I have many things about which I wish to write. I will briefly name a few before getting on with this post: My new job as a part-time deli worker at Dominick's. (Back and feet very unhappy, brain very happy indeed.) These three posts at Bruce Droppings, wherein an ex-pastor talks about how the way Christianity is practiced in America today can exacerbate or even cause mental illness (with thanks to Geds for recommending them). A post at barkingreed which contains a wonderful, beautiful Wendell Berry poem, from which I selected my new "about me" quotation. It is a lengthy quote: originally I was torn between either the first two sentences or the last three. Since I think it is heinous, outside of strict academic writing, to post bits of a poem with "[...]" for a piece cut out, I included the whole section. And am quite pleased with it.
On with the post.
Earlier today Dave was asking me, "what do those letters in your blog subtitle stand for?" My answer--really the only sensible answer--is that "they are Discordian mumbo-jumbo which mean whatever a given individual takes them to mean, which more or less means that they mean nothing." More nothing, if one takes them to mean nothing, and less nothing if one takes them to mean something.
I did not go on to tell him that technically, they stand for "Paratheoanametamystikhood Of Eris Esoteric" and "Keeper of the Sacred Chao" (Chao is pronounced cow), respectively. I was quite pleased with myself for my restraint. Which of course now I have ruined, by going on to explain it anyway, in the less-useful literal way rather than the more-useful roundabout one. Alas.
On a whim arising from this exchange, I Googled Zarathud a few minutes ago and found that today is actually the holyday of Zarathud, patron saint of the season of Bureaucracy! Which, again, means more or less nothing. There are of course no hints anywhere as to how a dutiful student of a given Apostle is to celebrate said Apostle's day: this is only right and proper. My own view is that a ritual has value to oneself in direct proportion to the degree of participation one exerted in the design and execution of said ritual. By this measure, a ritual designed entirely by oneself but performed entirely by another is of the same value as a ritual designed entirely by another but peformed by oneself.
I feel I must mention a very important caveat, however. The "design" of a ritual includes not only the external components--words, gestures, costumes, props etc.--but also the psychological and emotional machinery by which one invests those components with the energy of one's will. So let's say that the outward plan for carrying out a ritual, as well as the symbol set in which it is framed, were authored by others. If a dutiful student were to design the whole internal part of this ritual for themselves and then perform the ritual themselves, it would have at least three-quarters as much value as a ritual of comparable potency which was that person's own creation from beginning to end.
When I use the word ritual above, the definition I have in mind is #8 on the dictionary.com list: "any practice or pattern of behavior regularly performed in a set manner." Yes, this can and does include rituals performed in a religious context. However, my remarks are meant to refer to ritual in the broadest possible sense, as it is my personal belief that all things are holy. Not all actions, thoughts or ideas are holy, but all things are holy. And persons are also things and thus holy in essence, though persons, by the power vested in them, may generate unholy actions and ideas from time to time.
Questions such as "what kind of 'value' should I take this to mean?" and "how am I meant to compare the 'potency' of one ritual to that of another?" are beyond my expertise to answer. If you are interested in how I came up with my own usable-but-incomplete answers to those questions, the story is almost certain to be longer than you would enjoy reading. Therefore I will not explore these matters further at the moment. For a similar reason I also will not, just now, undertake to answer the question "what do you mean by 'holy'?"
Instead, I will move on to another subject. No one is going to ask me about it, but I have thought about it carefully and have an answer prepared. Question in next paragraph, answer in the following paragraph, discussion to follow.
A quick read-about of the Discordian Saints, plus a more than passing acquaintance with yours truly, would seem to make it clear that the saint whose personality I most resemble is Sri Syadasti. This is the patron of the season of Confusion, whose full name is said to translate, "All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense." The impression I have of myself is that I confuse as I breathe--constantly, with little effort and only occasional awareness. Confusion is natural and comfortable to me. It is my native habitat, the territory from which many of my perspectives on life and humanity arose.
Therefore it would be of very little use to me to consider myself a student of Sri Syadasti. We do not take the name of a religion in order to remain as we are. We take such names into our identities in order to become what we yearn to be. We do not, unless we are lazy to a truly unholy degree, become students of those who would teach us the things we already know.
One impression I have of the five seasons*, the five apostles**, the five elements***, etc., is that they are symbolic depictions of how human beings react to change. Let me give you as quick rundown using the seasons:
1. Chaos. "This new thing is totally cool. It's, like, awesome. Everyone should have some. Here, try it. No, seriously! C'mooon, it'll be fun. Please? Just listen to me tell you about this thing for just a sec--"
2. Discord. "Hey, this is MY thing! UR DOIN IT WRONG! No one ever said there was more than one side to this thing, so my side is the only correct one! Gyaah!"
3. Confusion. "Wait, this thing isn't just your thing and my thing. It's, like, like a lot of different things. There's more to this thing than meets the eye, man. It's almost like it's a thing, but it's really not a thing, or else it is but not exactly, and it's all mysterious, or something..."
4. Bureaucracy. "This thing is a thing in the following ways. (List appended.) The number of ways may be subject to change without notice in the following circumstances, known and unknown. (See chart.) Persons with appropriate qualifications may pronounce expert opinions regarding the thingness of stuff when their opinion is called for, and even though experts disagree regarding which experts are experts, their opinions shall be recorded as fact."
5. Aftermath. "The experts have all become liars. The stuff doesn't really involve things anymore. The mysteries became puzzles whose answers some jerk scrawled in pen all over the front of the workbook. And their spelling was bad, so the answers didn't even make sense. This sucks. I'm outta here."
The idea I have about this is, if one is aware that this series of states is going to happen, one has a better chance to adequately prepare for them.
It is much like Douglas Adams' description of astrology. Picture the universe as a piece of blank paper with very slight grooves in its surface. These grooves are largely invisible to the naked eye, and to feel them with a fingertip would crinkle the paper and alter them. But if you sprinkle sand or iron filings or pepper on the paper and give it a little shake, the granules will settle into the grooves, making them visible. So if the universe is the paper, then the symbol set one chooses is the granulated substance. And the little shake is the application of thought and effort.
Thus, when I sprinkled the abovementioned symbol set and gave it that shake, a useful thought occurred to me. Since my experience of life in general tended to be characterized by one phase of the process more than any of the others--namely Confusion--it would be most beneficial for me to focus my efforts on learning the lessons of the next phase--namely Bureaucracy.
Of course, using different "granulated substances" produce different ways of describing the subjective life experiences I am trying to understand. One of the things I think it is important to be able to do is to filter the same data through many different symbol sets, many different perspectives. I'm pretty confident this skill is one of the things Discordians are rather encouraged to do, although given the nature of Discordianism, it isn't really possible to be certain.
Now, if one can enter into a given perspective with complete sincerity--believe in its principles and precepts honestly and with unambiguous favor--then the information one gets from its use will be of a much, much higher quality. (See the discussion of rituals above for my reasoning on this point.) This holds true, albeit in a lesser degree, even if the belief is entered into temporarily and for the sake of argument. Any way you go about it, the more of yourself you can put into a belief system, the more its recommendations for your life will prove useful and have personal significance for you. The more you are able believe, the better will be the results you get from believing.
So, by putting as much of myself as possible into a given filter while I am using it, I get the best results. The more filters I am able to use, the more information I can get on a particular issue.
And in my view, the best course of action on any given issue is an action which is recommended by every filter I am able to use. That happens when, no matter which perspective, which set of beliefs I enter into, a particular choice is always among those recommended. This is the situation I refer to as "turtles all the way down."
Edward Current, an extremely sarcastic and parodic fellow, has a video entitled "I've converted to every religion (just in case)". He came up with it as a way to mock Pascal's wager. But I would do it, I swear to dog I would, in all seriousness, just for the lovely lovely information. Mmm...information. And the turtles, oh yes. The pretty happy turtles, of whom there are more every time I turn around and all of whom say they will be my friends. Just like the rocks on the beaches of Santraginus V! My capacity for belief is getting bigger all the time, always just barely behind my capacity to suspend disbelief and just barely ahead of my capacity for disbelief. Someday, if these trends continue, someday I do so hope I can give even the mighty Gödel's theorem a run for its money.
:D
------------------
* Chaos, Discord, Confusion, Bureaucracy, Aftermath.
** Hung Mung, Dr. Van Van Mojo / Patamunzo Lingananda, Sri Syadasti, Zarathud, Malaclypse the Elder.
*** Sweet, Boom, Pungent, Prickle, Orange -- or as they are known in the Kingdom of Loathing, Sleaze, Hot, Stench, Cold and Spooky.
Showing posts with label wednesdays with invisible friends. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wednesdays with invisible friends. Show all posts
Miercoles con los Amigos Invisibles vol. 18: how it is I came to deconvert
God is dead. Pity killed him.
~Nietzsche
You see, my view is that even when we think it's about abstract things like God and hell and creationism, it's really about other people and out relationships with them. Which I suppose is just one further proof that we all are shaped by our personal narratives. Since for me, deconverting was about relationships with people, or rather, the delightful discovery that I was able to have them.
Once upon a time I was a Christian.
This of course isn't the beginning of the story. Long before I had any doubts about God, I had not doubt, but rather certainty that my own emotional and cognitive reflexes were completely unreliable. I had zero confidence in my own ability to perceive and judge accurately, and only marginal and situational trust in the ability of others to perceive and judge accurately. (When was the last time you walked down a street knowing, deep in your bones, that everything you see is certainly not what it appears to you to be, may be friendly or inimical, and in any case by the time you find out it will already be too late?) This has mostly to do with my parents' divorce and the emotional environment it fostered. Two highly intelligent people, who are passionately devoted to one's welfare in slightly different ways, each of whom believe (at the time) that the other is the apotheosis of evil and wishes only to brainwash and torment oneself, and each of whom has (relatively speaking) absolute power over oneself in one context or another, are bound to produce this effect. I got used to sort of watching my own life with a sick feeling of apprehension, waiting for the next inevitable, inexplicable event which I was certain I could have prevented, if only I had opened myself up to believe X or Y. Guilt and self-disgust were like air, plentiful and endlessly renewed. I am sure my sisters had nearly identical experiences, with the exception that they seemed to have been able to believe X or Y from time to time. I have no idea whether or not that made it easier. I think we each of us came away from the 90s with the feeling that we, ourselves, had been least damaged and had sacrificed most to protect the other two. I'm now certain I was wrong, and I had even less power over the situation than I assumed at the time. That, though, is another story.
By the time I was in sixth grade I had determined it was necessary to completely abandon all my judgments about people. Everything I thought I knew was wrong, or at least, dangerously incomplete. Whenever I acted by reflex, mimicking the things Mom or Dad or various authority figures had taught me, the results were disaster. People's feelings were hurt; they got mad at me, rejected me, reacted as though I were being a self-righteous ass. So I tore everything down and started from scratch at about that time. I spent most of my mental effort on this. (It was easier than spending my effort on family problems I knew I had no power to solve.) When I encountered a person and the reflex assumptions and categories sprang up in my mind, I would smack them down again. Viciously at first. As my new habits started to kick in, the new reflexes started to come more naturally. I would say silently to myself--in French, to minimize potential emotional baggage tied to terms--"C'est un/une que je ne connais pas." He/she is one whom I do not know. Obervation and inference as careful as I could manage filled in the gaps.
There were demons, of course. Mom believed in them, that they crept into the lives of believers and unbelievers alike, to cause misfortune and the desire for wickedness. This may not be entirely accurate, but it was my perception. I knew they were real because I could feel them, always, like a buzzing, predatory cloud just outside my skin. Mostly outside. Which parenthetically is the major reason I never did seriously consider suicide during that time: I knew they were there, waiting for me. Without the feeble protection of my body I would have been mincemeat. Evildoers and wicked actions and thoughts, I learned, brought demons into the lives of those they influenced. And every undesirable attitude and behavior had its own demon. Demons of disobedience, rebelliousness, sullenness. Demons which congregated around one's bed at night, or around one's awareness in the daytime, like invisible mosquitoes who whispered mind-shattering confidences and responded to every exercise of will with mocking laughter. Prayer would take the demons away, I learned. Only prayer to Jesus, only the complete submission of self to Jesus, the annihilation of self. The proof would not only be that the presence of the demons would recede--the real proof would be the changes in attitude and behavior. If I prayed and prayed and got no result, it was because my prayer was insincere, was not sufficiently abject, my soul not yet a fitting sacrifice. God was testing me. Again, my perception; at the time, though, it was my universe.
Sometimes it even worked. What the evangelicals call "mountaintop experiences" were the times when I had temporary relief. Surrounded by fellow believers, in a holy place, supported by the prayers of others who presumably were not so completely infected, the demons would recede. For days, sometimes weeks afterwards, it was quieter inside me. When I prayed it would seem to be going somewhere, rather than being swallowed up and muffled on the way there. Yes, intellectually, I knew God could always hear me, whether I felt like I was being heard or not. But it was hard. I felt like a selfish brat, a whiny little bitch, for wanting to know God was there at the other end when I prayed--all the time, no matter how thick around me the demons congregated. How dare I ask for such unusual favor? Me, who didn't have to worry about where I would sleep or what I would eat or fear being beaten? I was a worthless, selfish, totally corrupt piece of trash, and if God didn't think I was worthy to have my demonic entourage curbed, it was less, far less than I deserved, and I ought to be grateful it was no worse. I thanked God every day that it was no worse, and prayed desperately for some relief from the loathing in my heart or the pain in my gut. (Which latter, I later learned was an undiagnosed non-perforated duodenal ulcer, but that's another story.) The lack of response was further proof of my own unworthiness.
Once upon a time, I was a Christian. I was one of about three total charismatic evangelicals at an extremely liberal Chicago high school. Given my previous experiences within the evangelical community, I was kind of expecting people's responses to the "witnessing" strategies I'd learned to vary from the script. After all, one's teachers and youth pastors and Christian age-mates, far more righteous and in tune with God than oneself, could vary from their scripts. So it was to be expected that poor unsaved souls with no notion that their suffering could be relieved might do the same. It wasn't a surprise to me, then, that the biology teacher rolled her eyes and scoffed at the subject when I brought up creationism, that the principal took me and my Christian Club co-founder aside and carefully explained that it would make her life easier if we did not have revivals and Holy Spirit manifestations on school property, that my atheist classmate Nick Lambrecht (whose Eschew Obfuscation t-shirt I still fondly recall) threw up his hands in exasperation at me when our two-person creation/evolution debate ended with me stubbornly insisting "God did it!!!" All these things were to be expected, and I would have gladly endured them in the service of my faith, if not for one thing.
They pitied me.
I had by this time spent several years studying the reactions of people, you recall, learning to sift what they really meant out of the morass of what they did and said. So I could tell what kind of pity it was. Some of it was the condescension, of which I'd so often been explicitly or implicitly accused. The condescension, namely, of the person who believes they already have all the answers and rejects as unworthy any person whose opinions do not agree with their own. This I set aside (on an intellectual level, after wallowing in self-pity, and recrimination for said self-pity, of course!) as the child of ignorance and laziness. What remained was a kind of pity I'd never experienced before. Sometimes my peers expressed it in words or actions; other times I had to strain it out from clues of posture, facial expression and tone. It roughly translated to something like,
Why is she making herself so sad?
You're a good vibe, but you need to get in trouble.
Why do you hate yourself so much? You're nice and I like you.
Sure, you're annoying, but that's no reason why you have to be miserable.
I was not, at this time, a very well socialized person. I had what I then called verbal diarrhea, what one of my later therapists suggested might have been undiagnosed ADD. Maybe an unlooked-for side effect of homeschooling, where I'd gotten used to one-on-one interaction and had trouble developing other habits. At any rate, I couldn't hear speech without some part of my brain assuming it was directed completely at me, and formulating a response. A response I absolutely had to verbalize, or else experience an almost physical pain, like that of an overfull bladder when no bathroom is in sight. (Hence the verbal diarrhea moniker.) My interpersonal reflexes and assumptions were not only untrustworthy, I was aware that they were untrustworthy. So when I took a bit of harmless friendly sarcasm as being in deadly earnest and fled to weep about it, spouted off a piece of smutty innuendo in total ignorance of its implications, or misread a social situation to the point where I mortally insulted somebody by repeating a phrase or action outside its appropriate context, I was always aware that I had erred, but not how or why or how to fix it. Among fellow Christians this was a fairly simple procedure. They and I all pretended that none of it had ever occurred, and I was ostracized from further meaningful interaction with whichever social set my misbehavior had offended. One of several reasons I was glad we changed churches every few years when I was a kid--it gave me a way to gauge my progess at being a more effective simulacrum of a functional human being.
