog draft, I began to think about what we learned about memoir in class last night. To write memoir, you really have to make your struggles and what you have learned available to others. You have to begin with memory (reflection), move on to processing these memories, and then connect the dots, braiding all the pieces together. This is not necessarily to mean that something deep and mighty must be delivered in the process, but there needs to be a real heartbeat to this material that makes it as much "large story" as a personal story.

The other bit, which seems obvious, but somehow wasn't, was how much I have to work to say enough. I know the stuff that happened, but no one else does. It's just like writing a novel.
If I am going to write about my struggles with femininity, I have to settle this firmly in a context of time and place--my immediate role models (the women actually in my life) as well as the imaginary role models. Some things will, of course, speak for themselves. I imagine that the hugeness of difference between the girl who showered in the dark and the woman who wants to dance for crowds is readily apparent.

So, I'm not writing a novel this month. I'm probably not even writing a memoir this month, but I do intend to write three (one for class) really strong essays and throw them at some publication or another...even Hamline's grad school mag.

Wish me luck!

Caught on Midday.

Yes. I listen to speeches in my car from time to time. I'm not going to do a lot with these words, just that Harold Kushner (America's Rabbi, apparently. How awesome is it that I have a rabbi though I am not Jewish?) said some good things:

Stuff that applies to the class I just took:

He was talking about age and aging, and one of the great inferences he made is that with baby boomers aging, we might actually begin to see age in this country. We do not have a society that is particularly down with aging. It leads, inevitably and frighteningly towards thoughts of death.

America's rabbi has two things to say about aging and dying. He says we must end "the war between the generations". The elderly must stop being annoyed with the noisy chaos of youth and the young must "stop seeing the elderly as an obstacle...but see them as people with stories to tell."

Yes. and thank you.

On the big D: "Do not be afraid of death. People about to die are not afraid of dying...but of having wasted their lives...Go to the cemetery. Tell me if you find one headstone that reads 'really good salesman', 'very effective CEO', 'really good with numbers', 'always drove a new car'. No. You know what the headstones say at the cemetery: 'Beloved husband and father', 'cherished wife, mother and grandmother', 'dear friend'. If you have achieved that you don't need to have achieved eminence in any other area of life."

It can probably seem a little trite, but it really struck home with me today. Also, I hope my headstone says "dear friend." (And also that it has Egyptian-style cats on either side of it.)

Kushner finished his talk with a quote from William James: "Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create that fact."

Bring it on home.

Work

The obvious right out of the gate: I am not dedicated to my job. It is a means to an end. I would hate to have it pulled out from under me at this point, but I also do not treat it like it is the most important thing in my life.
I have a coworker who cannot separate herself from her work. If she has to do it, she's going to make it important. This is not necessarily a bad trait to have. In a lot of circumstances, I imagine it's an asset. But I think she has told herself a self-importance story when it comes to her work as a faculty secretary. I also think she knows that I keep myself pretty separate from work, and I kind of think it drives her crazy that I can do this.
I don't think her job is made any easier because she's so committed either, if anything, it makes it more difficult because she starts to get edgy when things she sees as 'hers' are 'taken' from her. This has happened recently over the transition of a student activity that reports to one of my disciplines, but she has been taking care of it for the last four years or so.
She is forever saying to me: "Not that I think you're incompetent." But ah, when you hear it often enough, the message sure becomes "I think you're incompetent." I mean, I've been known to do that from time to time.

I had another one of these little run-ins after a meeting this morning. I ask her questions because: 1) she's had the job longer than I have, and 2) she's not my boss (who is a whole different kettle of crazy). Asking a simple question resulted in spew about the result of a faculty meeting in which "my faculty" were surprised that "her faculty trusted" her with website alterations from the word go.
Now, I don't have a lot of work on a daily basis, and maybe it is because these people think I'm "incompetent", but this was a meeting of department chairs. Most of the people who are department chairs right now are individuals I've had as teachers. They know I'm no fluff-brain.
They may indeed have implied that they didn't want me working on the website, I don't know, but I still got the impression that I was being put down, not by "my faculty" but by my coworker.

I've given this woman the benefit of a doubt a zillion times. She is brash and abrasive and not afraid to tell anyone what she really thinks, but man...I think this time, she IS afraid to tell me what she thinks. And she's doing a piss poor job with her passive aggression. (Unlike well...blogging about it...which is totally direct. Guess I'll step off my high horse now.)

Fit.

