Prayers for the Broken - My Al Chet This Year

"L'shanah tovah tikatevi v' taihatemi”

May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year.

There is the traditional Al Chet and then there is something more modern that I’ve encountered and I think it’s important because it grounds the sins from the formal and therefore the internal to the actual failures we commit during the year. The failures I have committed.

I need to remind people that a kind of personal god that looks like a human and has a form is not part of Judaisim – we use human shaped words to try to grasp something infinite – something not human. When humans use the word god the part of me that interacts with my religion hears a wordless/wordful thing that is “Universe”

God is not a magical sky fairy that is going to give me a puppy if I’m a good girl. The Universe is an immense thing that I struggle to engage with and understand and attempt to be the best human I can be inside of it. So the English formulation of “Ruler of the Universe” which is often used in translation is the one that speaks/works for me.

I am having immense difficulty with the things that represent Judaism in practice in the world being corrupted by specifically American duality and ideology. This is a day I will struggle with that some more.

One of the things that many people who aren’t religious practicitioners don’t know is the reason we say the Al Chet outloud during the day all together is because a sin cannot be forgiven unless it is admitted to outloud and publically.

But we say these things together to protect those who sinned so they can say it out loud without having to bear the burden or shame of it alone. We are all admitting to the sins because we are all people who share in the effects of the sin. In many cases we do actually bear the shared responsibility for allowing or condoning the sin as culturally acceptable or necessary in the first place.

So for all these things I ask forgiveness, in my version of public because right now it hurts to much to be in a prayer space – because there is currently no prayer space without politics and politics are nothing but methods of extraction for power interests  to enrich the already powerful.

And I have not figured out a way to stop that or stand against it yet – for that more than anything I beg forgiveness.

This was updated in 1978 – and it’s the one I’ll use tomorrow and here today.

We sin against You when we sin against ourselves.

For our failures of truth, Our God, Ruler of the Universe, we ask forgiveness.

For passing judgment without knowledge of the facts,

and for distorting facts to fit our theories.

For using the sins of others to excuse our own,

and for denying responsibility for our own misfortunes.

For condemning in our children the faults we tolerate in ourselves,

and for condemning in our parents the faults we tolerate in ourselves.

We sin against You when we sin against ourselves.

For our failures of justice, Our God, Ruler of the Universe, we ask forgiveness.

For keeping the poor in the chains of poverty,

and turning a deaf ear to the cry of the oppressed.

For using violence to maintain our power,

and for using violence to bring about change.

For waging aggressive war,

and for the sin of appeasing aggressors.

For obeying criminal orders,

and for the sin of silence and indifference.

For poisoning the air, and polluting land and sea,

and for all the evil means we employ to accomplish good ends.

We sin against You when we sin against ourselves.

For our failures of love, Our God, Ruler of the Universe, we ask forgiveness.

For confusing love with lust,

and for pursuing fleeting pleasure at the cost of lasting hurt.

For using others as a means to gratify our desires,

and as stepping-stones to further our ambitions.

For withholding love to control those we claim to love,

and shunting aside those whose youth or age disturbs us.

For hiding from others behind an armor of mistrust,

and for the cynicism which leads us to mistrust the reality of unselfish love.

Teach us to forgive ourselves for all these sins, O forgiving God, and help us to overcome them.

For all these sins, O God of mercy, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement!

The sin we have committed against You by malicious gossip,

the sin we have committed against You by sexual immorality,

and the sin we have committed against You by gluttony.

The sin we have committed against You by narrow-mindedness,

the sin we have committed against You by fraud and falsehood,

and the sin we have committed against You by hating without cause.

The sin we have committed against You by our arrogance,

the sin we have committed against You by our indolence,

and the sin we have committed against You by our irreverence.

The sin we have committed against You by our hypocrisy,

the sin we have committed against You by passing judgment by others,

and the sin we have committed against You by exploiting the weak.

The sin we have committed against You by giving and taking bribes,

the sin we have committed against You by giving way to our hostile impulses,

and the sin we have committed against You by running to do evil.

For all these sins, O God of mercy, forgive us, parson us, grant us atonement!

