| dreadnaught's profileThe Golden DirigiblePhotosBlogLists |  Tools  Help |
|
The Golden DirigibleInto the fog, another low road descending it's a road, and each brick has two crossed swords and the inscription, "Good Blogs"
worth my time and yours
December 14 Dirigible Mach 2Well, hi everybody. I'm getting a little tired of Spaces changing things without asking first and am making the first tentative step over to Blogger. It might not work out. If you care to, you can find me at http://goldendirigible.blogspot.com/
There'll still be random thoughts, I'll still try to un-sword-iy RiYue, and the Dirigible will still run on dreams.
sailing, not a polite euphemism for itThis was going to be a free-association entry, but since even at three o'clock in the afternoon those tend to end up with "and I dreamed you were..." a variety of things, usually "dead," or "a tree" or "drank too much cough syrup," it would certainly not be a good experiment in the wee hours of the night. Methinks nobody wants to go down that road. So instead...
Did you know that it is impossible to sail in a straight line? It's true. The straight lines on cargo maps were euphemisms for "we want to head in this general direction & end up in that location." In reality, a boat is always influenced by the wind above & the current beneath. A captain must make constant corrections to keep his course. Believe me, this is going somewhere: the collective human ken is much like this ship. Owing to the human penchant for going to extremes, for misunderstanding ideas or bending them to fit their own agenda, our zig-zagging to & fro with new ideas and progressing zeitgeists looks a lot like the real path of a ship. We cannot help but be influenced by the course of those who came before us, by the climate of the times, by events, etc etc. Nothing wrong with this, it's what people do, but all too often sentiment gets out of control & then we go sailing into a whirlpool.
Ahh, I'm making things all deadly which is exactly what I said I wouldn't do. Most often it's just sailing too far one way or the other, no whirlpools or rogue waves or nuclear-powered destroyosaurs or what have you. Here's an example that never fails to irritate me: when I was in college, our football team was engaged in a long-standing feud with the football team from a neighboring state. Everybody made fun of the other college & we were supposed to talk about how dumb they were as opposed to how great we were. I never understood why I was supposed to get all riled up over a lot of students who'd never done anything to me. I'd never even met them. It wasn't catastrophic. It was just the burnt-out remains of the Missouri-Kansas feud that had been going on since before the American Civil War. Still, it's the sort of silly, smug sentiment I detest. "Oh, come on, manda," you say. "It's just sports. College sports." Yes, and it ticks me off because school sports condition little kids to foster an us/them mentality for no good reason. Don't get me wrong, it's great to have pride in your school, pride in your team, pride in the discipline it takes to be part of such a thing. But people have a tendancy to go to extremes and get all riled up without even remembering what they were proud of in the first place... like the multigenerational feud between Missouri & Kansas. Here's a perfect example of the zigzag course: Back in the day, teachers weren't allowed to bring up evolution in schools and there was a huge uproar over it. And now we've gone the other way. People get all upset if creationism gets brought up in front of impressionable youngsters. And so human history continues its corrections and overcorrections. December 11 JanusI sat quietly in the bar trying to hear myself think over the music and yelling. The Honorable Husband and I were with another couple who seemed mainly concerned with the pop culture of the 1980s. My martini was pretty good. I like them with Grey Goose and three olives on a sword. Never, never dirty. This one was so cold there were chips of ice in it and I enjoyed that. Then the guy across from me asked
"Do you ever come out of your shell? What do you ever talk about?"
I politely explained that I don't talk just for the sake of talking. He then explained to me that unless I learned to get conversation where I found it, I would very rarely enjoy myself. I tried to burst him into flames with my mind, which might have worked if not for the martini. He related instructions for how to fit in. He gave me advice on how to adapt my sense of humor according to the crowd's. He genuinely believed he was helping. I wanted to crawl under the table.
At this point I offered a silent prayer to Janus, the god of hallways and portals, beginnings and endings, and manic depression, that if I got out of this without incident I would never leave my apartment again. The great thing about Janus is that he is two-faced and not only expects his supplicants to turn promises on their head, but is rather pleased with them for doing so. December 08 RiYue and HoneyI reclined on my couch with a mug of tea, put Dejae from the Earth on the stereo, and closed my eyes to think.
Though he followed me around for the better part of four years, I know very little about what matters to RiYue. For example, I do not know whether he has a vast hoard of treasure stored beyond the walls of my shallow existance, or whether he kept nothing at all beyond the time he was done toying with it. Even his thoughts used to nest in his long, tangled black hair until they grew black-and-gold stripes and were mature enough to fly. Then he caught them barehanded and swallowed them.
