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Right Brain, Left Brain, Write

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 12:17:30 GMT

Back in the Middle Ages—well, the 1980s and ’90s—when networking groups were being invented, I was a member of a southern California organization for professional women called Women In Management (WIM). WIM was founded in the late ’70s by Dr. Helen Diamond and had seven chapters around Los Angeles. I served as program chair for the Orange County chapter, then later became corporate VP for public relations. Being a member of WIM was enormous fun (and a lot of work). I met some exceptional people and once got to carry a genuine Olympic torch around the room for one of our speakers.

Many of WIM’s members were women moving into corporate management positions. Remember, those were the days when women earned 50 or 60 cents to a man’s dollar. Those were the days when the “girl” got coffee for the men and often ran errands for her boss, too. When executives never touched a keyboard because keyboards were only for secretaries. When computers were just beginning to replace typewriters and floppies were eight inches in diameter. (I wrote a user guide about that time in which I had to caution new owners of computers not to use magnets to stick their floppies to the fridge or push pins to stick them on the wall. Really!) When only men were considered to be supporting a family. Every woman I knew who saw the movie 9 to 5 exclaimed, “Yeah! That’s how it really is.” We all knew managers and middle managers who deserved to be harnessed and strung up just like Judy, Violet, and Doralee strung up Franklin M. Hart Jr. Like the guy who fired me from a technical writing job. He was younger than I was, had only a B.S. degree, and probably weighed less than I did. Ahhh, yes. Living well may be the best revenge, but writing about the one who done ya wrong is a pretty good revenge, too. Like there's this telemarketer in Quicksilver Moon. He's so offensive that the vampire leaves him in a gas station, pretty well drained. Hah!

WIM taught me networking skills and brought me friends that I have to this day. As a very active member, I started using those skills, nourishing those friendships. I went to meetings. I became a member of the board that planned a women’s conference (also a new phenomenon in those days). I started doing presentations to other Women-In networking groups—Women In Advertising, Women In Film, Women In Accounting, and so on. I am proud of the fact that I actually persuaded a room full of accountants to close their eyes (in public!) and go along with a brief guided visualization I was leading. (Accountants tend never to close their eyes.)

As I was becoming known in the Orange County business community as a speaker, I was also exploring new avenues in my own life. One of them became my favorite topic: creativity, which I wrote about here last month. As I recall, studies in brain hemisphere function were beginning to be released to the public, and I found that extraordinarily interesting. Pretty soon, I put two topics that interested me together and created a talk for networking organization that I called “Right Brain, Left Brain, Write.”

Thanks to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and numerous scientific and medical studies, we know a fair amount today about how the brain works when we’re doing specific tasks or thinking specific thoughts. Twenty-five years ago, we knew that that left brain is in charge of words and logic, the right brain in charge of images and creativity. That’s very simplistic, of course, but it’s still useful. I often find myself pulling little bits of my old speech out of my head to help my authors organize the books they’re writing. I’ll be talking about some of those techniques for getting organized and jump-starting creativity in the blogs I write for Feathered Quill.

Put simply, therefore, what I told my audiences twenty-five years ago and what I tell the authors whose books I edit today is that it takes both sides of the brain to write successfully. We use our right brain to “brainstorm” for ideas and/or conjure up the characters. I see and hear my characters, and I think that happens in my right brain, though sometimes the characters seem to be standing right in front of me. We use our left brains to organize our ideas or the plot and to get the words right. When I’m editing, in fact, I got into what I call total left-brain-nerd mode. That’s when I’m paying attention to commas and semicolons, to details about characters, to historical accuracy. My guess is that I’m not much fun to be around when I’m in left-brain-nerd mode, but that’s what my authors pay me for. Making collages like the one I described last month is my anodyne. So is watching DVDs of movies in which people sing and dance.

Restarting Creativity with the New Year

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 17:01:22 GMT

I like to start the new year restarting my creativity. Not just in my work with the authors whose books I’m editing, not by making resolutions—stop eating junk food, be nicer to my neighbors, wash the kitchen floor … you know the drill—but by doing something creative. Since childhood, creativity has always been important to me. I was forever writing stories, drawing pictures, running around with my little Brownie camera (yes, I had a real Brownie), inventing games. It seems like half the events in my life turned into stories. When my brother joined the Boy Scouts, I had to write a story that I called “My Life as a Boy Scout.” I tried to sell it to Boys’ Life. Early rejection slip.

About twenty years ago, my friend Suzan inaugurated what she called Goal Board Sunday, usually the second weekend of January. She invited a dozen of her friends (most of them New Agers, plus me, the only witch in the room), hauled a ton of old magazines out of her garage, and prepared light refreshments. We guests were instructed to bring poster board, more magazines, pens, pencils, crayons, scissors, glue sticks, and refreshments. We then set about putting the law of attraction to work. We cut pictures of things we wanted to manifest during the year out of magazines and pasted them in nice even rows across their rectangles of poster board. One of my friends pasted a picture of a red car on her goal board; by the end of the year, she was driving a bright red Mustang. Another pasted down pictures of computers; come spring, she had upgraded. The law of attraction works. Of course, you can’t just sit around passively and wait for it to work … but that’s the subject of a whole ’nother blog.

