Chew

After I've cleaned up Witch's Blood and started to get the hang of grad school, when I'm midway through working on a good novel and trying to forward my publishing career... I'm going to do something foolish. I am going to enter Blogger's story month thing. I have no idea what I'll be writing. I haven ocharacters, no plot, no nothing. I just have a sort of faith that on All Saint's Day, when the damn thing starts, the beginning of British New Year, when the spirits are out and the line between the worlds is thin, then the proper spirits will come to me and give me thier story.

I really think I'm getting in over my head.

On Writing

A lot of thoughts go through my head in a single day. Especially on writing. And then, on days like this they distill into a few lines. All week we've been looking at other author's, older authors, far more established authors in class, and the question is always, "What character are you?" or, "What do you have in common with this character...?"

Well, all of my characters are very different from me, and from each other. I was remembering an old story, written long ago about a character I would never trouble to write now. He had been born rich and and destiend for a lot and was trapped in that role, a slave to social duty. I guess I knew what mattered to me even then, when I first began writing.

My characters, my people, have this one thing in common with me and each other. I do what I want to, I follow my desire and this makes me free. And so I write now about free people.

I am the lust of the world
i am the whore who burns and turns
a girl into a woman
the stiffening cock
that turns the clock and separates
boys from men
i am the cry from heaven
that links like lovers in orgasm
the two to one
the heaven to hell
i end all divisions
i am reaching out right now
i am longing
i am...
yes, i am lusting
i will not let you fuck me
with all these sad ass expectations
and i follow one law
thou shalt not be bored
i have whored out my heart
to every flaming interest
i am reaching, i am straining
i am riding on a beast with seven snapping
heads
and i will not stop
until i have taken it all in

October leaves are falling to the ground
red and gold currency all around
God's wealth falls softly from the trees
and teaches we who live to cling
by quickly curling up
and turning brown

Labyrinth

I cannot properly go into the new day without gratitude for the one that has passed. My gratitude comes in snapshots of what I have seen. Climbing up and down the steep hills behind the woods, I met a man who was fishing and mushroom hunting. He was mad as a hatter, but most people are madder than hatters. I had the sense to wear boots and gloves though it was warm. I ended up in a ravine and had to climb out of it with hands and feet, hooking my legs around tree branches.

Walking the labyrinth, perform the spiral dance, all around me the trees were a mellow fire of mustards and deep reds. There was a little wind so the chimes were in constant song. The sky was a rare blue. It warm like God had painted it with pigments left in the heat. And as I walk this labyrinth, at the beginning of the esbat of the full moon, remembering the Mother of the Earth, who is the Earth, the bells from the Catholic church are chiming a Black Protestant hymn written by an Anglican. As I turn and turn and make the spiral, every tradition that intersects in me, comes together over me, right now, at this moment.

To quote the Hiltons sisters:

That’s

Passing

Today I pass a place I remember well. Three years ago it was icy and grey and I fell to piece there. Slowly, painfully, I put myself together again. No one else did it. I did. God helped, but I put myself together again. So I know that should I fall apart again, I will be able to once again to the work or reassembling.

endnotes

We're putting the new flooring down. While father and I moved the refrigerator, three dead mice fell out of it.

Disgusting.

Scott

Scott needs to shave.
Scott the librarian is so pale he is translucent. You can nearly see through him. It's nearly eerie except he's kind so if he's a ghost, you'd have to call him Casper. Only, Scott is very much a live, and even a little bit of facial hair looks like too much on someone that pale. Clumps of gold all over his face as he checks my fines and, upon seeing that I might be a little in trouble, clicks the override button for all the items I might be fined.

Whenever library fines magically disappear, or I'm riding he bus for free, or receiving a book voucher from the receptionist for this semester's text books even though my loans are in default, I remember that it's always a blessing to have friends in high places.

And high places are usually just on the other side of the counter.

Grace

The choir is singing:

Ave verum corpus, natum de Maria Virgine:
Vere passum immolatum in cruce pro homine...


