Medieval Europe Lives Again In the American Desert

I am going to try to go to this conference in February:

http://www.acmrs.org/conferences/2010/conferences.html

I had no idea that Arizona was a hotbed of medieval studies. Maybe the dry climate is good for preserving manuscripts? I found out about this conference through the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA. I also want to go to one of their upcoming events, a lecture from a manuscript specialist at the Getty Museum:

19th History of the Book Lecture
“Searching for the Origins of Secular Imagery in Thirteenth-Century France”
Friday, January 29, 2010

The mid-thirteenth century in northern France saw an explosion in the production of books in the vernacular. Most art historians have seen the illumination of romances and histories of the period as a rather thoughtless adaptation of sacred painting models. In this lecture, however, Dr. Elizabeth Morrison (Curator, Department of Manuscripts, J. Paul Getty Museum) explores how artists adapted and ultimately broke away from their religiously inspired beginnings in order to create new formats and compositions more suited to their needs and the needs of a new breed of manuscript- the illuminated secular book.

From here:

http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/calendar.html#1-29

It's part of this series:

http://www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/history_book.html

It's good to live in a large town where you have access to resources like this. I'd be even happier if I lived somewhere like London, but I always try to use every place I live to its fullest.

Rotten to the Core

Well, I thought that my Apple computer was fixed when the Genius tech removed a faulty RAM module before Christmas, but when I took it back into the store to have the replacement installed, it crashed again. They ran a diagnostic, and based on that, they just gave up and replaced my hard drive. The model I had was no longer available, so they gave me a free upgrade to a more powerful drive and sent me home. All of this happened right before the holiday break, so I have not had a chance to fire it up again and re-do all of my settings and make sure it's back on the right track, but I plan to do that this weekend. I have to say, it's really been getting me down. I invested a lot in this computer, and it's a been a huge holdup for me this past year. I hope this solved the problem. The Apple techs were very kind, and have been awesome about addressing my concerns, it's just been awful to have so many things go wrong with what is supposed to be such a good machine.

Book By Its Cover

This year has seemed to be one of delay and disruption. I shared below how my computer has been giving me fits, and so has the economy. There have also been some personal things that have required quite a bit of processing on my part to come to terms with. I've taken some of the slow time to get mundane parts of my life in order, but I feel like the hour is approaching for me to move forward with my creative projects again. My first book is about ready to go as an e-book, but I've had a holdup with the cover artwork, because my artist friend who is doing it for me has recently had a quite serious illness. I am hoping he recovers soon because he's been through a lot the last few years and truly does not deserve this. I think his state has come mostly from stress due to unpleasant stuff he has had to deal with, which amounts to being unfairly punished for being unfairly punished. I can relate to that, it's certainly happened to me in the past, but I feel very sorry for him because he's sick enough to have taken disability time off from his day job and I know he feels physically awful. I am sharing this because I write this blog to share my experiences with developing my writing, and this kind of thing is part of the process. Reality is something that must be dealt with.

More Scribd

I've gotten about one thousand hits on Scribd since I posted a sample of The Flower of Knighthood there, so I'd say it's definitely a success. I want to write some essays and put them up there as well to generate more traffic.

Poisoned Apple

I wrote on here back in February how I finally was able to buy an Apple computer after months of saving. Alas, I have been having problems with it ever since, issues which escalated recently. It's been giving me one kernel panic after another, a state where the operating system is not communicating with the requested application and the machine freezes and shuts down. I took it to the Apple Genius Bar twice over the summer, and they could not find anything wrong with it because, as often happens, it not do exactly its same breakdown for them as it did for me at home. I then went online and researched the failure and its possible causes, and went so far as to erase the OS and reinstall it from scratch. I thought that had fixed the bad seed, but this weekend it failed more spectacularly than ever, so I took it in again. It finally did its screaming, seizing collapse in full glory for the tech, who realized it must have a faulty RAM module. He removed half its brain (one chip) to check, and it instantly worked better. It's still under warranty, so he ordered a replacement at no charge and told me it should be here in a week or so. It's operational even with one good chip, and it's working better than it has in months. I am very pleased, because I thought my Apple was a lemon and feared that I would have to return it. I was so happy to get it, and it's been so frustrating to me to have it be such a problem when it was supposed to solve problems. I've been stalled out on developing my music because of it and the drain on me from trying to fix it has slowed me down on my editing and writing, too, but hopefully now it can live up to its promise. I think my Apple has been expressing a metaphysical problem as well as a technical one - I've also written some about crossing Da'ath, the Abyss, in the Tree of Life over the last few months, and in the very center of the primal waste stands the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, with a serpent coiled around its base. Maybe I had to get past the poison of the snake in order to be able to apply the wisdom of the Apple. The doorway to the Qliphoth, the reverse Tree of Life, is in the Abyss as well, and makes its influence known through brokenness and corruption, often of a psychological nature. My RAM module, clearly a symbol of thought and memory, was corrupt, but through serious effort towards systems integrity it is in the process of being repaired. It's like a redemption of the Fall enacted in cyberspace, which is not a bad metaphor for the archetypal realm from which this process of spiritual initiation originates.

The Holy Grail

"How at the Castle of Corbin a Maiden Bare in the Sangreal and Foretold the Achievements of Galahad" by Arthur Rackham. From Alfred Pollard's The Romance of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table (1917).

Shadowlands

I have been watching a great many movies lately. I've been somewhat tired, and kind of took the summer off to catch up with myself. I live near a library and on the weekends I've been checking out mostly older films on VHS. There's not much competition for them, so I've gotten some really good titles. Last night I continued my C.S Lewis multimedia kick, watching Shadowlands, the 1993 film starring Anthony Hopkins as Lewis and Debra Winger as Joy Gresham, nee Davidman, the American poet who became his wife. Gresham was a great admirer of Lewis' work, and in turn she inspired his books Surprised by Joy and A Grief Observed. If you are not familiar with their story, you can infer some of its arc from those two titles. A native New Yorker, Gresham corresponded with Lewis from America when she was still married to alcoholic writer William Lindsay Gresham. Unhappy in that marriage, she took her two sons, David and Douglas (only Douglas is mentioned in the film) to London and went to Oxford to meet Lewis. The two became friends, and when she finally left her husband and settled in England, she approached Lewis with an unusual request - she asked if he would marry her in a platonic civil union so she could remain in the country. He obliged and they lived separate lives until she was stricken with bone cancer. Lewis realized that his own lectures characterizing pain as a call from God to spiritual awakening had come to life, and that he loved Joy. The feeling was mutual, and they married again with an Episcopal priest presiding at her hospital bed. Gresham eventually died in 1960 after a long struggle with the disease, but by all accounts her marriage to Lewis was a happy one. It's been remarked upon how surprising the couple's eventual romance and marriage was, but Lewis was an unconventional man in many ways. He wrote science-fiction and childrens' stories, and also penned populist theology such as The Screwtape Letters, all of which were considered somewhat suspect for a man of his academic accomplishments (don of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at both Oxford and Cambridge). There is a scene early in the film in a local pub where his professor friends are ribbing him about his Narnia books, trying to find Freudian overtones to the wardrobe and fur coats, but Lewis stands up and enacts the scene of pushing through to a new world and describes it as simply "magical." His point is not understood, as the other men are highly invested in intellectualism and rationalism and can't make the imaginative leap to follow him in the snowy footsteps of a faun. Gresham was different. Herself a poet with an imaginative sensibility, she was a prodigy of intellect. She attended Hunter College at the age of fourteen and was published in the prestigious Poetry Magazine by the time she attained her majority. Her family were Russian Jews from the Bronx, although Gresham herself converted to Christianity at least partly on the basis of Lewis' theological writings. She was outspoken and intelligent and I think Lewis liked her simply because she was an equal in her own right who could keep up with him. I have to say I admire him for marrying a strong woman. It cements my positive image of his character that he could hold his own enough to choose a wife who could challenge him.

There is also a strange kind of symmetry to each of the major relationships with women that Lewis had in his lifetime. Lewis's mother died of cancer when he was a boy, which devastated him. In the film, he says his world ended, which is a very fair statement to describe what happened to him in real life. His father did not deal well with the event, and the boys were shipped off to boarding school. It's no wonder they spent most of their lives in company with each other - each was pretty much the other one's only emotional support after their mother passed away. Lewis' brother Warnie had his own struggles with alcoholism, and the men shared a house together for years, exactly as depicted in the film. What isn't covered in the movie is the earlier relationship Lewis had with the mother of a friend. Paddy Moore was a co-cadet with Lewis in WWI and the two agreed that if either died, the survivor would help the other's family. Moore was killed in action, and Lewis, though only eighteen years old, made good on his word. Mrs. Moore was forty-five when they became acquainted, and they lived together until the 1940's when ill health forced her into care. He never elaborated on whether their relationship had a romantic dimension, but he loved her deeply and referred to their interaction as complex. She filled many aspects of the maternal role for him, but also looked up to him as a man, and a stand-up one who had been willing to set aside some of his own needs to help her. As to Gresham, she was already a mother of two sons when Lewis met her, and that had to be appealing to him, echoing the dynamic of his own family with himself and Warnie as the earlier template. He disavows Freudian implications in the film, but the psychological subtext is undeniable. As someone who lost a parent in childhood, I can testify through personal experience that one finds oneself seeking ways to compensate for that loss through later relationships. There is no harm in that, emotional needs exist to be fulfilled, and Lewis' relationship with Gresham seems to have been very fulfilling for him. I read A Grief Observed and while I found it hard to take in some ways due to its personal nature and the dark emotions it describes, it's very clear from the text that Lewis deeply loved his wife and missed her terribly after she was gone. He wrote the book anonymously, but finally had to come out publicly as its author when many of his own friends kept recommending it to him as a tool to deal with his feelings, surely an irony for a private man. He took good care of Joy's sons after she died and named them as his heirs, with all rights to his works - just imagine inheriting Narnia.