By the second year I was bored with rectangles and images in rank and file like a parade. I craved color, design, harmony, balance. I wanted to put the stuff of dreams on my goal board. Well, maybe it wasn’t a proper goal board anymore. I was turning it into a collage. To me, it's a work of art. Now don’t get me wrong—although my mother and brother were artists, and I’ve know some truly fine artists, I don’t consider myself a real artist. I once took a right-brain drawing class and drew a spectacular contour drawing of a brussels sprout, but that doesn’t make me an artist. I have good eyes, though; I know that artistic principles apply not only to illustrative art but also to music, writing, design, and other avenues of artistic endeavor.

What did I do? First I went for colored poster board. As the years have passed, I notice that I’ve usually gone for green, purple, and blue, though I’ve also been to red and yellow. Next, I laid my round altar top on the poster board and drew around it. I was the only one in the room working in the round. Then I went for pictures of gardens. I like opening doors, paths of stone or brick, trees, lake and mountain scenes. And I didn’t just line these images up on my collage. I overlapped them, I trimmed them, I found ways to make one image lead to another above or below it or next to it. I cut pictures out of catalogs, too—headlines like Act Old Later (which I have used two years in a row) and Breathe and Relax. This year, I’ve got one that says Happiness Is an Inside Job. And goddesses. Sophia (whom you can see at the top of my home page), Dame Fortuna with her cornucopia and her wheel, Green Tara and White Tara, Athena, Sarasvati with her vina, Hera. You get the idea. Every year, I had at least seven goddesses on my goal board. And glittery paper and glittery stickers. If you go to my Facebook page, you can see part of last year’s goal board behind me in my headshot.

After ten years, Suzan’s friends got too busy for her Goal Board Sunday, so she discontinued. But I kept going. I like have my own, private work of art hanging on the wall above my computer. It’s nice to look at. It inspires me. It reminds me to be creative.

I made my 2010 goal board last weekend. In the bottom quarter are big wooden doors opening inward. On the doors are cartoon draws of cats; they don’t look like my cats, but they seem to express my cats’ personalities. To the right of doors is a big headline that says My home is a mess … but my homepage looks fantastic. Because 2010 is numerologically a 3 year, I made a photocopy of Card III, the Empress, from my favorite tarot deck and pasted her right above the 2010. There’s a little photo of me on the collage, also a little photo of Michael Ball. Every year I hope and wish that I’ll have the time and money to go to England again and see him on stage or in concert. This year’s goddesses are the Winged Nike, Green and White Taras, Sophia, Sarasvati, Dame Fortuna, and Lakshmi. And—for the first time in twenty years—there’s a god there, too. Mars was not originally a war god; he was a Latin agricultural god who defended his people and his turf, which is why he was conflated with Ares. Over the past two or three years I have prayed to him to help protect my apartment and the building I live in. Also to encourage my upstairs neighbors to be quieter. My work with Mars has worked, so this year he’s on my goal board. Like every year, there’s also a border of glittery stickers around the edge—Blessed Bees, flowers, stars, fancier flowers, fancier stars. Some people might deem it tacky. I think it’s gorgeous.

And creative. I spent five hours, nonstop, creating this collage that is now hanging on my wall. I look up and see glitters and goddesses and green trees, and I feel inspired. It seems to me that my creativity flowed into my goal board just as it flows into the work I do sitting here at my keyboard. I do creative writing. I put on my creativity cap (which is like a thinking cap) when I edit books for authors who aren’t altogether sure how the writing process works. When I say, “Let me be your editor,” they get my creativity as well as my education, and some of that creativity shines out in glittery stickers and pictures cut out of magazines and pasted on green poster board.

Occult Adventures with Walter Troll & Other Invisible Friends

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:39:54 GMT

This article was published in Circle Magazine in the winter, 2002, issue. Yes, it really is a true story, though I did change some names. I also put Rev. Debbee (not her real name) into one of my novels.

Back in the olden days, 25 years ago, when I was young and exceedingly naïve concerning the invisible worlds, I was a practicing Unitarian and a technical writer. Evidently, some higher being thought that made me good fodder. First, one of my friends told me that the things suddenly started happening were not “just my imagination.” Those colored balls zipping around the room were real. There were no coincidences in the universe. Next, I fell in love with a man who worked by day as an engineer. He also did automatic writing, and his “control” had convinced him that he had a Great Mission To Accomplish In This Life. He believed it. I came to believe it, too.

And then someone advised me to visit a metaphysical church of good repute (which I’ll call the Loving Light Center) and study with Rev. Debbee. God spoke directly to Rev. Debbee! While she was in the bathroom. “Well, that’s the only time I have any privacy,” she would explain. She was, she went on, pursued simply all the time by her students. “They call me for advice at all hours of the day and night. They depend on me for every little thing.” Why, Rev. Debbee was so wise that she already knew she wouldn’t have to reincarnate again after this life. That’s why she was teaching so many classes—so her knowledge would not be lost to us forever.

Like I said, I was exceedingly naïve. I started taking her classes. I tithed to her.

Rev. Debbee taught that everyone living on earth has Eight Spirit Guides who surround and protect them at all times. Members of this invisible crowd that sit on our shoulders, whisper in our ears, and fling Significant Signs And Signals in our paths are (1) an American Indian Warrior to teach us to be strong, (2) a Naturopathic Doctor to heal our physical ills, (3) a Space Brother to help us explore the cosmos, (4) a Saint to lead us to God, (5) a Teacher or Scientist from Atlantis to bring the lost knowledge back into the world, (6) a Knight in Shining Armor to keep us safe from evil influences like demons and witches, (7) an Ascended Master from the Far East to teach us Upper Chakra Wisdom, and (8) our own Soul Mate to Love And Protect Us. Rev Debbee assured us that these Eight Spirit Guides led us every day along the Right-Hand Path to the White Light of God. How cool is that, I said to myself. How can I get in touch with these spirit guides?