Litany Source = Gates of Repentance:  The New Union Prayerbook for the Days of Awe (New York:  Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1978), pp. 327-331

Dance - Everyone's Watching

The introspection didn't start because of the numerous and plentiful articles and responses about "geek girls" and "girl gamers" and women in general. It started, like so many things start, with Madonna.

I have always admired Madonna, even when I wasn't fond of her music. I admired her ambition, sense of risk and willingness to go big or go home. I liked her tough girl art-chick persona in her early movies, Desperately Seeking Susan and Who's that Girl. I rooted for her even though I didn't buy her albums. They were occasionally fun to dance to, and since I was desperately trying to be an actor I knew all the words and could sing along because that's what you do. You learn ALL the things when you are an actor so that you can use them. Ironically, unironically, bitterly, joyously. You need to be able to feel all the things the way someone might feel them, even if you don't particularly. The first Madonna song I liked was "Like a Prayer" and I probably liked that song because it's true.

When the person I love calls my name it still feels a bit like a revelation - and like prayer sometimes it's intense, or sometimes it's a shock that you still notice or care, and sometimes its a reminder of transcendence. Sometimes it's home.

It's a funny thing about that lyric though. Like all callow youth and the default of all pop songs and everything Madonna it was interpreted by some of my peer group to be about sex, specifically about blowjobs, because of the chorus:


When you call my name it's like a little prayer 
I'm down on my knees, I wanna take you there 
In the midnight hour I can feel your power 
Just like a prayer you know I'll take you there 
[ Lyrics from: http://www.lyricsfreak.com/m/madonna/like+a+prayer_20086915.html ] 


But that interpretation was made by a bunch of oversexed hormonal theatrical twenty somethings who were busy either creating their own spirituality or vociferously rejecting oppressive theologies. I do not say that last bit with snark. It was the era of AIDS. We were surrounded by a group called the "me generation" in the press and the rising of the Moral Majority in our politics and school system. Everyone was either letting us wander along or preaching at/to us.  We were diesnfranchised in the most literal sense being taught that "you can't fight city hall". The biggest joke at my school ( once again most likely because it was true) was that we wrote a longform article on the apathy of our student body and no one read it because they didn't care. Literally, no one even picked up our school paper.

Here's the part of the song you have to ignore in order to concentrate on the sex as subtext in Like A Prayer


Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone 
I hear you call my name 
And it feels like home


To accept that this song is only about relationships to other humans an not about something more; life, meaning, place, is to ignore that there's no relationship given, that there's no vision or contact with the subject of the song. It ignores that there might be a voice as metaphor that calls her name and the feeling is actually based in a religious feeling.

She wrote a song about her name being called. She made a video explicitly showing the conflicts of being called out by a suffering god and and and angry population and it was looked at not as a song truly about her personal expression/experience of the merging of the conflict/joy of that feeling and interacting with a suffering god in a world ignoring the god and abusing the symbols it was looked at as a publicity stunt to piss off religious people and a song about blowjobs. But that bit:

When you call my name


He said to him "Abraham"

It's like a little prayer

and he answered "Here I am."

Hinneni 

If I had put this allusion through it's paces at the diner after rehearsal while everyone was making blowjob jokes,  I wouldn't have been mocked but I would have been kind of looked at as a killjoy. And honestly at that time the idea that Madonna was genuinely interested in religion or spiritual fulfillment would have been taken as a joke.  If I had brought it up in a group of pagan women I would have been taken to task for a number of things, but one of them would have been why I thought that Madonna would want to express her experience and yearning and interaction of the divine with male symbols and patriarchy.

I am reminded of these situations by thinking about the discussions around women in leisure cultures now.

Most of my female pagan friends at the time admired her for owning her sexuality on her terms instead of exclusivley make defined ones. It's hard to remember now when all of her bits have been co-opted and digested and third wave feminism exists but what she was doing was self-defined.  In retrospect she might be the only mainstream popular act to do that because after her came the two terms to minimize discussion of sexuality or women in cultural consumption "Attention Whore" for those who incorporated their sexuality their persona and "White Knight" for any male who might defend pretty much any woman with a public persona. You can't discuss anything that uses sex and bodies in performance or marketing without having the labels thrown around for chilling effect.