But in high school, this was not the case. Yes, my social faux pas were counted against me, but the fact that I was pitied granted me a certain amount of leniency. People would give me second and even third chances, and when I (as I felt at the time, inevitably) used them up, even then there were not really hard feelings. Just a change in the tenor of the pity they felt for me. This was novel. This was even encouraging. At this point, you may imagine, my relationship with God was such that I was pretty much exhausted, or at least had gone beyond my wits' end to some numb place where I just waited for something, anything to change without really expecting it to change.
So, having heard many stories of people who backslid and later came back to the Lord even better and holier than before, I decided to experiment. With my own eternal soul. Because what else, in the final analysis, was mine enough that I could presume to mess with it? And it's not like God would be losing anything much if I screwed it up.
A song I wrote within the past year sums up my thought process pretty well.
[afraid of god]
all through my first sixteen years
you know I did believe it
waded through demons up to my ears
until I had to leave it
prayed to god at the time
said, "dear lord, with respect
I've just got to find something
that has an effect"
you know I was so afraid of god
but not afraid of ain't no god
I was so afraid of god
not afraid of ain't no god
you say you can't imagine a world
with no one to create it
you say I am just one little girl
who's too opinionated
I don't mean to be mean
but I think that's a crock
can you call yourself free
hiding under that rock
honey then you're afraid of god
but so afraid of ain't no god
I say that you're afraid of god
more afraid of ain't no god
well there ain't no polite way to say
you're gonna rot in a cemetery
and there ain't no polite way to say
I think your god is imaginary
but you politely tell me
I must burn in hell
unless I will believe
in your savior as well
well if I'm afraid of god
you're afraid of ain't no god
honey if I'm afraid of god
you're afraid of ain't no god,
ain't no god
uh-huh, uh-huh uh-uh uh.
*****
Yeah, the last verse is more of a recent attitudinal development. The first verse, however, is definitely how I approached it at the time. "Look, God, I don't know why you've chosen not to relieve me of these demons or their constant presence in my life, but I'm a human being who's weak and I can't take it anymore. I am going to do whatever I can think of to help myself. And if nothing I do works, you can bet I'll come crawling back to you begging fvorgiveness, like everyone always tells me I will, and because you're God I know that in that event you will forgive me. So please understand, this is something I have to do."
So I started wrangling the demons my damnself, instead of praying "Jesus please come rescue me!" and hiding in a corner, hoping maybe Jesus would finally come this time and chase them away. I started yelling at them, demanding things of them, trapping the sense-of-presence of one at a time under my intellect and dissecting them emotion by emotion, assumption by assumption. It has been, what, ten years or so since I started this process. Today I am essentially demon-free, in the sense that one might say one is disease-free despite the fact that the everyday living environment is full of germs which are simply not strong enough to overwhelm the body's immmune system. Do I now consider a demon to be an invisible creature with its own life or a complex of memes generated and fueled by a human psyche? The closest I can get, short of an entire separate post, is to quote The Simpsons' Rev. Lovejoy: "Short answer: no, with an 'if'. Long answer: yes, with a 'but'."
As for me and alleged Jesus, the situation is a little different.
Studying human beings, myself first and most strenuously, gives me a constantly evolving awareness of the dynamic tension between the ideas we hold in our conscious minds, the real evaluative emotional categories we use to ineract with external reality, and the things we do and say. Relationships are an extremely subjective experience--quintuply so for relationships with invisible people. As I wrote in another song (the full text of which I will NOT reprint at the moment, I've hurt too many feelings already today):
I needed help from the whole congregation
to tell God apart from my imagination
And when you get down to the brass tacks of those things commonly termed "religious experiences", I have had equal numbers of them on both sides of the conversion/deconversion fence. There are a lot which fall into the category of "possible contacts with lesser positive beings," none of which of course left denominational calling cards. There are a whole host of minor subjective experiences and wrinkles in causality which could equally be attributed to good guys giving me a heads-up or bad guys trying to fool me. There are a few unambiguously evil experiences. There are a few experiences--I can count them on the fingers of one hand!--which absolutely fall under the aegis of goodness, which as the campfire song says:
That's how it is with God's love
Once you've experienced it
You want to sing
It's fresh like spring
You want to pass it on
But as with the other possibly good ones, no calling cards. Equally powerful and meaningful experiences as a non-Christian and as a Christian, with no notable differences in content or tone. No statement to the effect that "Christianity is the one proper expression of my presence on Earth, and you should align yourself with it, come what may." Which is something of a relief to me, in a way. The example of Christ, the Christ of myth or history, however you slice it, is a hell of a thing to live up to, and I wonder that more well-meaning Christians don't break under the strain.
So I'm fairly well convinced that there is some sort of invisible side to life, if only because my training and habit predisposes me to believe in such. As my little sister is fond of saying, the cavemen who saw lions when no lion was there are the ones who lived. However, I reject the term "supernatural." If any of this crap exists, then it is part of nature, whether it arose as part of a freakish pocket of anentropy to provide balance to a largely entropic universe, or was engineered by a benevolent intelligence as an expression of said intelligence's love and undying devotion to the flawed tiny self-directed beings it caused to exist for some inscrutable purpose.
And I will conclude with some words from my most beloved piece of ancient poetry, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as translated by Edmund Fitzgerald:
What! from his helpless Creature be repaid
Pure Gold for what he lent him dross-allay'd--
Sue for a Debt he never did contract,
And cannot answer--Oh, the sorry trade!
~Nietzsche
You see, my view is that even when we think it's about abstract things like God and hell and creationism, it's really about other people and out relationships with them. Which I suppose is just one further proof that we all are shaped by our personal narratives. Since for me, deconverting was about relationships with people, or rather, the delightful discovery that I was able to have them.
Once upon a time I was a Christian.
This of course isn't the beginning of the story. Long before I had any doubts about God, I had not doubt, but rather certainty that my own emotional and cognitive reflexes were completely unreliable. I had zero confidence in my own ability to perceive and judge accurately, and only marginal and situational trust in the ability of others to perceive and judge accurately. (When was the last time you walked down a street knowing, deep in your bones, that everything you see is certainly not what it appears to you to be, may be friendly or inimical, and in any case by the time you find out it will already be too late?) This has mostly to do with my parents' divorce and the emotional environment it fostered. Two highly intelligent people, who are passionately devoted to one's welfare in slightly different ways, each of whom believe (at the time) that the other is the apotheosis of evil and wishes only to brainwash and torment oneself, and each of whom has (relatively speaking) absolute power over oneself in one context or another, are bound to produce this effect. I got used to sort of watching my own life with a sick feeling of apprehension, waiting for the next inevitable, inexplicable event which I was certain I could have prevented, if only I had opened myself up to believe X or Y. Guilt and self-disgust were like air, plentiful and endlessly renewed. I am sure my sisters had nearly identical experiences, with the exception that they seemed to have been able to believe X or Y from time to time. I have no idea whether or not that made it easier. I think we each of us came away from the 90s with the feeling that we, ourselves, had been least damaged and had sacrificed most to protect the other two. I'm now certain I was wrong, and I had even less power over the situation than I assumed at the time. That, though, is another story.
By the time I was in sixth grade I had determined it was necessary to completely abandon all my judgments about people. Everything I thought I knew was wrong, or at least, dangerously incomplete. Whenever I acted by reflex, mimicking the things Mom or Dad or various authority figures had taught me, the results were disaster. People's feelings were hurt; they got mad at me, rejected me, reacted as though I were being a self-righteous ass. So I tore everything down and started from scratch at about that time. I spent most of my mental effort on this. (It was easier than spending my effort on family problems I knew I had no power to solve.) When I encountered a person and the reflex assumptions and categories sprang up in my mind, I would smack them down again. Viciously at first. As my new habits started to kick in, the new reflexes started to come more naturally. I would say silently to myself--in French, to minimize potential emotional baggage tied to terms--"C'est un/une que je ne connais pas." He/she is one whom I do not know. Obervation and inference as careful as I could manage filled in the gaps.
There were demons, of course. Mom believed in them, that they crept into the lives of believers and unbelievers alike, to cause misfortune and the desire for wickedness. This may not be entirely accurate, but it was my perception. I knew they were real because I could feel them, always, like a buzzing, predatory cloud just outside my skin. Mostly outside. Which parenthetically is the major reason I never did seriously consider suicide during that time: I knew they were there, waiting for me. Without the feeble protection of my body I would have been mincemeat. Evildoers and wicked actions and thoughts, I learned, brought demons into the lives of those they influenced. And every undesirable attitude and behavior had its own demon. Demons of disobedience, rebelliousness, sullenness. Demons which congregated around one's bed at night, or around one's awareness in the daytime, like invisible mosquitoes who whispered mind-shattering confidences and responded to every exercise of will with mocking laughter. Prayer would take the demons away, I learned. Only prayer to Jesus, only the complete submission of self to Jesus, the annihilation of self. The proof would not only be that the presence of the demons would recede--the real proof would be the changes in attitude and behavior. If I prayed and prayed and got no result, it was because my prayer was insincere, was not sufficiently abject, my soul not yet a fitting sacrifice. God was testing me. Again, my perception; at the time, though, it was my universe.
Sometimes it even worked. What the evangelicals call "mountaintop experiences" were the times when I had temporary relief. Surrounded by fellow believers, in a holy place, supported by the prayers of others who presumably were not so completely infected, the demons would recede. For days, sometimes weeks afterwards, it was quieter inside me. When I prayed it would seem to be going somewhere, rather than being swallowed up and muffled on the way there. Yes, intellectually, I knew God could always hear me, whether I felt like I was being heard or not. But it was hard. I felt like a selfish brat, a whiny little bitch, for wanting to know God was there at the other end when I prayed--all the time, no matter how thick around me the demons congregated. How dare I ask for such unusual favor? Me, who didn't have to worry about where I would sleep or what I would eat or fear being beaten? I was a worthless, selfish, totally corrupt piece of trash, and if God didn't think I was worthy to have my demonic entourage curbed, it was less, far less than I deserved, and I ought to be grateful it was no worse. I thanked God every day that it was no worse, and prayed desperately for some relief from the loathing in my heart or the pain in my gut. (Which latter, I later learned was an undiagnosed non-perforated duodenal ulcer, but that's another story.) The lack of response was further proof of my own unworthiness.
Once upon a time, I was a Christian. I was one of about three total charismatic evangelicals at an extremely liberal Chicago high school. Given my previous experiences within the evangelical community, I was kind of expecting people's responses to the "witnessing" strategies I'd learned to vary from the script. After all, one's teachers and youth pastors and Christian age-mates, far more righteous and in tune with God than oneself, could vary from their scripts. So it was to be expected that poor unsaved souls with no notion that their suffering could be relieved might do the same. It wasn't a surprise to me, then, that the biology teacher rolled her eyes and scoffed at the subject when I brought up creationism, that the principal took me and my Christian Club co-founder aside and carefully explained that it would make her life easier if we did not have revivals and Holy Spirit manifestations on school property, that my atheist classmate Nick Lambrecht (whose Eschew Obfuscation t-shirt I still fondly recall) threw up his hands in exasperation at me when our two-person creation/evolution debate ended with me stubbornly insisting "God did it!!!" All these things were to be expected, and I would have gladly endured them in the service of my faith, if not for one thing.
They pitied me.
I had by this time spent several years studying the reactions of people, you recall, learning to sift what they really meant out of the morass of what they did and said. So I could tell what kind of pity it was. Some of it was the condescension, of which I'd so often been explicitly or implicitly accused. The condescension, namely, of the person who believes they already have all the answers and rejects as unworthy any person whose opinions do not agree with their own. This I set aside (on an intellectual level, after wallowing in self-pity, and recrimination for said self-pity, of course!) as the child of ignorance and laziness. What remained was a kind of pity I'd never experienced before. Sometimes my peers expressed it in words or actions; other times I had to strain it out from clues of posture, facial expression and tone. It roughly translated to something like,
Why is she making herself so sad?
You're a good vibe, but you need to get in trouble.
Why do you hate yourself so much? You're nice and I like you.
Sure, you're annoying, but that's no reason why you have to be miserable.
I was not, at this time, a very well socialized person. I had what I then called verbal diarrhea, what one of my later therapists suggested might have been undiagnosed ADD. Maybe an unlooked-for side effect of homeschooling, where I'd gotten used to one-on-one interaction and had trouble developing other habits. At any rate, I couldn't hear speech without some part of my brain assuming it was directed completely at me, and formulating a response. A response I absolutely had to verbalize, or else experience an almost physical pain, like that of an overfull bladder when no bathroom is in sight. (Hence the verbal diarrhea moniker.) My interpersonal reflexes and assumptions were not only untrustworthy, I was aware that they were untrustworthy. So when I took a bit of harmless friendly sarcasm as being in deadly earnest and fled to weep about it, spouted off a piece of smutty innuendo in total ignorance of its implications, or misread a social situation to the point where I mortally insulted somebody by repeating a phrase or action outside its appropriate context, I was always aware that I had erred, but not how or why or how to fix it. Among fellow Christians this was a fairly simple procedure. They and I all pretended that none of it had ever occurred, and I was ostracized from further meaningful interaction with whichever social set my misbehavior had offended. One of several reasons I was glad we changed churches every few years when I was a kid--it gave me a way to gauge my progess at being a more effective simulacrum of a functional human being.
But in high school, this was not the case. Yes, my social faux pas were counted against me, but the fact that I was pitied granted me a certain amount of leniency. People would give me second and even third chances, and when I (as I felt at the time, inevitably) used them up, even then there were not really hard feelings. Just a change in the tenor of the pity they felt for me. This was novel. This was even encouraging. At this point, you may imagine, my relationship with God was such that I was pretty much exhausted, or at least had gone beyond my wits' end to some numb place where I just waited for something, anything to change without really expecting it to change.
So, having heard many stories of people who backslid and later came back to the Lord even better and holier than before, I decided to experiment. With my own eternal soul. Because what else, in the final analysis, was mine enough that I could presume to mess with it? And it's not like God would be losing anything much if I screwed it up.
A song I wrote within the past year sums up my thought process pretty well.
[afraid of god]
all through my first sixteen years
you know I did believe it
waded through demons up to my ears
until I had to leave it
prayed to god at the time
said, "dear lord, with respect
I've just got to find something
that has an effect"
you know I was so afraid of god
but not afraid of ain't no god
I was so afraid of god
not afraid of ain't no god
you say you can't imagine a world
with no one to create it
you say I am just one little girl
who's too opinionated
I don't mean to be mean
but I think that's a crock
can you call yourself free
hiding under that rock
honey then you're afraid of god
but so afraid of ain't no god
I say that you're afraid of god
more afraid of ain't no god
well there ain't no polite way to say
you're gonna rot in a cemetery
and there ain't no polite way to say
I think your god is imaginary
but you politely tell me
I must burn in hell
unless I will believe
in your savior as well
well if I'm afraid of god
you're afraid of ain't no god
honey if I'm afraid of god
you're afraid of ain't no god,
ain't no god
uh-huh, uh-huh uh-uh uh.
*****
Yeah, the last verse is more of a recent attitudinal development. The first verse, however, is definitely how I approached it at the time. "Look, God, I don't know why you've chosen not to relieve me of these demons or their constant presence in my life, but I'm a human being who's weak and I can't take it anymore. I am going to do whatever I can think of to help myself. And if nothing I do works, you can bet I'll come crawling back to you begging fvorgiveness, like everyone always tells me I will, and because you're God I know that in that event you will forgive me. So please understand, this is something I have to do."
So I started wrangling the demons my damnself, instead of praying "Jesus please come rescue me!" and hiding in a corner, hoping maybe Jesus would finally come this time and chase them away. I started yelling at them, demanding things of them, trapping the sense-of-presence of one at a time under my intellect and dissecting them emotion by emotion, assumption by assumption. It has been, what, ten years or so since I started this process. Today I am essentially demon-free, in the sense that one might say one is disease-free despite the fact that the everyday living environment is full of germs which are simply not strong enough to overwhelm the body's immmune system. Do I now consider a demon to be an invisible creature with its own life or a complex of memes generated and fueled by a human psyche? The closest I can get, short of an entire separate post, is to quote The Simpsons' Rev. Lovejoy: "Short answer: no, with an 'if'. Long answer: yes, with a 'but'."
As for me and alleged Jesus, the situation is a little different.
