House Outside of Time

26 May 1988

Ten centuries have gone by. I have repeated and repeated the protocol of alchemical maneuvering, but still no neutrinos have come from the edge of the exploding universe to inform the base metal in my crucible of its new and true identity.  My sisters have lapsed into somnolesence as they wait for me to finish, and my brothers have all married women of different nations and taking up farming or trade. The world shifts inexorably from that which once I knew, and in the place of fragmented frames I am left with the pastel suppositions of what was never more than a tentative vegetable dye that gave color to the things around me.

And this house is old; so old, that I can no longer find the books I brought here as a young woman. The corridors grow in length each year, glacially, but now they are too long to traverse in a day.  New rooms have grown, too, and blossomed furnishings stolen from the hall of time and the temple of creativity, where billions of unrealized forms yearn for incarnation.

The garden inside the walls that surround this noble, self-creating house have turned inward upon themselves in the past 50 years and I can see now that they seek the silence of the desert.  The flowers of each spring for five decades have fragmented into sand, and each year the tan drifts rise higher against the cooking room windows, higher against the firmly mortared stone of my tower laboratory.  The trees have grown ever more spiny and terse, and their speeches to me as I gaze out upon them each evening at sunset scroll their meanings for leagues.

No visitors have come since the year of the aeon nine hundred and ninety six; but I have heard rumors of another woman who has come to live in one of the newly-grown rooms. Perhaps she dreamed herself there; or perhaps a new entrance had grown onto the house that she passed through, one I could not see from my tower’s oratory windows.  80 years ago, one of my sisters awoke from her sleep to take a short nap awake.  She heard a sound of singing or muttering or chanting and followed it to the room where she found the woman, marking her path with chalk so she could return to her couch.  The woman’s room was a prison cell and the door was locked, so my sister could only look through the viewing slit.

The woman sat on a high stool next to a high table and was carving heads from large nuts.  A bushel basket of uncarved nuts sat on the floor at her feet and another, partially filled with carved heads, a short distance away.  One of the carved heads hung from the ceiling on a wire, dangling near the woman’s head. The woman wore a loose jumper of sack cloth and had shoulder-length disheveled hair.

My sister spoke out to her, but the woman paid no notice.  She then left the newcomer, and retraced her steps from the cell, pausing to visit me in the cooking room to tell me of what she had found before returning to her couch in the darkened room.

But now visitors come. We who are here, we do our work and find the silence one of kindliness.  It has been said—I read it in a book since lost—that before this house stood here, there was a spring, a well, and a stream.  The well is perhaps the same as the one in the room below the cooking room from which I pump the water I need.  It was relined as recently as 300.  There is no sign of a surface spring or stream anywhere, although there is a portion of the garden, enclosed in its own separate wall that I have never been able to enter.  Perhaps it is in there.

When I am not watching my crucible in the tower, I have another mystical experiment I perform. My three sisters sleep in a large drawing room in the oldest part of the house whose windows are covered with heavy brocade sent by their husbands from the east.  Down the center of the room, I have constructed a channel for water to flow through.  It took me many years to bless and purify the water I needed to fill it.  Now the water rests there always, pure and undefiled. When I wish to do this ritual, I go down to that room where my sisters are sleeping on their couches.  I move the couches so that they straddle the water. My sisters then become bridges and the room opens out into a familiar landscape.  A narrow river flows between stone banks, crossed by bridges.  On one side of the river is a small city of ancient stone houses and shops; on the other lie farm lands and wooded hills, crisscrossed with a network of narrow lanes.

At the boundary of this city and its land, the river dips into a deep flume and enters the earth. A book I bought at a shop in the city that I have never been able to return to in this realm tells me that this river reemerges in the bottom of Scotland’s Loch Ness.  Perhaps it is so.  When I emerge into the dream of this city, I most often wander along the banks of the river, viewing the strange play of light on the land.  Sometimes I stop in a public house and listen to the farmers and business people discuss their affairs.

But this ritual is merely relaxation.  The first time I went to the city, in a dream, I spent a long time examining maps of my own realm that were kept in the City Library.  This was many years ago.  It was then that I discovered the power of this realm and caused the house to start growing.  I was gazing at an old map of this house and its grounds and the closer I looked, the more I could see.  Bent over in scrutiny, I did not notice the approach of a tall, solidly built man who came up from behind and tapped my shoulder.  As I felt the tap, I said “Yes”—a statement, not a question.  No reply came and I turned around.  I saw the man for a split second then awoke.

I was puzzled by this for many centuries until I finally noticed the growth of the house and its similarity in essence to the figure I had briefly seen.  The man was no man but the spirit of the house asking permission to grow and shape itself.  The map I had been looking at was not so much a map as a record of the essence of the structure.  By devoting my complete and increasingly engrossed attention to it, I had contributed enough energy to the whole to allow a manifestation of it in human form to appear.  This manifestation desired my recognition of its autonomy, which I unthinkingly gave it.

