Terrace House, a Deeper Dive: Group Living

Shared houses have been a common setting of reality TV in the US since the The Real World, and, perhaps, the creators of Terrace House were looking to the West as they started this series back in 2012. However, shared houses are not necessarily a common form of housing in general in Japan. In fact, Hansan and Arisa were interviewed for a short YouTube documentary about shared living after the show and Part 1 was thoughtfully translated by someone on reddit (the user name has since been deleted - I'd love to give them credit). And it's fairly clear from that interview and the tone of show that the produces would like to promote the idea that shared houses can be a stylish and enjoyable way of living which should become more popular in Japan.

As Hansan and Arisa say on the topic in this documentary:

H: It seems sharehouses used to be for foreigners who moved here for work to live together. It started as so-called ‘foreigner houses’. It was not stylish at all, it was just chosen because it was cheap. But now I believe it has this designer-thingy going on. Because it is stylish, people opts for a sharehouse, not just because it is cheap.

A: Because people can’t live by themselves, but they can live in a stylish sharehouse.

H: I thing their popularity will only expand. Now people assume it is just for people who would live alone, but it can form new families and provide interaction between different generations living together.

And, indeed, there is some indication that the show has sparked a trend towards shared houses in Japan.  See, for instance, this article from a month ago in which a journalist tries living in one.

I lived in shared houses in college through grad-school. This was my Terrace House:

It was a seven person house in Palo Alto. Three of us were in grad-school and the rest were twenty-somethings working in the early parts of their careers. Importantly, we all agreed to share the cooking which, I believe, is truly key to a quality shared house. We'd each take a night, and prepare the meal, and everyone had their own approach. Jim would go to a store and just pick whatever ingredients that struck him that day. He was a decent cook, and I never had a bad meal from him, but, apparently, a year or two before he tried to make a casserole with bananas and eggplant that was so bad that everyone immediately got up from the table and started making sandwiches. Susan said it was like eating snot.

Terrace House does not tend to organize itself to the same extent. We do see them sharing meals, and most cooking tends to be done by the women though the men do get brought into process over time. Both Uchi and Taishi seem to be fairly comfortable contributing in the kitchen, to be fair. But except for special occasions, there do not appear to regular shared meals in any permutations of the house. My impression is that Hana on B&GND may have cooked quite a bit more than most housemates - she seemed to enjoy it and was excellent at it.

The other constant issue that group houses have to address is keeping the house clean. I suspect that with all the white carpeting in the houses, that the show does provide some house keeping. But it's also clear in AS that the cast are in charge of their bathrooms, and in BxGND there is at least one house meeting around taking out the trash. The younger members of the house may have never had to deal with cleaning, and so, like all shared house, there has been some conflict around the general level of cleanliness.

The one real disadvantage that the members of Terrace House have in comparison to people living in similar situations in, shall we say, the real world is that they have no control over who gets to join the house. At my favorite house finding new housemates was a consensus process and everyone had to agree to a new housemate. In fact, if you planned to veto a member during an interview, you were to say, "I'm thirsty: can I get you some water" which was a signal to the rest of the members to wrap up the interview. Terrace House members know that they're likely to get someone attractive as a new housemate, but that's about it which much surely add some additional stress on top of the expectations for romantic story lines.

The various called house meetings on the show are very true to what happens in real life. Situations arise and need to be resolved (and almost no one gets to have a Hansan to artfully mediate disputes). Such meetings can be uncomfortable, but often they also pull people closer as group.

Terrace House is, to some extent, style-porn for shared living. The show is aspirational, and presents a cool way of life that some people may not realize is a possibility. Shared living can be occasionally contentious, but it also can be hugely rewarding. I like that one of the secret agendas of the show is bringing the advantages of shared houses to the attention of a wider audience.

Terrace House, A Deeper Dive: Uchi v Taishi

There was a pivotal moment for me in Episode 15 of Boys and Girls In the City: the panel reacts to Uchi and Minori's new relationship by mentioning that they are the fourth couple in the show's history. Yes, that's right: 114 weekly episodes had led to four couples at that point. Doesn't Bachelor in Paradise have like four hook-ups per episode? (I've never seen an episode of Bachelor in Paradise.) Is there any wonder that Japan has the third lowest birth rate in the world? One of the theses implicitly supported by the show is that courtship should be easier and more casual in Japanese culture, and part of that support is seen in the framing and reaction to Uchi's and Taishi's strategy "of ask them all out".

There are a lot of patriarchal rules around dating in this show (and, presumably, current Japanese culture in general), and many of those rules are similar to the rules in the West not too long ago. Terrace House, in this respect, sometimes feels a bit like a dire dating etiquette educational film from the Forties or Fifties in the US. Only guys can initiate dates. Women are encouraged to reveal any interest indirectly through food. Men are expected to act swiftly and decisively when they've identified the sole woman who has sparked their interest by asking the object of their affection out on successively more romantic dates. Women must demure, at least initially, even if they are interested. Feelings must only be intimated at rather than spoken from both sides. I'm sure those of you with higher EQs than I can add deeper rules to the list where successive layers of potential hurt are anticipated and protected.

It's no wonder that Tokui's reaction to B&GND was to host a softcore parody of Terrace House called Pero Pero House ("Happy House") as part of an ongoing series of comedy specials for an Adult satellite channel. The joke. from what I can tell, of the first one, for instance, is that one of the girls gives head one at a time to all of the guys while in an adjacent room the remaining housemates are doing the usual "What's your type?" initial maneuvering.

And so it is interesting when Uchi declares his week, and Taishi declares that he is going to keep trying to find his "love worth dying for" even when he is mocked as a guilty samurai and later dressed down by Cheri for not being clear to all the girls he's asked out. They are breaking some of the rules of social etiquette and doing seems to facilitate the process more directly even if it's a bit self serving. To their credit, they both seem interested in tailoring the dates to the individual women.

The larger issue that all these kerfuffles hide is the almost complete lack of agency (at least, in terms of their romantic life) that is granted to the women on the show. The women do occasionally ask out the men on the show, but it's much rarer. Minori's writing "coward" is probably the strongest act of self-determination in these matters that we see on the show until Cheri pops in from an American reality show and asks out Eric directly (which I found refreshing).

There is also an apparently patriarchal bias in the casting of the romantically unavailable housemates. It's hard to argue a trend from four instances, but, thus far, the two unavailable males I've seen (Shoto in B&GND and Hansan in B&GITC) have girlfriends and the two unavailable females (Rie in B&GND and Riko in B&GITC) have jobs which contractually preclude them from forming a sexual relationship. There's no real equivalent for men in Japanese culture as far as I know (Maybe a Buddhist priest? Are there hot young Zen masters?), but why not cast a young woman with a current boyfriend?

