Saturday, May 25, 2002

Entredeux
Being between -- between two places, two worlds, two people, two states of consciousness, two hearts, two minds. Betweentwo. Betweentwo.

As Jeneane says Helene Cixous says:
Human beings are equipped for daily life, with its rites, with its closure, its commodities, its furniture. When an event arrives which evicts us from ourselves, we do not know how to 'live.' But we must. Thus, we are launched into a space-time whose coordinates are all different from those we have always been accustomed to.

Aha! Aha! Ahas happen because of entredeux journeys.

Rituals are meant to be catalysts for certain kinds of entredeux – to evict us, launch us – force us to alter our perceptions, perspectives, permissions. To force Ahas.

Soon, soon.

I am surprised that no one has emailed me and said, What are you weird? You don’t really believe that magic ritual stuff do you? Well, almost no one. Frank Paynter asked me. He asked me some other questions, too, and I wound up writing “The Story of My Life in 5 E-mails.” If he shares any of that on his blog, you will know if I believe in magic.

Meanwhile, I will share with you one of my favorite passages from one of my favorite magical novelists, Alice Hoffman. It’s from Turtle Moon.
Every May, when the sea turtles begin their migration across West Main Street, mistaking the glow of streetlights for the moon, people go a little bit crazy. At least one teenage boy comes close to slamming his car right into the gumbo-limbo tree that grows beside the Burger King. Girls run away from home, babies cry all night, ficus hedges explode into flame, and during one particularly awful May, half a dozen rattlesnakes set themselves up in the phone booth outside the 7-Eleven and refused to budge until June.

Magic is a way to view the world.

In another hour, I will leave and go outside, where three fir trees form a perfect triangle, where the roof of a strip of garages blocks the view of those trees from the windows of my elderly frightened neighbors, who, no doubt will call the cops if they see the flicker of candlelight, if they notice the subtle whirl of shadow and sage smoke.

The clouds obscure the gleam of the full moon, but I know where it is. The same moon that nestles above the cloud cover here in upstate NY is the same moon that watches over Boulder. The moon is entredeux.
It’s the thinking that counts
Periodically, over at AKMA and Himmer and Sanders, and often spilling over to other fiefdoms in Blogaria, are meandering meaningful conversations about religion, afterlife, and all of the associated dogmas, beliefs, wishes, and hopes.

Again, b!X inadvertently reassures me that, somewhere along the line, I miraculously managed not to damage his soul. In his “In Heaven, Everything is Fine” post, he speculates on what if there were a Heaven in which everyone gets to spend eternity. In this thought experiment, he says:

It presents us with a profound choice: To live our lives however selfishly or destructively as we desire, since there will be no repercussions. Or to derive from this complete separation of worlds a deep sense of our own individual and collective power.

We and we alone would be responsible for making the world. We and we alone get to decide just what sort of world we wish to have.


I do believe that if b!X and Marek J. got together to join politically active forces, the universe definitely would bend a little in the right direction.

Now, whether it bends tonight when I conduct my Ritual for RageBoy is yet to be seen.

The crows already gathered in force at exactly 3 p.m. to begin cawing down the moon. Their insistent chant filled the circle of trees at the far end of the new park behind my building. It has begun, I thought, as I sat beside my re-planted garden, worshiping the drifting sun, offering the threads of my mind to Apollo, begging the beneficence of Pan with the new proliferation of basil bowing to his wanton will.

I hope it doesn’t rain before midnight.

I am thinking that, perhaps, for the Summer Solstice, when I will be on the coast of Maine, I will create a ritual for b!X – another Scorpio struggling to find a loving place in this world. Sounds about right to me.