"if there was...any real 'great secret' to life..."

under my mother's influence and because there were so many of them around the house, I started reading books on metaphysics, "mysteries," and the new age at an early age. books by charles berlitz, madame ellen blavatsky, erick von daniken, jeanne dixon, katherine kuhlmann, anton levay, edgar cayce, hugo stiglitz, brad steiger and others were constant companions who explained much of the world's secrets to me. on my own I discovered alan watts, jawahrl krishnamurti, chongyam trungpa, sun bear (winona laduke's father), and the late peter tompkins, whose the magic of findhorn left an incredible impression on me.

tompkins is best known for the seminal book of counterculture kinda-science, the secret life of plants, and I'm currently reading paradise fever: growing up in the shadow of the new age, the memoir of his youngest son, ptolemy tompkins. if the younger tompkins is to be believed, it's good to know that the search I found myself a part in wasn't just going on in the homes of muggles like me but among the young of the masters themselves.

"I noticed that [my father] always seemd to be talking about secrets of one sort or another and how knowing those secrets could set you free. Sometimes...the 'great secret' would be that you and God weren't really different, but on some mysterious inner level one and the same. But at other times it would be about something else--that love was the engine that drove the universe, or that everything possessed consciousness, or that all things good and bad that happened to a person came from actions committed in a past life.

"In addition to the various 'great secrets,' there was any number of lesser ones. Who built Stonehenge? Who wrote the plays attributed, by the dull-witted academicians, to Shakespeare? Who ran the banks in America? What were the ancient Egyptians really up to? Gradually it became clear to me that if there was, in fact, any real 'great secret' to life, it had to do not with any single, specific secret but with the nature of secrecy itself. Life was essentially a carnival of misleading appearances--a papier-mache landscape set about with hints and inconsistencies, which, when examined closely enough, pointed the way to a realm beyond. The mass of humanity, it seemed, chose to ignore these little openings and inconsistencies with which the world was strewn..."

caveat fantasist

this is interesting.

"There are fairly ancient beliefs, mostly from religion, that stories can alter reality. The Judeo-Christian God spoke the world into being. Magicians can use incantation to make a person to fall in love with you. An impure thought might lead you to hell. People have attributed great power to storytelling, and therefore we sometimes mistakenly judge fantasies using the same moral and ethical principles that we use to judge reality. So if I enjoy the Twilight movies, it's the same thing as enjoying spousal abuse. Or if I like first-person shooters, I'm actually the kind of maniac who would love to kill wantonly.

"Basically what we're talking about here is an entrenched, unexamined idea that stories will take over our minds, and fantasies become real. It's the kind of belief that doesn't hold up to much scrutiny, unless you really do believe in sorcery. Once you let go of this belief, you're free to understand fantasies as what they are: Bursts of emotion, metaphors, parables, ways of safely exploring the unknown in yourself and the world.

"But there is another, more pernicious belief about fantasies. And that leads to my second theory, which is that certain fantasies are deemed unacceptable because people fear the opposite of what I described above. They fear that fantasies are under our control, and that we can harness them to understand our place in the universe. Looked at from this angle, Twilight becomes a disturbing story because it's something that girls use to figure out their sexual desires. Violent stories are upsetting not because of all the bloodstains, but because they stand in for something more profound and socially powerful: They represent many struggles, from the push to escape the ghettos of GTA, to the fight for adulthood and autonomy."

I had hoped the author would take this a little farther, but she didn't so I will. is there a point at which fantasy, especially sexual fantasy, becomes dangerous? some rapists have fantasized about it for years although most rape fantasies remain fantasies. much of adult hetero porn is predicated on the fantasy of sex with teen girls--hence the prevelance of pigtails and catholic school uniforms and lollipops and titles like "innocent high"--but few consumers actually catch a flight to thailand for sex with underage girls (or boys). of course, all porn is based on fantasy: that this hot person wants to have sex with me right here and now.

sex researchers have known for decades that fantasy has a rightful place in actual sex, not only in fetishistic sex but in vanilla intercourse. if you close your eyes and imagine it's tom cruise atop you, your partner, who will probably never know that's what you're thinking, reaps the benefit of that and everyone's happy. is it the same if who you're imagining is your neighbor's 12 year old neice?

here's where it gets tough. part of me wants to argue that fantasy is fantasy, and if your imagination runs to preteens, and it stays in your imagination, then all's good, rock on, no one needs to ever know. despite many parents' willfull ignorance, we know pre-teens have sexual feelings, and most of us only need to remember back to our own tweens and earlier to know that's true.

but another part of me asserts there's something wrong with this. it's one thing for a 12 year old to touch herself in the middle of the night while fantasizing about doing something, she's not sure exactly what, with the 40 year old neighbor and quite another thing for the neighbor to imagine what he would do with her. most teachers and preachers would say the problem is in power and it's partly that but it's also got a lot to do with maturity and age-appropriateness. nabokov's lolita is a classic attempt to articulate what this difference consists of, and a.m. homes' the end of alice is a contemporary, more explicit try at it. the difference in both of these examples is between imagining and acting out, for both would-be participants, and maybe the difference lies in that completely.

we can't legislate what people fantasize, although we try to sometimes, and the ick-factor some of us associate with fantasizing about rape or bdsm or same sex or coprophilia or beastiality or pedophilia--and the discomfort I feel in lumping gay sex with beastiality is an indication of how far we have to go in articulating clearly a difference between acts between consenting and non-consenting participants--can't fool us into thinking that we can.

as newitz argues in her essay, "Without fantasies, especially extreme fantasies, our minds lose their ability to splinter a single moment into many possible options. Immersing yourself in the story of something ugly and horrifying, or silly and frivolous, is a way of saying, fundamentally, that things don't have to be the way they are." there's something fundamentally human in fantasy, especially sex fantasy, and I suppose the most realistic way of dealing with it is a form of caveat emptor: let the fantasizer be aware what he's getting into.

as if I knew what I was talking about...

I'm not much of a television watcher any longer so I may be coming late to this. we were watching one of the local news stations for the weather and traffic and as if to prove my assertion yesterday of the ubiquitousness of the internet, and to provide examples of how not to integrate into other media, 4 of the 5 local stations in the space of 5 minutes did features in which they placed a full-screen shot of a website--facebook, youtube, cnn headline news, and tmz--and either played what was on it or simply read it aloud. the only one we get which didn't was an affiliate even further out on the rim than we are, and my endorsement of their not doing the same thing must be tempered by my sneaking suspicion that they simply don't have the technology yet.

listening in on the presbytery

I missed my own denomination's general assembly in minneapolis a couple weeks ago, so I suppose it's only fair I attend a workshop on worship for another faith. the presbyterians are meeting for their general assembly in the same place as the unitarian universalists--the minneapolis convention center--and my teacher jann cather weaver (who's united church of christ) gave a presentation focusing on church and social media, a topic in which I'm particularly interested (and which I am studying in greater depth with her this fall).

jann's presentation was sparsely attended--I counted about 25 people over the course of 3 hours--but it struck me as one of those poorly attended lectures like 1928's "what to do if the stock market crashes" or 1979's "protect yourself from immune deficiency viruses." she had a lot of worthwhile things to say to people who heard her and were aware they were listening to a treatise on the reality churches find themselves in today, not in the future: a place where a rapidly dying demographic ventures 1 day a week with the expectation of hearing that it is a good and gracious group whose children, if they could only put down the electronic whizzbangs, would soon find themselves as valiently articulated. the fact they don't find their children beside them--or when they are beside them, find them checked out--seems either not worth notice or is evidence of their children's deficiencies.

jann's message was that social media are themselves works of the spirit to bring about the kingdom/kin-dom/realm of god, communicating the way we live out our faith. this was a good message to hear since it is not an endorsement or denial but a recognition that facebook, google, youtube, texting, iphones, ipads, and whatever other communication application is hovering around the corner is a way, not of holding one another off at arm's length but of drawing one another closer in ways never considered before. I sit here now in the crystal court of the ids tower in downtown minneapolis, utilizing public wifi, watching no fewer than 5 people around me texting while listening to whatever they're listening to--music, talk, phone conversations--on earbuds. 2 are reading from kindles. a man in a 3-piece suit and with several piercings in each ear walks by chattering into a bluetooth handsfree plugged into 1 ear. the little girl with her family who looks about 6 around the corner from where I sit is involved in some online game while her parents talk to each other in spanish. this is not the future. this is today. if we are honest in our profession that church is not simply a 2 hour a week phenomenon and if we are successful in our attempts to bring it into the quotidian, making our everyday time liminal, then this is a part of that: not as a method of shutting each other out but of bringing one another in.

who needs to be warned?

this is the text of a letter to the editor I sent to the bradford (pa) era in response to an article they'd printed (and which doesn't show up on their online edition, although this followup headline did). I've been told by my dad it was published the other day, although the era doesn't have a practice of printing their letters to the editor online.

To the Editor: I take exception to the characterization of the story about the impending visit of the Rainbow Family as needing a "warning," although that's probably how officials from Pinedale worded it. I am visiting your area after the death of my mother and will be at the Gathering in another week with several thousand of my family. A veteran of many Rainbow Gatherings and a 50 year old teacher of college english and lay minister, I am likelier the demographic most of your readers will meet at their businesses and on their streets than the people against whom they're warned to "look out [against] for theft, take keys out of cars, lock up houses and anything else of value." Of course there are addicts and thieves among us, just as among any group of 12,000 people. There are approximately 8400 people living in Bradford: don't you have any crime? If the Allegheny National Forest were hosting the Republican National Convention, there would be similar offenses (the difference of course is that for all their rhetoric they're not likely to spend money anywhere around Bradford). We are your kids and grandkids, your aunts and uncles, your cousins and childhood friends. We're coming to celebrate being alive and a number of us will purchase water and chocolate in your towns and fill up our cars and for the most part we will come and go quietly. Just as in the old days of the carnivals and circuses some of your kids might leave with us and some of us might stay around. But what puts the real lie to the need for a "warning" against the Rainbow Family is a story several pages in: the suburb of Chester, population 37,000, has had 11 murders since January. Perhaps the Rainbow Family and others need to be warned against visiting that town. It sounds a lot deadlier.

list of my family I met at the 2010 rainbow gathering

· Bickel and his girlfriend: driving a truck with MO plates but coming from Florida to help set up Oz Kitchen; had a cab-full of dogs and a cat that rode on the driver’s lap; parked at A Camp cuz they feel safe there
· Harold and Katy: a pair Bickel picked up hitching outside Warren, PA, who were from Baltimore; been on the road about a year
· Dog Bite Girl: came across her on the road into Welcome Home after she’d been bit by a dog near Bus Village; was pretty rattled; gave her a toke from my cigar after she asked for a cigarette; wore a “Fuckin Homeless” printed like “Dunkin Donuts” t-shirt; strawberry blonde and about 6 foot; ran into her that night again with her hand bandaged up and on antibiotics from the hospital; told me the litany of tests and shots they did and then crowed to her companion, “He gave me a smoke off his cigar and it was a Black and Mild, man!”; companion gave me the thumbs-up
· Sparrow: also came across him on the logging trail but he was heading the opposite way with a cartload of stuff; stopped to tell me he was from Boston and was tired of being without a female in his life; “I mean, girls, at least flirt with me, I’m wholesome;” about 20 with coke-bottle glasses and sandy hair, tall and thin
· Elmo: young woman about 25 carrying an open Japanese parasol who came up to bum a cigarette off Sparrow while we were talking; looked kinda longingly at him for a moment and after he gave her 1 I said, “Elmo, will you kiss me?”; she did, a warm hug and full-on lips, and I said to Sparrow, “That’s what you got to do, brother;” he shook his head and went on his way and Elmo and I walked on chatting until I dropped her off at Kiddy Village; from Denver and heading out to this year’s Burning Man with a theater group
· Tony: at Main Circle; from the Delaware Water Gap; we traded stories about 209 and Dingman’s Ferry before he went off for food
· Grandfather Woodstock: an old man with long white hair and long tobacco-stained beard naked under a rainbow-dyed robe; had set up a small shrine at Main Circle complete with chair and bicycle horn; told me he was 100 and he looked it; saw him with a camcorder the next night standing on the chair to video the drum circle
· Magic: another old man staying at Kiddy Village; old cracked leather vest and drawstring pants; giving his great-granddaughter a ride on the logging road in a plastic cart; she said, “Grandpa, I wanna pick berries” and he wheeled her right into the brambles and she laughed
· Aviva and her fiancé and Katy and the Jersey crew: most of these were from south New Jersey, except Katy, who they picked up in Philadelphia; Aviva came from west of the Pine Barrens and was carting in a heavy dufflebag full of food; I offered to help her carry it in and shouldered it and walked it the mile and a half to their camp; she was astonished I didn’t drop it or slip once in the mud and called me “a rockstar” to her campmates; she was short and kept her dark hair in braids while Katy was tall and had her blond hair in dreads; once we got to their camp near the Rusty Nail Aviva packed a bowl and held it out to me saying, “That’s for you;” I only took a few hits off it, opting to share it with her and the others around the fire; like almost everyone else she had a dog
· Red and Chef: I know Red from Menomonie where she and her family used to attend the church that I served; I recognized her my 2nd night wandering around Main Circle; she had more barbs in her lips since I’d last seen her but I recognized her immediately; she and Chef had to drive to Erie the next morning with a bunch of other kids who’d been ticketed for underage drinking and possession of paraphernalia a week before; I said I was leaving the next morning and offered to head that way but they said they already had a vanload of kids going but appreciated the offer; they’d been there already 3 weeks; we traded stories of people we knew and I was surprised when I asked about 1 of her brothers that she’d had a restraining order taken out on him; turns out he’d been abusive for years; I apologized and said I didn’t have a clue and she said she knew, it was always kept quiet; she said she hoped to smoke pot with her dad this year (she’d long ago done so with her mom); she hugged me when I got up and we determined to meet up again out in Babylon
· Trashcan: came in off the road, originally from Florida; offered me some crank and asked if I knew anyone who wanted meth; I said no to both but got him talking, which wasn’t hard, and he told me a long rambling story about his hitching east, most of which was muttered and pretty unintelligible; but he was friendly enough and hugged me when we parted
· Duluth: I met up with her on my way back from Back Entrance and we took to talking about where we were from; she’d spent a long time in Minnesota—“I keep ending up back there”—although she’d been living for 6 months in Ithaca, NY, and expected to stay another few months; she studied herbology; she was normal height, heavy-breasted and slim, with big glasses; she seemed pretty stand-offish and didn’t even tell me her Rainbow name (I called her “Duluth” and she didn’t argue); she melted into the crowd at a kitchen we passed
· Steve: from Denver; his 1st Gathering; he’d come in with a group of guys for the experience of it; we’d been talking for a while on the trail in from Welcome Home before we stopped and helped Aviva and Katy carry in stuff
· Adam: I met him at Main Circle a couple days later; he was 1 of the guys who’d ridden in with Steve; big-bellied young guy, maybe 25, also born and raised in Denver
· Black Hills: a very monkish-looking fellow from South Dakota, raised near Spearfish; wore tie-dye robes and long shirts and linen trousers and what looked like a dreamcatcher on his head like a sunbonnet; not very talkative but as we were walking a brother stopped to hug him and said “You actually smell clean”
· Dog Runner: my name for a tall thin man I saw running a pack of 6 or 7 dogs of various sizes along the lumber trail each morning; shirtless and wearing thin runner’s socks under his sneakers; dreadlocked; I don’t know if they were his dogs or he was running them for other people
· Mica, Jackson, and Goose: a trio who’d arrived the same afternoon I did from Jacksonville, FL; traveled with Henry the dog; Mica was a big girl in a billowy muumuu and her mom was a police officer in FL; Jackson was a young bearded guy with the look of someone who’d been on the road much too long (Henry was his dog); Goose was a tall kid with a wispy mustache who’d never been out of FL in his life and he and Mica acted as if they’d been friends for a long, long time
· Benny: had been there 3 weeks already, arriving with the intent of being part of Council; pudgy like an early beer-belly but friendly as all hell
· Kevin: Benny’s dad who’d just retired after 30 years with the Coast Guard; had gone to the Academy and graduated into the Guard and had decided to live in VA; this was his 1st Gathering, which was funny since I’d started talking with him cuz I thought he might have been someone who’d been there back when I was; shirtless and pasty but with heavy arms, someone accustomed to hard work
· Dog Girl: from FL and traveling with 11 dogs, a mom with slackened tits and her 10 pups; tall and green-eyed with wild red hair and freckles; maybe 19 or younger; told everyone the pups had all been found homes so she didn’t have to deal with explaining to some people why she didn’t think they would be effective dog companions; I wanted to call her Diana because of her pack but didn’t think she’d get the reference; she was probably the person I was most comfortable talking with and if she’d been interested I’d have taken her with me just for the company
· She Slips: when I told her my name she said she wanted to come up with a clever one too and finally settled on “She Slips in the Mud and Falls on Her Ass” after doing that 6 times as I walked with her back up the trail from Main Circle to her camp near Welcome Home; dark hair and burnished skin; talked a little crazily and muttered so I often asked her to repeat things; came from the St. Regis Reservation in New York near the border; kept up a running muttered monologue as we walked; good-looking
· Michael: a cyclist from Ohio I met on my way out; I’d stopped at a stream I knew of in order to bathe and he’d spent the night there; 1st words to me were, “I’m lost;” worked as an occasional tree-lopper and grew trees and flowers in his nursery; had made enough money cutting trees to buy land and build his home and nursery and now had no bills and lots of free time; a little taller than me and sinewy and burned; gave him most of the food I had left (granola bars and dried fruit and peanut butter) and gave him what I hope were accurate directions

back to babylon

home again, home again, and too busy to talk about much of anything. I'm posting a link here to a video I think is pretty representative of this year's vibe--it's not my own video, I'm still in the process of editing that, but it is a minute from monday evening at main circle, and while you can't see me, I am sitting on the ground behind the shirtless dancing man in the center of the screen.