I do have to say that I had a few issues with the film. I had wanted to see it because I like Lewis so much, and I am glad that I did, but I thought there were some major gaps in the story which made it somewhat jarring for me. The absence of Joy's son David is one of the main ones. The fact that she had two sons was for me of paramount symbolic importance, since Lewis was also one of a pair of brothers. Perhaps David did not want to be in the film. I have not found any explanation for his absence in any of the related material online, but he was written into an earlier stage version of Shadowlands, so it does seem odd to me that he was taken out of the more high-profile film project. I also felt that the screenplay did not quite do justice to the story. There were several instances where the action was inadequately explained. In one scene at Oxford after their marriage of convenience and just before her cancer diagnosis, Lewis and Gresham are in his college rooms, and she suddenly verbally attacks him for arranging a closed-off life for himself where he always holds the upper hand. She stops one sentence short of calling him abusive, and storms out. He is left utterly confused, with a teakettle whistling in the background that I felt was emblematic of their heated emotions and especially so of her venting. Only one or two scenes later, he is shown calling her, and she falls with a snapped femur on the way to catch the phone, setting the stage for the revelation of her advanced cancer. There isn't adequate explanation, for me at least, of why he even called her. She had been downright rude, almost to the point of being psychologically dysfunctional, and he himself said in hurt surprise, "I thought we were friends." There isn't enough build-up to that scene, and there isn't enough follow-through, either. It is supposed to be one in a continuum of vignettes that shows how Lewis shut down emotionally after his mother's death and never opened himself up to pain again, even though he somewhat hypocritically prescribed its tonic to others in his talks on religion. I felt that that plot point was handled awkardly, however, with this scene as the most egregious example. Her accusation comes out of nowhere, and goes nowhere. As soon as she is sick, it's just forgotten. In a film about two writers, I found several similar lacking elements in the screenwriting. It isn't quite balanced, spending too much time in some places and not enough in others. And as odd as David's absence is, there is a young student of Lewis' that seems to have wandered into the movie for little reason. He's struggling with his classes, and with Britain's class divisions, a poor boy who falls asleep in school and doesn't complete his lessons because he stays up all night reading preferred volumes he has stolen from the local bookseller. He's contrarian, refusing Lewis' help and eventually drops out during his third year but later becomes a teacher. I think he is supposed to be another maverick who bucks Lewis's control, but I found his character grating and superfluous. I am not sure if he was based on someone from real life or was merely added for dramatic tension, but I considered him a distraction whose sacrifice would have strenghened the film. One strong-willed and obstreperous foil is enough, even for C.S. Lewis. Shadowlands was directed by Sir Richard Attenborough, and it is lovely to look at. Oxford is a naturally photogenic setting and the period look of the early 1950's is masterfully achieved. The film proceeds at a stately pace, but there simply isn't enough explanation and development in its content for my taste. Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger are both well-cast for their roles, they certainly look right and perform admirably, but I never felt any chemistry between them, a serious failing for a film based on romance. As fulfilling as this relationship was in real life, I simply found the movie unsatisfying. Other people have loved it and raved about it to me, but I think I just prefer the real-life story to the Hollywood version. As the takeaway of that, here is a very cute picture of the pair hanging out at his house in Oxford - they do look really happy, don't they?: http://www.aslanbooks.com/images/CSJoylewis.jpg

Mindwalk With Me

I just watched the movie Mindwalk, released in 1990 on VHS. It's never been reissued on DVD to my knowledge and I finally tracked it down on EBay at a price I was willing to pay. It's kind of a cult hit, especially among Mensa types, and copies can go for as much as $100, but I found one for $20 and snapped it up. I've been wanting to see it for a while, especially since I went to Mont St. Michel last summer - except for one brief scene at the beginning, the entire film was shot on location there. It's a deceptively simple film, almost more like a play, featuring a rambling conversation between a female Norwegian physicist (Liv Ullmann), an expat American poet/actor/playwright living in Paris (John Heard) and an American Senator and recently defeated presidential candidate (Sam Waterston). I was amazed at how timely the topics were, with the dialogue including commentary on global warming, international economic issues and sustainability, all of which have grown even more critical since the film was made almost two decades ago. The movie opens with Waterston calling Heard in the aftermath of the election and asking if he can visit the poet, his speechwriter in past years, in France, with the ulterior motive of recruiting him to rejoin the politician's staff. The men drive up to the cathedral and meet the physicist there, their mutual introduction setting off a two-hour discourse of ideas. Ullman's scientist is the voice of conscience and holistic consciousness and speaks passionately about the importance of ecology and ethics in human affairs. Waterston and Heard listen to her with a growing respect throughout a walk that weaves from the high gothic cathedral of St. Michael to the beach above the mudflats of the Bay of Normandy which surround the holy isle. The central premise of the film, whose script is based on the book The Turning Point by Fritjof Capra, is that Cartesian rationalism had its place in its era as a philosophical catalyst which made possible a new perceptual model of the world, and that that model served to bring humanity into the modern age. However, as the physicist articulates, that model has now worn out and needs to be replaced by a newer one, because its mechanistic approach is too reductive for the complexity of organic life and the pressing demands of the present day, a time when technological knowledge has outrun wisdom. The scientist maintains that man must make another perceptual paradigm shift in order to accomplish the imagining of the needed model. She's struggling with that on a personal level as well as an abstract one - she is in a crisis of faith and is on a perhaps-permanent Sabbatical from her work, because an X-Ray laser that she invented for medical applications was corrupted into a component in the Star Wars missile defense system. To paraphrase her words, that "blew her mind," and she retreated to the simplicity of the isolated medieval monastery to settle her thoughts and achieve some clarity about her future direction. She and the two men are all in some degree of midlife crisis. Each seems to feel like a failure in one way or another. The poet is published, but not well-known or financially successful (he says he sold 12,000 copies of his poetry book, which impressed me, but, hey, it's a movie) and the Senator, having lost his bid for America's highest public office, is retrenching and figuring out his priorities. The discussions which occur directly between him as the voice of pragmatism and the physicist as that of higher human aspiration are especially effective. She criticizes politicians for their one-track worldview, but he lays out the reality of Washington as a place where you have to pick your battles if you hope to get anything done at all. She admits that she lives in an ivory tower, and he invites her down into the brawl by offering her a job as an advisor to his office. Their interaction, especially the scenes where she tries to explain quantum physics and the subatomic world to him, is like an allegorical meeting of the sacred and the profane. As allegory reached its height of refinement and popularity in the literature of the Middle Ages, using the conceit in the medieval setting of Mont St. Michel is a stroke of genius, a construct which carries a powerful psychological punch. The character of the poet is the foil to the other two and a conduit for their energy. He's a holy fool figure, also a popular medieval construct, who provides reflection and comic relief, drawing off some the tension of their polarized dynamic and defusing it. The politician represents power - he is in a position to hire the other two, and he makes policy for the government that can affect the course of global events. He's a personification of the world, the male realm of privilege and prestige, but there are limits to his power, as his electoral defeat shows, and as demonstrated by his befuddlement in the face of the feminine force of nature who communicates to him the strangeness of the quantum field. To his credit, he at least tries to understand her, perhaps a hopeful sign for a favorable outcome in the real world over the long term. For another medieval comparison, all of the characters remind me of the colorful people in The Canterbury Tales. They drop in, tell their stories, and go on about their business. They are on a pilgrimage of sorts, and we see only the part of their life's journey concerning our tale. The midlife crisis motif in the film is a highly creative symbol for the state of modern man - outgrown of the primitive stage that marked his childhood, the bright and shiny reason he thought would solve his adult problems has fallen short, and he must find a way to reinvent himself and forge a better future for his race. The film ends as suddenly and ambiguously as it began, with no firm decisions made, but with much thought provoked. The last line alludes to the title of the originating book - as he and the poet walk back to the car, the Senator muses to himself that he may have reached some kind of seminal "turning point." I have also been reading a book by C.S. Lewis that synchronistically resonates for me in context with this film. It's called The Discarded Image, and it concerns exactly that medieval model of the world which Descartes' rationalism and Newton's modern science replaced. That model is of especial interest to me, because it's the foundation of the ascent mysticism that I've devoted myself to studying lately (please see my earlier posts on the topic - it's coalescing as the absolute core of my own work and I've gone on about it quite a bit). It placed the Earth at a remove from the rest of the cosmos in a way that is actually kind of bewildering. Lewis described it as making man almost suburban in his geographic relation to the universe. This medieval natural order sets the earth and its environs in the solar system within a series of concentric circles drawn by the orbits of the near astronomical objects. The transit of the moon marks the boundary between the realm of matter delineated by our world and that of spirit, termed the Empyrean and composed of a substance called aether which is quite different from the gross matter of the lower reaches. Aether can best be conceptualized as something approaching primordial light, and its regions are those where God and His angels dwell. The hierarchical structure of these realms is an inversion of how the universe appears to us from our perch on the rocky earth. We seem to be at the crux with the heavens whirling around us, but in actuality we are the ones rotating around the Empyrean, the true cosmic axis (another kind of turning point). One metaphor Lewis gives for this is that of a wheel: if God is at the hub, the point around which the created cosmos spins, then man is at the far rim of the wheel, the edge which whirls the most furiously. We suppose ourselves to be the center of the universe, but that is but our self-involved perspective - we are really very far from the true center, God, and are spinning madly and dizzily in the outer darkness. We brought that on ourselves according to this model, because we have Fallen: our own actions served to cast us centrifugally away from the Source, and it's our job to climb back if we can, hence the ascent. In this worldview, we are almost powerless in the face of the spiritual forces that run the cosmos, our only real tools being faith and free will. The Cartesian view is nearly the exact opposite. Because it posits life as mechanical, man can hope to master it. The systems theory propounded in Mindwalk offers a different path from either of these by providing man with a way to work with the universe to mutual benefit. Man can use his inherent connection to all of life, a fact described beautifully by the scientist in her discussions of quantum physics, to create a sustainable means for himself to prosper while having as little negative impact as possible on the rest of the interrelated web. This could be called the organic path, as opposed to the older spiritual or mechanical one, and it involves co-existence and stewardship rather than domination or abject submission. As a model for man's future, I think it holds great promise, and I believe at least some of humanity has already woken up to it. The symbol of Mont St. Michel is actually a perfect illustration of the kind of interaction man could best have with his world. It was a barren rock in the bay until a priest had a vision from St. Michael to build a church there; hence it signifies the civilizing influence man can have on the raw environment, motivated by spirit and aimed toward mastering matter. The cathedral is a marvel of engineering that utilizes the rock itself for its building materials. The island sits balanced between the four elements - earth, sky, air and water - like an archetypal example of an alchemical ideal. It has been employed before as the image of the Holy Jerusalem, a perfect city and mankind's true home. I myself used its first sighting by the Grail Knight in my book Parsifal to foreshadow the eventual restoration of God's order upon the earth. What better icon to represent man's striving toward unity than a city built by divine directive and seamlessly integrated with its environment? Mont St. Michel is elemental and civilized, sacred and profane - commercial shops line its lower streets but the ascending approach to the cathedral is spiritually colored indeed. The hues of its stained glass reflect the blue and gold light of the bay and the sky and the warm green and brown of the earth. It's built on an island, not tethered to the mainland, so it belongs to everyone and to no one. It stands on rock, but floods with water and sand constantly washes around its very foundations. It's lasted hundreds of years and seems both solid and eternal, but to God it's a city built upon a single grain of dust. It's homely and transcendent and I've never been happier anywhere in my life. Doesn't that sound like heaven on earth? The meeting point of the book and film is the mechanistic model of Newton and Descartes (for my own holy fool moment of levity, perhaps we could call it The Descartes Image?). The book outlines the model which preceded it, the medieval spheres of matter and spirit divided symbolically into the realms found below the moon and above it; the film hints at the model which must inevitably follow it, hopefully a unification of all such duality into cosmic oneness. Man is not the master of life, but he doesn't have to be its helpless victim, either, and he has been assigned a dynamic role to play in Creation. It's our responsibility to figure out how to live that role to its highest and fullest potential. It would be very interesting to look down from the aethereal heights five hundred years from now and see what model finally came to define our age: a stubborn clinging to rationalism that ignores all other modes of thought or a flowering of conciousness that ushers in a new Renaissance. I'll leave you with a final image of the glory of Mont St. Michel to hopefully stir you towards your own perceptual shift: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mont_Saint_Michel_bordercropped.jpg More info on Mindwalk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindwalk http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100151/ More info on The Discarded Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discarded_Image http://www.amazon.com/review/R1FF231EYZBIGQ More info on Fritjof Capra and The Turning Point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritjof_Capra More info on Mont St. Michel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_St_Michel