Terrace House as a franchise seems to support the idea that dating should be easier in Japanese culture. Certainly, doing so publicly on a television show that can be watched by your fellow housemates must only make dating more difficult. While I liked Aloha State, I'm fairly sure that a physical move to the West and towards more Western Reality TV tropes is not the right solution for this show. What we really need is a female version of Uchi and Taishi in the next cast: a Wonder Woman to Uchi and Taishi's Batman and Superman. (Or is that what Seina became? Those of us waiting for the fansubs will see eventually, I suppose.)

Terrace House, A Deeper Dive: The Dark Side

So, this week the news spread that Makoto had done a porn scene. That fact is tawdry and sad. As reasonable consumers of reality TV and of this mostly wholesome show in particular, we mostly wish the cast members well. Part of our engagement in Terrace House is seeing these people succeed, not only in the relationships they explore and create while on the show but also in their lives outside the show. We all cheer when Guy wins the tournament in Bali. But the news about Makoto is not the only touch of scandal the show and its cast has experienced. Reality TV has its dark side and part of that arises from how these shows are structured and created.

Thanks to Google Translate, it's not hard to take a look at the news stories that have focused on the show in Japan where it's far more popular (simply copy and paste テラスハウス into your browser.) Late in the original run (BGND) a producer was accused of sexually harassing one of the house members. There has been no evidence before or after the accusation that such harassment occurred. A similar rumor surfaced in the first run that cast members have been offered significant amounts of money for love-confessions and kisses on screen.

Producer manipulation is an inevitable part of any reality TV show. I am fairly sure that the house members are being paid to be on the show. It is likely that some of that payment only comes after the episodes are released: such an approach is a time-tested and effective way to enforce the kinds of NDAs which are necessary to prevent spoilers and maintain interest in the show.

However, it's highly unlikely that cast members are being paid for particular story lines. The housemates know that the producers want stories, and they know that their screen-time will depend on being able to provide story lines. Because the show has no confessionals, I suspect that the housemates interact far less with the production staff than other similar shows.

However, it is clear that no dates, scenes or group events at private venues occur without alerting the production staff ahead of time since releases must be signed (at least in the US) for everyone who appears on screen. Most small businesses are happy to accommodate the show since the advertising is more than enough to compensate for clearing parts of the venue for an hour or two. I do pity the production assistant that had to reach out to all the restaurants that Yusuke made reservations for in the hopes that Lauren would go the dinner with him after the movie.

I do think that other than the location management, the production staff is fairly hands off. They almost certainly arrange the various previous member cameos that happen, but I doubt that they are meeting with the house members frequently and suggesting things to do or say. I suspect that the housemates spend far more time with the tech who is putting on and taking off their mics as they enter and leave the house and replacing batteries as necessary.

I do think it is likely that there is some mild pressure from the production in some situations for some house members to leave the show. I do think any couples which form are expected to leave reasonably quickly to make room for more stories.

Another dark side of the show has been its relationship to Japanese Idol culture. Terrace House has had idols on the show at least twice. I can see why they did so in the first run. It was a way to increase the cachet of the cast as whole by including a successful member of AKB48 in the house. However, idols are contractually forbidden to date in the Japanese idol industry. That fact is hugely sexist and problematic. It also places pressures on the young women in that position who appear on this show that no other housemates have had to face. Rie handled those pressures like a pro. Riko did not, and I actually sympathize with both Hayato and Riko in that situation. The show's choosing to cast any idol is problematic when so much of the focus of the show is on developing romantic relationships. I think the show is hoping for a line where an idol will sacrifice her career for the sake of love which is some particularly foul patriarchal bullshit right there.

It's easy to dismiss the idol issue as something that's only a part of current Japanese culture. However, it was not that long ago in US culture when Brittany Spears' loss of virginity was similarly suppressed. Just because we have not formalized the idol creation process in the same way as Japan does not mean that it is easy for young female pop stars in the US to navigate similar sexist marketing issues.

The surface of Terrace House is one of clean architectural lines, stylish clothing and food porn. Always remember, however, that it is a show, and despite the mantra of "no script at all" there are dark currents under that surface.

Terrace House, a Deeper Dive: Romance and Beyond

I like the fact that Terrace House is not entirely about romance. I know that much of the narrative drive and fan interest in the show derives from the inevitable romantic arcs. But what makes Terrace House great is the fact that it is not a crass hook-up show built solely to generate conflict and drama through the complications of heteronormative sex. The show is relentlessly heteronormative and cisgendered, but what makes it interesting is that the tone of the show conveys an implicit critique of Japanese dating norms. And part of that critique is revealed through the casting of the house members.

In Western reality TV and in the US in particular, cast members are often selected for their potential to generate conflict and drama. I blame MTV's selection of Puck back in Real World Season 3 in 1994. We see the trope of the reality TV star who is "not here to make friends" through to the most recent incarnation of The Bachelorette.

The cast of Terrace House is not selected for their potential to create conflict (though not always their abilities to make friends, Tap). A few have created conflict and have been given a heel-edit, but, as far as I can tell, the members are chosen for their physical attractiveness and their potential to expand their personal brand-awareness and collaterally the brand-awareness of the Terrace House franchise. That's why we have seen so many models, artists and athletes.

It's also why the show has had so many hafu members. Half-Japanese people are disproportionately over-represented in the cast of the Netflix seasons of the show and in Japanese media in general. Certainly, part of that impetus towards more diverse casting is Netflix' desire to see the show succeed outside of Japan. But I think the show is, in part, a reaction to the fact that Japan has an extremely low birth rate and an extremely homogeneous population. The show is looking outward from Japan and seeks to expand what is acceptable and normal for dating relationships.

Of course, there is some danger of objectification, exoticism and even fetishism in this approach. But the glacial pacing of the dating on this show does let us get to know these characters as people first well before the extreme salaciousness of that first holding of hands. The panel also helps to lampshade and critique the dating norms of Japanese culture with Yama often representing the traditional, patriarchal viewpoints and having those viewpoints roundly dismissed by the rest of the panel. I do not think that the show particularly admires or desires Western hook-up culture as a model, but you do not include a former host of Handjob Karaoke on the panel (Tokui, if you did not know) without at least some impulse towards a more open and sex-positive approach to dating. The Japanese Room is hidden until the moment of romantic commitment, but then it's astonishingly available, accepted and even celebrated.

Terrace House undoubtedly desires and encourages successful romances for its cast members. Every nuance of every date is teased apart and deconstructed by the panel. It's clearly one focus of the show. However, always remember that there have been a few cast member in committed relationships outside the show since its first incarnation in Japan, and, of course, Hansan is almost universally well-regarded despite the fact he was in such a relationship. Terrace House is a dating show, but it's so much more than that, and I intend to explore those aspects of the show more deeply in future posts.

Friday poem

Conjure waffles
Conjure sunshine
Conjure palm trees
Conjure sex
 
OK
I’ll tell you how:
Mix the batter
Heat the iron
Or go
To the Egg Shop
And buy a goddamn waffle
 
There is no mystery
Magic is embodied
In life
In healthy lust
And every aspiration attempted
In every fleeting win fulfilled
 
Conjure waffles
Conjure midnight
Conjure failure
Conjure pain
 
Yeah
Life flails and decays
“The centre cannot hold”
 
So what
 
I am Shiva trampled
Better for having flared
With passion
And lost
(So many, many times
--- Does poetry ever help?)
 
