14, La Muerte, or a Musical Meditation on the Art of Darkness

I've been listening over and over, as is my wont, to a few songs lately, and wanting to find a way to say something about them. There's a theme to these songs, though, that seems so morbid to set words down about them, especially when the songs themselves don't actually produce morbidness as one of their emotional responses.

What I love about Tarot cards, so resonant and laden with meaning -- and by extension the Mexican loteria, on the one hand nothing more than a paper bingo game and yet somehow also a set of archetypes upon which one might meditate -- is that they become keys to unlock mysteries of meaning. They're like visual wordless poems that allow our minds to wander and learn. Tarot card images are full and complicated: every little piece of the design has a little bit of meaning and correspondence. They're deeply loaded with all sorts of occult symbols and suggestions, as well as the simpler meanings suggested by the parts of the design. Loteria cards are much simpler images, the details quite unimportant. Here's the thing about the death card in Tarot, though. It's not exactly about death. Oh, I know enough about a fortune-teller's trade to know that in context it could mean that. But what it means above all is transformative change.

Which brings me to the three songs I've been listening to. The first is probably the most well known. It's the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson singing "Trouble of the World." Here's how I first heard it; you too, probably:



That's the climactic scene from the classic Douglas Sirk melodramatic tearjerker "Imitation of Life." Susan Kohner, who has been "passing" for white, has missed the death of her mother Annie (played by the great Juanita Moore), and now must suffer the guilt of discovering that her mother was a figure beloved by everyone except her own light-skinned daughter; so beloved, in fact that at her jam-packed funeral the greatest gospel singer of our time sings her a parting spiritual. It's a great flick, full of 1950s repression and a very complicated, surprisingly un-racist depiction of African-Americans, setting aside of course the casting of a white actress as the passing daughter.

Anyway "Trouble of the World" is a classic Christian spiritual: "Soon I will be done with the trouble of the world, going home to live with God. No more weeping and wailing, going home to live with my Lord." It's somber, in that it's a song about death, for sure, but it's really more reverent than sad. It's used in the film to force all the tawdry soap-opera characters to think about what they've done and how empty and barren their own lives were compared to the late Annie, who though a humble maid saved enough money to take care of her family and send herself out in style.

I'm not a Christian; I don't share this certainty of "going home to live with God," but the powerful faith revealed in Mahalia Jackson's completely committed delivery is inspiring to me. That death could be transformed from the object of fear and dread to something else entirely is quite a leap. But this is remarkably powerful message music and that leap is made convincing. There are a lot of things people can do in this world, but that finality must be met: and here Mahalia Jackson's steely determination and spiritual optimism says, "have no fear."

The second song I've been listening to is much less well known. Jazz trumpeter Charles Sullivan released the album "Genesis" on the Strata-East label in 1974; it was reissued on the Inner City label a few years later, and actually was recently reissued on CD by that reactivated label. Most of the album is some excellent instrumental jazz, typical of what the indie Strata-East musicians were recording at the time. But the young Dee Dee Bridgewater, then taking a guest turn on the albums of many jazz musicians, was brought in to sing an absolutely devastating suicide ballad, "Now I'll Sleep." You can hear it on Youtube:



"Why am I alive what have I got to live for
I'm through with playing games they just add up to zero
Life is war and war is hell and I'm no hero
I tried I failed but I tried I'm sorry
I can't begin again no chance to change my story
The end is just the end forget those dreams of glory
I had my chance to win I chose to lose
that's funny
Afraid to love so you die unhappy

And those who have no love to give
they have no need to live
how senseless it all is to me

And so I say goodbye with just a hint of sadness
For lonely is the road that leads me from this madness
But frightened though I am I feel a rush of gladness
And peace more peaceful than night
It's the peace I've searched for all my life
Now I'll sleep and never be afraid of waking up again."

It's pretty shocking to hear the sweet voice of the woman who sang "If You Believe" in the original production of the Broadway musical "The Wiz" sing these dire, hopeless lyrics. At the same time, I find this a beautiful, witty song. I love the line, "Life is war and war is hell and I'm no hero." This is an utterly convincing portrayal of someone who has had enough. And though I have lived my life without any bouts of suicidal depression, I find myself checking my mood when I listen to this song just to make sure I'm doing so with a healthy mind. I think that's powerful art.