Magic Books

I’ve been Twittering about The Magician’s Book by Laura Miller, a kind of biography and literary analysis of C.S. Lewis combined with some personal essay about Miller’s feelings about his work, especially the Narnia series of books. She did a really excellent job of researching Lewis, especially the influence of his childhood on his later life, his intellectual background and his relationships with the Inklings, a group of literary and intellectual men at Oxford which included his friend J.R.R. Tolkien. Miller accessed resources at Wheaton College in Chicago and traveled to England and Ireland to look for clues in Lewis’s environment to the origins of his Narnia stories. She was transported by them as a child, grew estranged from them as an adolescent when she realized their Christian sub-context, and returned to them as an adult literary critic (she was one of the co-founders of Salon, the online journal). I enjoyed most of her book, to the degree where I had a hard time putting it down and eagerly looked forward to my reading time each day as I worked my way through it, often stopping to conduct my own internet research when some detail piqued my curiosity. I am a fan of Lewis, with many of the same feelings from childhood about him that Miller shared, but without the shocked betrayal that she felt at the discovery of his Christian agenda. I apparently had a better church experience as a child than she did - I was raised with a record of sporadic attendance at a mild-mannered Protestant church of the Scottish Methodist persuasion. I never had a problem with Christianity until I got much older and realized that I don’t agree with a lot of how it is conducted; I don’t believe in proselytizing or mission work other than charity-oriented projects because I feel that religion should rely on attraction rather than coercion, and I also don’t feel that any one religion is superior to any other or is the only true path or answer. Many religions including Christianity say that they are the only way, but that stems from tribalism and the need to validate the faiths and to attract followers to them. Religions are cultural reflections and therefore none is greater or lesser than any other. They all have universal constants and they each have something to teach us, the same way every individual does. Taken together rather than viewed hirarchically or exclusively, they are even richer, because they form a tapestry of geographic, social and temporal influence that is fascinating to observe. I have extensively studied religions of all kinds and as an adult have attended congregations as diverse as Orthodox Jewish, Sufi Muslim, Presbyterian, Tibetan Buddhist, and Hare Krishna, so my philosophy is not just something that I learned from books - I have put my money where my mouth is. I have attended a number of Anglican churches, the denomination of Christianity that Lewis subscribed to, and have found my experience doing so to be very helpful toward an understanding of something of his perspective. I was already very familiar with the Biblical stories that form the foundation of the Narnia ones, so when I made the conceptual leap around the age of nine that enlightened me as to their subtext, I wasn’t surprised or outraged by the discovery. It made sense to me that if Aslan was God in Narnia, then Aslan could be Jesus, too. The mention of Aslan’s father as the Emperor-Over-the-Sea cemented my understanding. I’ve always been pretty comfortable with God, and was very much so as a child. I liked going to church, maybe because we didn’t do it all the time so it never became a chore. It felt more like visiting a friend, and getting to sing and listen to stories, all of which are favorite pastimes of children. The church we went to was very pretty, built from bricks of pink granite, a native stone of Texas, with stained glass, and when I went to other churches, such as my grandmother’s in Dallas, it was usually for Christmas or Easter, festive occasions that almost felt like a party, with special music and decorations. Therefore, finding the God I already knew from church in a new guise as an animal in a favorite fantasy book presented no problem for me. It actually kind of made the stories better, and it was fun to think of God, the usually disembodied presence, as a big golden lion that would sometimes let little girls ride on his back. Miller had a very different experience. She was raised Catholic, and while she takes pains to explain that it was not as strict a Catholic upbringing as some, she still found it dreary and confining. She felt outraged and cheated when she learned of the Narnian/Christian connection by reading about it in another book. She felt that Lewis had played a trick on her and had constructed a trap that seemed at first to lead to a new freedom but then led right back to the same old tradition she did not care for. She almost sounds like some pagans I know who, centuries later, bitterly resent the fetter that the coming of the “new religion” put upon the old beliefs in Europe, but I think she is actually psychologically closer to modern agnosticism or atheism (she never states her religious convictions directly, so I am conjecturing that). I remember that a roommate I had in New York City had some highly disparaging things to say about Narnia and complained that the stories were like something from a Christian bookstore and not something fun or new at all. He had pretty much rejected religion altogether, I think more as a reflexive fashion statement than as a well-considered philosophy. I just chalked it up to his youth and the rebellion that usually accompanies that, but it seems that many people feel that same way, believing that the Christian content somehow cheapens the Chronicles. Christianity as an organized system has in fact often thrown its weight around in the West, so I’m not necessarily surprised by that reaction, but I also don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The Church gave us the Inquisition and tacky strip mall bookstores, but it also bequeathed us the glories of Gothic architecture and facilitated the preservation of learning in the chaos after the fall of Rome, so it deserves a thorough weighing of its drawbacks and merits rather than a kneejerk appraisal based on personal resentments. Lewis was not only a practicing Christian, but a published theologian and a Medieval scholar. I am a Medievalist, too, partly through his inspiration though not yet of his caliber, and I understand something of the mindset of that era and of those who study it. The Church was an enormous influence on the art and writing of the period, and at the same time, as Miller also very creditably points out, the Middle Ages were teeming with other cultural and religious influences as well, everything from pagan stories to classical mythology to Islam. Medievals did not have any trouble holding multiple and sometimes conflicting conceptions in their heads simultaneously, and the Chronicles present a personal palimpsest of Lewis’s mind that shows something very similar. I am also a Jungian by temperament, so that kind of overlapping of various strata of symbols is very familiar to me. Lewis’s portrayal of God as a lion makes perfect sense in his own context, as far as I am concerned. That is a solar archetype from alchemy, often seen in Medieval literature, and one with which as a professor of that field he was certainly familiar.