I have had so much that I want to write about, I have been writing about none of it. I feel, every time I sit down to begin something, at risk of rambling endlessly. These posts of mine are long anyway.
Anyway...I've gotta start somewhere.

Back in undergrad, when I took a creative nonfiction class, I was surprised by how much fun it was, and the amount of positive feedback I received on a form that I didn't consider my primary. I'm starting to feel like that in my current class run. I've been startled at the ease with which I dove back in. My papers have been strong. Perhaps not "several years of learning to construct academic writing again" strong, but I have had positive comments.
Last night, one of my classmates wrote an on-the-spot poem about my words as I gave my mid-term presentation. He said I was compelling. I probably turned pink with embarrassed pleasure.
There are people around me with bigger vocabularies, and libraries in their minds from which to draw, but I'm doing just fine, and my teacher thinks I have the skills necessary. I find it hard not to wriggle like a rewarded puppy.

One of my classmates asked last night: Has there ever been a time when you felt like you really fit in the story you were living? What did that feel like?
And our talkative class went quiet.

I've had small moments like that, I think. When I learned a dance in a week and performed at Ren Fest, the story fit.
I want so badly for the school story I'm beginning right now to fit. I feel like it does, and I just don't want to mess this up.
The problem is, that's one element. And I know now how much that one element isn't everything. I need to be socially happy as well, and, for good or ill, now that I've experienced a long-term relationship, that's part of the equation as well.
If I could get my intellectual life and my personal life moving in positive directions at the same time...I don't even have a concept of what that would feel like.

Maybe high school. Which is a terribly strange thing to look at as my benchmark for "good" because there was plenty that wasn't, but a lot of it was my own making and living at home.
Has it really been ten years since things fit?
Not that things have been bad, but the question just brought things home for me. What makes a story fit or not fit?

I haven't gotten to the bottom of all this yet anyway. Just throwing stuff out there.

(Sometimes I'm annoyed that the blog is a place of eternal first draft-i-tude. Sometime, I will put something up here that is polished.)

Variations on a Theme in G Major: Mississppi River Song

Yesterday finally felt like the fall I look forward to every year. Warm-ish. Smelling of nostalgia. Colorful. All those lovely things. I took a walk. At first, I was feeling a little sorry for myself that it was a walk alone, but I started taking pictures. The more pictures I took, the happier I became. I thought of my sister sending a photo diary of the State Fair back to CT to her friend. It occurred to me that there was no reason not to treat my random outings alone as things worth documenting. If I want experiences in life, perhaps I must treat my small joys as "experiences", and then, just maybe, I won't be so full of longing. I'll still want to travel and take in places that are unfamiliar with friends and family, but there will be beauty in finding pieces of my city/state that I don't know so well yet too.

And so...I'm not quite sure how this project will go, but here's the start of the project that I'm calling "Variations on a Theme in G Major".

Ford Bridge:

Looking from St. Paul to Minneapolis:

Off the edge of the map:

Hat left behind, Minneapolis side:

And now we know where I was...

Behold, I am Jim Brandenburg with an iPhone:

And someday, I might even get this layout thing down...

Cheers!

Random poetry

Sometimes, I wax romantic about my friends...

Tentatively titled"Bright and Hollow" (with all due credit to "The Passenger" from whence the lyrics come and the inspiration is stolen.)

I'm driving through a reflective world,
pavement layers of red and green.
My car falls deep
pothole, rabbit hole.

We used to dream these nights,
plotting the best way to catch
(and confuse) a man, spinning
white on black through the ghosts
of misleading light and sight.
Refraction.

They are our song.
Our you and me;
raining down years of us.

We ride and we ride.

The internet gap.

I'm laying in bed analyzing...'cause what else are you going to do when you're unfortunately awake at not quite 8 on a Saturday morning.  I began in the pleasant task of thinking about how I was going to become a zombie for this evening.  Quite pleasant, but this, of course, lead to concerns about the masses of people that are going to be in my house.  This would not be a concern if I had some party support.  

I'm not sure I'm going to...so I started rambling in that direction which lead me to an interesting place.  

