Barbara Ardinger's Blog, page 7
November 22, 2012
Fun and games with a dead language
play. When someone asks me what my sign is, I say, “Cancer. One of the
top twelve.” Then I watch the wheels go round in his head until he says,
“Oh.” Sometimes the person I’m talking with catches on fast and says, “And
I’m Taurus, another of the top twelve.”
I mention this because I’m inventing a new game. One of the books I’m
currently reading is a fascinating work by Nicholas Ostler,
Ad Infinitum: a Biography of Latin and the World It Created.
This is a history of the language that (after classical Greek) was once
considered the most important language in the world. From its earliest
days until Vatican II, when the Roman Catholic Church permitted masses
in vernacular languages, Latin held the universality that English has held
for the last couple of centuries. So here’s my proposed new mind game:
“Back when I was studying Latin in high school and Julius Caesar was sending
daily dispatches of his Gallic wars straight to my Latin class….” Or, “A
couple thousand years ago, when I was reading Caesar’s reports hot off
the presses….” Then, as I watch the wheels go round again, I’ll get to
say, “Of course I’m not really two thousand-plus years old. And I bleach
my hair!”
Just so we all know, Gaius Julius Caesar (100–44 BCE) was a Roman
enfant terrible and an
homme even more
terrible, who had three of his own wives plus, it’s said, the wives
of all the Roman senators. One story about him is that when he was kidnapped
by pirates as a teenager (or at age 25), he outtalked them and ended up
becoming a sort of pirate king. (It’s kind of like O. Henry’s “Ransom of
Red Chief,” but without the humor.) Caesar spent nine years conquering
Gaul (modern France), and when he marched back to Rome and crossed the
Rubicon River in northeastern Italy, his action started the civil war that
led to his assassination, the end of the Roman Republic, and the foundation
of the Roman Empire. (Cleopatra was in Rome when Caesar was murdered; she
promptly went home to Egypt.) Caesar’s death was dramatized by Shakespeare.
I have a DVD of the 1953 movie starring Louis Calhern as Caesar, James
Mason as Brutus, John Gielgud as Cassius, and Marlon Brando as Antony.
Without even a tiny hint of Stanley Kowalski—Brando could really act.
Back when I was in high school in the 1950s, that famous Republican Golden
Age, Latin was one of the popular electives. “Take Latin,” they told us.
“It’ll teach you to think logically. You’ll learn how English grammar works.
You’ll learn a lot of history. It’ll make it easier if you decide to take
another language.” I bought it. I took two years of Latin.
What I remember best about Latin II is that we had a page or two of Caesar’s
Commentarii de Bello Gallico (
Commentaries on the Gallic War) to translate every night. Latin was
a complicated language. Ostler writes, “As every schoolboy [
sic.] once knew, Latin had four different classes of verbs…known
as conjugations.” (p. 24). Verbs were conjugated in six tenses (present,
imperfect, future, perfect, past perfect, future perfect), two voices (active
and passive), and three moods (indicative, subjunctive, imperative)…“altogether
a large set of combination.” These combinations has up to six forms to
express person and number (I, you, he/she/it, etc.) plus infinitives (to
do, to have done), participles (doing, done, about to do), a supine (in
order to do), and a gerundive (which is to be done) (p. 24, n). Nouns followed
five patterns called declensions, with different forms for the noun’s function
in a sentence: nominative (subject), accusative (object), genitive (“for
a noun dependent on another noun”), dative (for a recipient), ablative
(for a source), locative (for a place), and vocative (for an addressee)
p. 25)
Whew! Is it any wonder that when our Latin II class was voting to ask
Miss Doyle to teach a Latin III class, I voted no? I knew all that stuff
and wasn’t sure I wanted to know more. To this day, however, I wonder what
we might have read and translated in Latin III. Probably the great Roman
poets and historians from the Golden Age—Ovid, Livy, Cicero, Virgil, Lucretius,
Catullus, and that bunch. I didn’t read these authors until graduate school,
when I read them in English translation in my classes in 18th-century literature.
I’ve never been a Latin scholar. When a friend asked if I wanted to take
German I, I remembered that someone had said German nouns have a dative
case. That was enough to make me say no again. I took French instead. I’m
glad I took Latin, though, because I’ve always been fascinated by the lessons
of history. I bet I’m not alone in seeing parallels between ancient Rome
and the U.S.
I wish I had time to sit around and read all day, but I don’t, so I’m
still working my way through the book. I’m up to Chapter 11 now. I’ve read
about how, after the takeover of Latin by the Roman Catholic Church, the
collapse of the Roman Empire, and the migrations of the Germanic tribes
across Europe, the
grammatica of classical Latin was altered and Latin’s daughters,
the Romance languages, were born. I’m learning something on every page.
It seems that an early Christian bishop invented silent reading; before
that, people always read aloud.
Although Latin got changed a lot during the so-called Dark Ages, the lives
of ordinary people didn’t change much when Rome “fell.” They just went
on doing what they’d been doing. A good book about this is by Peter S.
Wells,
Barbarians to Angels: The Dark Ages Reconsidered, which I also
recommend. And while we’re on the subject of the fall of the Roman Empire,
see if you can find a 2007 movie called
The Last Legion, which stars Colin Firth as a legionary who takes
young Romulus Augustus, the last western emperor, to England and they somehow
wind up entangled in the Arthurian mythos. It’s so awful it’s funny. And
Ben Kingsley’s in it as Merlin. If you want accurate information on the
Roman emperors, there’s Michael Grant’s book,
The Roman Emperors: A Biographical Guide to the Rulers of Imperial
Rome 318 B.C.-A.D. 476
But enough recommendations. I’ll end with a paragraph from Ostler that
I stopped and read three times. “Languages create worlds to live in, not
just in the minds of their speakers, but in their lives, and their descendants’
lives, where those ideas become real. The world that Latin created is today
called Europe. And as Latin formed Europe, it also inspired the Americas.
Latin has in fact been the constant in the cultural history of the West,
extending over two millennia. In a way, it has been too central to be noticed:
like the air Europe breathed, it has pervaded everything:” (p. 20).
October 24, 2012
Collecting Witches
Halloween is almost upon us. For pagans, it’s a sacred holiday—a holy
day, which is what “holiday” means. It’s a lot like
Día de los Muertos, when we gather in ritual space to remember our
ancestors and friends deceased from this earth but living in other worlds
and welcome them back to our world if they want to come for a short visit.
For the last decade or so, however, intolerant people have decided we should
not see Halloween associated with anything holy, even if the word itself
comes from “hallowed,” as in “hallowed be thy name” in the famous prayer.
These people want to force their children and everyone else to believe
our holy day is nothing more than a mere harvest festival or a just a night
for stupid zombies, dead presidents, Frankenstein monsters, cartoon characters,
and ghouls, spiders, and superheroes to run around.
Halloween’s coming. Just look in any store. What do you see for sale in
September and October? What we saw back in the mid-80s, when I first started
collecting witches, was a multitude of witches. That was during the second
wave of feminism, when
Marija Gimbutas was excavating the sites and writing about the civilization
of the Goddess in Old Europe. When
Z. Budapest introduced feminist spirituality to feminist politics
at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. When Starhawk wrote the first edition
of
The Spiral Dance. When Max Dashu was researching and archiving
her
Suppressed Histories. When other ovular books were being published.
