Someone I am acquainted with was trying to explain why they don't like someone. They said "He's a really nice guy and everything..."
But here's the thing.
"Nice" is usually, on some level, a euphemism with "OK with the world as it is".
In other words, they may be "nice" but they aren't GOOD.
Because NO FUCKING DECENT HUMAN BEING could look around at this shit and what we're doing to ourselves and everyone else without wanting to cleanse it with fire. That doesn't mean lacking sympathy or kindness or human decency. It means understanding that nice people have the wrong priorities. Nice people support genocide and war and poverty and cruelty by default, and that's the worst part, because they don't even have the decency to be malicious. They're banal, and that is perhaps a worse evil than malice.
Rather than being nice, try being good. It's a lot harder, and damn if you might not find that it's almost impossible to do in a world where our shoes are made by child slaves overseas, but it's worth a shot.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Saturday, September 17, 2011
A story for the soul eater
A very long time ago, in a forested area that is just to the southeast of what was once the continent’s largest city, a young woman lived in the outskirts of a village. It was an unimportant village, and people there mostly avoided the war and politicking that went on in more populated areas, living their lives as they had for many generations, hunting, farming, loving, worshipping, weaving, and having the same petty intrigues and gossip and fallings-out that people have always had; raising their children, tending their elders, and growing close to friends, spending hours in the evenings talking with each other. This is when people still knew how to talk and how to listen, and how to not mind the silences that fell when everyone was beginning to get tired and reflect on what had been said.
The woman was brown and strong and healthy, with dark brown eyes and thick black hair and a strong high nose like the eyes and hair and noses of the other women in the village, and she lived on the outskirts because she was a priestess. She had large white teeth and smiled often. Her primary job was to perform the duties associated with the transfer of souls from death to underworld and from underworld to birth. Her altar was no more than a pale stone slab that lay on the ground, and her temple was a simple arch. Her position as priestess was hereditary, and her father, also a priest, taught her the rites of death and birth. The village was healthy, and she was happy. She became pregnant, and this was a blessing which made her even happier.
Her son was the most beautiful baby she had ever seen, with her same wavy thick black hair and curly eyelashes, and his eyes were like obsidian mirrors. She loved him fiercely, with every part of her being, and as he grew, and his eyes lightened to a deep brown, they spent many hours playing together in the forest near the altar, where she taught him to be as observant and fluent of the language of the plants and small wildlife as she had been taught by her own father and mother. She taught him about the frogs and the insects, the pronghorns and the wrens. Life was right and good for the young woman with her village and beloved villagers, her parents, and her beautiful son.
I don’t know how she died; possibly of infection from a wound, possibly of complications from another pregnancy. It seemed important at the time, but it really isn’t. Her grieving father performed the rites of death, showing her son for the first time how to prepare the dark-green leaves from a certain small tree into a drink that would help him to channel the god who carries souls from the dead to the underworld in his belly, to wait to be assigned by the wife of Death to a newborn body.
The young priest had few friends; he had needed none, because he was still at an age where his best friend was his mother. He was small and slight and had not yet developed an interest in girls. Despite the attention of his grandparents, he was now alone, and profoundly lonely.
Some months after his mother’s death, among the other births, a baby girl was born in the village, and not long after she was born, he looked past her curly lashes into her obsidian mirror eyes.
After that, they were inseparable. They had an arrangement. How fortunate that their Goddess was the Goddess of assigning souls! Usually they would be husband and wife. Sometimes she would precede him into death and he would be her grandfather for a while, laughing at her toddler antics as she played around his feet. Sometimes he would be the teacher and she the student, sometimes they would be siblings, but they were always together. It wasn’t always a kind life; there was pain and strife and suffering. But in the village, it was mostly a clean and straightforward life. They were together this way for over three hundred years.