Conjure waffles
Conjure sweetness
Conjure power
Conjure hope
 
We are the making
We are the righting
We are the healing
We are the convergence
 
The spirit manifest in the physical
The agents of wise and compassionate God
The angels of restoration
For each other
For each other
In the broken ways we can
 
Conjure waffles
Conjure sunshine
Conjure palm trees
Conjure sex

Addison House

I found the following poem as I was checking to see if I had any other material on Jane, and now that there are at least four of us from Addison House on Facebook, I thought it might be fun to post it up and tag the group on it. I wrote it in 1992, a couple of years after I moved to So. Cal:

Addison House

     Once a month
     (Or, at least, that's what we'd hoped)
     We'd form a hug circle and listen.

     It was a time for asking and appreciation.

     It was a spider-web beautiful pattern, negotiated and cherished
     Like every kind of love
     Really.

     Do I miss that?
     Are you kidding?

     Oh, there were the rough times.
     Terri's window pane shattered exile.
     Laura's enmeshment and severing.
     Jim's retching in the bathroom from so much back-pain.

     And then there were the absurd times.
     Charles asked for something and I said,
     "Only if you stand on a chair and sing a song from 'My Fair Lady' in a high, squeaky voice."
     And he did!
     (You have to know Charles.)
     Or discovering amazing connections with Scott.
     Or the panic that swept the house
     When Jeanette's brother killed a woman in San Jose.

     But, mostly, I miss the talking
          To Jim
          To Susan
          To Nina
          To Charles
          To Terri
          To Scott
          To Tad
          To Meredith
          To Laura
          To Jeanette
          To Lori
     And the home we made together.

___________________________________________

At this point I have no idea what "Laura's enmeshment and severing" meant. Forgotten in the mists of time.

The Final Fragment/Young Love Part 11

And, at last, we reach the final gem:

Untitled XI

          Unasking and surprised,
               You gave me your touches, laughter and conversation
          I asked for love
               You took back your touches
          I asked for touching
               You took back your laughter
          I asked for friendship
               You took back your conversation
          I have nothing left to ask
               You have nothing left to take

Aw, Little Mertseger!

                    But…

          You gave me friendship
               I gave you pain
          You gave me attention
               I gave you pain
          You gave me nothing
               I gave you pain

Well, no. You are being melodramatic, LM. You gave her mild discomfort and awkwardness in a tight living situation. You were, essentially, a rash. You could be ignored except for the occasional flare-ups.

          You can give me nothing less
               I can give you nothing more

                    Why?

          Because you and I could not be an us
          Because I was too self-possessed
          Because you were too afraid

No, not really. She was just uninterested and hoping that avoiding Little Mertseger would not be too much of a hassle in the short-term.

          Because I expected too much
          Because you felt too little
          Because you and I were too young in many ways

Actually, that's reasonably accurate

                    And so?

          You and I can grow from this
          If we let

And that's where it all ends, fragmentary and incomplete, like many such sagas.

I had a meeting Berkeley today. Here's where the whole tragicomedy occurred:


I found solace in music that horrible last quarter playing on the streets of Berkeley with a group called (yes) The Troubadours.

Tim changed universities after that quarter, and Jane and he broke up. A year or so later (okay, I'll kiss and tell) Lisa Nakamoto gave me my first kiss (which may amuse any of my high school friends who might find this post up on Facebook). I asked Lisa out a couple of times immediately after that, but she did not want to take it any further. Two year later I had my first real, albeit brief, relationship.

I did see Jane a few times thereafter. I had a hot tub party at my folk's place three years later, and both Jane and Tim came (I got to see Jane in a one-piece! More fuel for the fire.) Jane and I went out twice alone together in the years following: we went to the SF Zoo right after she graduated, and I had lunch with her on one visit to So Cal (I bought her a dozen safely yellow roses, but did not give them to her.)

Seven years after the mess, I took a job teaching at Cal State Fullerton while I finished up my PhD.,and gave her a call from my depressing institutional, windowless office once I was settled in. I caught a huge whiff of the "you may be stalking me" vibe from that conversation, and, finally, let it go. In following year I started dating in earnest.

I have my regrets, and the whole episode was embarrassing. However, it opened me up in a lot of ways, and I do not, for all that, regret the poetry. I do not regret the aspiration and the lust. I do regret the dorkiness and lack of anything remotely resembling cool. However, it was a step on the way, and the message in the end is that it does get better. For all the mistakes, it does get better.

...sigh...Jane.

UPDATE:

Danny has thoughtfully provided a picture of many of the participants:


From left to right, that's Chris, Danny, Some Guy From Another Floor Who We Really Didn't Like And Did Not Want In The Picture, Yvonne, Jane, Me, and Eric B. (explicitly not the same as Edie's boyfriend at the time, Eric H.) This was taken near the end of the year, and I was happy for the moment being next to her. That's probably Danny's bed we're all on. I don't know why Jane had a pillow with the word "Bullshit" on it.

The Divine Oracle of False Hopes/Young Love Part 10

Back in the second quarter before the end of life as I knew it, things had gotten marginally better, and Jane was not avoiding me entirely
 

Untitled IX

 
(When I converted all these poems to HTML years ago, I gave the untitled ones a number.)

          To revel in the inexplicable
          To find delight in swirling confusion
          To laugh while facing the intractable
          To smile at deception and illusion
 
Mottos that I still try to live by. 
 
Unfortunately, Little Mertseger did not think these things were good at the time.

          Do you want me to care and not to care?
          Do you want me to play and stay away?
 
Did Jane give me some mixed signals?  Well, when your every action and expression is being monitored like it's an oracle of the Goddess Aphrodite, then mixed signals are inevitable.  Any mixed signals were purely a matter of LM's interpretation. 
 
I carried a torch for Jane for way too long.  At one point in grad-school I sent her a mix-tape(!) and letter lightly wishing we could go nude bowling on a tropical island somewhere (!!).  She replied with a friendly letter, much to my surprise.  The perfume on the otherwise innocuous letter was enough to make me pine for another two or three years.  Did she intend to put perfume on the letter, or did she not wash her hands that morning?

          I can’t know and remain unaware.
          I want to understand you.  There’s no way.
 
No, LM, you do not want to understand.  You do not want to accept a clear and direct rejection.  You want to cling to false hopes.

          I’ve watched the beauty play across your face
          Happy to be talking to you again.
 
I wish I could have just enjoyed those moments.  But lust demands more, does it not?  Sigh...

          Do you want me to help you find your place,
          And yet not want me to help at all, Jane?
 
Because it's her interests that I really have in mind.  What bullshit.

          I guess I care too much and not enough
          Why does this friendship have to be so rough?
 
