Archive for November 2011
Did it! Amazing experience, helped by the online Nanowrimo forum, with 200,000 other people doing the same thing all around the world. Dutch high-schoolers and Malaysian retirees and New Zealand farmers, Singapore lawyers and Hong Kong engineers. Everyone talking about it as they’re doing it. Egging each other on. Telling funny stories. Making and soliciting suggestions. Cries for help. Competitions. Excerpts for critiquing. How-to’s for people writing about medieval French history, chameleons, murder by deuterium, dragon mating, the proper warping and beaming of looms, the spices in chicken tikka, etc. Writing Buddies. The online support videos and posts from published authors. The sense of an immense online community engaged in huge set of magical creative hopeful acts against the naysayers and wannabes and critics, and our own doubts and inner censors and resistance and procrastination and sloth.
Word by word. And now, 50,260 words of the first draft of a fantasy novel. Or 106 pages in a Word document. A month of writing. Virtually no editing whatsover, beyond what spell-check does in true robot fashion.
Haven’t looked back at it. Not sure I want to. In any case I need to spend some time away from it. Catch up on this blog, on laundry, dishes.
Free at last! No, not free at all: finished with the first step. Let down a bit, to tell the truth. Adrenaline and all. Time to rest up, pull back from writing for a week, so the first symptoms of carpal tunnel subside (mostly my left arm).
Most productive day — over 5000 words. Had about five of those during the month. Nice to know I can do it. Wow. OK, onward. Get a fire built later (it’s sunny and in the 40s outside), shave, take a shower, write a letter, pay bills. Take a walk. Breathe.
Thank you, Powers of the Worlds, human and incorporeal. Wife, friends, the earth, the gods. And you, my readers, for all good thoughts. (It feels good to thank, to be grateful. An annual holiday for it isn’t often enough, of course. Daily.)
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[Part 1 | 2 | 3 ]
B F Skinner
Years ago now, I remember furiously reading behaviorist B. F. Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity on a plane. I was making lots of notes and highlighting the text and writing exclamation points in the margins — at one point my seat-mate, who hadn’t spoken to me otherwise, asked if I was prepping for a class. I still have that copy, a cheap paperback, yellowing on my shelf.
But I wasn’t reading to complete an assignment. I loathed Skinner’s conclusions, and I was gathering ammunition against them — all the false premises and counter-points and fallacies and over-generalizations I could muster. The most egregious of Skinner’s conclusions were that since — apart from genetics — we are machines controlled by our environment, there was no need to sustain delusional beliefs in freedom and dignity. There is no such thing as an “autonomous” person who thinks and decides and chooses. Any talk of political rights, a “soul,” consciousness, or freedom or any of a large number of other psychological states, was pointless, unfounded — an obstacle, in fact, to human progress. We’re formed and motivated by reward and punishment, by reinforcement, Skinner claimed. And he asserted that a “science of human behavior” made designing any human culture we wished both a possibility and a demonstration of his conclusions.
A few years later I found out that linguist and critic Noam Chomsky had already done the job of demolition years before — 40 years ago, now — in a 1971 article in the New York Review of Books. Chomsky takes Skinner down quite unapologetically:
Skinner is saying nothing about freedom and dignity, though he uses the words “freedom” and “dignity” in several odd and idiosyncratic senses. His speculations are devoid of scientific content and do not even hint at general outlines of a possible science of human behavior. Furthermore, Skinner imposes certain arbitrary limitations on scientific research which virtually guarantee continued failure.
I mention my personal story here because at the time I didn’t feel “free” to ignore Skinner — another way of saying I didn’t want to. My freedom in this case was a choice, though one strongly influenced by emotion.
Here’s why I didn’t feel free — why I “had to” critique Skinner — again in Chomsky’s words:
Noam Chomsky
There is, of course, no doubt that behavior can be controlled, for example, by threat of violence or a pattern of deprivation and reward. This much is not at issue, and the conclusion is consistent with a belief in “autonomous man.” If a tyrant has the power to require certain acts, whether by threat of punishment or by allowing only those who perform these acts to escape from deprivation (e.g., by restricting employment to such people), his subjects may choose to obey — though some may have the dignity to refuse. They will understand the difference between this compulsion and the laws that govern falling bodies.
Of course, they are not free. Sanctions backed by force restrict freedom, as does differential reward. An increase in wages, in Marx’s phrase, “would be nothing more than a better remuneration of slaves, and would not restore, either to the worker or to the work, their human significance and worth.” But it would be absurd to conclude merely from the fact that freedom is limited, that “autonomous man” is an illusion, or to overlook the distinction between a person who chooses to conform, in the face of threat or force or deprivation, and a person who “chooses” to obey Newtonian principles as he falls from a high tower.
The inference remains absurd even where we can predict the course of action that most “autonomous men” would select, under conditions of extreme duress and limited opportunity for survival. The absurdity merely becomes more obvious when we consider the real social world, in which determinable “probabilities of response” are so slight as to have virtually no predictive value. And it would be not absurd but grotesque to argue that since circumstances can be arranged under which behavior is quite predictable — as in a prison, for example, or the concentration camp society “designed” above — therefore there need be no concern for the freedom and dignity of “autonomous man.” When such conclusions are taken to be the result of a “scientific analysis,” one can only be amazed at human gullibility.
OK, there we have the arguments of two white Euro males. We’re equally gullible, of course, when we think freedom is some absolute thing, so that if we “have” it, it can’t be “taken” from us except by violating our “rights.” Societies organize and provide some things at the cost of others. It’s always a trade-off. Security in exchange for loss of freedom of movement has been a hot-button issue for some time now, with gated communities, and recent talk of a fence across the southern U.S. border, with the Dept. of Homeland Security scanning us every time we want to fly on a plane, opening our luggage, and fondling our pill bottles and mini-toothpaste tubes. Have I tried to take away your freedom by slanting my comments here, to influence you and nudge you in the direction I want, so I can manipulate you later on? Do you have the freedom to stop reading right now, or send me a nasty message? You know the answers. But how valuable is that freedom?
Changing gears, we have the pop version of freedom in Kris Kristofferson’s song “Me and Bobby McGee.” Here’s the chorus:
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose
Nothing, I mean nothing honey if it ain’t free, no no
Yeah feeling good was easy Lord when he sang the blues
You know feeling good was good enough for me
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee.