Until the last time. I don’t know what happened; perhaps he was bound or killed or taken away. Perhaps the magic that allowed them to find each other was broken. Perhaps he was protecting her from something, because often the most painful mistakes men make are the ones that are meant to be for the good of the ones they love. But whatever happened, the last time, he did not call the soul-eater god to carry her into the underworld in his belly. He was not waiting for her, and he did not come back. She waited for him, and waited until the waiting became despair and the despair became bitterness. Lost in confusion and sorrow, she didn’t notice at first that around her the happy village that she loved faded and died away. The old rites were no longer practiced, and her altar and arch became forgotten and overgrown. The gold and blue paint that once represented the wings of the goddess of rebirth was long gone. When the time came that no more babies were born in the village, she couldn’t wait any longer.
After a while, no one would know there had ever been a village there, not even the builders when they came to put up row after row of blank red houses for the new civilization that had no priestesses at all.
The once-young-woman lived now in a world where true partnership between sexes was mostly forgotten, if not forbidden, and she knew that this world was poisonous. It had eaten her old world. She made herself forget her village and her mate, her abandonment and anger. She even, mostly, forgot that she had been a priestess. Far away from the happy days of playing among the trees, she found other loves, had children, and at times she was even content. Sometimes, though, the pain of loss and loneliness would bubble up from a place deeper than memory, strong enough to pin her to the ground.
There is a story that Death’s wife, her pride wounded over her husband’s infidelity, killed him and took his mantle, hiding her feathered wings beneath it and assuming his duties alongside her own, and that this is why men, afraid, stopped working together with women and forgot that the goddess had once been their mother.
The woman was brown and strong and healthy, with dark brown eyes and thick black hair and a strong high nose like the eyes and hair and noses of the other women in the village, and she lived on the outskirts because she was a priestess. She had large white teeth and smiled often. Her primary job was to perform the duties associated with the transfer of souls from death to underworld and from underworld to birth. Her altar was no more than a pale stone slab that lay on the ground, and her temple was a simple arch. Her position as priestess was hereditary, and her father, also a priest, taught her the rites of death and birth. The village was healthy, and she was happy. She became pregnant, and this was a blessing which made her even happier.
Her son was the most beautiful baby she had ever seen, with her same wavy thick black hair and curly eyelashes, and his eyes were like obsidian mirrors. She loved him fiercely, with every part of her being, and as he grew, and his eyes lightened to a deep brown, they spent many hours playing together in the forest near the altar, where she taught him to be as observant and fluent of the language of the plants and small wildlife as she had been taught by her own father and mother. She taught him about the frogs and the insects, the pronghorns and the wrens. Life was right and good for the young woman with her village and beloved villagers, her parents, and her beautiful son.
I don’t know how she died; possibly of infection from a wound, possibly of complications from another pregnancy. It seemed important at the time, but it really isn’t. Her grieving father performed the rites of death, showing her son for the first time how to prepare the dark-green leaves from a certain small tree into a drink that would help him to channel the god who carries souls from the dead to the underworld in his belly, to wait to be assigned by the wife of Death to a newborn body.
The young priest had few friends; he had needed none, because he was still at an age where his best friend was his mother. He was small and slight and had not yet developed an interest in girls. Despite the attention of his grandparents, he was now alone, and profoundly lonely.
Some months after his mother’s death, among the other births, a baby girl was born in the village, and not long after she was born, he looked past her curly lashes into her obsidian mirror eyes.
After that, they were inseparable. They had an arrangement. How fortunate that their Goddess was the Goddess of assigning souls! Usually they would be husband and wife. Sometimes she would precede him into death and he would be her grandfather for a while, laughing at her toddler antics as she played around his feet. Sometimes he would be the teacher and she the student, sometimes they would be siblings, but they were always together. It wasn’t always a kind life; there was pain and strife and suffering. But in the village, it was mostly a clean and straightforward life. They were together this way for over three hundred years.
