Book done!

There is nothing quite like the feeling of finishing a book.  You never know for sure if it’s going to work, at least if you don’t write to a safe formula.

At a couple of points I even considered dropping the last story. happily I didn’t because I think it turned out well, not just for itself, but as a way to tie together previous threads.

And now the book is done and off to the publisher, Magic Realist Press.

Here’s the current working title:
THE TAROT OF PERFECTION: EIGHT STORIES

Over the next few week I hope to post a few entries here, on subjects that have come to mind these past days while I was focusing on the book.

For now I thought it would be interesting to put in a passage I ended up having to cut from the final story. That tale, called “Master Matyas,” concerns a boy who becomes a magician because he wants to fly.

He apprentices himself to a mysterious woman named Veil, whom he assumes can tell him the secret of flying if only she will give in to his demands.

The omitted passage comes from a moment when Matyas demands the secret. Here it is:

Matyas said, “I want to fly. I was born for it.”

“No one knows why he was born. Haven’t I taught you that? What is the basis of a magician’s strength?”

“His ignorance.” He closed his eyes briefly and he remembered when she took him to the roof of the tower and they looked Above and Below, where all color vanished into light and into darkness, one as unknowable as the other. He quoted her now. “Knowing ignorance is strength.”

“Exactly.”

“But what of the other part? ‘Ignoring knowledge is sickness.’ There are things that can be known and they should not be ignored. I am sick of sickness. I want what I want.”

“There are three levels of knowledge,” Veil said, “and three levels of sickness and three levels of ignorance. Can you really be sick of sickness if you have not passed through all the levels of knowledge?”

These statements, “Knowing ignorance is strength” and “Ignoring knowledge is sickness,” come from part 71 of the Tao Te Ching, as translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English.

I have pondered it many times, and written about it, in particular as two ways of doing Tarot, the way of Ignorance–reacting directly to the pictures–and the way of Knowledge–learning the traditional meanings.

The chapter goes on to say

If one is sick of sickness one is not sick.
The sage is not sick because he is sick of sickness.
Therefore he is not sick.

When I wrote my own passage above, it seemed to me that the idea of three levels of Ignorance, and three levels of Knowledge, and three levels of sickness, came as a purely intuitive leap. Now it strikes me that the lines above imply the idea of three levels of being not sick. This is something to ponder.

Hopefully I will write more about it here later.

Thought Form

This is my first political comment. When I started this i thought how one of the areas I might want to get into would be politics, or rather punditry. Punditry has long been one of my fantasy careers, along with astronomer, architect, archaeologist, sorceress, political operative (if they ever have a reality tv show for running a presidential campaign, I’d sign up), and rabbi.

Apparently, I’m not alone in fantasizing having my own political column. On a recent radio show about the media the panel mentioned how editors are constantly receiving applications for columnist.

So, since I have about 5 times as many writing projects in my head as I have time to do, I probably will keep my political observations down to an occasional commentary right here.

This first one is odd, in that I might call it an esoteric political commentary (how many of those have you seen in The New York Times?). It was occasioned by a discussion on Exoteric-L, my favorite hangout listserve. Exo, as we call it, was started by refugees from a SERIOUS Tarot discussion group, where we tended to get in trouble for not staying on topic.

In the way of such things, Exo has gotten political lately.  Recently, my friend Zoe Matoff referred to the United States as  a “thought form.”

At first I thought of a flippant reply.  Then I thought of simply asking what thought form she thought the U.S. represented.  From that came a long reply, which I give below, with some editing.

What is the United States a thought form of?

Is The United States a collective form of all its inhabitants, or just some?

It often strikes me that conservatives tend to win because they believe that the United States belongs to them, they own the thought form. When Clinton got elected part of the uproar was an affront to what had come to seem a natural law. Liberals tend to feel alienated, tend at a subconscious level to agree that they are on the outside, and so they somehow expect to lose.  They do not believe that they own the thought form.
On the other hand, the United States has enjoyed a special status in much of the world by promoting the idea that it is a (or maybe the) thought form of Liberty.

