Archive for March, 2010

Dreams of Healing

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

sane

I have always been interested that the root of the English word ‘sane’ essentially means healthy, that is shares its roots with ‘sanitation’ and ‘sanitary,’ two words that are seemingly unrelated to the concepts of modern sanity.  These shared roots are clues to this twinned history of medicine and sickness, a trace of the idea that our mental and spiritual well-beings are inextricably linked.  It is a common belief in shamanic cultures that the ailments of the body are intimately linked with the ailments of the spirit and that it is the spirit that must first be healed before the body can grow strong again.  While our contemporary world is filled with dangers that Stone Age shaman never dreamed of, HIV and asbestos poisoning come immediately to mind, I think there is still great truth to the link between our spirits and bodies.

When I dream of healing it is a white place, sanitary to be certain, but not sanitized.  It is clean, but not painfully so, not medically so.  Wonderful natural light that falls on the smooth surfaces of a well crafted room.  The air is neither warm, nor cold, but fresh, a joy to breathe.  There is, perhaps, just a trace of sandalwood in the air.  There are no windows in the walls, but there are numerous skylights in the ceiling allowing the cool light to enter.  There is no music, per se, but there is sound, little more than a soothing tone that rises and falls in gentle waves, at time accompanied by supporting tones, harmonizing gracefully and fading just before I become aware of them.  The room itself serves no purpose except as an escape, a fortress of solitude into which I can retreat and relax, whose doors are secure and soundproof, whose secret locks I hold the keys to in my heart.

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Tuesday Morning Kitchen Physics

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Tuesday Morning Kitchen Physics

I felt brittle this morning.  Standing at the sink, watching the sporadic rain fall across the Welsh hills, soaking in the weak spring sunlight that turned the trees into ghostly silhouettes, I felt stiff, fragile and easily broken.  This is the result of a poor night’s sleep, the boy unwilling or unable to lie down, stay still until sleep crept across his wide blue eyes.  And then, this morning the boy, undaunted but not unaffected by his lack of rest, is bull-headed and surly, and I’ve not patience for it.  It is difficult when two minotaurs meet like this, locking horns over the insignificant merely because neither of them is flexible enough to find another way to behave.  So I am standing between him and the rickety chair (second-hand-me-downs “generously” donated by our landlady) he wants to scale for the sole purpose of proving that he will not be limited by the arbitrary fence of the boundaries we set for him, standing when we ask him to sit.  His mother has already counted to three and taken him down from the chair, yet he is climbing back onto it, and I won’t have any of it, but the only way I can see to stop it, in the echoing tunnel of my sleep-starved mind, is to stand between him and the chair, and the only reaction he knows is to fight through the swathes of sweatpants between him and his goal.  So we stand at an impasse, him wriggling through the gaps in my legs, whining to get to his chair and me continuing to frustrate his attempted breakthroughs until his mother, the third actor in this demonstration of Tuesday morning kitchen physics: whiny unstoppable force and a grumpy unmovable object,  rescues or redirects her tiny missile in a more fruitful and less aurally irritating direction.

But her efforts did not prevent the impasse, they only postponed it.  Mother and wife off to the office for a day of wrestling with the finer points of feminist theology, the force and the object are destined to meet again on their old accustomed battleground: nap time.  It no longer takes much to send the boy into fits of frustration, but fits of frustration, I know, are the quickest path to the sweet land of Nod, and though kicking and screaming bushes grow thick and close here, it is the route I choose over and over again.  So it goes again today, a tired father tells his tired son that it is time for a nap, and the bargaining begins, his simple vocabulary all the more effective for its earnestness.  Book.  Car.  Apple.  Water.  Anything but being picked up and coaxed into letting his heavy head rest on his father’s wide shoulders just for a moment…

But after two books there is no bargaining left in his papa, and he is forced into a corner, forced into pitching a fit, upturning couch cushions, throwing clothes, assaulting the cat, throwing himself to the floor with dramatic, unearthly screams.  But I am not dissuaded or deterred.  This is expected, this is the path toward Nod.  The trick in walking this path, I have discovered, is repetition.  The boy knows what’s coming, and is still young enough yet that it feels inevitable.  I know this and I play on it, repeating that it is nap time.  Now we have changed positions: he is the unmovable force, and I the unstoppable object.  It is difficult path we walk toward the land of Nod, with many false starts, dead ends and a couple of stumbles.  It is uncomfortable and sometimes anxious, but it is important, it is necessary for his sanity and mine.  I can tell how important it is by the strength of his reaction, because the more that he fights the more necessary the nap.