I stated on Twitter that I feel Miller is much more of a materialist than I am, and that that is why we parted ways on our perceptions of the Narnia books and their God content. She helped found an internet publication and thrives in the New York publishing world, a place that is very literal and material. I consider myself a mystic and I have chosen to study religion, art, and archetypal psychology. I worked in that same publishing world for a few years, and while it was a very good learning experience, I ultimately found that it was not a good fit for me. I am happier in the realm of poetry and academics than that of consumer magazines. I also have a lot more in common with Lewis than I think Miller does. The final conceptual difference I had with her came in the concluding pages of her book. She stated that she did not care for The Last Battle, the apocalyptic book that ended the Chronicles and indeed the world of Narnia. She said many of the people whom she interviewed felt the same way, including the fantasy writer Neil Gaiman who loves Lewis and Narnia but who also felt that the final book was a letdown and the weakest of the series. Miller said that the destruction of Narnia made her sad, that it felt gratuitous, and that it made no sense to her that the Pevensies and their friends end up in a Narnia that makes the original one look like only a pale reflection. She loved the material Narnia so much that she did not want the replacement “further up and further in” that took its place. I don’t share this assessment. We were privileged as readers to be present at the creation of Narnia and so I think that it is a fitting conclusion that we are also to be witnesses to its destruction. As an adult contemplating the possible purposes of that, I can only conclude that Narnia is an artistic representation of a compressed cosmic cycle which Lewis designed and presented to make us comfortable with the concept of the death of worlds that will one day come to our own, whether through global warming, an Apocalypse, a Kali Yuga or simply the eventual death of our sun, and the promise of the renewal that will follow. The Last Battle closes one circle and opens a new one, in a dance like the eternal return. Narnia did not die; it did not go anywhere at all. It always was and always will be, like the proto-universes in the Wood Between the Worlds, the transitional space teeming with life that Miller discusses at great length. It is very strange to me that Lewis provided Miller with a restored Paradise itself, and she wanted no truck with it, I think because she truly did not understand what he was getting at. My takeaway opinion is that she thinks like a critic and does not have the mystic’s understanding of God, at least that of the emanationist philosophical branch that generated the Platonic concepts and a whole field of related systems with which as a Medievalist Lewis was very familiar. That construct holds that God is the center, the ultimate truth and that all things emanate from Him into material creation. The closer one moves toward Him, the more “real” things become because they are that much closer to their Source. That isn’t a consolation prize for the “lost” Narnia, it’s the real deal. It doesn’t degrade or replace the earlier Narnia, which served its purposes well as a lovely poem of its Creator. The simple fact is that the “real” Narnia IS ITSELF the Creator, part and parcel of Him. I personally loved The Last Battle and it felt just right to me as an ending to the tales I had loved so much. I still remember tearing up when it described the land beyond death as a state of dwelling in eternal happiness with those one loves the most, including God. If everything comes from God, then to reunite with Him is naturally to reenter the land one loves: the New Jerusalem, the Summer Country. It is the incorruptible place beyond entropy and the aether of eternity where our immortal soul already dwells - so what's not to like? I guess I always was a baby mystic, and I don’t suppose every kid would find these concepts so easy, but Lewis gave us credit that we would comprehend them sooner or later, or he would not have incorporated such rarefied concepts into books for children. The walled garden in The Magician’s Nephew and the model of the archetypal Narnia located further up and further in are integral to the ascent mysticism I’ve become so embroiled in lately, the true stream of knowledge linking Creation to its Creator in a song that calls us home. This is the water I swim in, and now you can see one of its earliest sources for me, the imaginal world of Narnia. The concept that Miller most irrefutably and elegantly put forward was that of Narnia as a compendium of every literary reference that Lewis himself ever loved. The books contain elements from Shakespeare, Spenser, the Bible, Plato, Phantastes, the Metamorphoses, etc., a catalog of their author’s voracious reading. Herself a true book lover, Miller posited Narnia as a land of literature, and, despite our other differences, on that point we can agree and mutually enjoy our time spent there.

More info on The Magician's Book:

http://www.magiciansbook.com/

Scribd Update

Well, I'd say the decision to start posting on Scribd is a successful one. I put my writing sample up less than twenty four hours ago and it's already had 434 hits, and 29 downloads (a few of those are me editing the page, but only about a dozen or so, the rest are other people). It's also on Scribd's homepage where they have a section called "What people are reading now..." and it has persisted there since I uploaded it. I am sure that that is what is driving all the traffic. I'm highly encouraged by this and it's motivating me to hurry up and get the book uploaded there, too. I put a link on Scribd to where you can buy the PDF and no one has done so, but I think when I get it up as an e-book and paperback, they will. I'm just happy people are reading it.

Scribd

I just posted a sample of The Flower of Knighthood to Scribd a few minutes ago, Twittered about it, and it's already gotten more than twenty hits.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/17590423/Sample-The-Flower-of-Knighthood-by-Susan-Brooks-Read-in-Fullscreen

Here is my profile page, too, named Fleurdamour:

http://www.scribd.com/Fleurdamour

This bears a lot more investigation - if this site gets this much traffic, it's an awesome place to put stuff.

Ascent Literature

I've recently read two books from the '90's that are amazing - Snow Crash and The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. They were bestsellers in the field of alternative sci-fi when they were published, so I've discovered them very tardily, but better late than never. My roommate Brent Heyning pushed Snow Crash on me because it was one of his influences for his Lightning Temple project that I've been peripherally involved in lately. http://www.lightningtemple.org/ I personally feel that information comes to each of us when it is supposed to no matter when it was released, which is why these books surfaced for me lately. They both contain archetypal material related to the ascent mysticism that I've been studying and that is at the conceptual base of the Lightning Temple. Each book expresses it somewhat differently - both of them are very technologically-oriented, but The Diamond Age seems more organically so to me whereas Snow Crash is more hard-wired. The Diamond Age was actually at the vanguard of the steampunk/NeoVictorian movement in the Goth subculture, and it was ahead of its time in that regard (another of my housemates at the artists' community, scientist (and something of an alchemist) Ryan Wartena, considers himself a NeoVictorian). Stephenson is highly intelligent and imaginative and I'm finding him quite inspiring to read. Snow Crash takes place mostly in Los Angeles, and utilizes Sumerian mythology, virtual reality and social commentary on authoritarian structures and consumer culture to tell interlacing stories about a mixed-race hacker, a rogue teenage skateboard courier, a psychotic Aleut, an equally psychotic telecommunications mogul, the Mafia and the Pentecostal church. Snow crash itself is a virus that affects both humans and machines, disrupting biological and binary codes. The Diamond Age is set in China, with sojourns to London, Seattle and the bottom of the sea. Its equally complex plotline combines East/West conflict, interactive content, nanotechnology, theater, struggles of class and ethnicity and fairy tales to tell the story of a street urchin who is set on the path to becoming an educated lady when an experimental piece of technology comes into her possession via an intellectual property pirating operation. Stephenson's works are set in a future time when technology has solved some of mankind's problems and created more. Both of these books tap into the archetypal substratum containing the ascent material, also in divergent but complementary ways. The Diamond Age utilizes the same structure of the ascent found in St. Theresa of Avila's The Interior Castle, the model of seven concentric rings containing within them the levels of personal development that bring one to the realization of God in the center of the Self. It also includes Chinese alchemy, with its concept of the ascent as a celestial ladder. Snow Crash contains elements of the sephirotic Tree of Life from Kabbalah, the older aspects of the contruct that derive from the proto-Semitic cultural pool. Another facet that it also utilizes is that of the Pentecost, the descent from heaven of pillars of flame (axis mundi symbols) that stimulate the areas of the brain which process language, opening them to the pre-Babel singular tongue. The tower of Babel was a ziggurat, also an ascent structure, an artificial mountain that symbolizes mankind's upward path toward divine realization. Stephenson has since written a number of books and I enjoyed these two so much that I'm looking forward to exploring the others as they come to me.