Some continue to defend whatever the U.S. does primarily on this basis. This is the doctrine of American “exceptionalism”–when we invade countries we do so for good and noble purposes. We do good by definition, not evidence.

Others are outraged that the U.S. seemingly has betrayed the ideal that supposedly produced it.  As the thought form of Liberty, the United States should be better than the rest of the world.

Personally, I believe that the United States was built on 3 pillars, of which the most prominent is undercut by the other two, but also hides the other two.

That prominent one is personal liberty and the chance for individual people to create their own destiny. The other two are slavery and genocide (whether deliberate or de facto). To some extent, the first is a thought form while the other two are economic and political realities. For many, the thought form has the most power.

My rabbi, Jonathan Kligler of the Woodstock Jewish Congregation, once suggested to me that sometimes a document states an ideal that is actually beyond the reality of its people, even the person or people stating it. But then the ideal takes on its own power and people strive to make it real.  This is part of what we mean by a thought form.

He gave as an example the Declaration of Independence. Its principal author, Thomas Jefferson, certainly did not live up to the statement “All men are created equal.” Clearly, he did not actually believe this.  If he did, owning other human beings would have been impossible, not simply uncomfortable.

And yet, once the statement had been made it became something that the country has tried, intermittently, to strive towards. Thought forms can have that kind of power.  To a large extent, the Civil Rights movement gained its moral authority from the thought form created by “All men are created equal.”

But there is a shadow side to such forms. People come to believe that it is reality, and therefore any negative facts are either trivial, or do not even exist.

They believe that America and liberty and virtue are all the same thing, and anything that America does must be by definition good and noble and idealistic. Instead of striving to make the thought form real we assume it already is.  A lot of terrible things can happen when a thought form displaces reality.

Back home again in Rhinebeckana

That’s Hoagie Carmichael singing in the background.

In the last 3 weeks or so I’ve been to the Omega Institute to teach Tarot, Goddard College to teach creative writing, and Readercon, a science fiction convention near Boston, where I sat on panels to discuss the work of Jorge Luis Borges and metafiction (fiction that plays with the idea of fiction, that allows the characters to talk to the readers and so on). Now I’m home and hoping to finish my book of fairy tales/ghost stories/mystical tales, Simon Wisdom.

On a recent post here I described the nearly universal experience of writers that something is moving through them when the writing is going well. The Greeks called this the Muse. For the last story in the collection, Master Matyas, the Muse has been flirting with me, showing up in all her dazzle, filling me with ideas, then dancing out of reach when I try to make the ideas work together.

Teased by the Muse. Part of the problem is that the story did not begin with a plot idea, or a what-if, or a character, but simply a name. I collect fountain pens. I use them for letters, and paying bills, and also for stories, every one of which is written by hand, one thousand words a day in large unlined journals.

One of my favorite vintage makers is Wahl, a company that fluorished in the first half of the 20th century but did not survive the onslaught of the ballpoint pen. Their pens are elegant, graceful, with amazing nibs. Some time ago, maybe a year, I bought a gold Wahl pen from an online dealer. The online description gave a glowing account of its quality, but then warned the buyer–there was a name engraved on it.

Now, you need to know that among serious collectors (not me–I’m what’s called an accumulator or a user) the more unused a pen the better. If they can prove the pen has never been taken from the box (let alone been violated by ink),

they can charge much more for it. A pen with a name on it–well, that’s a disaster. Which is nice for me, since not only are engraved pens cheaper but I find them more interesting. I like to buy them without asking what name is on them and then see what turns up. One–a smaller Wahl in a black and gold mosaic–showed up with the name Louise Pollock. It made me wonder if my Uncle Lou might have had a secret life!

When the gold Wahl arrived, the name on it was M. Matyas. I thought of a story about a magician named Master Matyas, and then, as I stared at the name and held the pen, the Muse whispered in my ear a kind of prophecy: “Master Matyas steals the soul of his brother.”

And that was the beginning.  The story has progressed since then, with a good opening, a good closing, and some really nice middle bits.  But the tying together–  Mama Muse is being coy about that part.

