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| On the Other Side |
| 01.12.06 (8:13 am) [edit] |
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And then sometimes what is necessary is to leave your head and go back into the world. To start again. Sooner or later you wake up--it is a gift--one the other side of the edge of life. Life offers her hand and ask you to dance. You stretch your hand out in response and say, "Why not?"
Until right now, at this moment, I didn't know how paralyzed and constricted I had become. Dancing around the mystery of the Epiphany I enter into it by accident.
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| I'll Take You |
| 01.09.06 (7:36 pm) [edit] |
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In these last few days everything has happened: the good, the bad and the exceptionally ugly. On Friday I finished publication of Colossus and then had a breakdown. I had been hit by a car and my bike was ruined in an accident just the day before. In my exhaustion the Lady spoke to me. It was hte Feast of the Epiphany when the Virgin of the Abyss bears her child and those who are wise and looking find him. I was so exhausted and she commanded me to rest in her arms.
And then the next day my computer crashed with all of my manuscripts and today I don't know if I will get that computer back--I'm on a new one. And that is funny because do you know what the voice said to me in Mass yesterday. The joyous voice which is a lady's voice and a virgin's voice? She told me how all this time I had been putting myself in one uncertain relationship after another, commiting myself to people, to working it out with this one significant other or the next one and she said: "Choose yourself. Choose your artist self. Fight like hell for him. He's what you have first and last."
My computer is what a musician's guitar is to him, and now I'm on a new one, and this is when the Creatrix tells me dedicate to my writing self! When a relationship that means so much (yes, another one) seems on the fritz, is hurting me a great deal and I've said I'm willing to end it, I am reminding of my first dedication--which is to me. to the Gift.
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| for those escaping drowning by whatever means necessary |
| 12.12.05 (4:34 am) [edit] |
there is a woman all in black and blue
who guards the darkest road
at the bottom she dwells
Our Lady deep, deep under the earth
if i did all i can
all i could do was good,
and all i did i did your way
--what if i found my way?
what if every desire that crossed my mind...
from now on everything that crosses my mind...
from now on the explosion in my body's
going to save my soul
what they don't know
--or what they've forgotten
is sometimes when you're past
post rotten the only buoy that
will save you
is the yawnng O
sometimes what the body needs is
what the mouth should not say,
the terrible tumble
the end of wandering
that is the wonder of orgasm
spasms with partners and partners
and there lives--on the edge of all
reason and good taste a holy, dark woman
who presides over need
Our Lady of the Dark Places
guarding the mazes
of sex and senses
and lives at the bottom
mixing the clay
from the deep blackness
mixing the day
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| Concentration |
| 12.09.05 (5:30 am) [edit] |
Today I learn about Saraswati. She is the underground river that flows from the Himalayas to the Indian Ocean. They say the river is either completely imaginary, or it has been covered over, buried beneath the land four thousand years.
She is also the goddess of inspiration, the goddess of art and skill, the Lady who says, “Get to it. Be serious about it.” She cuts out those circumstances and people from our lives that would make us frivolous. Remover of Infatuations the Jains call her. She removes trifles, so that we can love and create. As I get older I have less and less time to put up with frivolous things and frivolous people. My focus deepens.
This is so important for an artist. There is any number of people who will take you from your work and dilute your focus. They will always have this and that activity or, worse yet, you will be surrounded by pseudo artists. You know who they are. They are the ones who talk about working, but never do it, or never attempt to do it well. They are the ones who love everything about the artist’s life except the actual hard work that artists do. These are the people who are always saying “One day I’ll write that book.” “One day I’ll start painting again.” “If only I had enough time.”
Living with fools is endless pain.
Better to live with an enemy instead.
Living with wise men, like living with kind men,
Brings happiness.
You are your own refuge;
There is no other refuge.
This refuge is hard to achieve.
Sit alone, sleep alone, be active alone,
In loneliness continue the conquest of the self,
Even in a forest continue the quest.
I am by nature, solitary, but even I have hard time with the knowledge that it is better to cultivate yourself then put up with people who steal your energy. We have already talked about wasting our time on things that separate us from writing, from art. Now we need to consider who are those people who stops us from art?
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| Eating Apples... More |
| 12.04.05 (5:31 pm) [edit] |
I think, sometimes, that the way I do what I must do is just by living. Because I’m always in the poorer areas of town, rubbing shoulders with poor people, black, brown and white. There are times, with the poor, or the not so poor, the black and the white, that I shake my head and think, “How pedantic. What is this all about?” I start to get jaded and discolored, disgusted, tired of stupidity. I say, “What is this all about?”
And a voice says, This is all about you. And this is the thing you are supposed to living in and writing about. This is life.
And then I realize what it means when Christ makes many out of one, when the Mother gathers the children into her arms. It means that which I would escape is my deliverance. The thing I am separated from… is the thing that contains my soul.
I don’t know who will deliver all the poor. I don’t know who will save the Black community or the gay community or the Roman Catholic Church and all the other institutions that think they don’t need saving while less deluded heads are tossing the buckets of water from the sinking ship. I live in my own truth and my God saves me if I let Him. If I let Her. Them.