Is freedom “feeling good”? To repeat, if we feel good, are we “free”? After a medical misdiagnosis of mental illness, electroshock therapy cured my mother of some “delusions” that were actually caused by the onset of dementia, but I can’t ever say she was more free as a result. Something in her shifted after that treatment. It certainly sharpened the decline already under way. It didn’t matter if she “felt good,” though of course I didn’t want to deprive her of whatever positives we could salvage from the situation. In the other sense the song mentions, she was nearly “free.” She had (almost) “nothing left to lose.”
But the song doesn’t exactly say that. The lyrics assert, “Feeling good was easy when he sang the blues.” In other words, if I have an antidote for my pain, or an outlet or expression for it like the Blues, it’s at least somewhat easier for me to feel good. But actual freedom is a wash in this case, when I’m suffering. Take away the suffering, and then I can begin to consider whether or not I’m “free.” Until then, I got “nothing.”
The radically down and out, the homeless, the street crazies, the druggies — they’re free in many senses that I’m not. Far fewer obligations, responsibilities, commitments, possessions. Little of the self-building we do by putting on the right clothes, driving the right car, working at the right job, eating lunch with the right colleagues, and so on. (I can see it start early, in school, with the cliques and claques and in-out groups.)
But I’m in no hurry for that kind of freedom, at least at the cost the homeless pay.
I’ve allowed myself to ramble a bit in this post, rather than arguing closely toward a conclusion. Is that freedom?
More to come in Part III.
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With just under two thousand words to get down tomorrow, I can finally see the finish line and the completion of a month of Nano writing. I started with a character-driven story, knowing that with a vivid enough character, things would start to happen, and she was strong enough to make things happen herself. Now plot detail has been flowing in abundance, complexities I hadn’t foreseen or imagined, backstory and unusual motivations and sacred mathematics and a dream sequence that foreshadows all hell about to break loose.
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A singe grosbeak inspects our feeder, and as I look out through the living room picture window at the bird plumped against the cold, there’s a reflection in the glass of flames from the woodstove inside. In its orange vigor, my fire faces west, Druidically inappropriate, but very welcome on this grade A gray day.
In the northern U.S. that’s an image of this time of year: reflections, of heat inside, of life still proceeding outdoors and in, of the time of year itself.
The interval between Thanksgiving and the December holidays can be a delicious space, a “meanwhile” or middle-time for re-tooling and starting to close up shop on the current year. To feel that it’s often too busy, or merely filled with worsening weather forecasts, as though that is all it has to offer, is to miss something profoundly meditative about these days. What’s the opposite of miss? Attend, intercept, catch, be there. Whatever it is, that’s what I want to do.
There is as well in November and early December a late-autumnal melancholy, it’s true. The peak of Thanksgiving has passed, and some may see the next months as a pretty solid trudge through the valleys (in our boots, scarves and gloves, and hauling snow-shovels) until the climb to the next holiday.
So when I can take a look from this end of the year at a season at the other side of summer, I do. Off to that start of spring transience which mirrors something in us now as well. I followed a link from an article in today’s NY Times and there on the page was the sudden pure pleasure of “Sakura Park,” a poem by the late Rachel Wetzsteon (pronounced “wet-stone”). Take a visit to late spring, six months ago, or six months to come. The cherry trees (the sakura of the title) are in bloom …
Sakura Park
The park admits the wind,
the petals lift and scatter
like versions of myself I was on the verge
of becoming; and ten years on
and ten blocks down I still can’t tell
whether this dispersal resembles
a fist unclenching or waving goodbye.
But the petals scatter faster,
seeking the rose, the cigarette vendor,
and at least I’ve got by pumping heart
some rules of conduct: refuse to choose
between turning pages and turning heads
though the stubborn dine alone. Get over
“getting over”: dark clouds don’t fade
but drift with ever deeper colors.
Give up on rooted happiness
(the stolid trees on fire!) and sweet reprieve
(a poor park but my own) will follow.
There is still a chance the empty gazebo
will draw crowds from the greater world.
And meanwhile, meanwhile’s far from nothing:
the humming moment, the rustle of cherry trees.
Yes, that’s a poet for you — insisting on a connection between cherry petals and the growth of self, when all the cherry need do is be a self beautifully ready to attract bees, produce fruit and fulfill its cherry-tree-ness.
And yes, there’s a whiff of early middle-aged cynicism creeping in here (Wetzsteon died at 42), the dry rot that afflicts so many who tell themselves to be content with meanwhiles. “Give up on rooted happiness!” she urges. There is still green chance and raw luck and sweet grace in the world, but until they salvage something greater than what’s at hand, be content with meanwhiles, the poet advises, the “far from nothing” moments that hum with possibility even now. So it’s back to trees, where maybe we should have remained.
Too often we are literally “self-important.” We worry about the self like a barefoot child abandoned in a parking lot, or an opened can of tuna that will spoil unless we eat or cook or refrigerate it. The cherry tree sends out blossoms unworried about November. Not because November won’t come, but because it’s not November when it’s April. And when November comes, the tree will be a cherry in November, awaiting the next humming moment.
And yes, if I meditate among the swaying branches and crackling leaves this time of year (trying to fluff myself against the cold like an outsized bird, so I can sit or kneel a few minutes without shivering and breaking my focus), the “stolid tree on fire” matters more than it did before, and my own concerns matter less. Restoration that we seek, visit all who long for it. Find it in the silent witnesses of trees. We who listen for “a voice that will save us” forget what burns in front of us, the fire in the stove in the living room, this day passing with us into “later” and darkness and tomorrow, the trees wintering, summering and wintering again, the air itself, with its metallic crispness on the tongue and in the nose, the fire that burns in all things.
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The 50,000-word deadline this Wednesday 11/30 at midnight looms before us “wrimos,” and I’m finally within range. Woo-hah! The Nanowrimo site obligingly lets participants grab icons of progress — anything to keep us writing. Much of what I’m drafting now is detail, filling in missing scenes, background, snatches of dialog with disembodied characters, pieces of Harhanu physiology and psychology — and I suppose, not surprisingly, a brand-new and potentially primary character — because of course what I expressly did not need at this point is a strong new presence telling me “when you are done, you are not done, for I have more” — to paraphrase Omar Khayyam in his Rubaiyat. He already has a name (Tehengin) which he obligingly repeated to me till I got it right. But, probably, I do need him — in some way which I’m sure he’ll inform me about. In detail.