Being the studious type, I started with books. I read the mainstream metaphysical literature, the books on the European Occult Revival and the various psychic sciences, books on ceremonial magic and the Qabalah and theosophy and the Universal White Brotherhood. I read Blavatsky, Leadbeater, Besant, Dion Fortune, Horace Quimby, Manly P. Hall … well, the list goes on and on. Although I learned enough to be a walking footnote to this day, I didn’t learn anything helpful about that mob of spirit guides that was supposed to be running my life. Next I did Tarot readings for myself. Every reading predicted fame and fortune. I did numerological readings for myself, got astrologers to interpret my natal chart, got my palms and irises read. No spirit guides revealed themselves. Hey, I said to myself. That’s not fair. How come everyone I know gets to talk to their spirit guides but all I get is one lousy Kirlian photograph with eyes in it?

Under my boy friend’s tutelage, I tried automatic writing. All I got was a stiff hand. I visited The Psychics To The Stars. All I got was a lot of debits in my check register. I turned to Rev. Debbee. “I really want to meet my spirit guides,” I told her. “I need to know what’s coming in my life.”

“Well,” she said after a minute of deep thought. “Come to our next psychic fair. Let Kenny draw a spirit picture for you. That will be one of your Spirit Guides.”

So I went to the next Loving Light Psychic Fair, and Kenny sat me down, got out his conte crayons, and drew an Indian that he said he saw standing behind me. “Wow,” I said. “Is this one of my Spirit Guides?” “I’m sure he is,” Kenny said modestly. “He says his name is Sun In Sky.”

Breathless with enthusiasm, I took my drawing home. I propped it up against a stack of books on the table and sat there, gazing at into its eyes. I just knew this drawing was going to help me. I was going to be taught or protected or healed or led. “Here I am!” I said aloud. Let’s get on with it already, I thought. “Hey, I’m waiting! What do I need to know? What should I do? Why am I on earth this time? What is my Purpose In Life?”

Nothing happened. I went to work every day and wrote about copper mining in Peru, about building a harbor in Saudi Arabia, about propping up the Alaskan Oil Pipeline. I edited proposals and engineers’ resumes. In my mind, I talked to Sun In Sky. Hey! Why don’t you answer me?

Desperate for cosmic communication, I went back to Rev. Debbee. After two minutes of deep thought, she said, “Well, have you tried the pendulum?”

Although I didn’t realize it, that was the beginning of the end of my enchantment. But it took me more than a year to get through the learning process.

What Rev. Debbee told me to do was get a piece of typing paper and print the letters of the alphabet on it in an arc, like a Ouija Board, plus the numbers from 1 to 10. She showed me how to hold a pendulum above the paper. Soon it began to swing from letter to letter, spelling out words. “Just write down the words,” she said. “This always works. You’ll be hearing from your Spirit Guides now!” “Good for you,” my boy friend said, “but just to make sure you don’t get under the influences of any evil entities, say the Lord’s Prayer before you begin. And give yourself an hour or so every night.”

Reader, do you know the meaning of “compulsive”? Have you ever seen obsessiveness in action?

I should mention here that my son, Charles, was about nine years old at the time. He has always been very bright, very skeptical, very resourceful. I suppose I could safely say that my adventures with the Invisibles helped him become more resourceful, more self-sufficient. Within a week or two, my nightly hour with the pendulum doubled. We moved the TV into Charles’s bedroom. My doubled hour doubled again. I sat on the couch, not watching TV, not listening to music, not talking to friends on the phone, not reading mysteries, not petting the cat or meditating. I sat there with a mini-Ouija Board and a pendulum and talked to spirits. As I told my son, I was watching the “wizards drive the pendulum,” and they were teaching me everything I’d ever need to know.

I don’t remember the names of all the Invisibles who came through my pendulum. Sun In Sky called me his “precious child” (something my physical father had never done) and told me I’d been a Lakota Princess in 1800 before the white men arrived in Nebraska. He told me that my boy friend and I were destined to marry and create a dynasty.

Oh, yes—did I mention that my boy friend was not only self-absorbed but that he was also married? Another spirit, Mr. Kahlil, told him via automatic writing that we were to go to Egypt and/or Saudi Arabia together to save the world. From what was never specified. Mr. Kahlil started talking to me, too, about eternal love. My boy friend and I were advised to wait until his wife died, then we’d be together again forever. I am forever ashamed that I believed that story. Mr. Kahlil soon said he would assume a human body and visit the construction company where we worked. He’d bring a major construction project to which we’d be assigned, and off we’d go. I believed him.

I went back to Kenny for another spirit drawing. This time he drew an Incan prince named Kuti. And, sure enough, Kuti started talking through my pendulum. I learned about this past life and that one, about how famous I’d been, about my royal heritage, about my sacred destiny.

Wow, I thought. Now I know why I’m on earth. I know what My Purpose In Life is. Four hours every night after work with pendulum, spelling out a sentence and writing it down, spelling out another sentence and writing it down, watching the wizards steer the pendulum round and round and round.