That’s it for now.  I’m glad to be back doing this, and hope to keep up with it better.  And respond to people’s very interesting comments (I’ll get the hang of this blog thing sooner or later).

Greek Itinerary

Hello, everyone.  I've been away at Omega with Mary Greer, and a wonderful group of people, from as far away as India and Australia.  What a terrific week.

And now I'm off to Goddard College for the MFA Writing residency.  When I return I will respond to everyone's wonderful comments of the last couple of weeks (sorry, folks, for the delay). 

But meanwhile, I wanted to pass on the exciting news that the itinerary for the Greek trip is set.  I'm so excited.  Here it is, with my notes of what each of these places mean.  And I will be posting more about Greece, and especially the special qualities of the Goddesses and Gods.

For more information on the trip see my web site, or Nicki Scully's great site http://www.shamanicjourneys.com.

 GREECE!  OCTOBER 1-12

Sunday, October 1 — Depart from your gateway city to Athens, Greece.

Monday, October 2 — Arrive at Athens airport and proceed to our hotel. As folks are arriving from different locations at different times, we will try to meet for tea in the evening, after dinner, and have our welcome meal at lunch tomorrow. (This is flexible according to final arrival times.)

Whenever we have it, the first formal meal at the start of a sacred journey is more than a get-together (though it certainly is that as well). It creates a bond and a shared purpose in the joy of a feast. It will be wonderful to meet everyone!

Tuesday, October 3 — Morning visit to the Acropolis. The Acropolis is probably the most famous monument in all of Greece. It is the fitting place to begin our journey, for not only is this magnificent site sacred to Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, it also was the starting out place for the Mystai, the seekers who experienced the Mysteries.
After lunch and walk around Athens, we will take a late afternoon bus to Delphi for overnight.

Wednesday, October 4 — For the ancients, Delphi was the Center of the World. Set among stunning mountains, it was the place of the great Oracle. Just below Delphi, the temple of Athena Pronea allows us to continue the energy begun in Athens as we bring ourselves to the place of purification (the Castalia fountain) and then Delphi itself, where we will seek our own oracular truth in preparation for the Mysteries. Delphi was sacred to Apollo, whose shrine the Mystai passed as they left Athens. It also is a powerful opening to Gaia, the Earth, oldest of all the Deities. We will invoke Gaia and join ourselves to the Earth at the great boulder that has represented Her since before the temples.

Thursday, October 5 — Parnassus is the home of the Muses, the Goddesses who bring inspiration and beauty. Since the Mt. Parnassus site is closed to the public, we will have a rare and special opportunity when we visit and perform ritual there. In the afternoon we will visit the Delphi museum.

Friday, October 6 —Leave Delphi for Epidaurus. We will stop at Andirion down hill to Galaxidi (short stop) and cross the bridge to Rion as we drive to Nafplion, a beautiful seafront town. Mycenae is rugged and powerful, with roots going back to one of the oldest civilizations in Greece. It is a journey back in time, as we pass through the Lion Gate and climb the hill to a vision of Winged Artemis, the Goddess of the Mountains looming over the site. After some free time to walk around this beautiful town, we will overnight in Nafplion.

Saturday, October 7 — Morning Leave for Epidaurus and visit the site of the Aesklipion and the famous theatre of Epidaurus, the temple of dreams and healing. Here we will ask for our own healing and dream power, using oracular work to enter into and understand our own dreams. We also will visit the shrine to Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, for the ancients understood that there is no healing without Aphrodite.

After Epidaurus we make our sacred way to Eleusis, the site of the Great Mysteries themselves. Eleusis is surrounded by a modern industrial city, and most of the buildings were broken in 400 C.E., when Alaric sacked the Sacred Precinct. When we are there, however, all of the modern world falls away and we are transported back to the ancient rites, held at Eleusis for 2000 years. Here we will show the sacred objects, do a ritual to Demeter, and tell what is possibly the most powerful of all Greek myths, the Abduction of Persephone. We will literally breathe into ourselves the spirits of the Ancient Goddesses.