More info on Neal Stephenson:

http://www.nealstephenson.com/

The Green Man Mounts a Campaign of Civil Disobedience

I posted this to Twitter, but it's so funny it bears repeating here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/jul/08/human-shrub-colchester

Self-Referential Blogging Link

I found this article very interesting, regarding the impact of blogging on media in general:

http://www.salon.com/books/excerpt/2009/07/06/scott_rosenberg/

I blog because I feel like writing about what I want to write about with no one to edit me. I get feedback in the form of comments, but that's just fine, and very different from running up against the wall of a publishing gatekeeper. I want to earn my own readers and I want to hear from them when something I write makes them think. Blogs are self-expression in a very high form, augmented by the opportunity to open a dialogue with others. I love writing here, when I have the energy to do it (see post below). I don't want to read every blog on earth, but the more there are, the merrier. Vive l'internet, I say, in all its chaotic glory.

It's July Already?

I want to apologize to anyone who’s been following this blog and wonders what might have been going on with me lately. I haven’t posted here or to my music-related one in two months, the longest I’ve ever gone silent since I started both of them in 2008. I’ve kind of gone off the map in general the last few weeks for a variety of reasons. I’ve mostly just been exhausted, and it’s been building for several months. I derailed a little last fall when I almost had to move, and then when the economy sank so badly around Christmastime, I lost a lot of momentum that’s proven hard to get back. I’ve had some personal things to work through lately, too, mostly related to some care situations with elderly relatives. I’ve worked those out for the most part, which is rewarding, but it took a lot out of me to do so. My freelance writing work has dried up considerably and I honestly haven't seen much point in pursuing it in this downturn, so I’ve been concentrating on other daytime employment, and that’s been especially busy and draining recently. What energy I’ve had left I’ve been using for book edits, which are creeping along ever so slowly, but at least there is some forward motion. Pretty much everything else has come to a full stop. I haven’t answered any friend requests on Facebook or follow notices on Twitter, it took me several weeks to finish a challenging library book (which isn’t like me at all), I'm backed up on chores, and I haven’t balanced my checkbook in over a month, a dangerously long time for me because I tend to get a little careless with spending money if I don’t pay close attention to it. I’m not math-oriented, it doesn’t come naturally to me, so I have to apply discipline to my personal finances, and the fact that I’ve been unable to do so is a sure sign of burnout. I’ve earned a timeout, and I’ve been taking it. I had a huge pile of mending stacked up, and I used the last few weekends just to pile it up on the couch and work on it while I watched one DVD after another. I also read some books for the kind of pure enjoyment having nothing consciously to do with my research, something I haven’t indulged myself in for a very long time. I do enjoy all of my reading, but there’s a difference between theology and entertainment – I read The DaVinci Code, and then Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, and I’m just starting another book by him, The Diamond Age. I also went on a thrift store spending spree lately, starting around Memorial Day, which I think is finally trickling to a halt. God knows I never need any more clothes, I’ve thrifted for years and have plenty to wear, but I find clothing, especially of the vintage variety, very creatively stimulating, and I apparently needed an influx of new material, pardon my pun. This one got kick-started by visits to Vegas and Chicago, and by my discovery of a particular Goodwill in Los Angeles that has blown my mind. I can’t believe what kinds of things I have found there. It’s both good and bad that I discovered this store, because I’ve gotten some of the most incredible items I’ve ever owned in my life for pennies there, but they also seem to pretty much always have remarkable things that suit me, which is kind of dangerous considering that it’s not that far from my house and easy for me to frequent on a regular basis. I suppose, like my checkbook, this is another opportunity to practice self-discipline. Seriously, I’ve gotten an ankle-length skirt from the disco era that’s amazing, a black satin skirt like something from a film noir (both of those were $4.99 each), a gorgeous fake fur coat in perfect condition for $9.99, a black velvet clutch purse from around 1980 for $5.00, one of the most flattering vintage dresses I’ve ever had in my life for $7.99, etc. - the list goes on like that for a while. I’ve completely updated my wardrobe for about $100 spent wisely there, and another $100 or so scattered across Chicago and the Vegas Strip. I found a fantastic pair of $10 sunglasses and a $4 retro California t-shirt that helped things out, too. I think I just needed a reboot and defrag, which the shopping and passive film viewing at home provided. I need to put in some time organizing my new clothing purchases into my available closet space (I got rid of some old stuff to make room for them) and to catch up on some filing and of course the checkbook audit. I have barely touched my new laptop, that’s how bad it’s been. I just needed to have a little fun. I realized that even though I haven’t been doing all that much in terms of outside activities, if I’m this tired and fried, I need to do even less, so I’ve been ratcheting down my calendar accordingly and I plan to keep carving out some time for self-refreshment over the rest of the summer. My friend is supposed to have the finished painting for my bookcover to me this week. Waiting for that has been another stumbling block, but once I have it in my hand, I think that will motivate me considerably, too.

The Center of the Universe

I just wrote a long and very strange post to my music blog Fleur D'Amour, and don't want to repeat it here, but anyone interested in my axis mundi research should read it.

http://fleurdamourmusic.blogspot.com/2009/04/center-of-universe.html

Maybe I SHOULD Accept Ads for this Blog

Here's an interesting Wall Street Journal article about the explosion of blogging as an actual profession. No wonder old media is in trouble - I knew there were LOTS of blogs, but had no idea this many people were being financially supported by them: "In America today, there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers. " Whoa. That's a lot of bloggers. And that is a lot of ad money being drained from traditional sources.

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB124026415808636575-lMyQjAxMDI5NDIwMTIyNjE0Wj.html

Apple Workshop

I took the most basic Apple intro class this weekend at their closest store, and while most of it was as boring as you might think, it did also have some helpful material. I learned a lot about keyboard shortcuts and basic maintenance, so it was worth attending.

I've got intro to Logic Pro and intro to iWork coming up later this week. I'll book more of these workshops in the next month or so to help me get more acquainted with all of the programs. I've used Mac before, but never as my primary machine, and I want to get the most out of it.

Here is a link to the free classes at Apple if anyone is interested in taking some:

http://www.apple.com/retail/workshops/

The Path is Levelling Out

I have been struggling a little with my book edits, because, as I Twittered recently, this rough draft is heavily overgrown and needs a lot of weeding. It's not exactly a first draft, because I did some streamlining as I went, especially as I typed the manuscript, but it needs a lot of work still and it's been progressing very slowly. However, I suddenly remembered the other day that I did a lot more editing during the writing process in the second half of the book. I hit my stride at one point, and I recall that it became much more refined after that. That is the point at which I had an a-ha! moment that made a profound shift in my writing approach which I then went back and retroactively applied to my first book. The bottom line is that this should get easier very soon.

Opus Magnum

My housemate Evonne told me about this alchemy conference in the fall in Los Angeles and I plan to attend:

http://www.alchemyconference.com/

She heard about it from someone who came to her Lightning Temple meeting and who attends an alchemical mystery school - how cool is that?

Apple of Knowledge

I registered for some free classes at the Apple store: a general intro class, one on iWork and another on LogicPro, which I don't own yet but plan to buy soon. They also have sessions on iWeb, Aperture, Final Cut Pro, etc., and I plan to take all of them. Free is good. If I need more training, they also have more advanced one-on-one sessions that I think are reasonably priced.

She's Buying a Stairway to Heaven

Here is more info on the Levenda book, per my post below.

http://www.amazon.com/Stairway-Heaven-Alchemists-Kabbalists-Transformation/dp/0826428509/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238628866&sr=8-4

I stumbled on it at the Jung Institute bookstore and it's been immeasurably valuable to me.

Lighting Temple

My housemate Amoration (Evonne Heyning) and her husband Brent are working on a big project for a portable interactive performance space called the Lightning Temple. It's multidisciplinary, involving alternative energy, music, holistic elements, you name it. It's also based on merkabah mysticism, a practice in esoteric Judaism that activates the lightbody vehicle of human consciousness as a mechanism for the mystical experience of ascending a celestial ladder and coming before the throne of God. They have been having meetings with a variety of talented folks for months to plan this thing, which they hope to build shortly and take around for bookings on the festival circuit this summer. I recently came across a new book, Stairway to Heaven by Peter Levenda, which covers this form of mysticism and outlines parallels in spiritual practices as diverse as tantra, Voudun, Chinese alchemy and nineteenth century European Hermetic societies. The process is based around an activation of the chakra system by coordinating it with its cosmic analogue in the heavens, symbolized by either the seven planetary bodies of the ancient world or more commonly by the stars of the northern sky, the Big Dipper and the Pole Star, which comprise the axis mundi that I talk about all the time. This is right on target with my own work in Parsifal, about which I can't really say more without giving away important plot points, but suffice it to say, the emergence of this shared archetypal pattern in the art of my housemates and in the book I've been working on feverishly since I moved in has really got me going. It's also explained a lot about my own interests in mysticism - the Levenda book is very well-written and researched, and shows a clear connection between various esoteric things I have been interested in for a long time.

EvoAmo told me today that she has a session coming up on April 21st to discuss the merkabah and the spiritual aspects of this project, and asked me to give a brief presentation on the material covered by this book. I am so there. The book has been pivotal for me and has probably saved me years in independent research around these topics. Levenda has an esoteric pedigree going all the way back to the Magickal Childe in NYC in the late seventies and his work in this volume has impressed me immensely. I think it will help crystallize the project for everyone involved to know that there is a higher dimension to what they are doing than just making some cool art toy. It's really very deep, and I am excited to see what is going to come of it.

