A Sealed Sketch

In the box I told the story that I thought you might not know, the story of how I found myself climbing to your door.

In the box there is a world-- it is a plane for the most part, with occasional mountains in the far right corner, and a tower in the fore-ground. It is a tall tower, all huge stone blocks like the ones used to make pyramids for to remember kings, and there is a window towards the top, worlds away from the flatly anchored ground, where in the box I stand, looking up.

And when I see you looking out there is a moment of despair, eternities of moments of the desperate longing of one who knows their heart is incomplete and must needs remain that way.

It is the longing of one whose heart's desire is impossible, unreal, and in the box it fills the sketchéd lines.

In the lines of ink, I twitch my ears and wag my tail and set out to climb your tower, for what else can I do? And my hands slip, and slide, and there is no purchase for coyote-fingers on the black lines and I fall, not very far, and am confused.

And on the paper, I look back up and cannot see the tower window from the ground.

In the box that I sealed and folded and hid away, on the plane of shadowed sketchéd lines, I turn for the mountains, and nearly vanish to a pinprick, to the distance and away. When the ink moves on I am returning with stones, stolen from the mountainside, and there is a hope in the silhouette once more.

And when the stone tower that I build on the plane by the tower in the box crumbles, it hides away the scene, leaving no trace of what may've gone before, until the dust should clear away, and I am left among the stones upon the ground, scattered and bemused and the cloud yet obscures the tower window where you may not e'en remain.

In desperation now, there is a silhouette, in pen and ink on an inked cliff, holding the scraps of feathers I suspected, in the box, would not suffice for wings. And from the cliff a not-quite-wingéd shape falls, forward at first and then abruptly down, straight down, like an unshaded and unsubtle sketch.

And like the simple line on which I'm based, I crash in distant clouds of disturbed dust, a tragicomedy that fills the space but poorly, and a silence follows, in the box where the mountains point so subtly to the tower where I saw your face.

In Defense Of Love

Author's Note: I am kind of a shite writer sometimes. This is one of those times; I've had this flowing about my mind for a good few months/years now, but it always seemed like... like writing out the steps to an equation that you see complete in your head-- which is actually a lot harder than writing something complicated out-- it seems self-explanatory. But. All the same, here is the first bit; when I have a bit of time to breathe, think, and re-calibrate my head, I will write the second, which deals with "What God hath made clean call not thou unclean," and, if I were a philologist of absolutely any skill whatsoever, would also deal with the works of the Apostle Paul, and why I don't think what he is saying is what a lot of people think he is saying. As it stands I might try and touch on the point that he was writing to wayward churches with advice, not transcribing The Words of Jesus to all Christians everywhere at any point in the future. Or I might leave it-- sometimes it's better to have three decent points than three decent... and one weak.

In Defense Of Love

Let me begin with a disclaimer. I am not the best person to write this—nor anywhere near the top of the list. I am not as wise, nor as eloquent, nor as learned a writer as it takes to do this subject justice. Furthermore, it has been said before, I’m sure, and will be said again, more eloquently – and again, and again, and again, I hope, until it is no longer necessary to repeat; until we are, as the poet says, too old to need such crutches. In the meantime-- here goes nothing.

With the disclaimer out of the way, a more… traditional introduction is in order. This is a hard essay for me to write, simply because the final conclusion is something I reached a long, long time ago; it’s something I find self-explanatory, and I don’t know how to convey that simplicity.

Put succinctly – expect rewrites.

To the Christians the world over—every church deacon and pastor and preacher and priest and bishop, and every authority who’s made the claim that God Hates X. Unless that blank is filled with a word like ‘bigotry,’ ‘hatred,’ ‘hypocrisy,’ and especially if it is filled with a specific group of people, consider this essay directed almost entirely at you. I am a Christian, and it’s taken me a while to be able to say that again without wincing at all the implications – after seeing what this religion can be capable of, it’s hard to then take a deep breath and go back, and say to myself that it’s the institution, the people in charge – that I have no beef with God (at least, most of the time – I will admit to a fair amount of skyward-fist-shaking, and furious profanities shouted in quiet dark spaces), that I have never disbelieved in Christ.