The young ladies that DB is friends with should be people with whom I have things in common--and they are, to a certain degree.  I even think that if we had all been the same age together, we might be really good friends ('specially L and me), but they are from the "I grew up with/on the ninternet and with video games" crew.  Exposure to this is super fascinating.   Now, I've got friends who are not much older who are more like me in relation to the world, so I know it is a matter of upbringing as well, but roll with me here for a while:

I'm thinking back to my first and second year of undergrad (which puts me right in the age bracket), and the mindset that lead me to complete and total obsession with Darth Maul.  I drank nothing but Pepsi products all summer (and I hate Pepsi and Mountain Dew); I wanted those Star Wars cans.  I had merchandise like a crazy woman.  I sought supplemental entertainment on the internet, joined e-groups, wrote my own fanfiction.  I even had small giggle fits whenever I ran into a cardboard standee of Maul unexpectedly.  DB brought me comics signed by martial artist and Sith Lord Ray Park.  Everything fed into my drooling obsession, but the internet was new...the communal THING that is fandom was relatively new.  I didn't know how to break into it, so (as I did all through high school with Gargoyles), I fringed.  

My third year of school, I lived with a girl who introduced me to some (then odd) things about the internet, but now, especially with facebook and myspace, I think they're the norm.  My roomie had a webcam and a blog; she had friends with the same set up, and they had followers. People who just liked the window into the lives' of others, and they became mini-celebrities just for being themselves....without the zillion-dollar TLC contract.  It was pretty new (at least to me) at the time.  

It also was part of the reason why I started to become annoyed with my roommate situation. I didn't understand, or appreciate, the "famous" for nothing, cult-of-personality that was creeping into my living space.  

A few years later, I started spending a lot of time reading Harry Potter fanfic.  I became a casual observer to the phenomenon that is fandom.  I didn't post a lot, just read, watched and followed certain authors.  While there was certainly talent I admired (there are a lot of people writing out there who could make money at it if they wrote their own characters), I started to find that the internet fed hive-mind like whoa.  And it feeds the cycle of obsession...in a way that seems to have a distinctly young, female quality to it.  

Cults-of-personality left and right as people worshipped at the alter of others' art and writing.  The art and writing is the spontaneous outpouring of happiness the creator takes in (let's just use) Rowling's work--and then others partake, and the cult of Rowling expands to include the cult of these writers and artists (like Saints to God??).  And high spirits feed high spirits...and so it seems like the mood in such forums is always one of great excitement and silliness.  

(Part of me always thinks of Humbert Humbert--in the wry tones of Jeremy Irons--"Ah fame.  Ah Femina." as he observes Lola and some Hollywood magazines.)

This culture of disjointed distance friendships, I think, has given rise to "meet-ups" and a greater number of conventions than there have ever been previously.  Comic/entertainment industry conventions make sense to me.  People should see what's out there, what's up-and-coming, and have a chance to display their work.  Conventions/fan meet-ups that are cropping up now for a specific fandom just sort of confuse me.  

I understand on some level.  There is a powerful normalizing effect of being amongst people with the same mindset.  This is why I enjoy a con or two a year (that, and I like costumes).  It is also good, in many ways, to take these friendships made in cyberspace to a flesh and blood level, but often, when your friendship is based on "OMG bunny!Draco is so funny! *squeeeeeee*" translating that into anything else seems difficult.  ...or at least translating that level of excitement into something that suits daily life seems difficult.  I'm not just basing this on L and Bosie and their friend J.  I have, in my casual arm-chair sociologist way, listened to recordings and watched movies made by artists and writers at meet-ups.  Granted, the stuff that gets posted is filtered for fandom content as well...so they're not going to post the times they sat around talking about elections or rent or if they like strawberry ice cream--unless Draco likes strawberry ice cream...possibly a moot point.  

Regardless, there is something bizarre in the way people who are heavily involved in fandom via livejournal and other such forums relate to each other.   And I just don't really know how to get there anymore.  

I can be silly.  I'm often silly, in fact, and it often relates to geeky things.  (Ask me about how much I giggle at Star Wars references in ANYTHING...or about Zombieland OMG.)  But there is this understanding gap that has nothing to do with age and everything to do with internet and the way people in fandoms relate to each other.  

And I losing my train of thought here entirely....this was all so tight in my brain when I got out of bed.  bah.  Must be time for brain food.  

Ideas from the peanut gallery?  

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I think I've wrung out the problems DB and I are having into one issue really...everything else is possibly work-on-able, but the make or break thing (after some observation last night), is a respect issue. I don't think I can be with someone who will listen to me say: "I'm not comfortable with this" and then say, "But telling me not to do it is going to make it irresistible to me, so I have to do it." (This is the conversation we've had in the past.)

I can be ok with a female friendship, but I don't think I should have to be ok with the way high spirits in said friendship turn into wrestling matches.