Writer's Grant Analysis

I applied for a writer's grant and did not win, and I think I would find it helpful to write a bit of analysis about it. There were seven hundred and fifty applicants and only one winner, with five more non-cash-prize honorable mention finalists, so the odds against each applicant were very high, but I learned a lot through this process and I want to do a breakdown around it.

The grant was from A Room of Her Own, an organization that supports women writers with this and other grants and with writer's retreats and workshops.

http://www.aroho.org/

Their charter is based on giving a very large ($50,000) grant every two years to a writer who is already showing a high level of commitment to her craft. It is also derived from Virginia Woolf’s thesis that a woman needs personal space and resources in order to live out her full creative potential, which is why the award is so large – it really creates a space of independence to get that much money in a relatively short period of time. The funds are parceled out over a period of two years, and are to be used for any purpose that furthers the recipient’s writing. This year’s winner, Barbara Johnson of New Orleans, plans to use the cash to support the process of writing her first novel. Other people have used the award to pay for an MFA in writing, which the current winner did not need because she already earned one from the University of New Orleans. If I had won, I planned to use the money to self-publish and promote the two Arthurian books I have already created and to clear a little space to move forward with the remainder of the volumes in that series and with other projects in process. (I am going to do all of that anyway, but $50,000 of free money would have sped things up considerably.)

I read Ms. Johnson’s application, and I looked at her biographical info and that of the finalists and I found it to be very revealing of the mindset of this particular awards committee. When I was filling out the grant application, I came across a question that made me think, “I’m probably not going to get this grant.” The question asked what community benefit one’s writing would have if awarded the grant. I live in an artist’s community, and I interact with my neighborhood and the greater Los Angeles creative community, I social-network online, and I’ve done volunteer work for various organizations. However, I am not involved in any substantial way with any community arts organization, partly because I have not lived in L.A. that long and partly because as soon as I got here, I started writing my second book and holed up in my house for over a year to complete it. It was so demanding that I did not have any time or energy for anything else, and the editing process has proven to be no less demanding. It’s been a pretty clear choice to me my whole adult life that I have to either do my art and not much else, or not do my art, which is unacceptable, so I’ve cut out a lot of other interaction. The public aspect of my creative career has certainly suffered for that, but it was a sacrifice necessary in order to actually make the art. I haven’t pursued finding avenues for publishing my shorter poems for the same reason – I felt the books were an investment of my time that could pay much larger dividends in the future so I put the bulk of my focus on them. I’ve also had almost insupportable disruptions in my life from 9-11 in NYC and Katrina in NOLA, and I had to ruthlessly refuse a lot of activities requests in order to get back on track with my writing after both of those massively destabilizing interruptions. I honestly haven’t been in a position to help anyone else much, because I’ve had to apply all of my effort to getting somewhere for myself. I answered that question on the application by outlining how my work is feminist in nature and possesses a strong component of historical relevance and religious and cultural cross-pollination derived from its origins in medieval source material. I said I would like to bring those values to a dialogue with the wider community, and that I would happily give free readings and workshops in places like libraries and other public institutions in order to further that. When I reviewed the background qualifications of the winner and finalists,

http://www.aroho.org/GOF/Barbara_Johnson.php

it was clear that they all have extensive community outreach experience and they have all been far more public with their writing work, garnering prizes and gaining advanced degrees. The winner herself and two of the runners-up already have writing MFA’s, which does show a high degree of commitment to one’s art. I have foregone that level of education to date simply because I was writing the books, and felt that committing to them was my best course of action rather than seeking public validation of work not yet completed. I also wanted to form them in the crucible of my own sensibility rather than expose my creative process to the possible subjective influence of critical feedback from a professor or thesis committee. The process of writing my books is highly spiritual in nature, very much like the milieu of a monk or scribe sitting in isolation in his cell in order to refine his own expression on the page. They are an act of private devotion, and bringing them out for public scrutiny before they were ready was not at all something I wanted to risk. The very first person I showed my first book to at the medieval conference I went to in France tried to edit it to her own taste, so you can see why I wanted a clear field of non-interference to work with. I think there are two potent lessons in this for me: one, the organization behind this grant simply had their own set of priorities for candidate criteria, which is perfectly fair, they just did not happen to match my profile of career and life experience; and two, I do need to go more public with my writing. Journalism is one thing, but the books are something else entirely, and I really do want to get them out to the world and start interacting around them. For what it’s worth, too, if taste was a factor in the determination, I can see that mine diverges greatly from that of this organization. The winning writer, Ms. Johnson, writes poetically, but her style is very American and modern. My literary touchstones are old sometimes to the point of antiquity and are mostly European. I need to find a grants organization whose objectives are more closely aligned with the work I am producing and I think I’ll get better results.

I read back over my grant application, and I would not do anything differently with it. I was very honest about my writing and my life situation, and I spelled out exactly what I hope to accomplish. I outlined specific goals and the steps I would take to reach them, and in the part of the application that inquired what I would ask for from AROHO, I said I could use their help creating a business plan, which I thought was a very reasonable request to make of people who make a living supporting the creation of books. I wrote very passionately about my art and what it means to me, and I especially responded to one of the questions that asked applicants to discuss one of several Virginia Woolf quotes regarding writing that were provided by the committee. I love Woolf, and wrote a paper in college about her book Orlando. We share the same birthday and she’s been a big influence on me. I chose the quote, "Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father." In the essay, I gave my mother due credit for teaching me to read and taking me to the library when I was little, and I wrote a lot about how women have been marginalized educationally and culturally throughout history, and of what a profound impact Woolf’s words had on bringing attention to that. She self-published via the Hogarth Press which she founded with her husband Leonard Woolf, and I wrote about the admirable avant-garde nature of that undertaking, too, and how I’d like to emulate it. In answer to a question about what writing means to me, I described my trip to France, and how overwhelmingly happy it made me to visit Mont St. Michel, a place I had written about in my Parsifal book. Here is a passage from that essay:


Seeing in person what I had seen only in books and on the internet was incredible - I had imagined my hero Parsifal, the knight of the Holy Grail, exploring those same lands and the great cathedral, and I felt like I had stepped into a fairytale, a fairytale that I had written. It was like the wonder of the stories I loved when I was a child curled up in a chair with a pretty book, but I was living the book instead of reading it. That is what writing means to me – it is no less than a divine gift that allows me my highest expression in the duration of time that encompasses my earthly existence. I was given the gift of writing the story of my own life and thereby co-creating with the great Creator my tiny corner of the world He made, and aside from life itself, I can’t think of a greater gift than that. That’s why the first cave paintings, also in France, hold such a sense of wonder and awe – they convey the whole cosmos and they make of a cave a cathedral. The Gothic churches are in turn an articulation of their builders’ awe at the immense groves of trees of Old Europe, the soaring trunks that suggested columns and the interplay of light in the leaves that solidified into the glory of stained glass. Thus is distilled the core of spiritual interaction between man, environment, and Maker: the arts are the closest that man can get to being God and making a world in his own image.


I'll stand behind that any day of the week.

My housemate, Evonne Heyning, runs a small non-profit to support artistic aims and is an old hand at grants. She is also a master social networker in new media, and when in my postmortem of this application I asked her for her advice on the grants process, she had an absolutely brilliant idea. She responded, “Why don't you use the space we have available at the artist’s community where we live to hold literary and poetry readings and workshops, and do more community outreach that way?” I can create a salon that comes to me, rather than having to search out venues, and I can put the resource of free space that we have in the service of the greater community. The Los Angeles literary community is not as widespread as in many other cities, due to the overwhelming presence of other kinds of media, but that is a perfect motivation to create another event for it. There are a lot of fine writers who deserve exposure, and an underground, grass-roots event is right up my alley. I may not have won this award, but I’ve now got more grants experience for myself, and a great idea of how to win friends and influence literary people.

Transatlantic Love

I got some traffic to my Etsy shop thanks to a mention on a U.K. college girl's style blog.  Sweet.  And I made two sales from it.  She apparently did a search for "floral blazer" after seeing one on Topshop's site, and found two from the 1980's that I had for sale.

www.thrillsandfrills.com

A Selection from Parsifal

I've been working so hard on edits for Parsifal that I decided to post a small section of what I've done. Here is the very first section of the book, still somewhat in progress (I can't vouch for perfect grammar yet), but you can see where it is headed.