Until the last time. I don’t know what happened; perhaps he was bound or killed or taken away. Perhaps the magic that allowed them to find each other was broken. Perhaps he was protecting her from something, because often the most painful mistakes men make are the ones that are meant to be for the good of the ones they love. But whatever happened, the last time, he did not call the soul-eater god to carry her into the underworld in his belly. He was not waiting for her, and he did not come back. She waited for him, and waited until the waiting became despair and the despair became bitterness. Lost in confusion and sorrow, she didn’t notice at first that around her the happy village that she loved faded and died away. The old rites were no longer practiced, and her altar and arch became forgotten and overgrown. The gold and blue paint that once represented the wings of the goddess of rebirth was long gone. When the time came that no more babies were born in the village, she couldn’t wait any longer.
After a while, no one would know there had ever been a village there, not even the builders when they came to put up row after row of blank red houses for the new civilization that had no priestesses at all.
The once-young-woman lived now in a world where true partnership between sexes was mostly forgotten, if not forbidden, and she knew that this world was poisonous. It had eaten her old world. She made herself forget her village and her mate, her abandonment and anger. She even, mostly, forgot that she had been a priestess. Far away from the happy days of playing among the trees, she found other loves, had children, and at times she was even content. Sometimes, though, the pain of loss and loneliness would bubble up from a place deeper than memory, strong enough to pin her to the ground.
There is a story that Death’s wife, her pride wounded over her husband’s infidelity, killed him and took his mantle, hiding her feathered wings beneath it and assuming his duties alongside her own, and that this is why men, afraid, stopped working together with women and forgot that the goddess had once been their mother.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Facebook symbolism
Today I blocked my Eater-of-Souls on Facebook. Again. Then I went for a two-mile run, trying to tire out the sorrow.
Blocking him seems childish in a way, but it is more than anything an admission that I'm not over him, not getting over him, and that there is no hope for us, now or ever, because the conditions of my exile require getting over him for there to be hope.
It's a double bind, a catch-22. There is nowhere to go with it. So I give up, and I give in to being hopelessly in love with him, and I give in to the permanence of being separated from him. I give in completely to his absence from my life. I admit my helplessness over the yawning void where it still feels his body and words should be.
Maybe someday my hands will stop shaking. And maybe someday, after hopelessness has worn its way through the soles of my running shoes, I'll be ready to move on and love someone else, someone completely different, completely unique, and completely wonderful in ways that could not possibly be any more unlike Eater-of-Souls.
Blocking him seems childish in a way, but it is more than anything an admission that I'm not over him, not getting over him, and that there is no hope for us, now or ever, because the conditions of my exile require getting over him for there to be hope.
It's a double bind, a catch-22. There is nowhere to go with it. So I give up, and I give in to being hopelessly in love with him, and I give in to the permanence of being separated from him. I give in completely to his absence from my life. I admit my helplessness over the yawning void where it still feels his body and words should be.
Maybe someday my hands will stop shaking. And maybe someday, after hopelessness has worn its way through the soles of my running shoes, I'll be ready to move on and love someone else, someone completely different, completely unique, and completely wonderful in ways that could not possibly be any more unlike Eater-of-Souls.
Monday, August 22, 2011
Sunday, August 14, 2011
We Were Magic
When we first went out, you were in your jacket with suede elbow patches. Tall, gawky, awkward, all tweed and elbows, a balding professor of a Lothario. I asked you why you were doing what you were, and the conversation lasted well into the night. I didn't know if I was attracted to you, but I thought I'd like to see you again, anyway. It was a month later that you gave me the letter that changed everything and shaped the relationship we were to have together, and I still have the letter in a box, along with books, a poster of us, the perfume I used to wear, and the earrings you bought me in Arizona.