It's still hard for women to admit their sexuality or discuss fluctuations in it without it falling into some pre-packaged trope. Madonna managed to be self defined until very, very recently. When she hit fifty the "cougar" became a sexual stereotype for women who were somewhere between milfs and crones. She and Dr. Ruth Westheimer were my early models for empowered women talking about sex on their terms to other women and whatever men cared to listen, but not for men. Really for them. For us, for little, evenutally growing up, me.

The other Madonna song I liked was "live to tell" .

Madonna is complicated, she's a social signifier, I was waiting, really to find out what would happen next. The two albums of hers I bought because I liked them and they actually spoke to me were Ray of Light and Music.

Most of those songs still speak to me. She's writing about subjects that mean something. By the time they came out while people were very confused and starting to spread crazy rumors about what Kabaalah was ( hint it's not it's own religion and SURPRISE Catholisicim has it's own Kabbalah ) no one by that time would be surprised that her work contained religion and sex intermingled, and even if they thought it was her shtick, most people actually assumed that she probably meant it, even if they now judged her for being crazy.

Of all of the Madonna songs that fill up the cultural soundtrack of my life the one that I hear in the back of my head when I'm very, very still is the one that has these lines:

"When you're trying hard to be your best, could you be a little less"

Does anyone even know that song? Is it one of the ones that get forgotten because it's uncomfortable?

I don't actually play the song through at all. Over the last several years it's made me cry. Mostly because it's true. It's actually the only song or article or anything addressing the topic that feels like what I feel. She wrote it when she was approaching 40.

When you open up your mouth to speak
Could you be a little weak?


But she's not 40 anymore, she's 50 and when she was at the superbowl some other, very brave self defined woman who I admire for all the same reasons I admire Madonna wrote how disappointing it was that she was not embracing her age and seemed to be trying to reach backwards or fight aging in her superbowl performances.

And I wrote back to that woman through the lightness of tweeting that

it's hard 4 someone like me 2 figure out how 2 age in a way that's true 2 self. It must be x1000 for Madonna

And that performer agreed enough to retweet - amplifying my struggle and empathy to ALL of her followers who are quite dedicated. And I found myself worrying a tiny bit if there was a cost to defending something as nebulous as that fact that maybe it's just Madonna's turn to look around for who she is and how to be and find out nothing that fits. She can be sexual, and maternal, and flawed, and perfect and performing because ALL of our age and gender presentations are a performance.

And everyone is watching but the roles are narrowed. How do we explore the space? When do we admit that the construct of a public persona is just as authentic as the personal persona?

The difference is in the size of the audience, but here in the age of the internet all of our performance is the size of internationally sold out stadiums. We are all at the risk of suddenly being judged by the same number of people that will judge Madonna, just for a shorter period of time.

But that's a big thing to risk. We might trip up.

Other things are bubbling up right now about being a female and being in the now. This is it for this one though

"Do you know what it feels like for a girl"

Do we even admit what if feels like when we are still considered "girls" when we're looking to define ourselves post childrearing. Madonna was 40. Girl is much more complicated for me than bitch. I want to both claim and supersede it so that I can be seen as a whole person in the communities I operate in. But if I don't claim "girl" all of my tribe become slightly less visible ( even if I occasionally disagree with large percentages of that tribe).

You know what my male friends don't do? They don't refer to themselves as "boys".

I"m not sure I have an answer, I'm sure that this isn't my last exploration of this theme.

I am sure I want to dance.

Hineni

O What a Nobel Mind is Here O'erthrown

The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword,
Th' expectation and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
Th' observ'd of all observers, quite, quite down

The Nature of Books and Business - A Tour of the Books In My Bedroom - Part 1

I'm going to write about books and fame and authorship and the publishing industry and the identity of being a reader.

I can write about this with a simulacrum of authority, and I think it might be some variant of important since I'm really one of the little people, but I can approach it a bit differently due to things I used to be.

I used to be kind of a big deal.

But not in any special kind of way that matters.

Some Background:

It was pre-internet, although I was using it, so its closest modern equivalent is "internet famous". I used to call it psuedo-semi famous. If I walked in anywhere that touched the world where I was sort-of-famous people who knew me and I did not know them would come up to tell me where they met me or saw me, or if I helped them. ( Or sometimes if I hurt them).