That I believe in Love.

For that is the greatest commandment, is it not? Love the Lord thy God, with all thy heart, and all with thy soul, and with all thy mind. No side-stepping, no hemming or hawing; that’s straight out of the KJV, the Bible the more strict churches believe is The One And Only Word, right down to the punctuation. Love thy God; love thy neighbor. These, Jesus says, are the greatest – there are no commandments greater than these. But what does that mean? Love thy God – how, exactly, are we to do that? Besides an internal belief, and surely that isn’t all, what are we to do?

Peter doesn’t ask this at the time – I can’t recall if any of the disciples do. It’s a lawyer who originally asks him what the greatest commandment is – what he must do to inherit eternal life, depending on which gospel you’re reading. But at the end of the gospels, Jesus asks Peter. I’ll just… I can’t paraphrase this.

“So when they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, [son] of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my lambs.

“He saith to him again the second time, Simon, [son] of Jonas, lovest thou me? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my sheep.

“He saith unto him the third time, Simon, [son] of Jonas, lovest thou me? Peter was grieved because he said unto him the third time, Lovest thou me? And he said unto him, Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee. Jesus saith unto him, Feed my sheep.” (John 21:15-17)

Unless there’s an entire lost gospel kicking around somewhere about Jesus’ time as a shepherd, those are metaphorical sheep there he’s talking about. The message is clear: If you love me, take care of your brethren—your neighbors. Everyone you can. My sheep. My flock. You. How do you uphold the first commandment? Follow the second.

God is Love. Over, and over, and over again, this crops up in Christianity. So why is it that apparently, in order to worship Him, we need to wear nice clothes to church every Sunday, marry a nice boy/girl (depending, obviously, on gender) in our own social group, always support our country first, and spend much of our life shaking our heads in disapproval at those who don’t follow our set of rules? All of our rules are meaningless – yes, everything even The Apostle Paul wrote, everything that does not uphold those two commandments. Love thy God; love thy neighbor. If it’s not supporting that, what is the point?

So there’s my first proof. But that doesn’t quite hit the heart of the matter; there are plenty of people who preach the doctrine ‘Love the sinner, hate the sin,’ and in this manner avoid outright acts of violence towards any subgroup they disagree with, while at the same time telling them, basically, that their love is something God hates. That they are condemned as sinners – oh, of course we all are – but… they are, moreso, for something they didn’t choose.

Here, I will pause the sermon-type bits to make a short point that I find very difficult to talk about LGBTQ without mentioning. Often, the argument or debate or discussion quickly disintegrates into a snit-fight over whether homosexuality/bisexuality, etc. is something natural, or something chosen. I have one quick question to every single person who’s about to rush me with one finger upheld, pointing, condemning, or, most infuriatingly, holding up invented 'studies'. Look at your Significant Other. Your Better Half; your fiancé, fiancée, your wife, your husband, your lover, the one person who you want to spend your life with. Look at everything that makes you love them – if you will, an itemized list. (Note: Do not actually try to make an itemized list. It’ll take you a good few eternities, I assure you.)

Did you choose that? Did you choose her eyes that make you smile? Did you choose to have that little flutter in your chest every time he looks at you? Did you make a conscious choice, at some point, to first be attracted to that person, and then to fall in love with them? (...Or to fall in love with them and then find yourself blown away when you actually meet them face to face?) Somehow, I doubt it. So unless you’re about to tell me that you made the conscious decision to be attracted to girls with red hair, to really tall guys, to girls with dark eyes, to guys with green eyes, or to guys or girls at all, I don’t want to hear it. Nobody chooses who they fall in love with, okay? Moving on, now.