Yes, “ovular.” A book on feminist spirituality can hardly be called “seminal.”
(Books of feminist wisdom do not squirt out of Freudian symbols.) In those
days, we were reinventing an old religion, rehabilitating the word “witch,”
and reconstituting the wisdom of witches. Today, as intolerant people are
trying to take us back to the 1950s (when the world was mostly witch-free),
I guess we need to start all over again.
My collection currently hovers—note that I use that verb on purpose—at
between 340 and 350 witches that range in size from an inch tall to as
big as a Muppet. I’ve done witch censuses around my home, so I’m pretty
sure I’ve got them all counted. But “one never knows. Do one.” (Thank you,
Fats Waller.) Some of my witches are expensive works of art, some are authentic
collectibles, some are majorly cheap and tacky. That’s OK. I cherish them
all.
Here are photos of a few of my witches. I can’t show them all because
that would make this blog as big as a movie to download. I bought Hazel
(though not her red chair) at Nordstrom. I bought the Halloween pumpkin
at the gift shop of the Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. I
have a witch riding a spider that I bought at the St. Mary Hospital gift
shop. I have five Barbies dressed in witchy clothing, four of them, including
Barbie as Samantha from
Bewitched, in their original Mattell boxes. The fifth I bought at
the Long Beach WomanSpirit solstice fair several years ago. “Does Mattell
know you dressed Barbie up like this?” I asked the artist. He refused to
answer. I have Elphaba and Galinda in a Time Dragon Clock snow globe that
I bought at the Ozdust Boutique. I have Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, Magrat,
and Tiffany Aching from Discworld. They’re tiny pewter game pieces, but
I have no idea what the game might be. I have two small Madame Alexander
Oz witches that came (I think) with Happy Meals. I have a gorgeous witch
teapot that I bought in an extremely expensive gift store. I have witches
riding owls and one riding a goose, two riding in vegetable-cars, and one
as the top of a nutcracker, plus several on their customary broomsticks.
I have witches that cost under $10 and witches that cost well over $100.
There are forty-odd witches on shelves above my bed. These are all stuffed
cloth dolls because if the Big One strikes, I don’t want witches made of
wood, resin, metal, wire, ceramic, bone, and any combination thereof raining
down on me in the middle of the night. When I look up from my pillow, I
see witchy feet.
For twenty-five years, as surely as September comes ’round, I go shopping
for witches. I used to go to malls. I once found a large, expensive witch
in a large, expensive garden store in a mall. I also go to Michaels and
Pic ’n’ Sav (now called Big Lots). At a marketplace here in Long Beach,
I used to start at a mailbox place that also sold gifts. Then I walked
around the corner to a shop called Rainbows that sold flowers, candles,
and toys, including witches. Next, to Home Economics, a store that sold
mostly kitchenware, plus witches in October. Then to the Hallmark store
and a huge fabric store, then to a store that sold high-priced crystal
and tableware, and finally to a children’s store. There were witches in
all these stores. But many of the stores are gone now, thanks to the Republican
recession, and the ones that are still in business are mostly witchless.
Why is that? Intolerance and intimidation.
I had a long chat with my friend Gregory the other day. Gregory owns a
shop called Babcock & Cooke, and I’ve been buying witches from him
every single year since at least 1988. He and Mike, who works there, joke
that they always know it’s fall when they see me come in the door. Over
the years, Gregory has told me about the buying trips he used to make across
the country looking for witches and other items to sell in the store. About
ten years ago, he started telling me how he was having trouble finding
witches. Intolerant people were forcing artists and stores to abandon witches
because, they said, Halloween and witches and anything pagan came straight
from the depths of hell, and if you’re gonna celebrate anything at the
end of October, it has to be a tame little harvest festival. Gregory has
told me many stories about the intimidation of artists whose work he used
to buy. Just last week, he told me about another company that is being
forced to shut down.
You can still go on line and buy witches (which I did about five minutes
ago), but it’s harder and harder to find witches in stores. Try it yourself.
Go out and look. If you find a good-looking witch, buy her. Support artists.
Support witches. I’m persistent. I hope I can keep finding witches. Happy
Hallows Eve. And thanks to Alexis, my web designer, for sizing the photos
in this blog for me.
September 22, 2012
Need to practice writing? Write a blog or two.
sure that nearly everyone I know—both in person and via the Net—reads blogs,
and a lot of those people write blogs, too.
ComputerHope, a nifty website that I went to for help when I was writing
about Herta’s new (in 1990) computer for the reader’s guide for
Secret Lives gives this definition for blog, a word that was apparently
first used in 1998: A weblog or blog, is a listing of text, images, or
other objects that are arranged in a chronological order that first started
appearing in 1998. Blogs are often maintained and run by a single individual,
updated daily, or contain random personal remarks about a topic, a personal
ramble, an update on the person's life or their current feelings. In many
ways, many weblogs are like a personal journal, diary or a look into another
individual's life and can be a great way to learn about people, events,
places, and much more from millions of people around the world.
I write two so-called regular blogs, this one and a monthly blog for
Feminism and Religion. For FAR, I’ve worked ahead so that
Xochitl Alviso, who posts my blogs for me because I’m a technological
nincompoop, has me scheduled for the next two or three months. Later today
I plan send her my Christmas blog, which is about gods (including Jesus)
who were said to be born around the time of the winter solstice. (We don’t
know exactly when Jesus was born, probably in the fall or the spring between
7 and 4 BCE. What we do know is that in 354, Bishop Liberius of Rome moved
the birth date of Jesus to match the birth date of Roman god Mithra. For
more about the solar gods, check back with FAR around Christmastime or
read December 25 in
Pagan Every Day .) (But—good grief—don’t spent over $100 for
a copy on Amazon! I can sell you one, and I'll even sign it, for $18.)
I’m one of two pagans who are regular contributors to FAR (my friend
Carol Christ is the other, and she’s the one who invited me). FAR presents a new
blog every single day. I read the FAR blogs every morning and invite you
to read them, too. I’ve also just sent a fairy tale about Egyptian goddesses
to Xochitl to see if it might be a good blog. (“Blog” is sometimes pretty
loosely defined; a British scholar named
Daniel Cohen, who has been active in the Goddess movement in Britain
for many years, has posted some terrific stories.)
And so today, I’m sitting here doing what the authors whose books I edit
do: I’m pulling words out of my head and pushing them out through my fingers
to my keyboard. I type awhile, then I stop and read what I just typed.
Then I go,
Oh.My.God, that doesn’t make sense at all. I immediately start editing.
When I wrote a sort of blog for a friend a few months ago, the subject
was writer’s block. In it I said (cross my heart) that I don’t believe
in writer’s block. That’s true. I don’t get blocked. Well, sometimes I
procrastinate. Sometimes I have other important things to do. Like wash
dishes. Go to the bathroom. Comb the cats. Eat lunch. Take out the trash.