I haven't hashed this one out completely with him yet, but back in the beginning of summer when I was trying to set boundaries, Miss K pointed out that DB and I flirt with everyone. Crap. We do. And I crawl into girls' laps when I'm a bit into the wine. ...usually, they are my friends, not DB's friends, and ah...crawling into Bosie's lap makes having the above conversation difficult...without including her.

That's the wacky part here. I want their interactions to change, but she has to know why too, I think. ...also setting boundaries for him/them means setting boundaries for me.
I can't say: You don't get to be attracted to this person, when I enjoy playing with that attraction all cat and mouse. (Not that you can say: you can't be attracted to this person. It doesn't work that way. Believe me, I've tried to tell myself the same thing.) The point here is...we're still being reactionary. He flaunts his freedom to play (essentially) catch-and-kiss, so I react by playing up the titillation of the two girls fantasy which will go nowhere. Wicked. Evil cycle of pettiness and juvenility.

Adulthood is tricky this way, and I think that's what drives me super bats about this whole thing--yesterday's whole thing. There was a collegiate feel to the evening...that started earlier in the day when L, Bosie and I were sitting on the floor like dorm-mates having a lovely afternoon. We made cupcakes. We colored. We had grilled cheese. We talked about "what we want to be when we grow up". ...of course, we also talked about Batman...which in this circle is the equivalent of talking about boys.

DB's arrival changed the dynamic, but it stayed very college-party. (And the girls, bless them, don't know that things should be different.) Bosie and L like to play little tricks on him; he teases (often like an older brother). He shows off the things he's doing that will get the fangirls squeeing. Lovely girls with whom I have shared a quiet afternoon are reduced to DB's little ego-boosting squad. And they become a little exclusive, though not so bad as it was three months ago. (I think I have a little loyalty from L, after all. She notices things, is observant. Is wise for her age.)

I don't know a compromisey way out of this one...well, I do, but it's up to someone who is afraid that growing up means no fun. My half has already been completed: not walking out/saying outright NO to Bosie. The rest is out of my hands, but for the conversation that needs to happen.

I want us to just be able to have a good time without over-analyzing everything, and I don't feel like boundaries and fun should be mutually exclusive. At least I finally feel like (after nearly a month of break from high-spirits event-friendship) that DB and I are in a place where talking about this is possible.

My stories: Revisiting The Woman Warrior

When I was an undergrad, I read Maxine Hong Kingston's book The Woman Warrior as part of a creative writing class. It was a meaningful reading experience, and I kept the book.
Now, reading it again, I'm amused by the things I had underlined (and by my metallic gel pen phase). I was obviously reading from a word-use perspective, but I was also reading as a girl who was neck deep in a story about a woman warrior.

I was attempting my first rewrite of Armina's story at the time, and she was still a kick ass first, think about it later sort of gal. I honestly think it was in the reading of this book that Armina started her metamorphosis into something less sword-wielding and crazy.
Coming across my younger self in the pages of this book alone makes the reread worth it, but reading it now feels downright exultant to me. Reading this book is like building up buttresses around the walls of my personal cathedral.

The way MHK travels through Chinese legends as herself is a great reminder of how powerful story can be. I've been trying very hard to focus on my school work, not getting side-tracked into the land of my fictional characters, though my brain is firing at 90 miles an hour, and all this talk about myth makes me want to work on Rak and Dane...and all this talk about gods makes me want to work on Armina.

It's very hard not to cave because I haven't had the focus, or desire, to work on either since my life went wonky in June. I was just starting to get back on the train the week DB met Bosie. (ah ha. yes. so clever my literary history references.) Then, I couldn't even think about anything...much less a story where the female friend gets the hero...whose lovely, sad wife is conveniently disposed of in childbirth. I thought about rearranging my favorite love story because of real life...VILE.

This is the power of story...both the story I was living, and the stories I have been telling.
If stories can hurt (and I'm choosing to treat my perceptions/DB's actual behavior as a form of story), stories can heal as well.
I recently wrote a paper for class about my connection to Wendy Darling in Peter Pan. I found that I was really angry about the way this story had been co-opted by DB and Bosie, so I wrote about redefining my relationship to Wendy Darling. It is time to do that with my own stories as well. I won't allow myself to hate characters that are parts of myself.

Armina and Justin, close friends of the opposite sex or not, are not representations of that other life story, and they predate it by years! (Though I can't say I won't include some of what I've learned this last summer in adding poignancy to the relationship between Justin, Anne and Armina.) I will not allow my annoyance with Bosie's one track mind to cloud the way I write Dane's ambiguous sexuality. That was in the works long before I knew she existed.