I know still less about RiYue's ideology. He used to say that the price for dripping honey from cuts is a stomach full of bees. I don't know why he said that-- his blood is red as mine. From what little he's told me, he seems to have abandoned almost more causes than he's picked up. I don't know which ones he's kept, if any. Still less do I know which he'd be willing to change himself for.
As for the individuals in his long and changeful history, I know even less than that. All I see are silhouettes in my mind's eye; powerful ones who took him under their wing and then vowed to destroy him when he outgrew them; old enemies who at this point have forgiven and forgotten; Enlightened ones who got tired of being reincarnated and are in places like Sri Lanka and Los Angeles atoning for past goodnesses. He has never told me about anyone he cares for enough to break free of himself rather than let them die. Perhaps they are his treasures. Perhaps those are the memories he keeps apart, swallowing them when they threaten to fly away forever.
The melodic strains of Dejae wound around the livingroom and suddenly I sat up: RiYue was strangely affected by music and poetry. The effects were not always predictable but they were always there. Perhaps he still loved them enough not to harm them. But how could I use a sword to cut poems? Could it cut music? I sighed loudly. The fault was not with the sword, which could probably cut through memory and make it bleed honey. The question really was, could I myself figure out how to use it that way? Probably. But if I figured it out, could I bring myself to do it, knowing what would happen if I did? if RiYue did not break out of the sword? if I succeeded in obliterating a beautiful, defenseless piece of music? December 05 RiYue and Blackwings**The person I meet in this entry is not my character. He belongs to my friend E.** The store is so close and the fog so pretty that I decided to walk to the store. I carried the katana across my shoulders. It’d do RiYue good to get out, even if he didn’t know about it. The sun was setting as I walked back, turning the fog a strange seashell pink; the Pacific gives us fog you could use to fill pillows. The tops of the pine trees were visible down the block, ‘way up where the fog started to thin. The bag of groceries was light enough not to be a burden-- some honeycrisp apples for a friend and some Hello Kitty band-aids-- but heavy enough to swing in a circle and be amused by centrifugal force. There was a rushing, flapping noise as if a crow had taken off from a nearby pine, and I ducked. It sounded as if the crow were right over my head. No. It wasn’t that close. It was just very, very large. Too large to fly without magic, in fact. The black feathered wings belonged to an abstracted young man in an old gray hoodie. His hair matched his wings. “Oh, this is just what I‘ve always wanted,” I grumbled. Yet another spirit following me around. He looked surprised as he touched down. “It is?” As if he were paying attention to the words, not the tone. “He must have told you I was coming.” There was only one being I know who could have told me a moody guy with huge black wings was coming to call. “RiYue isn’t here,” I said as if in passing. Blackwings fell into step beside me, hands in the front pocket of his hoodie. “You’re not a vampire, are you?” Vampires have always been attracted to RiYue, I’ve never figured out why. “Absolution,” as if answering my thought, not my words. I was silent. He seemed okay with that. The fog muffled the sounds of our footsteps. After a while I noticed him looking at the samurai sword I carried across my shoulders like my electric guitar. “A shell,” he said. “Beg pardon?” “Ossification.” When something stops growing, they stop making new shells. When the shell becomes too thick and heavy, the creature inside it dies. Despite his lack of elaboration, Blackwings was strangely easy to understand. Part of it might have been that I’ve gotten used to interpreting cryptic witticisms from an ancient Chinese spirit who had apparently kept idiosyncratic popular culture from every era and profession he’d ever been in, a heart that had been broken more times than I could count, and English that was just as bad. It might have been something about Blackwings himself. Whatever it was, talking to the Emo guy avec des ailes noires was almost like having a normal conversation.“You see him, then.” “I see what he has become.” “Can you bring him back.” “That path is not just world-mind, but mind-world.” “Can you do it is all.” “I cannot break the shell. Not his. Not with my current level of physical or philosophical power.” Blackwings resettled his feathers. Beads of mist clung to the tips, so his wings were outlined in soft hues of pink and purple from the sunset. “Do you know who--” “Lord Sky himself, perhaps.” “Then--” “Possession.” Then RiYue would be Lord Sky’s, not his own. Another kind of death. I blew a tendril of hair out of my face. It floated right back down when I ran out of breath. “How does the world come to matter again to such people?” Blackwings asked. “You tell me.” “Radical interaction.” Something that jolted a person out of their methodology or paradigm. An apple that sent someone careening out of the Aristotelian