Hearing this song we put ourselves in the position of its singer, brought to life by such a gifted vocalist as Bridgewater. We're allowed to experience a flash of this terminal disappointment and sense of failure, and the grasping desperation of taking matters into her own hand. But we're also allowed to walk away at the end of the song: surely the phrase "There but for the grace of God go I" has never had a better testament. Interestingly on the album, the graceful piano and voice of this song is immediately followed by driving bass and percussion of an extended suite called "Genesis." To me it's almost like trumpeter/composer Sullivan is immediately repudiating the pessimism and self-doubt of "Now I'll Sleep" by saying that life, creation, genesis, is complicated, challenging, sometimes chaotic, but worth staying awake for and ultimately rewarding in its gift of experience, both bad and good. All that existential angst? Get over it!

Art, like the tarot cards, is full of meaning and symbolism: it should make us confront the deep and dark things as well as the light and joyful ones. Both the solemn inspiration of "Trouble of the World" and the brutal self indulgence of "Now I'll Sleep" ask us to confront our assumptions.

The third song I've been listening to is "How Glory Goes," from an obscure musical called "Floyd Collins" by composer Adam Guettel. The version I enjoy the most is sung by Audra McDonald, the title song of her second solo album, released in 2000. (Another excellent version of the song is performed by Brian Stokes Mitchell on his own eponymous album.)

The song is a meditation on what happens when you die: as in "go to glory," the rapturous revelation of heaven at the moment of passing in Christian teaching. It begins:

"Is it warm?
Is it soft against your face?
Do you feel a kind of grace inside the breeze?
Will there be trees?
Is there light?
Does it hover on the ground?
Does it shine from all around, or just from you?
Is it endless and empty, as you wander on your own?
Slowly forget about the folks that you have known?
Or does rising' bread fill up the air
from open kitchens every where?
Familiar faces far as you can see, like a family?"

Audra McDonald is an art singer; and her theatrical training suits this song well. Her voice is almost operatic, soaring; the arrangement behind the song delicate and restrained with the flavor of theater music or classical music not pop. The gorgeously sung lyrics muse on all those unknowable mysteries of mortality.

"Do we hear a trumpet call us and we're by your side?
Will I want, Will I wish for all the things I should have done,
Longing to finish what I've only just begun?
Or has a shining truth been waiting there
for all the questions everywhere?
In a world of wondering suddenly you know;
And you will always know..."

In my own religious tradition, the Yoruba-based Santeria faith, there's a proverb attached to one of the sacred divination oddu: "The one who knows does not die like the one who does not know." To my mind, rather than promising some kind of special treat upon death to the initiated, some heavenly reward or playground of virgins, what these words are avowing is more profound. They're saying that when you explore the mysteries of your faith, of spirituality, you gain a level of consciousness that is what other religions might call grace. You find peace in being given a peek at the mysterious workings of the universe, seeing the transformative changes of life and death as not something to be dreaded, but something that simply is, trusting in the cosmic machinery that in the end, everything is as it should be.

Which I think is why I find "How Glory Goes" so special. It strips out the fatalism, the morbidness, the darkness, if you will, of that most human of predilections, worrying about what happens next. It doesn't say it's wrong to ask unanswerable questions, but it gives us the tools to move on with our lives lifted of the burdens of uncertainty. It offers a kind of spiritual serenity, which becomes a call, I think, to experience the living of the now with reverence and wonder and joy, welcoming the changes that need to come as the unfolding mystery of being.

As the song concludes:
"Only heaven knows how glory goes,
what each of us was meant to be.
In the starlight, that is what we are.
I can see so far..."

World AIDS Day, 2009: Online Immortality?

December 1 is World AIDS Day.

The GLBT History Archive in conjunction with the Bay Area Reporter is launching an online obituary archive here, which should prove painfully fascinating, helping us remember those we have lost by giving them a presence online. I google my lost friends every now and then, wondering if they are granted online immortality.