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| On Spirits |
| 12.01.05 (4:05 pm) [edit] |
There are spirits, always speaking to those who are willing to listen. Everything you see possesses a spirit. The trees with the wind whispering through their leaves live. They have a spirit. Everyone you meet who you ignore is a spirit. People trying to impress you, damn near standing on their heads, are spirits. Listen to them. Some people want to be heard so badly they could almost die. They just want to be noticed. You’d be surprised how grateful people are for just a touch of kindness and how many people are ruined because they haven’t received it. And, of course, every character that comes to me is a spirit, treated with respect. Because everything that is is real, and everything that is real has a spirit.
And what does this all have to do with writing? I sit to write, and I’m not quite sure what will come out. What do the spirits say? What does do the Mothers demand? Remove all bitterness. Release all strife. Embrace. Be embraced. And this is what I try to do when I write.
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| Eating Apples: continued |
| 11.29.05 (4:35 am) [edit] |
There are some people who seriously hold to the fantasy that, given the free time and the appropriate peace of mind, they will finally sit down and write. I can’t answer that from experience. All I have is a room of one’s own in a noisy house with a busy life.
Or better to say a full life. It is busyness that kills. Everyone uses this word. I associate it with the phrase busy as a bee. Because bees are stupid. They buzz around and make honeycombs. And then they fuck the queen. If they’re drones. And the queen buzzes all the time too. She sits on her ass and buzzes. And this is what busy people are doing essentially.
I have decided not to be one of those artists who forever tries to hammer home the importance of his work. Telling you, this is work, it is a job. Like anything else. Because it isn’t. In most jobs these days people show up to do the least amount of work for the most amount of money and bitch about it. You don’t have to be good because, since the industrial revolution, most people are fairly dispensable. Creation is not like that. You cannot go to the word processor or the easel of the studio groaning about it, or expecting to be paid well today. And you cannot be lazy because no one will be there to pick up the slack for you. If someone asked me, “Is writing work?” I would say it is a work, in the old sense of the word, a well done effort. A mighty effort even.
The sky is darkening and the day is almost over. I’ve hardly gotten any writing done today. That was my point earlier. So little of writing is writing. Last night, at the pub, I ran into another obsessed writer, a few years younger than me. Writing is the last part of it. Paying attention is the first, and the middle. You always need to look at people and things. You always have to look at them as if you’ve never seen them before. Most of the time when I’m walking down the street, or riding a bus, or roaming around a place someone bumps into me and asks, “Do you know where you’re going? Do you know where you are? Are you lost?” I always say, “I’m just looking.”
But maybe there is some truth to that. Maybe creation hinges on the fact that we are constantly looking again, always unsure, not quite knowing where we are, though we have been told, always reorienting. Reorient, means to turn toward the east again, to turn toward the Sun, the brightness and the beginning of the day. Always turn back to that. There’s nothing wrong with it. So maybe I am lost. Maybe all artists are blessedly lost in which case it is the being lost and not the being found that is our salvation.
If there is a difference between an artist and anyone else it is that we look at things afresh all the time. Many people don’t even look at the thing the first time.
If a writer is someone who writes then an artist is someone who sees.
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| Blessed Prerogative |
| 11.22.05 (12:29 pm) [edit] |
I can look at one of these stories I’ve written and say, “This is all about love and friendship. How could I have known about such love? I realized it was because during the tale’s conception, I lived in that love. The story was conceived in love. By that love it possessed life.
A friend asked me what it was like to have a book. Did I celebrate, or did I not care? Did I just put it away when it was finished, and stop thinking about it?
The truth is, when I’ve finished anything, it is hidden away. To complete a rough draft of any sustained narrative is a relief, and I don’t look at it for a long time. In fact, I may not really think of the characters for a while. But the truth is, they were already living spirits flitting in and out, coming to me. We were already keeping company in daydreams and half conversations before the book began. I was already asking permission to tell their story, and after the book is done, this does not change. Many people write fan fiction. Many people are obsessed with characters created by someone else, written in novels, put on televisions shows and films. Yet, to be too involved in your own imagination is frowned upon. Chiefly, because this leads nowhere. But for a storyteller it is quite different because the only way we get anywhere is by the overinvolvement in our imaginations, by the constant free association of looking at a light bulb or a sandbar and this leading to the creation of a whole new tale. It is the blessed prerogative of an author to spend a great deal of time in his imagination, keeping company with people of his own invention.
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| Wildly Pedestrian |
| 11.21.05 (4:12 am) [edit] |
This is your magical world. And none other. Even when working on a fantasy, even when writing something far away, it is never very far away. It is all in here.
Some people choose to bore us with the phrase: “I guess I’m just crazy…” that is the beginning of a long story about how they are misunderstood and have some particularly ingenious vision that no one understands but them. Men usually begin stories like this after a drink or so. They want to hear: “You’re not crazy, you actually have a unique mind and I wish I thought more like that.”
I never tell anyone that because it’s rarely true.
There are a lot of people who say, “No one sees things like I do. No one is quite as smart as me? No one has discovered how I feel. No one gets X, Y,Z. And they’re all wrong.
When I write or speak I don’t have any wildly different thoughts. I am, in many ways, wildly pedestrian. Writers do not thrive on having thoughts wholly unlike anyone else’s. No, we thrive on the fact that we have the same thoughts as everyone else. We thrive on this one compliment: “That’s exactly what I was thinking… only I never knew how to say it until I read it.” We exist for this: people to say, “I thought I was alone. Now I know I’m not.”
