Paracelsus in Excelsis

A homunculus (/hoʊˈmʌŋkjᵿləs/; Latin for “little man”) is a representation of a small human being. Popularized in sixteenth-century alchemy and nineteenth-century fiction, it has historically referred to the creation of a miniature, fully formed human.

In ancient times, (think Socrates and his ilk), a man’s sperm was supposed to contain this little man, a supposed microscopic but fully formed human being from which a fetus was

believed to develop.

Isn’t that a great image?  That’s sperm man.

When I was going to college, I got into reading about the philosopher’s stone, and alchemy.  I was doing a paper on Ezra Pound, and in reading this poem P in E(see above), got interested in the whole creating gold out of base metal and from there creating a little tiny man.  Go figure.

So here is what you need to make a humunculous:

Ingredients:

magician semen
sun stone (a mystical phosphorescent elixir)
animal blood
a cow or ewe
sulfur
magnet
green tutia (a sulphate of iron)
a large glass or lead vessel

Mix well.  Put into muffin tins.  No, not really.  You put this into a glass beaker and :

This is what happens when you get a degree in literature.  I read everything from Borax boxes to Ezra Pound.  I’m not sure which has been more valuable to me in my life. Depends on the circumstances, I’m sure.

Anyway, creating life has been a fantasy of humans forever.

“Oh, Honeycomb, won’t you be my baby
Well, Honeycomb, be my own
Got a hank o’ hair and a piece o’ bone
And made a walkin’ talkin’ Honeycomb”

Men want to create the perfect woman, women want to create the perfect man, and hopefully we all grow up to gratefully welcome the sorta.  The sorta perfect, the mostly perfect, the almost perfect.

And that’s it for now folks.

 

 

The Tweener

I’m reading a great book:  Lincoln at the Bardo .  It is about Lincoln and the death of his son Willie.

The Bardo is not a new restaurant.  It’s the liminal state between living and the final destination.  The tweener.  Not quite at rest yet.

At first I thought I was not going to like it, then I thought it was just too difficult for my brain to understand and then, I got into it and I love it.  Like some people I know, you just have to relax and let them take you where they will.  Saunders takes us on a wild ride in the cemetery where Willie is buried.

It’s a cross between an elegy and Day of the Dead celebrations.  Can’t say I totally get it, but I’m in.

It’s funny, outrageous and and sad.

Reminds me of a saying of my mother’s:

“Ain’t no sin to take off your skin and dance around in your bones.”

 

Hallelujah

I was in the upstairs bathroom this morning drying my hair.  I usually bend over to do this as I hope the process will add some life to my limp locks.

So I’m bending over with my head down, my back to a window streaming with sunlight. I look between my legs and sunlight seems to be pouring out of my crotch. It’s the Annunciation I think.

This is where I get weird, oh best beloveds.  This is the anti-shame.  This is my answer to all those patriarchal assholes.

Bet you guys don’t have the sun shining out of your crotches.  We can make babies guys. We take your seed and like Rapunzel we spin that seed into gold.  Babies.  We make life. You just make pee-pee.

 

What a shame

Shame is a painful feeling about oneself as a person.”The roots of the word shame are thought to derive from an older word meaning “to cover”; as such, covering oneself, literally or figuratively, is a natural expression of shame.

I am fascinated by this word as it seems to describe a state that is somehow primal, and it’s primacy, no matter whether it occurred in Eden (cover yourself Eve), or now, has not diminished.

I think women especially have been taught to feel shame, to fear shame.  Consider the scarlet letter, or the burkha, or Paul Ryan saying that women with bare arms should not come into the House.

Being uncovered is a condition of shame.  I can understand shame as arising from something one did.  But, I believe there is a difference  between shame arising from bad behavior and that arising from one’s essential self.

 Guilt—social norms–What you did

Shame—who you are

Why am I even giving this so much thought?  There are a lot of reasons.  I’ve been watching The Handmaid’s Tale and have been struck by the dichotomy between the fertile women who are dressed in red and basically just used as breeding stock and the other modest women.

Remember the picture of Adam and Eve being banished from the Garden of Eden. They are vainly trying to cover their privates.

Wait a minute.  No they’re not.  Adam is covering his eyes as if to say I cannot look at what I’ve done(Guilt).  Eve covers her privates as if to say look what this stuff has caused.  I need to cover myself.  By simply being a woman, Eve is in a shameful state.

Shame is such a powerful emotion.  I can remember each and every time I have felt it.  It is, at least for me, a whole body feeling.  It is not unlike sexual arousal which is interesting, in that it starts as a localized feeling which quickly becomes a whole body feeling.

It is not like any emotion I have ever felt.  Emotions aren’t big enough.  Love, hate, anger, guilt.  These are emotions I can relate to.