We will stop where dinner is available before boarding our overnight ferry which departs for Heraklion, Crete, at about 9:00PM. On the ferry we will have twin cabins inside. This may seem like simple transportation but it is much more. Crete was a magnificent civilization that predated Greece itself by a thousand years. This journey over the water, in the dark of night, is a journey back in time.

Sunday, October 8 — Arrive at Heraklion at around 5.30AM, and be met and transferred to the hotel Marina beach and bungalows, about 20Kms from Heraklion. After breakfast we will leave for Skotino cave. This cave is closed to the public, and requires special permits.

Evidence shows that much of worship of the Goddess in Crete was done in caves, not temples. Crete actually was the last flowering of the great Neolithic Goddess civilization, possibly the most creative period in human history. The sacred cave of Skotino is the perfect place to begin our experience and to continue to honor Persephone in the Underworld.

In the afternoon we will visit the Heraklion Museum, which contains wonderful objects that help bring the ancient culture alive. We will see the great variety of double axes, which were not weapons but instead votive objects, sacred to the Goddess. The double axe represents both the waxing and waning Moon, and the butterfly (our word "psyche" is a Greek word that means both "soul" and "butterfly").

Dinner is included upon our return to our hotel.

Monday, October 9 — In the morning we will have an extensive visit of the Knossos Palace. Greatly restored, Knossos shows us the splendor of the pre-Greek "Minoan" civilization. We will learn of the special qualities of this site, the true meaning of the famous Labyrinth, and learn to orient ourselves to the landscape.

After lunch we will drive back to the hotel, or those who wish could stay in town. Town shoppers and explorers can pick up a taxi to the hotel (not very expensive). Buffet dinner at the hotel.

This evening we will prepare for and begin a special ritual along the beach. This is a special ritual to Aphrodite for emotional and sexual healing, combined with an Eleusinian ritual of “searching” for the Goddess. We will complete the ritual the following morning at dawn.

Tuesday, October 10 — After our early morning ritual, Rachel and Nicki will work together to offer a unique and spontaneous day. Among other things, Rachel will offer some Oracular exercises with Tarot. She has some other surprises up her sleeve, which will be worked out in the moment and according to available terrain.

Wednesday, October 11 — 8.30AM leave the hotel for Festos for a gracious visit to this important site. Even more than Knossos, Festos takes us directly into the heart of the ancient power of the Goddess in the land. With the horned mountain of Ida looming over us, and other powerful features the Cretans understood as the Goddess's physical body, we will join with the landscape as a living presence. Here we will follow the winding path of the labyrinth into the heart of the sacred chamber.

Lunch will be on your own in Heraklion with time for a bit of last minute shopping. After lunch, we will return to the land one land last time to celebrate the end of the Mysteries! Here we will experience the return of Persephone from the Underworld, the reunion with her mother, Demeter, and the rebirth of nature and our own spirits. We will give the ancient cry of renewal and celebration, "Hye! Kye!" Rain! Conceive! as the Earth itself comes back to life.

We then will return for our closing buffet dinner, the feast of celebration that properly ends any true life-changing ritual.

Thursday, October 12 —Transfer to the airport in time for flight to Athens, to connect with your flight back home.

Something in the way She moves through me

It is almost a universal experience of writers, painters, and other artists–and, I suspect craftsmen, and cooks, and anyone who creates–that when the work is going well the experience is not "I am doing this," but "something is doing this through me."

Like others, I had experienced this for myself, but vaguely thought of it as special, maybe reserved only for those who are "serious" about their writing. I found out how pervasive it is through an odd source, the late and largely unlamented magazine for mercernaries, Soldier Of Fortune.

During the 80s, in the period I lived in Amsterdam, I worked in a wonderful American bookstore, American Discount Center. The owners believed in selling anything someone wanted to read, from feminist manifestoes to porn, from gay books to Fundamentalism.

One evening I had little to do and so picked up SOF. They had an interview with a popular writer, someone who turned out book after book in a violent action series, with titles like Exterminator 32. In the the interview the writer said something like "When the writing is going well, it's like I'm not doing it, something is doing it through me."