Someone who said she was Isis came and talked to me. She said she’d been my mother in a past life. Another Invisible said that my boyfriend had been David and I’d been Bathsheba. Another one said I’d been Cleopatra and he’d been Caesar and another boy friend had been Marc Antony. Another one said my boy friend and I had been the King and Queen of Atlantis.

How cool is this, I said to myself. I am royalty! Charles wanted to know what’s for supper and could I give him his lunch money and would I buy a “Frogger” game for him and hook it up to the TV and could he visit his friends for the weekend. My boss in the tech pubs department wanted to know why my work was so slow. My friends wondered why I never phoned them, why we never went to movies anymore, why I didn’t know what was going on in any of our favorite sitcoms. I am royalty, I replied in my imagination. I am above such mundane matters. I have a Major Task To Perform. All these Spirit Guides were running my life, and I was happy to let them do it.

By this time, my boy friend, who had been writing automatically for four or five years, had a whole stack of notebooks filled with different kinds of messages in different handwritings, none of them his own. My stack of pendulum papers was about ream-high. We were waiting for Mr. Kahlil to come and take us away from mundane construction. We were waiting to assume our rightful places in the sacred hierarchy of the world.

One Friday night, as soon as supper was over and my son was in his bedroom listening to Billy Joel records, I picked up my pendulum, assumed the position, and waited for wisdom. The pendulum began to swing.

We want you as our earth slave.

What? Oh, yes. I’d forgotten to pray. “Our Father, Who art in Heaven ….”

We want you to be our earth slave.

Who’s there? Who are you? Where is Sun In Sky? “Hallowed be thy name. … and deliver us from evil….”

We want you to be our earth slave.

Rev. Debbee wasn’t home. Her message machine said she was delivering a lecture at a metaphysical congress. Kenny was with her. I certainly couldn’t call my boy friend.

We want you to be our earth slave.

I put the pendulum away. I went into Charles’s bedroom and watched TV with him.

But I was addicted. First thing Saturday morning—back to the pendulum. We want you to be our earth slave. I prayed over the paper. I cupped the pendulum in my hands and prayed again. I visualized white light on the paper, around the pendulum, around my hands, around my pen and notebook, around my whole body, filling my living room. White light everywhere. I called upon angels to protect me. I implored my Eight Spirit Guides to come to me and do their jobs.

Now I had figured out by this time that I could influence what the pendulum said. I could make it spell out what I wanted it to say. Well, not this time. We want you to be our earth slave.

It was noon. I tore up the paper and burned the pieces in an abalone shell on sacred sand. Then I buried the ashes in my back yard. I took the expensive crystal pendulum outside. I also took a ball-peen hammer. I smashed that crystal point, burned the black thread, and buried it all.

But I was addicted. Sunday morning, I found another crystal point and tied it to another piece of black thread. "What’s going on here?" I asked, then held the new pendulum over the new paper and waited. "Who are you?"

My name is Walter Troll.

I nearly dropped the pendulum. "Who are you? Why are you scaring me?"

That’s not really my name. But you may know me as Walter Troll. It’s my job to scare you.

"Well, you’re doing a really good job of it."

Glad to hear that. Have you looked at your life lately?

No. All I’d been looking at was that pendulum. Well, I’ve been learning things from my Eight Spirit Guides. And Isis, she’s a famous goddess, you know, and she talks to me all the time. And my Indian father. They say I have a mission on earth.

Do you expect me to believe that?

"I believe it."

Do you really believe what a pendulum is telling you?

"Yes! Of course I do. Why wouldn’t I?"

It was, Walter Troll told me, time for a reality check. What is the quality of your life?

The quality of my life was lousy.

Good girl. Now pay attention. The way to live your life is to get out there and live it. That’s trite, yes, but it’s quite true. You’re so smart? Examine your life. What are you actually learning that is of any use to you, your son, or anyone in the world? Has anything Mr. Kahlil promised come to pass? Has anything any of these entities told you come to pass? What are you learning that is true and useful?

Reality check, indeed. I put the pendulum down and picked up a pencil and wrote in my journal. I went for a walk. I took Charles out for lunch and we had a genuine conversation. I phoned a friend, who said she’d been wondering if I was still alive. Monday morning, I went to work and edited a proposal to build a cement plant in northern Idaho. I wrote a report on a construction project in Florida. After work, I came home and watched a little TV with Charles, then took him out for supper. We came home, watched some more TV, and after he went to bed, I picked up a paperback mystery. I had to start at the beginning because I’d completely forgotten the plot.

Attagirl, Walter Troll told me Tuesday night. If you spend all your time waiting for instructions from eight spirit guides, what else do you have time for? You want a task on earth? How your son is growing up? How do you think your boy friend’s wife feels? Would he be any more faithful to you than he is to her? When’s the last time you spent time with your friends?

"Walter," I replied, "are you my friend? Really? Who are you?"

Yes, my dear, I am your friend. Who do you think I am?

"I wish I knew! Why are you here? Why did you tell me you want me to be your earth slave?"

Do you still believe you’re the queen of the earth?

"Well … no. That just doesn’t make sense anymore."

Do you need this pendulum?

"Okay. Yeah. I’m looking at it with clearer eyes. But why did you scare me? Who are you?"

