Hanging

We finally got the stuff cleared out of the hall so we could hang the painting that goes there. It's my favorite of everything my mother has done -- rich in blues and greens and purples and silver, which are my colours, which are her colours. Abstract and evocative, the pointed arch of the church door, the clear blue sky, light through the branches of the trees like light through the stained glass of the wheeling circular windows of the cathedral. Leaves fall.

I've closed the door to the Pink Room so the reflected sunlight doesn't change its colour palette, and I sit and watch the painting as the sun comes and goes, sometimes clear in its full intricacy, sometimes so lost in shadow that the only thing visible is the light blue through the church door.

She finished that painting the night before her own mother's funeral, so rich with depth and meaning and the echoes of generations.

It is so beautiful.

Mortification of the Flesh

Daisy and I were talking last month about ecstasy and pain and sacredness and a variety of other things. And I'm working my way through the pain and blood that is my own calling to the divine, the things that it demands; the flogger I picked up at the Fetish Flea is still sitting by my bedside table. At some point it will be more than merely a pretty object.

The power of pain has always been something that I have known, down in my bones, something that spoke its own language. There was debilitating pain -- the headsplitting agony of the migraine with its warped vision effects, the sick wet pop of my hip missocketed, the way I could only do pushups with one hand on the knuckles so it wouldn't fail under me. And then there was the other pain.

There was the pain when I was so far gone into my own head, into the demons of the darkness lurking somewhere south of sanity, that I could grab, rake down my arms with my nails, dragging myself back into the world rather than fall into the abyss of going mad. There was the pain that took that stuff from inside and pulled it out, inverted it, made it something under my control, taming the beast. There was bringing myself back into reality, the sharpness and clear sparkling realness of it. There was tracing patterns in the back of my hand with the point of a knife, because I could see that doing something, and it hurt less than anything else I put my focus on. (That time my husband took the knife away from me.) There's the sharp immediacy of pain grabbed and put through alchemical transformations, my standard first step of the little energy work trick I learned in my teens: how to block pain.

(I don't know if any of my readers know the game Egyptian Rat Screw, but the relevant point is that if two cards of the same value are played in sequence, the first player to slap them wins the stack. I once slapped in on a pair of queens and won the game. My roommate one summer at camp was very good at it, and played some kid with a cast on his arm. At midnight, she was up plaintively complaining how much her hand hurt, so I got up, and I made it stop. Then, bloody rationalist, she whined that I had stopped it, until about two, when she exclaimed, "Yes! It hurts!" and went promptly to sleep. Occultists get no respect.)

I had scars, thin brown discolorations, down the outside of my left forearm for about eight years, from high school.

When I need, absolutely need, to keep control of my temper, my nails go into my palms, leaving little crescent arcs that last long after I let go. Or sometimes somewhere into my arms. Sometimes I've left bruises.

And I have this rigid wall between pain and sex, pain and ecstasy, and I'm suspecting it's going to come down.

The rigidity of that wall may be surprising to some, with the way I bite and sometimes scratch -- I've had a reasonably nippy evening, just that kind of mood, even without any sex being involved -- but none of that parses to me as working with pain. Physicality, sensation, a feral streak that has a large thread of sexual energy to it, sure, but not pain. That spot where the shoulder flows into the neck? Biting that doesn't hurt. Biting that is something else altogether.

Taking the wall down scares me.

(And yet, He said, fear is how we measure ourselves.)

It scares me because so much of the work with pain goes so deep, so intense, and so closely tied to madness and managing madness. And I refer to "Have you ever gone mad?" a few posts down because there's a seductiveness to madness, this sense of release, of freedom, and choosing to turn my face towards the abyss, to go to where that huge, deep wellspring of power is, that tremendous, transformational power, and beyond it the hungry Void ... scares me.

I know that siren song, the seductiveness of going completely unmoored.

So for a long time, I maintained this rigid, rigid wall. This is not me. I don't understand it. I don't go there.

It scares me, and it scares me deep and hard and hitting right around Swadhisthana.

There's an edge there, a sharp one, a delicate balance between madness and reality, that sharp erotic curve of the transformational line.

I have always met the gods at the edges of things.

Update to "World Fatigue"

helen-louise, the woman whose livejournal I linked in the previous post regarding the monks and protests, has started up a blog specifically for covering the current situation in Burma, which can be found here. Please, if you have the time and spoons, have a look at the work she's doing on this. She has some (largely UK-specific) suggestions on actions people can take in her most recent post.

World Fatigue

There's a lot of stuff going on out there in the world.

Like the group of African-American lesbians who were violently attacked by a homophobe who threatened to sexually assault them, defended themselves, and are doing time for it. Like the young black woman whose death in Iraq was ruled a suicide, though the autopsy seems to rather suggest otherwise. Like the virtual march on Jena. Monks in Burma are now being attacked by riot police. Like Republican candidates blowing off POC discussions. Like creepy patriarchal polygynists getting convicted as accomplices in rape, people getting tasered in what may or may not be publicity stunts, like various posturing with Iran, like the whole Blackwater stuff, like American food imports being turned down by China, like a baby crib recall due to dangerous construction, like ...

... like all the things that are just too damn overwhelming sometimes. There's a lot of world out there, and it's hard to know where to start.

Do you see what I hear?