If this sense of artistic creation is nearly universal why do we insist that I have written my book? Is the "I" who works on a book really only a channel for an energy?

Then what is the energy? Does it have a purpose? That is, does it want to tell a particular story and find me for that need? Or is it just available for any story, and I get to choose what tale will receive the energy? For writers choose the subject, which is often their own life history.

In older cultures, people seemed clear that a divine figure was telling the story. The Iliad begins "Sing in me, Muse, of the wrath of Achilles… " The energy that passes through the poet was personified as a Muse (nine of them, actually).

And yet, at the same time, Greek tradition attributed that poem, and its companion piece, The Odyssey, to an individual poet, a legendary blind singer named Homer.

The more important the text, the more extreme are the two positions. The founding text of Judaism is The Torah. Jews (and Christians) refer to it as The Five Books of Moses, on the absolute belief that a founding figure named Moses, for whom there is no historical evidence outside the Torah, wrote it all down.

At the same time, they insist that God composed every word, with Moses actually a sort of secretary. If we take this literally (as Orthodox Jews and Fundamentalist Christians do), Moses is writing down things that will happen after the event of writing them.

That is, the giving of the Torah–the dictation–happens about a third of the way through the story, in book 2, Exodus (followed by Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy).

The later part of the story includes serious mistakes that Moses will make. If he was writing them down before they happened, in the book that declares free will for humans, wouldn't he know not to do them?

This is a kind of time paradox. If Moses learns, from God's dictation, of a mistake he will make then he can avoid doing it. But if he avoids doing it, then it won't appear in the text. If it doesn't appear in the text, then Moses won't know to be careful, and he will do it, so that it should be in the text.

This mental merry-go-round arises from taking literally the two contradictory claims, that a person who is part of the story is writing the book, and at the same time God is really writing it, so every word is infallibly true.

Today, we have the cult of the individual creator. Despite the fact that almost all writers and artists say that "something" is moving through them we still insist that I own the book I write.

We prize originality. Instead of telling cultural stories, as "Homer" or anonymous poets and village story tellers did for millenia, modern writers not only claim authorship for their work, they write about their own lives.

Maybe modern writers should begin their work "Sing in me, Muse, of the pain of my childhood."

So what, then, is the relationship between the writer, her life that is being described, and that energy that moves through her and makes the actual writing possible?

Is the energy–the Muse–a kind of delusion? Is it just the subconscious–safely a part of me–that somehow just feels like something outside of me?

But what is a subconscious? You can't see it or touch it, you don't find it in the brain when you do an autopsy. I suspect that terms like subconscious, or higher self, are simply modern terms for old names we no longer feel comfortable saying, such as muse, angel, daimon. But substituting "subconscious" for "muse" doesn't actually tell us anything about what it is.

My friend, Callan, brilliant essayist and blogger (callan.wordpress.com), writes the following:

"Writing is like any choice, it lets us make ourselves visible in the world. We can no more see our true selves than we can see the back of our head. We need either mirrors or models, and when we make art we expose ourselves."

I love this. i will quote it to my writing students. And yet how does it happen? Who is revealing these things? Am I just tricking myself, getting past my filters?

Or should we take seriously that powerful sense that writing opens the way for something else to move through us? I will leave the last comment to Callan:

"I am a piece of her, a facet of God, connected & separate, unique & the same.

And that's what we feel when we tap into those inner voices."

Friends and Bloggers

This is all new to me.

My dear and brilliant friend, Callan, introduced me to this wonderful service, and helped me set up an account.  She has been making suggestions, and adding links.  Her own blog, callan.wordpress.com, is a model of honest (& painful) insight.

Now, as i have begun to post a few ideas, others have begun to come forward, and I am very honored to have their comments.  Alex Chee very kindly mentioned me on his blog. 

Alex is the author of Edinburgh, a novel about healing from child molestation that is simultaneously very sad and very passionate. It's one of those first novels that leaves many of us oldtimers figuring it's time to put away the pen and get a job as a dishwasher.