So we do not succeed on the eccentricity of our individual thoughts, but rather on a courage motivated by faith that knows our very secret and private thoughts are those of others and so should be laid out on the table.
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| DEAR HELEN |
| 11.17.05 (1:25 pm) [edit] |
My friend Helen wrote to say:
Hiya. And he's back! With a vengence! I started to write the other day, but didn't get very far. I have no focus for it at the moment. Does that make me a wannabe??
That's a good question and I wouldn't say, "Helen, you're a wannabe!" But I would say that if you want to write: hone your focus. No, it's not as easy as that. There were years and years between me wanting to write and being able to write, and even now, sometimes I can't write everything I want to. It is a matter of grace. I strongly believe in grace.
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| Eating Apples-- PART ONE |
| 11.14.05 (1:00 pm) [edit] |
I go around and around this subject, the way I am about biting into an apple. I don’t know how to get into it—which is probably why I never eat apples. I think I know how to begin now, but I’m not completely sure that what I’m saying right now I haven’t said before.
How is a story written? Surely, in the course of these last essays I have said it. But something tells me I haven’t. I’m always being obtuse because I expect other people to be more subtle. I’m always so afraid to be obvious I generally don’t say enough.
It is late, I’m heading off to bed. But I am trying to write this while I listen to a soundtrack, one better than its movie. I can't listen to it without getting a thousand visions. I am not creating them, but rather receiving them. Not to see the green hills and the dark grey crags or the blue sky, or the pewter sky would be to intentionally shut them out. My mind is porous. Thing rush into it.
Rosario Castellanos said she was an eye. I try to adhere to that, to be an eye, to see things accurately. Often I’ll be on the bus, or walking down the street, or see some people at church and think, “My God, these people! These people…” And then I have to take out a mental camera and remember, “These people… are your people. Look well. Pay attention. These are your stories. This is what you write about.”
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| Fuck and Pray: CONCLUSION |
| 11.10.05 (4:09 pm) [edit] |
Once I was reading an article on gay men and spirituality and a gay Christian remarked about a retreat he went on with a lover, “We prayed and fucked, fucked and prayed. It was terrific.”
Fuck and pray? Fuck and pray? Growing up Catholic the phrase I am used to is work and pray. Work, sober labor, something I think its greatly overrated but the rest of the world does not. Fuck, something earthy, dirty, visceral, violent, shuddering pleasure. Prayer, serious and sublime. Fucking, sublime and serious in its own way. Fuck and pray, two things which have no place together? Or do they. In this young man’s life they did and in the lives of many gay religious people they do. Indeed, in the lives of all healthy sexual people who seek to have spiritual lives the two words joined make sense.
Recently I saw a movie where the sex scene was short. I had to rewind the tape to make sure they’d actually done anything. But the battle scene lasted a mind numbing half hour. This isn’t right. Is it more virtuous to take life than to make love? I blame the Israelites. They were the first people to get rid of Asherah—also called Venus--and all the fertility gods and strip everything down to Yahweh, a battle lord. And we’ve been glorifying Mars over Venus ever since. All of our religion is typified as a battle, with the devil, with the flesh, with each other. Anyone who says the point of life is love, is written off as a mystic. Love is mistrusted. As for me, I know that if there were more fucking and less fighting, the world would be a happier place.
I like the word fuck and I love to use it. I love the word fuck. I love the implications of it: violent, pleasurable, tender, deep, naked, shocking. Fuck is the one word that sounds like exactly what it is. I really don’t get tired of it, though I used to hate the word. I love the idea of it.
Fuck belongs next to pray. Fuck, and all the words we don’t associate with prayer. All the services we do before the Wild God’s altar that churn up his sacred waters. We live in an era where fight and pray and work and pray sound good. The acts of toil and bloodshed belong next to prayer, But not the acts of love and pleasure. I can’t agree with that. No, I am with that man right now, and his lover. Fuck and pray.
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| Writing |
| 11.10.05 (11:02 am) [edit] |
"Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. . . . Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way."
--E.L. Doctorow
You don’t know the trip is over until it is. I have never finished a story wittingly. Always I sit, perplexed. I lift my finger over the keyboard, and think and think and then to my surprise, realize I have finished. Every book you ever read, the last line was written before you ever read the first. That is the strange thing about reading. Should I ever get lost in the winding adventure it is already resolved. But in the middle of writing you wonder: “will I ever untangle this thread? All of it? Should I even?”
I don’t know how to communicate with someone who isn’t an artist, one who doesn’t use his imagination, how stories come or--for that matter how--once they come it is not good enough to talk about them, they must be written. It is one line, one face, one event that will set off a whole story.
Sometimes ideas reincarnate themselves. Sometimes a score of ideas drifts around and falls apart until the one central idea comes and forges them into a story. Then the writing begins.
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| Fuck and Pray: We Don't Know Who We Write For |
| 11.08.05 (3:37 pm) [edit] |
We don’t know whom we write for, do we? And so we must write honestly. I am not sure the problem is finding the audience. I think if the heart is sincere then you cast your bread upon the waters, it may return to you. In fact I think it will. Isabel Allende was shocked to learn that when Noriega was arrested they found two books with him and one was her The House of the Spirits! You just never know.