Studying human beings, myself first and most strenuously, gives me a constantly evolving awareness of the dynamic tension between the ideas we hold in our conscious minds, the real evaluative emotional categories we use to ineract with external reality, and the things we do and say. Relationships are an extremely subjective experience--quintuply so for relationships with invisible people. As I wrote in another song (the full text of which I will NOT reprint at the moment, I've hurt too many feelings already today):
I needed help from the whole congregation
to tell God apart from my imagination
And when you get down to the brass tacks of those things commonly termed "religious experiences", I have had equal numbers of them on both sides of the conversion/deconversion fence. There are a lot which fall into the category of "possible contacts with lesser positive beings," none of which of course left denominational calling cards. There are a whole host of minor subjective experiences and wrinkles in causality which could equally be attributed to good guys giving me a heads-up or bad guys trying to fool me. There are a few unambiguously evil experiences. There are a few experiences--I can count them on the fingers of one hand!--which absolutely fall under the aegis of goodness, which as the campfire song says:
That's how it is with God's love
Once you've experienced it
You want to sing
It's fresh like spring
You want to pass it on
But as with the other possibly good ones, no calling cards. Equally powerful and meaningful experiences as a non-Christian and as a Christian, with no notable differences in content or tone. No statement to the effect that "Christianity is the one proper expression of my presence on Earth, and you should align yourself with it, come what may." Which is something of a relief to me, in a way. The example of Christ, the Christ of myth or history, however you slice it, is a hell of a thing to live up to, and I wonder that more well-meaning Christians don't break under the strain.
So I'm fairly well convinced that there is some sort of invisible side to life, if only because my training and habit predisposes me to believe in such. As my little sister is fond of saying, the cavemen who saw lions when no lion was there are the ones who lived. However, I reject the term "supernatural." If any of this crap exists, then it is part of nature, whether it arose as part of a freakish pocket of anentropy to provide balance to a largely entropic universe, or was engineered by a benevolent intelligence as an expression of said intelligence's love and undying devotion to the flawed tiny self-directed beings it caused to exist for some inscrutable purpose.
And I will conclude with some words from my most beloved piece of ancient poetry, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as translated by Edmund Fitzgerald:
What! from his helpless Creature be repaid
Pure Gold for what he lent him dross-allay'd--
Sue for a Debt he never did contract,
And cannot answer--Oh, the sorry trade!
Miercoles con los Amigos Invisibles vol. 17: Balance
Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight. Equilibrium is pragmatic. You have to get everything into proportion. You compensate, rebalance yourself so that you maintain your angle to your world. When the world shifts, you shift.
~ Tom Stoppard
I just had a lovely and interesting conversation with Amber which touched, among other things, on the subject of balance.
When I changed my blog skin, the lists and links on the right-hand side of the page did not carry over to the new version. So I had to start reconstituting my links from scratch. Naturally, I started with the blogs and sites on my own "follow" list--the things I read regularly. Since this time I was able to figure out how to make it a blog list rather than a mere link list, it now shows the titles of the most recent post on each site. (Though, perhaps due to my poor skills in technomancy, I still haven't figured out how to put up a cool "donate through PayPal" link like the one PersonalFailure has. Ah well. Maybe I'll just create a PayPal store which offers poetry by commission, and circumvent the whole problem.) This caused Amber to notice, and be disturbed by, a thing I had only thought about as a vague worry in the back of my mind: Almost all of my links are liberal, anti-conservative, ex-Christian, or otherwise blue sort of places. Yet in conversation and in real life I strive for a more balanced, "I don't trust anybody" approach, and this seemed to her like a worrisome contradiction. Possibly disingenuous, even.
My own views are more like the t-shirt which reads "fiscally republican, socially democrat, sexually liberal." I like the idea of a flat tax, a percentage of income for all persons, and of laws which permit relatively law-abiding citizens such as myself to own firearms. (Did you know it is illegal to own a handgun in the city of Chicago, but not illegal to own a rifle--for which there are no practice ranges within like 100 miles?) I like the idea of gay marriage being legal, of evolution being standard curriculum in schools, and of marijuana being legal, at least for medical purposes such as the treatment of chemotherapy-related nausea. (Seriously. Nothing else worked for my sweetums at the time. Even the doctors agreed that as long as they didn't officially know about it, it was a great idea.) In fact when it comes to relationships between consenting adults, I like Dad's idea of the relationship contract. Regular hetero marriages, in addition to being legal contracts, could have the sanction of the appropriate religious bodies. However, any other relationship which does not violate other laws could be delineated in a contract and signed by the appropriate parties. Which would include of course gay marriages, but also temporary partnerships, poly groups, Gorean "slave" contracts, open marriages--pretty much every kind and flavor of human relationship. Provided the persons involved are all adults and sign in the presence of an attorney and/or judge, who would hopefully be able to vouch that said adults did not do so under any overt coercion.
But of course there isn't a political platform which perfectly matches my views: we live in a democracy. Not a synchromocracy, in which the whims and opinions of the populace are charted in real time and fluctuate like the weather. Unfortunately one is expected to choose either the red team or the blue team, harp on the flaws of one's opponents, and sheepishly apologize for the foolishness of one's allies. This seems ridiculous to me. I view myself as rising out of a conservative background, even though for the last decade I've been either a nonparticipant or a silent, not entirely comfortable participant. So I take some comfort in reading many blogs with a liberal bias, because they make me feel that maybe I'm not crazy. At least by comparison.
Yet having primarily liberal-leaning blogs in my sidebar does create an inaccurate impression, and is definitely counter to the spirit of what I'm trying to do here. I want my blog to be a place where everyone genuinely feels welcomed and validated, regardless of their views. I want the distinction between thoughtful and asinine to be far, far more important than the distinction between conservative and liberal. With the caveat that everyone should get a chance to be asinine from time to time, so long as they don't become dependent on the habit.
I'm thinking that my sidebar categories will be something like "Good Guys", "Overzealous Partisans", "The Unabashedly Rude", and "Relations and Personal Friends". Y'all know what categories you yourselves will fall into if you are regular readers.
I would like to invite everyone who reads me, though, to give me some links to get me started. Reasonable conservatives and crazy whackjob liberals especially, since given my linklist I will have a slightly easier time finding the converse. (Although You Are Dumb, for example, clearly falls into the Unabashedly Rude category on the liberal side. So perhaps it won't be so hard for me to find crazy whackjob liberals...) My point is, if there's any viewpoint which you think should be represented yet I have failed to adequately acknowledge, please, find an eloquent proponent of same and I will linklist them.
Because here on the internet we are a collective of disembodied voices, bereft of the social cues and visual signals which would normally ameliorate the acid touches of our opinions on one another's brains. My own blog postings of late have been deliberately void of politics and the doings of religious organizations, for the very good reasons that those things are relatively small parts of the average life, and any discussion of them tends to get people's dander up. I am not avoiding the subject because I have no opinions. I am avoiding the subject because, in general, I don't consider my own opinions authoritative enough to be worth starting a fight about, and besides, I have so many other things to talk about which I find interesting and fun.
So please, post me some links, or send them to me if you have my email! Expand my horizons, and thereby help me to expand the horizons of my other alleged readers!
~ Tom Stoppard
I just had a lovely and interesting conversation with Amber which touched, among other things, on the subject of balance.
When I changed my blog skin, the lists and links on the right-hand side of the page did not carry over to the new version. So I had to start reconstituting my links from scratch. Naturally, I started with the blogs and sites on my own "follow" list--the things I read regularly. Since this time I was able to figure out how to make it a blog list rather than a mere link list, it now shows the titles of the most recent post on each site. (Though, perhaps due to my poor skills in technomancy, I still haven't figured out how to put up a cool "donate through PayPal" link like the one PersonalFailure has. Ah well. Maybe I'll just create a PayPal store which offers poetry by commission, and circumvent the whole problem.) This caused Amber to notice, and be disturbed by, a thing I had only thought about as a vague worry in the back of my mind: Almost all of my links are liberal, anti-conservative, ex-Christian, or otherwise blue sort of places. Yet in conversation and in real life I strive for a more balanced, "I don't trust anybody" approach, and this seemed to her like a worrisome contradiction. Possibly disingenuous, even.
My own views are more like the t-shirt which reads "fiscally republican, socially democrat, sexually liberal." I like the idea of a flat tax, a percentage of income for all persons, and of laws which permit relatively law-abiding citizens such as myself to own firearms. (Did you know it is illegal to own a handgun in the city of Chicago, but not illegal to own a rifle--for which there are no practice ranges within like 100 miles?) I like the idea of gay marriage being legal, of evolution being standard curriculum in schools, and of marijuana being legal, at least for medical purposes such as the treatment of chemotherapy-related nausea. (Seriously. Nothing else worked for my sweetums at the time. Even the doctors agreed that as long as they didn't officially know about it, it was a great idea.) In fact when it comes to relationships between consenting adults, I like Dad's idea of the relationship contract. Regular hetero marriages, in addition to being legal contracts, could have the sanction of the appropriate religious bodies. However, any other relationship which does not violate other laws could be delineated in a contract and signed by the appropriate parties. Which would include of course gay marriages, but also temporary partnerships, poly groups, Gorean "slave" contracts, open marriages--pretty much every kind and flavor of human relationship. Provided the persons involved are all adults and sign in the presence of an attorney and/or judge, who would hopefully be able to vouch that said adults did not do so under any overt coercion.
But of course there isn't a political platform which perfectly matches my views: we live in a democracy. Not a synchromocracy, in which the whims and opinions of the populace are charted in real time and fluctuate like the weather. Unfortunately one is expected to choose either the red team or the blue team, harp on the flaws of one's opponents, and sheepishly apologize for the foolishness of one's allies. This seems ridiculous to me. I view myself as rising out of a conservative background, even though for the last decade I've been either a nonparticipant or a silent, not entirely comfortable participant. So I take some comfort in reading many blogs with a liberal bias, because they make me feel that maybe I'm not crazy. At least by comparison.
Yet having primarily liberal-leaning blogs in my sidebar does create an inaccurate impression, and is definitely counter to the spirit of what I'm trying to do here. I want my blog to be a place where everyone genuinely feels welcomed and validated, regardless of their views. I want the distinction between thoughtful and asinine to be far, far more important than the distinction between conservative and liberal. With the caveat that everyone should get a chance to be asinine from time to time, so long as they don't become dependent on the habit.
I'm thinking that my sidebar categories will be something like "Good Guys", "Overzealous Partisans", "The Unabashedly Rude", and "Relations and Personal Friends". Y'all know what categories you yourselves will fall into if you are regular readers.
I would like to invite everyone who reads me, though, to give me some links to get me started. Reasonable conservatives and crazy whackjob liberals especially, since given my linklist I will have a slightly easier time finding the converse. (Although You Are Dumb, for example, clearly falls into the Unabashedly Rude category on the liberal side. So perhaps it won't be so hard for me to find crazy whackjob liberals...) My point is, if there's any viewpoint which you think should be represented yet I have failed to adequately acknowledge, please, find an eloquent proponent of same and I will linklist them.
Because here on the internet we are a collective of disembodied voices, bereft of the social cues and visual signals which would normally ameliorate the acid touches of our opinions on one another's brains. My own blog postings of late have been deliberately void of politics and the doings of religious organizations, for the very good reasons that those things are relatively small parts of the average life, and any discussion of them tends to get people's dander up. I am not avoiding the subject because I have no opinions. I am avoiding the subject because, in general, I don't consider my own opinions authoritative enough to be worth starting a fight about, and besides, I have so many other things to talk about which I find interesting and fun.
So please, post me some links, or send them to me if you have my email! Expand my horizons, and thereby help me to expand the horizons of my other alleged readers!
Miercoles con los Amigos Invisibles vol. 16: Practice makes permanent
Back in high school, I used to look over people's shoulders and notice them writing out the lyrics to their favorite songs. The first couple of times this happened, I'd think "oo! other people obsessively writing poetry, just like me!" When I realized this wasn't the case, I was a little disappointed. Still, there was something comforting about it. These were young people who, like me, sought refuge in the magical power of beautiful words. But instead of floundering around trying to cobble together words of their own, they went and got the best, most moving words they could find, and wrote them out from memory. Took the guesswork out of it, I suppose.
Earlier this wake-time I had to go online to look up the lyrics to Bob Dylan's "Positively 4th Street" so that I could write them down to help me memorize them. I've recently learned how to play it on the guitar. But since the complete song isn't in the Dylan songbook I got for Xmas, and I want to memorize it, I needed to copy the words out by hand. It was kind of a trip down memory lane to those old high school days, since I haven't written out a set of song lyrics I didn't actually come up with in a long, long time. It got me thinking about the power of reciting things or writing things down, rather than just listening to them.
You may have run across the psychological factoid that writing down information improves memory retention. I forget where the exact percentages fall, but it's lowest for something you heard or saw passively, next highest for something you wrote down or repeated after hearing or seeing it, and highest of all for something you then explained to a second person. As a psychologist who recently did some work on the topic put it: "The act of retrieving information actually improves memory because you are practicing a skill. And that's the exact same skill you are going to need to retrieve that information again and again."
So writing down something you know, even something you've got memorized, is the mental equivalent of muscle memory. Retrieving certain bits of information in a certain relationship to one another becomes a habit, more firmly encoded in your synapses with each use. The habits of thought that allow me to remember the words to a song I know aren't too different from the habits of muscle memory that allow my fingers to switch positions from one chord to another on the neck of the guitar. Of course the particular neurons getting worn into a groove by these habits reside in different locations in my skull, but they're undergoing the exact same kind of process.
But here's where I get a little teleological, and venture into metaphor.
I choose to train the muscles in my fingers to take up particular positions. Then, once those habits are established, I train them to move back and forth between one set of positions and the next. Once I get one sequence firmly embedded in muscle memory, I'm eager to move onto the next set, and the next after that. I do this because I want to use my smart little fingers to make particular sounds with the strings of my guitar. The more muscle memory procedures I've got encoded, the more sounds I can make. And, as with any muscular system, the more I make use of the muscles in question, the stronger they become. My body feeds them more nutrients to keep up with their increasingly demanding workload.
So let's say that my classmates in high school were doing something similar. They wanted to train their minds to follow a pattern of ideas the way I'm trying to train my fingers to follow a pattern of positions on guitar strings. The analogy isn't exact, because the ideas exist entirely inside the mind, while the fingers are being trained to the shape of an instrument which lies outside the body.
However, ideas in a person's mind do have an effect on that person's brain, which in turn has a sometimes profound effect on what is happening in the body. When a person's emotional state transforms, it does so through a shift in the balance of chemicals and hormones that determine how the body regulates itself and responds to its environment. So instead of fingers touching strings that produce sounds from a guitar, we have ideas touching emotions that produce changes in the brain. Just as repeated practice sharpens muscle memory into habit, and habit into reflex, repeated practice sharpens recall into habits of thought. And, eventually, into mental reflexes, in other words--beliefs.
This is the reason behind teachers telling misbehaving students to write out sentences on a chalkboard, the reason behind the rote prayers or call-and-response segments in religious services. A simple statement can carry a profound weight of emotion behind it. Repeated often enough, the statement becomes a habit of thought, and the habit of thought can become so reflexive the mind perceives it as fact.
But unlike a guitar, a personality makes music only its inhabitant can truly appreciate. Two people standing right next to each other may attach different emotions to the same words. The same prayer recited by one person might be the emotional equivalent of a Bach sonata, while the other person might be experiencing the emotional equivalent of a snarling, woeful track by Alice in Chains. It's easy, far too easy, for me to assume you're getting out of my favorite set of words the same ideas, the same emotions that I get. You might be getting a jolt of meaningless static, nothing at all. You might be getting nails dragged down a chalkboard. The only way I can have any idea is to ask about it--and even then, unless we both step back and discuss what we mean by the words we are using, we might be talking about two different things the entire time.
Miercoles con los Amigos Invisibles vol. 15: Keep it real
An invisible friend is you!
You're not invisible, I know. But since I've never seen you, you are in serious danger of being made into an invisible friend. By me--though I will try my damnedest not to!--or by anybody else out there who thinks like me.
Here's how it works.