Walter Troll never answered my questions. Like the Little Prince, he was much better at asking questions than answering them. But, you know, he made me face myself. To this day, I don’t know who he was. And all the other Invisibles who talked to me through that pendulum—were they real or did my needy self make them all up? Were my Invisibles extrinsic to me or intrinsic? I’d read quite a lot and, when I reread their dictation, I saw that none of them had said anything I hadn’t already read. Who was Walter Troll? I have never heard from him again. He spent a week in my head, a week driving my pendulum. What he taught me was to be skeptical of “messages from beyond” and of people who think they don’t have to reincarnate anymore. He taught me to look closely at power and magic and claims of power and magic. He taught me that the invisible world may exist only between our ears and beneath the canopy of our skull. The invisible world may also be all around us. It can be hard to tell the difference. And he taught me not to be afraid of knowledge, whether it comes from worlds visible or invisible. He taught me to face gods, goddesses … and invisible trolls.

Getting Organized

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:21:28 GMT

Overture. A decade ago, I used to think that drumming was the best thing there was. I drummed at rituals and took classes and taught classes. But then the venue where I was part of a regular weekly drumming circle closed (now it’s a hyper-vegetarian restaurant) and the people I drummed with moved away. I sold my ashiko (a drum slightly smaller than a djembe) and most of my frame drums and gave away my other doumbek. Now I live with cats, and I believe that purring is the best thing there is.

Act I. When I say, “Let me be your editor,” and an author says yes and sends me his or her book, one of the issues we often discuss is organizing. I’m editing a dissertation at the present time, for example, and have suggested to the Ph.D. candidate that he reorganize and put all the discussion of his qualitative tests together and all the discussion of his quantitative tests together. He wants me to do this for him, but that’s way beyond my scope of work as an editor, so while I’ll help him, I suggested that he get with his committee and get their advice.

Organization is important to both fiction and nonfiction. You can use nearly any organizing model that works, from a simple list of the topics you want to hit to something grand elaborate. What I’m doing with this blog is using what I’ll call a musical theater scheme: overture, Act I, entre’acte, Act II. I like musical theater and I want to see if this organization works for a blog.

But you might want another organization scheme. When I used to teach public speaking, I taught the most common outline: Tell ’em what you’re gonna tell ’em, tell ’em, tell ’em what you told ’em. Introduction, body of speech, conclusion. It always works, and in an oral presentation, the repetition is both useful and necessary. If you want to get really fancy in your book, you might try sonata form: introduction, exposition, development, recapitulation, coda. If it worked for Mozart and Beethoven, then maybe it can work for your memoir or novel. You might think about sonnet form: three quatrains and a couplet. The quatrains might be short related sections, chapters narrated by your characters, for example, and the couplet at the end might be your authorial voice closing the story. The model for a novel is rising action, climax, falling action, denoument. If you’re using sonnet form, then it’s your authorial voice that narrates the denoument, or resolution.

You might try baseball, too: nine innings, three strikes and you’re out and the teams change places. How would this work with the book you’ve got in mind right now? Or one of the organizing principles of fine art: symmetry, rhythm, repetition, balance, harmony. In Sunday in the Park with George, George Seurat sings about the difficulties of creating modern art in “Putting It Together,” and to introduce “Sunday,” which is one of the most beautiful songs in the entire Sondheim canon, he lists these principles: order, design, balance, composition, harmony. Although we don’t have to get entirely literal when we apply a model from another field to our writing, these are principles that I think apply to anything from setting the table for supper to getting dressed to writing a memoir or a song to playing just about any sport. (BTW, the Getty has a sketch Seurat made of his mother. From across the room, it looks like a line drawing. Up close … it’s all dots. Extraordinary.)

Entre’acte. Are cats musical? Pax, Andrew Lloyd Webber and T.S. Eliot, but no, cats are not particularly musical. And I’ve never seen one dance like they do in Cats. (Felines are horizontal, whereas homo sapiens are vertical.) Why, then, have I replaced drumming with purring? Maybe it’s the rhythm. Purring is rhythmical. It’s also mysterious. How does a cat purr? What’s the mechanics of purring? Drumming, when you’re really in the groove, is mysterious, and you learn to depend more on muscle memory for that beledi than to try to count it out every time—Doum DOUM tek-a-tek-a DOUM tek-a-tek, tek-a. Or whatever variation you want to try. The beledi is always 4/4, but you can add all the teks you can fit in. (They’re like quarter notes and eighth notes.)

Act II. When you’re organizing your memoir or novel or dissertation, think about rhythm. Think about the overall rhythm and balance of the full composition. This is one reason authors like to open with a prologue or foreword and close with an epilogue or afterword. Balance. Think about rhythm and order and balance within chapters. This includes logical progression. I am forever writing notes about logic and non sequiturs to my authors. Even if you’re writing about a chaotic life, your writing has to be balance, logical, make sense.

And think about the rhythms of the sentences you compose. Are all your sentences simple declarative sentences? Then you have a page of soldiers marching in rank and file. No variety, no interest, unrelenting rhythm, boring. If you’re writing dialogue, get the rhythms of people’s speech patterns right. The easiest way to learn to hear--and write--good dialogue is to sit in the mall and listen to people, not to their exact words but to hear how they put sentences together, to hear the rhythms of their talking.

I think we can all profit when we think about the ideas Stephen Sondheim put into the mouth of George Seurat. Order. Design. Balance. Composition. Harmony.