We were more than lovers; you were the Father-King and I was your Dark Empress. We were legendary, we were beautiful, we bested the curse of the Thunderbird and emerged clean from the Valley of Death, we drove all night under shooting stars to arrive delirious in the morning in Her Chosen City. We drove through the desert in monsoon, we were struck by lightning, Oh Eater of Souls, the things we saw together! We saw places through our four eyes that no one else has ever seen, not the way we saw them. We saw machine cities, bears and glowing centipedes, caves and herds of elk.
We were more than lovers; you were the Father-King and I was your Dark Empress. We were legendary, we were beautiful, we bested the curse of the Thunderbird and emerged clean from the Valley of Death, we drove all night under shooting stars to arrive delirious in the morning in Her Chosen City. We drove through the desert in monsoon, we were struck by lightning, Oh Eater of Souls, the things we saw together! We saw places through our four eyes that no one else has ever seen, not the way we saw them. We saw machine cities, bears and glowing centipedes, caves and herds of elk.
You were the golden plains and I was the road. The railroad track was our story. I made a legend for you, my Spore of the Desert. The legend is alive and growing, even though you are lost to your Queen. It's been taken up and propagated by your people, who are my people. You don't know how it grows, because you're not here for me to share it with. I yearn to show you my beautiful, terrible gift, but the world you are in is not my world. Not anymore.
Oh my King, love of my life. Every time I turn around in the kitchen and you are not there, I feel the gap in my synapses where you used to connect. Can you still feel my feelings, my love? Because I can no longer think your thoughts.
I'll meet you at the railroad tracks when the rains begin again.
Make a wish,
Oh my King, love of my life. Every time I turn around in the kitchen and you are not there, I feel the gap in my synapses where you used to connect. Can you still feel my feelings, my love? Because I can no longer think your thoughts.
I'll meet you at the railroad tracks when the rains begin again.
Make a wish,
-Snowcap
Sunday, January 30, 2011
On exes and their new loves
I have a boyfriend; a wonderful boyfriend. A wonderful person. A kind, gentle, compassionate, strong, willful, accomplished man.
He has an ex, his most recent ex, who is from all accounts an interesting, intelligent, strong, willful, accomplished woman. They broke up around the same time I broke up with my most recent ex, although our relationships were very different.
For me, when I have lost someone loved, it has always been a sort of comfort to establish a friendship with them that included knowing their new loves, even if it hasn't always been easy... even though it's often painful to see someone I loved and hoped for a long life with having that life with someone else. There is also something valuable, I think, in seeing that loved one live happily with another person who is not only my equal but an even better match for them; someone who I can honestly like and feel not upstaged by, but simply recognize them as a better match. It's harder when I perceive an inequity, for instance if I don't think my ex treats the other person as well as they deserve or vice-versa... but usually it is a good thing, remaining friends with my ex and establishing some rapport with their new love.
In this case, my boyfriend's ex wants to remain friends with him, and for many months had a hard time recognizing the boundaries he set, in a fairly intrusive way. To give her some credit, for the first months of our relationship he didn't know what boundaries he wanted to set, didn't know what he wanted from our relationship, and so she perhaps couldn't clearly perceive the lines most of us know by heart; the lines between lost love and new friendship. So it was difficult.
After a time, though, after about six months of our dating, the lines became clearer; he had definitively chosen a new relationship with me and discarded the potential for rekindling the relationship with her, at this point long-distance by some thousand and a half miles. He said in no uncertain terms, this is where I'm at; this is my new life. Still, she persisted in communicating with him as her lover, not her ex-lover. She would not let go of the old intimacy, and rejected news of me as too painful for her to hear or acknowledge.
He, wanting to honor their former closeness, told her that he wanted to stay in communication, but asked that she acknowledge his new relationship, and acknowledge me; and asked that if she wished to stay in close contact with him that she make some effort to befriend me. She refused.
This is where it gets muddy.
