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.