Incense sweet and deep smelling fills the air, the congregation in making its circuit up out of chairs, down the various aisles, back to seats, the cupbearers leave the altar, leave their various stations to drain the last of the wine from brass chalices, shiny as gold. Maybe they are gold and I would rather not believe. Here, God, is the mystery. It is shapeless save the shape be round, round like eternity. It is not a doctrine or a creed but truth and love. You cannot grasp it, it cannot be touched except by touching the flesh and blood of the person in the pew beside you.

Amen

Scribbles

Scribbling in my journal. Writing in that book is what keeps me a "writer". The actual physical contact of the pen to the paper, the fingers to the pen, the scratching of the pen against the paper, the spill of the ink makes me a writer. Without that it's just fingers on the keyboard, and I am becoming a typer. I don't know that I can point to any way that my journal is "practical" except that it keeps me writing in something, sketching in something.

And what is it in me that feels the need to sketch down quickly, on this page, in poems, in notebooks, on a keyboard... life?

Notes

Watching a documentary: Real Time. Kids in a jail-slash-reform school. Three of them are in there for rape. One of them talks about coming into a woman's house and saying: "Can I have some pussy?" The woman says not in this room where my daughter is. Then they go into her room and he fucks her. That is what it was. It technically isn't rape, but it wasn't love or intercourse or anything as benign. After that he goes out and rapes her daughter. Another inmate raped chldren. He went in for an offense he commited when he was fifteen. And still there a boy who beat a girl in the head with hole bunch and then threw her on the floor and raped her.

But this is a school as much as a jail. What is the motivation behind the kindness and the mercy that makes this place work? The principal says: "When these people come out, they will be our neighbors. We will live next to these people. They need to know we're all in this together."

We need to know we're all in this together. When the interviewer ask Rasul if that old life was fun he says yes. There was nothing else to do but bad things. Coming home it's not fun to see cupboards bare, family hiding food.

When the interviewer asks what fun is now, Rasul answers: Life.

Well, today I’m not going to actually write about anything I learned in class about The Handmaid’s Tale. Or Oates or Atwood.

Today I’m going to write about church on Friday.

I’m Anglican, and you should never ask for an Anglican perspective on anything, because when Mass is over one third of the congregation will on a pro-life march, a second will attend a gay rights rally and the last third will do time between both. And we all read, so when I brought up the Handmaid’s Tale after Mass, at lunch, there were many statements about it that brought me to the heart of Atwood.

Father Paul stated, disapprovingly: "She doesn’t think much of Christianity."

I disagreed and corrected him, even though he’s in his mid-seventies and I’m in my mid-twenties. He modifed it to, "Well, she doesn’t have much to say about evangelical Christianity." He’s an evangelical Anglican. I agreed that she didn’t and said that I didn’t either. All the liberals were gone from lunch that day, and I had to hold the fort for right thinking leftists. Everyone who had read the book or seen the movie said that Atwood found fundamental Christianity a threat. I said pointed out that she never said it was Christianity, but that it might well have been. What was more, I saw fundamental Christianity as a threat. Like all fundamentalisms it’s so NOT fundamental. It is not basic. Fundamental Christianity should be, "love your neighbor as yourself," or the Sermon on the Mount. So would say a liberal. I recently watched the documentary "Fear and Trembling before G-D about the horrible treatment of gays in the Jewish Orthodox and Hasidic communities. But Rabbi Hi! llel, when asked what the heart of Judaism was gave the same response (and did this standing on one foot) as Jesus did about his message- which was also rabbinic. Fundamentalism is so good at picking and choosing what it likes, and what is of advantage to the mighty. It demonizes the other and makes a demon out of the oppressor. By now I’m sure I’ve stopped talking about the book, but isn’t that what a good book does, lead you discuss something beyond it? Something immediately in this world?

I am reading Oate’s The Faith of a Writer now, and going to the poems. Handmaid led me into a slight argument with a friend who is a Lutheran minister (he eats with us on Fridays and sometimes says Mass at our church). It was about the essence of faith. He is a good man, but his faith can be boiled down to three sentences he learned in seminary. There is nothing terribly strong or dynamic about it. I would that my faith was the faith of a writer: not easily set down, put out in poems and essays, changing, expressing itself in the world, whispered through ink on pages from my soul when it is quiet to the soul of another when he or she is all alone in her room reading.