I want to feel like I have friends. But--I am terrified of the emotional risks involved in keeping actual friends. In person I'm a pleasant and fun companion; the initial making-friends part is easy for me, and more often than not people would prefer that I stick around once they've gotten to know me. I've made a few friends worth keeping, even a few that I've put in some effort to try and keep. Once we get to that point, though, I get jittery and lose all faith in myself as a worthwhile companion. Eventually my willpower breaks down and the fear gets the better of me. When the ball is in my court to stay in touch and keep the relationship going, I just flake out. I don't call, don't call back, don't initiate contact, make a rendezvous but end up breaking it due to some unconscious self-sabotage. So I go on the internet and do something that gives me the feeling I crave without the risks. A forum, a blog, a chat room community: I have done all of these things. Currently just a forum and blog. Sometimes even those are too much for me, and I leave one internet hangout in search of another, less uncomfortably personal place.
No matter how heavy my emotional investment has been in a person or place, I never seem to have any trouble cutting the cord and fleeing when the panic finally rears its grinning plastic head. It feels like something just and inevitable. Like I'd been defrauding the other person or people involved in some way, and my absence will allow them to cut their losses and get on with making real friends and having a real life. I get this weird feeling of relief. Weird, because I usually miss the person or people and am saddened to be without them, a little more drab and empty. But relief, because I feel freed; the portion of my identity wrapped up in that relationship deflates and all its metaphorical lights go dim. It's been scrapped for parts, turned from active persona into mere information, leaving a whole bunch of emotional energy and mindspace unfettered and blank, ready to be filled with new selfparts. Whatever happened between those friends and me, the feeling seems to say, was just practice. Practice for them, in learning how to recognize not-real people and in future avoid forming unnecessary bonds with them. Practice for me, in learning how to trick people into thinking I'm real people so well that one day, maybe (yeah, right), it will stick.
Where does this belief, this fear, this creeping dread, this absolute certainty come from? I'm not sure. It's one of the central personality construction problems that I've been trying to get a handle on for years. I have some inarticulate belief, too deeply buried for conscious access, that says I'm not worth having as a friend, and anyone who mistakenly thinks I am is in for a world of disappointment. So I keep living out a stupid self-fulfilling prophecy whose origins are obscure to me and whose mechanisms I have yet to untangle from the rest of my personality.
The comforting thing about a blog is the invisible audience. In my mind, somewhere out there is an archetypal Perfect Reader who is even more interested than I am in the things I type, is in a perfect position to make good use of any insight I have, and is delighted by any creative work I manage to come up with. The Perfect Reader is of course completely passive. They have no thoughts or blog of their own, they never comment, they never point out my embarrassing craptasms. But they are always there, in the back of my mind, soaking up my every byte and thereby validating my existence. Giving me the boost that feedback from friends can provide, without the panic-inducing muddle of attempting to make, and keep, real friends.
Which is why over the past period of time I've been making an effort to get real readers. To dispel the myth from my mind, to keep me mindful of what it's like to write for real people. People with their own blogs, ideas, interests and fears. People who will say something when they have something they want to say, and won't when they don't.
The danger there, though, is the temptation to start pandering. Pandering accelerates the "fraud" feelings enormously. Just earlier today I caught myself going over past posts to see which ones generated the most comments. Maybe, I caught myself thinking, if I write more of the kinds of things that got people to comment in the past, maybe then they'll comment more in the future! But this is not the way I want to run my blog, or myself. Right now it is not a good thing for me to do. Because I would in fact be trying to turn my real readers into living, typing replicas of my imaginary Perfect Reader. In accordance with my stupid unconscious self-fulfilling prophecy.
In most circumstances, a person who's trying to give good value for their readers' time ought to be willing to present what they've got in a reader-friendly way. They know what they've got, they know what they're interested in and want to write about, they know who they are. All they need to do is take what they've got and make it really engaging and fun. By studying what other people will react to, a contributor can change the form and style of their contributions to maximize the kind of reactions the contributor most wants to get. If they do their job right, others who are interested in their topic will say "hey! that's the best source of XYZ I've seen in awhile, this person really understands XYZ and makes it fun, I'm going to get my XYZ here from now on."
However, I'm not yet at that point. Because in a sense, I don't even know what I have. Won't know, is maybe a better way to say it. Using just the rational, intellectual parts of my mind, I can rattle off a long list of interesting things I can contribute. But emotionally, I've got to fight against the certainty, the absolute conviction that the things I'm interested in are boring because I'm interested in them, the things I care about are useless because I care about them, the things I want to say are stupid because I say them.
So if I took all my cues from my readers, if I only blogged about things in the hope of getting comments on them, all I'd be doing is building a persona to match what I perceive to be my readers' desires. I wouldn't be taking the things I care about and presenting them to real people in hopes their interest would move them to validate my opinions. Instead, I would be using my perceptions of other people's interests to manipulate them into giving me the validation I crave. Everything I said might be from the heart, everything I wrote about might be something I'm genuinely interested in, but as far as my personality was concerned, it would still feel fraudulent. Would still be fraudulent. The distinction is subtle, but it is the difference between pandering and contribution, between concern and concern trolling, between asking for an opinion and fishing for a compliment.
Man. Keeping it real is hard.
You're not invisible, I know. But since I've never seen you, you are in serious danger of being made into an invisible friend. By me--though I will try my damnedest not to!--or by anybody else out there who thinks like me.
Here's how it works.
I want to feel like I have friends. But--I am terrified of the emotional risks involved in keeping actual friends. In person I'm a pleasant and fun companion; the initial making-friends part is easy for me, and more often than not people would prefer that I stick around once they've gotten to know me. I've made a few friends worth keeping, even a few that I've put in some effort to try and keep. Once we get to that point, though, I get jittery and lose all faith in myself as a worthwhile companion. Eventually my willpower breaks down and the fear gets the better of me. When the ball is in my court to stay in touch and keep the relationship going, I just flake out. I don't call, don't call back, don't initiate contact, make a rendezvous but end up breaking it due to some unconscious self-sabotage. So I go on the internet and do something that gives me the feeling I crave without the risks. A forum, a blog, a chat room community: I have done all of these things. Currently just a forum and blog. Sometimes even those are too much for me, and I leave one internet hangout in search of another, less uncomfortably personal place.
No matter how heavy my emotional investment has been in a person or place, I never seem to have any trouble cutting the cord and fleeing when the panic finally rears its grinning plastic head. It feels like something just and inevitable. Like I'd been defrauding the other person or people involved in some way, and my absence will allow them to cut their losses and get on with making real friends and having a real life. I get this weird feeling of relief. Weird, because I usually miss the person or people and am saddened to be without them, a little more drab and empty. But relief, because I feel freed; the portion of my identity wrapped up in that relationship deflates and all its metaphorical lights go dim. It's been scrapped for parts, turned from active persona into mere information, leaving a whole bunch of emotional energy and mindspace unfettered and blank, ready to be filled with new selfparts. Whatever happened between those friends and me, the feeling seems to say, was just practice. Practice for them, in learning how to recognize not-real people and in future avoid forming unnecessary bonds with them. Practice for me, in learning how to trick people into thinking I'm real people so well that one day, maybe (yeah, right), it will stick.
Where does this belief, this fear, this creeping dread, this absolute certainty come from? I'm not sure. It's one of the central personality construction problems that I've been trying to get a handle on for years. I have some inarticulate belief, too deeply buried for conscious access, that says I'm not worth having as a friend, and anyone who mistakenly thinks I am is in for a world of disappointment. So I keep living out a stupid self-fulfilling prophecy whose origins are obscure to me and whose mechanisms I have yet to untangle from the rest of my personality.
The comforting thing about a blog is the invisible audience. In my mind, somewhere out there is an archetypal Perfect Reader who is even more interested than I am in the things I type, is in a perfect position to make good use of any insight I have, and is delighted by any creative work I manage to come up with. The Perfect Reader is of course completely passive. They have no thoughts or blog of their own, they never comment, they never point out my embarrassing craptasms. But they are always there, in the back of my mind, soaking up my every byte and thereby validating my existence. Giving me the boost that feedback from friends can provide, without the panic-inducing muddle of attempting to make, and keep, real friends.
Which is why over the past period of time I've been making an effort to get real readers. To dispel the myth from my mind, to keep me mindful of what it's like to write for real people. People with their own blogs, ideas, interests and fears. People who will say something when they have something they want to say, and won't when they don't.
The danger there, though, is the temptation to start pandering. Pandering accelerates the "fraud" feelings enormously. Just earlier today I caught myself going over past posts to see which ones generated the most comments. Maybe, I caught myself thinking, if I write more of the kinds of things that got people to comment in the past, maybe then they'll comment more in the future! But this is not the way I want to run my blog, or myself. Right now it is not a good thing for me to do. Because I would in fact be trying to turn my real readers into living, typing replicas of my imaginary Perfect Reader. In accordance with my stupid unconscious self-fulfilling prophecy.
In most circumstances, a person who's trying to give good value for their readers' time ought to be willing to present what they've got in a reader-friendly way. They know what they've got, they know what they're interested in and want to write about, they know who they are. All they need to do is take what they've got and make it really engaging and fun. By studying what other people will react to, a contributor can change the form and style of their contributions to maximize the kind of reactions the contributor most wants to get. If they do their job right, others who are interested in their topic will say "hey! that's the best source of XYZ I've seen in awhile, this person really understands XYZ and makes it fun, I'm going to get my XYZ here from now on."
However, I'm not yet at that point. Because in a sense, I don't even know what I have. Won't know, is maybe a better way to say it. Using just the rational, intellectual parts of my mind, I can rattle off a long list of interesting things I can contribute. But emotionally, I've got to fight against the certainty, the absolute conviction that the things I'm interested in are boring because I'm interested in them, the things I care about are useless because I care about them, the things I want to say are stupid because I say them.
So if I took all my cues from my readers, if I only blogged about things in the hope of getting comments on them, all I'd be doing is building a persona to match what I perceive to be my readers' desires. I wouldn't be taking the things I care about and presenting them to real people in hopes their interest would move them to validate my opinions. Instead, I would be using my perceptions of other people's interests to manipulate them into giving me the validation I crave. Everything I said might be from the heart, everything I wrote about might be something I'm genuinely interested in, but as far as my personality was concerned, it would still feel fraudulent. Would still be fraudulent. The distinction is subtle, but it is the difference between pandering and contribution, between concern and concern trolling, between asking for an opinion and fishing for a compliment.
Man. Keeping it real is hard.
Miercoles con los Amigos Invisibles vol. 14
"Today I was going to stop being so superstitious, but all the omens were bad."
With a few rewrites, maybe a concrete image, that could be a great sigquote.
Superstitions aren't the only beliefs I'm wrangling at the moment--they just happen to be the easiest to write about. The others aren't so much weird or esoteric as they are achingly self-referential. Such as: subtle changes to how I think about thinking about myself, or how I react to reacting to how others react to me. Each mildly different emotional state and social situation has its own whole set of parameters and needs its own finicky nudges. None of which, as a general rule, ever even get to the point where I consciously "think out loud" to describe what I'm doing. I just do it, and notice it only to the extent that it does or doesn't feel right, does or doesn't fit with the broad outline of my aims.
Thus, they would make really terrible reading. I would likely only confuse myself further if I were to attempt to describe the rebalancing of emotional forces that goes on when nudging a belief out of an old alignment. And if something I write is ever confusing to me, then I can be pretty sure that to other people it might as well be a picture of a bowl of squid chowder. Complete with smells!
All of the things on my list of superstitions have happened today. (Except for the bus one, which happened last night on my way home.) Which is very polite of the universe, riffling them all past me like flashcards so I can remember to forget them.
Except it isn't very polite of the universe, is it. Because reading motives into the perceived patterns of random event is...superstition! Man. Most of these things grew from emotionally satisfying hyperboly into de facto animism so gradually I hadn't even realized how bizarre some of them had gotten. D'you know how many times today I had to remind myself that file folders did not, in fact, feel sad and rejected when I chose to throw them in the recycle bin, to be replaced by newer, less wrinkly file folders? I had to actually think at myself, in the mental equivalent of the tone of voice used by sergeants to point out blindingly obvious things to privates who are standing more than twenty-five yards away, "Those are your emotions. You are projecting them. You don't need to do that."
What's going to be an equally interesting challenge is trying to pay an equal amount of attention to patterns of random events without trying to read meanings and motives into them. Unless the patterns came about as a direct consequence of the actions of a manifest being or beings, in which case the motives or indifference of those beings can be considered. Manifest in this case meaning a thing the existence of which is objectively provable. Which brings up all sort of interesting cases. Can a corporation be said to objectively exist? A religion? An academic "school of thought?"?
One of my favorite things to do when I'm bored is to imagine myself pontificating about something at a captive audience. The imaginary audience never speaks; I just imagine their shifting levels of approval, disapproval, bordeom, etc. In this case I was trying out different phrases of pithy advice on an imaginary young person (not pictured). Apart from the "bad omens" one above, this here was my favorite:
You are not finished--with anything!--until you reach the point where you have to throw everything away, and start again at the beginning.
With a few rewrites, maybe a concrete image, that could be a great sigquote.
Superstitions aren't the only beliefs I'm wrangling at the moment--they just happen to be the easiest to write about. The others aren't so much weird or esoteric as they are achingly self-referential. Such as: subtle changes to how I think about thinking about myself, or how I react to reacting to how others react to me. Each mildly different emotional state and social situation has its own whole set of parameters and needs its own finicky nudges. None of which, as a general rule, ever even get to the point where I consciously "think out loud" to describe what I'm doing. I just do it, and notice it only to the extent that it does or doesn't feel right, does or doesn't fit with the broad outline of my aims.
Thus, they would make really terrible reading. I would likely only confuse myself further if I were to attempt to describe the rebalancing of emotional forces that goes on when nudging a belief out of an old alignment. And if something I write is ever confusing to me, then I can be pretty sure that to other people it might as well be a picture of a bowl of squid chowder. Complete with smells!
All of the things on my list of superstitions have happened today. (Except for the bus one, which happened last night on my way home.) Which is very polite of the universe, riffling them all past me like flashcards so I can remember to forget them.
Except it isn't very polite of the universe, is it. Because reading motives into the perceived patterns of random event is...superstition! Man. Most of these things grew from emotionally satisfying hyperboly into de facto animism so gradually I hadn't even realized how bizarre some of them had gotten. D'you know how many times today I had to remind myself that file folders did not, in fact, feel sad and rejected when I chose to throw them in the recycle bin, to be replaced by newer, less wrinkly file folders? I had to actually think at myself, in the mental equivalent of the tone of voice used by sergeants to point out blindingly obvious things to privates who are standing more than twenty-five yards away, "Those are your emotions. You are projecting them. You don't need to do that."
What's going to be an equally interesting challenge is trying to pay an equal amount of attention to patterns of random events without trying to read meanings and motives into them. Unless the patterns came about as a direct consequence of the actions of a manifest being or beings, in which case the motives or indifference of those beings can be considered. Manifest in this case meaning a thing the existence of which is objectively provable. Which brings up all sort of interesting cases. Can a corporation be said to objectively exist? A religion? An academic "school of thought?"?
One of my favorite things to do when I'm bored is to imagine myself pontificating about something at a captive audience. The imaginary audience never speaks; I just imagine their shifting levels of approval, disapproval, bordeom, etc. In this case I was trying out different phrases of pithy advice on an imaginary young person (not pictured). Apart from the "bad omens" one above, this here was my favorite:
You are not finished--with anything!--until you reach the point where you have to throw everything away, and start again at the beginning.
Miercoles con los Amigos Invisibles vol. 13
Senor Burns, Senor Burns
con el corazon de pero
Senor Burns, Senor Burns
el diablo con dinero!
~that one Simpsons where the school strikes oil. may have gotten the words wrong!
should I
save myself
for later
or generously
give
and do
~Bjork
Saw a rabbit this morning. I said, "Hello, bunny." It just sat there warily as I walked past, which surprised me, since like all rabbits it looked as though it were ready to bolt into the underbrush at the slightest movement.
I sometimes think my dream logs might be the most entertaining things I put on this blog, because they are colorful and action-packed. Like reading a miniature short story with a plot that doesn't make sense, but characters and images which are shiny and leave a tasty residue in the brain.
Oh, a doozy of a dream last night. A doozy! Acts 2 and 3 would make a great movie plot.
However, in order for me to understand what this dream was trying to tell me, I needed the symbolic context provided by an earlier dream. Which, in backreading, it turns out I did not write down.