How the Outdoors Got on Us

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 14:22:38 GMT

I first met my friend Valerie Eagle Heart in 1995, when she was leading a women’s circle in Santa Ana, California. Our circle drummed and did rituals on the full moons, and we also worked our way through The Artist’s Way and The Vein of Gold by Julia Cameron. Nowadays, Valerie lives in the desert east of Los Angeles, where she “offers Purification Lodges; shares the Teachings of the Medicine Wheel, facilitates Women's Retreats; offers various workshops and Gatherings and leads the Women’s Dance of the Green Corn and the SunMoon Dance.” It was at one of those early circle that I Found Caloria, the Goddess of the Potluck. Valerie tells me that to this day, the women in her circles gather around the table, join hands, and recite the invocation to Caloria. Every time I’d Find another goddess, I’d email her to Valerie, who inevitably emailed me back, “I love her.”

Valerie also supervises vision quests (safe ones), and while I wouldn’t do a vision quest on a bet, I have in fact driven out to Joshua Tree to support my friends. We all stand around the fire all night and send prayers to the person “out on the mountain.” Knowing I don’t like to get the outdoors on me, Valerie Found two goddesses appropriate to my personality. I wrote a story about them. Here, presented for the first time to the public, are Cleanessa and Comforta.

How the Outdoors Got on Us: A Found Fable for City Witches

Back in the Olden Days, when the world was a whole lot fresher (not to mention cheekier) than it is now, the people lived in the City of the Goddess. They were sensible people, beautiful people, smart people, golden people and—because they stayed in the city—they were Civilized People. They were much beloved by their Urban Goddess, who gave them Every Civilized Comfort, and so they lived in clean, comfortable homes and did the things civilized people have always done: they read books, they went to plays and concerts, they entertained their friends with home-cooked meals and home-bred conversation. They did every creative golden thing they could think to do.

Now these civilized people who lived so peacefully in the Olden Days were ruled by the Two Daughters of the Goddess of the City, Comforta and Cleanessa. Comforta and Cleanessa were the Co-Queens of the City and lived at the Ritz, where they enjoyed all the amenities of city life—haute cuisine, haute couture, and haute tub.

“Cleanliness is next to Goddessness,” Cleanessa always said, and …

“You shouldn’t get the outdoors on you,” Comforta always added.

The sisters always nodded at each other, folded their hands over their stomachers, ordered a light supper, and sat upon their clean and comfortable thrones to receive and counsel their people. Life in the City was clean, comfortable, calm, and civilized and nobody got the outdoors on them.

But one day …

One day—something happened! No one knows why. Perhaps the Goddess was bored. Perhaps She decided that Her Daughters were too prissy and needed a little loosening up. Perhaps She decided that Her children needed chocolate to go with the vanilla.

One day, Crystal and Blossom left the City. They ran into the Great Outdoors that was all around the city. They traveled the long, winding path to Turtle Hill, and there on Turtle Hill they began to dance. Crystal and Blossom boogied, they cha-cha-cha’d, they lambadad’d, they charleston’d, they waltzed, they jitterbugged, they macarena’d. For three days and three nights, Crystal and Blossom were so busy dancing that they forgot to eat. They were so busy spinning, jumping, whirling, leaping, and skipping that they forgot to drink. Crystal and Blossom were Having A Good Time.

Crystal and Blossom got the outdoors on them.

Their Mommy called them to come home to supper. For three days and nights, she kept calling them, and finally Crystal and Blossom heard her voice calling them. Finally, they paid attention. Finally, they stopped dancing. They came home. They still had the outdoors on them.

“My goodness!” said Mommy. “Where have you been?”

“Out in the outdoors,” said Crystal.

“What have you been doing?”

“Dancing,” said Blossom.

“Inventing the samba and the fox-trot,” said Crystal.

“Perfecting the tango and the bunny-hop,” said Blossom.

“Is that how you got the outdoors all over yourselves?” Mommy asked.

Crystal looked sideways at Blossom. Blossom looked sideways at Crystal. They looked up at Mommy and shuffled their feet and shrugged their shoulders. “When you dance the outdoor dance,” said Crystal, “you tend to get it on you,” said Blossom.

What could Mommy do? She threw up her hands and shook her head. Then she pulled her big white hankie out of her pocket and told Crystal to spit in it so she could scrub behind her ears. Then she told Blossom to spit in the hankie so she could wipe the back of her neck. She made them smooth their hair and stand up straight. She told Crystal to tuck in her shirt and Blossom to tie her shoelaces.

“We’re going to the Ritz,” said Mommy when she was satisfied that her children were Clean Enough. Comforta and Cleanessa were holding a Full Moon Drumming Ritual to honor their Mother and all the people of the City were invited. Who knows, some of them said—perhaps even Creator might come. “Of course,” they said, “you never know with him.”

When they arrived at the Ritz, all the people were enjoying the drumming and the potluck supper. They were all wearing their best clothes and fanciest jewelry. They were singing the usual songs and chants and gossiping the usual gossip.

And Creator was there. He had brought along his Paint-By-Number kit, which he used to create and name all of the wild things that lived in the outdoors. He was also, as usual, teasing his sisters.

Look,” he said to Comforta, “lions and tigers and bears!”

“Oh my,” said Comforta, taking a step back.

“Look!” he said to Cleanessa, “spiders and flies!”

“Not in my parlor,” said Cleanessa.