Growing up, I was able to use fiction as a means of channeling the things that were bothering me, and somewhere along the line (perhaps in believing I could do this for money), I blocked up that flow. I'm hoping that having a career path that is not entirely dependent on fiction writing will open this up for me again. There is so much wealth in the upside down world.

And there are many other stories it is time for me to take back and make my own again. I think that was the pull and giddiness I was feeling as I was reading Maxine Hong Kingston retell the Fa Mu Lan story with herself at its center. Of course, some of that was still the idea of myself as swordswoman: years of training on the dragon mountain, gaining the skills to return and take her father's place in the army. Riding out with revenge characters carved into her back, gathering armies, being undiminished by marriage and a child, coming home in triumph to live in peace.


P.S. I have chills that "Muhammad My Friend" was playing on itunes as I completed this: "We both know it was a girl/back in Bethlehem."

Rose Ensemble: Il Poverello

Friday night I went to a concert made up of music devoted to St. Francis of Assisi--in some cases with lyrics by St. Francis.
Here are some ramblings based on things written during the show:

I.
During the pre-concert discussion, Jordan Sramek (the director--who looks so young to be so accomplished!--I give him four years on me, if that) told us a bit about the religious climate of Italy in the 13th century. Great fervor all around certainly, but the thing that never fails to grab my brain and hold on tight is sects of flagellants. These were individuals so devout that they cut a piece out of the back of their robes, so that they might roam through the streets, displaying their wounds and adding more.
Mr. Sramek called this "penitent pain." I'd not heard it described in that manner before and I'm sort of in love with the term.
Modernity doesn't get this behavior. (Though I'm sure there were those in the middle ages who didn't get it either.) In general, we are all raised to be so sure of ourselves and so self-sufficient, that the idea of "penitent pain" causes much squirming.
I can't come up with the sort of feelings that would lead me to beat myself in the name of god....and if I can't (I who often have feelings of "unworthy" in the face of the divine), it seems no wonder this sort of thing holds no sway in hearts and minds but to be labelled bizarre--unhealthy.

I don't condone this sort of behavior--self injury is never a good thing, but there is the sort of wonder in it...an intensity that defies definition. Is it a blend of feelings of near-pathological unworth and longing that mingles with frustration as one cannot touch the divine? Chronic apologia for behaviors in fellow humans that are less than godly? ...so there is a greater involvement with the community/ion of souls than we are currently capable of? Or hidden in the depths of all this there is fear?
I always feel that people who are overwhelmingly sure of their faith are completely full of it, and have no place displaying it like they do, but honestly under certainty (of any sort) there is so often doubt and fear.

I have no answers, and I'm not out to make an analytic argument one way or another. Regardless, I find it fascinating that on the one had the religious fervor led to cathedral construction like crazy, the springing up of various monastic orders (even things that approximated a monastic order among lay people) and masses of music, and on the other: penitent pain. mea culpa. mea maxima culpa.

II.
I enjoy the chill of large churches. I can't really explain this feeling, but there is a special vaulted-ceiling, stone floor, stone walls chill. It always soothes me. Perhaps it is just the association with travel and having spent some of my very best days roaming around in damp monuments to faith. Whatever it is, it's cozy to me when logic says it should be exactly the opposite.

III.
There is a special power in doing something alone. I have been fighting with myself lately about whether I need someone to share in my "religious" experiences with me--my moments of soul-soaring (music, outdoors, etc) or if these are things that are just as glorious when the communion occurring is with the self. I think I may have answered this on Friday.
I would like a companion who enriches my life in some way, but there was power and great calm to be had in just allowing the spirit and joy to flow out of myself (to the gods--to other people--to the wooden Marys over my head) and then back into myself. I've been mourning having someone to share "my moments of overflow", but perhaps I do not need that as much as I thought.

IV.
Post the above, this dialogue came to me:

Once, I feel I was a great lady
and groups of musicians played
for my pleasure in the sun
of a great garden.
A question:
Once?
Yes. Once, I reply,
for what am I now?
Comes the stunned response:
What aren't you now?

Many-headed Gender

Doing a lot of work with "ideal" womanhood in class....and by, association, the romanticizing of this "ideal" as something more complete than the masculine.

I just found this line in the book we're reading this week (James Carroll's An American Requiem): "In recalling the power of that first ideal in which virtue was not the opposite of masculinity but the essence of it, I recognize that the man I still long to be is the one I first thought my father was."