I am not by nature a kind person, but I did my level best not to hurt anyone. It's important to remember that people see you as something other than what you know yourself to be Both good and bad. And with any kind of status you get some power. As Steven Moffat made the Doctor say last week "Good men don't need rules." I too have a lot of rules. Truly good people will be good regardless of race creed color or religion. I'm religious so that I can at least check myself against what a truly good person might do.

These pieces of information are important because you are about to see the books in my bedroom and what they mean, and what it means for the publishing industry. While I'm showing you, I'm pretty sure I'll drop a fan or miss a step in this burlesque show and you'll see me nakedly struggling with the fact that I'm working hard to decide what I want to be when I grow up and the past is informing the present.

It's what the past does. No one should be really surprised.

Some present-round with pitches for very nice writers:

Two weeks ago, I was somewhere in that world where I used to be kind of a big deal - but I went away. Now almost no one knows anything about me. All fame is fleeting, niche fame more than most. It makes me happy in a kind of subversive way. I do something different there now. I am an enabler, not an event anymore . I like it. It's very useful. I am happiest when I am useful.

People who write books and publish things are there too. For various reasons we end up talking. I almost look like "the public" to them so I am representational. I usually have not read their work. This is because I am out of touch, not any failing on their part. Sometimes when I meet them I will then read their work. This surprises me when I think about it because it used to go the other way : I will have read their work, and then I would meet them, and then sometimes it would change the way I viewed their work. I developed a theory back then that you should never meet anyone who's work literally changed the way you think or look at the world, because there is almost no way for it not to change something about you, or them, or the work.

There is a very good book about discovering things like that written by Laura Miller, you'll see it later.

But now I almost never hear about a new genre writer unless, due to the oddities of my life I meet them.

So I have met Paolo Bacigalupi, who is very cool and whom I enjoy hanging out with but whose books I have yet to read. There are two of them in my house. You will see them too. I confessed that after an entire year of his winning every SF award in sight I was possibly the only person left on the planet who hadn't read it - but at least he knew I liked him for himself.

Paolo is really the reason for this blog entry, and perhaps James Knapp, who won the Compton Crook Award for State of Decay which is being marketed as a Zombie Genre thing but it isn't one. It's traditional hard SF. I would never have looked at it if he hadn't won the award putting him in a position where I was facilitating a podcast interview reading of his first chapter. ( I don't know if it's posted yet but I'll update if there is a link.)

Perhaps this is where I need to admit what I was fairly semi-famous for. Once upon a time I created and edited a magazine. This was when publishing opened up because of new tech, the closest thing I could compare it to is the way podcasting works now.

Some Nostalgia:

So I ran a writer's group, which was very different than contemporaneous writers groups, as it was focused on things other than getting published and it wasn't juried. It was exploration and craft based. And I hosted and ran workshops, and I wrote a bit. Thus when I started the magazine, which was a non-profit kind of incubator thing - I promoted the hell out of it. So people saw me pretty much everywhere on panels, as a guest, and with people who were much, much, more famous than me.

(It doesn't matter which one . . . those days are over and you're all way too young to remember something that would in effect be hipster like from that era anyway . . .)

What that does mean, is I used to know a lot about the publishing industry, all of the pieces of it not just genre stuff, because I was deeply involved in trying to get the publishing industry to distribute my magazine, which was dedicated to giving writers a chance to write, take chances and possibly fail without having to publish a novel first. Because that was the way it was then. I was consciously recreating a John Campbell style environment in order to try to get writers to be more creative and less focused only on getting published. I was good enough at it to get a real distribution deal. I was in Walden and Borders. However 14 years is a long time.

16 years ago ( maybe longer, it's fuzzy now ) when electronic books were still fiction and the convention hall was packed with people who hoarded their books like dragons hoard gold, I was on a panel where every single person on it was the equivalent of Madonna famous and I was something equivalent to say . . . Moonshine Willy. The panel was on whether or not people would buy electronic books, and the bibliophiles in the room all of whom embraced science fiction with the passion that fueled real world rocket ships to Mars were saying "No, bloody hell no!! We will not go!! To the last musty page we will defend our books!!"

