Witch's Blood

Of late something has happened so amazing, such a change, that I had to document it. I thought maybe other people would feel it too. For themselves.

I know now, that my whole life I have wanted to be, thought I should be a great something, or a good someone, and wondered what that path should be. I always tried to walk down that road.

Suddenly the only thing I must be is who I am right now. Everything is in that. I am the road. The Way is me.

Lists

There's something about this time of year... makes me feel like making lists.

The Ten Most influential novels (or series) for me:

in the order that they come to mind...

1. The Song of Solomon Toni Morrison
2. His Dark Materials Philip Pullman
3. Giovanni's Room James Baldwin
4. The World of Normal Boys K.M. Sohnlein
5. The Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien
6. The Red Tent Anita Diamant
7. Dune Frank Herbert
8. A Wizard of Earthsea Ursula LeGuin
9. A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens
10. The Harry Potter Series J.K. Rowling

What a strange list! Some of these books a lot of people have never heard of. Some of these books I know I'll never read again. But they've left their mark on me for various reasons. What are the books that leave an imprint on you?

Taste

i saw you
waiting, slowing down
for me
expecting me to come
and i didn't come
because i didn't feel like it
why do you do that to me?
how sometimes i don't feel like you
sometimes i can't stand you
all of your words
like fingernails
and i'm the chalkboard
why won't you just be quiet?
how could you ever have been
pretty to me?
add that to an
oh-my-lord
i'm so tired of you
and i can't give anything to you
and when i'm through all of this
by myself i would give anything to
you
i would make room for you
and run my hands over you
there would be nothing more welcome
more welcome than silk the feel of your body
molded by my sculpting hands
wondering, in wonder and in awe
like a catholic before the virgin
all of my love burgeons sometimes
thinking of you
is this desire?
sometimes i cannot take you
and then sometimes
i just have to taste you

Ode

Today I saw an ass--
round and tight, firm
and confident,
full of arrogance
proud and upright,
encased in cordoroy and
and naivete
and that ass reminded me of you
and your ass so long ago
so round and full of itself
and I still see your ass in my mind's eye
with the shirt hitched up on it,
shirts never ever
fell right down over it--
that ass never hid
i meditate of that ass
and wonder how you are

Vision

We all landed on this planet, not making the rules, feeling, for a time, at least, subject to them. For the first years of my writing career (which I would stay started at eighteen) I was exploring the place I was in, the world I'd been handed, trying to understand other people, always uncertain of my own interpretation of the world, gullible enough to take people at face value.

And I think I was a person of struggle. Though I would never have classified myself as deferential, I suppose I was deferential to Rome, to the Church being the final say. How could I know when I was writing Jamnia, that this little book marked the beginning of that end. Not a year would pass before I was heavily jaded by the religion of my youth, and only a little more time could pass before I had gone back to the mystery traditions that, in deference to Rome, I had forsaken. Only a little more time would pass before I traded in being a loyal Roman for a skeptical Anglican who was religious on his own terms.

And this matters how?

I thought I was writing about my writing, not my religion. But I see the two are the same. Especially as I enter now into the actual paper publication of Jamnia. The person who wrote that was a devout Roman who felt it his task as a Catholic to disagree with his Church, to maintain a tension between himself and the Powers That Be. The author who remains is a Anglican Pagan, a bit of a gnostic, a liberal heretic. He is not struggling against any power or any doctrine. He is not chafing under any dogma because he does not believe in one. He knows God is good and God is everywhere. Very different from dogmatic faith.

And this effects my writing?

Well, yes. Because it effects my imagination. It is the difference between having an imagination that is (however grudgingly) subject to someone else's imagination. In my case the imagination of a Church was what I subjected my own to, but sometimes it is the imagination of a nation or a race. This collective imagining which demands that the individual give way to It is more like a dream than it is a vision and more like an opiate haze than a dream.

So, if in the beginning I wrote because I wanted to know, I wrote myself into a sort of knowing and it appears that now I writeto clear away the opiate haze. I don't want to impose my vision on anyone else because I don't really have a vision. Pity, isn't it. I hope, though, when I write, to prick, to slap, to sting a little bit not so that the reader may have my vision, but-- in a sharp moment of clarity-- have her own.

Hope

I'm becoming increasingly sure that one task of a bard is to be a sort of social critic. A prophet, maybe? Both terms are so loaded. One says I am coming with the fire of God, and one has me standing in the corner at the party with a martini a cigarette and a sour look on my face. But what I think I'm supposed to be doing is something much more humble. I just want to give voice to my doubts about common assumptions. I just want to suggest that maybe cherished truths are not absolute truths. I want to look at things a different way and invite other people to do the same. I am not happy about the course this country is running. I am not satisfied with the average lifestyles of American twenty-somethings. Or thirty and forty somethings either. But I am full of hope.

Third time’s the charm
For it is this third time
You have disarmed me and I remember all the times
Before
The shape of you passing me
Your smile
When you smile at me
So honestly
The set of those lips,
Waiting and wet,
Like two fruits,
Red.
Sweet I wonder
And I am so afraid of
This thunder
Distant and rumbling that rises at my horizon
After such a calm
After the quiet joys of lovelessness
And living alone

Writing Again

I am remembering someone asking me about one of my stories. He thought that somehow in them were clues about me, that to ask about the tale is to ask of the teller. The story tells about itself. And it tells about you, the reader. It is an eye, and it is mirror. Held up. Many people think that the story will tell about the storyteller.