But this is something I think I do know. The killer is writing for an imaginary audience, writing for that literary audience that will appreciate your genius. There is one girl I know, a young writer, influenced by one author, so influenced that she is in shackles. Her language is high and lofty, not for the simple folks around her, but for someone out there. The thing about being imprisoned in someone else’s voice is that though a good drag queen can impersonate a singer very well, a writer cannot be good at all impersonating another writer. He or she will always be third or forth best.
There was an author: I don’t name him because I can’t remember him. He wrote a book in which he managed to embarrass everyone around him, and when asked about this he said something to the effect of, “You must do such things for art. When you are writing for posterity you can’t think of the people around you or the immediate. Everything must be sacrificed for art.”
I suspect this is why I can’t remember his name.
There is another author, and I am sorry because I should know his name. When he died, his close friend said of him, “He was good. That is the highest compliment. It’s not hard to be a good artist, but it is very hard to be a good person.”
I agree, but only halfway. A good storyteller, at least, must have a pure well, must have clear vision and for this he must have a pure heart. I don’t know how a good storyteller can be a foul person. Others will disagree with me.
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| Fuck and Pray continued: Love All Things |
| 11.08.05 (10:07 am) [edit] |
Write for your own time, if not for your own generation exclusively. You can’t write for “posterity”—it doesn’t exist. You may be addressing, unconsciously, an audience that doesn’t exist; you may be trying to please someone who won’t be pleased, and isn’t worth pleasing.
Don’t expect to be treated justly by the world. Don’t even expect to be treated mercifully.
The first sentence can’t be written until the last sentence has been written. Only then do you know where you’ve been going, and where you’ve been. The novel is the affliction for only which the novel is the cure.
--Joyce Carol Oates
Nothing good comes of holding onto resentment, especially if there should be no resentment. Why should we expect mercy? But we do. Why should we expect an easy time of it. But that’s what we want. Why should we expect understanding from those who cannot help themselves? Look around you. Look at your well intentioned friends and family who are telling you to be practical. Look at your teachers who would teach you how to be you. Look and understand.
Understand all things
Love all things
The world is full of people who got rid of their dreams long ago, or who kindly handed them over so long ago they don’t’ even remember what a dream is. The people around you who hurt you, but love you, who say cruel things to you and don’t know how to unsay them: bear them. Love them and ignore them, but do not hate them, do not cling to the supposed beauty of your own hardship story. To understand all things is what a writer does. And what does that mean? To look into all things, all matters, all people and take each one absolutely seriously. Take in the whole of them. Take in the whole of the enemy even. Take in the whole of the one who loves you but acts like the enemy. Doing that will burn like a coal. There is so much anger and frustration in the people around us when they tell us not to write, when they poo poo our writing with a wave of the hand, when they want to make us pack it up and burn it up, when they want to crush the creation in us. Love all things. That is, develop a compassion for all things. This compassion is a soothing thing. It is the only way the writing can remain pure. It is the only way we can write about the other. The awful thing about compassion is that the other ceases to be the other.
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| Fuck and Pray... On Urgency, Continued |
| 11.06.05 (10:57 am) [edit] |
And so I began to write. I seized upon the idea to finally write a novel, to not give it up. I sensed, no matter how vaguely, that my soul was inside the novel, that my life was sustained by the ability to spin a story. The only break I had in working on this tale was when I went for the first time to monastery. And while I was there I took my large journal and wrote the outline for The Hidden Lives of Virgins. That black, sad, necessary time seems like it lasted so long, like it was so long ago. There was a movie that came on, about army basic training and the sergeant told one of the young cadets, “Find your deeper place.” That was the only way she could survive. At the end of the movie the cadet was asked, “Have you found your deeper place?” I don’t know if I’ve invested too much depth in that phrase and that film, but the charge and the question have rang through my mind throughout the years. When I write I am going to that deeper place. I still haven’t learned if it is writing that puts me in that deeper place or if I can only write when I am in that deeper palce. I suspect it is a little of both.
You have been bored to death by the literature department. I know. That is part of the reason you stopped writing. You wouldn’t be the first. You are so enamored of the world of books and then, after a while, you realize that everything you ever wrote for a professor was crap. Everything that gets lauded: is bullshit. Every original idea and insight: is shat upon. What they want to do is build shrines to the long dead prophets their predecessors slew. What you are being brought up to become is, at last, a fan. They say those who can do and those who can’t teach, and there may be a little truth in that, but, after a while behind the doors of the English department, most writers feel that what is happening is that they are being taught to teach and forgetting how to do.
A professor should never be a writer… says someone in my English department, who himself is a profound writer. I would say that an English professor is often schooled into being such a fan that he becomes incapable of being a writer. The lit department is a lot like the Church. Most saints and holy men found and find a difficult time in churches, though the whole establishment exists because of them and most writers find it very difficult to be at home in the lit department. Professors look at writers the way priests look at saints and mystics: as an other and not altogether trustworthy species. The gap may be crossed. It often is. But no one ever became a writer by doing well in the lit department, so scrap that route. After a while there comes an end to the interest you take in writing the same old papers for one person who wants the same ideas. There is an end to being assigned books to read when you are perfectly capable of reading on your own.