And I was saying something along the lines of this: we grew up with books, but access to paper at this level is new, books are a form of wealth once, but there were penny dreadfuls and dimestore novels and pamphlets. We love our books because that's what we held in our hands when we discovered our worlds and that attachment is sentiment, not necessarily ergonomics, economics or comfort. We will always have some physical books, but they will once again be objects of wealth, education or eccentricity. The reality will be when the form factor becomes usable, children will remember their electronic books and their teenage discoveries of literature with the same fondness we have for our pulp art covers.

At this point I should perhaps mention I was the youngest person on the panel being a mere 24 years or so old and I now shockingly recall the only female. And at least two of the Really Big Deals conceded the point and when it ended everyone had agreed with me that the tech wasn't anywhere close to being pleasant to read now so we weren't in any danger of having to figure out where it was going to go. ( In the late 80s/early 90's).

I was invited to be on a lot of panels about the future of books after that. Reflected starshine. I'll bet hardly anyone remembers that was a really big deal 20 years ago.

What Happened in the Bar - With That Guy:

So flash forward to now - We were talking about reading a book vs reading on the e-readers with Paolo checking out my iPad and me explaining that the Kindle on iPad is what I'd been waiting for and we were cross comparing iBooks and Kindle for stores, sorting and readability.

I showed him my Kindle library - and he looked at me and said "You're willing to show me that you read Kelley Armstrong?". And there, in that moment; was the moment others said we were going to lose when books went electronic. That moment when you know something about someone because of what's in their library just by seeing it. A social signifier. In Slate there was an article called Judging a Girl by Her Cover. It used to be what you saw the stranger reading created the intimacy or the shared knowledge, but now sharing what I was reading was an act of trust and therefore intimacy.

Here an author ( a good one! I have read his journalism) was now looking at something very real about me, knowing I hadn't gotten to his book yet, seeing what was sitting there instead. And he immediately saw Kelley Armstrong; author of Dime Store Magic, the title that made me buy her books. And he also immediately teased me about it, and I immediately told him the truth. They're light, they're popcorn and not particularly brilliant but they are filled with female characters that make rational choices in unnatural situations making them one of the very few "supernatural" series with female characters who don't make me want to kill myself or someone else.

It was just as if he'd seen it on my bookshelf.

The iPad mostly gets read in my bedroom. So the books inside it count for the tour. Here were the other books in my Kindle for iPad, their covers floating at him in glorious color:

• The Jeeves Collection by PG Wodehouse
• At Home by Bill Bryson
• Sherlock Holmes
• Seder K'Riat Haftorah - My People's Prayerbook
• Cleopatra a Biography - Duane W. Roller
• Hobson's Choice - Harold Brighouse
• The Great Transformation - Karen Armstrong
• The Magicians: A Novel - Lev Grossman
• The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia - Laura Miller
• Son of a Witch - Gregory Maguire and two other books by him
• All of the Stieg Larsson novels - I had read them exclusively on e-formats
• Living with the Dead - was the Kelley Armstrong he saw initially - I have three of her others on the iPad Kindle
• A whole bunch of Mercedes Lackey - because she almost always tells a good consistent story that doesn't leave me hanging
• And the Regency Dragon series by Naomi Novik because they gave me the first one free I bought the other two.
• Troll's Eye View - edited by Ellen Datlow
• Fall of the Roman Republic - Plutarch the Rex Warner translation
• Buried Child - Sam Shepard
• Pride and Pejudice - Jane Austen
• Aesop's Fables - the George Fyler Townsend translation

But of them all honestly, Kelly Armstrong's have the most striking lurid covers recalling modernized pulp fiction infused sensibility. Of course he's going to focus on that instead of the strange religious book and the philosophy and history stuff. But really all he got to see was the new cyber effect of "what's in my purse". Does it show anything about me? Well yes.

I read history, I read about the nature of God through a lens other than my own, I tried Bill Bryson's book and it was awesome, his book reads like my brain thinks but it's non-fiction. I read plays and translations and when I read fantasy I obviously read it frothy - or at least I do when it's on my Kindle app.

There is nothing there to indicate whether I would be a target market for Paolo's book - The Windup Girl. But we had a fantastic conversation about female characterization, the nature of ebooks and whether or not it was going to change things.