They are wrong.

Rosh Hodesh

New Moon, New Month. After yesterday's fast I am pure. This is not liek saying I feel pure, and this is nothing, I don't think, like the Christian sense of purity. I do not feel forgiven, or justified, or better. After the last two days of the esbat, the shit is shed, the webs are cut, and I can go on to do what must be done in the next twenty-eight days. The Jewish prayer is, "May God grant us a blessed month," but it's really a blessed moon, and not month. Like the Druidic and Islamic calendars, the Jewish year is lunar. I did not shed old blood, I shed old ways, and now we move on to the new ones.

The Book and the Ignorance

Today I've thought of a new book. It will be a long time before I can even begin to sit down and write it. I read London's blog today, and about how her week ended: an SUV plowed into her car. And then today I heard about how a plane crashed in the middle of a Detroit neighborhood demolishing one house, but killing nobody. I talked to Dr. Watson, and I was telling me how his father died. I thought" a novel which begins with a plane crash in the middle of town, ends with a broadside minor collision, and the heroine laughing at her wrecked car, and has the death of a father somewhere in the middle. I would call it The Noisy Kingdom... And it would be a comedy.

They say ignorance is bliss. If that were so then America would be the happiest and not just the richest country on earth. Innocence is bliss. Ignorance is the condition we are born to, mistaking lies for truth and shadows for substance. As children it is our birthrite, but it wears out our strength to hold to this as adults. Innocence is a hard won thing, and the journey from the first state to the latter is what Christians call salvation.

To Bards and Shamans

Today at lunch, my friend. Jen, asks someone what Kabbalah is. In a church of the educated she asks someone who is not educated, and today, when I don’t feel like being rude I keep silence when he says in his bored way, “Oh, it’s just fortune telling and mysticism. Oh, he would have done so much better if he’d had the humility to say he didn’t know. These Christians and indeed, all of these religious people these days with their business suits and lukewarm religion! Or with their narrow religion.
How I tire of these people who make a god out of mediocrity and a Christ out of being middle class. Not only is their whole world grey, but they want our world to be grey too. Not only is their world a small one, but they want ours to be just as small! Let me stop before I When I hear tattoo artists speak of what they do as shamanistic, when I hear of counter cultural people who look for religious experience, divine experience far from church doors, I understand exactly what they mean.

Most people in this world are unfit for mystery. Do not tell your dreams to everyone. Do not share with the whole world your chief concerns or your heart or hearts. This is like a dragon turning up his underbelly to a knight.

To a young writer, like myself; top a shaman, to a poet, to a keeper of the mysteries: the world so desperately needs us. The world is so in need of those who can pass between the worlds and bring back healing in ritual, in story, in poetry and song. And that world doesn’t know it’s sick. For the road we walk there is so little pay off, and we may lose our way now an again. We may grow faint of heart or tired. We may even lose ourselves. No matter. London, everything has not been written yet. There is a place very deep in you where the power comes from. In you, my love, it is right beneath the surface. And if this place is in you, if it’s been building up in you like oil under the earth, for ages and ages, since before you were born, then how can it already be written. The world is filled with cheap voices, discount voices, little entertainments and easy answers. But it is waiting for something more substantial, little sister. It is waiting for your voice.

The Habit

I couldn’t get it together to work on the fantasy novel today, elections and drafty windows aside, there is the NaNoWriMo book, Eversky. Working on it I’m remembering the things on my mind.
These characters: the Laujinesse family, Jayson, his friends, I know them. I knew them. I went to school with them. When I’m writing about them I’m certainly not writing about my world. I’m writing about a world I was right beside. That world is ten years gone. Not just from me, from all of the people involved. When I take up that story again I look at it as a storyteller. There is this peculiar dance where I look at it as someone twenty-seven staring into the teenage world of these boys, where I look at it as someone who is seventeen looking into a world that isn’t really mine, that is a little better than my world, running parallel to it. But the moment of transubstantiation comes when, in writing, I become the other. Ultimately Jayson and Ryan and Scooter… all of these are me. And I remember things they said long ago, and those words echo in my brain. No, not my brain… some place else, then.

Last night, Dr. Bender said, “Many writers becomes professors to support their habit.” That’s what I am doing. That’s why I am in graduate school. Support our habit… Like we’re addicts, like what we are doing is some decadent, not quite respectable, addiction. Subversive, addictive, not exactly work.

Yes, Dr. Bender, that’s the PERFECT phrase!

First Day

Well, between Samhain and All Saints, there was a lot to do today without even mentioning the NaNoWriMo. But I have to mention it. Against all sense I have decided to write this book, and begun writing it. I have some idea where it's going. The blog looks really nice. It looks like a real book and everything. It's sort of like the web site I always wanted, and I'd better save the template because I honestly don't know how the hell I did it.

Bree! Bree! Wonderful Bree. Bree is wonderful.

No, I am not talking about the cheese.