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| Fuck and Pray... On Urgency |
| 11.06.05 (9:43 am) [edit] |
I think that if you don’t have a sense of urgency you won’t do it. If you don’t realize how much you need to write, you simply won’t do it. The less you think you are, the more the world tells you your words are worthless, the more you hear that interior voice, the more you have to write.
If your voice is not heard, write. If someone has taken the pen like a needle and sewed your mouth shut, claiming they speak for you, you have to write. Are you Black? Write! Are you gay? You know you must write. Are you a woman? Why aren’t you writing?
Are you a white man? Do you always wonder who this White Man you read about is? This great white hunter you’ve never met? You, too, really really do need to write.
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| Fuck and Pray... On Wannabes |
| 11.06.05 (9:41 am) [edit] |
Or if only I had something to say I would write. If only I had something worthwhile to tell I would write. I did not study writing. I did not study literature. I am not the writer some one else is. And so on. I have a book in me, and one day…
Coming of age in the English department is one of the reasons I have grown up around wanna be writers who are like other wannabe artists. And it’s good to use the term wannabe. It hurts. It is demeaning, but isn’t it honest? A writer is someone who writes. Plain and simple. You may not write well, that’s not the issue at hand. You may be absolutely horrid. A bad pianist is still a pianist. But even the worst artist in the world is better than the one who never begins. There is nothing in simply wanting to be a thing.
I wish the wannabes around me would understand this. I remember a few years back a girlfriend of mine—we are at her house—she tells her family, “I want to be a writer.” Well, that really was stupid. Dreams are like seeds. You don’t just let them out to the wind. You don’t tell everyone about them. And of course they laughed at her and told her she needed to do something real. They were right. She still hasn’t written anything. Three years getting a post graduate degree in writing and she hasn’t produced anything. When this year ends, when this job stops and the new one begins, when, when, when.
I have another friend who cannot write. He says, when we speak, I am still not writing. I don’t understand why people think this is such a mystery. I almost don’t believe it can be. It is so simple. If you would be a write: write. If you would be a great writer, keep writing. He who shoots high will often fall.
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| Fuck and Pray Continued... More Reflections on Writing |
| 11.05.05 (2:31 pm) [edit] |
I have many frightening sculptures, during certain times of the year—like now—kept on the house altars. It is important to reverence them.
Every devil I meet becomes a friend of mine.
I saw an illustrated man, and on his stomach was tattooed a devil with an open, bleeding mouth. Why? Because there is only so much strength to be gained from hearts and rainbows or lovely angels. Then we learn that devils and bloody mouthed Kalis have a great strength of their own. To cease running from the ugly spirits and look them as much as we can in the face, to claim their protection, to enter into the mystery of the terrible and realize that there lies God is a marvelous initiation.
Why am I compelled to write? Because the writing saves me from the complacency I fear. Because I have no choice, because I must keep the spirit. Of my revolt and myself alive. Because the world I create in the writing compensates for what the real world does not give me. By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it. I write because life does not appease my appetites and hunger. I write to record what other erase when I speak, to rewrite the stories others have miswritten about me, about you…
The problem is to focus, to concentrate. The body distracts, sabotages with a hundred ruses, a cup of coffee, pencils to sharpen…
Forget the room of one’s own, write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line… while you’re sitting on the john…
--Gloria Anzaldua
I wished that that woman would write and proclaim thus this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim; I too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs…
… Why don’t you write? Write! Writing is for you, you are for you: your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven’t written… because writing is too high, too great… “for men”, it is “silly.”…
Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you; not man; not the imbecile capitalist machine…
Helene Cixous
They say, be practical. There is no profit in writing, or writing is hobby, reserve it till when you can do it, put it behind other things. Put if off for one day. Even after you have written, still they think it comes out of the air, it is squeezed in when there is time for it, after everything else is done. This is nonsense.
Now, I am all for practicality, to look at matters with eyes wide open and count the cost is essential in any art. But all too often what masquerades as practicality is fear and laziness and, I suspect, laziness motivated by fear. One day, when there’s time, when I get things together I will write. One day I will rent that cabin in the woods and write. One day I will take off two weeks and write. No, no, no you won’t.
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| The Language of Oppression: CONCLUSION |
| 11.03.05 (2:02 pm) [edit] |
This is the injustice of cultural imperialism: that the oppressed group’s experience
and interpretation of social life finds no expression that touches the dominant
culture, while that same culture imposes on the oppressed group its experience
and interpretation of social life.
(Young, 101)
So what do these examples have to do with anything? They are, after all, only about religion, church and bible reading. Everyone doesn’t have to subscribe to a religion, let alone one where a male God has made the world. Church is a place where some people go. True. What happens there does not effect us. Not true.
Under patriarchy the female did not herself develop the symbols by which she is described
(Millett, 49)
Patriarchy has God on its side. One of the most effective agents of control is the powerful expeditious character of its doctrines as to the nature of the origin of the female and the attributes to her alone of the dangers and evils it imputes to sexuality.