(I think I’ll do that right now. Back in a minute.) I used to know people
who sharpened pencils and rearranged their bookshelves while they were
procrastinating. If you’re really good at, the list of things you can do
that are not writing is endless.
Okay, I’m back. Yes, I really believe that there’s no need to be blocked.
What do I tell people who ask me about writer’s block? Just sit down and
write! Write anything. Just get something on your screen (or on paper).
Anything. Even if it’s awful. Just get something written. You can,
and probably should, delete those “priming the pump” paragraphs, but at
least you’re getting yourself started. At the same time, I think the famous
quote by sports writer Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith is spot on:
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and
open a vein. If you’ve read or seen
I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, you remember that
Cassandra gets her father, the famous novelist who’s been blocked for a
dozen years, to start again by typing “the cat sat on the mat.” It works.
If you’re feeling blocked, it’ll work for you, too,. Don’t give up.
Foul Matter by Martha Grimes is another novel about, among
other things, a blocked writer.
If you want to write, you have to practice writing. With eight published
books, a couple that may never get published (because I wrote them on a
typewriter and don’t feel like retyping and rewriting them), and a whole
lot of stories and blogs and poems, plus my Ph.D. dissertation and a stack
of term papers from graduate school that is as tall as I am, I’ve had a
lot of practice at writing. It’s never easy to write well, but if you get
enough practice, it becomes easier to get a good first or rough draft going.
Then you can edit. And edit. And edit. And hire me to do some more editing
for you. As I tell many of the authors I work with, they’ve got terrific
rough drafts (which are seldom first drafts). Here’s the metaphor I commonly
use. The rough draft is like a garden. You broadcast the seeds or stick
little plants in the ground. You wait to see what grows. Your major task
is now to weed the garden. Pull out little plants whose seeds the wind
blew in. Pull out little plants that aren’t what you thought you planted.
Pull out little plants that are likely to grow so vigorously they’ll take
over the whole garden if you leave them there. None of these little plants
are necessarily bad little plants. They’re just out of place. They might
do perfectly well in some other garden, that is, in some other story or
book, in some other context. You also have to pinch back growing tips to
make a plant of which you’re fond healthier and bushier. And of course
it’s useful to add water and fertilizer to help your garden grow. So far,
the authors with whom I’ve shared this metaphor get it. They understand
that what they sent me is an unweeded garden. We’re weeding and pinching
and pruning together.
Writing rough drafts and blogs—aha! Back to my original point!—is practice
writing. Adults keep feeding us that old cliche,
practice makes perfect. I disagree with that. What practice makes
is
familiarity. Practice touch typing and you learn how to do it without
staring at the keyboard. Practice dicing onions and you learn how to do
it without too many tears. Practice driving your car and you learn how
to do it safely. Practice using your new smart device and you learn what
those weird little finger motions and apps do. If you practice wrong, though,
then
wrong will become familiar, and you’re not likely to learn to do
it right and become familiar with right, unless you start all over again
at the bottom of the learning curve. And so it goes with writing.
That’s why blogs are useful. A blog is a short form. You can write multiple
versions of the same blog and compare them. You can fact-check them. As
you create a blog, you get to practice writing. Practice putting a coherent
sentence together. A coherent paragraph. (That’s a lesson I’ve yet to learn.)
(Sigh.) Practice concision (a lesson I received from my major professor
in graduate school. But that's another story). Learn, say, the difference
between “imply” and “infer.” Learn that “allergic foods” is not what you
mean when you’re writing about food allergies. Learn that you need to heed
Strunk & White’s Rule 11 (“A participial phrase at the beginning of
a sentence must refer to the grammatical subject.”) or what you wrote won’t
be what you meant. Is it true that a journey begins with a single
step? It may be equally true that good writing begins with a single blog.
If you write a whole series of good blogs, you can even collect them and
turn the collection into a book. I don’t think I’ll do that, but it sure
is nice to have arrived at the end of this blog!
August 24, 2012
Grammar Fussbudgetry
The sun has entered Virgo. When I was writing
Pagan Every Day, I asked my friend Lilith the astrologer to give
me capsule descriptions of the sun signs. We know Virgos, I wrote. They’re
the obsessive folks to whom every detail has to be correct. Lilith the
astrologer says that Virgos even quantify their every emotion.
For the past decade or so, I’ve been telling the authors whose books I
edit that “obsessive” isn’t a strong enough word for me when I’m in edit
mode. It’s my job to pay attention to details, and that’s down to the comma
level. When I’m editing, I read for spelling, punctuation, grammar, syntax,
and transitions between sentences, paragraphs, and ideas. I do a lot of
fact checking, too. For a book about the author’s travels in Bolivia, for
example, I’ve been fact-checking every Spanish proper noun, especially
the names of cities. This is partly because this author doesn’t add the
accent marks. I also did a lot of fact checking for an author whose protagonist
was active during the French Revolution; he had the years of the Terror
wrong (it was 1793–94). I pointed out to another author of a children’s
book about the birth of Jesus that the inn in Bethlehem which there was
no room could not have been owned and operated by a nice,
gemütlich German family. There were no members of any Germanic tribe
in the Roman colony of Judea. And I changed the spelling of the word “levy”
in another book to “levee” because the author was writing about a waterway,
not a tax. I have even fact-checked product names and the titles of songs
and movies and the spellings of singers’ and actors’ names.I’ve been writing
book reviews for 20+ years, and I seldom review a book that hasn’t been
properly edited. I’ve declined to edit books with a “forward” instead of
a foreword, and I also set aside a book with an “afterwards.”
Loving puns, however, when I was writing
Finding New Goddesses and the publisher had “forward” instead of
“foreword” on the author questionnaire, I asked one friend to write a “foreword”
and another to write a “forward.” They did.
I’ve recently read a mystery novel by an author who spoke to a writers
club I belong to. She spun a good story, but if I were reviewing her book,
I’d pan it. This author is the victim, I assume, of lousy editing. There’s
a difference between “past” and “passed.” “Grit” is not a past tense form;
that’s “gritted.” A “puss-yellow” sky is the color not of leaking white
cells but a presumably ugly cat. “Fist” is a noun, not a verb. And there’s
a sentence in the book that ends “…raising his face to her’s.” (That “her’s”
is in the book twice.) The book was published by a major New York publisher.
Who on earth do those publishers hire to be their editors?
A few months ago, I was called a “grammar nazi.” Ya gotta love it. A young
woman had been posting on my Facebook page that she was writing a book.
Every one of her posts was filled with grammar, spelling, and punctuation
errors. After two or three posts, I commented that if she wanted to be
a published writer, she needed to pay more attention to correct English
(which I jokingly refer to as "gooder English"). After all, if you can’t
get through a Facebook post without errors, then it’s unlikely you’ll get
through a whole book. I’m pretty sure I wrote this as politely as I could.
When her book was published, she announced it to me. In my reply, I asked
if she’d gone to a print-on-demand or a vanity press. That’s when she called
me a grammar nazi.