This statement is not only one of the most poignant things I've ever read, but also one of great insight. It leaves me with that feeling akin to "Ah ha". Though I have not quite gotten to the Ah Ha yet, something is about to occur to me, and it could be brilliant.

The first thing that comes to mind for me is personal and completely non-academic. I thought of my grandfathers. I can't explain the virtue/masculinity connection in them, just that the idea resonated with their presence. These men were of the same generation as Carroll's father, so I wonder if there was something about this "Greatest Generation" perception of masculinity that (while arguably detrimental in a great many ways) we should be paying more attention to in this moment.

My second associations are questions: In what way is virtue the essence of masculinity? In what way is it now the opposite? ...and did a vocal feminist movement have anything to do with this?
I will get to these questions later/sometime.

First, I'd like to try to get to the bottom what it is that's been bugging me in our late 20th century readings of feminist-theory inflected spirituality. As wonderful as these things have been, I have to question balance. There are a few things to consider here.
1) Feminine power was in serious need of reclaiming throughout the last...oh...lots of centuries. I'm not going to argue that.

2) The breaking point with the lack of feminine power definitely rose to the top on several occasions throughout world history, but none quite so dramatically as with focused "civil rights"/humanist/feminist movements of the 60s. A decade of great reaction all around.

3) Things did change. For example: When my mother went away to college, it was still rather expected that she would only go to meet a husband, and she may or may not work once she met this man. When I went away to school, I was going to enrich myself. I have heard similar stories from many friends with mothers who share a generation with mine.

4) Things did not change enough, and there came a crop of certain writers (probably beginning in the late 60s, early 70s) who began to use Goddess imagery to advance the cause of woman on earth. I find this tendency especially prevalent in writings of self-discovery and spiritual journey published in the late 80s and early 90s. (It could be that I began seeking such books for my own personal journey in the mid-90s as a confused adolescent who really wanted to find something positive in her femininity. 'cause the world still wasn't selling it to me.) aaanyway....
There is a commonality--a trope almost--among these writers to claim that we must all experience the divine feminine, for only She is complete. (This is massively over simplified again....)

Most recently, I read it in Jean Houston, as it relates to the Hero's Journey as embodied by Odysseus. Odysseus often finds himself in caves, and--as any good dabbler in ancient religions knows--caves are places of feminine initiation. You're crawling back into the earth-womb when you take on a cave, baby.
And Odysseus has got to do this in order find his completeness. The HERO in general, must always get in touch with his feminine side, it seems.

I found myself asking: As a woman, how do I find the same balance? (Balance is all-important. There was a reason androgyny finds such power in old stories...) Do I feel like a complete and creating being that someone else should emulate? In what way do I experience the masculine? Do I have to run with the deer? Experience the year-hunt? Come back with blood on my hands and be anointed? What is it?

This then...is where everything seems to tie together in my brain. If as recently as the 50s we could still make the connection between virtue and masculinity, maybe we haven't been out of balance for as long as this crop of writers in the late 20th century would have us think. After all, they're all writing after the period of overthrow that sheds a different light on the gender roles of the first half of the century and earlier.

Now, of course, is when I start to wonder if I'm advocating that I stop working, go home and have babies right now dammit. No. That's not what I'm after. And I know that. Heck, I'm grateful for that choice, but somewhere on the path to this choice...something changed in a way that I'm not entirely sure is good. Yes, we lost a very obvious power imbalance, but perhaps the subtle undercurrent of power imbalance that remains is even more damaging.

We give a lot of lip-service to gender equality, but I don't think it's there. A lot of women--myself included--still have trouble figuring out what's great about being a girl. Also, I think we have tried to move towards a masculine-identified equality. (My brain just exploded as the personal and the wider world collided...hold on....)
Women, in relationships have a tendency to be the ones doing a lot of the work on self within the relationship. I, currently, must keep raptor-eyeball on myself to monitor if I'm warping too much towards what DB wants, away from pieces of myself. And part of me wonders if, as a gender, we made the same mistake in working ourselves toward an equality that was defined by men.
Men...being less likely to work on themselves (not across the board, but in general), may have reacted in a regressive way, rather than an accepting way. ...widening the gap, and we have yet to mend it.

