Memory

Watching "Adam" from this season of Torchwood made me think about the quality, the nature, of memory. Of how our identities and our selves are constructed not only of flesh and bone and blood, but of the scraps and threads of thought and recall that construct what we think of who we are.

What are the things we tend to remember? The really happy moments, the tragic ones, the traumatic ones. But we also sometimes remember pieces of our everyday lives: leftovers from breakfasts, lunches, and dinners eaten with the people we see or saw on a nearly constant basis; the tatters of an old favorite blanket or shirt or dress; the scruff of a beloved stuffed toy or pet.

I remember a moment of childhood spent in my mother's rose garden behind a grey house, tier upon tier of mulched flowerbeds, a green kiddie pool, and a red wooden fence.

I remember illness, the acrid smell of a hospital, the stiff cotton of the green speckled gown, the pain of the IV in my arm, the comforting familiar presence of a large purple unicorn lying above my head on my pillow. The taste of bad canned corn pushed around in an unbreakable bowl while watching the same cartoon movie over and over. Darkness. The strange, half-real blue of nighttime and rage. Hating what they did, what they wanted, what was wrong with me.

I remember endless summer days, swimming in the pool. Playing with the dog. The new cat - the one that hated me - climbing a tree. The salamanders I rescued bloated with chlorinated water. They were blue-black with yellow spots. Their skin was slick and rubbery, their feet like tiny wet pads.

I remember the county fair. The smells of beer and sawdust. Popcorn. Animals. The roar of people and of stock cars.

I remember the smell of crabapple trees in spring. The sneezing.

The sound of water trickling. The scent of Easter lilies and candles and incense. The cool crinkle of a new white dress.

I remember the pink linen dress with white and purple ribbons my mother made me. I remember wearing it whenever I could.

I remember many things. What I do not remember is the feeling of despair. I know I felt it, once. I know I thought the world - my world - was at an end. I know I blamed myself and everyone around me.

I do not remember this. I know it happened. I remember the clothes I wore, the food I often ate, the car I drove. I remember things I did. I do not remember the despair.

What does this mean? No idea. What do I take from it?

I am not that person. I have little to link myself to her but the knowledge that we have shared memories of the same little girl. The girl who loved dogs and cats and trees and flowers and water. The little girl who didn't understand just how sick she was. The little girl who never let herself be told "you can't."

So who are we? We are what we decide to allow ourselves to be. I don't mean our jobs. I don't mean what other people think of us. Those things don't make us what we are. They contribute to our thoughts, our memories, certainly, but they don't form us. It is how we respond, what we learn, and how we choose to recall our memories that reveals what we have become.

Our memories are the texts, the poems, the plays of our lives. They are the language and the scenes that make up the formation of our characters. They are informed by what we have written into them, but also by the way we read them.

We are the books of ourselves. The stories of our own lives. The verses and rhythms and meters that beat out the timbre of each year, each day, each hour. We are romances. Adventures. Fantasies. Mysteries. Endless pages waiting to be written and read. To be lived.

PPSD

Pre-Production Stress Disorder:
The result of Murphy's Law as applied to theater.
Everything that can possibly go wrong, is.

But rather than allow this unfortunate condition to cause me to become homicidal, I've decided to wax philosophical for a while.

Why do we, as human beings, elect to subject ourselves to situations we know will cause us inordinate amounts of stress? Theater, after all, is nothing but pure drama. In the most profoundly negative sense of the term.

We do it, quite simply, for one of two reasons.

1. We need stress - tension, adrenaline, what-have-you - to feel alive.
2. To prove to ourselves or to others that we have the balls necessary to claw our way through whatever unholy hell life has thrown our way.

I fall under the second. Whatever life - or the theater - manages to throw at me, I will not fall. I will triumph. It may be bloody, messy, dirty, involve tears and sweat and every other bodily fluid known to man, but I will. not. fail.

It's a holdover, I think, from being the kid that everybody picked on. There are other psychological options to that, of course. To become intolerably shy. To become so socially awkward people stop picking on you because they want more to avoid you. To attempt to force yourself to blend in, becoming miserably unhappy because you have no idea who you are or what you want. Or - my personal choice - to send a big finger in the general direction of the universe.

I've gotten better over the years. This mysterious thing called "maturity" has made me far less inclined to lash out unpredictably at everyone and everything in order to keep them from attacking first. But I haven't lost that streak that just wants to pile on the punishment until it gives in to the awesome power that is my pure tenacity. I believe it's called "stubbornness."

Well, that's what the theater is about, for me. About being the only member of the technical crew. About being director, designer, prop mistress, costumer... until I can't really think straight. Now don't get me wrong, I could do this to myself with only one or two hats, instead of the six that I seem to be wearing at present. And I'd probably do a better job. But I do a bang-up-enough job at all six that, since I don't have anyone else to wear those hats, I can manage it.