It had been most of a year since they had been together, and in the meantime he had allowed a fairly intimate level of communication. By then, she reasonably felt like they had a reasonable relationship for exes. She is quite young, and this was, and is, her first breakup of a very significant love relationship. So, she was angry that he would ask her to accept us as a package deal should they remain friends... and she refused contact with me. And until then, I had accepted his relationship with her as a package deal, thinking, deliberately, only of furthering our relationship together, and not of how she might still, after six, eight, ten months still be thinking of me as the "other woman".
So it got messy. I got angry. We got angry. I felt heartbroken.
We, he and I, together, got over it.
But she didn't. And she continued to talk to him, via email, obeying limitations we had set, but still not understanding or acknowledging, or perhaps understanding and refusing to acknowledge, how things had shifted; how we had become a package deal.
So, ignoring what he had asked for (that she communicate with me if she wanted a relationship with him) and obeying the technical restrictions he had asked for (that she keep things very surface-level if she would not) she continued to email him, at first infrequently, and then with greater intimacy and frequency. She had been in a car accident but not been hurt. Then, she wondered why she was so attracted to Pisces men (such as him). Then, why had he not answered her question about attraction? Also, by the way, she was coming to Portland.
He ignored her question a second time, and said that it was too bad they couldn't meet but he wouldn't feel comfortable with it unless she was comfortable meeting me as well... to which she responded angrily that she hadn't asked to meet and never wanted to meet me, and he could never suggest it again.
I don't know what I can say about that. To me, it crosses a line; one that has been crossed time and time before. I have left out many, many details, including the one about how I emailed her at his request, and was replied to with "I am his former lover of two years".
I understand that she is younger. But I was young once myself, and this still feels wrong. Her behavior, from a very early time in our relationship, feels wrong. It feels possessive, jealous, and intrusive. She is an ex, and seems to have no concept of how to behave as an ex who wants to develop a friendship. I have left out many of his attempts at setting boundaries, partly because it's all too much to type out and partly because they weren't strong attempts. It's not because I don't think he meant them, but perhaps in part because I don't think he knew what he meant.
And partly because I, like him, don't quite know what to do with people who can't understand and respect changing relationships and changing boundaries.
Even though I myself have been such a person in the past.
Almost four years ago I embarked on a relationship with a man who was separated from his wife. They had had an open relationship and she left him for a man she had been seeing. From his account, she was an abusive partner and a fairly inattentive mother; from my perspective as his lover, both were true, though it's obvious how such a perspective can be skewed. He cared for his children most of the time, as far as I could tell, and his stories of their breakup tended, as such stories will, to depict her as the villain. I was convinced but now I don't know; was she? I will never have the detachment to know.
Two years after they separated, they got back together. Although the sexual component of our relationship had ended months before at his decision, we had become very close friends and I was very much in love with him. When they got back together it was clear to me that I could not continue seeing him even as my friend, because of my intense feelings for him.
A year later I was in love with someone else, and we started hanging out again.
He has an ex, his most recent ex, who is from all accounts an interesting, intelligent, strong, willful, accomplished woman. They broke up around the same time I broke up with my most recent ex, although our relationships were very different.
For me, when I have lost someone loved, it has always been a sort of comfort to establish a friendship with them that included knowing their new loves, even if it hasn't always been easy... even though it's often painful to see someone I loved and hoped for a long life with having that life with someone else. There is also something valuable, I think, in seeing that loved one live happily with another person who is not only my equal but an even better match for them; someone who I can honestly like and feel not upstaged by, but simply recognize them as a better match. It's harder when I perceive an inequity, for instance if I don't think my ex treats the other person as well as they deserve or vice-versa... but usually it is a good thing, remaining friends with my ex and establishing some rapport with their new love.
In this case, my boyfriend's ex wants to remain friends with him, and for many months had a hard time recognizing the boundaries he set, in a fairly intrusive way. To give her some credit, for the first months of our relationship he didn't know what boundaries he wanted to set, didn't know what he wanted from our relationship, and so she perhaps couldn't clearly perceive the lines most of us know by heart; the lines between lost love and new friendship. So it was difficult.