I met Alex teaching at Goddard College.  It has been a pleasure of the job getting to know him.  He is warm and brilliant, with eclectic tastes (like me, he likes comics and fantasy novels as well as more "serious" literature).  The first semester we were there together he passed around some great photos of his wild younger days (I'll leave him to describe them).

The next semester was my Alex Chee residency.  At Goddard we do most of the work of the semester from home, through the mail, but we all meet at the beginning of the semester on the campus in Vermont.

That semester Alex and I were on the panel to open the residency with a keynote address (if I ever do my book on writing–i already have the title, Fearless–I will include some of the keynotes I've given).  We then went on to do a "publishing panel" together.

At the end of the week I was scheduled to give the commencement address for the graduating class.  I was unsure between two topics and I asked Alex.  He said "why don't you read the cards?"  So I did, and the images spoke powerfully to the subject.  I'm sure some of the spouses or parents of graduates were thinking "They have a Tarot reader give the commencement address?"

Alex has moved on to a real teaching job, and all of us at Goddard will miss him. 

I plan to do a  post on Goddard, and its amazing program for the Master in Fine Arts in Creative Writing.  For now, I just want to say that if you are serious about writing, and want to challenge yourself, and even more, transform yourself, think about coming to  Goddard, http://www.goddard.edu/academic/MFA_Writing.html.  It's an amazing experience.

One final comment.  I will be at Omega for a week starting two days from now, so things might be dormant here for awhile.  But I look forward to coming back, and especially look forward to your comments. 

Omega, Omega

The title refers to The Omega Institute in upstate New York.  I have doubled it because I have two things going on there that I want to tell people about.

The first is the annual weeklong class I teach with Mary K. Greer.

Mary is probably the teacher from whom I have learned the most, and much of that is from teaching with her. She is inventive, scholarly, gentle, and incredibly creative in her approaches to teaching. And her books, from the legendary Tarot For Yourself to the brandnew 21 Ways To Read A Card have quite simply shaped our whole modern approach to Tarot.

Mary and I have taught together at Omega for16 years. This year we are doing two classes, a five day, from June 12-16, and then a three day, from June 16-18. Space is available for both. Register at http://www.eomega.org. This year our group includes people coming from Australia and India. It should be wonderful.

The theme of the first class is Tarot Play, one of our favorites. We learn actual games, use the Tarot for stories, create fortune teller identities, try out being clients from Hell and have a wonderful time.

The strange thing is that at the end of all this people not only emerge as powerful readers, they often find their own lives transformed. Mary and I have seen people make life-changing decisions after the work–and play–done in our Omega classes.

The three day class is on the theme of the Tree of Life.  This powerful image from Kabbalah is intimately connected with the Tarot in its esoteric history.  Even more, it is one of the deepest myths in our culture.  I have written a book about this image The Kabbalah Tree, and Mary has studied and taught it for years.  This will be a spectacular workshop.

And if Mary and I are not enough, Omega itself is wonderful. Beautiful wood and lake setting, clean and comfortable, and superb food.  Having a chance to spend a week there teaching Tarot–with my favorite Tarot teacher–is one of the highlights of my year.

And the second "Omega" of the title?  This Sunday, June 4, my third annual Art Show goes up at Omega !

The art consists of framed prints based partly on my original art for the Shining Tribe Tarot, and partly new pictures, based on what I call Mythic Visions and images seen in stones that I find along the road.

Becoming a visual artist is one of the most exciting things I have experienced in the  past ten years.  My writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, has always been based on images and stories, and the drawings have been a way to approach images in a direct and powerful way.

You can see some of my Shining Tribe Tarot art on my website, http://rachelpollack.com/.

Come to Omega.  You won't regret it. 

Invocation to Hermes

For a long time I was only interested in the Goddesses. As with many women. I saw the Greek deities as at least partly about not only reclaiming the Divine Feminie, but as a way to establish personal connections with that power.

I like to tell a story about a time when someone told me about a conference being held around the theme of the Goddess Athena. My spontaneous response was "Oh, I'd love to go to that. Athena is a friend of mine." Aphrodite is not just a concept or a series of old stories, she is a presence in my life.