Mobi Morality

Even before I showed Ma the sculpture of Mobi, I knew I had failed. It was a representation of Mobi goddess of transport, death and putrefication. Her symbol is the bottom feeding fish, and of old she received child sacrifice. Her delight was in the fingernails and toenails of babies because she had no nails (or babies) of her own. She is a death goddess worshipped by the Solahnese people in the fantasy I’m working on.

So when Ma said that the sculpture was cute, I knew I’d failed.

This new image is what Mobi ought to be. Ma was violently opposed to it. “I don’t like it. The old Mobi was cuter.”

Which is how I KNEw I struck gold with this new image.
Which is why I am dismantling the old Mobi.

Reading various scriptures and mythologies it becomes clear to me that we have not only left a mythic view of the world behind for a moral one, but substituted the moral one (good versus evil) for pleasant versus not pleasant. Cute versus ugly.

I think the problem the West has with God (gods, divinity, the universe) is that if it is not pretty, it is not right. If it is not cute or convenient, it is wrong. When I hear an atheist say he doesn’t believe in God because if God were real the world wouldn’t have so much trouble in it, I wonder what kind of divinity he was promised. I come from a mythic tradition where there is no promise of a cute God or a nice life. There is struggle, weariness, and the glimpse of a sublime and terrible power. Goodness is only one of its aspects. You have only to gaze at a Hindu goddess to see how in the East they understand this perfectly. You have only to read a few chapters from a King James Bible to realize that once we understood it too.

haven’t you had enough
all his bullshit and all his stuff
you give and give and he never
says he loves you
he can never say thank you
you understand? i hope you do
you can get down on your knees and pray
get down on your knees and say hail marys
and pick him berries and squeeze the grapes for his wine
or you can get on your knees and suck his balls
until he comes all over the walls
and still--


he won’t love you

this is me when i love you
you’re like my mother
i could be nursed by you
you’re like my little sister and i would nurture you
or you’re like the significant other
and i’m like the lusty brother
and i could just fuck you

Remembering

Well, I’d better post again. It’s been a while and blogger tells me my posting has gone down from an average of six a week to five a week. Um.
There have been things to do. Last week, I finished the rough draft of Common Prayers and I always celebrate the ending of one story by waiting a week before attempting another one. Once I waited a whole month, a month without writing. That was bad. But then Jamnia was what I produced after that, so maybe the month of rest did me good.
I doubt it, though. Some people have a feeling that they aren’t really doing anything, that they ought to be “doing something.” Well, when I am not writing that is just how I feel, and when I write again, then I feel like I am “doing it” though what, exactly, I am doing escapes me.

It is the fourth day of Sukkot now, and every night you are supposed to invite a different character from the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, to stay with you. Usually it is one of the ancestors: Abraham, Sara… you know. But I am not really a Jew, and I am not really gung ho on bringing those ancestors into my tent. They had big enough tents of their own. So today I turn to the story of the concubine in the book of Judges, the woman whose husband left her to be raped and murdered by a whole town of men. He took her body and cut it in twelve pieces to send a piece each to the tribes of Israel. They were not avenging her, but avenging HIS lost property. I read the story so seldom that it shocks me every time I return to it. Something in me says, “This CAN’T be true. It can’t be.” It is just too much.

But, ah, but even if that one story weren’t true, there are many concubines, aren’t there, too many stories of two many girls killed like this.

So on the fourth day of sukkah we remember that woman, and light a candle for those like her.

Eversky

All this day I have been resting from most things, but not from getting the new blog ready for NaNoWriMo. It almost looks right, but there's this funky little thing with everything being centered. If I could just find a way to "uncenter" the font. This book, which has, as far as I know, no plot, is called Neversky. I didn't know it was in the blogosphere yet, and the funny thing is it got it's first comment when there was only one sentence up. Not even a good sentence. Here, at Witch's Blood, where I am working harder than ever, I hardly get comments at all. I think for a long time I let this deter me. I know I did. Well, whatever is being written, if it is good enough I suppose someone is reading.

I am getting tired. I am about to run out of juice. I'd better stop while there's a little left. I'd better take myself to bed.