(Millett, 51)
The regions where religion exist are in the psychic really. When we talk about our assumptions of God-which generally come from church, shul or the mosque and not a Wiccan coven—we talk about the assuming or rejecting the ideas of religions which have built western society. Even when an atheist talks about God in this country she is generally referring to a Judeo-Christian one. How we conceive of the Source of the universe has a great deal with how we conceive our place in it. If a man made the universe, then it will always be a man’s world. The fact that we have overwhelmingly identified Source, Center and Purpose as God and God as male tells us how strong the oppression has been. For God did not make himself a man. Someone interpreted him thus, and we cannot trust that the motives behind this interpretation were pure.
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| The Language of Oppression: PART TWO |
| 11.02.05 (11:43 am) [edit] |
In this society does the language of oppression still extend to women? At first glance I want to say no. There are a great deal of things that serve to oppress, to hold back women and many other people, but it is difficult to see where these things are in language. The first reason this is so is because the language we speak is the language we are used to. The fact is the very reason we may have no idea of something is because we may have no words to describe the idea. That’s how tricky language and examining language is. The oppressions which exist in this country at the beginning of the twenty-first century are also more subtle, far more sophisticated than they have ever been so it may take a while to see them.
When I define oppression let it be related to the Latin root. When I say oppression I speak of it here in the sense of being suppressed, being pressed under, of having ones ways, ideas or even existence forcibly (though the forceful hand may be ever so gentle) pushed down.
Recent theorists… have also given prominence to a rather different …oppression
which I shall call cultural imperialism. This is the experience of existing with a
society whose dominate meaning render the particular perspective and point of
view of one’s own group invisible….
(Young, 100)
The quickest place I see this is in religion and the best example I can give to assert two variations of this oppression is the Regender computer program.
In the beginning when Goddess created the heavens
And the earth the earth was formless wasteland and darkness
Covered the abyss…
Then Goddess said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
What may be an interesting, perhaps even amusing exercise in a classroom would still be blasphemy in a church. Though many religious people say, “we know God isn’t a man,” the term Goddess is aligned with paganism, heresy and heterodoxy (which are aligned with evil. This has been the case since the Israelite prophets burnt all the images of Asherah and swapped Ba’al (a married storm and fertility god whose wife of Asherah) for Yahweh (an unmarried storm and feritiliy god who was the enemy of Asherah). Only last year the Episcopal Church censured two priests for their paganism in being a little too warm with the idea of God the Mother. This though the Archbishop of Canterbury is ordained into the Welsh Gorsedd of Bards. Even in the most liberal Episcopal church a congregant would be pulling a brave stunt to cross herself announcing, “In the name of the Mother, the Daughter and the Holy Soul.”
But back to Regender.
Then Goddess said: “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky
To separate the day from the night…
Religious opinion matters because at heart to speak of God is to speak of the source of our existence, and in this society that source is seen as male. That is, in some way we owe our existence to a lone male entity even though someone will say, “I KNOW God isn’t a man.” Even the ancient prophets of Israel declared that God wasn’t a man, but what is being said is not what is being experienced at the deepest level. Because the maleness of God is such an accepted thing, we don’t even have to think about it. It sits there a given, just like a white Jesus, and one knows how much of a given it is when she sees the jangling sentence, “In the beginning Goddess made the heavens and the earth…”
The dominant groups and their cultural expressions are the normal, the universal,
and thereby unremarkable.
(Young, 101)
This is the second way of oppression: a light rewriting of the story. As Mary Daly demonstrates in Beyond God the Father, giving a feminist reading to something is far more than merely putting “dess” on the end of God’s name. The story doesn’t change one bit if the translation is that shallow. Now, if the translation had been full, then Goddess’s creation would have been completely different from God’s. Following the general pattern of a Creatrix myth she probably would have had family. She would have had a name. She generally would create out of her own body. Se would have children. We would be her children as opposed to the creation myth in which God is not a father at all. That’s a much later theological innovation. This retranslation ignores the fact that the experience of a Creatirx would change the story of creation. It remains the same as if men were still telling the story.
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| The Language of Oppression PART ONE |
| 11.01.05 (10:51 am) [edit] |
Before we can admit that language serves as a form of oppression, we have to admit that psychic oppression does exist, that walls can be built in the mind and that often, this is what language serves to do. We have to admit that very little of language is accidental, and many terms are intentionally employed either in their present form or in their initial institution to cause oppression.
In Bell Hook’s book We Real Cool she explores how the term Black came to be used for Africans and, in specific, African Americans. Baker does the same. Both proceed along the same lines. Very few Black people are physically black. At best the darkest Black person is a very deep shade of umber. So the term, which may seem to denote the darkness of a group of a particular people has little to do with that. If this were the case, we would be referred to as Brown. Well, then what does Black mean? It is the opposite of white. This is not the place to go into everything that white means. But we can explore all the things that Black has traditionally meant. Dark, sinister, evil, other, incomprehensible.
In order to make the case that creating such a term can bring about psychic oppression, in order to make the case that an insult lodged in the mind can have a concrete effect we must then look to the case of Blacks in America and ask, by the term Black, or rather Negro, has it caused us to live not second, but third and fourth rate lives? Has the identification with not being quite right, being the opposite of what is good—white—been detrimental to how we perceive ourselves and the lives we lead? Yes.
