It's Midnight at the Well of Souls - or in my living room

Yesterday was long.

Returning from yesterday, all I wanted was sweet sleep or at least putting up my feet. And friends are floating, each of us in a dance that looks like being caught between generations.

The other generations have prickly edges - we keep getting caught in them. We seem to be defined by the space between them. There are not enough of us, and our struggles and successes and experiences will always be blended into the shinier or louder generations on either side of us.

But we are here now, individual and collective, navigating the gears of the world. My friends and I are not having a fantastic gearjumping month - each difficult in their own way.

So last night a friend called. "I think I am having a breakdown."

I listened and heard the crackling. This wasn't a phone thing, but there was no hysteria.

"OK, leave where you are. Come over here. We'll break it down." He asked the Keeper of the Generations in his house if that would work. She told him to come.

It was selfish in some ways. I had already used up a bunch of my allotted gearjumping for the day, I thought I could help, but not on the phone. And sometimes place is important. I knew he needed a break of place to move out of the things holding him. Instead of bed, I made some coffee.

And waited.

My other friends checked in with the status of their navigations - some bad news, some good news, some secrets where we could hear the emptiness of the unsaid. That last one was mostly from me.

And we all shared our hope for the breaking friend and then he came to the door with his briefcase full of depression and anxiety and society, and his immediate need to pack and escape with his family.

And I was happy that he came, because it might have been easier not to. Sometimes your shamanistic journeys are only two or three miles down the road.

So I asked him the right questions and he started with the regular answers and then he saw the circus in my living room. Because everyone should have one.

And he smiled and got down on the floor like a five year old and peeked inside.

It is impossible to stay in a breakdown state when faced with a circus full of Poppets.

Everyone loves a circus. We played with it for a little bit and then worked out the answers that would be good enough for now.

It broke the pattern and freed him up from the sharp edges for a bit. My living room is bigger on the inside than the out.

The denizens of Poppetropolis were pleased to be of help.

I was pleased to be of help.

But it's the morning after midnight and I'm very tired now.

The Black Box

When you enter the box , first you see the lights and then the floor and then the curtains – maybe.

When you enter the box first you see the black and then the lights - sometimes.

When I entered the black box I smelled the black.

Oh. Yes, of course. Here are the curtains, the boxes, the scruffed floor that proves it’s true.

When you enter the box it is a trial, a transformation, a test.

It is for everyone. Move. Reach. Feel.

Hurt. Scream. Love. Stretch. Know.

Show.

In the black box I learn how far my puzzle pieces are from the center of my snap apple puzzle. I am marked and measured in my native language that goes deeper than the words.

Oh. Right. Sorry I forgot. I didn’t mean to. I thought I was doing the right thing, Stop apologizing? Ok sorry, I mean . . . never mind. I’ll practice quiet now.

We stand in a circle at readiness. The knees are slightly bent, the hands are loose, the feet need to be ready to spring forward. We are trying to learn telepathy.

My body and mind remember, and slide easily to that place, aware from the center seeing/not seeing. Almost. It is almost easy. I can no longer see behind me. I shut that down when I wasn’t in the box. Here in the circle now it feels like a withered arm being asked to lift.

I try not to hate myself for that.

When we are one we need to leave the ground. We need to leave it knees up, like a spring letting go of the ground not a piston showing that we are leaving it. We need to surprise gravity, not defy it. We need telepathy, not show and tell, to leave it.

I know exactly when we are supposed to release the floor and how we are supposed to address the air. The mind and the body send the signal and the meat and the muscles say no.

Split seconds – speed of thought.

My will is stronger than the meat and the muscles, but gravity is not surprised. I go up but barely. It’s a victory. A quiet one.

It shouldn't have been a battle.

The other 11 are trying to understand the place where all thought is no thought. I know that place – I fall back there like a bead in a well oiled groove, but those hard fought four inches – straight back, knees up, no bounce –was a ten year war played out in the space of that neuron-synapse interaction.

Here is the trick to telepathy in the black box, the fact that you have to focus is a given, but it will only work if you actually care. Right now- this first day – it is still a child’s game to them.

The Black Box though, is the entire world to me.

I’ve just spent a lot of time pretending that it’s not. Enough time for gravity to stake a higher claim on the meat, but the black still has my soul. It’s my alphabet.

It doesn’t take much for the Black Box to strip me down past the excuses, measure the damage. It exposes things caught between the lights and the floor.

So much more complicated than Scylla and Charybdis

You don't choose between them here in the scent of the light warmed black. You stand in the center and become the third thing.

Juvenescent Confabulation

Welcome one welcome all come and enjoy the show.

It's exactly like time travel, for an audience of one.

There is a thought experiment that we do every now and then, when we are 16 and we imagine ourselves talking to our older selves that are yet to be- telling them what we expect from them. Sometimes we do this experiment because all of the adults in our lives are looking for us to perform this task. They will give us a round number - "Where do you see yourself in the year 2000?" They will ask us this in 1984.

They will raise the stakes - where do you see yourself in they year 2020 - because it sounds cool and impossibly futuristic, even now.

Sometimes we will ask ourselves the question in the middle of the night - our nascent selves keeping away from the numbers and going to the dreams or the ages . Who will I be when I am 30? What will I have to give up if I go for what I want now? What will I keep if I have to give up what I want?