But I don't go into theater for the applause - they don't applaud the person in the booth in the dark - or for the accolades. I go into it because it's something that I can do despite all conceivable odds. And I think many technicians do the same. We all have horror stories. And we love them. They are our bear-slaying stories, our tales of manhood, our first kills. And every time we find ourselves in another impossible situation, we swear we'll never do it again.

And then, when a few days or weeks or months have passed, we forget the tremors, the screaming, the tears and blood. And then we start thinking about jumping back in. About the rush of watching our little creation unfold on a stage beneath the pretty lights, dancing about in a sparkling costume that only we know is held together with glue and tape and string that we're fervently praying will hold long enough.

But we also know that if it doesn't, the string and glue and tape alone will be a triumph. Because there is magic in the string, magic that maintains the illusion of other-worldliness even when the tape falls off and the sequins trail across the stage. There is magic just in believing that this place, this two-hours' traffic of our stage, is, for a fleeting time, real.

Sex Sells

Not my usual subject for ranting, I know, but this post over at Pixiepalace got me thinking. The venerable Rosepixie was a friend of mine from long ago and a land far away, though we've been only intermittently in touch for the last couple of years.

Her post deals with issues of marketing to female gamers, specifically, the over-sexualization of female characters and avatars in the gaming industry. Her complaint is, specifically, that the women on the promotional art (and sometimes on the boxes) is degrading, irrational, and oftentimes impossible.

I’m always on the lookout for gaming art with images of women that make me want to play the game or, even better, play that particular female character. I was a kid in the era when Ms. Pac-Man and Princess Peach were about the only female characters that were terribly prominent in the video game world. This led me to believe for a long time that video games weren’t really for me. I didn’t really want to be a princess in a pink frilly dress who constantly needed rescuing (What is up with that anyway? Somebody needs to buy Peach some books on how to be self-reliant!). Anyway, we’re beyond that now. These days, women are everywhere in the world of video games. Unfortunately, they still have a ways to go when it comes to being attractive as avatar images for women.

One commenter noted that women are not the target audience of these designs (there are images on Rosepixie's blog), and therefore, because more men than women buy games, it is the men to whom the designs are marketed. Rosepixie counters with the logical if-you-don't-market-to-them-they-won't-buy-it answer, and I think she's right. But I also think that by assuming a specific marketing audience, the marketers are perpetuating certain, very negative, stereotypes.

First of all, your "average" guy isn't going to go for the image of a woman in armor, no matter how scanty that armor may be. Not only does it very often look funny, but it would be a pain in the royal patootie to get off... which, let's be honest, is what most guys are after.

Second, these images of seemingly idiotic women in even more idiotic armor reinforces the idea that women just don't belong on the battlefield. And if they're wearing THAT, I'm going to have to be forced to agree. At least make the men equally stupid and in equally bizarre clothing so that everybody's got an equal change of being skewered.

Third, most gamers are more than happy to make the acquaintance of a female gamer. Especially if she knows what she's doing... unlike the ever-so-charming artistic depictions of her. Competence, like confidence, is very sexy.

I do acknowledge that a girl in full armor probably doesn't sell... oh, wait. Samus. A girl in full armor. Selling. (This would be Metroid, for those not in the know.) Admittedly, it's not really humanly feasible armor, but it is at least armor.

Anyway, my point being that if sexy sells, fine. But then be sexy to the men, too. Show that sexy does not always mean stupid. It doesn't always mean I'm-about-to-die-of-exposure. It doesn't always mean I'm-helpless. Show both genders in equally revealing/tight clothing that is actually wearable and in circumstances in which said clothing won't get them immediately killed.

Is that really so much to ask?

The Monarchy of the United States

Sometimes it occurs to me just how much like our political ancestors we really are. For instance, for all that we purport to be a democratic state, there are shocking political similarities between our current government and the early modern English absolute monarchy. There are many reasons why I find this profoundly disturbing.

Yes, we could find ourselves with a glorious monarch *ahem* president whose golden reign - er... term - will last for many harmonious years.

But.

(A good word, that.)

But. Absolute monarchs are no walk in the park. Even if it is St. James'.

Glen Burgess - in Politics of the Ancient Constitution - describes the dual prerogative of the Stuart monarchy beginning in 1603, lasting until 1649, when Charles lost his head. Literally.