A selection from Parsifal (or, The Holy Boy)

BOOK I:
The Forest and the Court


Once upon an olden time
In the forest’s leafy clime,
Dwelled therein a little boy
Who was his mother’s pride and joy.
‘Twere only just the two of them.
His father had been battle-claimed.
No siblings had the single child
And in the woods he grew up wild.
He was a wose, a greensward one
Born of the elements. The sun
Shone down upon him every day.
‘Twas no schoolhouse for that one, nay.
The boy was taught by stars and rain;
Educated by their plane
Was his mind. No geometry
Had molded him. Philosophy
Was a thought he'd never kenned.
He was taught by the west wind
And the woodland animals.
The lad’s brief life was very full
Of instinct. Living close to earth,
The forest thus defined the worth
Of his young world, its boundaries
Marked by the edge of the trees.
His mother had retreated there
When her dear husband fell to her
Defense. She held their growing babe
Still inside her, and there she gave
His birth to him. Her fear was strong.
To her love had her heart belonged
And she had grieved so passionately
She swore that his son would not see
Another man, so never fight,
And thus she would not lose his light.
All of his realm then was the small
Perimeter. He knew it all,
Every rock and every bird,
Whose singing he had always heard.
They made the music that he knew
And as the boy toward tallness grew
He mimicked them. He knew it not,
But his own voice was sweet, its note
Among the finest of all strain.
‘Twas tenor, with a pure and plain
True feeling that did powerfully
Transport, it so mellifluously
Expressed the essence of the one
Who sang, his natural emotion.
Parsifal was his name given
And he lived as if in the garden
Of mankind’s earliest existence,
A paradise of innocence.
He moved onward unconsciously
Toward his own maturity,
Knowing not what a man was
Save for a solitary guise,
A picture that his mother had
Of her dead husband. She had made
A painting of him, very small.
He’d been for her her one and all.
She had known him all her life
And wanted no more than to wife
The man her childhood love became.
He’d been a knight of figure handsome:
Black-haired was he, fair of skin,
And his eyes had been very green.
Such words described also the son.
When the grieving widow-woman
Looked at her child, she could see
A likeness, showing so exactly
Him she had loved that she swore
To e’er keep the boy there with her.
At his birth, she’d been very young
And so knew not that such was wrong.
She meant well, for she wanted him
Need never to encounter grim
And gruesome battle. ‘Twas a girl
And wanted peace in her own world.
Her name was Herzeleide, which meant
The sorrow of abandonment,
Which she knew well, for she had lived
That fate, and living still, she grieved.
She had lost her own dear love
And could not bear to ever leave
Her little son, so far away
Did she go then and there she stayed,
And kept him closely to her side,
Her sole treasure fiercely guarded.
Besides sharing with him speech,
The best resource she sought to teach
To him was her knowledge of God,
For holy things had ever awed
And acted on her. She was good
And taught her little one to read
Her Bible and her other book
Of prayers for every day. She took
The pair of volumes as she fled
Her household when her husband died.
His family and hers were noble;
Both were established and stable,
Prosperous. They did not know
Where she had gone, though high and low
They searched, for her son was the heir,
And as they did not find, they feared
The worst and felt that she had killed
Herself, and thus also the child,
And they stopped looking, though ‘twas late –
Diligently did they try it,
But ‘twas to no avail. She’d hid
Them too well in the deepest wood.

Pages

Just a brief word on my recent editing progress - I divided my six hundred page book up into four sections to make it more manageable to edit, and I am only four pages away from completing the first one. I can knock that out today or tomorrow and move on to the next section. I am starting to get my motivation back on it. I was so tired from the grueling process of writing the book all through 2007 and then the even more grueling process of re-editing my first book that I kind of lost my focus for a while. I carved out some downtime to read a lot of books and rest up, and that was a good idea. I am now finding myself excited by the improvements to the book and the process of re-reading itthat is required to make them. I love this book, and poured heart and soul into it. It's worth all the effort that it needs.

I also pulled out the CD-ROM's from the self-publishing class I took a year ago and I uploaded the lectures to my ITunes so I can refresh my memory on the process. My next major purchase will be music equipment and LogicPro software for the Mac, but after that I am aiming to release the book, hopefully in the summer - that's six months behind my original projected schedule, but I guess that is not so bad considering our current money apocalypse. We'll see if anyone has any pocket change left to buy it.

Deus Ex Machina

I spent a huge amount of time working on my new computer, and I am finding that I do have a learning curve to master the Mac. I have used PC most of my computing life because I've worked in editorial and office environments and they don't use Apple for the most part. I've taught myself a lot, and had a heart attack trying to install my photo program (1400+ pictures wiped from my camera's memory when it reformatted for the new system), but all is well, and I'm loving this divine machine. I can't wait to install the MIDI and Logic Pro, hopefully in a few weeks. I've set up my desktop, screen saver and Safari homepage all to reflect the Fleur D'Amour logo and webpage, and that is helping me get motivated on art projects other than writing. I am way behind schedule on my music because of all the chaos from 9-11 and Katrina, but I've got a whole folio full of songs that I've written over time, and it's time to dust them off.

The Apple Has Fallen From the Tree of Knowledge

I finally got my Apple MacBook Pro. I found a deal at one of the authorized resellers, MacMall, and bought it a week ago. I paid a few bucks extra for expedited shipping, and I got it before noon this past Monday. With their markdown (I think it is a 2008 model) and a $180 combined rebate on the laptop and software, I saved over $400.00 off of retail. Sweet. I already installed iWork, iLife and Norton AntiVirus and registered the machine. I plan to spend time this weekend installing the software for my Kodak digital camera and transferring photos. I need to post new stuff to my Etsy shop, and I've got to upload a ton of pictures for that. I also want to organize my France photos.

I still need to buy some more stuff associated with the Mac to get it primed to do everything I want to do with it - I need MIDI stuff, Logic Pro software, renter's insurance, a case to prevent scratching, a better laptop bag, etc., but I got the machine and I am really, really happy. I've got tons of poetry and writing material in an ancient PC laptop that I need to transfer to the new one so I can work on it.

The best part of this is that I was reading about Paradise (more about that later) when I found this computer online. So I named it Adam.

Mont St. Michel

I found this beautiful photo and wanted to post it because it reminded me of my wonderful trip to France last summer:

http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3947779

Some Taoism for You

"Manifest the simple, embrace the primitive, reduce selfishness, have few desires." - Lao-Tzu

Some Sufism for You

“Know that since God created human beings and brought them out of nothingness into existence, they have not stopped being travellers.” - Ibn al’Arabi

Priorities

I had a minor dilemma this weekend that highlighted the tension I am feeling between work and play. The bulk of my time is divided between work that pays most of the bills and work that I love, writing my books and music, which I also consider play, probably the best kind that there is. Those two activites take up literally almost every waking minute that I have, and the remainder of my time gets eaten up by household chores and errands. The area of my life that has suffered as a result is socializing and entertainment. I spend most of my leisure time at home, either reading or on the computer working on my writing projects, social networking to build a base or working on my Etsy shop. When I do go out, it's usually to cover something I've been assigned to review, like a concert or film. I haven't had any freelance assignments lately because the economy is so dire, and there is very little work to be had, so I've really seen almost nothing and been almost nowhere. I've been feeling socially deprived lately because of that, and I let myself cut loose more during the holidays, when there were a lot of parties, but have been getting back into the work groove since then. The reason I am so motivated now is that when I was really young, I constantly ran around here and there, and while I had fun and learned many useful things, I also wasted a whole lot of time. I wish I could have some of that time back to put to better use making art, which is why I work so hard now. It really is rewarding to create things, and while I still have to do other work to cover bills, I'd honestly rather spend most of my time writing or working on music and art than doing much of anything else. I spent a lot of this past weekend on research and book edits, but several of my housemates kept asking me if I wanted to attend the Edwardian Ball on Saturday, a costume event which always happens in San Francisco, but came to Los Angeles for the first time this year. Here is the website:

http://edwardianball.com/

I really wanted to go, and I also really wanted to use the evening to get work done on my book. The event also had a large cover charge ($30.00) and I am saving money for my Apple laptop, so I was thinking about the money aspect, too. However, my housemate Dena especially pushed me to go, because as she quite rightly said, artists need creative stimulation and this was certainly going to provide it. I waffled back and forth all day, and did not decide until the last minute whether to go or not; the only thing that convinced me was when my housemates Evonne and Brent came downstairs ready to go, and they looked amazing. So, I gave in and went. I pulled together a costume in about twenty minutes, which says something about my closet - I wore a long black poufy skirt, a Victorian blouse, a big gold locket, a capelet I bought in London, a huge black vintage handbag, crocheted gloves, a flower thing in my hair and carried a long stick umbrella. I went with my other housemates Ryan and Elizabeth and their friend Beverly, who also all looked fantastic. The ball was at the Tower Theater in downtown L.A., which was a perfect setting for it, with ornate wood and crumbling paint. Half of the Los Angeles creative community was there, and everyone was decked out. I saw someone with a Chinese lantern on their head, a lady with a wolf's head hat (it did not appear to be an actual wolf's head), wings, bustles, top hats, corsets and a stilt-walker. There was an aerial act (the Vau de Vire Society) and the local Cirque Berzerk. We took in the show until the ballroom dancing started, and we stayed until about 1 am, which was plenty long enough. The tickets turned out to only be $25, score, and I ran into a lot of people I know. I also felt very much at home. I don't want to club anymore really, only on rare occasions, but this was nightlife with value added. I was in bed by 2 am, and while I wasn't very productive the next day, I am still glad I went. I contemplated this whole thing a lot over the weekend, because while it seems sad that I have had to sacrifice a lot of social context during the last few years in order to get my own stuff done, I've made amazing progress and it's been worth it to me. I had a lot of fun when I was really young, and now I want a flourishing career and I am willing to do the work that that requires. I am at a different stage of my life now, a more inner-directed and focused one. It's not just a function of being older, either. I've never had endless energy. In an analysis of my past socializing, I realized something important: at the height of my social activity, when I was in college, if I went out a lot, something else always suffered, and that was usually school. If I ran around all weekend, sometimes I would have to skip a few classes the following week because I was wiped out. That's why I am so careful now. I know there will be consequences if I waste too much time and energy. Being the breadwinner changes everything, too. I haven't had student loans to fall back on for years. After I buy the laptop I still need to shell out more for a keyboard, microphone and software. I've had to put off these purchases for so long for various reasons that I don't want them to get pushed back anymore. Once they're paid for, I have other things to save up for, but I can cut loose a little more, too. My art is the meaning of my life for me, but it has to be said that it was also a lot of fun to dress up like a big china doll and go to a costume ball. It's not like that happens every day.

