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The Dance of Broken Toys

Saturday, November 6th, 2010

So much of this game is waiting now. So much of this writing is waiting. So much of this dance of broken toys is being willing to wait for the adults to go to bed and leave the house quiet and dark so the cowardly and the cautious are comfortable coming out.

I wish I knew what I wanted to say, rather than how I want to say it. I want to say it quietly, intimately, with whispers and gestures and long strips of silence. I want to examine the nuance of a sigh, to feel the delicate curve of marble become flesh beneath my fingers, and know the warmth of breath on rough skin of my hands.

I want to be subversive, but even saying that out loud (or whispering it quietly onto paper) seems cliché. I do not have the courage to be subversive, I do not have the guts to risk my life stealing fire and spend my days kissing eagles, waiting for Hercules to unbind me.

I know that I am close. I know that I am near the thing. I can, having walked this far into the trees, torch throwing shadows wildly in every direction, feel the beating heart of the beast, the heart of the forest, and realize suddenly that every thing I mistook for an individual, each tree I mistook for an entity is not at all, but a single reaching feeler of the earth on which I am walking, and that I am no more separate from that earth, though I would sever myself as often as possible, the soles of my shoes and the skin of the pavement and the carpet of my room keeping me from the luscious feel of earth against the soft bottoms of my feet.

I want to read the scriptures and understand them, I want to hear the leathery voice of god in the turning pages of the ancient books whose words we know but do not understand. I want to feel the warm desert wind and the awkward shapes of impossibly old words tumble like bones from upturned tomb.

And I wonder, sitting in the night long after I should be in bed, if I’ve missed my window, if every opportunity for revolution that I passed on to go home and read and write were single chances to break free of this shell that I have inhabited for so long, and that, having passed them by, having passed by exciting conversations and opportunities at interaction for evenings of study and isolation if there’s anything left or if that’s all passed now and the night is no longer interested in having me.

And I wonder if this is all an illusion, if this is just the product of a tired mind and too much television. Too many dreams coated in saccharine laugh track and a seductive soundtrack. The delirium of an addict in withdrawal from electrical stimulants that have for so long supported him.

I want an intention for my writing, I want an intention for my life. I want to cut deeply into the wood of this branch and shape the blunt end of this rod into the sharp end of a spear. I want to shove it deeply into the coals of the fire and harden the tip until it is an unbreakable obsidian blade. I want to dive into the sky, ride the lightning, enter heaven and plunge my weapon deeply into the skin of god and be overwhelmed by the ecstasy of knowing and being known, to drown in the pure current of information as it pours over me, dissolving the crude flesh that’s wrapped about the perfect soul I posses, but cannot access.

And then I wonder, one more time, because this is what I do when my belly’s full, stare at the sky wonder if I’ve got this all wrong, all backward, all fucked up and twisted, and the flesh is real and the soul is an illusion and all this searching the sky for answers is just a waste of precious energy.

And I know, I know the answers lie somewhere between the flesh and the spirit, that somewhere in the symbiosis of the two lies an answer, but probably not The Answer. And I keep poking this finger in the fabric of existence, like my tongue against the irritated flesh of my mouth, unable to keep from exploring the pain with a dedicated an academic manner, recording the sensations with a specificity and articulation that would make the most avid masochist proud. But what else is there to do, lying here with a belly full of food and eyes that seem made for staring into heaven, wondering if there’s a god?

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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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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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Black, Red, White

Monday, June 1st, 2009

Black. In the beginning it is always black. It is the absence of everything, the emptiness of space, its infinite distance stretching lightless in every direction before a single fire is lit, balancing for a moment on the tip of her finger before pouring through the nothing-becoming-something in a single silver flash. It is the color of separation. It is the fullness of everything, rich black soil turned by the steady silver plough. It is the warm, wet black of the womb, wherein the child turns and grows, floating in the darkness growing, waiting for a chemical signal to flood through the membranes and the fluid, compressing the darkness and then, finally, piercing it.

Black. It always begins with black. Black running to red. Black running to green. Black is the color of potential, the box in which all things are locked. Black is the color of rest and growth; the shadow in which I find respite, the long and restful slumber. Black is the color of potential, the color of secrecy and code for the unknown, all of which are related, moving back and forth between each other with the fluidity of shadows. Black is the color of waiting. The color of perfect patience, balanced delicately on silver strings, waiting for the sound of panic to come running up its legs. Black is the color of before.