It was a funny full circle thing - but much reduced. Paolo is now maybe Adele level famous ( to keep with the music analogy) and I'm practically unknown. We were at a table in a bar instead of a convention lecture room and I believe, although I am not sure, that I am older than him. But it's the same conversation with the primary difference being the e-book is in my hand instead of being imagined.

And truth be told right now I am far more likely to buy an ebook than a physical one.

But there is a caveat- those books on my Kindle were books I bought when it was on my iPhone. I just got the pad, they were transfers. The iPhone is a 4 inch screen. I specifically bought books that I knew no one in the house will be interested in besides me ( until the announcement of iCloud there was no way I would have anticipated being able to even share them with family members). So these were books that I COULD read on a 4 inch screen and my "serious" books in that collection "At Home", the Plutarch, the Karen Armstrongs, the Cleopatra, were otherwise large and expensive books that only I would be reading. I made the effort to read them on my tiny 4 inch screen but I longed for a Kindle sized electronic format to read them in. I hate unitaskers. I needed an eReader that had other uses, I am not personally fond of the electronic ink for reading - although it is a preferred tech for many and I did buy a Kindle for my mother - it's not to my preference ( this is not a holy war, there are lots of different kinds of paper and bindings too).

So by default the things I was sharing with him were my "light" things and my selfish reading indulgences. On reflection it was very personal indeed.

And now, of course, I felt guilty. I still hadn't read The Windup Girl. When I started it back in November in our dead tree oversized trade edition I realized that I wanted to take my time with it. It wasn't something I wanted to read like disposable popcorn. After we returned from the trip two weeks ago I broke open the book again. I have taken some time off and it was a perfect opportunity.

I came to a horrible realization. It would be much better for me right now to read this on my iPad. It's more comfortable, it's more portable. The physical book is beautiful, the print is easy on the eyes but it's not readily available without me making special effort and time for uninterrupted physical space. Whereas the electronic version is readable late at night without keeping lights on disrupting the Perfectly Normal Husband, I can't just lean over and pull up the Windup Girl or read it on a six hour jag start to finish. Which is the way I prefer to read books. But I can only read electronic books that way now. Physical books are taking up space and lend themselves to interruption far more than ebooks.

Even back when I was sure ebooks would be a given (I can carry a library in my purse!) I didn't predict this.

But I can't justify spending money on the electronic version of something I already have.

So that got me thinking about books and how I use them. The way I relate to them. The tipping point between hoarding and cherishing. They are meaningful to me, ebooks are simply interesting to me, but I haven't bought any eBooks that are "Important" yet.

So in the context of the other things that have happened over the last two weeks, I started wondering how to sort out all of that thinking. I realized that if Paolo interacting with my ebooks was a sort of "what do you know about who you are moment" that the books in my bedroom are perhaps a better indicator of how I relate to books now and in the future.

It's a microcosm of book culture, and desire and market. So the next few entries will be an experiment, much like the ones I used to give the writer's group. I will describe the books in my bedroom and why they are there. And ponder things like "what does it mean to Farenheight 451 if the screens are the books too". Because frankly, I believe that's what's really going to happen.

But the publishing industry counts on the me from 20 years ago behaving the same way today. And that endangers authors. The model underneath is changing, but the people in that room with the Madonna famous writers love their books and the culture of books, and the handling and smell of books.

I'm pretty sure of one thing:

If the books become the screens, when the Firemen come -we'll still be the first against the wall.

The Black Box - Inner Workings

All of the other Boxes deal with Light. The getting of it, the making of it the manipulation of it. Wrestling it into art or code, or just getting enough of it in to shed onto other things.

The Black Box is about the Dark, what to do with the Empty, how to admit that there is no such thing as Empty, to use, code, and manipulate the things we pretend are Empty to make art. Or light.

The Black Box will invite the light in, but only on it's terms. Light is just another thing in the fullness of Empty.

In the Black Box we are expected to build things out of the Dark.

Now we are building Universes. Out of art.

It's a big thing. As a friend of mine says it's almost unfair - I have been worrying at the problem for a good deal longer than my boxmates. In the room where I turn light into art, I have also been asked to make a world out of someone else's art. All my rooms ask me to make Universes. All my rooms lead back to art.

But the Black Box is different – even time travel changes there . It is dual place. I have been here before and yet somehow it's new. I thought it would fill up the Empty places, it would shine the dark in the places I worked to only see light, so I could get back to the whole.