The earlier one, let's call it "the laser stadium dream":
Act one. My entourage and I were hurrying through the outer hallways of an enormous building which felt like a stadium. It was well-lit and bustling with people (not pictured), its walls made of grey stone. Visible through the occasional archway in the walls (or maybe I just knew what was going on in there through dreamovision?) was a central chamber, about the size of the United Center turned on its side. Maybe a little bigger. In it, partnered teams of humans and enormous, shiny magical beasties were taking turns singing and dancing together; the music was haunting and wonderful and the dances gyrated and pranced all through the empty space. I wanted very badly to go on in and take my turn. One of my entourage handed me a vibrantly-illustrated book, and as I looked through it I realized with a jolt that I had no idea what I/we were supposed to perform. "I don't know the words," I said, stricken. My entourage-person grabbed me by the hand and we took off, flying down the halls.
Act two. We flew up and up around many halls, ramps really, and the light and the color of the stone walls gradually shifted from cool grey to a warm light tan color, like afternoon sunlight on sandstone. At last we came to a square chamber, its walls and ceiling made of large blocks of the same color of stone. Lower down on the walls there were a few round ducts or tubes, one of which we had arrived through. Instead of a floor the walls stretched down into emptiness (not pictured). I was alone. There was a round window or portal, near the top of the wall at the front of the room. The warm light should have been shining through it into the room--and thence, I understood, down into the rest of the building. Instead, there was a complicated and nasty-looking metal device which exactly covered most of the window, and in front of the device a crossbeam of iron or charred wood ran across the length of the room. In the center of the device there was a small pinhole or lens, through which the sunlight captured by the device could be focused and pointed like a laser. I floated, or was gently pulled, down into one of the tubes, and rushed out of the floorless room back down into the building.
Act three. My entourage and I were sitting at a table in a large banquet hall behind the performance chamber in the stadium. Some other people were with us--I think they may have been fictional characters or representations of people I knew, but those details are gone from my memory. The hall was crowded; everyone was eating their meal and talking and mingling. I brought my attention back from looking around at the room, and saw that everyone else at my table had gotten up and wandered off. Then laser beams, three or four of them, fired down out of the ceiling, scoring the table in front of me. I was worried by how close I'd come to being hit, and also quite annoyed.
The symbolism in that dream has come to be very understandable to me as I've thought it over! What I am fond of calling "the machine in my brain", the issues I still have that are what remains of my craziness, are represented by the machine in the window in act 2. They take something that should be wholesome and joyous and make it into a weapon. A weapon which, more often than not, is something that endangers me and drives people away from me, or me from them. The proper use of the thing the machine is sitting on top of and evilly transforming would enable me to achieve some form of awesomeness that I desire very, very much.
As I fell asleep last night, I was contemplating in some detail about some personality-construction issues that have been bugging me. It is therefore most gratifying to me that my dream-making parts were able to represent the issues with which I am wrestling in the following way! I want to call this "the pointless dystopia dream (with monster)":
Act one. Some confusion of sequentiality here. My entourage and I were hanging out in a house. I had found a seal, or went out and found a seal, who was definitely my friend. It was a happy and playful fellow and didn't seem to mind having to waddle around on land. We went into the living room of the house or were already there. A dog was there, equally happy and playful as the seal, and also my friend. I sat down on the couch to play fetch with them, and wanted them to play with each other. I had some sort of toy that I would throw across the room; whichever animal reacted first ran over to the other end of the room, grabbed it, and carried it back to me, while the other animal sat in front of me feeling miffed. When they continued in this way even after I'd explained to them what I wanted (yes, dogs and seals in dreams can have things explained to them!) I became a little frustrated and vaguely confused.
Act two. Camera pulled way back. Lighting went from midday summery sunlight to temperate darkness and gloom. Same location, different process, that much was clear.
(Interesting thought occurs to me here. I never experience temperature in dreams; it can only be inferred from the quality of ambient light, or more obvious visual cues like snow or fire. Must read around to try and find out which parts of the brain one dreams with. I wonder if the lack of certain physical sensations like heat and cold are due to the same limitations that prevent your body from responding to physical movements you make while dreaming?)
Mr. Burns had either knocked down his own house, or realized that it had been knocked down. He grinned evilly and made imperious gestures, and as he did so, mazelike walls and ramparts and corridoors began constructing themselves. The structures expanded out and out in erratic patterns, to fill the entire landscape. The whole thing was made of plywood which had been inexpertly painted black, like the plain boxes theaters use to make rearrangeable sets. Only here the paint job was bad and the wood looked either flimsy or old or both. Myself and my entourage had to hide in the hollow spaces inside the walls and flee from the place's security guards. Since the place wasn't ours, of course, we didn't belong there and we didn't want to be caught. So the ending image of this act was of us in flight, certain that pursuers were only a step behind us.
Act three. Did not take any longer in subjective time than the previous acts, but was information-dense, so I've subdivided it into scenes!
Scene one. I fled into something like a junkyard or a car scrapyard, still with the feeling that my pursuer was gaining on me. After a few dodges and darts I found an unlocked car and threw myself into the back seat, landing on some crumpled-up plastic. The chief security guard got into the front seat. This was her car. For a single panicked moment I thought maybe if I crouched under the plastic and stayed very still she wouldn't see me. But then she gave me a look over her shoulder and a little smile, and I knew that me finding her unlocked car was exactly the plan.
She looked a bit like Annie Lennox:
only with heavier makeup and one of those old-fashioned police hats. Scary, but rather hot. (Gee whiz, I wonder what recurring dream character we have here? Grr. Whee!) More dreams or movies about dystopian futures should have such a chica as main antagonist!
Scene two. The car was now a tank. There was more light in the sky, and scenery existed in the background. She drove us over to the edge of the scrap yard, where it bordered on the woods, and I saw something like a small graveyard. I recognized it immediately as the graves of my fellow members of the resistance, kept there in (supposed) secret from the guards. The area with the burial plots in it was marked out from the bare dirt by a loose line of pale stones. Narrow pathways marked out in the same way meandered throught the area. Instead of names and dates, the graves were marked with gaudy headstones made of brightly-colored metal and plastic. Even though the paths were extremely narrow and the ground was difficult to see from inside the tank, the chief guard lady maneuvered along the paths with delicate precision, turning with slow care, so as not to disturb anything. I noticed this and realized it for a gesture of deep respect, as between honorable enemies at the end of a long campaign.
Scene three. We moved further out, to the edge of the woods. No longer had the sense of being in a vehicle. It was just about dawn. Behind us and to the right, beyond the scrap yard, a nearly-intact highway stretched out to the horizon. On our right plains and woods rolled out, with some steel-colored old water towers standing lonely in the distance, the paint on them faded beyond legibility. (The old-school shape, like a hat-wearing cup on stilts, not the kind that are all bulbous on top.) In front of us was a wide river, and immediately to our left was a pool of water with a weeping willow leaning out over it. I/we looked around at the river and further out to the woods and plains, and thought, Maybe anyone who was left [from the resistance, that is] fled out there, into the wilderness. Then a flock of pigeons exploded out of the trees, their flight patterns indicative of panic. You know how flocks of birds get all crazy-swirly when there's a bunch of flocks that don't normally fly together trying to share the same airspace? I didn't recognize it till I ran through the images in my mind just now, but that's where I'd seen that before. After the first flock of flocks, more came; the birds were fleeing from every direction except the one from which we had come. And I had the horrified thought: Plague. Here we'd been fighting each other for control, while out there in the wilderness there was coming something that wanted to totally destroy us.
Right on cue, a hideous behemoth came into view in the distance, lumbering down the highway, wide as four lanes of traffic all by itself.
I scrutinized it as best I could from afar. Didn't intend to stick around once it got near. Its basic body type, my brain had clearly gotten from the behemoths in Heroes IV (oh how I miss that game! and the broken laptop all my savegames are on!), but it was distorted or mutated way beyond that. Still had the grey fur and the lumpy physique. Instead of a face-shaped face, though, its head skewed over to one side, so that one eye would have had to be much bigger than the other. (Fortunately the small-eye side was the side facing us.) Its legs were small and stubby, almost vestigial, while its arms were freaking enormous, massive muscley claw-shaped hands nearly as long as the rest of its body. Between the arms and legs it had a mass of wavy tentacles instead of a proper front-of-torso. As it continued down the road towards the scrap yard I saw it (or perhaps another one like it?) glide through the air, using its tentacle mass as a kind of wings, so that its huge grasping hands looked like a giant scoop held out in front of it. It turned right as it came to the scrap yard, and upon closer inspection it didn't look so much like the behemoth as I'd thought.
My companion (not pictured) was now apparently carrying me by flapping with her wings; I could feel the action but was not paying attention to it yet.
The beast was headed towards the pond--not hunting us, just hunting. I looked down at the water and saw the silvery side of a fish, wide as my arm, turning just under the surface. My first thought was, Hey, a fish! Maybe we can catch it and eat it. But then it kept turning and turning--eight feet long, I thought--and I realized no fish could be that long and the still same width all the way down. The idea disturbed me and I discarded any notion of possibly trying to eat OR catch whatever it was. We hovered back away from the bank as the beast approached; it passed next to the tree, brushing back the lower branches as it went by. (This was a very tall tree.) It hitched itself over, with something like a very graceful full-body shrug, so that it could lower itself into the water tentacles down. Seen up close, it was obvious to me that it was also a kind of squid, and its tentacles up close looked a lot more like fish than like part of a furry beast. Long, silvery fish.
Just then, I could feel that the wings that kept us hovering over the surface of the water were laboring harder, that we were slowly beginning to sink towards the water.
At the thought of even touching the surface of a pond with two of those fearsome beasts in it, I felt that old familiar, "well, fuck this!" feeling surge up inside of me, and woke up.
So it'll take me some time to sort out all the symbols in there, but there are some things I can say right off the bat.
The little girl character has become a woman! No longer just an unpredictable young woman whom I love dearly and fear passionately. Now she is a sexy commandant who tricks me into the back of her vehicle, honors my fallen, and then warns me of oncoming peril which endangers us both. Oo yeah. That kicks so much ass.
Mr. Burns is me again. This is like the fourth or fifth time that an active mode entered into by my conscious personality has been represented in a dream by a male cartoon character. The flimsy dingy gloomy maze probably represents a mental state. Of, well, gloomy brooding with undertones of panic. Maybe I turn into male cartoon characters when I do things that are stupid, selfish or immature? That would make sense.
The dog and seal are an interesting image. Tentatively I'd interpret them to be the conscious and unconscious sides of my hat. The dog would represent the conscious side because it is a land creature and because it was already in the house. The seal would then be the unconscious side, because it is an underwater creature and because I just recently became friends with it. So they'll each play with me, but not with each other, and each feels sort of pouty when I pay more attention to the other one than to it. Oy vey. At least they are both friends with me, though!
Yeah, the behemoth squid thing was scary-looking. But the threat it presented was potential, avoidable, rather than immediate and certain. Like keeping an eye on the wasp in the room. All the cues point to it being something not originating from within my personality, as well, which makes it a little easier to be alert against it. Whatever it represents.
What I find most interesting from a dream tech standpoint was the car/tank/graveyard/flapping bird wings thing. Okay. We already postulate that the "wilderness" represented the world of mental experience outside my personality; behemoth came from there, I don't have that many flocks of pigeons in me, etc. Which means that act three, scene one up there either represented (if I was not traveling or there's no such thing) or was (if I can and was) me and my invisibler half moving to, and then across, the boundary between my personality and whatever's right next to it in whatever part of the world we all go to when we dream. Which, assuming the second thing, suggests several items of tech.
Item the first, sexy scary chick is the person/represents the aspect of me who/which has the ability to direct energy extensions out of my personality. Textev: car belongs to her. Car becomes tank as we approach boundary. Once we cross the boundary, the tank becomes unmanifested, implying that what feels big and bulky when on the inside is like a minimal requirement for movement on the outside.
Item the second, what I refer to as "my entourage" in dreams, whoever or whatever they are, are not of use or do not manifest separately from me when outside my personality. This is the meaning of the graveyard scene. Now, I don't take that scene to mean they are dead or disempowered or whatever. I would be very surprised if they were absent from my next dream. Rather, I think it is location and function-dependent. Like in the card game Magic, when a creature you had in play is put into the graveyard, that doesn't mean it's no longer a factor in the game. There are spells that can bring cards out of the graveyard, shuffle them back into your deck, or that simply act differently when certain things are in your graveyard. So the term, and the image, are pretty fluid for me. But the whole no-entourage-outside-the-ego-boundary implication is pretty unambiguous.
Item the third. This is not a conclusion, only a suspicion. I have seen dream-beasties before which resemble the behemoth squid monster. For lack of a better word, an organism/idea/experience of the sort represented by that dream image is the sort of creature I do refer to as a demon.
(I've talked about this before and at length, but to recap a bit. In common parlance, demons and angels are like anthropomorphized quanta of moral energy under direct control of either god or the devil. According to that system, only the direct (god speaketh!) or indirect (I speaketh in the name of god with his/her permission!) intervention by one of the two ultrapowers will affect their behavior. In my personal made-up lexicon, demons and angels are either A. organisms which don't have bodies, B. memeplexes which seem to behave organically, or C. there is no difference between the two descriptions. Which means they can be treated like organisms; communicated with, befriended/tamed, chased away, eaten etc. My favorite is C, by the way.)
So then. What if, when a thing like our friend Uglybuns over there gets inside a personality but doesn't actually subsume it, part of it can turn into something like the laser-window machine from the laser stadium dream? Like a...hell, hard to think of a good metaphor for this one. Like if a lion tried to gouge out your guts, maybe, and while you were fighting it off a piece of claw got lodged in your small intestine, so that from then on all the food you digested had to move around it, so you got fed more slowly and had diarrhea no matter how much you ate?
Okay, that metaphor sucks. I'm usually better at metaphors. But, dangit, at least half of being good at metaphors is being able to notice when two things resemble one another, even (or especially) in a totally non-obvious way. And those two things did, some way or another, even though I can't possibly show them to you because my brain assembled them out of bits and pieces of sense-memory and shoved them into my dreams to try and get me to pay attention to parts of my personality that need fixin'.
Peter Carroll once wrote something to the effect that even a small ability to change oneself is greatly preferable to a large, impressive ability to perform useless parlor tricks. So even though my metaphorical analysis is gappy as of yet, the goals they describe are clear to me. Metaphorically speaking: I must get to be on even better terms with this dream lady with the too much eye makeup, and/or convince my dog and seal that they really can get along, even if the one doesn't swim too good and the other finds walking a chore. Then I will perhaps open up several new, improved avenues by which to be able to change myself into someone even more fun to be around!
Then, not only will imaginary lava want to be my friend, so will other people maybe! Teeheehee! *tents fingers and tries vainly not to giggle*
That means, "I'm not crazy anymore"--in my made-up space language.
~ Saturday Night Live, one of the Jeopardy sketches
Ach, time to go home from work.
con el corazon de pero
Senor Burns, Senor Burns
el diablo con dinero!
~that one Simpsons where the school strikes oil. may have gotten the words wrong!
should I
save myself
for later
or generously
give
and do
~Bjork
Saw a rabbit this morning. I said, "Hello, bunny." It just sat there warily as I walked past, which surprised me, since like all rabbits it looked as though it were ready to bolt into the underbrush at the slightest movement.
I sometimes think my dream logs might be the most entertaining things I put on this blog, because they are colorful and action-packed. Like reading a miniature short story with a plot that doesn't make sense, but characters and images which are shiny and leave a tasty residue in the brain.
Oh, a doozy of a dream last night. A doozy! Acts 2 and 3 would make a great movie plot.
However, in order for me to understand what this dream was trying to tell me, I needed the symbolic context provided by an earlier dream. Which, in backreading, it turns out I did not write down.
The earlier one, let's call it "the laser stadium dream":
Act one. My entourage and I were hurrying through the outer hallways of an enormous building which felt like a stadium. It was well-lit and bustling with people (not pictured), its walls made of grey stone. Visible through the occasional archway in the walls (or maybe I just knew what was going on in there through dreamovision?) was a central chamber, about the size of the United Center turned on its side. Maybe a little bigger. In it, partnered teams of humans and enormous, shiny magical beasties were taking turns singing and dancing together; the music was haunting and wonderful and the dances gyrated and pranced all through the empty space. I wanted very badly to go on in and take my turn. One of my entourage handed me a vibrantly-illustrated book, and as I looked through it I realized with a jolt that I had no idea what I/we were supposed to perform. "I don't know the words," I said, stricken. My entourage-person grabbed me by the hand and we took off, flying down the halls.