Finally he relents, finally he is convinced.  He lets me pick him up and he puts his head on my shoulder in a way that assures me that this was his decision, not mine, and I believe him.  My job is never to make him do anything, it is only to convince him that it is in his best interests to choose to do it himself.  This is not to say that we are finished, but at least the first act is passed, and in reverse of a well-crafted drama the climax comes early and dénouement comprises the rest of the play.  He lays his head down while I sing, interrupted occasionally for the hopeful call for his mother who, sadly, cannot hear him.  The sleep that follows is not immediate or deep.  He will not let me put him down, even with his eyes closed and seemingly unconscious he reaches for me, bending like a potato bug on its back when I withdraw, whinging and threatening to wake until I pick him up again.  It is a hitch in our dance, a new step that I have not seen for months.  My skills here are rusty, and it takes me a few tries before I remember the technique of laying him down on his back on the bed without standing back up immediately.  His back hits the bed and his body tightens against me, reflexively convincing me not to go, and I don’t.  Finding me still present, his body relaxes against the pillow and he finally asleep, snorgling peacefully in the land of Nod.

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The Smiths & Me

Monday, March 29th, 2010

03.29

I wish that I could claim some authenticity in liking The Smiths, to plead my case with evidence that I was there when they took the stage in that grimy club in Manchester, long before Morrissey was Morrissey and was just some creepy kid named James with a penchant for melodrama and a small black book full to choking with illegible poetry and macabre drawings.  But I wasn’t there.  I’d like to claim that I came to The Smiths in my adolescence, mooning over them in my bedroom and listening to “This Charming Man” on repeat until my parents wondered not if I was gay, but just how gay I was.  But I didn’t.  It would be nice to claim that I knew of The Smiths before “How Soon is Now?” became an anthem for a generation of pre-teen suburbanite pseudo-goths when it played in “The Craft,” but I didn’t, and to be honest, while I found the song more haunting than most (like so many before me, with so much more claim to the band), it didn’t start in me a fire that led me to my local used CD store to purchase their entire back catalogue.

The truth is that I can’t remember when I started listening to The Smiths.  I can’t remember when they entered my musical vocabulary, because I knew even at the time that they were such a polarizing band among people my age that admitting I liked them would spark the kinds of conversations I loathed being a part of.  I feared telling people I liked The Smiths because I hated to think that I’d be labeled a bandwagoner, and despised the thought of lectures on how I wasn’t good enough, essentially, to listen to The Smiths; that a suburban boy like me couldn’t really get what Morrissey was saying.  Never mind that these lectures and lectures like them were often delivered to me and people like me by suburban girls fiercely defending the territory that they’d suffered for all throughout their junior high years by steadfastly bearing the standard of the Goth Army: black hair, black nails and copious amounts of silver jewelry and band T-shirts.  I didn’t tell anyone I liked The Smiths because I didn’t think I was good enough to listen to them.

But listening to them is wonderful.  I am always thrilled by the feeling that I am listening in on a world that is not mine, a world of secrets and lies; of bitterness, gossip, drama and hyperbole; midnight wanderings, meaningless conversations, endless disappointments; lives I wanted to lead, but felt unable to in the beige stucco’d world I had been born into.  But if this were just a trick of aural voyeurism I think the appeal would long ago have worn away.  Because there’s something more substantial, more essential, more touching to this voice, to these lyrics, to this music, these stories.  I don’t know how they manage to capture so eloquently and articulately the futile melancholy of the suburban experience, but they do.  The shallow hope of possible distraction by pretty people and flashing lights, the pointlessness of emotional expression between two people and the unexpected alliances of friendship that often bleed so imperfectly into something more complicated and less easily explained.  There is something intangible and electrifying about their music, the combination of tightly-woven cleanly-played, bass-driven melodies and the glamorous, luxurious , luminous, haunting male voice that flutters and floods over the top of them that is so tantalizingly incongruous.  It is this uniqueness that likely draws such diverse fans.

It has been a long time since I had the luxury of sitting for hours listening to music, dreaming of a life something like Morrissey sang about.  There are things to take care of now that never a Smiths’ song sang about.  Sitting here writing this with my son on my lap (awake long past his bed time, stubbornly refusing to sleep), Word open on one half of the monitor, ‘Avatar the Last Airbender’ playing silently beside it on the other half to the accompaniment of “Hand in Glove” my hope is that despite my late arrival to the motley band of people whom I count as fellow fans and who might ever-so-uncomfortably acknowledge me as a compatriot if not an equal, I might introduce my progeny early to the sad, seedy world that Morrissey & Co created, populated and popularized.

