The Embarrassed Ambassador

                   

 

The Embarrassed Ambassador has arrived! The Ambassador's arrival is wholly unexpected and therefore all the more welcome. Here in the Dreamtime we are all too aware that the "meat world" could use more gentleness and diplomacy. 

The Ambassador's arrival has made me think of the nature of healing. It's mission was to smooth the way with respect and peace and a sense of giving. It arrived on a day when I was at then end of my supply of all of the above. 

With physical illness there is a period between being so ill that you can't picture ever being healthy, and being well. This in-between state is also there with physical injury. It's that place in recovery where you think you SHOULD be able to behave like someone who isn't sick or injured because you don't feel nearly as bad as you did before, but it's an illusion. You aren't really healthy, you're just better.

If you've been sick a long time, people have to remind you that better is not healed, because you want to go do things. If you push too hard, or expect too much you can re-injure yourself, or create a relapse. But sometimes the people who remind you have forgotten as well.  Then instead of celebrating better, you and they mourn the loss of healthy. 

As the one who reminds, I am trying hard to remember, but I might only be better too.

Countries are like that. If too many countries think they are healthy when they are only better they re-injure themselves and no one really heals. It takes diplomacy to bring them back around to the business of trying to heal all the way.

It also takes diplomacy to care for people and organizations who are better, but a long way from healthy, which is a great deal of what I do.  I've been losing my diplomatic abilities lately. The Ambassador was a great help on a day when I needed it. 

Perhaps building the Embarrassed Embassy will help us get back to celebrating better, while preparing for healthy. 

Crushing on Bradbury - Reading is FUNdaMENTAL

There are no TVs on the entire main floor of the house, the kitchen is here, the dining room is here, the living room is here. My house would burn to the ground. We have living room books and dining room books and kitchen books. There are also bedroom books and ALL of the Books (family room) and office books and each child's personal collection of books.

My religion is based on books and collecting the books and comparing the books and arguing about the books. I'm pretty religious that way, so I have a bunch of those books, and the books about the arguments about those books.  I play games that require their own books, and have replacement books. I treat my computer like a book. I just bought a computer with "book" in it's name - subliminal messaging perhaps?

They are decoratively placed so we don't look like one of those families who is owned by their books but our family room does resemble a library.

Without books there is no part of my life that would be as warm as it is - books provide the fire to make things four dimensional. We'd never make it talking to the walls.

That was the first thing I took away from Fahrenheit 451.

The second thing ,was that when Farber and Montag thought of the revolution and needed to network of people to put it into motion, Faber thought "Oh there are may actors alone who haven't acted Pirandello or Shaw or Shakespeare for years because their plays are too aware of the world. And we could use the honest rage of the historians who haven't written a line in forty years" 

A direct hit! As a former actor married to a historian, those who know us would surely agree with Farber that our rage would be easily tapped. I'm fighting my own rage being kept from acting Shakespeare right this second, and that's my own fault. I pity the censorship society that inflicts it on me involuntarily  since I can barely forgive myself. 

It's the first time I can remember every seeing anyone tag actors as being willing to participate in a revolution, and admitting that it would be for access to the art and not an act of ego. 

Actors are people too who are AWARE - with books! I now have a total schoolgirl crush on Mr. Bradbury, he's the only one who really understands me  . . . .

Fahrenheit 451

I had not read Fahrenheit 451 until this afternoon. My son has been reading it with enthusiasm, which is not the way he generally reads. It's certainly not the way we greeted him reading A Clockwork Orange. This led to the uncomfortable occurrence of us watching the Kubrick movie together.  That will be a completely separate post. 

I do like Ray Bradbury, and I've had the novel in my house and have for as long as I can remember, left behind by some roommate, or boyfriend long gone. But I have not read it. So my son asks me about it over  and again. Then last night he brings me his laptop and says there might be Poppets inspired by Fahrenheit 451! So Lisa Snellings Clark has actually written about her concern because she is close to having a wall of TVs and she's fairly sure Bradbury would not approve.

To be honest she makes me wonder how she can accomplish all she does with so many TVs - We have 1.5 here. It forces us to share. I cannot abide TVs in the living room and I won't let one into bedrooms unless you can cover them up. This is my own preference - I did not grow up this way, and my parents have more TVs than people.  

But the TMC ( too many coincidences) factor was too high, and so today I've read the book - which means now I'm thinking about the book, about belief and fire and the nature of dystopia. And if we're living in one now. 

First thing - around page 9 poor unsettled Montag is walking with Clarisse and sees her family on the porch and asks her  what they were doing ."Oh, just my mother and father and Uncle sitting around, talking. It's like being a pedestrian only rarer."

And I laughed aloud and my immediate thought was "Poor Ray Bradbury" because he already saw things going that way in 1953. Because it's true, for both halves of the statement.

When my daughter's friends come over they are surprised by the fact that we converse at the table. We hang out in our living room and talk to each other. We eat most meals together in the dining room. (not in the helicoptery "because the magazine said so way", but because the food is ready, and if you want to eat, it's placed on the set table.) So we converse with each other. About stuff.  About  books and webcomics, and people and art, and the nature of God,  and why book reports matter, and politics and respect, and manners and poppets, and work and school and how we are spending the next 24 hours. This week we spent alot of time talking about why Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange about Kubrick's views of sex instead of Burgess's view of sociopathy and redemption. We agree that maybe Kubrick should have seen a therapist. 

We'll be the first against the wall when the fireproofing comes. 

An Introduction

I've given in, I need a place to share the poppets.  I'm not fully sure of what else will be going here. I feel very identifiable and would like to avoid viral over sharing.


My shamanistic quest to be a virtual Gypsy Rose Lee.

Maybe I'll let the art out here, maybe I'll let the snark out here. I think my subatomic particles are snarks and boojums and I'll leave the quarks to find their own way.  

In dreamtime the Id can play  . . . .