After a time, though, after about six months of our dating, the lines became clearer; he had definitively chosen a new relationship with me and discarded the potential for rekindling the relationship with her, at this point long-distance by some thousand and a half miles. He said in no uncertain terms, this is where I'm at; this is my new life. Still, she persisted in communicating with him as her lover, not her ex-lover. She would not let go of the old intimacy, and rejected news of me as too painful for her to hear or acknowledge.
He, wanting to honor their former closeness, told her that he wanted to stay in communication, but asked that she acknowledge his new relationship, and acknowledge me; and asked that if she wished to stay in close contact with him that she make some effort to befriend me. She refused.
This is where it gets muddy.
It had been most of a year since they had been together, and in the meantime he had allowed a fairly intimate level of communication. By then, she reasonably felt like they had a reasonable relationship for exes. She is quite young, and this was, and is, her first breakup of a very significant love relationship. So, she was angry that he would ask her to accept us as a package deal should they remain friends... and she refused contact with me. And until then, I had accepted his relationship with her as a package deal, thinking, deliberately, only of furthering our relationship together, and not of how she might still, after six, eight, ten months still be thinking of me as the "other woman".
So it got messy. I got angry. We got angry. I felt heartbroken.
We, he and I, together, got over it.
But she didn't. And she continued to talk to him, via email, obeying limitations we had set, but still not understanding or acknowledging, or perhaps understanding and refusing to acknowledge, how things had shifted; how we had become a package deal.
So, ignoring what he had asked for (that she communicate with me if she wanted a relationship with him) and obeying the technical restrictions he had asked for (that she keep things very surface-level if she would not) she continued to email him, at first infrequently, and then with greater intimacy and frequency. She had been in a car accident but not been hurt. Then, she wondered why she was so attracted to Pisces men (such as him). Then, why had he not answered her question about attraction? Also, by the way, she was coming to Portland.
He ignored her question a second time, and said that it was too bad they couldn't meet but he wouldn't feel comfortable with it unless she was comfortable meeting me as well... to which she responded angrily that she hadn't asked to meet and never wanted to meet me, and he could never suggest it again.
I don't know what I can say about that. To me, it crosses a line; one that has been crossed time and time before. I have left out many, many details, including the one about how I emailed her at his request, and was replied to with "I am his former lover of two years".
I understand that she is younger. But I was young once myself, and this still feels wrong. Her behavior, from a very early time in our relationship, feels wrong. It feels possessive, jealous, and intrusive. She is an ex, and seems to have no concept of how to behave as an ex who wants to develop a friendship. I have left out many of his attempts at setting boundaries, partly because it's all too much to type out and partly because they weren't strong attempts. It's not because I don't think he meant them, but perhaps in part because I don't think he knew what he meant.
And partly because I, like him, don't quite know what to do with people who can't understand and respect changing relationships and changing boundaries.
Even though I myself have been such a person in the past.
Almost four years ago I embarked on a relationship with a man who was separated from his wife. They had had an open relationship and she left him for a man she had been seeing. From his account, she was an abusive partner and a fairly inattentive mother; from my perspective as his lover, both were true, though it's obvious how such a perspective can be skewed. He cared for his children most of the time, as far as I could tell, and his stories of their breakup tended, as such stories will, to depict her as the villain. I was convinced but now I don't know; was she? I will never have the detachment to know.
Two years after they separated, they got back together. Although the sexual component of our relationship had ended months before at his decision, we had become very close friends and I was very much in love with him. When they got back together it was clear to me that I could not continue seeing him even as my friend, because of my intense feelings for him.
A year later I was in love with someone else, and we started hanging out again.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
I called him my love
I don't even know what it means. For months we have danced around this word, "love". He asks what it means, and I have no answer; and tonight, as I go to sleep, I project him into it. My love.
I am not sure I will ever know what it means.
I am not sure I will ever know what it means.
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