Go down the list of the oppressed and the same pattern asserts itself. The terms Straight and Queer are even more obvious in their intent though few people trouble to examine them. To assert “I am straight” is to assert being straight forward, a straight shooter, not crooked, not bent (wicked comes from the Anglo-Saxon term wicce, which implies bent or twisted). To be straight is orthodox, the right thing. It doesn’t simply mean a man who is sexually attracted to women, or a woman sexually attracted to men. The actual definition has nothing to so with sexual attraction at all.
And Queer? Odd, funny, not right, causing alarm, weird. There is not a single good meaning to the word queer. Out of the ordinary. We can take the same test for Queer or Gay that we used for the term Black. That is: can a word be oppressive? Do slurs carry over into the realty of life?
Last year I took a refresher driver’s ed course and was surrounded by teenagers for about two weeks. They were for the most part, good people. I knew that no one would ever be allowed to call another person a nigger or a bitch but, oddly enough, the word faggot was thrown around liberally. Harmless? Of course, because in the common mind gay kids are about as real as witches and fairies. They are “out there” and so no one’s being hurt unless you level the word at them. Then the word itself is a weapon. And in that place it was a weapon, because one boy in the group, who was nervous and frightened and fidgetty, who couldn’t wait to get out as soon as possible, when asked by someone else if he was gay said, “Yes.”
When, even with the supposed mainstreaming of gays into the American media, and what we call toleration, gay teens are still overwhelmingly more likely to commit suiccie than those who do not identify themselves as gay—straight is very misleading term—I think we can assert that language is a source of oppression.
We’ve only taken two words, and neither of them about women. But I think our survey of oppressive language is incomplete if we don’t also mention all the underground impolite words which go with Black and Queer. Traditionally Black has gone hand and hand with nigger, colored, coon, spook and so forth. All of these terms obviously have a negative connotion and the myriad portraits of lynchings, the photographs of Emmett Till, the legacy of slavery attest to the results of such associations. Queer is tied to faggot, sissy, ass-chaser, cocksucker, dyke, carpet muncher and much more. And these are the terms used by many people. There have been enough Mathew Shepherds to tell us what the result of such terminology is.
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| Fuck and Pray: The Mothers and the Daughters |
| 10.31.05 (1:50 pm) [edit] |
Listen, the body knows. Saint Paul was wrong. Many times he is. Provision must be made for the flesh. The flesh tells us so much. There is no such thing as chain smoking for no reason, or having constant migraines for no reason, or frequent sickness for no reason. Nausea never occurs for no reason. Our bodies are telling us a great deal if we would listen. Or if we would feel. But I fear we are forgetting to do both. Really, what we are doing is a lot of pointless running around a lot of silly chatter, a lot of putting the hand to the head and murmuring, “Oh, my, I’m so busy, to cover up for the fact that we haven’t done a thing. We haven’t even started. We wouldn’t know where to begin.
It is late. I really ought to go to bed now, but before I do I want to say a word about the Ladies. I want to give honor again to the spirits. Especially the ugly ones. If one is a Catholic, and that is how I grew up, then he has the Virgin Mary to square off the idea of a male God, a man with no wife, no female side to him. We have forgotten God the woman, or rather, done out best to get rid of her. But this Mary is really no substitute for God the Mother, not here in the Mid West where she is scrubbed, flat chested and Caucasian, where it is noted that she is, after all only a woman. And that’s true. She is only a woman. She is not God. She is a sort of substitute in a patriarchal structure.
So my structure doesn’t stay within Christianity. Christians claim they have the only truth. They are wrong. My structure crosses the border. I have Africa and indigenous America in my blood. I have Wales, England, Scotland in me, and I remember the Mothers. We need the Mothers and the Daughters, the virgins and the not so virgin. We have remembered the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. We must not forget them. But we must also call to mind the Mother, the Daughter, the Holy Soul.
When May comes again, it is time to put up the portrait of the one some called Kore or Persephone. In my world she is Tanquare. She is very real, she is the force of sap in the trees pushing blossoms up from the wood and grass from the earth.* Tanquare is she who once was dead, and we fear her. My mother said, last year, “I am not ready for spring,” and I understood her. Perfectly. As much as we shiver over the winter there is something comforting about how its greyness holds us still and shields us from moving. But Tanquare is the Mistress of the Wheel. She is change, and I have to embrace her every year, embrace her, take her in, and grow. Or resist her and become stagnant. Look around you, look at the vacant looks in the peoples eyes and you will understand what happens to those who resist her.
*As I post this it is Samhain, All Hallows, and Persephone comes to us as Dark Lady and Queen of the Dead
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| Fuck and Pray--Reflections on Writing, CONTINUED |
| 10.30.05 (12:33 pm) [edit] |
There will be no plot to this. Not really. I’d like there to be, but really I think we will just write and write until we are done and chapters will end when they need to.
The other day at that beach we were on the top of a dune. The wind blew lightly. The wind was telling me things. The wind is lady. In my world she is Aiuryn, the woman of the winds and she wears the deepest blue cloak over her whole black body and it is hooded over her face. All you see of her is a black hand pulling the veil back and an eye winking from the depths of the veil. She is the oldest of goddesses, hard to hear and hard to see. But for those who listen she always has the most startling news.