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Loki’s Veil

Monday, March 15th, 2010

Loki’s Veil
03.15

In the beginning were the humans.  They called themselves in a brutal, guttural tongue, simply ‘makers,’ We, hoping for more articulation, though possibly less meaning, might call them storytellers, myth-makers, but this in itself says too much, implies a level of fiction between what they said and what they believed, a level of fantasy in the things that they created, and this would not be accurate.  There was no fiction in what they said, in the stories they told.  They were not stories, they were explanations, they were truth, they were the science of the times, brought forth with eyes that saw very differently from ours.

//

There was also a man named Adam who felt like he never grew up.  He was an adult, but he never felt like one.  Adults were powerful human beings who could make great things happen without even trying and Adam tried everyday and couldn’t make anything happen.  This is an exaggeration.  Adam had made many great things happen, and yet he felt no pride in those things, took no responsibility or credit for them.  They were the product of forces activated by his hands, but whose function or maintenance he was in no way responsible for.  He was merely a first actor (and even that was questionable) he had merely tipped a domino and signed his name on the right line.

//

These humans were different than the rest of the animals that surrounded them, that slept with them and filled their bellies.  They saw things that weren’t there and communicated their ideas with a surprising and efficient clarity.  They had ideas.  They had unlocked the magic of the symbol, first in words, then again in image.  They carried water in pots and carried ideas in symbols.  They encoded their ideas and carried them across long distances of space and time.  Their ability to share ideas swiftly and efficiently separated the humans from the other animals, and this confused the humans.  They had simple questions about their separation, and they answered them with stories, weaving a fabric of continuity across perceived gaps in their understanding.

//

Adam had questions as well.  He came up with stories to answer these questions, and he wrote these stories down, but none of them were ever good enough.  None of them ever had the weight of Truth.  None of them ever seemed to contain the presence of God, which was another way of saying the weight of Truth.  His ideas seemed like poor reflections of other ideas that other people had already had and written down and expressed more efficiently, more clearly and more succinctly.  More than that, his ideas never seemed worth sharing, barely seemed worth writing down, worth capturing in one of the myriad symbolic containers that the humans had developed in order to share their ideas, both efficiently and inefficiently; directly and indirectly.

//

The humans knew that they were set apart, that the other animals were not as efficient at sharing their ideas (if they had them) as the humans were.  They had unlocked, however accidentally or purposefully, a facility for the use representation and reflection.  This tool, the use of symbols to capture ideas, the exhaust of the conscious mind, its reflections and representations of external stimuli, transformed the world in which they lived.  They pointed their symbol-maker at the sky and reflected themselves into the sky, creating a sky god.  They pointed their symbol maker at the earth and reflected themselves at the earth, creating and earth god.  They pointed their symbol-maker at the animals, reflecting themselves in the animals and created animal gods.  They pointed their symbol maker at the weather and reflected themselves in the weather and created weather gods.

//

Adam was no different than these humans.  He reflected himself in the world around him, only there was more world to reflect upon, a wider surface in which to be reflected, more things to be confused by and make sense of, less truth to help make sense of it.  Adam reflected himself in the world through his symbol-maker (now so deeply embedded in his consciousness that it was no longer recognizable as a piece of foreign technology; so long a part of him that he did not know what it was like to live without it, could not understand himself as the cyborg that he was) with more and less understanding than his predecessors did, those unnamed humans who had created the first symbols in different places around the world.  He did it with the understanding that he did it, but with no power to control the consequences of doing it.  Doing it made him powerless in reflection of the way that it made his unnamed ancestors powerful.

//

The humans made these reflections to give themselves efficacy in the world, to give them tools to feel they had some control over the events that surrounded them: the sky, the earth the animals and the weather.  This power was based, however crudely, on the separation of the self from the world, and the most advanced civilizations were the ones who could most purely separate themselves from that world and inject themselves into the realm of thought and idea, cleanly delineating themselves from the world around them, the way that a man taking a picture at his son’s graduation is no longer a part of the celebration, but has distanced himself from the event through the act of observation and the physical symbol of the camera.  The concept of representation allowed these humans to distance themselves from the world, even for a moment and within that distance find a piece of themselves, for better and for worse, creating a world in which the identity was more clearly defined, but whose definition is based on its separation from the world around it, a world that might give it weight, balance, sense and nourishment were it still connected.