No, LM, Jane awoke in you a good old animal rut, and from the moment you declared your love for her and she said no it could never really be a friendship, not while your desire remained overwhelming. 
 
Just one more poem to go in the grand saga of....sigh...Jane.

Martyrdom for Idiots/Young Love Part 9

It was the last year of quarters at Cal: next year they would switch to semesters.  I returned from winter-break in full wallow mode for the second quarter.  I thoroughly given up the ghost that I was writing for Jane, and so these last three poems were written with no expectation that she would ever see them.
 

A Second Rather Poor Love Sonnet Written ‘Midst a Typical Crush

 
I'm sure you will be pleased to know that there is no third one in the series.

          Pound it down, the nail beaten into flesh:
 
Wait, is Little Mertseger really going to compare his unrequited love for Jane to ...

          Every time I see your smile I’m hung
          On a cross-spanned moment, feeling the fresh,
 
As Pamie said, "Jesus." 
 
Literally.

          Daylong torture until my spirit’s sunk
          In a stormy hell of frustrate desire.
          My every strand of hope has unraveled
          And burned in the unnoticing fire
 
Which is it, crucifixion or immolation?  Make up your mind, LM!

          Of your eyes from which I cannot travel.
 
Now that is an awkwardly constructed sentence.

          Dead, I am not God to rise and heaven find,
          And so my soul treads the long, awful miles
          To the Last Despair, my body left behind
 
Ah, yes, the Random Capitalization of deep significance.  Unfortunately, I still use that device. 

          An empty husk crucified by your smiles.
 
"Crucified by your smiles" is good.  Probably not good enough to build an entire sonnet around.

          Only your touch will warm these cold remains,
          And until that time I will Rest In Pain.
 
The deepest irony here is, of course, that while I was perfectly aware that I was being a martyr and that I had enough detachment to connect my unrequited love for Jane to earlier crushes on women who I had never really interacted, things were not really as bad as they could be and things were going to get worse. 
 
In the second quarter of quarter of my junior year I took the hardest class of my college career:  Mathematical Analysis.  The course essentially takes all the results you might be taught in your first year Calculus course if you're a science or engineering major and proves them rigorously.  IIRC, we started off with the axiom that 0 does not equal 1, and proved 1+1 = 2 in the first problem set.  The take-home final had us prove a version of the Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem (every continuous function of a compact set to itself will map at last one point to itself) which sounds remarkably esoteric until you learn that it's very much on the same line of reasoning that results in the Nash Equilibrium of A Beautiful Mind fame.  Fueled, in part, by the sublimation and avoidance of whole...sigh...Jane crisis, I got one of my three A+'s, the one that I'm most proud.
 
After picking up my grade that afternoon I asked Jane's roommate Yvonne if Jane and Tim were a thing.  She said yes, and I became some form of the walking dead as I headed into spring break.
 
I suppose it could have been worse.  I never heard sex sounds coming from their rooms, nor even saw them kissing.  They were considerate of my feelings and discrete.  But when the last episode of MASH screened that spring, the rest of the floor gathered in Tim's room to watch, and I went to watch in the lounge on the ground floor sad that she was watching in his arms as Hawkeye went insane.

The Bitter Sweetness/Young Love Part 8

 

On Love

Yes, I'm sure this sonnet will last for the ages as one of the definitive expositions of love.  Oh, yeah, right up there with Will's and Edna's.
 
In fact, after this episode of unrequited love, I made an effort to avoid using the word "love" in my poetry even in the sonnets I wrote for later girlfriends and my wife.  "Love" is weak.  Oh, It's a powerful concept, a powerful emotion, but it's a weak, weak word.  Vague.  Incapable of bearing the specificity of this individual, this moment, this rising tide of pulse and affection.
 
And I do not, by the way, find the distinctions between eros, amour, and agape all that useful.  That taxonomy seemed like such a revelation when I first learned of it in my church's youth group.  But now, mostly,  it just seems to be a tool for repression and sublimation.
 
Gah!  It's okay that you want to fuck her.  Really.  It is.  You certainly don't have to act on that fact, nor, even express that desire to her.  The usual social boundaries are perfectly necessary.  They largely work at keeping people emotionally and physically safe.  Learning to negotiate those boundaries does not have to be disaster (though, for almost all of us it will be at one point or another).  That's okay: there is grace, healing and life goes on.
 
Agape is nice, in its tepid way.  Compassion and service and working for justice are all worthy things.  Go and do them.  But agape is no substitute for good, healthy lust.  For it is in lust that we are most engaged in life, in that marvelous, miraculous chain of creation and renewal.
 
However, I am a sucker for amour, and I'm not sure that it's entirely good for me.  "To love, pure and chaste, from a far."  Hell, I probably sang "The Impossible Dream" in the shower while this whole mess was going on.  Thing about amour is that it can be entirely one-sided.  You can carry it with you no matter what happens, no matter what the other person feels or wants.  It's beautiful, but it can be a trap.  It can be perfectly safe, in a way that would have appalled the troubadours who invented it.  The idea of courtly love was meant to subvert the dominant social paradigm.  It was meant to be dangerous and cross socially acceptable boundaries. 
 
          How can I describe the hurting, the bliss,
          The lonely hours laying awake at night,
          The confusion about what was amiss,
          The despair that it would not work out right,
          And the blinding rush of hope that maybe
          – Just maybe, in spite of the odds – it would?
 
I'd probably describe it now as a perfectly normal part of learning to love that I should have confronted years earlier.

          How can I tell of my having to see
          You laughing and sorely wishing I could
          Share even that small joy with you again?
 
After she rejected me, Jane tried to avoid me to the extent possible given that our rooms were two doors away from each other.  But, inevitably, I'd encounter her, and her face would fall, and she'd bail.  It got better, but remained awkward.

          The good feelings and all those painful ones
          Are both, I believe, part of love.  And, Jane,
          Love does not diminish once it’s begun.
          And so, despite the pain, I still love you
          And hope that someday you will love me too.
 
It was the fall of 1982 at Cal, and so I had the additionally surreal experience of getting to sit next to Jane after she rejected me at the Big Game which concluded with The Play.  See, a last second triumph was possible!  I'd just keep lateraling and refuse to be downed as I ran through the Stanford Band of her rejection.
 
And so I wrote these sonnets and bought a box of fancy gray Crane stationary, carefully typed up all seven of them on my electric typewriter and put them in a nice black report binder to give to her for Christmas!  (Gray and black?  How romantic.)  Thank goodness I chickened out about giving them to her. 
 
I did write three more poems about her that year, and so we are approaching the end of the story.

Shall I Compare Thee/Young Love Part 7

At last we reach a poem that is a bit more like a love sonnet in that it's a tiny step in the right direction towards being more direct.  It's still a failure in many ways, though.
 

On You

 
Yes, let's focus more of my unwanted attention "on you".  I'm sure that will help.

          I want to say how beautiful you are.
 
