Brain Plague by Joan Slonczewski

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Brain Plague is an impressive book. Science Fantasy, it reads as a combination of thriller, social commentary and a novel exploring the growth of emotional maturity in its main character, Chrys.

I love Joan Slonczewski’s writing and this is one of her best. Struggling as an artist in an unattractive future city, Chrys signs up for an experimental program hoping it will pay her bills; she agrees to host a colony of microscopic beings, who will live inside her skull, in her brain’s outer linings. Their relationship with her sets the pace for the book – and at their pace the reader, as well as Chrys is swept into another world. They live and die on a different scale from humans, whom they refer to as Gods. One of our days is a year for them and (they breed only as children) one of our weeks a generation. One of the results of this is a potential revolution during a human’s night sleeping time. Their ethos, ambitions, requirements and understandings are paralleled with those of human societies – but do they have the same rights?

There’s adventure in this book and Chrys’ whole world of art, friendships, family and love but the main focus is through her, onto the colony inside her head. As they press closer and closer towards demanding the same rights as those held by humans we also are dragged to that position, via a partially resolved debate about machine intelligence and rights. This future world is confident enough not to have to explain itself, so often we are in it without fully comprehending its intelligent buildings that grow by themselves, its art that is computer generated and light-based, its inter-steller travel, bio-technology and social mores.

I loved it. I was sorry when it ended. This is the kind of book I like best.

Body in Aphrodite’s Magic

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I’ve been running two sets of chakras lately; one with a Distance Aphrodite’s Magic group and one for a personal working. I knew there would come an overlap between this Aphrodite process, heading downwards, and the other one, heading up and it arrived at BODY (the 3rd chakra). Then during that time I ran an Aphrodite’s Magic weekend in the Blue Mountains, so when we were in Body on Sunday morning I paid particular attention, knowing I was in a triple overlap.

There was eleven of us in quite a small room, but with access to a large and beautiful courtyard Temple space. For Body I play three quite long tracks of dance music – but it was raining. We opened the doors anyway and provided towels for any brave enough to dance outside – there was a cover in the centre of the courtyard, but around the outsides it was still open. The second track I asked everyone to ‘sweat their prayers’ – to dance as if for Aphrodite, asking her for what we had set as our intention – and I went outside and danced in the rain and it was beautiful. It just seemed perfect, to be granted rain, to be invoking my longings dancing in rain looking up into the sky and the raindrops coming towards me.

For the final track of music, which lasts eight minutes, I asked us all to dance as if it were the final eight minutes of our lives. I danced outside again, for part of it, and at one stage I caught the eyes of another woman dancing there. We smiled at each other and then we started laughing; with joy, I think, it was extraordinary. Ecstatic. I was so glad to be alive – and to have this body, be this body.

Twelve Wild Swans – Transformation

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I began Transformation, at Lammas, with an Elemental Scouring Ritual that took me two days. I felt overdue for Transformation, since a relationship had ended dramatically several months earlier and I wanted to get somewhere beyond the cycle of distress, shock and confusion which meant I had hidden away from the world.

I started with a rebirthing session (for Air) and ended up choking out, again and again, all my unsaid words… repeating some phrases dozens of times, that I wished I’d said, or I should have said, or now I wanted to say. I did a Fire ritual, burning through bonds, broken promises and old emotional ties; it was so ferocious it took me a few hours to recover. That night I had a bath, which wasn’t my original plan for the Water section, but by that stage I was exhausted and needed something gentle and serene. As I lay in the bath I felt carried by the warmth, and great waves of remembering came across me; I remembered beauty, joy, delight and pleasure… they were like revelations, each one of them.

On the second day I worked with Earth, cleaning my physical space and scouring my desk clear to make a space for creativity to flower. I took myself out to lunch, though it felt extravagent, and odd on my own; but I wanted my body to be comfortable again out in the world, and feel worthy of such attention. Then I went to the Labyrinth in Centennial Park (how convenient to have one nearby) and called to the quarters and elements and sang myself on the winding journey inwards, bearing gifts of flowers. I walked out again, feeling myself shifting somewhere… into the last chapter of Twelve Wild Swans and the final workings.

I did other rituals as well for this chapter, both on my own and with the group I was working with. I ended the time feeling young – much younger than when I had begun – strangely free and as if I was remembering myself. When we got to the end of our nine-month working we laid it down with relief, knotting together the threads each of us had been carrying and burying them under the lawn at CloudCatcher WitchCamp; another spell laid down there.