Book Stuff

I deployed my new Acer netbook computer this past week so I can get more book editing done during the day. I am averaging three pages of edits every morning when I use the netbook on my commute, which is not bad, and it's making it much easier for me to reach my goal of at least ten pages a day. I work on it over my lunch hour and in the evenings, too, as much as I can stand. Some days I really enjoy getting into it, re-reading what I wrote and polishing it to make it as beautiful and perfect as I can, and some days, when I am tired, it feels like climbing Mt. Everest over and over again while small rocks continually slip out from underneath my feet. That's when I know I need a break for a day or two, and just give up and read someone else's book rather than making my own.

I read something a little depressing the other day in media news, regarding self publishing. In addition to the terrible economy and the challenging media landscape, there are simply far more books now than potential customers for them, because print-on-demand has made it so much easier for anyone to create and sell a book. You really have to do a lot now to make your book stand out in order to attract customers for it. Publishing success seems to get exponentially harder every day. On one hand, it's awesome that creating things is no longer such an elite activity. On the other hand, the very accessibility that makes it easier to craft and release work has led to a media glut of untold proportions. I don't know about anyone else, but some days I feel so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data I am expected to process that I just shut down. I have never had much luck getting past the gatekeepers of traditional media, and I know that many worthy artists have had the same experience. Even Harry Potter and Star Trek almost never got content deals, which tells you indisputably that the old model was just ridiculous. Imagine how much money would have been missed out on if those had never gotten distribution, let alone the enjoyment they've provided, and who knows what awesome stuff is out there that never did get disseminated? A lot of what is in the public sphere now isn't very good, it has to be said, but I say yea to anyone who wants to make art and show it to people. It's just a little daunting to contemplate the effort it's going to take to get attention for my own worthy project. That's why I am writing this blog and Twittering and undertaking all of my social networking activities - like anyone else with something to say, I want to raise my profile because I want people to find me, and read what I have written and to take something useful away from it. Like any artist, I want people to know that I am alive, and to learn what I am about. I know I am taking the right steps, and I am glad to do the work - I love to write, I love to make things and design things, and to put all of that energy in service to my own art is my dream, so I am truly living it right now, by writing this account of my own creative process. That's the whole point of life, no matter how much attention you get, and you should never write for acclaim, anyway. The only way to go about this art thing is to write the best and most honest thing that you can, do what you can to shepherd it and hope for the best.

Arts and Crafts Movement

I buckled down this weekend and took photographs of all of the new merchandise I have for my vintage and crafts shop on Etsy. I got behind on that project because of my near-move and subsequent residential space re-design late last year and then due to the holidays. I wanted to get the new stuff up online for Christmas, but I was just too tired and busy. I've also been demoralized by this wretched economy. Honestly, I've only sold a handful of items from Etsy since Thanksgiving and I lost my will around it. I've got some really pretty stuff, though, and I think if I price it low enough, it might move. I had a lot of fun taking the pictures. I used the warehouse art space where I live, and I set up the portable closet storage that I got as a gift over the holidays, so organizing the stuff to shoot and ship it is much easier now. My housemate Robb, the video artist, was working out there, too, and played some chill ambient music the whole time, which made it more like play than work. I'm going to discount some of my older stuff into a clearance section, too, and I am rethinking ways to package some of my craft projects. I plan to make some toys and jewelry soon, too, which will also be fun. I've been working for so long and so hard on my books that I think I do need to mix it up a little more with other creative outlets. I cannot WAIT to get my Apple laptop and MIDI; I think this year is going to be fun no matter what.

The Holy Grail of Book Editing

My new little Acer netbook is a gem (literally, it's sapphire blue). I used it on my commute for the first time this morning and got six pages of edits done. I finished my first edit draft of Parsifal last night (via hard copy markup - that's by hand on a printed manuscript, which is why this whole process is taking me so long) and now I'm going back and transcribing the changes I made into the master file. I still need to print it out after every draft and read it as it appears on the printed page because sometimes you catch things that you miss on a computer screen, but this is still going to be a lot better with the netbook. I'll save on paper and printing and I'll save time and energy.

Higher Education

I've been looking at some educational programs to fulfill professional and creative aspirations that I have for the future. I found a publishing arts certificate program at Antioch College near Los Angeles that sounds interesting, but I just discovered that it is prohibitively expensive - $12,000 total. That's more than I want to invest in an industry that is undergoing what may well be the death throes of its prior business model. Honestly, I just want to gain the skills to release my own content, books and music, and at this point I think I will be better off for the most part investing in equipment and training myself to use it. I do think I want to pursue the music production certificate at ULCA - that fits well with what I actually hope to accomplish and it's only $6,000 total, payable a few hundred bucks at a time as you register for each short-term class. I had looked at a similar program at Musician's Institute a few years ago, but it was over $20,000 and they had no night school program, so if you were a grown-up and had a day job, you were out of luck. This UCLA one is much better in that regard, and I think it's just a better program overall. It's more geared toward the real world, and teaches all the Logic Pro applications and also music business material. I've learned some of that stuff piecemeal over my time in and out of the music industry but I'd appreciate a refresher course on some of it, and an intro to everything I don't know. My first priority at this point is to get the MacBook Pro and an upgraded MIDI set up, and then I'll register for the program, hopefully in the fall. That sounds doable.

Portable Workstation

I bought a little Acer Aspire One netbook from the clearance section at Best Buy, and I love it. I’ve barely started using it, but I can tell it is going to be very helpful for portable writing and edits. I maximize the productivity of my commute time by usually taking the bus and train instead of driving, and I do a lot of writing and editing then to bookend my day. I work from a printed edit copy while in transit, making markups by hand and then entering them to the file later. This is tantamount to creating an illuminated manuscript – it goes very slowly and creates double work for me, but I did not really have a solution until now. I am still saving up to buy an Apple MacBook Pro for music and larger projects, but until I get that, all I have had to work with is a very old IBM Thinkpad. The battery stopped functioning a while back and it’s so old they don’t make replacements anymore, which is why I have had to resort to such old-school tactics for my edits. My housemate has a netbook like the one I ended up buying, and I asked if I could see it. I realized it was a perfect solution for what I need, because it’s really lightweight (less than three pounds), it’s got enough memory for work documents and email, and if it gets lost or stolen, it cost less than $300, so it’s easily replaceable. I bought the sapphire blue one, because that was the only one marked down, and I love it. I named it Computer Jee, in homage to Slumdog Millionaire (I looked it up online, and that really is the way to say "computer" in Hindi), and found an awesome Ganesh painting for my desktop wallpaper. I plan to give it a test run this weekend at home on the edits I’ve already done that need to be entered. This really is a huge step forward for me – I think I can speed things up by 5-10 hours per week working this way instead of by candlelight and quill pen.

Here is the model I bought in case anyone is interested – I really think this is a good, affordable tool for writers: http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9163291&st=acer+aspire+one&lp=1&type=product&cp=1&id=1218040477207

And here it is at regular price in different colors:
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?_dyncharset=ISO-8859-1&id=pcat17071&type=page&st=acer+aspire+one&sc=Global&cp=1&nrp=15&sp=&qp=&list=n&iht=y&usc=All+Categories&ks=960

And here is the main product website:
http://www.acer.com/aspireone/

There are several kinds of netbooks on the market right now, but I bought the Acer because it got the highest consumer rankings for its class. My housemate Ryan highly recommended his, too, and he's very tech-y, so I figured if he liked it, it would be good enough for me. You can apparently get a longer life battery for it, too. The one it comes with lasts for about two hours, but the six-cell battery is supposed to be good for up to seven hours of worktime. It’s a little pricey and apparently it weighs a little more, but I want one anyway. I think it is worth the investment.

Re: edit progress, I’m less than twelve pages from finishing my first edit draft of Parsifal. This is also huge – it still needs work, but it’s moved from being a true rough first draft into a workable manuscript. I should have all of the current edits entered by early spring (it’s six hundred pages long, so it’s going to take a while). I’m already on a second read-through at the back end, too. When I get tired of just entering edits I’ve noted by hand, I go back and read through the first section where that process is already complete. I also need to work on refining the notes in the back that explain my inspiration and the spiritual meanings behind some of the concepts. I have not touched that in months and it needs a lot of filling out, but I am very pleased in general with where I am with the book.