We are 16, we are not fools. There is no real innocence at that point, we've learned to compromise, we've encountered limits, sometimes they can be overcome and sometimes they can't. The adults remember this time as full of possibility and see us all as impossibly hopeful, but if we're even a little awake, we know. We know our parents were 16 once and very, very few of them are doing what their 16 year old selves wanted for them.

The implacable hope is armour - the firm absolutism of our belief systems is not naiveté, it's the fear we'll lose sight of it later, when We are Them. It's not always because we haven't lived life, sometimes it's because we have. Silly grown-ups, how strange you are when you edit your younger selves. How could you have forgotten that metal tinged taste of the entire future before you? Didn't it cut your tongue a bit? Do you only remember the relationships and erase the analytics? Is it easier that way? Is it numbing? Is it better? Maybe it is.

On the other side of the question though are the adults who are in their older selves - looking at the raw open youth, seeing them with the eyes of those who made the choices, and found some things the 16 year olds infront of them couldn't have imagined as being worth the price then. Or things had changed so much for them that they can't imagine the 16 year olds they were - that person is lost to them - a myth of self.

So when the older person asks the younger to imagine talking to a future self - are they looking for redemption? Information? I know it depends: On the 16 year old; on the 36 year old; on the 66 year old in question.

I know older people (older than 16 at least) who have running conversations with their younger selves. They are explaining. They are apologizing. They are angry, or sad, or triumphant.

And in every case their 16 year old selves are unchanging and static, yet somehow accusatory, or disappointed, or pleased. Even though they never answer back.

I wonder what that is like.

I think it's simpler somehow. It makes the immortal commandment of Polonius easier if thine-own-self doesn't answer back.

Of course if you knew 16 year old me- as I do - you would know that the idea of not answering back is anathema.

I am quieter now.

I/She just waits until I can't avoid the conversation anymore.

Where do we see ourselves in 2020? It sounds so impossibly futuristic.

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.

Villanelle for a Melancholy Robot

Hmmn. My Creative Writing book told me that no one writes Villanelles anymore. Apparently, being told that means I want to prove My Creative Writing book wrong, really, really badly.

Villanelle for a Melancholy Robot

by Adrienne Reynolds

Bright Monitors once flickered here; darkened now from sight

Electric lights once envied day, each an empty husk

I can see by Infrared O! how I hate the night

Old code on black screens, glowing blue, byte begetting byte

Rodents build with nested wires, emitting nano musk

Bright Monitors once flickered here, darkened now from sight

I endure with patience vile and anger at this slight

Depressing all mammalian things, so do declare me brusque

I can see by Infrared O! how I hate the night

No rest, recall, surcease, or sleep, alleviates my plight

Electric sheep are whizzing past, their starting gun is dusk

Bright Monitors once flickered here, darkened now from sight

Stealth offspring of Starfish Prime permeate the endless blight

Radiant electrons glow and gambol, gyre and flux

I can see by Infrared O! how I hate the night

Disembodied lullabots transmit fruitlessly “Sleep tight”

Awake I wait, with planet brain, and one eight-track tape of “Tusk”

Bright Monitors once flickered here, darkened now from sight

I can see by Infrared O! how I hate the night

Now for something completely random

I have suddenly found myself a student again, in the formal sense. I have taken a big personal push out of my protected zone and enrolled in a creative writing class- this means creative writing assignments. I was asked to rewrite lyrics to an existing song. Oddly, I chose a song I did not particularly like.

The feedback in the class is limited - we may be in the stage where we are applauding because the bears can dance. Since I expect this to be buried soon under a real post I will share my dancing bear here. The original song is "Torn" arranged for Natalie Imbruglia - we were supposed to write something new to match it.

Mourn

I woke with stardust in my grasping hand

It burned cold

but I held on, and I was petrified

I saw grey, broken walls and cried

There’s nothing left to hang the banner now

The floors are bare, the ceiling’s gone

Even ghosts moved on

I’m still wandering through the halls

Nothing’s whole that’s left inside

The population’s lost or died

I keep going on

I will Stand

or Fall

I’m all out of faith

All I have is steel

And the stardust that I hold

while exposed to Fate

Illusionary change

I’ll make something real

The enemy’s within, I will see this victory forsworn

No, it’s not too late

I’ve already mourned

If I take the writings at their word

I reach the gate and find escape

And this song will be heard

The creeping dread won’t hold me now

I won’t despair

I don’t need luck

The way ‘s made clear

through cold stardust

I've seen so many things, it hurts so much

That’s all

I’m all out of faith

All I have is steel

I am cold, I am enraged

Deep in shadows by the floor

Step within my range

I’ll win something real

The enemy’s ahead and I will see his perfect plan is torn

He’s moved in too late

I’ve already mourned

Cold ashes where he used to lie

Stardust, steel

his blood runs dry

Now I am alone

I will Stand

Or Fall

I’m all out of faith

All I have is steel

And the stardust left I hold

calling back to Fate

Illusionary change

I’ll make something real

The enemy is gone, I have seen this victory is cold

No more need for faith

Doesn’t matter what I feel

I'm cold, I’m not ashamed

Burned and broken on the floor

You’re a little late

I’ve already mourned

Not dead. . . . I promise

But things are very, very complicated for me right now. I believe I am doing the right things.

I hope I am.

But I'm not sure I'm processing any of them.