Freyja’s Myth – Odin

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Odin was the final of four deities that we worked with in this myth, as part of the preparation for CloudCatcher WitchCamp 2013. That working finished a couple of months ago, but parts of it still seem to be lingering with me. I barely knew Odin at all before we did this myth, and then more as the tortured being sacrificing himself on the World Tree than as a potent ruler of Gods and story-lines.

My initial impressions of him were as the heavens opened and it started raining – and then it rained and rained and I thought of him weeping. His part in this story of Freyja’s necklace is so definite, so unpleasant, really – that the more human side of his actions can be easily overlooked. Jealousy, grief, anger, revenge, a need for control, crushing responsibility… I felt edges of all those things jostling within his part of the story. I felt more emotional myself, in my own life; whereas with Loki I had felt incisive and clear, with Odin I felt all muddy and churned up; stormy. There seemed to be huge things grumbling away inside me; longings and love and the tenuous hold we have to meaning; the emotion seemed related to a fundamental unease with existence.

Later, in Brisbane, I stood watching a storm break; the clouds and rain and thunder – the drama of it all – and felt that was Odin, rattling and shaking things and saying he would be heard and seen, not silenced or easy. There’s a lot of unease in this story and I felt he held huge parts of that; that issues of cost, betrayal and loyalty were very strong and unresolved with him. Part of the burdens of kingship, perhaps; and of trying to control things, his wounds seemed very close to the surface. I didn’t emerge from this working liking him any better, but I could feel him, in my own uncertainties and desires, my own confusion and pain.

Freyja’s Myth – Loki

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With the Teaching Team of CloudCatcher WitchCamp, I spent the month of February journeying with Loki, and examining his role in the myth of Freyja we are working at Camp. This was a strong month for me, in terms of the myth, in that I felt secrets were being revealed – exposed, maybe.

I had heard so many – rumours! – about Loki… don’t go there, bad news, can’t trust him… Then when I look at the story, all I can see is that he is the revealer of truth. He rips the veils of illusion away. Exposes others to their own actions, and forces the consequences of those actions. He’s an anarchist.

When I say this to others, I have met with further rumours, Oh, but in other stories he does worse things… but I am not in other stories, I am in this story, and the treatment of him is reminding me of how people are about the Dark Goddess – all bad news for the discomfort she creates, and no appreciation for the work that is done in the ending times/transformation.

For myself, I began the month with a very strong two day Lammas Ritual – dedicated to ripping away/scourging out my emotionalism over the ending of my relationship – not the emotions, just the – hysteria, maybe. And I felt very supported in it – by, I have to imagine, Loki – it was much less painful and awful than i had imagined it might be. It came simply. It felt surprisingly effective, afterwards. The rest of the month I felt relatively quiet, emotionally; real. Present. I thought this was his gift – coming into the present.

There’s also a piece in Demetra George’s Finding Our Way Through the Dark that I happened to read this month, that is written about the Dark Goddess, but I felt also applied to Loki -
For many people it is a very frightening thing to see ourselves stripped of our illusions and false pretensions. She forces us to look at ourselves with utter, naked honesty and makes us demand the truth of things… She is ruthless in destroying any of our life structures or relationships that are built upon a foundation of deception and disresepct… Healing arises when we can enter into our darkness, release our pain…. We can then reclaim the lost and rejected parts of ourselves and integrate them into the wholeness of our being.

I felt – Loki is operating in the NOW – without thought of history or consequences. He impels it. He is presence, and so demands others also become fully present, with truth/reality – his actions can look like manipulation, or trickery – but actually they are exposure, ripping away the veils, the secrets, the covert – we don’t like it when this happens to us, so we label it untrustworthy.

My basis for really believing this is how my month was, the grace which attended it… how in that flow of moment, of trying to be true to that I was so supported – in the difficult ritual, in the simplicity that remained, afterwards… Efficient. Ruthless. Powerful.

The last two mornings of the month I woke to a blazing sunrise – the sky was on fire, on the 27th – all red. on the 28th I woke and it was golden. The purge and the blessing. I felt he is old – older than the others in the story – cathartic and almost cthonic… not with the more human characteristics of the others in this story, more essential. a deep truth. Sere.

The Dwarves in Freyja’s Story

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In the leadup to CloudCatcher WitchCamp 2013, I spent the month of January, along with the Teaching Team, delving deeply into the part the Dwarves play in this story of Freyja and her necklace.