So anyway, here I dance at 44212 words, taking a break to blog, before I return to dance some more. Wish me well in this home stretch.
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With the Thanksgiving holiday, travel to my in-laws in FL, and nano-ing, it’s been a busy week. I’m in the home stretch as far as writing, with 38,177 words completed. Huzzah!! 5000 words came through yesterday, including a draft of the ending, while I was tucked away and mostly out of earshot of happily noisy relatives.
Back to regular (full) blog posts soon!
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[Part 1 | 2 | 3 ]
With so much attention to freedom these days, both freedom from and freedom to (they can feel like — and amount to — very different things), it’s strange there’s so little discussion of what to do with it once we get it. We’re supposed to know intuitively, like eating or breathing. Let me “do my own thing,” “don’t fence me in,” “don’t tread on me,” “a man’s home is his castle,” “do what you want,” and countless other phrases and proverbs and old saws and aphorisms to capture that sense of a supposedly “inalienable right” to do — what? Along with life and the often asymptotic* happiness we’re supposedly in pursuit of, this third leg of the American Independence tripod got declared and delivered to us and we haven’t done a paternity test to see whether it’s our baby. Liberty. As in “see Statue of.” As in Patrick Henry, who gave himself and his audience only two choices (“liberty or death”), proving he was definitely not a true American, because as we all know, Americans love their choices. “Have it your way,” goes the old Burger King advertizing jingle. OK, my way. But once I get it, how do I know I have it? Is it like a lottery ticket — changing in value by the day, and up to me to claim it if I won it? And then what? What’s freedom for?
More to come in Part II.
*An asymptote, if the Wikipedia definition above doesn’t do it for you, is a curve that keeps edging ever closer to a line, but never actually arrives. (Unless you want to count infinity.) Think of it as a geometric tease.
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Passing the halfway mark of 25,000 words a couple of days ago felt as big this year as reaching 10K last year did — a milestone. Inevitably I’ve fallen behind — this time by about 5000 words. Got nothing written at all on Monday, and Tuesday was little better. Today’s quota is 30K. I’ve gotten down 3000 words so far, in a burst of catching up, and hope for another few hundred by day’s end, which will bring me within striking distance. I’m at 28,125 as I write this. (Yes, my break from writing a novel is writing a blog entry.) Definitely some interesting material has come through. I’ve put my poor succubus Alza in a number of implausible, erotic, challenging, historical and dangerous situations, just to see what sticks.
I’ve also found out that in order for an important historical meeting to occur, she needs to be about a century older than I’d made her. Not sure how she feels about that. Will no doubt find out. And I’ve gotten down a description of her original appearance that she has just discovered, the “face she had before she was born,” as the Zen masters like to say — before she shape-shifted the first time in her life among humans. That discovery seems to give her a stability and sense of self nothing else has. Here’s a striking image I found online and used for inspiration as Alza. It comes, both appropriately and ironically at once, from an Australian evangelical website, in the form of a pamphlet providing counsel to victims of Incubi and Succubi.
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A spiral differs from a circle. There’s motion in it, and change. The track or trail of movement is itself motionless. (Well, comparatively: the boat’s wake dissolves in ripples, the jet trail fades, but some time after, at least; the jet’s long gone.) It records the journey. But journey in a spiral is not repetition. It’s recognition, re-encounter from a fresh perspective. History, planetary or personal, doesn’t repeat itself, but it does often spiral.
[Originally when I took the photo I was simply looking for a background that would contrast with the bowl. Only later after I’d uploaded the photo did I realize that the grain of the wood holds at least as much interest as the spiral design of the bowl. Talk about not seeing the obvious.]
You may remember the chorus in Joni Mitchell’s lovely song “The Circle Game”:
And the seasons they go round and round
and the painted ponies goes up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look behind
from where we came
and go round and round and round
in the circle game.
Joni, it’s lovely, and it’s easy to be seduced by the beauty of your song, but you’re wrong. Or at least, you’re right only about one choice among many. It’s a game, and therefore we’re no more captive than any player is who agrees to the rules in order to play at all.
We can choose to play the game this way and be participants in time. That’s the only way to live in a material world anyway, from what I’ve seen: in time. Once we release the drive to “get ahead” or “win the race,” we can begin to jump through time, from moment to moment, recognizing “infinity in a grain of sand, and eternity in an hour,” as William Blake has it. Time is illusion, yes — but in the sense of play (Latin ludere, lusus, illusio = in+ lusio — “in the game”): a set of rules to make sense or pattern out of the flow of experience, which is e-lusive. We need “before” and “after” in order to begin (or return) to experience “now.” The moment of illusion, of play, then broadens and deepens.
“Time is the stream I go fishing in,” says Thoreau. I use this as a mantra when I get stressed about deadlines, minutes ticking, the illusion gaining hold in a way that’s no longer a game, no longer pleasant to be playing. There’s nothing wrong or cruel about time, once we let go the fear that comes with clinging to any particular moment — of resisting the play because life is supposedly such a serious thing. “Eternity is in love with the productions of time,” Blake says in another poem.
These “long lessons” are ones I keep learning. Most of us do — most of us are slow learners — earth’s a place for those with “special needs.”
To live any other way is to suffer needlessly — never my favorite thing to do, anyway — and to be trapped in regret and loss. We’ll all have a taste of these if we live long enough, as part of the balance that comes with fullness of life — why seek out more, and worse, elevate them to a kind of icon of authenticity? “I’m not human unless I make a fetish of my suffering,” some people seem to say. “I AM my suffering,” say others.
The Circle Game goes best when we treat it as a game, as a shape of experience. But it’s not the ONLY one. We hear of people being “lost in the past.” How about seeing what it’s like to lose yourself in the present? Nowhere is now here, to make a linguistic jest with wisdom at its core.
Robert Frost was on to it in “Birches.”
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
If I don’t experience it on this curve of the spiral, it won’t be there for me the next time to “come to and begin over” in that “can-be-delightful” encounter of the “familiar-new” that often flavors our experiences. I cheat myself of so much joy, thinking there’s someplace “where it’s likely to go better.” Now, here, is when and where it’s at.
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OK, indulge me in a fit of professional pique. Grr. And afterward, having carefully checked my counterpoints below, show me where I went wrong. Until then, my case stands against careless authors and bad linguistics.