Here's the trick about my Universe in the Black Box - I'm building it to put other people in it.

They each have Universes of their own:

• an ancient storyteller's circle,
• a religion where the all knowing priest reveals the power of relationships and venerates the matriarch with blown glass and colored light,
• the warmth of an eternal eve of Christmas, fellowship and eggnog,
• a Universe of kindergartners with sparkly stuffed snakes, hungry caterpillars and vicious jars of playdough.

There are 7 Universes to go.

In each of their Universes I am somewhat me, but mostly I become who they think I might be. It's my job to fit in their Universe, their job to create a Universe where I can see what they want me to be. We have to experience it for each other to make it real. It's their Universe but they made it for me. When I make my Universe, I will make it for them.

Their Universes are all based on art that made them happy or whole. Mine is based on art that made me break.

I do not know how that will work for them. I will build it anyway. In the Black Box I am a tiny lonely god.

In between Universes, we do two things - explore who we are and learn how to be everyone else. It's hard to see this happen, so we also learn how to watch and how to evaluate the becoming of others. How to help others see the choices they would not make themselves.

When becoming others - it is easy to see how you might find the things living in your own Empty. It is not so apparent that you find those things when watching the others Become.

I don't know what it's like to have always had a Black Box nearby, to have experienced the sliding between action/observation. absorbing/becoming, experiencing/remembering while doing all of the things one does to exist. But the gap in time fills the Black Box Dark. I watch my boxmates struggle because sometimes there are places and choices and things that fill the Empty and they can't see them. It stops them from Becoming.

When we Watchers see them, its our job to share them. In the sharing we give them our own things that live in the Empty and I wonder if we become just a little less material ourselves.

The Black Box has coughed up some reality; caught in someone else's words, in someone else's worlds.

Warriors know where each of their scars came from. In some cultures we circle and tell the stories of those scars, our lives written on our bodies. The stories tell the warriors of things to know - not just to avoid - but to know.

Some battles are long won, it's rude to mention scars now. Our culture is about the perfect presentation, healing, moving forward. So maybe we are surprised when we tell about a long healed wound to find the time travel.

Maybe we are surprised to find out we were Warriors.

The pain is fresh in the telling, you use the pain in the Becoming, it's new again, but you leave the Box and it's just a scar.

There are two things here - surprise at the real time pain and surprise that you can still go there. But to share it outside the Box, people will label it - say things like " you're not really over it" insist that you "admit it" or "deal with it". Everything outside the Box is Present Tense, but only in the Now.

Inside the Box everything is in the Present Tense too, but it’s in the Always.

We are the engines that build the Universes, but we can also get lost between them.

And I'm beginning to think that maybe outside the Black Box we're just somewhat ourselves, but mostly we're what we need to be to fit into someone else's Universe too. And that sometimes that pain we carry around in the Empty is when we realize that sometimes we don't make that Universe better, because we can't.

I was prepared for that in the doing, I wasn't prepared to find it in the watching.

I'll build it into my Universe.

When the Universe is built I’ll put my boxmates in it.

Then they will be in my Universe, I’ll be in the Empty before and after that Universe.

I wonder if it’s like this for all the things that build Universes.

And all the Men and Women Merely Players

Sometimes, it's not the loss that causes the melancholy, it's the effort needed to rebuild.

There are things I thought I put away, not childish things in any form, but passionate ones. I played with little shadow versions of them, like puppet show passion plays. Those would/could/should be enough.

"Passion - Etymology: Middle English, from Anglo-French, from Late Latinpassion-, passio suffering, being acted upon, from Latin pati to suffer."

Isn't it funny how we've taken a word whose meaning is based on suffering and changed it into a kind of ecstatic frenzy - a euphemism for sexual love? A desire for more passion in our lives or our marriages takes on a whole different meaning when you bring it back to the root. Ultimately a possibly unhealthy meaning.