Act two. We flew up and up around many halls, ramps really, and the light and the color of the stone walls gradually shifted from cool grey to a warm light tan color, like afternoon sunlight on sandstone. At last we came to a square chamber, its walls and ceiling made of large blocks of the same color of stone. Lower down on the walls there were a few round ducts or tubes, one of which we had arrived through. Instead of a floor the walls stretched down into emptiness (not pictured). I was alone. There was a round window or portal, near the top of the wall at the front of the room. The warm light should have been shining through it into the room--and thence, I understood, down into the rest of the building. Instead, there was a complicated and nasty-looking metal device which exactly covered most of the window, and in front of the device a crossbeam of iron or charred wood ran across the length of the room. In the center of the device there was a small pinhole or lens, through which the sunlight captured by the device could be focused and pointed like a laser. I floated, or was gently pulled, down into one of the tubes, and rushed out of the floorless room back down into the building.
Act three. My entourage and I were sitting at a table in a large banquet hall behind the performance chamber in the stadium. Some other people were with us--I think they may have been fictional characters or representations of people I knew, but those details are gone from my memory. The hall was crowded; everyone was eating their meal and talking and mingling. I brought my attention back from looking around at the room, and saw that everyone else at my table had gotten up and wandered off. Then laser beams, three or four of them, fired down out of the ceiling, scoring the table in front of me. I was worried by how close I'd come to being hit, and also quite annoyed.
The symbolism in that dream has come to be very understandable to me as I've thought it over! What I am fond of calling "the machine in my brain", the issues I still have that are what remains of my craziness, are represented by the machine in the window in act 2. They take something that should be wholesome and joyous and make it into a weapon. A weapon which, more often than not, is something that endangers me and drives people away from me, or me from them. The proper use of the thing the machine is sitting on top of and evilly transforming would enable me to achieve some form of awesomeness that I desire very, very much.
As I fell asleep last night, I was contemplating in some detail about some personality-construction issues that have been bugging me. It is therefore most gratifying to me that my dream-making parts were able to represent the issues with which I am wrestling in the following way! I want to call this "the pointless dystopia dream (with monster)":
Act one. Some confusion of sequentiality here. My entourage and I were hanging out in a house. I had found a seal, or went out and found a seal, who was definitely my friend. It was a happy and playful fellow and didn't seem to mind having to waddle around on land. We went into the living room of the house or were already there. A dog was there, equally happy and playful as the seal, and also my friend. I sat down on the couch to play fetch with them, and wanted them to play with each other. I had some sort of toy that I would throw across the room; whichever animal reacted first ran over to the other end of the room, grabbed it, and carried it back to me, while the other animal sat in front of me feeling miffed. When they continued in this way even after I'd explained to them what I wanted (yes, dogs and seals in dreams can have things explained to them!) I became a little frustrated and vaguely confused.
Act two. Camera pulled way back. Lighting went from midday summery sunlight to temperate darkness and gloom. Same location, different process, that much was clear.
(Interesting thought occurs to me here. I never experience temperature in dreams; it can only be inferred from the quality of ambient light, or more obvious visual cues like snow or fire. Must read around to try and find out which parts of the brain one dreams with. I wonder if the lack of certain physical sensations like heat and cold are due to the same limitations that prevent your body from responding to physical movements you make while dreaming?)
Mr. Burns had either knocked down his own house, or realized that it had been knocked down. He grinned evilly and made imperious gestures, and as he did so, mazelike walls and ramparts and corridoors began constructing themselves. The structures expanded out and out in erratic patterns, to fill the entire landscape. The whole thing was made of plywood which had been inexpertly painted black, like the plain boxes theaters use to make rearrangeable sets. Only here the paint job was bad and the wood looked either flimsy or old or both. Myself and my entourage had to hide in the hollow spaces inside the walls and flee from the place's security guards. Since the place wasn't ours, of course, we didn't belong there and we didn't want to be caught. So the ending image of this act was of us in flight, certain that pursuers were only a step behind us.
Act three. Did not take any longer in subjective time than the previous acts, but was information-dense, so I've subdivided it into scenes!
Scene one. I fled into something like a junkyard or a car scrapyard, still with the feeling that my pursuer was gaining on me. After a few dodges and darts I found an unlocked car and threw myself into the back seat, landing on some crumpled-up plastic. The chief security guard got into the front seat. This was her car. For a single panicked moment I thought maybe if I crouched under the plastic and stayed very still she wouldn't see me. But then she gave me a look over her shoulder and a little smile, and I knew that me finding her unlocked car was exactly the plan.
She looked a bit like Annie Lennox:
only with heavier makeup and one of those old-fashioned police hats. Scary, but rather hot. (Gee whiz, I wonder what recurring dream character we have here? Grr. Whee!) More dreams or movies about dystopian futures should have such a chica as main antagonist!
Scene two. The car was now a tank. There was more light in the sky, and scenery existed in the background. She drove us over to the edge of the scrap yard, where it bordered on the woods, and I saw something like a small graveyard. I recognized it immediately as the graves of my fellow members of the resistance, kept there in (supposed) secret from the guards. The area with the burial plots in it was marked out from the bare dirt by a loose line of pale stones. Narrow pathways marked out in the same way meandered throught the area. Instead of names and dates, the graves were marked with gaudy headstones made of brightly-colored metal and plastic. Even though the paths were extremely narrow and the ground was difficult to see from inside the tank, the chief guard lady maneuvered along the paths with delicate precision, turning with slow care, so as not to disturb anything. I noticed this and realized it for a gesture of deep respect, as between honorable enemies at the end of a long campaign.
Scene three. We moved further out, to the edge of the woods. No longer had the sense of being in a vehicle. It was just about dawn. Behind us and to the right, beyond the scrap yard, a nearly-intact highway stretched out to the horizon. On our right plains and woods rolled out, with some steel-colored old water towers standing lonely in the distance, the paint on them faded beyond legibility. (The old-school shape, like a hat-wearing cup on stilts, not the kind that are all bulbous on top.) In front of us was a wide river, and immediately to our left was a pool of water with a weeping willow leaning out over it. I/we looked around at the river and further out to the woods and plains, and thought, Maybe anyone who was left [from the resistance, that is] fled out there, into the wilderness. Then a flock of pigeons exploded out of the trees, their flight patterns indicative of panic. You know how flocks of birds get all crazy-swirly when there's a bunch of flocks that don't normally fly together trying to share the same airspace? I didn't recognize it till I ran through the images in my mind just now, but that's where I'd seen that before. After the first flock of flocks, more came; the birds were fleeing from every direction except the one from which we had come. And I had the horrified thought: Plague. Here we'd been fighting each other for control, while out there in the wilderness there was coming something that wanted to totally destroy us.
Right on cue, a hideous behemoth came into view in the distance, lumbering down the highway, wide as four lanes of traffic all by itself.
I scrutinized it as best I could from afar. Didn't intend to stick around once it got near. Its basic body type, my brain had clearly gotten from the behemoths in Heroes IV (oh how I miss that game! and the broken laptop all my savegames are on!), but it was distorted or mutated way beyond that. Still had the grey fur and the lumpy physique. Instead of a face-shaped face, though, its head skewed over to one side, so that one eye would have had to be much bigger than the other. (Fortunately the small-eye side was the side facing us.) Its legs were small and stubby, almost vestigial, while its arms were freaking enormous, massive muscley claw-shaped hands nearly as long as the rest of its body. Between the arms and legs it had a mass of wavy tentacles instead of a proper front-of-torso. As it continued down the road towards the scrap yard I saw it (or perhaps another one like it?) glide through the air, using its tentacle mass as a kind of wings, so that its huge grasping hands looked like a giant scoop held out in front of it. It turned right as it came to the scrap yard, and upon closer inspection it didn't look so much like the behemoth as I'd thought.
My companion (not pictured) was now apparently carrying me by flapping with her wings; I could feel the action but was not paying attention to it yet.
The beast was headed towards the pond--not hunting us, just hunting. I looked down at the water and saw the silvery side of a fish, wide as my arm, turning just under the surface. My first thought was, Hey, a fish! Maybe we can catch it and eat it. But then it kept turning and turning--eight feet long, I thought--and I realized no fish could be that long and the still same width all the way down. The idea disturbed me and I discarded any notion of possibly trying to eat OR catch whatever it was. We hovered back away from the bank as the beast approached; it passed next to the tree, brushing back the lower branches as it went by. (This was a very tall tree.) It hitched itself over, with something like a very graceful full-body shrug, so that it could lower itself into the water tentacles down. Seen up close, it was obvious to me that it was also a kind of squid, and its tentacles up close looked a lot more like fish than like part of a furry beast. Long, silvery fish.
Just then, I could feel that the wings that kept us hovering over the surface of the water were laboring harder, that we were slowly beginning to sink towards the water.
At the thought of even touching the surface of a pond with two of those fearsome beasts in it, I felt that old familiar, "well, fuck this!" feeling surge up inside of me, and woke up.
So it'll take me some time to sort out all the symbols in there, but there are some things I can say right off the bat.
The little girl character has become a woman! No longer just an unpredictable young woman whom I love dearly and fear passionately. Now she is a sexy commandant who tricks me into the back of her vehicle, honors my fallen, and then warns me of oncoming peril which endangers us both. Oo yeah. That kicks so much ass.
Mr. Burns is me again. This is like the fourth or fifth time that an active mode entered into by my conscious personality has been represented in a dream by a male cartoon character. The flimsy dingy gloomy maze probably represents a mental state. Of, well, gloomy brooding with undertones of panic. Maybe I turn into male cartoon characters when I do things that are stupid, selfish or immature? That would make sense.
The dog and seal are an interesting image. Tentatively I'd interpret them to be the conscious and unconscious sides of my hat. The dog would represent the conscious side because it is a land creature and because it was already in the house. The seal would then be the unconscious side, because it is an underwater creature and because I just recently became friends with it. So they'll each play with me, but not with each other, and each feels sort of pouty when I pay more attention to the other one than to it. Oy vey. At least they are both friends with me, though!
Yeah, the behemoth squid thing was scary-looking. But the threat it presented was potential, avoidable, rather than immediate and certain. Like keeping an eye on the wasp in the room. All the cues point to it being something not originating from within my personality, as well, which makes it a little easier to be alert against it. Whatever it represents.
What I find most interesting from a dream tech standpoint was the car/tank/graveyard/flapping bird wings thing. Okay. We already postulate that the "wilderness" represented the world of mental experience outside my personality; behemoth came from there, I don't have that many flocks of pigeons in me, etc. Which means that act three, scene one up there either represented (if I was not traveling or there's no such thing) or was (if I can and was) me and my invisibler half moving to, and then across, the boundary between my personality and whatever's right next to it in whatever part of the world we all go to when we dream. Which, assuming the second thing, suggests several items of tech.
Item the first, sexy scary chick is the person/represents the aspect of me who/which has the ability to direct energy extensions out of my personality. Textev: car belongs to her. Car becomes tank as we approach boundary. Once we cross the boundary, the tank becomes unmanifested, implying that what feels big and bulky when on the inside is like a minimal requirement for movement on the outside.
Item the second, what I refer to as "my entourage" in dreams, whoever or whatever they are, are not of use or do not manifest separately from me when outside my personality. This is the meaning of the graveyard scene. Now, I don't take that scene to mean they are dead or disempowered or whatever. I would be very surprised if they were absent from my next dream. Rather, I think it is location and function-dependent. Like in the card game Magic, when a creature you had in play is put into the graveyard, that doesn't mean it's no longer a factor in the game. There are spells that can bring cards out of the graveyard, shuffle them back into your deck, or that simply act differently when certain things are in your graveyard. So the term, and the image, are pretty fluid for me. But the whole no-entourage-outside-the-ego-boundary implication is pretty unambiguous.
Item the third. This is not a conclusion, only a suspicion. I have seen dream-beasties before which resemble the behemoth squid monster. For lack of a better word, an organism/idea/experience of the sort represented by that dream image is the sort of creature I do refer to as a demon.
(I've talked about this before and at length, but to recap a bit. In common parlance, demons and angels are like anthropomorphized quanta of moral energy under direct control of either god or the devil. According to that system, only the direct (god speaketh!) or indirect (I speaketh in the name of god with his/her permission!) intervention by one of the two ultrapowers will affect their behavior. In my personal made-up lexicon, demons and angels are either A. organisms which don't have bodies, B. memeplexes which seem to behave organically, or C. there is no difference between the two descriptions. Which means they can be treated like organisms; communicated with, befriended/tamed, chased away, eaten etc. My favorite is C, by the way.)
So then. What if, when a thing like our friend Uglybuns over there gets inside a personality but doesn't actually subsume it, part of it can turn into something like the laser-window machine from the laser stadium dream? Like a...hell, hard to think of a good metaphor for this one. Like if a lion tried to gouge out your guts, maybe, and while you were fighting it off a piece of claw got lodged in your small intestine, so that from then on all the food you digested had to move around it, so you got fed more slowly and had diarrhea no matter how much you ate?
Okay, that metaphor sucks. I'm usually better at metaphors. But, dangit, at least half of being good at metaphors is being able to notice when two things resemble one another, even (or especially) in a totally non-obvious way. And those two things did, some way or another, even though I can't possibly show them to you because my brain assembled them out of bits and pieces of sense-memory and shoved them into my dreams to try and get me to pay attention to parts of my personality that need fixin'.
Peter Carroll once wrote something to the effect that even a small ability to change oneself is greatly preferable to a large, impressive ability to perform useless parlor tricks. So even though my metaphorical analysis is gappy as of yet, the goals they describe are clear to me. Metaphorically speaking: I must get to be on even better terms with this dream lady with the too much eye makeup, and/or convince my dog and seal that they really can get along, even if the one doesn't swim too good and the other finds walking a chore. Then I will perhaps open up several new, improved avenues by which to be able to change myself into someone even more fun to be around!
Then, not only will imaginary lava want to be my friend, so will other people maybe! Teeheehee! *tents fingers and tries vainly not to giggle*
That means, "I'm not crazy anymore"--in my made-up space language.
~ Saturday Night Live, one of the Jeopardy sketches
Ach, time to go home from work.
Miercoles con los Amigos Invisibles vol. 11
[This Wednesdays unintentionally left blank. If ever I figure out what I originally meant to write about on this particular Wednesday, I will do it. Otherwise, enjoy the brevity.]
Miercoles con los Amigos Invisibles vol. 10
Last night, I had a dream from which I remembered only one scene. This lasted about twenty subjective seconds.
I and my allies (not pictured) were standing in front of the entrance to our place.
Our place felt like a combination of two types of location. Firstly, a mine, but one where the shaft extends horizontally into the rock of a hillside rather than vertically down underground. Secondly, a high-tech scientific facility of the sort where special security protocols control entry and exit.
A stranger came up to us. His intent was hostile, and he wore a full-face gas mask, of the sort that has goggles to cover the eyes and two air filters jutting out to either side of the mouth, all mounted on a rubber mask. He was wearing something like a battered, grayish-black jumpsuit. I was aware that he was about to release a toxin into the air, and turned towards the entrance as if to go inside. The others present remained where they were standing. Instead of going inside, I turned back to inspect the stranger and his gas mask. There was a small LCD screen mounted on the front of the mask, which I had previously not noticed. I studied the screen more closely. Words scrolled across it, and I read them. Just as I began to comprehend what I had read, a puff of soot or smoke exploded into the air around me. This was the toxic attack I had known the stranger brought. I knew I was breathing the cloud in, had been exposed to it because I had not gone inside. I found myself unable to breathe and woke up in a sudden panic.
I returned to this image several times throughout the day, but didn't feel especially like writing it down. Now I do.
Yesterday I did indeed take off work to go see a doctor about my throat. As I mentioned in today's earlier post, it was the doctor's opinion that I have acute pharyngitis. He prescribed penicillin, which I was able to pick up at the pharmacy after work today.
In the interests of honesty, I did smoke a total of five unfiltered cigarettes today, in addition to what I smoked when I got home from the pharmacy. This doubtless aggravated my throat and lung situation. In the past couple of weeks that I've been feeling bad, such behavior has been known to irritate my lung tissues to the point where breathing becomes painful and requires greater than normal effort for a time.
However, when I took my first penicillin this evening, it got stuck in my esophagus about halfway down. My neck and upper chest began to tighten up and developed a burning sensation. I became dizzy. My left trapezius is normally tight and somewhat sore, but that and my neck just above the collarbone feel as though someone has grabbed them. Someone who occasionally squeezes.