Over the past few years I have maintained my strong feeling for the Goddesses while at the same time becoming interested in at least a few of their brothers. One figure that looms more and more in mind is Hermes.

The word "Hermetic," the name for the Western esoteric tradition, comes from Hermes. However, it is a later version than the original Greek God. The term comes from Hermes Trismegistus ("thrice great"), a semi-legendary figure from Hellenistic Egypt who composed a series of great texts.

Our expression "As above, so below" is a short version of Hermes Trismegistus's "That which is above is the same as that which is below, and that which is below is the same as that which is above, for the preservation of the miracle of one thing." (I used that line as the opening for a "keynote address" at Goddard College, where I teach writing–the theme for the keynote was "Form and Content.")

The Hermes of myth is much older, possibly going back to the Stone Age. He is a trickster, a thief, a guide to dead souls, a teacher of Mysteries, and a swindler.  In my opinion, you have to love a religion that has a God of swindlers!

I hope to say much more about Hermes in the future, especially his great staff, the caduceus. When the group of us go to Greece in October we will call on Hermes to journey with us.  Right now, I want to share a poem I wrote as a direct invocation of Hermes. 

I actually wrote this poem while at Goddard, possibly during the same residency (most of the teaching is done long distance, but we meet for a very intense week at the start of the semester) where I quoted Hermes Trismegistus.

A couple of notes: 

1. Moly is a magical plant.  In the Odyssey Hermes shows Odysseus how he can use moly to stop the sorceress Circe from turning him into an animal.  I am convinced that originally moly was the opposite, an herb used by prehistoric shamans to shapeshift.  "Holy moley!" from the old comic book Captain Marvel, comes from moly.

2. The expression "secret agent lover man" comes from Francesca Lia Block's magical book Weetzie Bat.  Everyone should read it.

 

INVOCATION TO HERMES

I call my brother Hermes,
My snake thief music man,
My dress up dancing man.

I whistle him come to me,
Sliding up the evening
Dripping lies and magic.

Hermes the vampire,
Hermes the conman.
Offers field trips and cruises,
Guidebooks and theater passes,
For lackluster dead.

Hermes!
My razzle dazzle mambo boy,
My scoundrel secret agent
Lover man,
Skin bags full of moly,
Sticks and shiny leather.

My scandal whisper gossip god,
My story serpent mojo man,
My brother,
My Hermes!

Two films, one of which I haven’t actually seen

One of my purposes in doing this is to indulge myself by commenting about the things that come into my mind through the course of the day (or night, I tend towards insomnia). Today I want to talk about a couple of movies and the thoughts they've sparked. The funny thing is, I have not yet seen one of them, so my comment really is about its source. First, the one I've seen.

(Get ready to cue electronic woo-woo music.)

Last night ABC ran Enemy of the State, a very interesting choice for Memorial Day weekend in 2006. Directed by Tony Scott and starring Will Smith, it features the terrifying power of the National Security Agency, the NSA, to target innocent Americans, tap their phones, destroy their lives, all for reasons no one might know, and with no accountability to anyone for such terrible power.

Okay, the film gives the fig leaf of the "rogue agent," who gets caught, but it really shows what the technology can do, and how people might not even know what was happening to them. It was made in 1998, and yet so much of the dialogue could come straight from some melodramatic version of the recent hearings NSA hearings.

And now here's where it starts to get strange. Jon Voigt plays the villain, and in his whole appearance he could almost be a double for Donald Rumsfeld. Remember,this was 1998, when Rumsfeld was a more or less forgotten figure from the Ford administration. Okay, that's just a certain kind of look. But then the heroes find out about him and call up his file on their own computers, and as they scan down they comment that he was born on 9-11-1940. 9-11. They don't mention out loud much else about him, but they say that, his 9-11 birthday, as if it matters somehow when he was born.

Got that woo-woo music going?

Okay, the second subject is more standard cultural criticism. And more serious. The movie is X-Men: The Last Stand. I haven't seen it, but I plan to (as soon as my friend who shares my liking for superhero movies comes back from her weekend trip).