The Woman of the Wind speaks in numerous ways. Usually she speaks over and over again through disconcerting situations. This has been an arid year. Then this morning, the Woman of the Winds spoke. She speaks just like that, not commanding, but singing and you have got to pick up on the tune, the tune that says, “You are trapped in boxes. Here, if you listen to this song, you may find a way out.
Is the way safe?
Well, now that is just the thing. We are all so willing to sell everything for the price of security, and in the end nothing is secure but death. Too often we trade life for stagnancy.
All I know was that love had died in my heart. My heart was becoming smaller and smaller my joy was slipping away.
The moment the book was ready the moment that things changed. With a very large book in my hands, I could no longer allow myself to be a small person. The English department, in the end, is not always the best place for a writer to be. With not much sadness, I turned my back on the land of dry bones I had lived in a whole year.
Oh, my people, I will open up your graves and cause you to rise from them. I will put my spirit into you, and you shall live, and will place you in your own land, and you shall know that I the Lord have spoken it. I have said and I will do it!
If you are full of ideas, full of zeal and innovation and the things you value are not valued, you are not valued, get out. If everywhere you turn everyone is digging through dead men’s bones preferring what has passed. Put it away. If all of your marvelous ideas are greeted with less than enthusiastic response, leave those poor greeters behind.
Now we are all pilgrims, more or less, aren’t we? We are all looking for that home, and the mistake comes when we settle for that which is not, when we give up the search thinking, this is as close as I will get. This almost fits. What did I expect? Surely, I must give up some things. That may work for buying shoes, but not finding home. I bought a new pair of sandals on sale today because I needed sandals and trying them on I realized they didn’t quite fit in the heels. Maybe they never will, but in time my heel might make room for them. I will finally break them in.* That is not the way it is with finding the wrong home. The wrong situation will not get better. You will only get used to it, and when you have gotten used to it, when you have surrendered to the mediocre: you die.
We must have faith. What is faith? Is it belief in a certain religion, a certain church, a certain savior? Well, no. But it is belief in religion, in religio, that all things are held together, and it is believing in saviors. You may very well be surprised to learn the savior is you. It is the belief that there is a spirit to fill us and take us out of the land of dry bones, that dry bones are not all there is, that there is a home to be led to, that the universe makes us a promise, and will fulfill it. If we are of good and faithful heart, if we do not cease in the journey, we will arrive home. And home and home again.
*I never broke them in. Let this be a lesson to the reader about attempting to make things fit that do not.
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| Connix et Ora or Fuck and Pray |
| 10.29.05 (12:32 pm) [edit] |
Titian has a painting titled The Flaying of Marsyas. The story: the satyr Marsyas challenges the god Apollo to a contest of the arts, whoever wins is allowed to flay the other. Lysias, challenging the gods, that is to say, going beyond himself loses, and he is being flayed in the painting, all of his skin exposed, Apollo gently takes off his flesh, almost lovingly.
In Michelangelo's painting of the Last Judgment, Saint Bartholomew rides up to Christ. Bartholomew who himself was flayed alive. He is holding up his skin, but anyone who knows art a little realizes that this empty flesh, the flayed flesh in not that of Bartholomew, but of Michelangelo. It is his grey, stripped face, his stonemason's body represented in the hanging skin.
So this is a theme in art. Here is a question for the artist to ask: I ask it myself. Around this question comes many, many troubling revelations which assault our assumption about success. Most of the people we will ever meet are fully prepared to be mediocre. If you would succeed at all times you can only do that which you are sure of doing flawlessly.
But now so the artist. We must always go beyond ourselves and in a way. Whether we hold up the flesh to Christ, or are flayed by Apollo, we always challenge the God within, we always respond to that call, and in some way, we always lose. So winning is not really the question. The question the consummate artists must ask is this: have I offered myself up? Have I gone beyond and ripped off the skin? Have I been merciless on myself and gone into myself? Surely this is the only way. Have I been flayed?
Believe it or not, the only answer that brings peace and rest is, "yes."
We may not be able to tell exactly what is wrong, but there is always the something. We can’t think properly, life is gone, we are weeping, or we want to, even in the happiest moments there is that black dog, that wrong feeling.
It is the esbat of the dark moon, and tonight I offer up juice and alcohol, salt and water and incense at the altar of the spirits. I remember the spirits of this house and of the earth. Everything has a spirit, all spirits ought to be served, especially those who cannot serve themselves, or those it is our responsibility to serve. Perhaps for a storyteller the chief spirits to be served are those of our characters. They are given to us and no one else to be fostered. Sing to them, talk to them, burn incense for them, cajole them, be them, see them.
The other day I went to the beach. We went. It was cool because spring is late in getting here, and the beach was nearly empty in the first few days of May. I remember years before I used to go the beach with someone else and there were so many people. I would look at the people. There was this one boy, maybe thirteen, with bright blue eyes in a pale face. He wasn’t handsome, really, but he was stunning. His knees were drawn to his chest, and he had dark hair plastered to his head. He became Roy Cane, and in a way Ian. He became a template for the men of the Cane family. The way when he saw someone he must have gone to school with, that he waved at them—as if he was kind, but not their friend, as if he was well liked, but not a part of the group—made me know everything about him. And that is how the characters come.
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