I'll pick this up later with a Part Two. But I'll summarize that Part Two now by saying that it is unbelievably hypocritical to blather on about homosexuality being a huge, incredible, horrible sin, to persecute and attack and marginalize the very humanity of couples, two people whose major crime seems to be loving one another, while ignoring the rest of Leviticus. And before you go on and point out that shrimp and unclean animals are allowed by Peter's vision, I will quote that passage: "What God hath made clean, call not thou unclean." God seems to have scattered people in all different molds. I'm pretty sure His intention was not to make some automatically more powerful than others, simply by dint of being born out of the majority. And before you put on airs about that passage applying to food, not people, and who do I think I am anyway, I will roll my eyes in advance, and point out that the same passage of Leviticus forbids women to leave their rooms while on their period, forbids men from touching them, or sitting where they have sat, and declares that if a man rapes a woman who is not betrothed, they must be married. (If she is betrothed, her family/fiance gets to kill the rapist! Fun times.) That passage was never specifically refuted either! (Unclean, unclean!)

Now I'm going to go beat my head against the wall until the overtired crazy goes away, and write that rest thingy later.

I should also add, as an aside... this is not meant to be patronizing. As I said, it's a letter to Christendom, explaining... well, why I think they're wrong. It could be argued that everything I've said here is heresy-- so be it. But I don't want anyone thinking this is a "Hey, gay dudes, lesbians, trans people! It's okay, you have my religion's permission to love, now!" It's more... a statement of belief-- I don't think love is condemned by my religion, or ever has been. I think we got something wrong, somewhere a long ways back.

Of Cities, and Unfolding Minds

So I’m sitting in the top bunk of a nifty little bed in a hostel room, second floor, first living floor, and typing up a summary of… well. Honestly, I just wanted to write something. I’ve been missing it.

To my left, there’s a lovely view of a rooftop, and a wall. On the rooftop, there’s some kind of dark brown vent-pipe, and, if you lean, a gray lighter, a beer can, assorted seagull feathers and cigarettes and the like. The wall’s got some sort of triangle on it in black spray-paint, and if you lean far enough out, you can see a brick building, maybe four, five stories, and beyond it, sky and skyscrapers. In the hostel room itself, there’s two bunk-beds. Mine’s the top of the one on the far side of the wall, next to the window, and the other one is against the side wall, long from the door. There’s a longish mirror, and four plywood lockers, big enough for a duffle bag, which is all I really need. Oh, and a towel hook. That’s rather important.

My first roommate is an older woman named Kendra who travels the world doing… something. She doesn’t have a home, she says, and seems to enjoy it. My other roommate, who only arrived two nights ago, is a bit younger, maybe a few years older than me, named Kim, from Australia. She’s very cool, seems to spend most of her time traveling. I guess that’s what hostels are for, and when Rebecca finally goes traveling next summer (she’d better, anyway), she will enjoy the company, I think.

I was wondering if there was something wrong with me, as I did not seem to be completely overwhelmed by this city. I was expecting, what with the mountains, and the hills, and the trees, and the fountains, and the architecture (so crazy! so, so crazy!), to be just staring goggle-eyed all about, but somehow it just feels… comfortable. I like this city. I am not overwhelmed, I do not feel like a tiny, insignificant prawn lost in the shuffle of bigger, more important lives. Dwarfed by the mountains, and the trees, yes, but the streets are wide and the skies are big and there is water. I could spend some time here.

…I could spend a lot of time here.

Quite honestly, I would not mind living here for a while. And that is partly the awesome geography, and the topography, and the architecture, and… well, it’s also largely the fact that these streets I have wandered down, I have been wandering down them in very excellent company. A beautiful city is nice, but it is infinitely nicer to have someone who… well. Someone to appreciate it with?

We’ve passed the stage where we both mutter apologies when our hands brush up against each other. I’m rather glad for that. For all the mockery of Those Puritans who freak out about holding hands, it is actually rather a big step for someone who just isn’t a physical contact sort (though hugging? hugging is awesome). And last night we talked about mental illnesses, and minds, and… mine. And I kind of just talked and talked and talked, and told him all (well, summarized) the stuff in my head that I cringe from, and some of the stuff I’ve embraced, and the stuff that’s a blessing and the stuff that’s a curse and the voices of doubt and the voices of hate and the voices I love and the voices I’ve run from and all the things in my past I have bled over and bled myself over and been terrified to face for so, so long and he listened, and commented occasionally, and we walked through rapidly darkening streets and below bright lights very quickly up very steep hills and it was dark and a bit chilly and the breezes and my mind opening up to someone who I’ve known for five years and less than a week, simultaneously, and it felt…

Really, I don’t know.