Between the competing sides in the imposition debate there was substantial theoretical agreement. Everyone agreed that the common law protected property, within England at least, and that the king could not infringe upon property rights without his subjects’ consent. Most agreed also that the king had both an ordinary and an extraordinary (or absolute) prerogative, the latter properly used not to contravene the common law (through which the king exercised his ordinary prerogative) but to supplement it. It provided a basis for royal action in areas where the common law had no force, whether geographical (possibly the high seas) or institutional (possibly the church). The dispute was not primarily theoretical at all, but more about whether impositions were in fact properly a matter for the absolute prerogative and thus of no concern to the common law.¹

Okay, you may ask, that's all very well and good, but what does it have to do with King George II (you know who I mean)?

The idea of absolute prerogative grants, ostensibly, the power to the monarch to issue commands, statutes, and dictates above and beyond the purview of the common law. While common law in seventeenth-century England was drastically different from American law today (for one thing, it wasn't written down), I think the notion is still applicable. Our ruler - a.k.a. President - is able to, in particular circumstances, issue directives above and beyond the law. Fine. Makes sense. But there's a problem, and it's the same problem we saw with Charles I, the same problem foregrounded in Shakespeare's Richard II and Marlowe's Edward II.

Nobody told the king.

When absolute prerogative functions to allow the monarch to functionally create a precedent for something outside common law, it's lovely. When a monarch - or President or Prime Minister or whatever - uses absolute prerogative to overrule or alter common law, then we have a problem. When, hypothetically, the sovereign authority decides to ignore the Bill of Rights. Or confiscate property from a law-abiding citizen.

The intellectual elaboration that it underwent in the early-seventeenth century was made possible by the tools provides by civil law jurisprudence; but the elaboration was not at first fundamentally inconsistent with accepted common-law thinking. That inconsistency would not arise until the king’s power outside the law came to be used (it was more a matter of use than of theory) as a power over the law. This was a feature of – as Oscar Wilde might have said – the general carelessness that lost Charles I three kingdoms (and a head).2

This "carelessness," boys and girls, is what the very astute early moderns call "tyranny." It's what happens when our rulers and leaders forget that they - like the rest of us - are human and subject to the same laws (like gravity) as the rest of us. When they assume that the power they've been granted by vote or blood makes them better than the ordinary woman or man. Why do they forget? Because not only do we let them, we encourage them to forget. We encourage them to think themselves better than we are because we want them to be. We want our leaders to be great heroes, demi-gods whose blood is somehow purer, greater, more than ours. And that is a very natural, very dangerous thing. It leads to corruption, to the abuse of power and prerogative, and - as we are reminded by our good friend Shakespeare - to tyranny.

And what happens to tyrants? Well. Look up 1649. Look up Richard II or Edward II. I can tell you it isn't nice.

We in the U.S.A. happen to be lucky enough to have this thing called "term limits." We have an out that doesn't involve fire pokers. And a good thing, too. We also have a very nice First Amendment that lets me write this with little to no fear of having my head chopped off because I can't recite the Lord's Prayer in Latin. I'm not saying we're living in an unenlightened age. I'm simply saying that perhaps we aren't quite as enlightened as we think we are.

Or, maybe, that Shakespeare and company weren't living in an age of barbarism.

But perhaps we're all barbarians. Perhaps we will remain so as long as we enjoy bloodsport and American Gladiators. Perhaps enlightenment - in the truest, Buddhic sense - will elude most of us permanently. Perhaps an alien race will come upon our little blue and green planet, shudder in disgust, and blow us all to smithereens.

Or perhaps we'll go on as we always have, living our little lives with passion and confusion, both loving and hating every breath with all the vitality our unimportant souls can muster.

I don't think that would be so bad, do you?

1 Glen Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (University Park: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 142.

2 Ibid., 167.

Today's Revelation

Brought to you by Neil Gaiman.

"writing is, like death, a lonely business."

This encapsulates so much of what writing is about, at least for me. "A lonely business." There is something about that which is very, very true. You can share your aches and pains, complain about the blockages and the cramps, but, ultimately, it is something you do alone. A lot like aging. Like dying.

And writing is its own form of rebellion against death. It is our window, however transient and translucent, into immortality. Our way, as writers, of leaving a mark in indelible ink on the parchment of the world. For some of us, we do this consciously. We know, as we set pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, that we are attempting to write our own legacies. Some of us do it for other reasons. To find out who we really are. To explore the possibilities and impossibilities of our world. To tell the stories and say the things that so desperately need to be said. But, underneath it all, we know that this is our trust to the people and places we will one day leave behind. Our bequeathal to a future that might otherwise never know we exist.

I see no shame in that. Shakespeare did it, after all. Keats. Shelley. Marlowe. Jonson. Wilde. Yeats. Eliot. Pound. Writers have written their way into the eternal, inscribed their names and beliefs on pages and stones for us to find. It is what we do. Because, like death, writing "is a lonely business."