I came up with these two links yesterday, though they're somewhat oblique. My friend Michael Botkin was my roommate in my last apartment in Chicago. We joined the RSL at about the same time, and he was dating Joe Galanti/Alongi, one of the leading members at the time. Michael's experience in the League ended badly: he seems to have been summarily drummed out of the group, whereas I sort of wandered away. Anyway, in the 1980s Michael went on to write for the ground breaking subversive journal Processed World, which covered the experience of working for a living in a newly computerized world from a truly human--and humane--perspective. Writing as "Kwazee Wabbit," Michael tied his experiences in the RSL to this brave new world, and the results are an entertaining read, albeit a sobering one.

Here's one article entitled "Progressive Pretensions" in which Michael documents the rude awakening of discovering that the good guys aren't always the good guys. Here's another called "The Art of the Purge" in which he tells the story of being purged from both the RSL and from an academic setting. His obituary from Poz Magazine is here; he died in 1996. Sadly I don't have a picture of Michael and wasn't able to find one online.

Most of us who are gay do not have children to carry on our stories. With so many lives cut so tragically short by the ravages of this disease, it becomes doubly important for those of us who have survived the past era to carry on their stories--the stories of our beloved friends--to the future. Always remember.

(If you haven't read my story of Steve Rose, today would be a good day to do so!)
---

Update: thanks to the above referenced database (which doesn't seem to work in Firefox), here's an excerpt from Michael's obit, with a photo. Thanks to the BAR & the internet.

Echoes of a past life: Healing Darkness

Here's another piece from the Queer Pagans 'Zine: the longest one I wrote. It covers a lot of ground, touching on some pivotal moments in my spiritual journey. It's interesting to me that I chose not to identify the specific goddess archetype I felt I was interacting with until the last portion of this piece. Although I felt devoted to Hecate/Hekate, it became less and less important to me that the spiritual energy I experienced bore any name tied to a specific pantheon. My spiritual practice yielded more information about this divine force than my attempted research of the historical record of the ancient Hellenes or medieval witches. It's also ironically funny to me that as far removed as I now feel from the Neo-Pagan path and its community, the tattoo of Hecate's wheel that I had etched into my arm in this period is still there begging explanation from those who see it and ask about it. Anyway, the word "God" is much shorter and less suspicious, and if it causes its own kind of confusion, these days I much prefer it to the more exotic and complicatedly capitalized constructions of these earlier words. Note: I've added a few parenthetical details here and there in this piece to flesh out details, noted in italics.

Healing Darkness: A Meditation in Three Parts
By Ian Scott Horst
from QP #15, Halloween 9994 [Fall 1994]

Part 1: Vows and Promises

Of all the God/dess, one came to me first, and for that I will be ever grateful.

A friend of mine lay dying. He was thin, and his skin seemed tight and brittle. I tried talking to him, but I wasn't sure he heard me. His gaze was no longer full of the man I knew, but something focused far away from where I sat, holding his flaccid hand.

It would make a great story to say that as we sat there, a goddess descended into the hospital room, bore him aloft, and held me in her healing embrace. But it was not like that at all.

He died a couple days later and his family repossessed his body, shunned his gay friends and lovers at his funeral, and tried to throw his lover out of their apartment.

John's death happened at a time when I was trying to figure out a lot of things for myself. I found myself outliving some important friends and many treasured beliefs and unsure of my footing. The spiritual crisis I had been dodging for several years descended upon me, forcing me to examine who I was, what I was doing, what I wanted, why I was.

The short version of the story is that I discovered Paganism, and immersed myself it it, this new part of myself aware and longing for satiety. But I didn't understand a lot of things: while the Divine presence was easy enough to feel alone under a Full Moon in Prospect Park, it was harder to pull from the myths and rituals of the traditions I was trying to understand.

Then I discovered Her. As John [Moroney -ish]'s death became a part of my life, I realized that death is always a part of life. In fact, without death there is no life. Without the darkness there is no lightness. I meditated on these things and pondered what happens in the crossroads.

And all of a sudden, that which had felt abstract about Paganism became real. And suddenly She touched me in such a way as to convince me of Her beingness. And Her touch was not sweetness and light, no, but the darkness of sleep and the night, the power of She Who Changes.

Her darkness was not the darkness of evil or the macabre. I was not tempted to trade my chalice for a skull goblet or festoon myself with black lipstick. But She was about death, about understanding its place in life, about accepting its challenge, about the balance which is the natural order of things.