I spent undergrad and grad years studying linguistics, both in class to get degrees, and on my own, to “follow the bent of my genius, which is a very crooked one,” as Thoreau says of himself.
So when any published authority who should know better does a bad job with linguistics, it provokes my ire and righteous indignation. Stings me to creative invective, expressed in various naturally-occurring and invented languages. If you’re a fan, think Firefly and Joss Whedon‘s creative use of “gorram” and Chinese for the characters when they need a good brisk curse to capture their feelings that won’t get censored by feckless Anglo censors. (So I slightly misused feckless. It’s such a great word, I’m automatically forgiven. Why isn’t there a feckful?!)
When it involves an attempt to set the record straight about Druids, we particularly need careful scholarship, along the lines of Ronald Hutton, whose consistently excellent and thoroughly researched books shrink Romantic inflation, while leaving the essential mystery. In fact, that could be a definition of mystery: what remains intact, even more vital, after the facts have been established. Mystery isn’t obscurity, but a depth beyond easy ratiocination. It transcends language, though intuition and imagination are both on to it. It’s home turf for them.
People believe all kinds of nonsense about language, and often on flimsy evidence — perhaps because in the West, most people know only one language, so the ways of them durn furriners will always be inscrutable — not a true mystery, but the consequence of mere ignorance.
A classic example I’ve cited before: “Samhain is the Celtic god of death.” It really isn’t, but people get seduced by the appearance of authority and mistake it for the real thing. This is reminiscent of Kipling’s Monkey People in The Jungle Book: “If we all say so, it must be true.” The linguistic falsehood is still reprehensible, but it’s understandable here in propaganda like the anti-Pagan tract in which this Samhain citation appears.
On to the source of my wrath.
A Brief History of the Druids by Peter Berresford Ellis is a necessary book, providing analyses of evidence for an understanding of Druidry that aren’t available in print elsewhere. He’s cited as “a foremost authority on the Celts,” is the author of half a dozen books on the Celts, and for the most part deserves this accolade and others.
But …
How is it, then, on page 96, that he can foolishly, carelessly assert that “the very word Teutonic is derived from the Celtic word for tribe, tuath in Irish”? This is simply wrong. “Teutonic” comes from Latin teutonicus, and refers to the Germanic tribes. The cognate word — the “sister word” in Germanic, because both Celtic and Germanic are daughter languages of Proto-Indo-European (PIE) — is thiudan-, related to King Theoden in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and Deutsch, the German word for ‘German.’ However much Ellis would like the sound laws of PIE to reflect his desire for Celtic to be the mother tongue, they don’t and it’s not. Neither is Germanic, of course. However, Proto-Indo-European IS. And Ellis knows this, but lets his carelessness sway him into a baldly wrong, and worse, misleading assertion. The Celts indeed contributed much to Germanic culture, and that includes words as well as objects, but tuath isn’t one of them.
Here’s another example among others from this one book. On page 111, once again, Ellis wants Celtic to rule the roost. “When we turn back to Medb we find that her very name means ‘an intoxicating liquor’, [sic] and is the origin of the English mead.” And once again, the Irish medb and the English mead are cognate, or “born together,” from PIE *medhu. The English word doesn’t derive from the Irish. Both however do descend from the same parent — and that is PIE. [The * indicates a linguistic reconstruction.]
One instance of such false derivation in a scholarly work is possibly a “mistake” or oversight. Several instances become part of a consistent pattern of misuse of scholarship in the service of an agenda. It makes me question and doubt his other claims (not a bad thing, says my inner rebel; find out for yourself); and he gives just enough evidence to convince someone who doesn’t know enough about historical development of the Indo-European languages generally, and Celtic and English specifically, to challenge his assertions. It sounds right. But it isn’t. Boo — hiss!
Not the end of the world. But shoddy. Very shoddy. OK, enough ranting. <end rant>
Thank for indulging. Back to your regularly scheduled program.
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Nano update: hit the 20,000 mark — in fact, passed it last night, with 20177 words. Somehow this feels more substantial in many ways than passing the 10K mark, which seemed such a milestone at the time — not merely twice as many words, but a kind of undeniable solidity or substance that can’t be denied or dismissed. Got some new (potential) characters, too, knocking to be let in. Will have to see whether this story needs an incubus to muddy the waters, or a preacher bent on saving Nick (Alza’s “chosen”), or a girlfriend (and second succubus?!) for Nick’s best friend Paul. Anyway, onward …
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As editor of a collection of essays, The Rebirth of Druidry, OBOD‘s Chosen Chief Philip Carr-Gomm attempts to characterize something of the appeal of the spirit of Druidry in human terms. I quote his article at length because in its effect it is all of a piece, and because it provides a suitable introduction to some things I want to say about the Goddess:
Druidry is the perfect lover. You fall in love with her so easily because she is so romantic. She whispers to you of the magic and mystery of the turning stars and seasons. She loves trees and Nature above all things, and you yearn for these too. She tells you stories of Gods and Goddesses, the Otherworld and fairies, dragons and giants. She promises secret lore — of sacred trees and animals, of herbs and plants. She points deep into the past, and ahead towards a future which is lived in harmony with the natural world. But just when you are convinced you will marry her, because she is so beautiful, so tantalizing, so romantic, she turns around and there she is, with rotten teeth and hideous face, cackling and shrieking at your naivety. And she disappears, leaving you with just her tattered cloak, made up of a few strands: some lines from the classical authors, whose accounts are probably inaccurate anyway, a few inferences drawn from linguistic and archaeological research, which could be wrong, with the rest of the cloth woven from material written from the eighteenth century onwards, replete with speculation, forgery and fantasy.
You feel a fool. You don’t tell your friends about your lover. You feel tricked and defrauded, and decide to follow something more authentic, more established, more substantial — like Buddhism, or Christianity, or Sufism, or Taoism — something serious. But then you go out walking. You follow the old trackways, you come to the old places. You see the chalk gods and stone circles. You pause and open yourself to the Land, and there She is again. But this time she is even more enchanting because you can see that she is not just a beautiful woman, full of romance and seduction, you can see that she is also a wise woman, who will provoke as well as seduce you, who will make you think as well as make you feel. And then you suddenly know why she has been the object of fascination for so many through the ages. She is the Muse, the Goddess behind Druidry, the bestower of Awen, of inspiration.