I’m of two minds about the idea that anything connected with the Nazi
Party can be used humorously. (I suppose the phrase started with
Seinfeld on TV.) On the one hand, I’m old enough to remember the
real Nazis. My uncles fought in World War II, and I’ve known survivors
of the concentration camps and the children of survivors. In high school,
I had an English teacher from England who had survived the Blitz. On the
other hand, though, I’m with Mel Brooks, who said in an interview about
The Producers--remember "Springtime for Hitler"?--that the “only
way to get even with anybody is to ridicule them. So the only real way
I could get even with Hitler and company was to bring them down with laughter.”
He’s right. Make fun of your enemies and you diminish their power. (When
I saw
The Producers at the Hollywood Bowl last month, I got to see Gary
Beach and Roger Bart as Roger De Bris and Carmen Ghia, the roles they originated
on Broadway in 2001. They were fantastic.)
But the young writer wasn’t being humorous. What she and I and all of
us need to understand is that our language is a great, growing, verbal
organism. It has rules for grammar, spelling, and punctuation that need
to be obeyed not just for the sake of obedience but because most of those
rules make our language work. They help us create sentences and paragraphs
that make sense. That’s because if we speak and write correctly and generally
follow the rules (do we all have our copies of
Strunk and White?), what we say and write will be better understood
by other people. Gooder English counts. That’s why even though I’m not
a Virgo, I’m as picky as one. Grammar Nazi? No. Grammar fussbudget? Hell,
yes. When what you write is full of grammar, punctuation, and spelling
errors—and probably logical errors, too—then, unless you are writing for
willfully ignorant people, your credibility goes way down. If you state
your argument or develop your plot with gooder English, then your credibility
goes up. I guess I’ll just spend my life as a kind of Editor of La Mancha
tilting at the windmill monsters of badder English. I’m dreaming an impossible
dream of good writing. P.S.—More obsessiveness. The bakery in my local
Ralphs grocery now has a sign that says FRENCH CRUELLER DONUTS. I love
French crullers, but I gotta wonder if Cruella de Vil buys those cruellers
and feeds them to the Dalmatians.
July 21, 2012
The Shamanic Narrative of Tigger’s Bounce
My guest blog this month come from my friend S. Kelley Harrell. Kelley's
an urban shaman who lives on the opposite edge of the continent from me.
We became friends on a listserve. I read her new book,
Gift of the Dreamtime, which is now out in its second edition. It's
a terrific book. I hope you'll read it, too. Here's Kelley--
“Bouncing is what Tiggers do best. —Tigger, from A. A. Milne’s
Winnie-the-Pooh
Since the birth of our twins a little over three years ago, I've delved
back into children's literature in an entirely new way. As someone who
works as a shaman, I'm always intrigued by the shamanic narrative told
in everything. This narrative is the story told to the shaman by the body
or emotions, through symbols which are interpreted to bring healing to
the individual. We each have this collection of symbols, some unique, some
joined in collective meaning. In reading to my children a narrative I commonly
find is the story of soul wounding and healing.
The most basic view of what a shaman does, thus the basic principle of
the shamanic narrative, is an imbalance of power. Power is either missing
from a place that it should be, or is in excess in a place where it shouldn’t
be. A common state that results from this imbalance is called soul loss,
perhaps the most common ailment shamans work with. Though I refer to it
as "soul shelving,: it's a state in which one (or more) of the infinite
facets of the soul has wandered out and cannot reconnect with the manifest
consciousness.
Wandering out is our natural state of widening our awareness, and we often
accomplish this through dreams, creative processes, engaging new ideas
and feelings. Upon experiencing trauma, soul parts leave and often can't
reconnect with the earthly consciousness, resulting in the state of PTSD.
How this reaction to trauma manifests can range from severe self-destructive
behavior to mild depression, the onset of physical illness, or the general
sense that one isn't quite one's self anymore. This interrupted flow of
life force abrupts personal power.
In reading to our kids, I see this journey from wounding to loss of power,
to victorious balance and empowerment in children’s stories. Take the beloved
Winnie the Pooh character, Tigger. Everyone knows him for his ability to
revel joyfully in life, specifically for his ability to bounce as both
a way to experience joy and share it with others. Because it is his most
fond pursuit, it is his soul's expression. Laura Driscoll’s The Search
for Tigger’s Bounce, a later addition to the Winnie-the-Pooh series based
on works by A. A. Milne, describes such a journey from soul wounding, through
the story of Tigger’s lost bounce.
One day Pooh observes that Tigger isn’t his usual bouncy self. Specifically,
Tigger is moody, his tail is drooping, and he’s very still. When Pooh presses
him about feeling down, Tigger says, “I think I’ve lost my bounce!”
He can recall when he last bounced and that he doesn’t feel like bouncing
now, but he doesn’t know the root of his lethargy and woe. Tigger realizes
that his bounce has gone away, and that it went away so suddenly he didn't
know where he lost it. This is a typical description of the lethargy and
sense of disconnection that occurs with soul loss. Senses and awareness
we had prior is simply gone. Tigger’s ability to articulate how he feels
and the symptoms around not being able to bounce demonstrates how we can
intellectualize that we should be able to do something, be aware that it’s
not working properly, yet we can’t just by knowing those things force it
to be fixed. This is a nother symptom of soul loss.
His friends offer to come along and help him look for his bounce. This
is a common facet of the shamanic narrative—the acquisition of spirit allies—Nature
spirits, angelic guides—who support and assist along the way to healing.
Eeyore, Piglet, Roo and Pooh set off to help Tigger find his bounce.
Roo suggests that Tigger return to the place he last had his bounce so
the group can search for it there. This return to the source of imbalance
is akin to the induction into trance in the shaman’s decoding of the narrative,
and is also symbolic of Tigger having to face what caused his bounce to
leave. In the shamanic narrative there is always some realization of returning
to the source of trauma—figuratively or literally—in order to heal it.
In observing the stream where Tigger was playing when he lost his bounce,
the group learns that he was bouncing on a fallen tree trunk, which bridged
the stream’s banks. While bouncing on the fallen tree, Tigger realized
he was above water and become very afraid.
Pooh then deduces that Tigger’s bounce had been startled out of him. Having
an aspect of the soul leave in times of duress is a classic feature of
soul loss. Often in trauma one can articulate the feeling of a part of
self leaving, afterward feeling fragmented or that something is missing.
In this case, Tigger’s bounce was missing. In being faced with a deep fear,
his power had left him.
The group looks high and low for Tigger’s bounce, only no one finds a
thing. No one can identify exactly what Tigger’s bounce looks like, so
they aren’t sure how to find it!
Drawing on the expertise of yet another ally, Christopher Robin, he points
out, “I think you got startled on that tree trunk. And then you got worried
about bouncing. But you could never lose your bounce,” he says. [1] Christopher
Robin represents the voice of the shaman, interpreting the symbols of Tigger’s
story of losing his bounce, drawing meaning from them so personal to Tigger
that he acquires a context in which to understand, thus overcome, his fear.
With the support of his allies and through the process of them witnessing
his journey to reconnect with his bounce, and with Christopher Robin’s
affirmation of his power, Tigger gains the confidence to try to bounce
again. In the shamanic narrative, gaining the support of one’s tribe is
the deepest fostering of healing. It is the bestowal of power. Within that
support, power is recognized, thus balanced, and the wound released.