“Children,” said the Goddess, “you behave yourselves and Play Nice Together. You don’t want to make me have to take you outdoors and Speak Firmly to you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

As the festive night went on, Comforta made sure everyone had enough to eat and drink. She plumped up all the pillows and opened the windows when it became too hot in the Ritz. Cleanessa put her Handiwipes in her pocket so she could wipe up the inevitable spills. She picked up the empty Pepsi cans, kept the cats off the table, and stacked the coffee cups and plates and forks and knives and spoons in the dishwasher. Creator sat in the corner with his Etch-a-Sketch and created aardvarks and wombats and lemurs and Joshua trees and mugwort. Crystal and Blossom taught everybody the fox-trot and the bunny-hop and the jitterbug.

And so everyone lived happily ever after.

Pretty soon, Crystal and Blossom took their friends out dancing and taught them the spiral hokey-pokey. They had so much fun that they stirred up the outdoors and got it all over themselves … and, you know, sometimes even Comforta and Cleanessa could feel their toes a-tap-tap-tapping.

The End

Maybe

Beauty Asleep

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 14:27:56 GMT

Once upon a time, approximately now, there was a hard-working, highly principled man who was Lord Mayor of the megalopolis. The Lord Mayor lived, but spent very little quality time, with his wife, Queenie, and their prepubescent daughter, whom the media had affectionately dubbed The Princess. Queenie, who had once earned a juris doctor degree, had upon her husband’s election to his high post retired from her voracious practice at the legal clinic and devoted herself to philanthropic and occasionally quixotic endeavors. Having observed that the people do not tolerate professional first ladies, Queenie now focused her considerable energy upon only two targets: raising The Princess to be a bright, assertive young lady and raising the hopes of the homeless women who flowed back and forth through the megalopolis, a tide of tearful crones.

While her husband labored ferociously in eighteen-hour days with his administrators, lawyers, accountants, and other civic officials to restore lost order to the megalopolis, Queenie home-schooled their daughter and tried to teach her the correct values: justice, prudence, fortitude, and temperance, also faith, hope, and charity. Like that great prince of another land and another time, The Princess was cherished, protected, and isolated from exposure to the tribulations and terrors of the “real world” outside the guarded doors and barred windows of the mayoral mansion. Even the girl’s television viewing and time on the Internet were closely monitored by her mother. The Princess was thus innocent and idealistic, and they intended to keep her that way.

Time came for the girl’s thirteenth birthday. Time came also for her first bleeding. While the Lord Mayor issued a proud media release announcing the former, the latter was of course kept strictly private. It’s doubtful, in fact, that the father even knew of the event when it happened.

As a special birthday treat, The Princess was scheduled to promenade through the great park that anchored the heart of the megalopolis, and her father remembered to send squads of police officers and trash handlers before her to make her way safe. Early in the morning, Queenie took the girl aside, saying, “Daughter, today you are a woman. As a special treat, you may invite whomever you wish to accompany you in the park, and we will honor you and your guests at a banquet in which you will be officially introduced, via the media, to the people.”

The Princess kept silent and pondered these things in her heart.

Now it just so happened that, on the very same day when they went into the great park, thirteen crazy old ladies were also there with their shopping carts and their many fears and their few hopes. As soon as they spied Queenie and The Princess setting foot upon the freshly scoured pathway, these thirteen crazy old women called out their greetings. They also commented on both the girl’s pure beauty and the vicissitudes of worldly life.

The Princess stopped and stared. She knew from overhearing her mother’s phone conversations that homeless women existed. But they had never been flesh and blood creatures, had never appeared as more than remotely controlled images and subjects of occasional human interest stories and grant proposals.

“Mama,” she finally said, “I’ve seen old people on TV. I’ve watched the news and seen hunger and death. But who are these women? Why did nobody ever tell me that they were actually living out here beneath overpasses and behind bushes, in boxes and doorways, through all the seasons of cold and heat? Mama,” she said, “why are these women calling me to bring beauty back to a wretched world?”

Queenie appeared to be listening. “I do as much as I can to help homeless women,” she replied. “You know I do. You’ve helped me gather goods and organize services to distribute the goods to them. But I fail to see what concern beauty can be to such as they.”

“Well,” said The Princess, “you said I could choose some friends to accompany us through the park and attend my banquet. I choose these thirteen old women.”

What could Queenie say to her daughter’s demand? Could she deny it and thus deny all the idealistic education she’d been giving the girl? Could she say, No, these are ignorant old women, they stink, they have no manners, they’ve been homeless so long they’ve become savages? Could Queenie say, I’ve been telling you to pity the poor and work to better their condition, but you most certainly may not invite them into our home?

The thirteen crazy old ladies were ushered into the mayoral mansion, and the mayoral public relations firm was ordered to create the proper story, spinning verbal webs of compassion and bountiful civic spirit. The thirteen crazy old ladies were given hot baths and proper clothes and firm instructions on how to behave. The thirteen crazy old ladies were soon clean, sober, and respectable. If they wondered if they’d died and gone to heaven, in their hearts they knew it was really a one-night stand.

Thanks to skillful management, the banquet was a great success. Until midnight.

The first crazy old lady suddenly stood up. “Yo! Listen up! The girls ’n’ me, we wanna thank ya fer this here terrific dinner. But we gotta few things we gotta tell ya.” She turned to the parents of The Princess. “You bin teachin’ this girl a lotta stuff about life. But you know it’s all hooey. Life is garbage. Real life is fulla terror. Ya never know when some punk is gonna come up behind ya with a gun in his hand and rape on his mean, stupid, little hip-hop mind.” Then the crazy old lady walked straight up to The Princess, leaned across the banquet table, and stared her in the eye. “Wake up, girlie. You’d never survive out there.”