I was passionate about a boy once. When I look back on it, it seems like a derangement. Every moment was vibrant and alive with possibility, unpredictability, intese joy, intense sorrow. In the throes of passion doesn't mean the bedroom - it means all of the time you are controlled by this passion whatever it is, who ever it is based on. The connection to the suffering is real and immediate, everything else seems shallow and chalky and gray. Only the things related to what or who is the center of the passion seem real and bright. Everything is just something that leads you to the chance to surrender, to participate in that presence or action again. All the times you are not near or engaged are all the "moments before". The time of suffering while waiting to see what passion will bring. As poor fools in the throes of it all, we will call it many, many, things and we will try to use that word "passion" to make it fit those other, safer things.

But it will still be passion.

I got over the boy. If he even remembers me now he will remember our time together very differently than I do. Passion is a kind of insanity. You cannot build a life on it. Not the real kind where you don't die young, or end up stabbed 23 times by Senate.

Passion based on a person is by nature transient. The idea of suffering because I am not near someone if foreign to my understanding of love. When I am alone and I am loved, I am happy because I know my love for the other person is not based on proximity but security. I love them just as deeply two continents away, or two hemispheres away as I do when I am next to them, when we are entangled together. Distance is nothing to love. Love is like Damascus steel to me - tools we share, my beloved and I so that we can build and fight and defend to and craft together.

All of my beloved - family, lover, children - I am not passionate about them. The greeks who separated love: agape, eros, phillia, storge, they missed a word or category for this kind of love. Maybe "storge" but it didn't make it into a lot of literature, (possibly because it doesn't lead to tragic or comedic actions). But it is not passion.

I was passionate about an artform once. I had convinced myself that I could use the past tense. I could learn from it and chuckle with fond memories and traumatic ones and move on.

I am utterly and devastatingly wrong.

The tense is present tense. It's much stronger than a simple passion for a boy. Everyone knew it then. People who knew me later knew it still. People who know me now got glimpses when I played with the shadow versions. Then I stopped playing with those. Now the people in my life are blissfully ignorant of it. All was quiet on the passion front. Not the modern one with it's garish calls to buy things at Victoria's Secret or the pretty religious ones trying to create some form of agape with ritual and structure. Those puny passions are fine. I put aside the suffering. I became an audience ( for the first time?)

For those around me it was a good call. True Roman Stoicism for the good of the community and all that. There is a reason after all that they call it "suffering for one's art" and it is pretty obvious that great artists that could truly be brave for art or scientists (those monomaniacs of discovery) always had someone supporting them or no ties at all. But if you are the support - parent, breadwinner, wife - your art is best something to be dabbled with, shown proudly by offspring or spouse when visitors come to call. Art for Art's sake as long as it causes no one else any inconvenience.

And I believed that so completely that I didn't even realize I wasn't putting things together, I was breaking them apart. Or maybe breaking me apart.

So now - when I checked the recent damage of self and current competencies - all of the ways I used to take inventory and maintain and repair had failed. Not because they were bad systems, but because I had used them up. They were finite measures meant for specific or surface damage. They worked bravely and well for over a decade. They are simply the wrong tools. There to fix- like love, not to upset and destroy and recreate - like passion.

That's not enough. Love does not conquer all, it cannot heal by itself and sometimes you can't fix things unless you break them a bit first. Maybe I needed to break them alot.

And so with a long hard look at what was broken, I stood on a crossroad with a different devil on every choice. I blinked instead, and refused the road alone. I invited the devils to follow me but I needed to go back. Or down. Everything that was wrong - all the pieces damaged, and battered and missing - I thought I had learned them in other places, through life or jobs or school or relationships and simple survival. That was the mistake. I had learned them all in theater.

All of them. Every last one.

Dammit.

Now I'm awake. The question is what am I going to do about it?

There are four devils following me to school. Dionysus is laughing behind them because they don't realize they're pulling the chariot. I'm hoping that Minerva is travelling with him.

We'll try not burn or break too much.

****

Passion - Date: 13th century

1 often capitalized a : the sufferings of Christ between the night of the Last Supper and his death b : an oratorio based on a gospel narrative of the Passion
2 obsolete : suffering
3 : the state or capacity of being acted on by external agents or forces
4 a(1) : emotion (2) plural : the emotions as distinguished from reason b : intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction c : an outbreak of anger
5 a : ardent affection : love b : a strong liking or desire for or devotion to some activity, object, or concept c : sexual desire d : an object of desire or deep interest

passion applies to an emotion that is deeply stirring or ungovernable passions.