Maybe that’s okay?

Dance

It's an unscripted thing, something you've never seen before, and you want to possess it... to take it into your body, your mind, to bring it into your soul and get drunk on the rhythms therein. You're already body-drunk on the over-effects of the livingness of it, of the wild actions and the breathless spaces of perfect calm-- for no longer than a beat at a time. It almost hurts, the perfection.

You've been searching your whole life for something like it; you've climbed mountains and watched the rocks go tumbling past you, to a doom for any man. You've gone diving, seen the depths and the shallows alike, and all the wonders that play there, and you've seen the herons bowing over ponds, and the cranes in their rituals, and you've seen the eagles dive together, interlocked.

You've searched your whole life, and been everywhere, it seems. You've met, you've-- heard. It all makes sense, everything is made clear, and you are-- transcended.

It's over, just like that. And the man sitting next to you, lounging with one arm thrown carelessly over the desk, nods indifferently. He glances at his clipboard, the checklist, and makes a bit of a face.

"Yeah... I just don't think it's what we're looking for. Thanks anyway-- next!"

And just like that. Just like that, the lights go back on in your head, and the next dancer heads on up to the stage, tossing her hair coquettishly. You don't see where her predecessor went, in the darkness out of the spotlight, and the brief sound of her footsteps is lost almost immediately to the opening piano chords. The dance is trite, simple, but it's got a hypnotic sort of effect. The director nods approvingly, tapping his pen against the clipboard.

The dream is over, and the morning that life bestows you has stolen the last shreds from your mind, like a bead of dew, there and gone before the sun has risen from the haze in the East. The dream is over, and you return without a thought of reluctance or relish to the waking life.

Wordcloud from Wordle

Unknown Caller and the Unknown Future

Laying here, under this bridge, maybe it used to be a road, I've lost the capacity to understand these things, wondering, thinking, didn't I used to be able to follow a train to its conclusion, the railways didn't change, maybe I did,

Hear me, cease to speak that I may speak-- shush, now

Oh, it doesn't make sense, how did I get here, though? Not here, I remember finding this place in case it rains maybe I won't get as wet as if the streets weren't up there, above me with the cars going over them to places, other places, they go too fast, too loud, or they used to be but at night it's easier to hear and there aren't as many, but so things are quieter and the sky is brighter. No, wait. that's not right.

You know your name, so punch it in

Sold my soul for self-control, pushing for the devil's goal, not much more to reach for anymore. That was a stupid thought though, now there is less to reach for, just that broken bottle over there, but it won't look so good if I take it out of the light from the over over the bridge into the shades here even though I look better out of the light they said back then. No, not back then. Now. Near now. Yesterday or one of those days.

Hear me, cease to speak that I may speak

There was a reason why not to do this, except now it's just that I have no money and so it's been too long and I can feel things getting worse and is this what they warned me about? The plane ticket was supposed to not be me except it wasn't the plane ticket they warned me about it was the needle, I wasn't supposed to use the needle ever ever ever ever because things would be bad and I would be bad and friends would all go away or stop being friends or friendly or shewing himself themself itselves friendly

Password, you-- enter here; you know your name, so punch it in
Password-- you. Enter here
Password, you, enter here
password
you
enter here

This was originally about depth perception

The skky is so three-dimensional, it's more complex than anything humans could make, except that it would probably be difficult to sculpt the sky anyway-- sculpt the sky, should be the goal of every philosophy, ever artist's dream: to sculpt the sky. It's a statement that could mean The Sky-- you change every aspect of life, to the extent that you have sculpted the way people look at everything, no one even looks at the sky the same way anymore, or you could take the easy way out and just sculpt the sky itself, or sculpt a copy of the sky, which makes more sense, potentially.