I want to say how beautiful you are, but, instead, I will only speak of it indirectly.
 
There are two pertinent facts here.  Jane is gorgeous, but back then she had all the normal insecurities of any other college freshman.  Since men are behind the curve in our social, emotional and sexual development, most guys can not address that tangle at that age.  I certainly did not have the tools.  Most guys learn not to go there until we're well within in the safety of the make-out zone.

          I could write in some really schmaltzy style
          About your soft raven hair or the star
          That flashes in your eyes when you smile.
 
My particular issue for a long, long time was a lack of immediacy of my feelings and their expression.  I'd only figure out I liked this girl when the date was over, and I had a chance to process it.  And then all the emotions would pour out upon the page, by which point the girl assumed that nothing was there and had already moved on.
 
I would have been better off had I written directly about how hott she was.  She would, almost certainly, have been incapable of hearing it amidst her anxiety about her freshman two, but, at least, doing so would have been more honest.

          But the beauty that overwhelms me so
          Is, instead, an inner glow of caring.
 
No, Little Mertseger, Jane sympathized with you once in a friendly way.  She was no saint: just a nice, normal young woman.  That glow you're seeing?  It's a healthy and wonderful part of your self that your overlaying on your image of her.

          You’ve much inside of you to give, and, though
          I may never be a part of that sharing,
          I hope that you will open up to someone
 
Oh, oh, oh!  Little Mertseger, be careful of what you wish for!  If you think it's bad now, wait until she starts seeing Tim two doors down that hall. 
 
Ow.

          So that you may know the same joy I felt
          Once the vibrations of love had begun
          To warm me and make my icy core melt.
 
As Maude says, "Oh, Harold... That's *wonderful*. Go and love some more. "

          Your beauty lays in what you have to share,
          As well as in your eyes and body fair.
 
No, not really.  I mean, Jane, was nice enough.  She was a little depressive for perfectly reasonable reasons that it is not my place to share.  No, her beauty, as I knew it, was all from wonderful, healthy, superficial reasons.  Fantastic cheekbones, large captivating eyes, a tall, mesomorphic frame, great legs, and full lips that were quick to smile.  Sigh...Jane.

My Superpower: An Ineffable Capacity to Bore/Young Love Part 6

Okay, so maybe whining is not the answer to winning Jane's affection.  Maybe if I apply my vastly greater perspective as a JUNIOR, I can help her with her problems:
 

On College

          What is college life really about, Jane?
 
As you can see from the fact that I ended a line with it, her name really is Jane.  I shan't reveal her last name, but it would not matter much if I did.  The name she had in college does not seem to show up on the web, and so I presume she got married at some point.

          Problem sets, boring lectures, GPA’s,
          No time to sleep, intellectual strain,
          Declaring majors and long final days?
 
I managed to sleep ten-hours a night in my college days (to the envy and disgust of my floormates).  I never could understand the ritual of going to a library for hours each night, talking to each other, and avoiding actually doing the assignments and then complaining about not getting enough sleep.  I'd work on the problem sets in the afternoon, and if there were any problems I could not solve, I'd review them before sleeping, and then, more often than not, wake up with the answer. 

          The important part of college involves
          None of these, for beneath the constant strife
          You will find that most people need to solve
          The dilemma of an undeclared life.
 
And that remains true.

          You must discover yourself and your needs.

Know thyself! 
 
Is this the least romantic love sonnet ever written?
 
          You must find out what is important to you.
          And after you know yourself well indeed
          You will know, at last, what you want to do.
          But unless you learn that, all the knowledge
          You’ve gained will be worthless after college.
 
Yes, yes it is.

Neediness and the Anima/Young Love Part 5

The details are hazy to me after all these years, but I apparently presented the previous three poems to...sigh, Jane.  I probably copied them from the lab-book in which I wrote my poetry back then to the blue stationary I used back in those pre-internet and e-mail days using a blue, erasable ink pen.  We join the program already in progress:
 

After That Black Friday

 
One week after we saw Pink Floyd: The Wall she rejected me.  The exact way and location has been, thankfully, expunged from my memory at this point.  I do know that she felt bad about it, and that at least it was not the more usual, "We can still be friends." speech.

          Please don’t shut me out, I need to talk to you.
 
Yes, please: I'm sure the puissant force of my neediness is exactly what can turn this relationship around.

          I’m sorry about what happened last week.
          I see now what I was trying to do:
          Forcing you to become THE ONE I seek.
 
Is this the point where we talk about projection? 
 
Robert Bly calls THE ONE "the golden-haired one" in Iron John, and makes the case that guys project the "perfect woman" on the first woman we fall for when, in fact, that perfect woman is an idealized part of our own psyche (the anima).  Most woman will, naturally enough, flee at the first whiff of such expectations.  Women go through similar issues with their animus, though Bly makes the case that there are some differences in how men and women go about integrating these other sides of their personality.

          You said you couldn’t be "special" to me,
          And for days after that I raged inside
          Like some spoiled brat deprived of his candy,

Well, I am an only child, and pretty used to getting my way.
 
          A wise friend’s letter came to turn the tide.

Here's where I must say that my friends really came through for me during that time.  John wrote me lovely letters of encouragement during the weeks of this little drama.   Then over Christmas break all my high school friends helped me commiserate.
 
It was a couple of years later, after he came out to me, that I learned that John was going through a similar, but far more difficult, crisis over his straight roommate at the very same time.  I am extremely grateful and amazed that he would support me while his being in the closet prevented him from seeking similar support from me.
 
          It’s you I like, not what you can give me,
 
Bullshit.

          And I write because I enjoy writing,

Truth.
 
          Not because I expect you, Jane, to be
          Part of something "special" and exciting.

Bullshit.
 
          Even if you give me nothing, you see,
          You are already someone special to me.
 
And bullshit, yet again.
 
Yes, Little Mertseger, she was special to you, but you were not attractive to her.  It's really that simple.  The loftiest poetry in the world (let alone this screed of neediness and bullshit) could not change that fact.

The Agony and...Well, the Agony/Young Love Part 4

Okay, so here's where I reach the peak of squirm. We still have four poems to go in this first part of the...sigh, Jane saga, but I came to my senses and never gave them to her. This one though, this one is the one I regret giving her. It would be a fine poem to save and present later in a relationship, but...

The only jury I ever sat on was for an indecent exposure case. A delivery driver was dropping off paper at a local company, and thought he was getting powerful signals from the cute receptionist. She had, for instance, shown him the storage closet and stretched a bit from her morning of sitting at the phone, and he took that as the universal bow-bow-chika of a porn scene, apparently. In any case, when she turn around at her desk to sign the invoice, there he was with his pants down around his thighs. She objected, he fled and by the time he had returned the truck that day, he was fired.