Obviously the imagery here from a male author conveys part of how a man may first encounter the “Goddess behind Druidry”; it may not appeal to women, who find their own powerful ways of connecting with Her. In mythic terms, however, this account very much reflects the changeability of the Goddess — what has inaccurately been called her fickleness, and which has caused many accustomed to meeting deity in a single, invariant form to confuse variety with unreliability or untrustworthiness. Westerners in particular have largely been cut off from experience with aspectual deity, which the Goddess so clearly manifests. Rather than manifesting a loving and compassionate presence, “[t]he deity may appear in wrathful or challenging forms, but these should not be considered hostile. She is the kernel of truth at the heart of everything, and if she appears in challenging forms to you, look more deeply, considering why this may be so,” suggests Caitlin Matthews in her slim but potent book, The Elements of the Goddess. “Many of those who venerate the Goddess are unhappy with her supposedly dark aspects because they associate ‘dark’ with ‘evil.’ In order to save her child about to do something dangerous or silly, a mother will get angry, shout or scream, but this doesn’t mean to say she loves her child any less.”
My first encounter with the Goddess came unbidden, unsought, when I was 25. (You need to know: I’m not especially sensitive or psychic. Friends who are say anyone who wants to reach me has to raise quite a ruckus to get my attention. If you’d asked me then I’d say — still would probably, even today — that half of what people experience in such situations is imagination. But now by “imagination” I mean something considerably larger and more potent than I did then. More about that later.) It was a frosty autumn day, and I was wandering the fields and scattered woods of a farm my father had recently bought in western New York, south of Rochester. I paused in a swampy grove of trees, with several fallen and decaying trunks to sit on. A mood or atmosphere of autumn pervaded the place, almost palpable. The air lay perfectly still. The musty-sweet smell of dried dead leaves filled the air, along with a tang of rot and manure from a nearby field, and a hint of woodsmoke. Over the hills from a distance came the faint roar of some town maintenance vehicle — they were always patching roads in the area. But distant sounds simply deepened the stillness by contrast. As this meditative silence spread and enveloped me, I became aware of a presence that filled the grove and towered over me, fifty, sixty feet tall. Immense. One face of the Goddess. Conscious encounter. Her.
She didn’t knock me on my ass, though that might have been useful too, given how dense I can be. But though I describe it here in mild enough terms, the experience was unforgettable, not for any one detail, but for its undeniable — and familiar — quality. This was someone I knew. Not someone or something alien, or to be feared, or a matter of belief, any more than I need to believe in the tree-trunk I sat on. It was like finding a limb which, when you found it, you knew had always been a part of you all along. You just hadn’t been aware of it. As if it had been asleep, but for its waking you finally twitched a muscle in it, and in feeling it respond you felt it.
So what’s the big deal, you say? “He met the Goddess, in some ways it was an anticlimax though also somehow memorable, he got over it, it was years ago. So?”
A year later I was in the throes of my first love affair (can anyone say “late bloomer”?), a tumultuous relationship in which I did get knocked on my ass. Among all the other things this Goddess encounter was, it was preparation, or warning. I needed greater emotional experience, insight, maturity. I was about to get it.
In between the divine and human realms is an archetypal one — a place, often, of dream and vision, and the idealized images of Others for men and women which “haunt our imagination and often make our love-lives incredibly tortuous until we realize that these daimons will never become physical realities. They are messengers between the divine realms and the human levels of our experience” (Matthews, 13). This was part of what I needed to learn firsthand. No book knowledge this time. It was an initiation of its own.
So this fall at OBOD’s East Coast Gathering, in a meditation involving an encounter with the Goddess in her guise as Cerridwen, I felt a surge of panic — again. “Cerridwen is bad. She tricked Gwion Bach in the old Welsh tale.” But it was old programming. Incomplete knowledge. Fear of that “fickleness” I mentioned earlier. “The old, outworn, dualistic concept of the Goddess as cruel and capricious must be viewed for what it is: a reflection of our shadow-side, a terrible polarization of social responsibility with which women have been burdened as a sex” (Matthews, 24). But now I had more tools to begin to deal with it. At Samhain I did specific work with the Goddess. I needed to. Is it any wonder I also spent 15 years working in a freshman girls dorm as a house parent? Training up close and personal. “The Goddess stands at the heart of life, death and further existence and she will assume the forms which are most appropriate in her dealings with our world” (Matthews, 24). Or as a teacher in the other path I follow related, when he talked about his own experiences with inner and outer realities, “They had to get me to stop bowing every time they appeared, so they could actually work with me and get some work out of me.”
Matthews continues, in ways particularly useful for a male bard like me. “Men experience the Goddess through their creative side. She makes manifest their ideas by animating their dormant creativity. There is a strong sense of ebb and flow about these energies which give men an experience of the cyclical nature of the feminine menstrual cycle. This kind of relationship is rarely recognized for what it is, yet all men can discover and welcome this experience. Although the effect of a Goddess upon a man is less immediately physical than in a woman, it is nonetheless potent” (15).
There is much misunderstanding of gender and sexuality, and what constitutes the self and its connection to the world, perhaps nowhere more so than in the West, with its addiction to pornography, its fear of homosexuality, its violence against women, and its frequent indifference to children. I’ll let Matthews have her last word here. “Every human being is a child of the Goddess … The way of the Goddess is one of natural law and natural wisdom … It is primarily the people of the West who are orphans of the Goddess. The social and political reasons for this desolation have been documented in many books … Both women and men need to find their Mother, relating to her and her creation in fresh and balanced ways, for every one of us needs to drink of her wisdom and realign ourselves with her natural laws.” This is not a matter of belief but of incarnation — our own — to live fully, gratefully and passionately in this world, until we leave it.
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Nano update time. Is it any wonder, in light of this post, that I’m writing about a succubus?! And sympathetically — as a main character?! Must be some sort of assignment from the Goddess. Further training. God knows if it’s publishable. (Goddess may know, but if she does, she ain’t tellin’.) Reached 17,804 words: over 1/3 of the way there. Need to hit 20,000 today to be fully caught up, including today’s work. Should be able to do it. Major scene yesterday, in which Alza connected with the man she needs for her magical work, showed him her nature in a brief feed and reversal of energies to restore him, bypassing the mental level altogether, where the idea of a succubus would have completely flipped him, and left him with a medallion magically linked to her — ongoing physical contact to reinforce the dynamic. The resulting reactions when he deals mentally and emotionally with what he already knows will be interesting to capture, but the heavy lifting for that scene is done.