I found this in a review for E. Anthony Rotundo's book American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era: "...by the end of the 19th century, men (with Theodore Roosevelt as paradigm) were seen as overgrown boys, their boyish impulses being their best part." This is even earlier than I was thinking for my above statements, but still...we have one half of the world, working analyzing, growing and the other half operating on impulse.
That's not virtue. It's also the sort of thing that obviously sets the stage for a certain type of theorist to say: "You are incomplete. You must get in touch with your feminine side. You must have the initiation of the goddess." Perhaps, what is really meant is: "You must accept your mind and its growth. You must work at adulthood--be less reactive. Live with purpose--like your life depends on it because you don't want to be dependent."

This bring me back to: What is my initiation in the god then? Do I need to remember not to take things so seriously? Is that man's gift?

I once read a fantasy novel in which there is a quest for a crown--which turns out to be as much a state of mind as it is a physical object, neither here nor there--with which the only the True King can be crowned. On this quest, the seekers visit 7 lakes. Each lake has a lesson. At one, the seekers must learn to play. The character with whom I most identified had a hard time with this one. He felt himself very much above the splashing and otter-like stone sliding.

Maybe I need to stop pushing so hard for soul-searching in myself and let my child-self experience for a while.


I think I have raised more questions than I answered, but this may only be an introduction...
This topic is a hydra.

More to come.

Harvest

Today is the equinox. Ms. Amos wrote once:

"We move into a state of perfect balance today.
As much Light
As much Dark...
A new cycle is in motion, and we have chosen to move with it....
The harvest has come in. Whatever that is. Gathering in and getting rid of that which will not serve me in the coming months..." (reprinted at Here In My Head)

What is my harvest right now? What do I gather to myself? And what do I part with?

I have already posted about potential for my new cycle, but there is something about the concept of "gathering in" that I want to play with.
The other day, I was talking to my sister about autumn, and how it has always been my favorite time of year. I waxed rather poetic about the colorful leaves being the pyre of the Year King in his passing, though this is not a time of mourning. If the periods of stasis are beneficial personally, surely the earth needs this time just as much. This is the time the earth gathers itself together; it rests, like the Judeo-Christian god after creation.
Autumn, and the move into the dark season, is the world's/gods'/Creation's gift to us. As the earth pulls its energy inwards, so too, can we. We can turn the energy that has been focused on others, focused on work, focused on anything but our own lives as creative beings, and turn that energy inwards for a time.  

I am very aware of the fine balance one must keep in terms of "looking in" v "turning energy in."  Looking in can be more like stewing, the dangerous over-analysis that is not useful, and not healthy.  This is what I can cast from myself at this time.  Instead, I commit to myself in balance. I make my connection to my own lights and darks, while dispelling their governing influence.  

I also cast from myself (though this will take more doing than just saying it) grasping, envious behaviors.  I gather in compassion and self-larger-than-self. 

 A new cycle IS in motion, and I choose to move with it.  

Initiation--brain bookmarking

As previously mentioned, I'm reading a book about the Odyssey and the ways one can expand the story of Odysseus' trials into one vast, mushy metaphor for one's own life muck. ...I'm buying it in bulk.
I always feel a lot like I should be dressing (and perhaps speaking) like Prof. Trelawny in the Potter movies when I find myself flailing in recognition while reading things that might be rejected as New Age tripe by more logical minds, but I have never really credited myself with a logical mind. Also, I imagine at 50, I will be THAT woman....with the large jewelry, funky glasses on a beaded chain and floaty clothes, so perhaps it is entirely appropriate that I am already identifying with that particular earth motherly archetype.
Moving right along...
This book has me thinking about the ways the trials of my life have been nothing but preparation for initiation into the possibility for a whole new me...a whole new stage of self. (There are about 900 layers of this. Bear with me.)

I'm beginning to come up with a reason to accept what is happening to my marriage. I don't have to like it, but I am coming up with reason.
My Odyssean trials--my Cyclops, poor winds, Scylla, Charybdis, death of my crew, etc--are (aligned with no particular image):

• reaching the end of my undergraduate career, drowning in doubt as I realize/decide that what I thought I wanted is not what I want...and thus nearly failing every class my senior year because I ceased to have direction;
• a hereditary mental illness that decided right in the middle of all this crap was a great time to kick it into high gear,
• the dissolution of friendships that had been important to me,
• and a complete lack of faith in my ability to get into grad school or do anything important with myself for fear that my head would just eat me alive again.

Into the vortex of Charybdis I go, clinging to pieces of my ship--my raft: my relationship with DB. It is at this point, I spend my seven years on Calypso's island. ...in the form of what I thought was a nearly idyllic relationship (ok...in my case 7 years was more like 9). Still with me? No? Damn. Moving forward anyway.