The first thing I did, of course, was panic. I suppose I haven't got much of a handle on panic after all. I attempted to extricate the pill from my stomach. Due to both the large quantities of liquids I had consumed in order to swallow it and my unfamiliarity with the procedure, this attempt was not successful. Dave and I briefly discussed a return to the emergency room. I then had the bright idea to call mom and ask her if I am, in fact, allergic to penicillin. As a child, she informed me, I had not been so. Which was a very great relief to me. When I went on to describe my symptoms in more detail, she allowed there was a possibility I'd developed a sensitivity to penicillin in recent years. If so, a Benadryl or Claritin might help. Her recommendation was that I call one of my aunts, both of whom are nurses, if I still got worse after that. Dave also pointed out, once I was off the phone, that penicillin tends to forcefully drive bacteria out of infected tisues, and this movement may account for some others of my symptoms.
It's been almost an hour since I took that damn Claritin. I've been typing this post almost the entire time. My symptoms are nearly unchanged, though a back rub from Dave and the relaxation of some back, shoulder and neck muscles provided temporary relief. And irony of ironies, I want a cigarette ever so much.
In all my reviews of the remembered dream scene, I could never recall the words I read on the LCD screen or even the sense of them. Ah, if only it had read "don't take the penicillin" and I'd also remembered it. That would have saved me a bad time. But I am sure my unconscious uses the symbol of the act of reading in a different, less direct way. Reading and eating may actually be similar symbols in my lexicon.
[Here I attempt to smoke that cigarette I want so much. When this proves unwise, I go to sit under a hot shower for half an hour. I emerge, clad in Dave's bathrobe, obtain spicy chicken soup, and return here.]
In fact the last time I read anything in a dream, it was a document, delivered in a case which also contained a condom, sealed with an angry red circle. This was the dream where I fought stormtroopers and later sneaked out posing as one of them. (I was a jet trooper, and stayed close to the ceiling. Memories of Battlefront II influenced that image for sure.) Which dream occurred a day or so before that unpleasant Saturday during busy season when I left work early to go to the hospital. Where after many hours and (dismayingly expensive) tests they discovered the small ovarian cyst which, while painful, is not actually a long-term threat to my health.
I backread a bit just now, and that was one of the ones I didn't log. I wonder if there is a correlation between the logging of dreams and the occurrence of the events they represent. Here we have two unlogged dreams in which I had read a threatening document. Shortly after each I was diagnosed with a medical condition to which the dream symbols surrounding the text I read bear a notable relationship. But this speculation goes too far towards an assertion of correlation and the following attempt to determine if a causal relationship exists. Way ahead of myself there.
The boldest hypothesis I am willing to put forth at this time is this. My body and all its systems are connected to my brain. My unconscious mind has greater access to the data contained in these systems than my conscious mind. When there is an urgent problem with my physical systems, my unconscious mind may be able to represent some of this information in the form of a dream. Proper interpretation of such dreams may enable me to seek proper medical care more promptly when it is needed or determine when it may not be needed with greater confidence.
I go now to attempt rest or sleep if such are possible. May all be well, me included.
I and my allies (not pictured) were standing in front of the entrance to our place.
Our place felt like a combination of two types of location. Firstly, a mine, but one where the shaft extends horizontally into the rock of a hillside rather than vertically down underground. Secondly, a high-tech scientific facility of the sort where special security protocols control entry and exit.
A stranger came up to us. His intent was hostile, and he wore a full-face gas mask, of the sort that has goggles to cover the eyes and two air filters jutting out to either side of the mouth, all mounted on a rubber mask. He was wearing something like a battered, grayish-black jumpsuit. I was aware that he was about to release a toxin into the air, and turned towards the entrance as if to go inside. The others present remained where they were standing. Instead of going inside, I turned back to inspect the stranger and his gas mask. There was a small LCD screen mounted on the front of the mask, which I had previously not noticed. I studied the screen more closely. Words scrolled across it, and I read them. Just as I began to comprehend what I had read, a puff of soot or smoke exploded into the air around me. This was the toxic attack I had known the stranger brought. I knew I was breathing the cloud in, had been exposed to it because I had not gone inside. I found myself unable to breathe and woke up in a sudden panic.
I returned to this image several times throughout the day, but didn't feel especially like writing it down. Now I do.
Yesterday I did indeed take off work to go see a doctor about my throat. As I mentioned in today's earlier post, it was the doctor's opinion that I have acute pharyngitis. He prescribed penicillin, which I was able to pick up at the pharmacy after work today.
In the interests of honesty, I did smoke a total of five unfiltered cigarettes today, in addition to what I smoked when I got home from the pharmacy. This doubtless aggravated my throat and lung situation. In the past couple of weeks that I've been feeling bad, such behavior has been known to irritate my lung tissues to the point where breathing becomes painful and requires greater than normal effort for a time.
However, when I took my first penicillin this evening, it got stuck in my esophagus about halfway down. My neck and upper chest began to tighten up and developed a burning sensation. I became dizzy. My left trapezius is normally tight and somewhat sore, but that and my neck just above the collarbone feel as though someone has grabbed them. Someone who occasionally squeezes.
The first thing I did, of course, was panic. I suppose I haven't got much of a handle on panic after all. I attempted to extricate the pill from my stomach. Due to both the large quantities of liquids I had consumed in order to swallow it and my unfamiliarity with the procedure, this attempt was not successful. Dave and I briefly discussed a return to the emergency room. I then had the bright idea to call mom and ask her if I am, in fact, allergic to penicillin. As a child, she informed me, I had not been so. Which was a very great relief to me. When I went on to describe my symptoms in more detail, she allowed there was a possibility I'd developed a sensitivity to penicillin in recent years. If so, a Benadryl or Claritin might help. Her recommendation was that I call one of my aunts, both of whom are nurses, if I still got worse after that. Dave also pointed out, once I was off the phone, that penicillin tends to forcefully drive bacteria out of infected tisues, and this movement may account for some others of my symptoms.
It's been almost an hour since I took that damn Claritin. I've been typing this post almost the entire time. My symptoms are nearly unchanged, though a back rub from Dave and the relaxation of some back, shoulder and neck muscles provided temporary relief. And irony of ironies, I want a cigarette ever so much.
In all my reviews of the remembered dream scene, I could never recall the words I read on the LCD screen or even the sense of them. Ah, if only it had read "don't take the penicillin" and I'd also remembered it. That would have saved me a bad time. But I am sure my unconscious uses the symbol of the act of reading in a different, less direct way. Reading and eating may actually be similar symbols in my lexicon.
[Here I attempt to smoke that cigarette I want so much. When this proves unwise, I go to sit under a hot shower for half an hour. I emerge, clad in Dave's bathrobe, obtain spicy chicken soup, and return here.]
In fact the last time I read anything in a dream, it was a document, delivered in a case which also contained a condom, sealed with an angry red circle. This was the dream where I fought stormtroopers and later sneaked out posing as one of them. (I was a jet trooper, and stayed close to the ceiling. Memories of Battlefront II influenced that image for sure.) Which dream occurred a day or so before that unpleasant Saturday during busy season when I left work early to go to the hospital. Where after many hours and (dismayingly expensive) tests they discovered the small ovarian cyst which, while painful, is not actually a long-term threat to my health.
I backread a bit just now, and that was one of the ones I didn't log. I wonder if there is a correlation between the logging of dreams and the occurrence of the events they represent. Here we have two unlogged dreams in which I had read a threatening document. Shortly after each I was diagnosed with a medical condition to which the dream symbols surrounding the text I read bear a notable relationship. But this speculation goes too far towards an assertion of correlation and the following attempt to determine if a causal relationship exists. Way ahead of myself there.
The boldest hypothesis I am willing to put forth at this time is this. My body and all its systems are connected to my brain. My unconscious mind has greater access to the data contained in these systems than my conscious mind. When there is an urgent problem with my physical systems, my unconscious mind may be able to represent some of this information in the form of a dream. Proper interpretation of such dreams may enable me to seek proper medical care more promptly when it is needed or determine when it may not be needed with greater confidence.
I go now to attempt rest or sleep if such are possible. May all be well, me included.
Miércoles con los Amigos Invisibles special edition: Categories!
Categorizing things is a great hobby of mine.
The thoughts I had in my last post I can categorize as at least partially the result of panicky feelings. Amber and Pearl are still my awesome sisters and we still have a great sister thing going. I have faith in Dave and he in me and both of us in us. And I don't have to get any closer or truthier with Mom than I deem necessary. So there, panicky feelings! :P
I started out wanting to make this post about me and the everlasting Dave's categories for music. They don't have to do with sound or production methods. Rather, they describe the emotional tone the music-maker is aiming to produce.
The categories, as I recall them, are:
Rock
Funk
Soul
Smug
A musical group will have differing proportions of these qualities. The Waterboys, for example, have an enormous proportion of Soul (which may also be called Spirituality) and a respectable amount of Rock as well. Soul Coughing is almost entirely Funk (which may also be called Groove), but they have quite a bit of Smug and certainly some Rock. They Might Be Giants are more Smug than anything else.
This relates, in my mind, to the four qualities of poetry and lyric I learned about in college. These are:
Story
Word-musicality
Meter
Rhyme
Word-musicality is tough to explain, unless perhaps you've listened to a lot of Mike Doughty. The man oozes it. You can't even speak the phrase "buddha rhubarb butter" without experiencing a taste of the Funk. It IS different from rhyme, and for beginning poets a lot of times the focus on rhyme strips word-musicality and tosses it right out the window with the bathwater. My weakest category is story. Meter is probably my strongest--though given how I feel about categories, that shouldn't be too much of a surprise.
You might say it's an obsession, but obsessions I think tend to be more overt and specific. (See? Categorizing even now.) You could go so far as to call it a trait or a characteristic. I am a poet and a lyricist, which one doesn't usually associate with the sort of mentality that wants to put everything in a neat little cubbyhole. Or with someone who self-identifies as a Discordian for no externally discernible reason.
My attitude is this. I am essentially a cautious, even fearful person. Everything in the world is alive. (Always start there. Saves time when you later discover signs of life in a particular pattern, object or postulated entity.) Anything that lives has the power to choose, in other words, the power to change its mind. Which makes the world a place of extreme uncertainty, in which literally anything can happen at any time. All that is necessary for any wild and unthinkable event to take place is for many, many living creatures, all at once, some knowable and others--if only for reasons of time--unknowable, to change their minds.
So it is necessary to make one's way in a bizarre and chaotic universe governed by the whims of uncountable, ineffable beings. Some of whom borrow your pen and talk about the weather with you and would laugh at the idea that they are, in fact, ineffable beings actively involved in the continual creation of the mysterious universe.
My solution to this is to get to know all the people and things around me in a friendly sort of way. Because, according to my theories on trust and friendship, when you are friends with someone and they with you, you grow to understand them. Parts of who you are become similar enough to parts of who they are that you can imagine how they might feel about things, how they might be moved to choose for themselves. Though trust, you can get an idea of how and why a being is likely to change his, her or its mind. You come somewhat to understand what moves and shakes them, what changes their world and how the world changes around them.
Then--and here's the beauty part--you can take everything that isn't that, and stuff it in neat little boxes with word-labels on them. What is a being's religion is sacred to them, and when you're dealing with sacredness you have very little idea, let alone any control, over what might happen. But when you know what is non-sacred, is profane in a particular context, then once you've got it pigeonholed you don't have to worry about it anymore. You can just leave it in its little pigeonhole. Meanwhile you can concentrate on all the mysterious sacred things that might jump any which way, turn into a newt, or cause someone to get really, really angry at someone else in a way that you neatly manage to avoid by having an understanding of why the first person was likely to get angry.
So you see, it's really very simple. Categories are for all the things that can be categorized. Relationships are for all the things that can't. And if you tell me that's an oxymoron or a tautology or any such nonsense, I'll just go sit on my own lap and sulk until you see reason.
(If you do, would you please point it out to me?
Bastard owes me five bucks!)
The thoughts I had in my last post I can categorize as at least partially the result of panicky feelings. Amber and Pearl are still my awesome sisters and we still have a great sister thing going. I have faith in Dave and he in me and both of us in us. And I don't have to get any closer or truthier with Mom than I deem necessary. So there, panicky feelings! :P
I started out wanting to make this post about me and the everlasting Dave's categories for music. They don't have to do with sound or production methods. Rather, they describe the emotional tone the music-maker is aiming to produce.
The categories, as I recall them, are:
Rock
Funk
Soul
Smug
A musical group will have differing proportions of these qualities. The Waterboys, for example, have an enormous proportion of Soul (which may also be called Spirituality) and a respectable amount of Rock as well. Soul Coughing is almost entirely Funk (which may also be called Groove), but they have quite a bit of Smug and certainly some Rock. They Might Be Giants are more Smug than anything else.
This relates, in my mind, to the four qualities of poetry and lyric I learned about in college. These are:
Story
Word-musicality
Meter
Rhyme
Word-musicality is tough to explain, unless perhaps you've listened to a lot of Mike Doughty. The man oozes it. You can't even speak the phrase "buddha rhubarb butter" without experiencing a taste of the Funk. It IS different from rhyme, and for beginning poets a lot of times the focus on rhyme strips word-musicality and tosses it right out the window with the bathwater. My weakest category is story. Meter is probably my strongest--though given how I feel about categories, that shouldn't be too much of a surprise.
You might say it's an obsession, but obsessions I think tend to be more overt and specific. (See? Categorizing even now.) You could go so far as to call it a trait or a characteristic. I am a poet and a lyricist, which one doesn't usually associate with the sort of mentality that wants to put everything in a neat little cubbyhole. Or with someone who self-identifies as a Discordian for no externally discernible reason.
My attitude is this. I am essentially a cautious, even fearful person. Everything in the world is alive. (Always start there. Saves time when you later discover signs of life in a particular pattern, object or postulated entity.) Anything that lives has the power to choose, in other words, the power to change its mind. Which makes the world a place of extreme uncertainty, in which literally anything can happen at any time. All that is necessary for any wild and unthinkable event to take place is for many, many living creatures, all at once, some knowable and others--if only for reasons of time--unknowable, to change their minds.
So it is necessary to make one's way in a bizarre and chaotic universe governed by the whims of uncountable, ineffable beings. Some of whom borrow your pen and talk about the weather with you and would laugh at the idea that they are, in fact, ineffable beings actively involved in the continual creation of the mysterious universe.
My solution to this is to get to know all the people and things around me in a friendly sort of way. Because, according to my theories on trust and friendship, when you are friends with someone and they with you, you grow to understand them. Parts of who you are become similar enough to parts of who they are that you can imagine how they might feel about things, how they might be moved to choose for themselves. Though trust, you can get an idea of how and why a being is likely to change his, her or its mind. You come somewhat to understand what moves and shakes them, what changes their world and how the world changes around them.
Then--and here's the beauty part--you can take everything that isn't that, and stuff it in neat little boxes with word-labels on them. What is a being's religion is sacred to them, and when you're dealing with sacredness you have very little idea, let alone any control, over what might happen. But when you know what is non-sacred, is profane in a particular context, then once you've got it pigeonholed you don't have to worry about it anymore. You can just leave it in its little pigeonhole. Meanwhile you can concentrate on all the mysterious sacred things that might jump any which way, turn into a newt, or cause someone to get really, really angry at someone else in a way that you neatly manage to avoid by having an understanding of why the first person was likely to get angry.
So you see, it's really very simple. Categories are for all the things that can be categorized. Relationships are for all the things that can't. And if you tell me that's an oxymoron or a tautology or any such nonsense, I'll just go sit on my own lap and sulk until you see reason.
(If you do, would you please point it out to me?
Bastard owes me five bucks!)
Miércoles con los Amigos Invisibles vol 9.
Remembered last night's dream.
Act one, I was outdoors in a beautiful woodsy / fields sort of place. The place-tag in my mind said it was India, but since I don't have a clear concept of what India looks like, the actual foliage was the type of plants you'd find in America. Summer day, blue sky, good temperature, slight breeze. Everything looked extremely alive and smelled wonderful. I wandered around for awhile, smelling and looking at and enjoying everything and (by so doing) drawing in happy mana like it was on sale.