And before anyone else could move, before the mayor could open his cell phone, before Queenie could blow her little golden whistle, before any of the civic officials could gather their wits about them, even before the cameraman from Channel 2 could decide where to point his minicam, in the blink of an eye, the other crazy old ladies began springing up and yelling:

“Rape!”
“Terrorism!”
“Gang wars!”
“Drug deals!”
“Police violence!”
“Random shootings!”
“Graft and corruption!”
“Kids with guns in schools!”
“Toxic waste all over the streets!”
“Poverty with never a hope of relief!”
“Morality and ethics straight down the sewer!”
“Women and children starving, beaten, and abandoned!”

Chaos. Disorderly conduct. The ideals that had always sheltered The Princess dissolved under these grim words from the real world. Something died just then.

Or woke up.

The thirteenth crazy old lady, the oldest old lady the girl had ever seen, the one who hadn’t spoken a word as long as anyone could remember, this oldest crazy old lady slowly pushed herself to her feet. She laid her linen napkin on the table beside her dessert spoon. She took a last dainty sip from the goblet before her, then set the goblet on the damask tablecloth. She gestured. Her lips moved, but no one heard the secret words she whispered. She gestured again and uttered one more long-silent word.

Order. Complete silence. Movements made as if under water, then stillness. It was as if everyone in the palatial banquet room had been asleep for a hundred years, as if all the guests had only now opened their eyes, had only just now emerged from life-shattering night visioning, had only at this very minute begun to see and hear and feel. Perfect order, perfect silence, perfect stillness.

The thirteenth crazy old lady stepped to the middle of the room. Actually, she seemed to glide through the room, and two or three who were there remembered later that the air had glittered around her.

“Time is come,” said the thirteenth crazy old lady, her voice as soft as fairy wings in pellucid air. “Time long ago foretold is now awakened. Time out of mind now returns to mind, and you awaken to what is true.”

The thirteenth crazy old lady reached out and rainbows grew in her hands. She gestured, and the rainbows took the measure of all in that room. “At last I may pronounce the original blessing.” She motioned to The Princess, and the girl smiled and stretched.

“Tamed, hidden, and asleep, beauty has been among you and you never knew it. Beauty, I say to you now, Awake and move among your people. Beauty, I charge you: Awake and come with your former blessings to these latter days. Beauty, awaken all who can see you.”

And with a final gnomic gesture, the thirteenth crazy old lady led her twelve scattered sisters out of the banquet room. The air glowed where they walked, the scent of violets and roses moved with them, and the shadows of ancient trees made a doorway for them to pass under. Great cats and majestic dragons went beside them and doves and owls flew above them as they returned to the world.

You Were Warned ...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:25:12 GMT

One of my favorite T-shirts proclaims I am the grammarian about whom your mother warned you. When people see it, I watch their lips moving as they read it and think about it. Sometimes they laugh. Sometimes. Some people don’t get it. What’s not to get? I think it’s the “about whom.” People are haunted by junior high and the English class they sat in and sort of paid attention in, and reading my T-shirt they think about the rules they didn’t quite learn.

One of those rules was the whom rule. The first thing ya gotta know (and Mrs. Eighth-Grade English Teacher may not have known) is that English grammar was more or less invented in the 18 ^th century. That’s the era of Dr. Johnson, Alexander Pope, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, John Gay, Laurence Sterne, and John Dryden (well, not quite; he died in 1700, but he still pretty much counts as an 18 ^th century dramatist). (And Mozart, who wrote the only operas I like.) During the 18 ^th century, England saw itself as a reincarnation of the Roman Republic under Augustus Caesar. This period of English history is even called the Augustan Age. They built the famous neoclassical buildings we’re familiar with today, both in London and in Washington, D.C. They translated and rewrote Latin literature. They modeled everything they could on Rome, and they tried to turn English into a Latinate language.

Which gave us rules like don’t split an infinitive. Why not? Because in Latin, an infinitive ( amare, “to love”; legere, “to read”; scribere, “to write”) is one word. You can’t stick an adverb in the middle of one word. Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. You can’t do that in Latin, but in English? As Winston Churchill so famously wrote, “That is something up with which I will not put.” And use the proper case of pronoun. “Who” is subjective case, the subject of a sentence. “Whom” is objective case, a direct or indirect object, the object of a preposition. Thus, “about whom.” There are many more rules. But nowadays we’re not imitation Romans anymore, so we write in a looser fashion.

As a scholar and an editor, I’m of two minds about this looser modern writing. I suspect that no one except Dr. Johnson ever spoke that elaborate Latinate English, and we certainly don’t do so today. In fact, when the authors of books I’m editing starting writing stiff dialogue, I suggest that they go sit in the mall and listen to how people really talk. We talk in sentence fragments. We gesture a lot, and our gestures often become part of our sentences. We talk in rambling, run-on sentences with comma splice errors. We do not speak in Latinate—or even “correct”—English anymore. What I tell my authors to do is listen to rhythms of the sentences they hear. That’s the key to success in writing dialogue. (I almost never tell them, however, that we still speak in a kind of loose iambic pentameter, which is why Shakespeare is understandable today.)

Why do I love my T-shirt? Because of the “whom.” Because it’s formal. Because it’s funny. I have another T-shirt that says Be careful what you say. You may end up in my novel. Especially if your dialogue is interesting .