In the end, just like Tigger, we may not know where we lose bits of our
power, but we fully recognize their absence. Armed with the insight of
the shamanic narrative in All Things, we gain support to go back and find
our bounce.
[1]
The Search for Tigger’s Bounce, Laura Driscoll. Disney Enterprises,
Inc., 2004.
My friend Kelley is author of
Gift of the Dreamtime – Awakening to the Divinity of Trauma, now
out in its second edition. Her shamanic practice is Soul Intent Arts. You
can Google her name and gets lots of hits and also find her on
Facebook,
Twitter, and @SKelleyH,
GoodReads, and (good for her!!!) the
Huffington Post. Check her out. She's very wise. Tell her I said hi.
June 20, 2012
The real truth about those "senior moments"
I’m starting to sort of identify with those infamous bandits that confront
Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) in the 1948 movie,
The Treasure of Sierra Madre. You know the guys I mean—“Badges?
… We don’t need no stinking badges.” Substitute “senior moments” for “badges,”
and we’re there. Somebody can’t remember something, so they laugh and say,
“Oh, it’s just a senior moment.” I don’t need no senior moments.
We all have minutes and days when we just can’t call a name or a word
or a fact to mind. We wrack our brains, but it just won’t come. It’s not
“on the tip of the tongue,” but somewhere further back, say, down around
the tonsils. Or lower. As we get older, the so-called joke is that we’re
having “senior moments.” But that’s a just code word that, like most codes,
hides a secret fear. We’re afraid of early-onset dementia and/or early-onset
Alzheimer’s. So we joke about it. I’ve spent time with people with dementia
and Alzheimer’s, both as an AIDS emotional support volunteer and as the
paid companion to a woman who was eighty-two years old physically, but
mentally only about two. She had occasional lucid moments—seconds, really—during
which I asked her, “Fran, is this is hard for you?” She’d say yes, and
then she’d be off again, talking to invisible people from her childhood.
The code phrase is not funny.
Senior moments? Phooey! It’s mere forgetfulness. Here’s an example. When
I went to see
Romeo and Juliet with a couple of friends last week, we watched
Romeo waxing lyrical about his current girlfriend, Rosaline. Rosaline never
appears in Shakespeare’s play. I remembered a play I saw several years
ago in which she not only appeared on stage but was a major character,
her and Bunbury, who is Algernon’s famous invalid friend in Oscar Wilde’s
1895 comedy,
The Importance of Being Earnest. I wanted to be witty and
mention this play to my friends…but could I remember Bunbury’s name? Not
on your life. All the way up to the moment when Montague and Capulet shake
hands over their dead children’s bodies, I was still trying to recall that
name. It wouldn’t come. I tried going through the letters of the alphabet,
because sometimes when you know the first letter of a word, you can pull
the rest of the word up, like a fish on a line. I got all the way to Z.
Nada. Twelve hours later—Bunbury! By then, of course, it was the next day.
Opportunity lost.
Here’s my theory about what senior moments really are. Our heads are old-fashioned
file rooms. They're filled with filing cabinets, the big metal ones with
drawers and real paper files in them. When we’re young, like in first grade,
we usually need only one file drawer. As we age and get more experiences
in our lives, we add more files and more drawers. Education gives us additional
files, especially if we really like history or get majorly into a hobby
and want to remember details. I can recite all the kings and queens of
England since William the Conqueror in 1066. In order. That’s a fairly
hefty file. I know people who know the whole Periodic Table, who can recognize
all the symphonies of Mozart, who understand and can recite baseball statistics.
Everybody has general files for getting through life (the rules of the
road, which way to turn screws or water faucets, how to count money and
make change), but we also have our specialized files.
Some people are known to have “encyclopedic knowledge” or “encyclopedic
memories.” These people, so my theory goes, have Really Big file cabinets.
Many-drawered, many-splendored file cabinets. And when you get to be a
senior citizen, well, your filing system is getting kind of messy. Papers
are stuffed halfway into their folders. They get torn or wrinkled. We use
them and put them back in the wrong place. They fall out of their folders.
They fall into other drawers. They fall on the floor. Occasionally we remember
to go in and clean up our files. Since we’re working on a highly metaphorical
level here, I suppose we do that housecleaning in meditation.
Another example. My son recently mentioned that he’d learned a new word.
Praeteritio. It means saying something by saying you’re not going to mention
it. We see it all the time in political ads, as in “I won’t say that my
opponent is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short [a line from Thomas
Hobbes], but….” Charles even used the word in a sentence for me. But I
didn’t get it properly filed away. What came out of my mouth an hour later
was “preterit,” which is a verb form of the past perfect tense used to
describe past actions that have been completed. Then another word popped
out of my mouth. “Ratiocinate.” To reason, as in what Sherlock Holmes does.
Praeteritio just wouldn’t come back. The next day, however, when I went
an email to Charles asking for “the word,” I suddenly remembered it. Praeteritio!
I wrote it down in ink on a pink Post-It, and it’s sitting next to my keyboard
(along with my new Facebook password) until I get it safely filed in that
messy file room I call my head. (I just added it to my spell check dictionary.
Like I’ll ever spell check it.)
Let me conclude with a nifty quatrain by Alexander Pope, a very short
man who had an exceptionally tall, full file room…er…brain:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
If you’re gonna learn something, he’s saying, learn it good. I say, tidy
up your mental file room so you can remember those facts and figures and
those dratted words that keep hiding themselves somewhere in the desert
in your head. BTW, it was the muses who regularly drank from the Pierian
Spring, which was in Macedonia and was the source of art and science.
May 20, 2012
If we listen to W.S. Gilbert, maybe we can improve our government
the world). Pay closer attention to W.S. Gilbert. You surely know
Gilbert and Sullivan, the Victorian gentlemen who wrote satirical
operettas about the topsy-turvy worlds of sailors, pirates, aesthetes,
a women’s college, Titipudlians, ghosts, and fairies. Their best-known
operettas are
H.M.S. Pinafore (1878),
The Pirates of Penzance (1879—you may have seen
Joseph Papp’s 1980 production starring Kevin Kline, Linda Ronstadt,
and Rex Smith), and
The Mikado (1885).
One of my favorite operettas is
Iolanthe (1882). It’s the plot of this operetta that reveals
the solution to our political mess in the U.S. in 2012. Gilbert’s primary
target is the extremely conservative upper house of Parliament, the House
of Lords, also called the House of Peers. The only qualification for membership
in the House of Lords was to have been born the son of a lord. If you were
a peer, you were a member. No intelligence was required. (The famous pirates
of Penzance turn out to be “young lords gone wrong.” A lot of young lords
went wrong—gambling, carousing, dueling, raising hell—though few of them
became pirates. See almost any Victorian novel.) The Lords, who probably
never read any of the legislation proposed by the Liberal Party, could
veto any bill passed by the Lower House. Are you seeing any parallels yet
between Gilbert’s dysfunctional government and our own? Like the totally
unqualified Tea Partiers who got themselves elected in 2010 and now rage
against any kind of compromise with the Democrats in Congress?