I remember, years ago, working on my undergraduate thesis and coming across the myth of Thoth. Thoth - the Egyptian ibis-headed god of writing - was charged with finding a way to remember things. He invented writing and presented it to Ra. Ra was both pleased and angered. Thoth had done as he was bidden, but he had also contradicted those orders. With writing, what was could be remembered so long as it could be read. But so long as it could be read, there was no need to remember it.

Does writing mean we no longer need to remember things? Post-its, memos, and little check-mark notes in our PDAs certainly seem to indicate that memory has gone the way of the Dodo. We have things that do our remembering for us. But so long as we have those things, read those writings, we have the capacity to remember so much more than if we had to rely on the feeble weakness of our fleshly minds.

Do I wish I could hear a play and recall it, almost verbatim, a few hours later? You bet. But do I regret ever having the urge to read or write? Never. Words, whether engraved within the cellular matrix of my mind or written out - even on something as simple as a post-it - are the inky blood that keeps my psyche - my soul, if you will - alive. They allow us not simply to remember, but to grow. To take what our mothers and fathers have taught us and to change, to become something wonderful and rich and strange. Like death. A lonely business.

Ashes, ashes we all fall down

While it’s been a long time since I actually believed in any sort of god or savior beyond my own psyche, I never fail to grow contemplative around Ash Wednesday. As a holiday – a holy-day in the truest sense of the word – Ash Wednesday always fascinated me. It was eerie, beautiful, dark. The creature hidden in the closet that nobody talked about but, when you open the door on that one day of the year, stepped out with a strange and feline grace, her dark fur glossy and dusty and oh-so-elegant in its secretive and forbidden finery.

It reminds me, in the way that things can only remind a creature of book and word, of Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday.” And not simply because of the title.

If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spent
If the unheard, unspoken
Word is unspoken, unheard;
Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard,
The Word without a word, the Word within
The world and for the world;
And the light shone in darkness and
Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled
About the centre of the silent Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

Ash Wednesday is a time of silence. A time where congregations of people who are uncertain and unsure – both of who they are and why they pause in their lives, in the very midst of their days, to sit and daub themselves with ash – gather to simply breathe in one another’s company, to draw into themselves the air and the word. The Word.

O my people, what have I done unto thee.

We are the people. We are the suffering, the crucified, the dying. We. The ashes smeared on our foreheads are our own. They are the reminder – the words we hear every year, at every funeral, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” – of where we have been and what we will become. They are our signal to mourn the losses of our lives, the little and the large, to allow ourselves one hour out of our day to lament and languish, to smear ourselves with the paint of grief and wallow in the strange patters we find our fingers drawing on our skin.

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

We force ourselves to believe in hope. We force ourselves to believe that there is something more, something beyond… but we rarely manage to answer beyond what? We do not hope to turn, we do not hope, we do not hope to turn again…

We have turned before, O my people, we have turned and will turn. Our lives are composed of the turning of the stair, of the twisting and winding of the hourglass, the turning and turning over, the timeless moment before the grains tumble the other direction, carrying us back and forward all at once.

the time of tension between dying and birth

Our lives are… turnings. Windings. Stairs. Our lives are the moments that exist between birth and death, and we hope for a turning that leads us back, from death to birth. And there is no shame in that hope. No folly. There is shame only in no hope. Shame in refusing to hope for another turn, to hope for another day, another hour. There is folly only in placing our dreams beyond our own hands. Dreams are meant to be shared. Meant to be formed and reformed, turned and returned, drawn and written and revised. Reenvisioned.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

In my Ash Wednesday, I sit alone, naked, in a warm garden filled with flowers curling from the ground like smoke, their leaves and stems and petals the sepia tone of old photographs, the fading black-brown wash of ink. In my Ash Wednesday, the ashes are a thick paste-like paint, kept in pots that rest their little clay bottoms and feet on stone and grass. And all the color of ink and ash. They are warm. The ashes glide onto my skin like silk, stain it like henna set for days, draw out the patters of my lives and hopes – oh, yes, I have had many lives, many hopes – and trace the promises of my dreams. And I have dreams.

Dreams in which Angels sing demons to sleep, in which wings are formed of feathers made of words, in which my skin gleams with sweat and sings in a language I cannot yet understand, but one I hope someday I will learn.

In my Ash Wednesday, there are hands that are not my own, and they draw new patters, trace new words, new dreams, new hopes, onto the canvas that is my skin. They are gentle hands, warm hands, hands with patches of rough that tingle and tickle what they touch. I know whose hands they are.

In my Ash Wednesday, there is no division between life and loss, no division between hope and despair, no division – Suffer me not to be separated – but all is a revel in the glory of our lives, our dreams.

In my Ash Wednesday, there is fire. Heat. Passion. There is screaming. There is laughter. They are the same. In my Ash Wednesday, there is promise.

And let my cry come unto Thee.

In my Ash Wednesday, a phoenix is born.