Since I'm spending this week in a state of stressed, a litle emotionally unstable, and feeling slightly unreal, I might as well take a little time to write about my mother some more.

This is another one of those iconic fight moments, where all the context is gone as irrelevant, but there's this one crystalline statement that just stuck in my head like shrapnel. This time, the statement was:

"Your father treats you like an adult."

I was probably fifteen at the time, ish? And being fifteen, my (unspoken, because I knew better than to say it) response was something like, "And that's why I actually like him."

From, y'know, twice that age, I think it was more a case of ... my father treats me like a person. Someone who might not have experience, knowledge, accumulated wisdom, to alays make good decisions, but did have some right to have input and opinions. But that was my first clear, if only half-articulated at the time, recognition of the pain of not existing as yourself -- there was this whole undercurrent to that fight about whether or not I was human enough to make decisions for myself.

Whether or not I was real.

Today, I'm feeling slightly unreal, a little sort of ... above and behind reality, watching myself watch things, my proprioception not quite synched up with my motions. It's a familiar old feeling, probably one of those things that author Jo Walton once commented, "The hardest thing to put down is a shield you no longer need" about, a way of dealing with a world in which asserting my reality was met with that sort of dismissal, that sort of ... you are an object, you are not someone with opinions, with independent self to assert. You are a pawn. You serve rather than exist.

Asserting reality, speaking its name, has always been so important to me; so much fighting against this constant pressure to be Other, to be normal, to be an extension of my mother or any of a number of other things, so much that I need to dig my heels in against and say, "No. I am, and I am this." Writing letters from Gehenna, where they look at the world from an angle.

ειμι ειμι ειμι

I got your reality right here

The Mayor of San Diego realises that when push comes to shove, he really can't believe in separate but equal, and thus signs a resolution in support of same-sex marriage rights that he was expecting to veto until the moment it hit his desk.

The video of him explaining this brings tears to my eyes.

The world tends towards goodness.

Have you ever gone mad?

If I talk to you about madness, will you take it as a rhetorical exaggeration, a little dance for effect, something said to shock and startle into understanding some lesser point?

Have you ever gone mad?

If I talk about madness, will you understand?

Let me talk about the edge of madness, the contours of it, not quite funnel shaped, not that even, but still the slicked-down grass, wet with sweat, tears, and blood, the way the feet of the mind slide on it, edging downwards even if one never loses balance, the slow circling around and around the abyss in the center, never quite sure whether the event horizon is still safely below, or something somewhere a few steps up, now crossed and unreachable, leaving one only able to orbit and slowly descend on the oozing turf towards the hole in the centre.

Let me talk about the last gasp, the recognition of the slow circling progress towards unbeing, the gathering of all the resources left that could be spent circling, circling, circling until the horrible mud makes it impossible to do anything other than slide. Let me talk about hoarding that up, pulling it all in for the last leap for freedom, hanging all the breathing left to have on "I will just do this, and when I have done this, it will be okay", the running lurch up the slope to catch at a tuft set in solid ground, something to hold on to, something that could be used to haul up out of the emptiness with maybe a little help, something secure.

(I told myself I'd have a glass of milk and it'd be okay, and went over to the little half-fridge on the floor, took out the milk, got my mug, pulled the twisty thing off the cap, tried to pour ...

... discovered it was frozen solid.)

Have you ever felt your mind break, a crystalline explosion, that last expenditure of all the resources of sanity spent grabbing for that tuft, that rock, that low branch, the brushing of the tips across the surface, too little, and gone. Have you ever watched the pieces of cognition spiral down and into the gap as one goes with them, surrounded by them, swirling, suddenly bloodstained with the effort it took it to break free of a head so shattered it feels like wind in the cranium, bloodstained with that and the effluvia of the descent, and then all of it, all the pieces, gone before you, around you, on top of you, a pelting of little fragments of a life?

Have you ever sat there, marvelling at the realisation that you are a being of light, a being of light, and everything around you is a shadow? That perfect clarity of sharded mindbits, where, look, some of the shadows are concerned about the shadow that is the body, talking in their shadowworld about shadowthings. Maybe one of them is concerned about suicide, but that's silly, death is a shadowthing, the body is a shadowthing, these shadowthings are irrelevant, there is this clear, blinding, agonisingly clear reality of existing as a being of light?

Have you ever spent days, weeks even, curled up in bed, watching life go by around you, wondering what happened to that beautiful clarity of perfect separation from all these things, aware that the sweat and body oils are building in a stench, are grinding so deep into the fibres of the sheets that they are turning black, and being distantly bothered by this, as if somewhere, in some other life, maybe it might once have mattered?

Have you ever, once you had managed to pull yourself together into something a little more resembling, happened to be one room over from someone whose sole concern in any of this was the shameful state of cleanliness that comes of two weeks unmoving on off-white sheets? Who wished to express how horrible that housekeeping was to a person who had witnessed the descent into the abyss, milk and all, and helped me claw back out again? To keep that overheard thing and never mention it, because if I was supposed to overhear, well, I'm not going to grant the satisfaction, and if I wasn't ...

If I talk about madness, will it be the eyerolls and the mutterings of "drama queen" from people who have never run their fingers across a grease spot on the sheets in detached indifference, knowing what that means without managing to know how to care?

Have you ever gone mad?