I’d been including more fire imagery in description and action, since Alza’s succubus nature seemed increasingly to resemble that of a fire demon. And then, as a break yesterday, doing some research on demons and succubi in other cultures, I happened on this quotation from the Qur’an: “And the jinn, We created aforetime from the smokeless flame of fire” (Al-Hijr, 15:27). And in an email yesterday from the university where I’m taking a seminar, advertising a weekend workshop for men: “FRIDAY, 11/11/11 – SUNDAY, 11/13/11 – ON THE EDGE OF FIRE: A MEN’S SPIRITUALITY RETREAT.” Right between the eyes — the kind of serendipity and synchronicity and happy accident one hopes for in writing. So I’m on some kind of track. I’m just still discovering what it is. And that’s much of the deep pleasure of this verbal marathon.
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“We are many sets of eyes staring out at each other from the same living body” — Freeman House, Totem Salmon
We are many sets of eyes, staring out
at each other from the same living body.
We are ears listening to each other
across valleys of skin.
Heat of the other’s blood
warming the air we breathe,
air that filled the other’s lungs
not long before, and will again,
ruffling our hair, rippling this field
of frost-gray grass.
We touch earth that touches each other,
life-print curling at our fingertips and lips,
world (a piece of it) digesting in our bellies,
swept along in blood and spit,
spice of it in our marrow,
essential you in everything
I eat and love and do,
essential me in you.
/|\ /|\ /|\
So there’s a poem provoked (I say “provoked” rather than “inspired” because that’s the sensation — I encounter a piece of language not my own that becomes the grain around which oyster tries to form a pearl. It won’t let go until I respond, and try to shape the sensation into something in words.)
Nano update: I’m catching up at 13,527 words and counting, but still a little more behind than I’d like. We’ll see what 2 and 1/2 cups of coffee this morning helps me accomplish. I don’t usually drink it, since I’m hypersensitive to caffeine and it keeps me up most of the night following the day I drink it, but I was cold this morning, and the smell! … well, anyway, I’m caffeinated and writing.
Found an interesting passage in a medieval author yesterday, Walter de Mapis. (If you’re gonna procrastinate, I say, why not procrastinate tangentially? I researched historical refs to succubi.) So now I know something about rumors surrounding Pope Silvester. The pontiff flourished around the year 1000, and his legacy includes the story of a certain succubus, who was said to give him advice, and who was reputed to be his lover. Supposedly he repented on his deathbed. Traitor. I’m expecting my succubus main character Alza will have something to say about that. Who knows — maybe she was there. Maybe she was the succubus …
Just discovered she has a mantra or prayer or verbal talisman she recites frequently. Maria, one of her worshippers (from her “cult” phase), overheard her this morning talking quietly to herself, and asked about it. Here are the words Alza said (part of the charm is to speak about oneself in third person):
Alzakh ne utayal gashem muk dafa.
May Alzakh grow in this surrounding fire,
may Fire know her for its own,
may Fire fill her in all she does,
burning away what blocks her,
burning toward what is native to her,
what is or will become or has been Fire,
time the Fire that moves all things into being.
Always fun to get a piece of the original in Harhanu. You need to know: among my other odd hobbies is conlanging. So I hear bits of languages, like I imagine musicians and songwriters hear snatches of songs and musical phrases. Here are the italicized words phonetically, as I heard them from Alza’s mouth: ahl-zahkh NEH oo-tah-YAHL gah-SHEM mook dah-FAH. [Literally, Alza this surrounding fire-in grow-imperative.]
Alza’s name in Harhanu is actually Alzakh, with the kh the raspy sound in loch and Bach — a voiceless velar fricative, to be all linguistic-y and precise about it. Alza’s name got truncated over the years, to match what people thought they heard, or thought it should be. Much as men around Alza imagine the woman they want, which she can then use to seduce them. Most men are, frankly, pretty seducible, she learns. So that part’s easy.
You want Druidry? Find it here, or go bother somebody else. (Now maybe you have some idea why I don’t overdo the caffeine. It makes me all cranky-creative and snarky and stuff.)
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“Don’t get me wrong, I like your reality; it’s way more interesting than mine. It’s just that mine seems to be the one everyone else is in.” Courtesy of ivebecomemyparents.com
When I was in my teens, conversations with my mother about the future usually ended with her saying, “You have to live in the real world.” This usually amused me, and sometimes annoyed me. How little I knew at the time that her statement was loaded, that stuff was hanging off it and dripping into the reality overflow collection vat at the bottom of the psychic stairs.
1) She never once claimed that she lived in a real world. But I had to. Why was this? The question isn’t as naive as it sounds. And how could she tell I wasn’t already in the — or a — real world? “It takes one to know one,” as we used to say. What was the give-away, I wonder?
2) Where did the compulsion to live in a real world come from? Only from parents? “You have to live there.” Funny — if I hadn’t been living there, then I’d already disproved such a claim. I didn’t have to live there, which was clear because I’d been living someplace else. But she wanted me too. Probably “for my own good,” which is along the lines of “this hurts me more than it hurts you.” (To their credit, my parents never said that to me.)
3) What is a real world? How do you tell the difference between a real and an unreal world? Is there more than one world, as this statement implies? Sure seems like it. Then what’s the other world like? How did she know? And how did she decide or discover that this one is more real? Simple majority vote? “We live in this world, you — a single person — live in that one. We win.”
4) Is it a whole world? (Sometimes life seems like jumping from one to another of a subset of all possible worlds.) There could be and probably are worlds far better, worse, uglier, stranger and more comfortable than this one. Then again, maybe not.
It feels like we do live in several worlds, all of them real on their own terms. Like we shift worlds all day long, moving from one to another with such ease we forget, we don’t notice, we assume reality is unitive and discrete, rather than a series of interpenetrating planes and grades and places. Waking. Fully awake. Deeply focused. Spacing in front of a video. Lost in music. Making love. Eating. Daydreaming. Sleeping. Dreaming. Tell me those are all identical states of consciousness, identical worlds! I’ve had flying dreams, felt the wind rushing by around me. Last I looked, trying to fly in this world lands you six feet under, or heavily medicated.