Red. Red is the wine pouring from the chalice, red is the blood pouring from the yoni, red is the color of our fingers traced against the blazing sun. The color of fire, the color of life, running through our veins and through the earth. Red is without hesitation, the color of seizure and war. The color of anger and friction and burning. Red is the color of movement, conflict and collision. The color of tongues in conversations, kissing lips and pricked fingers. Red is the color of now.

White. White is the color of passing. It is the color of age and the color of bone. White is the color of faded paint and faded fabric; white is the color of the forgotten, the form that no longer holds its color, the material that no longer holds its form. White is the color of age and disease, the creeping reminders of physical frailty. White is the color of God, the color of return, the color dissolution. White is the loss of importance and the color of understanding. It is the color of release and renewal; return and rejoining. White is the moment after now, the one we assuming is not coming. White is the color of coming home.

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The Spirit of Reflection

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

03.17.08

I have, for a long time, taken the name of Epimetheus in situations where I’m asked to choose an alternate name, which is a regular occurrence in this age of digital identities and electronic masks. Originally I’d chosen Prometheus as my alter ego. The titan appealed to my sense of grandeur as a poet, channeling the divine into the manifest through my words. But as more and more people got online, and as I came later and later to the game, the harder it became to snag Prometheus before everyone else did, and I never wanted to be Prometheus238. I thought Epimetheus was a clever compromise, though in my heart I knew which titan I really was. Later, I soured on the grandiosity of myself as a fire-bringer. Who was I to liken myself to the god who brought so much to humanity? The more I disenchanted I became with the idea of myself as Prometheus, the more interested I became in Epimetheus.

Epimetheus is a titan famous for the people that surrounded him. He’s the less successful brother of Prometheus and the husband of Pandora. His credentials aren’t stellar. While he and his brother are making all the beings of creation, Epimetheus uses up all the talents on the animals, leaving human kind helpless. Luckily, his bother saves the day by stealing fire. Then, even after Prometheus warns him not to accept any gifts from the gods, Epimetheus takes Pandora as his wife, and we all know how well that turned out.

I never really thought much about or of Epimetheus until I read this. It was the first time that I really viewed the character of Epimetheus as redeemable. Until then he’d seemed more of a stumbling sidekick, the dorky little brother whose bookish nature and dashing older brother left him often overshadowed.

Now, though, I know that there is more to him than that. Epimetheus is the spirit of quiet reflection. He is prone to mistakes, probably impetuous, but he has the capability to learn from his errors in a way that I think his brother doesn’t. Sure, Prometheus stole fire from the gods for humanity, but he had to since it was his fault they lost it in the first place. Epimetheus has no quarrel with the gods the way that Prometheus does. I think it’s easy to make Prometheus into a martyr, but I’m not sure that this quarrelsome titan deserves the title. I don’t think it’s stretching things too much to paint Prometheus as a posturing prima donna, picking fights he knew he couldn’t win in order to gain sympathy as a martyr, or perhaps the meddling Don Quixote whose delusions of grandeur make more trouble than they solve. I often envision Prometheus making the same mistake time and again because in his hard-headedness he just doesn’t learn. His foresight is valuable, but his lack of hindsight is a handicap.

There is of course no right answer. Neither brother is best. What I think I’m getting at is the imbalance between the two. In this era of duality I think it powerful to hold foresight in my right hand and hindsight in my left and let the two sit together in the awkward and uncomfortable silence; to cultivate the Jesuit tension that lies between the two. To that end, I have, in proper reverse fashion, become an advocate for the Epimetheus, the spirit of reflection. If humanity needed an advocate on behalf of the divine and Prometheus stood for us there, then let me stand for his brother, the divine, on behalf of humanity. It provides the kind of clever inversion that I think both titanic brothers might appreciate.

Certainly forethought and action on behalf of the underprivileged and unjustly persecuted is laudable. But after-thought and acceptance of what the gods give us is something as well, though perhaps not nearly as glamorous. And my suspicion is that the lack of glamour is just the way that Epimetheus would want it. His is not the limelight, and he is likely just as happy to pass off the mike to his brother at the wedding toast as make a speech. But when he does speak, listen, for what he has to say may not be as flashy or passionate as his brother’s oration, but his words will hang with the weight of the wise; they will be worth listening to because they will have been well considered and their wisdom hard earned.

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