You may have read or heard the famous “
nightmare song” from Act II of
Iolanthe. It’s probably Gilbert’s most famous patter song: When you’re
lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is tabooed by anxiety, I
conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in, without impropriety;
For your brain is on fire….
So what’s the connection I see between
Iolanthe and the U.S. Congress in 2012? Let me try to condense the
plot. Twenty-five-years before the operetta begins, a fairy named Iolanthe
married the Lord Chancellor, who to this day is still the highest judiciary
functionary in England and ranks above all the peers except the royal family.
The Lord Chancellor acts as the Speaker of the House of Lords. Now let’s
keep in mind that a Speaker recently tried to run for the Republican nomination
for President of the U.S. (see my parody,
Eye of Newt), and Speaker John Boehner has more or less surrendered
to the Tea Party.
Because of her marriage to a mortal, Iolanthe was banished by the Fairy
Queen. But she gave birth to a son, Strephon, who is an Arcadian shepherd
(more parody—of the fabled innocence and purity of all rural folk). Strephon,
we learn, is a fairy from the waist up and human from the waist (well,
actually, just a bit lower) down. Strephon and Phyllis, a ward of the Chancery,
are going to be married, but Phyllis is also being courted members of the
House of Lords. The Fairy Queen is persuaded to bring Iolanthe back from
exile, and when mother and son sing a duet, Phyllis and the Lords spy on
them. Fairies don’t age and Iolanthe looks as young as her son, so Phyllis
thinks her boyfriend is making out with another woman and promptly gets
herself engaged to two Lords.
Meanwhile, the Lord Chancellor is plotting to marry Phyllis himself. Strephon
calls on the fairies—his aunts—for help, but when they arrive on stage,
the Lords think they’re merely students at a girls’ school. There are satirical
remarks in several of Gilbert’s librettos about the deleterious effects
of women in politics. (And what percentage of the U.S. Congress is female?)
Offended, the fairies decide to run Strephon for Parliament. He wins of
course, and soon becomes the head of both parties. One of his first acts
is to sponsor a bill opening the House of Lords to competitive examination,
which every existing Lord would certainly flunk. But Strephon already has
too much power to be voted down. End of Act I. As the curtain rises on
Act II, we meet
Private Willis of the Grenadier Guards, who sings about how every
boy and every girl is born either “a little liberal or a little conservative”
and that when Parliament meets, they leave their brains outside and vote
the way their leaders tell them to. Does this sound familiar? Think about
what the Tea Party has wrought in the House of Representatives and the
Senate. Brains have indeed been left outside the door. Strephon explains
to Phyllis that he is part fairy, which leads Phyllis to muse that if she
ever sees him with a young, attractive woman, well, it has to be one of
his aunts. Now Strephon asks his mother to persuade the Lord Chancellor
to release Phyllis, but Iolanthe says that because she was his wife (the
Lord Chancellor thinks she’s dead), she can’t. But she pleads her son’s
case, anyway, in disguise. No luck. Though the Lord Chancellor is glad
to see his fairy wife is alive, Iolanthe has broken the law again. Marriage
to a mortal is still a capital offense, even though all the other fairies
have been flirting with the Lords. Now the fairies are all “fairy duchesses,
marchionesses, countesses, vicountesses, and baronesses.” Are they all
to be put to death? Iolanthe is about to be banished again when the Lord
Chancellor—who used to be a very crafty clerk—finds a way to change the
fairy law. “The subtleties of the legal mind are equal to this emergency,”
he says. “The thing is really quite simple—the insertion of a single word.
Let it stand that every fairy shall die who
doesn’tmarry a mortal….” And every Lord promptly sprouts fairy wings.
To save her own life, the Fairy Queen marries Private Willis, and they
all fly away to fairyland. And how does all this nonsense apply to politics
in the U.S. in 2012? Four ways.
First, Private Willis sings that “I often think it’s comical…/How Nature
always does contrive…/ That every boy and every gal/ That’s born into the
world alive/ Is either a little Liberal/ Or else a little Conservative!”
This suggests to me that it would be good to have some liberal-conservative
amity. Maybe some mating, too! There’s good to be found in liberalism,
also in conservatism. If they mate, maybe they’ll produce a child with
the best points of both philosophies. We can consider this either metaphorically
or literally.Second, let’s institute that competitive examination for people
running for both the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. First,
give them an I.Q. test. Then a simple multiple-choice test. First question:
The year we are living in is (a) 1929, (b) 1954, (c) 1984, (d) none of
the above.Third, as every pagan knows, the humans and animals we see walking
upon the planet today are not the only sentient beings here. There are
invisible beings. Some are fairies, or the Faery. They don’t look like
Gilbert’s fairies “tripping hither, tripping thither,” nor like Shakespeare’s
Oberon and Titania. They’re not little twinkly folks. They’ve almost been
wiped out, but some still live in hidden places, and they’re not called
the Good Neighbors for nothing. I bet they’re really pissed off by global
warming, monoculture farms, and strip mines and fracking. We need to be
nice to them. Let’s arrange some meetings between the Good Neighbors and
the Tea Partiers and see what happens to the latter. With any luck, the
Good Neighbors will find them entertaining (or tasty) and they’ll be flown
off to Faery Land and we can get back to running the country in a more
civilized, kinder way. Finally, Gilbert’s Fairy Queen is not a wispy
little Hallmark babe but a substantial contralto with a powerful voice
and presence. Women are 51 percent of the U.S. population Let’s elect more
smart, powerful women to government, local, state, and federal. We need
more Fairy Queens in charge.
April 18, 2012
Blogorrhea. Blogolalia. Veroblog and Blog-o'nuts. What's all this then?
BLOGORRHEA. I just made this word up. (Well, I haven’t seen it anywhere
else.) It’s related of course to logorrhea, an “excessive flowing of words,”
which is related to diarrhea, which comes from
dia, “through,” and
rhein, “flow” via Middle English, Latin, and Greek.
I’ve noticed quite a lot of blogorrhea. I receive a lot of it via email.
I’m sure you do, too. I don’t know quite how I got on all those lists,
and I don’t read every blog I receive every morning, but I find the ones
I read interesting. Since late last year, I’ve been writing more blogs,
not only this monthly blog for my website but also regular blogs for
Feminism and Religion. Take a look. I think you’ll find blogs there
to enjoy, too. But I think I must be their divergent thinker; they’re all
wise and earnest, and here I am writing parody.
The word “blog,” which I just Googled and got 13,970,000,000 hits for,
comes from “
web log.” A web log is a short personal essay published (posted) on
the World Wide Web. Wikipedia credits “web log” to Jorn Barger, who seems
to have first used the term in 1997. The short form, “blog,” Wikipedia
goes on, “was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog
into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April
or May of 1999. Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used ‘blog’
as both a noun and verb.”
And now it seems that practically everyone blogs. Well, we all have opinions
and we’re all entitled to express them. I almost wrote “we’re entitled
to express them as long as we don’t commit libel or hurt anyone,” but that
distinction seems not to exist anymore. We get spam blogs. We get attack
blogs. We get bigoted blogs. We get opinions along the whole continuum
of dumb to wise. Everybody’s got something to say. There’s a whole lot
of blogorrhea. Not that that’s a bad thing—
—I started writing this a couple weeks ago, but then I got distracted
by my real work. My mind does not shut off while I’m editing, however,
and I’ve come up with more bloggish words. Here we go.