Ever since, the house has continued to grow in the direction it desires.  I cannot conjecture as to where it derives the energy and materials it needs to do this.  Perhaps it is taking it from the garden, which seems increasingly depleted and tired. I do not know.  Could I have made such a catastrophic mistake unthinkingly? By giving my ignorant permission as a resident of the house for the it to grow, have I robbed other aspects of the same creation that nurtures the house of their ability to sustain themselves? Or is this part of a larger plan, with myself as a pawn for its purpose?  I cannot know.

Monthly by the full moon I await in my tower chamber the flood of particles from beyond which will take the base metal which I have carefully nurtured all these years and transform it into a light-giving jewel, a precious stone of water.

Wesak and the Wesak Shawl

Wesak, in case you missed it, is the Buddhist version of Christmas: the day Shakyamuni Buddha was born.  Observance of the day at my zendo includes meditation, a ceremony involving ladling the water of wisdom and compassion over the baby Buddha's head, sending a prayer aloft with frankincense, listening to a Dharma talk and then eating a delicious potluck.

A woman I had never seen before came for the ceremony.  I immediately noticed she was wearing a very unusual and attractive shawl.  I managed to sit near her during the Dharma talk so I could surreptitiously examine its manner of construction.  When I got home, I started playing with string. This is a Kromski Harp rigid heddle loom, by the way.

The original shawl I had seen had used high quality bulk yarns as warp and woven them together with almost invisible lightweight thread.  I dove into my stash of yarn trouve and found the best bits I  had.  Nothing about what I wanted to do seemed to fit the usual ways of warping the loom, so I came up with what seemed like a good alternative. 

It turned out to be rather painstaking.  I worked on it little by little over the course of several days, experimenting with different bits of colored string.  While I had an idea in mind, it seemed I didn't know what it actually was until I started to warping the loom -- at which point, the colors, textures and weights of the different fibers started telling me what to do.  Eventually the whole process was complete.

Now I just needed to lie in wait until an unsuspecting housemate or visitor passed by who I could corral into helping me wind on.  Until then all ends remain, as always, neatly wrapped:

Interesting Times

The event was held at a high school gym and called “A Cultural Day of Play.”  It was sort of like a Filipino-themed high school carnival with games, food, and booths.  I was there to help out with the stick-fighting tournament.  This was several years ago, long before I had discovered kalamansi and ube ice cream; it was the first time I saw the dancers.

I admire most forms of athletic striving, but dancing has always just seemed stupid to me.  Mainly because it looks stupid and it’s obviously a waste of time better spent actually doing martial arts or having sex, which are the activities that dance always seems to be pussy-footing about.  So no, I’m not into dance.

But there was that one day in the gym.  Some guy I hadn't seen before came in with a big boom box and started fiddling with it over to one side as the MC started shooing people away from the middle of the floor.  Then the guy with the boom box hit play, one set of gym doors opened and the dancers started in.

As I now know, we have at least two local troupes who do traditional Filipino dance around here. They research the dances, the textiles of the costumes, the music, the instruments, and the props then train endlessly for performances.  I think this time I was seeing the Oakland troupe.  Time stopped for me that day as they walked onto the floor and started doing their thing.  For one thing, they were really professional; they took our little high school carnival space and commanded it to be their theater.  The hand and foot work of the dance was subtle and precise, which attracted my attention as a martial artist.  The textiles of the costumes were complex and beautiful, which attracted my attention as a weaver.  The dances themselves were full of mythological resonance, even if I didn't know the exact story being told.  Overall, the dance featured vignettes with costumes and props from different historical periods and dancers of all ages, including (my personal fave) mostly naked handsome young men.

The main thing I remember about that day is when the dancers came into the gym a bolt of electricity shot down my spine.  This was one of the most exciting and interesting things I had ever seen.  I wanted to get right up close and press my nose against the glass, except there wasn't any glass.  Mind you, I've done a lot of seeking in my day and I've found a fair number of things.  My life is not exactly short on “interesting” things (in the Chinese proverb sense) and, as I've already said, I’m really not into dance.  But I could not get enough of looking at their costumes, foot and hand work, and then the tinikling.

Do you know what tinikling is?  Probably not, if you aren't Filipino or don’t have Filipino friends.  It’s like a dangerous version of Twister that involves couples dancing over and between sticks that are being banged on the floor and then smashed together in rhythm to music.  Google tinikling images and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. There’s probably some huge cultural heritage full of nuances behind tinikling, but as a white person I was unscarred by any knowledge of that.  The first time I saw it, I was like, “What the f … whoa, what?  What?  Whoa, that’s cool!”

Ever since seeing that first performance I've had a keen eye out for any kind of traditional Filipino dance because it never ceases to electrify me.  In 2013 I had the opportunity to perform as a martial artist as part of a dance production with the San Francisco troupe Parangal, which was more exciting than excitement itself.  My job was just to get beat up on by my teacher, which was easy enough, but this time I had to do it in costume, wearing makeup, choreographed and on a precise schedule.