The Dwarves made the necklace! That was my first observation, and one I think is always underplayed in any retelling. They didn’t just snap their fingers, or wave their wands, or buy the parts and put them together – they mined, they shaped, they smelted, they refined, they polished – they conceived of, designed and then created this, the most beautiful necklace ever to come into existance. Every one of those skills learnt and honed and refined to the level of Master Craftsman. All working together in harmony, to create an item of such beauty, it reflected the Goddess herself.

In this way, I think of them as human-like. For that’s what we do; maybe hoping to catch the attention of the Gods; pour ourselves into our art, poetry, ritual and dance… call the Gods to us, from longing, from love. And when they respond – when we feel them near us – we beg them for favours; just like the Dwarves did. And it is the nature of the Divine to give, to merge… and Freyja gave one of her gifts, one of the things she is known for, her love; of course she did. And that part of the story seems perfectly balanced – they had loved her enough to make this thing, and to see her truely and capture that vision in art – and she loved them enough to recognise them for it, and accept their gift and their price that to her – a Goddess – is no price.

In the story, the Dwarves are ugly, unattractive; grasping, even. I wonder if that’s how we think of humans, compared with the Gods? And yet – without them there would be no story. Without us telling stories of the Gods, making altars and poetry and ritual – where would they be? They certainly would not be so definite as a beautiful necklace, wrought of gold and jewels. And the Dwarves – they almost vanish, beside their creation. As humans do; vanish into mortality, compared with Gods. But our works – our necklaces and poems and paintings – they sometimes remain…

Freyja – Goddess of Love….

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During the month of December I worked with the Norse Goddess Freyja, in the company of the Teaching Team for CloudCatcher WitchCamp 2013. It was a month of overwhelm. Parts of Freyja’s story that especially interest me include her – transition status – how she moves between the older and new pantheons of Norse Gods (via the time-honoured method of trading class, marriage) and how she endeavors to maintain her links with the earthier, more embodied tradition she originally belonged to. I had quite an intellectual approach to her before I began this work.

The minute we began working with Freyja, I was swamped by emotion. I did have a lot going on in my life, that overlapped, certainly, with some of Freyja’s story; but this never seems to be entirely co-incidental, and I had to believe that what I was experiencing was related, in various ways, to Freyja; as well as to the stories of my own life playing out. I felt I was drowning in Freyja; that I could not even get my head up above the surface long enough to take a look at her; it was all internal, all experience, and the experience was so vast and so overwhelming all I could do was pant through it, like that breath you are supposed to use when giving birth, that little panting breath that keeps you so focused in the present your mind can’t go anywhere else.

So it was all feeling. I felt her pride, in being – selected, chosen, married into this echelon of Gods, what she would bring them, what she could offer. I caught a glimpse of her standing there, alone, between the two groups of Gods, herself the offering, herself the marriage price. I felt her frustration, bound into a contract that demanded everything from her – her teaching, magic, love – but did not begin to recognise her depths, her vibrant connection to the living earth or the nature of her soul. I felt her increasing, creeping alienation, from everything… what she had left behind and what she had married into until, one day, it all changes.

She wakes up and is bound no longer, she sets out on a journey and the journey takes her back to the earthly realms. There a necklace is revealed to her; one that has been crafted to reveal her own essence; she not only has to have the necklace, in some ways she is the necklace. Magic, of course, is needed to release it into her keeping; after all she has betrayed her essence, inadvertently, already. The magic is the magic of love, and she is the Goddess of Love; she gives it freely. But when she returns with this great emblem of her power, another betrayal awaits her. The great Revealer of Truth, the one who strips away the veils of deceit and illusion, sometimes known as the trickster, or the untrustworthy or even wicked one, Loki; reveals everything to Odin, Freyja’s husband, student in magic and lover; and between them, they steal the necklace from her…

I felt her anger, her fear – terror, almost, at the loss of this part of her self – her rage and helplessness. With her, I was held in waves of shock, that greeted me every morning in my own life, and that I could only assume in some way reflected her shock. Just when she claimed her power, it was ripped away from her; just when she had learnt who she was and how to wear that, she is denied it again. And Freyja… she will strike any bargain to regain this necklace, this self – in the story it is written as if the nights of love with the Dwarves were the hard bargain, but I think it is the second one, her deal with Odin that does return the necklace to her, but also binds her to him and his agenda that was the difficult one… and that is where I want to break with the story, and change it.

Twelve Wild Swans – Holding Centre

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The Holding Centre chapter of Twelve Wild Swans fell between the Summer Solstice and Lammas, and I was really grateful for it. Grateful to have survived the Challenge, and to be offered some sort of – support – by the notion of holding centre.