He did not contest the facts, and so the case was whether his intent met that of the indecent exposure law. He took the stand, and had the following exchange with the prosecutor:

PROSECUTOR: You had delivered paper to that company several times before?
ACCUSED: Yes, Sir.
PROSECUTOR: And you had seen the receptionist at least some of the previous times?
ACCUSED: Yes, Sir.
PROSECUTOR: And you found her attractive?
ACCUSED: Yes, Sir.
PROSECUTOR: Did you ever ask her out on a date?
ACCUSED: No, Sir.

And we in the jury were like, "You know, you might just think about that before you pull your pants down next time." We deliberated a whole fifteen minutes trying to find any way to interpret the intent of the law in his favor, but we found him guilty.

And so it goes with Little Mertseger: could I not have just asked Jane out again before writing:

Thank You

          In this last poem I’d like to say thank you
          For the hours we’ve spent this past week talking,
          For caring when I felt depressed and blue,
          For telling me so much after walking
          Back from the movie that cold Friday night.

Apparently, I'd share my sadness of being a lonely guy, and she'd shared her sadness over of being away from home and the crunch of the studies at Cal. And we had said some words of encouragement to each other.

          Because, believe it or not, I do care
          That you can see the joy and delight

That line should read more towards "I do care/whether or not you can see..." but the usual squeezing into ten syllables squeezed out some sense.

          That permeates this world. I’d like to share
          The secret of the happiness I feel

[DALEK VOICE]: CLICHE ALERT! CLICHE ALERT!

          Even in the deepest pit of depression:

Ugh: I usually at least try to avoid them.

          It is the knowledge that no one can steal
          From me such moments of confirmation
          That there are people who care like you do,
          And so I say thank you and I love you.

And so that's it. My great squirmy shame: the first time I told any woman that I loved them was in a sonnet after a single, perfectly chaste, kinda, sorta, if-you-squint-the-right-way date.

The Patriarchy Strikes Back/Young Love Part 3

We talked a bit into the night after watching Pink Floyd: The Wall. Jane was a freshman at that point and a bit overwhelmed by college life and the challenges of Cal. A beautiful women confessing her flaws? Like catnip. Ogg man. Ogg fix things for you. Ogg make all better. Take you to cave, Ogg will, and

…ravish you?

Nope. Write another sonnet:

Second Thoughts

See what I did there? It’s the second sonnet in the series. Face meet palm.

          Maybe you don’t like sonnets – I don’t care.

And here we see the violence inherent in the system.

At this point even Little Mertseger is dimly aware that Jane might not want sonnets written for her at that particular point in her life from this particular guy. But he’s going to write ‘em for her anyway because that’s what a man does. A manly man gives due consideration to what a woman wants, ignores it, and then does what he wants anyway.

Mary Daly died a couple of weeks ago.

          Sometimes a poem is the only way
          To say something. Because you have to dare,
          If you want to communicate, O.K.?

Just who am I trying to convince here?

          Jane, you are not a husk but a cocoon.

And what woman would not want to hear that she’s not a husk, really?

          I have seen the butterfly in your smile,
          Heard it in your laughter saying, "Soon…soon…"
          And watched the wings flash in your eyes a while.

Have we thoroughly ground the butterfly metaphor into a messy pulp yet?*

          But you mustn’t be so hard on yourself.

That could be my job, if you’d just let me in.

          You’ve got to open up your curtains, Jane,
          And let your sunshine out, not leave it shelved

“Let your sunshine out” is probably the only slightly redeeming twist in this poem.

          In some musty corner smothered by rain.

But exactly how does one shelve sunshine? And how can rain smother anything, let alone musty-corneredly shelved sunshine?

          You’ve got to see the butterfly within
          Before you’ll feel your soul fly with the wind.**

Oh, the overarching sentiment of the poem is not horrible. Jane feels bad, and I’d like to be there for her. But I probably thought of myself as a feminist at that point, but was thoroughly lacking in any self-awareness about how that might matter in, you know, dating women.

*No, we have not.

**Now we have.

The Threshold of Doom/Young Love Part 2

It would be easy to blame Edie and Eric, but they were only the trigger, really. 
 
The real question is why in my junior year at Cal I decided to apply for a coed dorm floor after two years of listing no-preference and being assigned to all-guy floors.  My guess is that I just wanted to be on a coed floor because everyone else wanted to be on a coed floor.  In any case, it was on the fourth floor of Freeborn Hall at UC Berkeley in the fall of 1982 where the whole disaster took place.
 
See, I had been perfectly comfortable as an observer of the whole love thang.  It was safe and easy to keep it at a distance and watch while it happened all around me.  I was, like many mathematicians, comfortable in spaces of interiority and seeing the angst and roil of the hormone-fueled couplings around me merge and purge with and air of faint amusement.  How droll it all seemed.
 
But then, Edie and I were in Eric’s room and we decided to go see Poltergeist still playing that fall at the Grand Lake Theater.  Neither Edie nor Eric knew that it was their first date, to be fair.  But they were holding hands by the time we were seated.  And macking intensely by the time Carol Anne in the film announced “They’re here.”  Meanwhile, I broke in two, forgotten in the sidecar next to them.
 
And so I climbed up the hill to my sacred grove and cried.  It was finally time to admit that I was human.
 
And so, couple weeks later Yvonne and Danny were orbiting closer, and I had gotten to know Yvonne’s roommate…sigh…Jane.  That Friday we went over to the California Theatres where Danny and Yvonne went to My Favorite Year and Jane and I went to Pink Floyd: The Wall.  Which we bonded over hating.  (Writhing maggots lose me every time).  So, of course, the obvious thing to do while she was away that weekend was write her three sonnets and then (“No, Little Mertseger, don’t do it!”) give them to her. 
 
Here’s the first one:

Saturday Afternoon

Because it is ever so important to know exactly what I did in the hours following our talking together.
 
          Poets, lovers, and joggers – I missed you.
 
Not a bad sentiment, really.  But which of these three things is not like the other?
 
          I went into the hills after you left
          To take in the sunlight and enjoy the view.
 
Fair enough.
 
          And to write.  But words, no matter how deft,
          Just cannot describe how happily green
          The grass was as it pushed against the dry
          Brown of last year.  I wish you could have seen
          The awesome blue of that warm winter sky.
 
California is weird.  It’s the winter rather than the spring when life returns to the hills after the first rain falls.  Of course, it was the green of lust pushing against the brown of my repressed desires that was really the issue here.
 
          And all around people walking in pairs;
          People running up hills, while I just looked.
 
Here’s where I stop “just looking” … and start writing? 
 
Oh, well, at least it was a step towards interacting with another human being.  A horribly embarrassing, uncool and misguided step, but a step nonetheless.
 
          But, Jane, I don’t want to jog, and, I swear,
          I rather take you than my poetry book.
 
Wink, wink, nudge, nudge: say no more!
 
          For I would try to make you see
          The wonder and the possibilities.
 
“make you see” is rather problematic, in’t it?  I would be her knight in shining armor rescuing the fair damsel from her own issues.  Would were it ever so easy. 
 