Judy Cannato in her book Radical Amazement observes that it’s always time for transformation. To delay just makes the need for change more imperative and harder to ignore (though we’re pretty good at that). Our widespread sense of dis-ease and general “stuckness” and malaise and dis-spiritedness arise from discernible causes and have discernible solutions:
Our attitudes and behaviors are rooted in a way of thinking that is no longer reflective of the real. So much of the time we are stuck in the dualistic, hierarchical, either-or thinking that has created the very problems that threaten us. We are not mechanisms with separate parts, but interconnected holons that are mutually dependent. Yet far too often we cling to the individualism and dysfunctional systems that have “parented” us, molding obedient offspring carrying on the “family” tradition in a way that continues to devastate all life, others’ as well as our own. Shifting to a new paradigm takes commitment and hard work. It requires gut-wrenching honesty and the willingness to give up fear-filled control. We al know what a difficult undertaking this is, but we are capable of the challenge and perhaps more ready than we think. (14)
For me one key here is that this is inner work as much as anything else. I can start it, and I can start working on myself. In fact, that’s the only place any of us will find a lasting and satisfying solution. “Be the change you wish to see in the world” is not wishful thinking or unrealistic. It’s in the copy of Life: An Owner’s Manual that was tied to my umbilical cord when I dropped in, a little over five decades ago. Have you checked your copy recently?
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Nanorimo update! Speaking of real and unreal: I’ve cleared 11,000 words — over one fifth of the way there! With 2800 words today, I’m catching up, but today’s goal is 13336, so I need to get another thousand down by day’s end to be in the ballpark and be able to catch up in another day or so. I now find myself writing some semi-detached scenes — backstory for my FMC — Nano-speak, I learned, for “female main character.”
Her name is Alza, and she’s a Harhanu — a succubus. Why a succubus? I’m finding out as I write, and I’ll let you know if I arrive at a definitive answer. Right now, though, it seems to have something to do with desire and empathy and our capacity for both deluding ourselves into disaster and enchanting ourselves into freedom and discovery. Oh, and she’s 947 years old. But she can be really hot when she chooses. Like when she’s hungry. Her most recent feed was from a German tourist named Konstant. He’s one of two humans who know her real nature. Their relationship is reciprocal. Sort of. Do I believe in succubi? I do when I’m writing Alza’s voice, when she’s draining a victim, when she searches like we all do for meaning and purpose. In some ways she’s the most human of my characters. Which may be a problem I’ll need to work on.
That number (of people who know her) is about to change. She’s made an entirely accidental (hah! so she thinks!) connection with a younger man (everyone is younger when you’re 947) named Nick who she’s discovering is crucial to her plans for living. And dying. Both of which she’s seriously considering. She’s also seduced a priest or two in her long life, and once allowed a cult to form around her. Now she’s more interested in laughing at Cosmo and Playboy and figuring out why one human should so dominate her thoughts when she’s used to doing the dominating. Or at least getting what she wants. Which is what men think they’re getting from her. OK, some of this is pretty self-indulgent. It’s also indicative of the space you get into when you’ve been writing all day!
So how does this connect with Druidry? Who knows?! I started writing on Nov. 1 with the small cluster of ideas that came to me, about three days before Nanowrimo began. You go with what you get. Years ago I started a historical novel set in Pre-Roman Etruria. But that’s not what came calling this time, saying “write me!” Hence, my current work.
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Sunlit November trees.
A scarf of woodsmoke curls between the mountains.
Look long enough at beauty, someone says.
You’ll begin to see more things as they are.
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So, Nano writing update: was out of town at a conference yesterday, and got no writing done. That means today’s a triple push: tomorrow I have a class, a car appointment, and a (late) Samhain celebration with a friend, so there’ll be less time to write. And catch up from yesterday, along with today’s 1667 words.
I’m grateful they keep coming. You know a story is launched — and this says nothing about its quality, only about whether it’s alive for the author, at least — when characters invade your dreams and begin telling you stuff about themselves. And while exercising this morning on our secondhand treadmill in our breezeway (45 degrees, but warmer than outside), I got another piece of plot. Rather, more a set of questions to ask (and answer), and a couple of flashes of image-ideas. By the end of today, I should be at least at the 10,000 word mark if I’m to stay on track.
My main character has retreated to her house in Santa Fe to take stock. (Why Santa Fe? I’ve no idea. Never been there. Would like to, yes. Have to do some research, to see how I might use the locale.) Now to avoid merely lengthy exposition and instead make things happen. I might be able to get away with some flashback, dramatize bits of the past that are now relevant. I keep picking up the stray question here and there that won’t let go, and it generates backstory — in some cases, gobs of backstory. But no stopping to worry about whether the story should begin somewhere else. That’s for a revision. Right now the point is to keep going, keep seeing new pieces I wouldn’t encounter any other way. In that way it’s like any creative process. The road rises to meet your feet as you keep walking.
Maybe you’ve had the dream version: you’re dreaming, you come to a cliff, you’re aware enough to say, “It’s a dream — I can jump and nothing will happen! Woo-hoo!” So you toss yourself in complete abandon, enjoying the thrill of that reckless plunge you would never take awake, but just as the cliff edge spins away above and behind you, you terrify yourself by asking: what if it’s NOT a dream?!
With luck, at this point, you don’t wake yourself up, heart pounding, breathing hard. Instead, you watch to see how you will land, and where, whether you will sprout wings and fly someplace else, etc. In other words, you’re hungry to know what will happen next?! Don’t let me wake up yet!
Curiosity’s one of the best tools I know.
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Just the promised update on my progress: I’m now at 4614 words, just four hundred shy of the total of 5000 for the third day. A tenth of the way toward the month’s goal.
Still writing — I’ve just begun a crucial scene. My two main characters finally meet, though they’ve been circling each other, and in one way or another aware of each other, for a few days of story time. A decent amount of backstory has gotten filled in, through interactions with other characters, so their meeting should matter. Always a good thing to ask when you’ve got characters doing anything: does it matter? It’s a version of that cruel and very necessary question: So what?!