In Rose’s story Holding Centre actually comes across as another level of challenge, and I guess it is a different type of challenge, to stay true to oneself; but in my normal, human circumstances (not inside a fairytale) it was relatively benign. I felt comforted by it, and through the immediate aftermath of a major relationship breakup, it seemed as if it were offering me very specific guidance – not to look outside myself for strength or understanding, but to hold true to what I knew, to my own being. It reminded me of the advice of a friend, a few months earlier, who told me ‘stay in your skin’ – a wonderful reminder for those of us who tend to get too mind-y, or project ourselves out of our bodies under stress.

I found my centre was a very small, still place, where not much happened. Which was fine. I had each day as a single day, not letting myself dwell much on the past, and really not knowing the future, and not needing, right that minute, to know. Holding Centre for me was about food and exercise and sleep, about being gentle with myself and not demanding brilliance or huge activity. My cat was very kind, and conducted a sort of purr therapy, where she lay on my chest and purred, and I thought the vibrations were soothing my heart. Cats are pretty good at holding their own centres, so it seems obvious they can assist others to do so, as well. When the time came to move into Transformation, the final chapter, I discovered that I felt rested, clear, able to move on with the work; it surprised me really, since I had felt so subterranian with Holding Centre; but then that is very Dark Goddessy, to disappear for a while and then emerge reinspired.

State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett

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State of Wonder is an impressive book, whose plot circles around and around the reader, coming up from behind to bite you more than once. Its intriguing and unnerving story lines draw you into deeper and deeper places, a bit like the Brazilian rainforest that Marina ends up travelling to in her search to find a missing collegue, and the woman he was searching for, and the data that is supposed to exist for the drug company who is paying all their wages. Or perhaps it is really a story about love and fertility and the chances we all take? Or maybe it is a story that challenges all of its characters, and therefore its readers, to decide what is most important – and what that’s worth.

This is a very complete book, its worlds utterly convincing. There are inner worlds – particularly Marina’s, but also that of her ex-teacher and role model, now renegade in the nearly-unreachable jungle; the wife of the missing man; a deaf child apparently abandoned by a ferocious tribe and two displaced back-packers. And there are outer worlds, the brief shell of the drug research institution, the inner layer of a desperate and decaying outpost-city on the edge of the jungle, and the deepest layer, the jungle itself. Each layer seems real in itself, until passing to the next when that one was revealed to be a fragile conceit, now revealed in its lack of depth and self-knowledge and understanding of what is really going on.

A mystery, a character study, a moral confrontation, an intriguing story, a questioning of what’s possible, a portrait of fragile relationships – State of Wonder is all these things. A very satisfying novel, that seems almost too real in many of its dimensions to even be a novel… A review on the back cover concludes: ‘profound questions, compelling characters and startling revelations’. Quite.

Pages For You, by Sylvia Brownrigg

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This book was a completely unexpected find; I have been devouring books from my local library at the rate of one a day, and stumbled across this one. I picked it up on the basis of it being a love story and literary – there is the inference throughout that the book, written in short pieces (‘pages’) is the first person story of the narrator. It is both those things, and both surprisingly.

Set in an American College Campus this is Flannery’s story, a self-conscious first year, struggling to find herself and how she fits into the world. She falls in love with a tutor, Anne; glamourous, ferocious, intellectual and seductive and the book charts the journey of their relationship. One of the things I loved is that so little time or space was given to considerations that this was a lesbian love story – it undoubtedly was, but the characters are not interested in that aspect of it. They are fascinated by each other, and to some extent consumed by that fascination. Only towards the end do they really begin to take into account what it means to be two women together. Because Flannery questions only briefly within herself that Anne is a woman, not a man, the reader also can’t linger there, but instead is swept into the intricacies of this passion.

The writing is beautiful and often stunning. Reading from Flannery’s point of view, I also was captivated, mystified and seduced by Anne; and yet it is Flannery who is revealed on these pages. Flannery’s dedication to the depth of love, Flannery’s delight in discovering not just the perfections, but the ordinariness of another human being, Flannery’s growing understanding of herself as an adult. The writing of their sexual relationship is everything one would want as a reader, and aspire to as a writer. Again and again the pages, the pieces of text unlayer and dive into the complexities of sexual love; barely at all in terms of sexual activities and again and again in exploring the meaning, love, familiarity and yearning created within sexual intimacy.

The language is gorgeous; rich and poetic and flowing and reading as if every word was perfectly and uniquely placed. This writing is unexpectedly funny, unendingly intimate and carries the story’s powerful inevitabilities so assuredly that I flinched and sighed and yearned and delighted; both with Flannery and for her.