It’s not a bad little poem, but it is pretty indirect.  However, we’d had one chaste, semi-agreeable, sort-of date, and I was writing sonnets.  And that’s the issue right there.  I’m sure that…sigh…Jane had no idea whatsoever that this was coming.

Pulling off the scab/Young Love Part 1

So Pamie has found a journal she wrote when she was fifteen, and is presenting entries with commentary of the rage of hormones that is being fifteen, perpetually crushing, and wrestling the pain to the page.  It's delightful, often hilarious, and you should read it.
 
It's great because it is so universal and specific at the same time.  She's a pro, and the over-wrought language of her young love was, most likely, a necessary part of the development of her craft and her person.  It's beautiful, beautiful stuff.
 
I can match her, phrase for embarrassing phrase, and so in the spirit of internet camaraderie and terrible memes, I will present the sonnets I wrote for...sigh...Jane.  All my poetry is already up on the web, and you can read ahead starting here (press the red ball to read earlier commentary). 
 
Boys develop later than girls, of course, and my emotional development was later than most, and so I really did not fall off the cliff over someone I actually interacted with until my junior year in college.  Let's, however, back up a bit to the safety of a crush over someone to whom I literally said two words ("Harvard Co-op", if you must know). 

A Rather Poor Love Sonnet Written ‘Midst a Typical Crush

See, even as I wrote the piece, I knew it was just another crush.
 
          I’d write a sonnet every day and so
          Wrench the sun to this page, if it would light
          Your cheeks in the ancient vernal glow
          That shivers me when you fill my empty sight.
 
Because, naturally, writing sonnets is what gets women hot. 
 
Perhaps it's a writer thing in which it's far safer to pour your feelings out on the page rather than actually talk to someone.
 
I do like the phrase "ancient vernal glow": in other words, "horniness".
 
          But you’re encased in the amber distance,
 
Who's encased here?  Certainly not this fine young coed who doesn't even know I exist.
 
          A frozen span that lets me neither speak
 
Ah, yes, me that's who.
 
          Nor know whether behind your bright laughter glance
          There’s a woman who’d understand these weak
          Words, or whether your soft spring-shine smile hides
          A void of thought, spirit, hope or passion.
 
Because this girl I'm lusting for is either capable of understanding, you know, English or is a vacuous zombie.  Those are all the options.  Yup.
 
          For love in all its forms will not abide
          Solely upon a body’s attraction.
 
No, it requires peanut-brittle as well.  Or something.
 
          You attract me deeply, but I must know
          That you contain a heart, a mind, a soul.
 
Did I go there?  I went there.  Little Mertseger was a pig.  Or just stupid. 
 
Ah, well, as you can see LM had a lot of growing to do, and it was going to get worse, much worse, before it got better.

The Wicker Man: a Rock Opera about the Ultimate Sacrifice

The first thing you need to know about the current production of The Wicker Man as a rock opera currently playing in San Francisco through Oct. 25 is that it is essentially a community-theater production of the original film. I like community theater, but it has its limitations. In this case, those limitations include a postage-stamp-sized stage, and no scenery beyond a reasonably deft faux stained-glassed window which is covered up after the first scene. Given those limitations, the production is a qualified delight.

The venue is The Dark Room, a seedy bar in the Mission which has been somewhat converted into a seedy theater. The bar remains along the left-hand wall serving as the home of the light and sound boards. Surprisingly, the sound system is audiophile-level superb and effortlessly and accurately delivered the casts' voices. The theater seats maybe a hundred and a BYOB (beer mostly) crowd of, maybe, forty showed up for Saturday night's show. I sat immediate in front of DAN FOLEY's (Captain, Harbormaster and Photographer) affable Mom and Aunt.

The script is quite faithful to the 1973 movie. I'm guessing that roughly half of the dialog is taken straight from the film. The setting has been moved "an island across the Bay", and the period is nebulous. The time-line is compressed a bit, as is the running time (maybe 85 minutes here from 100 in the movie). Minor changes to the film occur throughout. Summerisle's (STEFFANOS X) first name is "Lord", for instance, and May Morrison (ERIN LUCAS) is a tailor. The imaginary Wicker Man is placed prominently in the middle of the village green. Essentially, this stage production is The Wicker Man (1973) minus the music of Paul Giovanni plus the music of Jim Fourniadis.

The music is serviceable and suggestive of rock operas of the era (Hair,Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar) though a bit less ambitious. The rock-combo orchestrations are pre-recorded but the cast and sound-guy easily hit all the cues. The first song, a brief sermonette on a passage from Job sung by the lead, FLYNNE DE MARCO (Sargeant Neil Howie), and the finale, a contrapuntal piece between the chorus of Pagan islanders and Sergeant Howie, are both pretty good (I'm a sucker for polyphony). "The Landlord's Daughter" from the original is sung in its entirely, and a verse of "The Tinker of Rye" is sung by DAN FOLEY in an awkward scene transition.

The performances are enthusiastic and fairly broad. DE MARCO anchors the show reasonably well. He had some pitch problems in the first song, but his nerves seemed to settle thereafter. His Sergeant Howie references Woodward's fairly closely. STEFFANOS X's Lord Summerisle is suitably charismatic, and KHAMARA PETTUS' Willow is pretty and appropriately burlesque (probably the only reasonable choice given the lack of nudity or, you know, even stage walls). The various bit players generally suit their roles. Props to MIKL-EM for gamely playing the role of an eight-year old girl (Myrtle Morrison) in addition to the Grave Digger and the Doctor.

All in all, the show is well worth the price, and I recommend Bay Area Pagans checking it out. If you like the 1973 film, then this show is a lively and small variation on the same material. Be sure to bring a beer in a brown paper bag (or you will feel horribly out of fashion) and enjoy the romp.
________________________________________________

Here's some textual criticism of the show from a Pagan perspective. Both the show and original film are largely unaware of Neo-Paganism (the show includes a invocation of the elements at the sacrifice which is not present in the film suggesting some additional familiarity), and that's okay. Do we, after all, really want to be portrayed as a community capable of conspiring to human sacrifice? Been there, done the Satanic Panic of the 80's. However, I do feel that the show misses some opportunities in its update.

Sergeant Howie's Scottish Presbyterian evangelicalism is quite a different flavor to that we are more familiar with in the US. Howie's faith is stern, austere, and ascetic. It might be more interesting to explore the character as a more scary kind of US evangelical: outgoing, compelled to witness no matter how awkward the situation, and utterly convinced that there existed a golden era of traditional, Red-state values no matter how little evidence there is that such an era actually existed. I expect that the character of Sergeant Howie would relate much more to the sufferings of Paul than Job, for instance.

Similarly, it might be more interesting to tie the Summerislanders closer to California, if that's where you wish to set the play. California was the home of The Peoples Temple and Heaven's Gate, after all, and a bunch of us go out to the desert every year to burn a giant figure of a man. FBI Agent Howie at Burning Man? Am I wrong or does it almost write itself?