Jean Houston writes of Odysseus: "So, battered, naked, stripped of all his symbolic veneer, the brilliant "man of many ways" lands on Calypso's womblike island, dead to his former self.... [Calypso] provides him with a regular daily life in which he has no need for the cunning and wily qualities that saw him through the Trojan victory and his subsequent adventures. Instead, he must learn to use the qualities of sensory enjoyment and emotional relationship."

This is where I started underlining just about every other sentence. Post HU (part 1?) I was lost...in need of a serious Restyle of Self. I rested in my relationship with DB, content to have one person with whom I was most intimate, content with the quiet in my life. I learned things about compassion in this time. I learned things about selflessness. I learned about sharing myself in my most unbound states. It was comfortable, and I was completely different from the girl who dove headlong at knowledge for fortune and glory, eschewing all personal attachments. This was not, as it sometimes felt, a stuck place, this may actually have been a period of "hibernation...presaging a fundamental renewal or restructuring of personality." (Houston again)

Now, though I may not like the way in which it is occurring, I may be ending my time on Calypso's island of rest and renewal. DB may have done what he was supposed to do in my life, and now I am ready to return to Ithaca (school, intellectual life, my abandoned "path"?) with less ego and true humility.

The difficult thing, but potentially the most selfless thing, is to realize that I might be the same thing in DB's life. Even though his movement does not look like "forward" movement looks to me, it might be.
(Now is the part of the show when I start mixing my spiritualities with as much verve as the Swedish Chef...)
It is very human to hang on to things you have seen as yours, but attachment causes suffering, right? And if there is an end to suffering, one must let go.
Insert applicable quote here:
"How do you let go of things? This means you leave them as they are; it does not mean you annihilate them or throw them away. It is more like setting down and letting them be. " (from Buddhanet)
And this is very much what I have been trying to practice in this situation, even as I come to look at DB as my teacher in the ways of various mysteries...as someone I may have to leave in order to take on what's next.

Not that any of this zenning makes what I'm going through any less painful. It is, in its own way, a set of trials. It is nice, in the midst of turmoil, to have this way of viewing what has been, and it does not feel false in any way.

Ways of Knowing #1

Of all the classrooms, in all the universities in the country, I had to walk into this one. And it was right! Sure...it's going to be some pretty fluffy learnin', but I've got a BA in English. I remember fluffy learnin'.

In which you read something and sit around a table and talk about it for several hours. I found myself writing down things JN was saying just because, not even because they were necessarily going to be pertinent. This, I feel, must be a good sign.

The difficulty I already know I'm going to have with this course--a course about "Great Stories", archetypes and "restorying" the world--will be keeping a healthy distance from it. So far, the things we have been assigned to read have felt like things I would choose to self-therapy my way through my current personal situation as well as all the build up from the past. (Using the phrase 'build up' makes me feel like my life is hair that has been overly styled.)

There were times, the other night, as I listened to my classmates speak in wise and complex sentences, that I felt just as I had in my philosophy of religion course as a first year in college: in over my head with nothing to add but overly personal details.

This is going to be good for me. Whoa what? Yes. This will, in fact, be good for me.

I have, in the past, approached education from the back of a draft horse. I am lookin' down on the world, 'cause I'm such a big fat smarty pants. Education was what I did. I looked for knowledge as a way to set myself apart from (and often above) the unbathed masses. (Holy hubris Batman!) This time around, the feeling is different. I am entering into a something very purposefully. I am driven by a goal that feels like something beyond myself. This, of course, also sounds New Age-tastic, but it's the only way I can phrase it right now.

I am beginning to understand the concept of Call. I still thumb my nose at the church-hiring process, (the concept of "receiving a call" as though from god, and not from a bunch of men and women sitting around a table in a church basement), but as I begin my religion-studying, I find the word popping into my brain more often with less sneering.

It is because I would like, someday, to be able to sit down with someone and lead them through their own personal version of Inanna's story--or Christ's--leading someone out of their own underworld. 'cause if I can get off my own damn meat hook/cross/tree of life/what-have-you, I can only hope to give someone else the spiritual/archetypal tools to do the same.

But this set of thoughts is exactly why keeping a healthy distance from the material is going to be difficult. It will be hard to discuss the archetypical importance of Odysseus' journey when I'm thinking very obviously of my own seven years lost on Calypso's island.

It will take focus, but focus has been distinctly lacking as of late. I look forward to it.