Since the novel straddles the supernatural/erotic divide (at least right now — who knows where this draft will go next?), I’m hoping for a tense, revealing encounter. OK, enough procrastination. I do laundry during breaks when I’m writing. It always needs doing, so it doesn’t feel procrastinatory? procrastinational? procrastinative? — and it gets me up and stretching, going up and down stairs. And usually a new idea will arrive while I’m separating whites and colors, or measuring detergent. So, up to sort and measure and start, then back to work.
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In her blog, Alison Leigh Lily writes beautifully about the human body as a holy thing, an altar:
So, too, my body is the altar in the nemeton [sacred grove–ADW] of my soul — that small, solid piece of world that settles down like a stone into my awareness. And that awareness in turn is carved by the spiraling torrents of the sacred world, the sun that crafts the seasons out of mud and wind, the moon that pushes the sea to its extremes, the stars that draw the eye into the great distances that yawn open between us, the deer, the jay, the badger, the rustling oak and every being and body that dances through its longing, hunger, fear, curiosity and sleep. All these things turn about the sculpted edge of my nemeton, the sanctuary my soul has made of itself, the self that calls itself “I” and reaches out into the world to touch the chaos that has given birth to it. Sitting in the center of that nemeton is my body, all surface, the appearance of skin and hair and angles and soft curves of fat and loose muscle. Like a ladder that reaches into the dark. A spine, a wellspring, a single tree, a tongue of flame. My body is the altar around which my spirit gathers itself into stillness. Not a temple, but only a simple, useful table where I sit down to do my work.
And some of the work we are called to do is to recognize that altar. In the Bible I read, “I will go up into the altar of God” — introibo ad altare dei in Latin. I use it as a mantra, a chant, to be mindful of the altar as a place to ascend to. For it feels like we do actually rise up, into the body, out of thought, out of waking, out of the distractions and worries and daily obsessions, the small news that passes for important events that other people call “headlines,” but which are mostly just footnotes — out of the image and into the reality, into this body that is part of the world, not a thought or an idea or a remove from the thing itself, but the place where we experience a universe.
I strive to occupy this body, this world, as fully as I can, to be fully incarnate. Not to forsake this great, unheralded, impossibly large opportunity to know, to dare, to will and to be silent, to listen for the voices of the Others who move all around me, chickadee at the feeder, crows scavenging a dead squirrel on the road early this morning as my wife and I drove through the dark and the fog to her weaving apprenticeship.
And Tom, who introduced himself yesterday afternoon — a neighbor, out chopping wood. He paused from his work and called to my wife and me, walking slowly over to where we were unloading our car. “It’s something I can still do, and it needs doing,” he said to us, as he stood before us, dressed in blue sweat pants, a gray sweatshirt, a blue hoodie, pieces of leaves and bark plastered to this clothes. “I was just recovering from knee surgery when I had a stroke. And I was recovering from the stroke when I lost my job. But I can still chop wood, as long as I don’t have to bend my legs too much.” So I touch that friendliness, and something of the spirit in him, that brought him to our doorstep to chat in the fading afternoon light of a day in early November. Is any song more wonderful?
“Sanctuary my soul has made of itself,” Alison says — a poem, a song, a prayer for this life, this world.
“Prayer is about being hopeful,” says Sister Alice Martin. “It is not a phone call to God’s hotline. It’s not about waiting around for an answer you like, especially since sometimes the answer you’re going to get is NO!” And she continues, “If you are going to pray, then don’t worry. And if you are going to worry, then don’t bother praying. You can’t be doing both.” I know which one I want to choose, often as I can, prayer at this altar of my body.
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So once again I’ve signed up with National Novel Writing Month — Nanowrimo to the online community of the literarily hopeful and the creatively insane. The goal is 1667 words per day, enough that by month’s end, you have a first draft of 50,000 words. A decent goal, and a manageable one, provided you don’t spook yourself, or find excuses more enjoyable than writing. Last year, working full time, I wrote 10,000 words of a novel — a solid opening week. Then I lost it. Teaching draws on many of the same energies as writing, and I simply didn’t have the energy to do it all. Now, on leave and still healing, I find, a year and more out from follow-up radiation after cancer surgery two years ago this month, I’m back at it.
I’m posting this here to give myself added reason to finish this year: peer pressure! You’ll know just how I’m doing, because I’m letting you in on the mess and marvel of it all.
As I’ve learned repeatedly, whenever I write, I discover something worthwhile. So in one way it doesn’t matter if I “finish” because I’ll still have material to work with. Not an excuse for not meeting the Nanowrimo challenge, but a none too shabby side benefit of committing to, and following through on, getting words on the page.
The novel I’m working on is VERY “drafty” — beyond an unusual main character, I don’t have much more than a couple of plot ideas, not enough — yet — to hang an entire novel on. But I’m not worried. I have an opening scene completed this morning that already introduces two characters I hadn’t anticipated. And that gave me some stuff to hang a piece of plot on that came into view as a result of the scene. So, progress!
I’ll update you on my word count every time I post here, and let you know how it all turns out — maybe even post a couple of excerpts from time to time, as it takes shape. Right now I’m at 676 words. I need another thousand just to make the daily average. So far so good!
Now to make good on the inwardness and creativity released on Samhain. Suddenly, no surprise, I have several other things to write as well: birthday cards to my uncle and first cousin, a thank-you note and a full length letter to colleagues, incidental email, and a monthly initiate’s report for another path I follow.
Oh, and about the elephant of the title? Maybe it’s a symbol for writing. Or not. Just a title, perhaps. Or something about memory and size and sheer bulk. Or solidarity among writers. Or herd instinct. Whatever the case, since you’ve been patient, here are not one but several elephants for your pachyderm viewing pleasure:
Here‘s the URL.
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Did it! Amazing experience, helped by the online Nanowrimo forum, with 200,000 other people doing the same thing all around the world. Dutch high-schoolers and Malaysian retirees and New Zealand farmers, Singapore lawyers and Hong Kong engineers. Everyone talking about it as they’re doing it. Egging each other on. Telling funny stories. Making and soliciting suggestions. Cries for help. Competitions. Excerpts for critiquing. How-to’s for people writing about medieval French history, chameleons, murder by deuterium, dragon mating, the proper warping and beaming of looms, the spices in chicken tikka, etc. Writing Buddies. The online support videos and posts from published authors. The sense of an immense online community engaged in huge set of magical creative hopeful acts against the naysayers and wannabes and critics, and our own doubts and inner censors and resistance and procrastination and sloth.
A Druid Way 