But, of course, that would not be the Wicker Man. Nevertheless, the show might be a spicier if it incorporated more of the languages of both modern evangelicalism (WWJD, Jesus is my boyfriend, etc.) and modern Paganism (theoretical support for polyamory, anti-patriarchal rhetoric, fanatical Green lifestyle, etc.).

Thoughts On Duotheism

So, back when I was in the fifth and final semester of training for The Third Road, I somehow got into my mind that I should write an ancient holy book. And so I told a couple of my oldest and dearest friends that I was doing so, and asked them what they'd like to see included. They both happen to be gay, and so one said "gay marriage". It was 1997 and I was reading The Witches Bible by the Farrars as I rode across the Bay on a ferry at dawn because BART was on strike.

The Third Road is an off-shoot of Feri Tradition, and so duotheism does not play as central of a role as it does in Wicca. In Anderson's Feri Creation Myth (a version of which can be found in Spiral Dance) the Great White Goddess splits of into two other Goddesses and then three other Gods, one of which (Dian Y Glas) becomes Her Consort and partner.

The question I had to address as I worked on The Book of Nub was how could placing a heterosexual couple at the center of everything not be biased against non-monogamous, non-heterosexuals? I came up with several possibilities and used at least three in the piece.

First, there was this idea of transformation that is already inherent in the Feri Creation Myth. Perhaps, the sexuality of the Gods is fluid. Affirming that viewpoint would allow the pair of Gods to be at the center of everything, and, thus, their relationship could be the mythological basis supporting all homosexual and heterosexual pairings. But, then, why only two? I could imagine the Gods splitting and interacting in ways that support all healthy human interactions. But, then, why human? Was I really going to have to tell a story that would cover the thousands of mating types of some fungal sexuality? Going down this path was getting messy. I intuited that the myth was losing power.

So how about putting Goddess and God back at the center of everything, and argue that even if gays and lesbians could not relate to their relationship, they could at least acknowledge that they were the children of one man and one woman? Bleh. I want my passion for my lover and not the passion of my parents to be reflected in the passion of my Gods for each other. However worthy my parents' passion is for each other, it's not my passion. How could I accept less for homosexual brothers and sisters?

Why did I find the sexual passion of the Gods for each other as so affirming of our existence? Why did I find it so powerful? The Wiccans use the term "polarity" to describe the forces that drive the universe. The attraction of oppositely charged particles and, indeed, all physical forces are seen to be mythologically connected to the sexual attraction between Goddess and God. There is a huge, powerful idea in there that I wanted in my book.

The one thing that every healthy sexual encounter has, no matter what its stripe, is that it is one being reaching toward another. The thing that I found most powerful in Wiccan duotheism is that idea that this raw connection between my self and an other in sexual intimacy reflects and encapsulates the similar intimacy the greater Powers that drive the All That Is. Every human could certainly relate to their self interacting with an other (or others) in that dance of sexual attraction. Thus, the first pervading version of duotheism in The Book of Nub is that between Self and Other. We are Selves striving for that intimate connection to the Goddess as Other, and She reciprocates and epitomizes and fulfills that attraction in Her relationship to God and to the Universe.

But what is the best way to express how God and Goddess are intimately interconnected? Francesca (my teacher) saw the Goddess as the darkness between the stars and the God as "...the light that emerges from the darkness to fructify it." That is, They are a mutually arising pair of opposites. I thought about Mother Earth and Father Time, and thought that another way to think of Them is as space and time, providing the ground for everything to be and become. And so this second approach to duotheism that I incorporated into The Book of Nub.

But, still, even though I spent an entire chapter showing how the God and Goddess' relationship affirms all committed human relationships, I did not feel that this fully affirmed good gay sex. And so I brought in some lesser Gods and Goddesses to show how purely gay and lesbian relationships might drive our world as well. Thus, Nub 8: 10-12 reads "The beautiful Goddess of Shore lies naked before Her lover Goddess Ocean. The romance of the Full Moon excites Them, and the Ocean licks deep the sacred hollows of Shore. In wave after wave of delight They come together, and the roar of Their Passion never ceases." (As a typical heterosexual male, I must say I find those lines hot, if I do say so myself. Oh, why must we fetishize the lesbians?)

And so to summarize my duotheistic ontology, I believe that the center motive that drives our Universe is that reaching out between Self and Other. The Goddess brings others into being that She and we might experience that longing, that lust and that love. The Goddess and the God are the exemplars of that Passion which drives the All That Is, and, indeed, it is within Them as space and Time that we have our being. Between us and Them are myriads of being including other powerful Gods and Goddess whose lust for each other drives particular systems within this Universe as well.

After all this material was worked out and written down, Francesca coincidentally afforded my fellow students and I the chance to do a small ritual with Fred Lamond who was one of Gardner's initiates. He's a lovely, lovely gentleman, and after the ritual we got a-talking about Wicca and thealogy, as one might hope. I read for him Nub 4: 1-2:

The Goddess delights in Darkness as well as Light, in silence as well as sound, in the transformation of death as well as the growth in life. The Goddess darkens like the Moon. She is the silence of mystery. She enfolds you soft within Her arms at every transition of Life to Death and Death to Life. For all meaning is rooted in contrast, and She is the Mother of Wisdom.

She is the trellis upon which the vines of being grow. Everything is rooted in the same material and clings to the same structure as it reaches toward the Light of its Godhood. Her manna is your uniqueness discovered in your isolation from the Other. Her nectar is the oneness you find in your connection to, immersion in and embracing of the Other. You eat and are, in turn, consumed, "for all things feed one another."

Truly, there is but one polarity: that between Self and Other, and any other duality is merely a lesson about that polarity. Love and Hate, Man and Woman, Light and Darkness, positive and negative electric charges are merely signposts on the path to Godhood. When you claim your Self, you claim the Universe.

We then talked about polarity in Wiccan terms, and he politely disagreed with my ontology. Theirs was a fertility religion, he said. It's a sexual energy between a Goddess and God which drives everything. And so I do not think that I could convince any Wiccan that my vision is correct. Nevertheless, it was an extreme honor to get to talk to him about the topic.

Least Read Book Meme

This meme started at obake, but I learned of it at Montykins.

Bold: Read.
Underlined Read for school.
Italic: Started but never finished.
Asterisk*: Liked well enough to reread or recommend.

The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
American Gods
Anansi Boys*
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye
Catch-22
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners
Dune*
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian : a novel
The Hobbit*
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell*
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables
Life of Pi : a novel
Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
Mrs. Dalloway
The Mists of Avalon*
Moby Dick
The Name of the Rose
Neverwhere
1984
Northanger Abbey
The Odyssey
Oliver Twist
The Once and Future King*
One Hundred Years of Solitude
On the Road
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Oryx and Crake : a novel
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pride and Prejudice
The Prince
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five
The Sound and the Fury
A Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
The Three Musketeers
Ulysses
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down
White Teeth
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West*
Wuthering Heights
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values