What prompted me to think about it was a comment in a review. The writer said that the plot concerns a drug designed to cure mutants, turn them into normal human beings. Said writer then added that this makes the connection to issues of homosexuality and homophobia fully explicit. And that comment led me to think about when I first realized that in fact the X-Men indeed was about that subject, and not pimarily racism as many people originally thought.

The X-Men originated in 1963, the same year as Doom Patrol, a comic I wrote in a later incarnation, for 2 exciting years in the 90s. Though it definitely did better commercially than the original Doom Patrol, the X-Men languished for some years as a knockoff of The Fantastic Four, for many years Marvel's flagship title.

What made the X-Men unique was that the characters did not get their powers from some freak accident, they were mutants, genetically different. While the book occasionally did stories that suggested an allegory of racism, that theme was never very developed.

Then, in the 80s, Chris Claremont began to write it. His stories were complex and deeply felt, and one of the reasons why I began to read comics again. Claremont brought two qualities to the fore: the idea that ordinary humans hated and feared the mutants, and the image of frightened outcast teenagers finding a home amongst people like themselves.  The idea of the group became central.

For some years, I, like many people, assumed that Claremont was making points about race in America.

And then he wrote a story with very little action, no villains, no grand threat to the world. Instead, it told of how Kitty Pryde (note that last name) hears of a mutant high school student who has committed suicide and decides to address the student body. Now, unlike some of the weirder–queerer–mutants, Kitty looks normal. She can pass. So asking to speak on the subject, and identifying herself as a mutant, is a brave and dangerous action. In other words, she comes out.

It was then that I realized that Claremont, whether consciously or not, wasn't writing about race at all. He was writing about sexual identity. (I probably should say that even though Chris Claremont and I once gave a joint literary reading in New York, I have never asked him about this.)

It's a mistake to directly equate racial and sexual minorities. Yet both experience the prejudice of the majority, people in both groups experience hatred, fear, and violence.

One difference lies in the fact that people of color are for the most part visible all their lives. Certainly there will always be some who can pass, but for the most part they have no choice but to be out in the world. Some queer people are so visible they cannot hide it, but most can, and many do, try to look and act "normal."

And there are deeper differences. People in racial minorities belong to their group from birth. They are in the same community as their parents. While some queer people (lesbian, gay, trans, bisexual) are obvious from early childhood, others are much less clear. And in most cases their parents are straight. Their families are from the other side. This is part of what makes queer teens feel so horribly isolated.

And for those who do not even realize their own sexuality until puberty blindsides them the situation is worse. They grow up looking down on the more obvious queer kids, make fun of them the way everyone else does. They are clear that they are part of "we" and the faggots and dykes are "them." Then suddenly, they discover they are no longer "we," they have become part of those people they have learned all their lives to despise.

This is what Claremont wrote about in the X-Men. Some of the mutants are born strange, with blue skin, or animal-like features. But most of them grow up just like any "normal" kid. They learn to make fun of mutants, see them as sick or monsters. Then, right around puberty, strange things start happening to them. They develop odd physical qualities, powers. Suddenly they are part of the people they themselves have hated and ridiculed.

I am not suggesting that Chris Claremont was writing solely about the situation of queer kids. For the most part, it is the common state of adolescence to feel strange, isolated, with fears of not being really human, or at least not like everybody else. But the analogy is powerful.

Remember, this was in the 80s when gay people were not anywhere near as visible as now. And there was no internet for young people to find others like themselves. Even if it never said so specifically, the X-Men gave a voice to a lot of kids who very much needed it.

Okay, now I will go see the movie.

Greece–the addresses!

Did I mention how this is new to me? I just finished a long entry about my trip to Greece (shold be just below this) and forgot to include the web sites for more information, such as how to sign up. There is my own site, http://www.RachelPollack.com, and then there is Nicki Scully's amazing site, http://www.shamanicjourneys.com/. Go the link for Sacred Travel and then Greece. And of course check back here for more information about the trip.