//

And now Adam is trapped in that vision of himself, unable to escape what his ancestors fought so hard to establish: the identity of the individual.  He is a grotesque mockery of being-ness, taught to worship the individual, the ego.  He is caught in the cycle of wondering what that identity is, how it is formed, what its principles are, unable to form one for fear that it might be the wrong one, founded on faulty principles, but trapped in a world wherein examination of all the possible principles is impossible.  He has no god, which is equivalent to saying that he has no truth.  He has distanced himself from the YHWH of his youth, the jealous and judgmental panopticon that plagues him to this day, whose presence he cannot shake, whose judgment is constant, thorough and damning.  He wants to worship the goddess, an old creation, renewed by a small group of unstable pagans whose only advantage over the painful concreteness of YHWH is her formlessness, which is not much to lean on in times of crisis and depression.

//

These humans and their symbols unleashed a powerful magic into the world, one that has created a world that they could never have imagined.  The power and efficiency of their symbols created a fabric of infinitely fine mesh, let us call it Loki’s net, that draped itself in a veil, Loki’s veil, across their faces changing the way that they saw the world, changing the way they interpreted their data, so that a thing was no longer a thing, but a thing and its significance, whatever that significance may be.  And its significance was beautiful and it was terrible and from this other body, from this thing behind the veil sprang all the could and ever would be.  In draping themselves in Loki’s veil they unleashed (Uncovered?  Discovered?  Revealed?) a world of relativity in which the truth, if it ever existed would be lost forever.

//

This is the world that Adam lives in, a world whose truth of existence is nearly lost. His veil of infinitely fine mesh, a birthright impossible to refuse,
has not changed, but the world behind it has, growing thick with meaning attached to things so that his world is a covered in a thick layer of electromagnetic resonance that buzzes and hums around everything he comes in contact with, so that the thing itself is obscured, nearly meaningless and its symbolic significance is almost all he can see.  This symbolic sensitivity, which he has honed, consciously and unconsciously, has become debilitating.  It is an asset when used to navigate the reefs of symbolic shit that have polluted his process of existence within the oceans of information that comprise much of his livelihood and identity.  But beyond that world of information, sounds, images, symbols, this sensitivity unbalances him, keeping him from understanding the true value of the thing beneath the thing, himself, his talents and understanding, his family.  He cannot find solid ground on which to plant his feet, he cannot rest on any idea for the Understanding Function that he has created within himself dissolves all ideas down to their basic pieces, consuming both the gossamer and the dross that held them together, leaving nothing interesting or shiny behind.

The crux of this is that nothing in his world is holy, nothing, no idea or concept (and it is, at its heart, all ideas and concepts, since Loki’s veil is the only way that he can navigate the world) can resist the corrosive influence of his Understanding Function, and at the heart of holiness is mystery.  If, as he sometimes speculates, deep in the hole of the depression created by a world that is neither holy nor happy, there was at some time an ability to connect with something beyond this world of ideas and the physical objects they overlay, some third thing that might be represented by a human soul, a small piece of holiness overlaid upon our physical bodies that might be a chip from some larger cosmic soul that might be called, for lack of a more articulate nomenclature, God, he thinks that he is no longer capable of this connection, that his ancestors who wove this veil for him likely took for granted.  If, he hypothesizes, there were a great mystery out there, a spiritual singularity wherein all understanding and knowledge were crushed the awesome force of the gravity within the hole, and only the spirit left to coalesce in the darkness, like dust from a pile of old bones, left to convene in silence with the great and wonderful mystery, he does not know of its existence, he cannot feel it beyond the numbness of the veil.

Adam is tired of trying to find this connection, hoping that it exists and failing to find it; hoping that by some unspecified regimen of self-discipline and regulated deprivation he will find a path to this God (that might also be called Truth) and finally have a place to stand that does not slip or slide, that does not succumb to the vision of Loki’s veil, that is not vulnerable to the Understanding Function, a place on which he can finally rest, knowing in his heart, in his soul that this one thing, this one place is safe and unassailable, knowing that from here he can stand, having rested, and start again.

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Cold Welsh Morning

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

03.04

I wish to get to the root of language, to its beginnings, its origins.  I want to walk back into the darkness, like Orpheus pursuing Eurydice into the underworld.  I want to be consumed by the shadows, feeling my way through the magic of our written and spoken past with only my fingers, my eyes blind to the distracting glint of jewels that might otherwise tempt me to abandon my quest prematurely, sufficing myself with some treasure, a worthless bauble that would be nothing in comparison to my achievement.

And when I am there, standing in the thick darkness of prehistory, one step from the nothingness from which we emerged as speaking beings, I will turn around and find a new way out, taking pieces of Language with me, heavy and filled with black liquid magic, making a new language all of my own, whose teeth are still sharp and have not been dulled by the long grind of aeons against one another, whose glyphs and symbols still sparkle in their hearts, waiting to be cut by my pen and polished against the rough edge of my tongue sounding out the new and magical sounds against the bracing air of a cold Welsh morning.

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