cosmos. He spread his wings. “You have a sword that can cut time itself.” He made a few running steps on his toes and lifted into the air. “Find something important to RiYue and cut it!” he called down to me. “My guess is, he'll abandon this shape, this shell, this rigid pattern of thinking, in order to save something he values more than himself…” Blackwings vanished into the fog, which had deepened from purple to twilight gray. December 03 RiYue and MemoryDidn’t get back from Downtown until late, stayed up past midnight to make up for it, worked all morning on the research paper. This is what life is now. I barely even glanced at the katana on the mantle as I threw myself onto the couch. Spirits have a way of fading from memory unless they want to be seen, and this one did not want anything anymore. I lit some incense and stretched out to catch up on reading the Qur‘an, but paused over the verse, “…and God made him die for a hundred years, and at the end of the hundred years God made him live again, and God asked him, ‘How long have you tarried?’ ‘A few hours,’ said the man, ‘Perhaps a day.’” Weird wording, thought I. That was my last thought before passing out for an hour. Jerked awake as I often do, disoriented for a few seconds upon finding that time has slipped by unnoticed. My brain clicks awake every few hours, day or night. I suppose it thinks a thousand years might go by just as easily as an hour if it doesn’t keep a conscious eye on things. Got up to make some hot chocolate and almost ran into the beautiful woman standing in my kitchen. She was wearing ceremonial Chinese garb, as usual, robes with multiple layers and long sleeves. The layers and ties must have taken hours to put together. Metallic thread shone here and there in the leaf-patterns, shining in the yellow light. To my sleepy eyes they looked like a constellation of non-sequiteurs. Her face was round, her mouth looked like two halves of a split cherry, and her eyes were double-lidded. Her skin was pearly-white against her black hair. She was a relatively new spirit to this world and stood on formality. “Ni hao,” I said, bowing. The word and the action came automatically, which surprised me. I hadn’t spoken Mandarin in a long time but even as I said it, I knew the finals were off. I thought it best not to embarrass myself any more and switched languages. “What are you doing in my kitchen? Even I could translate that. TouMing Qu was lonely. She wanted to reminisce about Deep Heaven with RiYue or possibly ask his advice about some problem. She probably expected me to comb her ankle-length hair while she did it. TouMing had another think coming, I had a paper to write-- abruptly I remembered the situation, and felt terrible for forgetting. One of my friends had somehow turned RiYue into a katana (my friend likes Japanese things) and now I could not get him back. At first I’d spent whole afternoons trying to un-sword-ify RiYue but then I’d missed one day, and another, and pretty soon weeks went by with barely a thought in his direction. I was sure this had not helped bring him back to himself and might even have let him drift further away. That’s how fey creatures work.
“Good luck,” said I, gesturing casually to the blade on the mantel.
TouMing’s eyes widened. The ornaments in her hair chimed when she shook her head. “That’s not him. That can’t be RiYue.”
My heart sank. Part of me had thought she’d be able to undo all this just as easily as I‘d pointed it out to her. Strange to think there was a time, after he first followed me home, when all I wanted was for RiYue to leave. Admittedly, my life had been more peaceful for the last few weeks. She glided to the mantel and ran one delicate finger along the black sheathe. There was dust on it. I squirmed. TouMing was too distracted to lecture me. Recognition was finally dawning in her eyes. “Why a katana--?”
“Long story. What can we do about it?”
She bit her painted lower lip and I too had a moment of recognition. I recognized TouMing Qu for what she was; a being who had come to this world only two years ago, and had barely been able to walk her first few months. She was formal not because she was a snob, but because she needed to keep up appearances. She had even less idea what to do than I did. “I’ve never seen him like this. He’s not fighting to get out, but he’s not doing this of his own will. It’s like he’s…”
“Like he’s asleep,” I said firmly.
She nodded, relieved. “Perhaps all we have to do is wait for him to wake up. How long do you think that will be?”
I swallowed. While TouMing recognized my terrible Mandarin, she had apparently not recognized me for what I was. She had put her faith in me as she’d once put it in RiYue, as someone older and wiser. “Why don’t you sit down,” I said, “and let me comb your hair? I think I have your butterfly comb around somewhere.”
TouMing composed herself in the livingroom. I rummaged around in a bathroom drawer, found the jade comb, and gripped it until the carved butterfly imprinted itself on my palm. I would not let RiYue slip into oblivion. TouMing had done that much.
|
rich and strange
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Send a private message
Subscribe to RSS feed
Tell a friend
Add to My MSN
Add to your network
Sign up for alerts
|
|
