Essentials
My "religion" is very strange, complex and grants much room for reinterpretation. Personal mythology entwined with a convergence of the shared elements of existing faiths gives me a guiding light I myself hold. It is at its most powerful when times are difficult and things go wrong. While others find themselves painted into a corner, broken by those things that failed to "be" what they were expected to be, I spin the wheel and reset "the game."
Although I admit, sometimes reinterpretation takes time. In the present tense it has taken, and is still taking, more time than the usual. This is because current events have been more dire and distressing than the average disappointment.
I am temporarily trapped in a place I don't want to be, dealt some really bad cards, so bad I didn't just want to fold, I wanted to burn the entire deck, the card table, the chairs, the room the table was in, the house around the room, the town around the house, the... well, anyways...
I suffer from a strange sort of Cassandra complex (as well as two or three other notable complexes), where I see the future and then refuse to believe what I see is possible and disregard my own vision. I don't believe in myself until things get bad and I have no choice. There is a message in that somewhere. Going back nearly three years, there was a series of dreams, one of which I logged here. They involved a reunion with the one I always considered the greatest love of my life, The Muse, The One Queen... and they all came before I reconnected with her and eventually returned to New Hampshire to be with her. The dreams also involved the cryptic tale of "the fourth queen," an entity which has never existed in my weird personal mythology, which tends to revolve heavily around a series of three queens. This "fourth queen" was said to bring disaster to my house and to throw everything into disarray. At one point I was told I would identify her because her name could be spelled out by taking letters from the name of my "dark angel," Ekaterina. I told you my religion was weird and complicated, didn't I?
And it all pretty much happened as I saw it, but refused to believe it could happen. And the house fell down as I was pretty much forced to relive the events that started me down the road to suicide many years ago. Events were so similar it was eerie, as if I had to face this ghost once again and this time live through it. There may be something to that. Knowing that I have survived and will survive empowers me in a big way, despite my ego's insistence on me being able to undo what has been "written" and is out of my control.
So, as The Muse turned out to be self-destructive without my being of any use in turning that tide, and then went on to carry on an affair while lying to me and stringing me along over it, she allowed herself to be downgraded in my pantheon. It became necessary for me to extend my full trust and belief in her in order to let her choose her path, as any betrayal of me under the promise of completely honesty and trust would cause he to seriously devalue herself and to box herself out of my immediate life. And she took that road, leaving me to pick up the pieces. Which isn't so bad when you consider that she created the scenario to allow me a clean break without having to venture any thought towards "what ifs." I'm not as dumb as I look most of the time.
This, of course, required me to enter into a deeply meditative phase and to reinterpret certain lines of scripture in my religion. The office of The Muse has always required certain things, one of them being a belief in me and my "work," the second being the ability to drive me to work harder, write better, write more and to always stay just out of reach, just outside of where she will ever be truly satisfied. Well, she who betrayed me no longer fits that bill, nor has she since our reunion (which I never actually wanted, but had to desire for what I consider "muse theory" to function). This required that I find and name a new muse, and upon much reflection and study, I realized that this question was the answer to another question. She who inspired me to keep writing, to keep trying to understand, and who believed in me when I was at my lowest in the past, and who I disappointed by never being able to reward her for all she did for me. In a really queer ceremony conducted while I was in a pink tracksuit, Tammy was named The New Muse. I can pretty much trust her not to reappear at any time in the near future.
In order to change your life when things are at their lowest, it is important to be able to reconfigure things in a way that works better than the configuration that has collapsed or failed. This is much easier to do when you have faith rather than an unnatural reliance on static rationalism. Rationalism and this whole rotten business of taking things at face value is what will eventually destroy mankind if we allow it to. They already tried to destroy faith and mysticism by trying to rationalize it, but we can still take it back. This shit wouldn't work at all if I didn't have a deep and abiding faith in it all.
Tell me something dangerous and true, baby, because I am back and I'm rebuilding the mystery. This has been one bad bump in the road, and I have miles to go before I sleep. Chris would be so happy.
Today's hymnal selections
From the Convergent Church of Rancho Nuevo
"Three Days," Jane's Addiction
"Road to Nowhere," Talking Heads
"My Name is Prince"
(First song recorded by said individual after his "name" change)
"Building a Mystery," Sarah McLachlin
"Good Morning Blues," Count Basie
I don't play
But when you do
I never lose
As soon as you play... the rules change.
Thank you for playing.
Yours truly,
(Still) The Jack of Hearts.