A Poem is Just the Groaning and the Singing of the Heart

June 18

I like how late it stays light these days. I like being at the beginning of the summer of another year. I walk out as it grows dark, and my head thinks it's late while my body thinks it's early. I sit on a comfortable couch in a coffee shop, drinking something hot and sweet and good, the light fading around me. I think about stories. About words. About faith, successes, morality, ethics. About how it can feel good to win even when no one knows you've won, even when it's a contest whose parameters you set up for yourself.

I think about love, and the goodness of the world, and the fact of it being light, even late.

*

In the novel I haven't really started writing yet, there are two insane characters. One of them is in the process of going insane during the course of the novel, and the other is insane before the book even begins. They're crazy in very different ways, and yet when they intersect, when their actions are combined, they become something even more dangerous. Like ammonia and chlorine; individually those are inert poisons, and when they're combined, they become poison gas-- something more aggressively lethal.

Getting into the heads of insane characters is difficult, if you do it honestly, truthfully, with effort. It tends to skew my head around in strange ways. I have to scramble my own sense of cause and effect. That's what I've been doing for most of the night. To make matters even more so, I read Brad Denton's Blackburn in its entirety this evening-- I like the book very much, and it is partly about madness from the inside, internally consistent madness. It's about lots of things. I'm still absorbing it. My insane characters are not at all like Blackburn. So now there are three very different crazy people muttering in my head; Blackburn is the most palatable of them. That may be because he's admirable, in some ways; probably it's only because he's not mine, and so his voice is not as loud as B.J.'s, or Denis's.

Though to be honest Denis just whispers implacably, and that's worse than B.J.'s superficially amiable ramblings.

*

Tonight I will write a poem entitled "Orpheus, Among the Cabbages." It's already written in my head. Except for the specific, particular words. But that's just detail work.

*

My Mr. Li story is much better than I'd expected it to be. I hope to finish it tonight; I see where it's going, almost completely, and it's very nice. I expected a fun story about starfish and decapitations. Now the starfish are gone, and it's about something else. Integrity. Winning a game with secret rules. Responsibilities.

I think it's still fun, though. And it's still got the decapitations.

*

My poem "Mask" is online at Strange Horizons, now. Please do read it. It's a bit less narrative than most of my recent publications; it's also a lot more autobiographical. Probably more cryptic, too, though I hope it's still enjoyable.

I've been told by several people, independently, that my spirit animal is the spider. I've always liked the notion of spirit animals (maybe that's part of why I like The Maxx so much). Though since my other favorite thing is the subjectivity of symbols, that stuff creeps into the poem, too. Symbols mean different things to different people. The Spider is lots of things. Some Native Americans call the spider Thought-Woman, and credit her with the creation of the universe, a universe created by telling the story of the universe. Thought-Woman moves in two worlds, equally at home in earth and in heaven (or the Medicine Lands, or what have you). To the Greeks, the spider was a symbol of Fate. Also a creative force, a spinner; though Arachne's creativity got her into trouble. To many, spiders are just one more nasty digit of the Devil, a scuttling poison factory. In English folklore spiders are healing forces, used in potions for curing gout, asthma, arthritis, or worn as necklaces to ward off coughs. Spiders dropping down on your face can be a good omen. Killing spiders is unlucky, and brings rain. In the middle ages there was a saying in Europe-- "If you wish to live and thrive, let the spider run alive." Spiders figure in stories about Robert the Bruce, Frederick the Great, and Mohammed. They're often seen as feminine forces. They're interesting.

But when these people-- mystical minded redheads with flowers in their hair, older women with dark and serious eyes-- say that the spider is my spirit animal, my totem, which spider do they mean? Which spider am I?

The spiders that fascinate me the most are the ones that supposedly go insane. They weave asymmetrical webs. The asymmetry is how you can tell they're insane. If you give spiders drugs-- pot, crystal meth, cocaine-- the webs they weave are markedly different from the norm, and very strange. I wonder what kinds of tangled futures diviners might read in the patterns of such webs?