BLOGOLALIA. We find glossolalia in the Bible; it’s speaking in tongues,
which happened after the first Pentecost when those flames lit up on people’s
heads. People in some churches still indulge in glossolalia, which the
American Heritage Dictionary defines as “fabricated nonmeaningful speech.”
The sounds that babies make as they’re experimenting with learning to talk
is also sometimes called glossolalia. When I was writing
Finding New Goddesses, I Found (made up) Panglossolalia, whose
name is a portmanteau word. It’s the name of Dr. Pangloss, the professor
in Voltaire’s short novel
Candide who teaches that everything happens for the best in the best
of all possible worlds, conflated with glossolalia. In my book, Panglossolalia
delivers an infomercial. A portmanteau word is what happens when two words
are telescoped as one. The term was invented by Lewis Carroll, who explained
that in “Jabberwocky” the word “frumious” is a portmanteau word made of
“fuming” and “furious.” What I’m doing with this blog is creating portmanteau
words around “blog.” We find blogolalia in people (
moi?) who never know when it’s time to stop writing. They’re also
afflicted with BLOGOMANIA. When we’re reading and writing and forwarding
blogs all the time, we’re probably suffering from BLOGOHOLISM and may need
a twelve-step program. (Hello, my name is Verbena. I’m the Found Goddess
of Wordplay and Really Awful Verse and I’m a blogoholic.”) Or maybe we’re
just indulging in BLOGOMANCY, which is not quite the same as cartomancy.
BLOGARIA. This is “blog” plus “aria,” a melody or solo vocal piece in
an opera. A blogaria would thus be really good writing with sentences that
flow like music. As I was standing in the shower a few minutes ago, I was
thinking how to make other forms of this word. Perhaps one who writes blogarias,
a superblogger, is a BLOGARIST? A BLOGARIATRIST? How on earth to pronounce
that? English, like classical Greek, often likes to put the accent on the
penultimate syllable, so my best guess is blog-air-ee-AT-rist. I just invented
the word and now I have to figure out how to pronounce it, too. Pronunciation
is important, of course. Victor Borge used to get a big laugh when he talked
about opera and how the soprano sings her “die-aria.” It came out “diarrhea.”
He had an accent and he was extremely intelligent; of course he did it
on purpose.
BLOGOCRACY. What if it comes to this? That “cracy” syllable indicates
government or rule and comes to us via the Latin
cratia from the Greek
kratos, “strength, power.” It’s a favorite of people who create portmanteau
words—mobocracy and kleptocracy, for example. So picture this. We’ve got
blogariatrists (who write blogs we agree with) and BLOGIDIOTS (whom we
don’t agree with), and they’ve all got access to the Internet. All the
time. Some bloggers are influential. But what if the blogidiots start getting
themselves elected to public office? We might end up with a blogocracy,
which would be, as Macbeth said, “full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.”
Forgive me if I sound cynical, but what happens when the House of Representative
discovers literacy? Oh, they have. Well, that explains the signs their
followers keep waving. And their constant appeals for money.
VEROBLOG. The “vero” syllable comes from the Latin
verus, “true,” and related words are “veracity,” “verisimilitude,”
and that ever-useful little adverb “very.” I guess a verb or adjective
becomes truer if you modify it with very. Presumably a veroblog is one
containing
true facts, as opposed to the other kind, which we get in politics
and advertising. Like beauty and morality these days, however, veracity
seems to be situational, so one person’s veroblog may be another’s BLOG-O’NUTS.
Ya gotta watch out. Perhaps blogs expressing stupid opinions can also be
called ILLEGITIBLOGS. It’s time to wrap this up. But wait! I haven’t even
gotten to BLOGOSOPHY and BLOGOLOGY yet. Knowing that the “sophy” comes
from the Greek
sophos, “wise,” and the “logy” comes from the Greek
logos, “word,” you can no doubt supply your own definitions. How
many other bloggish words can we make up? Is there a better way to have
fun?
March 20, 2012
Charlene Proctor, The Oneness Gospel
March seems to be my pay-it-forward month. I was invited by a friend to
write a guest blog for her site, which I did (and she’ll post it next week),
and then when my friend and former client,
Dr. Charlene Proctor, asked me to help launch her new book,
The Oneness Gospel
, which I edited, I said, “Sure!” I don’t blurb or review books I’ve
edited because it seems to me like I’m praising myself, but I’m happy to
help Char with a bit of PR. This will be mutually beneficial, which I think
is a good thing.
I’m not sure how long Char and I have been friends. I think we first “met”
on line, and then we met in person when she came to speak in Orange County,
where I lived before I moved to Long Beach. She and I had several very
interesting conversations about the Goddess, and then in December, 2008,
she phoned to ask me to edit her new book. “But it’s about God,” she said.
“Are you up for a book that talks about God and the Bible?” Well, I told
her, I’ve edited books on religion and philosophy from Calvinist theology
to New Age speculation, so, yes, I’m up for the standard-brand god, too.
We started working on
The Oneness Gospel (though it had a different title at the time)
in mid-2009. With Char’s book, I did what I do with every book I work on—I
corrected spelling and punctuation and sentence structure. For some reason,
people who write on spiritual topics like to capitalize nouns, so I also
knocked down a lot of capital letters. At one point in the year and a half
we worked together, I also advised her to use active verbs and put actors
in her sentences. While we were working, of course, we also had many conversations
that weren’t about her book—about friendships and families, about the marvelous
and heartbreaking things our sons occasionally do, about how hard it is
to find a good publisher.
Char asked me to ask her a few questions, so here goes. (And I’m not editing
her replies.)
[image error]
1.
How did you come up with the idea for The Oneness Gospel
? I sought the teachings of the oneness movement in Fiji and India,
and discovered their congruence with the teachings of Jesus. These spiritual
lessons were simple, interfaith, and universal. I was excited to find a
way to write about them exciting given the polarized society we live in
today.
2.
What kinds of ideas are taught in the oneness movement? The purpose
of the oneness movement is to awaken the human family, offering a gift
of grace of spiritual opening (a flowering of the heart) to ALL people
rather than a few selective seekers as in the past. The movement is meant
to restore wholeness within humanity by awakening people to their true
self, which is Spirit. Originally, I became intrigued with the idea of
deeksha. Many years ago I received similar energy transmissions from
a number of spiritual masters over the years and those were healing experience.
These blessings felt like unconditional love and helped me begin to release
my personal suffering. My mind quieted. I had more clarity on matters.
The teachings in The Oneness Gospel originate from an Indian couple named
Sri Amma and Sri Bhagavan. They consider themselves one unified, avataric
consciousness. They are God-realized and for years, were initiating the
collective force of unified consciousness in the form of something called
the oneness blessing. It’s actually
deeksha, but the difference between them and all who have gone before
is that they are teaching everyone how to give it. They are interested
in creating individual change through this neurobiological event and say
it happens through grace, one you invite that into you. It’s available
for everyone.