There’s only a couple of times in my life that I've been more terrified than just before going on stage, but those are the times you train for.  Win or lose, succeed or fail, at least you have your training; nothing else really matters, anyway.  What was fascinating was the backstage action.  On the stage veritable acts of ritual magic were being smoothly performed, as far as I could tell; backstage, people were racing back and forth to do costume and prop changes and get to the right entry point for their next appearance.  I realized that whatever acts of athletic prowess and nuanced physical control were being exhibited on stage, they were nothing compared with the controlled thermonuclear explosion that was going on in the wings and backstage.

All of which is to say, Parangal has a performance in San Mateo this October.  They spend two years researching local dances, working on costumes and rehearsing.  The troupe is not all professional dancers; many are just people who train hard.  That is why when you see a production of this nature it’s like witnessing a communal ceremony of ritual magic.  This time I am looking forward to being able to see the whole performance while sitting comfortably in a seat.  Life is indeed interesting, and sometimes that’s not a bad thing.

Waste Disposal Systems in the Ivory Tower: Technical Report

I was going back to the Institute to do some contract painting for Valarie, one of the scientists I used to work with.  This was after escaping from the family I was traveling with by buying my freedom from them.  Anyway, someone I used to know at the Institute was showing me around the place; it had changed from when I was there before.  Now peons had lockers instead of desks.  I set off to find Val so I could get started on the painting, because I couldn't be sure of getting paid until she had signed the papers hiring me, and I was already working just by being there.

The building was large and varied and there were people rushing all around doing things.  I knew my way around even though things had changed, so I wasn't worried.  I had to go to the bathroom, though, and the only bathroom I saw had two doors and glass walls, plus two people had gone in just ahead of me.  This was in a part of the building that also happened to be a kind of museum display of interior decoration, so the bathroom was an exhibit as well as a bathroom.  Since I actually had to use the toilet, I asked the two people ahead of me (who were in there just looking around) if they intended to use it or not, implying that I needed to.

They wouldn't budge, though.  Someone else told me that there was a bathroom down the hall, off a large room that was being redecorated by Val and a team of construction workers.  I figured that if the room was being redone, chances were the toilet was not functioning or inaccessible.

That left me with only one choice: a toilet I had passed a few rooms back.  This was a room that was like a fancy executive secretary’s office, fronting the inner office of the actual executive with a large glass front and glass doors separating it from the hall.  The chair behind the desk was also a toilet seat and toilet.  However, the desk was angled such that anyone sitting on the chair would be in full view of any passers-by.  Also, there was no toilet paper.  For this reason, I hadn't wanted to use this toilet.

However, I was now desperate to void my bowels so I bit the bullet and went into the room.  Even though the inner and outer doors were both perfectly clear glass, I tried to close them.  I think the outer one closed, but the inner one kept falling open.  Then I went over to the toilet seat/chair.  Someone had left a stack of papers on the chair, so I picked them up and set them on the desk.  Then I saw that the reason they had left the papers there was because the chair/toilet didn't flush, and was full of the previous user’s feces.  I sat down on it anyway and started to do my business.  The owner of the papers drifted into the office, looked enquiringly at me, and started to ask where the papers were.  I gestured, embarrassed, toward the desk where I had put them.

I went to the bathroom successfully but somehow managed to splash feces on my white shirt.  Then I was wearing something like a white fur coat and realized that the feces had gotten all over that, too.  Everything was worse than before, even though my bowels were now relieved.  Feces were splattered everywhere, but at any rate the other people in the room seemed sympathetic.  Everyone seemed to know it was a dumb place for a toilet to begin with, precisely because accidents like this do happen.  However, I felt guilty about leaving the toilet—which was also someone’s desk chair—in such a mess.  Also, the feces-covered coat I had shed was now a woman’s dead and mutilated body, which didn't seem to be the sort of thing to leave lying about.  I asked another woman who was standing nearby what she thought I should do, and she suggested placing an anonymous call to the maintenance staff, alerting them about the mess.  She commented that the sooner it was cleaned up the better, since the teeth continue to grow and the longer the monster is ignored the more dangerous it gets.

Inaugural Post

Welcome to the Superplex, the place where I put my thoughts when I'm done having them.

In the beginning I had my own domain and yes, I had to write all the code myself but dammit, things went where I wanted them on the page.  Then blogs came along and it seemed like they had attractive qualities for the more chronological kind of posting I wanted to be able to do.  I started several blogs with Blogger but felt limited in all of them, so I went to WordPress.  WordPress was a nightmare where I have at least one blog to this day that I can't get into because I changed my phone number once and failed to let WordPress know.  Some of the material I managed to extract from that blog was used to seed a new blog on Tumblr.  Tumblr is bizarre world I barely understand, but it allowed me to post pictures if in a clunky way and for a time I was happy there.

Recently, however, it's become more and more frustrating to make the kinds of tweaks I want on Tumblr.  I get caught up in endless loops of links that seem to take me everywhere except where I want to go.  Meanwhile, I kept noticing that all the blogs I liked best use a simple Blogger format, so here we are and once again the Great Migration will begin.