I'd had a conversation with Dad, actually during the week before he died, about traveling. That week and the ones previous he'd wanted to talk guns and money-making schemes and such and I'd kept pulling the conversations to things I wanted to talk about, like Wretched Slum and traveling. We were discussing a dream I had quite some time ago that seemed to me was a real traveling dream, but that had gotten cut short before the images in it fully developed and I'd never been sure why. I was standing in what felt like a gargantuan loading dock, but one not currently in use, looking out through the friggin huge entryway at a gentlly rolling hillside of lush green grass with like early-morning mist on it. And in the dream I'd inhaled deeply, trying to smell the grass and appreciate its prettiness. That action kicked me out of the dream, back into my body, and possibly awake. Dad pointed out that in a real traveling situation, you've pulled yourself up out of your body and are connected to it by a tether of whatever the energy is that invisible people and stuff are made of. Mana, I might as well call it. After all the word literally means, "What is it?" So if you try to draw on environmental mana whilst actually traveling, it weakens the connection between you and your body. Incarnate people--for their spiritual health, I think--are supposed to get all their mana filtered through the body. So his theory was that I got kicked out of the dream experience by my own reflexes (possibly with polite help from whoever was trying to communicate with me) when I was about to do something that would endanger me. My silver cord just snapped back like a rubber band.
Told you that story to tell you this. In last night's dream I was sucking up happy mana like a sponge. Which I can thus take to mean I was not traveling, but rather staying inside my own mindspace.
Act two I don't have good images for; I only remembered it upon further review, and had initially thought this was act three. I was in somebody else's house. She vaguely reminded me of lady boss but I knew it was a representation of a relationship type and not a representation of a person. The house was wood-paneled, not brightly lit though visibility was good, reasonably well-maintained and decorated, but unfamiliar enough to me that I didn't feel quite at home. I was doing something on a computer or helping the person figure something out on a computer, and I'm unclear on who thought who was doing a favor for whom. But somebody was being helpful despite having second thoughts and I don't know what was up with that.
Act three me and Goth (yes, dream-person in the form of my ex-girlfriend Goth) were walking down a street and decided to go into a Japanese restaurant. I mainly knew it was a Japanese restaurant from the language the signs were printed in and the fact that the decor included those nifty walls made of paper. Much like the house I was in earlier, the lighting was dim but visibility was very good. But I couldn't see beyond the main "public" space of the room we were in, and didn't think to look more intently. I didn't actually see anybody who worked there or other customers, just got the vague sense they were around somewhere. Weirdly I did notice a hanging plant (or unlit lantern?) and one of those stand-up fridges full of cold beverages that they have in like Dunkin Donutses or other places where they sell beverages but it isn't a mainstay of the business.
So me and Goth sit down, and this guy comes up to us and takes one of the empty seats at our table. He is dressed business casual and well-groomed but still manages to seem unkempt and nervous with his doughboy figure and anxious body language. Looks sort of foreign, but in a way where you couldn't tell what country he's actually from or whether he's local. He has like a clipboard or something, but we can sense right away that he's a dweeb and is just going to waste our time bothering us without even working up the courage to ask us out so we can say no and be done with it. Eventually we do get him to leave our table but he just goes and sits at a nearby table, as if hoping we'll change our minds. Goth is pissed at him but thinks it's funny, too, 'cause he isn't a threat, just a dweeb.
It wasn't till I was running for the bus this morning that I had the following thought. If, in fact, the dream-person in the aspect of Goth with me was my the little girl, then I am way mentally healthier than even I suspected! It would make sense, too, because the last time I remembered seeing the little girl we were actually sitting down and talking. (Okay, yes, she tricked me into getting nasty bug-worms all up in my hand, but I could totally handle that. Plus I should have known better than to stick my hand in anything in a forest made of things-about-to-die. And she doubtless thought it was funny.)
If that were the case, then our relationship has progressed to the point where we are allies. Arriving at place together, sitting together, being accosted by dweeb together, rebuffing dweeb together, sharing thoughts on reaction to rebuffing of dweeb. That's, like, at least a steel trust level. Maybe all the way up into silver since we had a level of emotional understanding and agreement as well. For her to appear in aspect of Goth is also very telling because of my associations. Girl who is beautiful and dangerous, proud and impetuous, possessive, vindictive and in many ways callous--but as sweet and cuddly and eminently desirable as she is scary crazy. This, you understand, is the balance of my memories of Val as I saw her when we were dating. And five or six years ago this same aspect of my psyche was represented by a scary spider who confronted or leapt at me, from whom I fled in panic every single time. So for her to take on the image of my sexy yet scary ex-girlfriend is a massive and to-be-celebrated improvement.
Act one, I was outdoors in a beautiful woodsy / fields sort of place. The place-tag in my mind said it was India, but since I don't have a clear concept of what India looks like, the actual foliage was the type of plants you'd find in America. Summer day, blue sky, good temperature, slight breeze. Everything looked extremely alive and smelled wonderful. I wandered around for awhile, smelling and looking at and enjoying everything and (by so doing) drawing in happy mana like it was on sale.
I'd had a conversation with Dad, actually during the week before he died, about traveling. That week and the ones previous he'd wanted to talk guns and money-making schemes and such and I'd kept pulling the conversations to things I wanted to talk about, like Wretched Slum and traveling. We were discussing a dream I had quite some time ago that seemed to me was a real traveling dream, but that had gotten cut short before the images in it fully developed and I'd never been sure why. I was standing in what felt like a gargantuan loading dock, but one not currently in use, looking out through the friggin huge entryway at a gentlly rolling hillside of lush green grass with like early-morning mist on it. And in the dream I'd inhaled deeply, trying to smell the grass and appreciate its prettiness. That action kicked me out of the dream, back into my body, and possibly awake. Dad pointed out that in a real traveling situation, you've pulled yourself up out of your body and are connected to it by a tether of whatever the energy is that invisible people and stuff are made of. Mana, I might as well call it. After all the word literally means, "What is it?" So if you try to draw on environmental mana whilst actually traveling, it weakens the connection between you and your body. Incarnate people--for their spiritual health, I think--are supposed to get all their mana filtered through the body. So his theory was that I got kicked out of the dream experience by my own reflexes (possibly with polite help from whoever was trying to communicate with me) when I was about to do something that would endanger me. My silver cord just snapped back like a rubber band.
Told you that story to tell you this. In last night's dream I was sucking up happy mana like a sponge. Which I can thus take to mean I was not traveling, but rather staying inside my own mindspace.
Act two I don't have good images for; I only remembered it upon further review, and had initially thought this was act three. I was in somebody else's house. She vaguely reminded me of lady boss but I knew it was a representation of a relationship type and not a representation of a person. The house was wood-paneled, not brightly lit though visibility was good, reasonably well-maintained and decorated, but unfamiliar enough to me that I didn't feel quite at home. I was doing something on a computer or helping the person figure something out on a computer, and I'm unclear on who thought who was doing a favor for whom. But somebody was being helpful despite having second thoughts and I don't know what was up with that.
Act three me and Goth (yes, dream-person in the form of my ex-girlfriend Goth) were walking down a street and decided to go into a Japanese restaurant. I mainly knew it was a Japanese restaurant from the language the signs were printed in and the fact that the decor included those nifty walls made of paper. Much like the house I was in earlier, the lighting was dim but visibility was very good. But I couldn't see beyond the main "public" space of the room we were in, and didn't think to look more intently. I didn't actually see anybody who worked there or other customers, just got the vague sense they were around somewhere. Weirdly I did notice a hanging plant (or unlit lantern?) and one of those stand-up fridges full of cold beverages that they have in like Dunkin Donutses or other places where they sell beverages but it isn't a mainstay of the business.
So me and Goth sit down, and this guy comes up to us and takes one of the empty seats at our table. He is dressed business casual and well-groomed but still manages to seem unkempt and nervous with his doughboy figure and anxious body language. Looks sort of foreign, but in a way where you couldn't tell what country he's actually from or whether he's local. He has like a clipboard or something, but we can sense right away that he's a dweeb and is just going to waste our time bothering us without even working up the courage to ask us out so we can say no and be done with it. Eventually we do get him to leave our table but he just goes and sits at a nearby table, as if hoping we'll change our minds. Goth is pissed at him but thinks it's funny, too, 'cause he isn't a threat, just a dweeb.
It wasn't till I was running for the bus this morning that I had the following thought. If, in fact, the dream-person in the aspect of Goth with me was my the little girl, then I am way mentally healthier than even I suspected! It would make sense, too, because the last time I remembered seeing the little girl we were actually sitting down and talking. (Okay, yes, she tricked me into getting nasty bug-worms all up in my hand, but I could totally handle that. Plus I should have known better than to stick my hand in anything in a forest made of things-about-to-die. And she doubtless thought it was funny.)
If that were the case, then our relationship has progressed to the point where we are allies. Arriving at place together, sitting together, being accosted by dweeb together, rebuffing dweeb together, sharing thoughts on reaction to rebuffing of dweeb. That's, like, at least a steel trust level. Maybe all the way up into silver since we had a level of emotional understanding and agreement as well. For her to appear in aspect of Goth is also very telling because of my associations. Girl who is beautiful and dangerous, proud and impetuous, possessive, vindictive and in many ways callous--but as sweet and cuddly and eminently desirable as she is scary crazy. This, you understand, is the balance of my memories of Val as I saw her when we were dating. And five or six years ago this same aspect of my psyche was represented by a scary spider who confronted or leapt at me, from whom I fled in panic every single time. So for her to take on the image of my sexy yet scary ex-girlfriend is a massive and to-be-celebrated improvement.
Miércoles con los Amigos Invisibles vol 8.
It's in the cards for all of us that someday
We'll move into the ground
Forgive me, Love - I only know the one way
To lay this burden down
The lines in a previous post may or may not make it into [don't forget]. But these, above, are non-negotiable. I'm thinking the song should be a long rambling string of good yet sometimes frightening advice interwoven with bits of stories. It's coming together, as all good songs, too slowly to suit me. And I'm leery of overthinking during the percolation process. It's like digging up recently planted seeds; interferes with the growth of the root structure. The most important parts of creative works take place in parts of your personality you can't afford to watch. Quantum observer type interference; the act of watching changes what's happening.
Had such a dream last night! I knew it was rememberable, but didn't have the urge to remember. So I got right up, Dave fed me breakfast and I let it slip out of my mind. The issues'll come back in another dream if they weren't resolved in this without me getting the message.
I've been thinking a lot the last few days about the logic of the story. And when I say the story, I mean the story of my life. We narratize our experiences in order to invest them with meaning. A good story can build all our scattered moments into a coherent whole, by weaving together those aspects of daily life we choose to hold sacred. This is one of the most important things my father taught me; that your religion is the things you hold sacred in this sense, the things you choose to give shape to the story of your life.
Way too much of my religion is invested in the stuff I may as well call magic. Misleading, yes, because everything I've got in that area I patched together myself from a combination of reading, discussion with others, and lengthy and elaborate observation/interpretation dances with my daily life. If most of the people I know were aware of the full extent of my current belief set, they would be seriously weirded out. Invisible friends, sapient stars and all.
But I had some words with Dave about it yesterday that heartened me immensely. My favorite words he used were "unassailable" (in the sense that it all hangs together coherently) and "unassuming" (in the sense that it does not presume to contradict observed reality, only attempt to explain it). Dave doesn't share all my beliefs; he is actively agnostic. As opposed to passive agnosticism, where a person hasn't thought it through enough to decide, his active agnosticism comes from his epistemological position. That is, we shouldn't be so arrogant as to believe things that we know we don't know enough about to properly understand. And it's stupid to put the emotional energy of belief into something for which you have no verifiable evidence.
However he doesn't think I'm stupid for having the beliefs I do, because they are part of a coherent plan. I don't believe all this crap because I know it's true, nor do I claim to know what's ultimately true. But I have chosen to believe a host of things because a) the beliefs adequately explain my experiences, b) as mentioned in an earlier post, my psyche is so structured that I have to believe something in these content areas, and c) my beliefs have been carefully selected for their potency in promoting psychological health.
Of course I do still go off on bunny trails talking about the universe, invisible friends, the meanings of dreams, the shapes of times or how the taig seems to me to be feeling today. Which can sometimes annoy. I suppose that's another thing I learned from Dad, albeit by negative example. He couldn't turn it off, couldn't not be thinking a mile a minute at any given time. So I developed a decent sense of when a listening audience is just starting to get bored, lose interest or be weirded out. Even if what I'm saying happens, by happy accident, to be both true and useful, what good does it do anybody if I've bored or disturbed them to the point where they won't hear it? And if by unhappy accident it is neither useful nor true, where do I get off wasting their time?
Which brings me to yet another example of how I use my beliefs to promote psychological health. Magic, as I am fond of saying, is all about relationships. And if I learn how to be a better friend in physical life, then I will also be a better friend in invisible life. A possibility I use to encourage myself thusly: "In treating incarnate people better and becoming a better friend, invisible people will be able to perceive the increased level of awesomeness in your personality, and perhaps you will attract a higher quality of invisible friend as a result! Assuming that they exist, happen to be in your psychic neighborhood, and find you interesting!"
Like most things that work well for me it is needlessly complicated. But as Mary Poppins says, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. Since I often find human-to-human relationships scary and difficult, sometimes holding out the carrot of human-to-invisible-person relationships helps me plod on forward under the weight of my fears. What else can a body do?
We'll move into the ground
Forgive me, Love - I only know the one way
To lay this burden down
The lines in a previous post may or may not make it into [don't forget]. But these, above, are non-negotiable. I'm thinking the song should be a long rambling string of good yet sometimes frightening advice interwoven with bits of stories. It's coming together, as all good songs, too slowly to suit me. And I'm leery of overthinking during the percolation process. It's like digging up recently planted seeds; interferes with the growth of the root structure. The most important parts of creative works take place in parts of your personality you can't afford to watch. Quantum observer type interference; the act of watching changes what's happening.
Had such a dream last night! I knew it was rememberable, but didn't have the urge to remember. So I got right up, Dave fed me breakfast and I let it slip out of my mind. The issues'll come back in another dream if they weren't resolved in this without me getting the message.
I've been thinking a lot the last few days about the logic of the story. And when I say the story, I mean the story of my life. We narratize our experiences in order to invest them with meaning. A good story can build all our scattered moments into a coherent whole, by weaving together those aspects of daily life we choose to hold sacred. This is one of the most important things my father taught me; that your religion is the things you hold sacred in this sense, the things you choose to give shape to the story of your life.
Way too much of my religion is invested in the stuff I may as well call magic. Misleading, yes, because everything I've got in that area I patched together myself from a combination of reading, discussion with others, and lengthy and elaborate observation/interpretation dances with my daily life. If most of the people I know were aware of the full extent of my current belief set, they would be seriously weirded out. Invisible friends, sapient stars and all.
But I had some words with Dave about it yesterday that heartened me immensely. My favorite words he used were "unassailable" (in the sense that it all hangs together coherently) and "unassuming" (in the sense that it does not presume to contradict observed reality, only attempt to explain it). Dave doesn't share all my beliefs; he is actively agnostic. As opposed to passive agnosticism, where a person hasn't thought it through enough to decide, his active agnosticism comes from his epistemological position. That is, we shouldn't be so arrogant as to believe things that we know we don't know enough about to properly understand. And it's stupid to put the emotional energy of belief into something for which you have no verifiable evidence.
However he doesn't think I'm stupid for having the beliefs I do, because they are part of a coherent plan. I don't believe all this crap because I know it's true, nor do I claim to know what's ultimately true. But I have chosen to believe a host of things because a) the beliefs adequately explain my experiences, b) as mentioned in an earlier post, my psyche is so structured that I have to believe something in these content areas, and c) my beliefs have been carefully selected for their potency in promoting psychological health.
Of course I do still go off on bunny trails talking about the universe, invisible friends, the meanings of dreams, the shapes of times or how the taig seems to me to be feeling today. Which can sometimes annoy. I suppose that's another thing I learned from Dad, albeit by negative example. He couldn't turn it off, couldn't not be thinking a mile a minute at any given time. So I developed a decent sense of when a listening audience is just starting to get bored, lose interest or be weirded out. Even if what I'm saying happens, by happy accident, to be both true and useful, what good does it do anybody if I've bored or disturbed them to the point where they won't hear it? And if by unhappy accident it is neither useful nor true, where do I get off wasting their time?
Which brings me to yet another example of how I use my beliefs to promote psychological health. Magic, as I am fond of saying, is all about relationships. And if I learn how to be a better friend in physical life, then I will also be a better friend in invisible life. A possibility I use to encourage myself thusly: "In treating incarnate people better and becoming a better friend, invisible people will be able to perceive the increased level of awesomeness in your personality, and perhaps you will attract a higher quality of invisible friend as a result! Assuming that they exist, happen to be in your psychic neighborhood, and find you interesting!"
Like most things that work well for me it is needlessly complicated. But as Mary Poppins says, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. Since I often find human-to-human relationships scary and difficult, sometimes holding out the carrot of human-to-invisible-person relationships helps me plod on forward under the weight of my fears. What else can a body do?
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