3.
Does it matter what version of God we have or what religion we practice?
No. Bhagavan says there are 7 billion people on the planet; therefore,
there are 7 billion versions or images of the Divine. God is like a huge
TV network, and I have a hard time believing he/she would create only one
spin off series. The universe is too diverse. I think there are many unity-minded
individuals who honor many names for God, the many paths to God, and the
many ways to worship God. There really is only one power and one presence
and we are all loved equally.
With any religion, explore those teachings based on your own spiritual
understanding and know that we are spiritual beings, created in God's image.
The spirit of God lives within each person; therefore, all people are inherently
good. Just see yourself as a reflection of Spirit. And don’t hurt anybody.
4.
What is oneness? Why did you write a book about oneness? We are all
One Spirit. Oneness is being completely aware of God within yourself. God
is Spirit, the loving source of all that is. God is the one power, all
good, everywhere present, all wisdom. God is divine energy, continually
creating, expressing and sustaining all creation. In God, we live and move
and have our being. Other ways people refer to God are love, life, the
universe, substance, or universal mind.
I enjoy encouraging people to think outside the box, challenge their perspective,
and to treat the Bible as history and allegory. I have shown readers in
The Oneness Gospel how to interpret some of its subject matter as a metaphysical
representation of humankind's evolutionary journey toward spiritual awakening,
without losing the meat of Jesus’ teachings. The Bible is a complex collection
of writings compiled over many centuries. I honor the writings as reflecting
the understanding and inspiration of the writers at the time they were
written, but I have always searched for truth between the lines. I think
the oneness teaching from India help to draw out the universal truths in
the Bible, which continues to be a spiritual resource for us.
February 21, 2012
What's in my head today?
What’s in my head today? Well, contrary to what a few guys have said,
there’s not nothing in my head. There is in fact quite a lot of something
under this bleached, spiky hair. It’s almost always music and words, but
not necessarily the words that go with the music.
Today, for example, it’s the high parts of the Queen of the Night’s “kill
Sarastro” aria from
The Magic Flute. I don’t even like opera, so why this aria? Well,
I recently read and reviewed
Mozart’s Last Aria and while I was in Vienna, so to speak, I
decided I wanted to watch one of my
Magic Flute DVDs, the 2006 production sung in English and directed
and costumed by Julie Taymor (I love nearly all of her work) with Nathan
Gunn as my favorite Papageno. I’ve seen Nathan in person; he’s terrific.
And sexy. But one
Magic Flute wasn’t enough. So then I watched
a 1991 production sung in German and with scenery by David Hockney.
I like that production, too. Inside the jewel box, I found an article from
a music magazine given to me by a friend in 2007. It’s about a film version
of
The Magic Flute directed by Kenneth Branagh with a new libretto
by Stephen Fry. This production is set not in a Viennese la-la land but
in a place land that looks a lot like Europe during World War I. Sometimes
I get obsessive. I had to have this production. I found the DVD on eBay
and bought it from a vendor in Greece (I have an all-region DVD player).
It’s sung in English. When it arrived and I watched it, however, there
was a great big scratch right in the middle of one of Papageno’s big arias.
Drat. Back on line. I found it again on Amazon.co.uk and ordered it and
I played it last night. Thus the Queen of the Night singing in my head
this morning. Oh—Branagh and Fry say that Sarastro and the Queen were married
and are now divorced, and that’s why she hates him and why he kidnapped
Pamina. I don’t know if anyone else has ever had that idea before, but
it explains a lot.
I tend to like Branagh’s treatments of Shakespeare, even when they’re
fairly weird, like his musicalized
Love’s Labour’s Lost , in which he plays Berowne and gets all
the good lines. The casting is, well, interesting…. with Timothy Spall
as a fantastic Don Armado and Nathan Lane as Costard. But, Ken, why on
earth did you cast Alicia Silverstone as the Princess?? This is the version,
of course, where the Shakespearean characters burst into songs by Cole
Porter, Irving Berlin, and others. It mostly works. I also have Branagh’s
Twelfth Night, which is set in a lovely wintry landscape; his
Much Ado About Nothing , with Denzel Washington and others; and
his famous
As You Like It , which is set in 19th-century Japan and in which
Kevin Kline plays Jaques and delivers the famous “All the world’s a stage”
speech. This production received mixed reviews, but I like it.
I recently bought Branagh’s
A Midwinter’s Tale, in which amateur actors are trying to put
on a Christmas production of
Hamlet. This reminds me of one of my favorite TV series,
Slings and Arrows, in which we get wonderful snippets from
Hamlet,
Macbeth, and
Lear, along with considerable off-stage drama and comedy and three
hilarious songs. BTW, I do not own Branagh’s
Hamlet. It’s good, but it just goes on too long. I have the RSC
Hamlet starring David Tennant and Patrick Stewart, but if I’m
going to really indulge in
Hamlet, I’ll take either
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or the 19th-century French
opera based on
Hamlet in which Ophelia goes mad, sings a lot, strews flowers all
over the stage, sings some more, stabs herself several times, sings some
more, dies, and then—to great cheering and applause from the audience—gets
up and sings some more. The reason for this? Mid-19th-century French audiences
adored
la femme fragile. Think of
La Dame aux camellias (
Camille in English) or most of the female characters in
Les Miserables (but not Mme. Thenardier). Ophelia is about as
fragile as any
femme can get, and Ambroise Thomas made her even fragiler.
So while the Queen is yodeling in my head, I’m also running words through
my brain like a perpetual squirrel cage. Sometimes it’s idea for my authors.
A couple days ago, I woke up with the thought that a big bird in one author’s
children’s story doesn’t need to have its wingspan measured in feet or
meters. Just say it’s big enough to lift the hero’s mother’s pickup truck
into the air. As soon as I opened my email that morning, I sent that idea
to the author. I’m fourteen chapters into another book, and I keep asking
the author, “When did this happen? What year is it now?” So I asked him
about putting the year under the chapter title. He said that was “too linear,”
so I’m waiting to see how he weaves the year into the first paragraph of
each chapter. In nonfiction, we usually need to know what’s happening when,
especially if the chronology goes back and forth a lot.Occasionally I wake
up with a few lines of a new poem in my head.
Occasionally these lines are half-way good. And I’m also perpetually writing
and rewriting the first paragraphs of book reviews and new blogs in my
head, trying them on, wondering if, for example, my newest bloggish idea
would be good for
Feminism and Religion. I’m a new blogger there, and I feel like I’m
in excellent company. I’ve been working ahead and have already written
four political parodies that will be posted in the coming months. (I think
one will be posted later this week.) When I wrote on
humor in religion my blog got some interesting comments from people
who say they find humor in the Old Testament. I never have. It’s likely,
of course, that like beauty, humor is in the eye (or ear) of the beholder.
Right now, I’m percolating a blog on magical names and another one on creativity,
plus I’m working up to a couple more book reviews. Gotta finish the books
first. So, yes, there’s something in my head. Words and music bumping into
each other. I guess it’s good that I can compartmentalize so I don’t start
walking into walls.