What you kind of have to wonder is what's up there in the sky, in all three dimensions and even the fourth, but the thing is there's so much to really contemplate even in the three dimensions we can perceive as humans that it's difficult to understan why people are always trying to find a fourth; what, is what we've got not good enough? I really think if you open your eyes to the world around you, to the absolutely limitless potential for shapes, static, kinetic, it's impossible not to be overwhelmed, and, perhaps, impossible to retain sanity-- which is probably why we can't, or don't, do it. Like whatever-it's-called, the eternity code or the eternity paradox or virus or the reality bug maybe? that essay that was all about how people would read this code-- and, of course, it's been confronted by literature of all kinds, in all methods-- and their minds would just shut down, because the sheer eternity of the thing would overload them. The debate, I believe, the major debate was over whether they had transcended reality into a state of pure bliss and omniscience, or whether they had just lost their mind completely, sanity wiped out-- but some people hypothesized that it all amounted to the same thing. Like the paradoxes which shut down computers, but the human brain... instead. The closest thing the author had said came was a sentence written in which a word was deleted, but the author let both the word and the deltion stand. Personally, I think if that's the best we can do, we might as well hand over the keys of reality to the birds-- ah, if only we had them.

If you sold the keys of reality, what price would they fetch, and what price would you want, and who exactly would want to buy such a thing, as though our own perceptions of reality were not enough, as if our own perceptions were too much, which, of course, they are, and that's why we can't even take those and we step out of them and we step into other perceptions either with drugs or omniscience which is shut off by sheer willpower or lack thereof because to know eternity is simply frightening as the lunatics know from their experiences with the great wonderful world of wild wonder eternity or something like that, it's like when you contemplate the sky and not just how far it goes-- limits and eternal stretching is the easy part, even when you think about the fact that the universe is (supposedly) expanding constantly, and perhaps even exponentially, but then you think about every shape that could be contained in that-- the abstract, the cubist, the natural, the sheer impossibility of it blows your mind simply because it is actually possible after all, the shapes are there-- we just don't see them because they're all the same, like if you connected every molecule of nitrogen with opaque or translucent lines and made them not transparent (except that they probably aren't, it's just that the atoms are mostly empty space, especially since the cloud of electrons is spread out and the molecules are so far apart because it's the nature of a gas-- if you compressed it to a state of solidity would it still be transparent? I think liquid nitrogen is opaque), and the shapes would utterly blow your mind, just as the shapes of clouds, except if we could perceive them in three dimensions, rather than the two which come with the lack of depth perception induced by seeing them from such a great distance, as is the natural state or so they tell us.

Maybe that's why we watch sunsets, because we can't bear the daylight sky, and it gives us such great pleasure to see it finally ending, and the imagination of our overworked minds can finally take a rest on the night sky and start contemplating stars, which are infinitely more complex than clouds unless you take eternity into account, at which point everything is equally simple and complex, and you spend hours just staring at a rock, because the rock is so interesting, infinitely more interesting than some strange philosophical doctrine (that sentence, by the way, was written that way partly because I tried to write it while Born In The USA started playing and the lyrics just carried over), even if that philosophy is about how everything is equally complex, because at some point every philosophy starts talking about actual people, and how you or they are supposed to behave, and after a while it just gets depressing-- you've got the idealists, the cynics, the Christians, the atheists, the existentialists and the nihilists (who claim, or are claimed by their critics, which makes it probably more true than the former, at least according to someone (possibly Gilbert Keith Chesterton) that they are merely the logical end of the existentialist philosophy-- though I must protest that existentialism only turns to nihilism if you're utterly cynical, which, of course, is half the point) and the optimists and the Marxists and the modernists and the postmodernists and now, you've got the pretentious sort of artists who look back at postmodernism as, somehow, not postmodern enough (or maybe just too postmodern, depending on the day of the week and trend), and turn out making things that are, honestly, just strange, which I always thought was part of the point of postmodernism (to be fair, that's only part of it-- strangeness in and of itself must be more than simply itself, or less, or only just, because if you are being strange for the sake of strange it's post-postmodernism, or maybe post-post-post-neomodernism, or neopostmodernism or something, but if you're being strange to prove that, say, life is strange, or life is not strange, or people are strange, or people are not strange but society is, then it's postmodernism, or sometimes just modernism, depending on your overall point, point of view, and whatever critic happens to be talking about your work), but I guess that's only if you really don't care what the critics think, unless you do.