Shame takes me over.  It starts in my ears, moves to my chest where it blossoms up my neck and into my face.

It is very much beyond disgrace.

Shame grounds the planes, stops the traffic, ends the laughter.

Shame trumps everything.  Whoever has suffered shame as a child, spends the rest of their life attempting to repair themselves.

I don’t know if shame beats out love as our most powerful emotion.  I hope not.

Guilt means you did something wrong, shame means you are wrong down to your core. You are a bad apple.

And that apple brings us back to Eve.

I believe the Church fathers, the patriarchs,the ayatollahs and rabbis and grand poobahs decided long ago to blame women for the Fall and therefore for all the “falling” since.

Women of the world—throw off your burkhas, your hijabs, your wigs and arm coverings, your veils and shame.

Modesty is cool; but shame is hobbling, joyless and spiteful.

Gardening trivia

I’m fighting with my fennel this morning.  I love it when its small but it is now ten feet tall and I can hardly reach those lovely little seeds I like to chew on.  It’s an ugly fact that it comes down to my self interest as opposed to the fennel’s.  Animal vs. vegetable.

It looks harmless doesn’t it?

I’m going to get out my mattock and have at it.

The discerning therapist

This is for my brother John who loves Callahan.

Who are you really?

The title of this cartoon is Vacuum.

 

 

I have been playing around with the idea of “the imp within”, the idea that there is our outer persona and then this inner being (not necessarily an imp, perhaps an angel, a forlorn child,  an old sage) who looks out at the world.  This being (for lack of a better word), is not necessarily judgmental, or mean spirited, or damaged, only hidden.

Two phrases come to mind:  “complex, layered human beings” and Virginia Wolfe’s “…the spirit driven in.”

Virginia Wolfe describes a woman’s need to hide her true self, to entomb herself in a more acceptable package.  This inner, outer reality, I think, is an important one to look at especially in women.  Women do not easily show their “true selves.”

I am interested in that core self. I am interested in that internal and infernal dialogue that goes on;  the hard little nut that needs to be engaged before change can happen.  That obdurate core needs to be coaxed out of its hiding place and brought to light.

We can never know what is going on in someone’s head unless there is safety, love and a desire on their part to take the chance at exposure.

There will be no healing, no chance of movement, until that little child looks out through the eyes of their host and steps into the light.

 

 

Blue Butterflies

As I water my garden in the early morning, I am thinking about blue butterflies.

After my mother died, blue butterflies showed up in my garden.  Like small slips of airmail paper they moved around my flowers and I thought—forget-me-nots.

I had never seen these butterflies before but people tell me they have always been around.  I prefer to think of them as a message from my mother, that she is all around me.

I will not forget.

Just because

The Fish

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
– the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly-
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
– It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
– if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels- until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

Elizabeth Bishop

 

Childish ways

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man(woman), I gave up childish ways.

This popped into my head this morning as I sat down to write.  Perhaps because of the fireworks that went on into the night, maybe because of our President, a childish man.

What is a grownup?  Someone who takes responsibility for his actions.  A woman who puts down dolls and picks up babies. A man who fathers a child and then FATHERS a child. A person you can count on no matter what.

I like that concept of responsibility.  To care for, to respond to, to state clearly that this is my role, my job, my place and I will step in and do my best.  I didn’t really understand this until I was divorced and left to finish raising my kids alone.  Sure, I was responsible for a big house, cooking and cleaning and correcting children, but really it was as if I was a maid in my own house.  In a way, it was if I was dreaming, and then I woke up and realized, hey, if I don’t step up no one will.  And I made an oath.  I will do this.  I put my head down and got on with it.

I am so grateful that I had this opportunity to come out of my dream, my dreaminess.  I needed a challenge.  It’s not sexy, it’s not even vaguely titillating.  It is taking on your life and the people in it wholeheartedly.

Responsibility cuts a rather wide swath.  From “thanks, I owe you one,”  to the often unspoken pledges we make to our children, “I will love and care for you forever.”  Our marriage vows “I promise to…”.

In the sense that I mean it, it is a response to the world around us.  I promise to take care of you in small and large ways.  From tilling the fields to pruning our trees to caring for the wildlife to loving our animals and families.  Even when our families are animals.

It is an approach, isn’t it?  An attitude that all things matter.

However, we should not bite  off more than we can chew.  We need to be careful to pick our spheres of responsibility.  Never eat anything bigger than your head, or take on something bigger than you are able to handle.

So responsibility also means choosing wisely.  If you’re not willing to walk through the fire don’t become a fireman.

Responsibility:  an oath, a covenant.  Not a quid pro quo.  It’s not a deal, it’s not a sales pitch.  It is stating “this is who I am and this is what I promise.”  Responsibility is hard, setting off fireworks is easy.

I am not badmouthing fireworks.   I offer you this: