Today's work

Here's the piece of my second Mythaca book I wrote today.

In this book, the magical beasts are in the children's world where they are very small and there's little magic.

X

Magellan is awake. He is wet! In fact, he feels as if he’s floating! A slight shift of his right shoulder reveals that he is tied down tightly. What? he thinks. Where am I? He opens his eyes. It seems he is bound to something flat which is tied to a post at the edge of some water. The smell is just terrible. He can barely breathe. Above him he can see the massive limbs of a monstrous tree, a tree with leaves yen times the size of an ordinary tree or even larger. It is dark, or perhaps dawn is barely breaking, but under the gigantic leaves it is very dark indeed. He is cold. With some effort he discovers he can move his neck and head. When he turns his head a little, he can see the backs of a small group of furry fellows about his own size, standing together and talking excitedly, but he cannot understand a word of what they are saying.

It is the rats, of course. They are resting after the ordeal of bringing Magellan this far. Carrying such a heavy creature through the plumbing was hard enough, but pulling him out of the septic tank was almost impossible. First they thought they could get him out through the pipes to the leach field, but he was too big. So they were forced to drag him up the side of the tank and out the top. Crossing the field was extremely dangerous, but fortunately the owl must have been busy somewhere else. Now they have Magellan tied securely to a piece of wood, floating in the creek. As soon as they finished eating and having their meeting, Radicchio and Harvey will float him downstream to the main nest.

“I’ve never seen one before either,” Harvey is sneering at Butch, “but that doesn’t mean I think it’s from another dimension. Other dimensions! Anybody with a hair on his body knows that’s nonsense!”

Butch says, “I dunno, Harvey. I ain’t so sure. Don’t you watch TV? I saw on a show the other night that...”

“Butch! You can’t believe what you see on TV!” Radicchio interrupts roughly. “You know well as I do that humans got no handle on truth, no handle at all.” He wags his head. “Why, they’ll put anything on TV, things that couldn’t ever happen! You know that! So why are thinking all of sudden that there’s other dimensions?”

“ It’s the same as when he got the whole bunch of us trying to get ahold of a catalog for the Acme Explosive Company. We must of robbed a hundred mailboxes,” adds Ralf. “But that show was all lies. There’s no coyote, there’s no Acme Explosive Company. They don’t exist. It’s all a lie.”

A little belligerently, Butch says, “Well, you guys don’t know what kind of animal it is either. You got no idea. You just wanna take it back to the nest and let it die and rot. You don’t even care what it is, or if maybe there’s something else we could get out of it besides another carcass.”

“I like carcasses,” pipes up Joey, the youngest of them. It is his first night out with the men.

“Me, too,” says Harvey. “And I think this is a dumb discussion. There is no such thing as other dimensions and that’s it. The discussion is over.” Harvey’s whiskers are trembling a little. He’s gonna lose it any minute, Ralf thinks nervously.

“Well, that’s what you would'a said yesterday about min’ature horses wit’ wings!” Butch points out. “And today we got one!” He isn’t ready to let it go.

Magellan can’t understand any of this, but he can tell they’re arguing. It doesn’t seem like they’re paying him any attention at all. He wonders if there’s some way he can escape. It won’t be easy, naturally, but after all, he is Magellan, the same Magellan who has flown around the world too many times to count, Magellan, the true discoverer of Mythaca. It should be possible. He begins to stretch his neck gently, trying to get his teeth onto to the rope.

* * *
Paracelsus is sleeping comfortably in his nest when he hears the call. Who can it be, calling at this time of night! Heavens, he thinks, I am being drawn right there! It must be an important call! He fades out of his nest, tail to wings, horn to whiskers, and then he finds himself emerging from some large, damp fabric (a towel perhaps?) on the floor of Marianna’s room.

“Oh, Paracelsus!” “You came back! Thank you!” “We’re so glad to see you!” the children cry out on top of one another when they see him.

“Eh?” grumbles Paracelsus, shaking out his wings one at a time “What is it you want? We worked everything out already as far as I can see.”

“No, it didn’t work out, see.” “Magellan disappeared!” they say together.

“Of course, he did! I used a spell to send him home to his meadow. No doubt he is there, grazing happily, at this very moment.”

“Oh, thank goodness!” says Marianna releasing a great sigh. “Of course you would do that!”

Ivan agrees, “Gosh, that is a relief! We thought maybe that’s what had happened, but when I saw that Amanas had some of Magellan’s feathers, we got worried that maybe he was still around here somewhere, hurt and all.”

“No, no,” Paracelsus assures him. “You should know by now that my spells never fail. You’ve seen the evidence! Rest assured that Magellan is safe in his meadow. Safe as he can be. Safe and sound. Sound? I wonder how his wing is. Well, I will check in when I am done here. Now, why did you call me?”

Ivan looks up in surprise. “Well, because of Magellan, of course!”

The small dragon begins to pace in a circle. “No, I’m afraid not. No, that isn’t the reason. It can’t be. I never come if there’s no reason, you understand? Some very real possibility, good or bad, the potential of some danger or some breakthrough, that’s what draws me. Not to tell you that Magellan is safe. No, that’s not enough, I’m quite certain. Unless things are changing, of course. Things are always changing, you understand. That is a particularly profound bit of wisdom. Things are always changing. So, now, what is the real reason you called me?”

Enchanted technology

Tom and I went to hear Bach's Mass in B Minor at the Performing Arts Center last night. Several of our friends sing in the Cuesta Master Chorale so we go to their performances about once a year. This time it was a huge production with a whole orchestra and five soloists.The PAC is a massive hall but Tom had chosen perfect seats: the fifth row in the middle. We could see perfectly and the acoustics couldn't have been better.

The first few pieces were a delight. Then my left hearing aid decided it was enjoying the music so much it wanted to sing along. At the end of the next few pieces, during the pause before the next one started, it sang its own solo in feedback. It would have been less of an issue if people had applauded between sections but that isn't the way it's done. I know how to deal with the feedback because these aids are prone to it, but it involves cupping my hand over the aid and letting it feed back to its heart's content. I couldn't do that there.

So my hearing aid sang to the whole hall, all by itself. As soon as I heard it I switched it off and on again, which shut it right up. At the end of each piece, I was ready. Off-on. That worked for a while. Then my right aid got the idea and it started singing along with the left one. It took both hands to switch them off and on. This continued for a few more pieces, and then they got even braver and started singing along with the music instead of waiting till the end.

By this time the concert was nearly over. I felt there was no option other than to take them right out. I listened to the last two and a half pieces with naked ears.

What an experience! Suddenly the Mass in B Minor, which is pretty bombastic at the end, with a choir of several hundred voices, a pipe organ, a brass section, the timpani, all as loud as they can be, was so quiet! All that sound dropped away incredibly dramatically! I could see all the mouths of the singers open wide at the back, but it took considerable concentration to tell whether they were actually making any noise! I could hear the soloists, who were ten or twelve feet in front of me, but they all had such tiny little voices! And the orchestra! The bows were moving across the strings of all those violins without making a sound. The brass section came in to a degree, and the bass viol and the drums were pretty audible. The second to last piece was a miniature alto solo accompanied by a silent cello. In the very last piece, everyone on the stage was very busy singing, playing, swaying, moving, but for me it could have been a nearly empty stage with only the five
soloists in the front singing in their tiny voices, and the trumpets and drums and the deep bass viol in the distance.

It occurred to me that you could draw an audiogram out of what what I could and couldn't hear in that setting.

On the way home I let my hearing aids sing until they were done, but really, if I wasn't so attached to them, I would have made them stay in the thinking corner for a long time after behaving so badly.

An unexpected visitor

When Linnea, Jenny and I came home from school yesterday afternoon, we found a visitor waiting. The girls shrieked and jumped back, but all three of us were entranced by our beautiful guest. It was snake, elegant and slim, maybe 18 or 20 inches long. Her greeting was to curl her tail into a tight fire engine red spiral and shake it at us. Then she quite purposefully slithered toward the door, obviously hoping to go inside. Her back was shiny and brown, but her belly was the most stunning red. She had a handsome red ring on her neck, too. When she found the door closed, and a threshold stopping her from going under it, she settled in comfortably, right up against it, aligning herself with the bottoms of both doors, holding them closed to the rest of us.

The girls decided to go in the back door, but I thought I'd work in the garden a while, checking the door every so often to see if she was still there. When I looked about half an hour later, she was gone, so I went inside. A quick search on the internet revealed that my guest was a Monterey ringneck snake.



Imagine my surprise when I returned from dropping Linnea off at work an hour later and opened the door to find the snake indoors, lying on the doormat. The dog and cat were there too, staring at her with much the same look on their faces that we humans had. I knew from Mother Internet that ringnecks play dead when they are afraid, so I had no qualms about picking up the doormat with her on it and taking her out to the stone wall in front of the house.

I don't know why she was out in the day, or so brave. Or how she got into the house, over the threshold. She must have been very determined to get in!

When I plopped her limp body down on the stones, she lay still moment, then lifted her head and looked directly at me before slithering away between the rocks.

Am I lucky or what???

Reflections on Christianity

I've been thinking about the power of the evangelical Christian movement a great deal lately. And I've been taking part in a discussion about it on a real slice-of-life list with a good number of capital C Christians on it, which is pretty enlightening.

I think there are a numbers of factors at play.

First, people are really, really starved for a meaningful, comforting mythology right now. We are all being dis-illusioned now and are going to be even more so in the next few years; it's what Saturn opposite Neptune brings (2004 -2008). Many people are already gasping for hope.

Then, I think the current Christian myth is very carefully crafted to touch the soul. It uses powerful and valid parts of the older Christian mythology, but it leaves out the parts that don't suit its goal, which in my understanding, unfortunately, is to divide us.

Take the Left Behind series (40 million sold between 1995 and 2005 - second only to the Bible!) If LaHay's intention was to bring us together, surely he wouldn't cast the UN and a man who professes to be a peacemaker as the Anti-Christ. It's frustrating and frightening to see people urged on to war, but I think that's what's happening. I really believe the Rapture myth is being perpetrated as purposefully as the Ubermensch myth was in Hitler's Germany. And so many people, good people, kind people, people who really want what's best, who truly love, and who truly walk their talk, true spiritual seekers, are being taken in by this frightening mythology. Imo, it's pure diabolos, dividing us against our neighbors and our families.

Finally, I think the people behind the promotion of this scary belief system are doing the whole ritual exactly right —particularly for the people they are trying to bring into their power. They're using time-honored and powerful spiritual techniques like surrender, baptism, faith, prayer, singing, and imagery combined with time-honored techniques of demogoguery: anti-intellectualism, an appeal to the prejudices of the audience, and a comfortable but false sense of empowerment.

So the people who buy into these sects actually do get what they're looking for. The imagery is about as primal and powerful as it gets and the experience is real and on-going. What more can you ask?

And, once you're over that line onto the Saved part of planet Earth, you get to look back and see how bad things really are and not be bothered by it. You are no longer fooled by the wiles of the material world. You're beyond it. In fact, it's such a relief to inhabit a world full of meaning after touching the place a beautiful song like "Dust in the Wind" takes you, you can be downright smug.

Part of me moans, oh, God, how can we have come to this? Didn't we learn from World War II? And the other part kind of steps back enough to see that Alice O. Howell is right, it's just the changing of the Age, not the end of the world.

But oh, boy, what a catastrophe these True Believers may be wreaking.

May Day!

My mother always loved May Day, which was an important holiday when she was growing up in Vienna. Only recently I learned that the May Pole Dance, the bandltanz , was a traditional part of the celebration in that part of the world as well as on the British Isles.

Today we did the May Pole Dance in our garden.