And although the truths She taught me began to heal me from the wounds I had suffered, Her presence began to be a bit more than I could bear. To consider death at every turn, to marvel at its purpose, to wonder at its finality, to embrace its inevitability; these were not easy things.

And so I conceived of a plan: I volunteered to perform a public ritual [for New York New Moon, an open circle--ish]. She Herself had taught it to me: a re-creation of Her crossroads, a place to meet Her, to appease Her, to open to Her healing touch, to offer and to learn.

I would organize this ritual, I would introduce Her to anyone who came, and then I would say goodbye to Her, ridding myself of what was beginning to feel like a burden.

It was the first public ritual I ever led, and it was a great success. Many people came, and to the surprise of those of us who organized it, it raised tremendous power; power which I felt but had no idea what to do with. When it was over many people came up to me to say how grateful they were.

The following weekend I went to a Pagan gathering [the Earthspirit Community's Twilight Covening--ish]. Also attending were many of the people who had organized and attended the ritual. But there was problem, my friends said. One woman had had a traumatic experience in the ritual. An old health problem had resurfaced, and she felt that the poorly grounded energy of the ritual was responsible. I apologized for my inexperience. But no, it's not just that, I was told. This woman thinks that she has been cursed by Her, the Goddess invoked at the crossroads in the circle. Would I, they wanted to know. please ask Her to remove the whammy that this woman had received.

And so I went alone to cast a circle, to recreate the crossroads, to call Her down, to perform the ritual I thought I was free of.

Exhausted from the gathering, and in choking clouds of incense I called Her. She came. And She spoke to me. She told me that it was an illusion to think I could be free of Her. I must embrace Her, and only then would I find healing and what I sought. Each dark of the moon, she made me swore, I would call her. I would honor Her. I would recreate Her crossroads, burn Her a black candle, sing Her healing song. She would be my friend and companion. She would be the night that I carried with me into the day.

No I was not free to refuse. I made the promise, the vow. And I waited for morning.

Part 2: Crows

I called it, in my journal, crow-woman, but it never felt comfortable around my neck. And maybe that was the point.

I bought it because I had been working, I thought, with Her crows. It had yellow and red and black beads, and three black crow feathers dangling from it. And a dozen withered black crows' feet spaced between the beads: grim amputated curling claws. It was a necklace. It had been made out west, by an Indian, I was told. It was much too intense a thing to be called jewelry.

I waited for it to come alive. I carried it to our dark moon rituals, where we called Her to come to us. I waited for its whisper. The scratch of its talons on my flesh when I put it around my neck made my skin crawl, but it remained silent.

When I went to the mountains of North Carolina one autumn, the whisper came. It said: take me along. And so I packed crow-woman with my ritual essentials and flew off -- no black bird but silver steel -- to a gay spiritual retreat.

Let me say here only that the retreat [Gay Spirit Visions --ish] was life-changing: an exploration of gay spiritual consciousness and a lesson in personal self-worth and affirmation.

At the retreat I met a man, whose full name I now struggle to call to my mind. He was called Raven. He had pale pale skin and jet black hair. He was an Indian, he said. He was not beautiful to me, but he was strangely magnetic and compelling; hos face bore traces of many burdens. He was one of the organizers of the retreat, and he had much cause over the weekend to speak to the hundred or so of us gathered there.

One of the climaxes of the retreat was a dance around the fire to the beat of drums. The beat was not wild and free, but carefully measured. And I could hear it from the distance as I walked the path from my cabin toward the central hall, the high mountain night wrapped dark around.

And in a spot of light -- my memory does not tell me if it was moonlight or starlight or flashlight -- I heard a whisper. It said: "give it to him."

When I hear a whisper in that part of my mind I usually try to dissuade it. If the whisper responds "OK, do what you want," I know it to be one of those little voices called self-doubt that are best ignored.

But the whisper said, "Yes, I'm sure. You know who I am and I say give it to him." By this time I knew what He was talking about, who he was talking about, and Who He was whispering to me in the mountain night.

So I turned around and went back to my cabin, and pulled the necklace from its black cloth wrapping. And I returned along the path to the fire. There gay men in various stages of trance and undress writhed in the orange light of a crackling fire.

I went up to Raven and said that I needed to talk to him. The whoops of the dancers and the pounding of the drums made us strain to hear.

I said, "I don't understand this. But I have to give you something," and I held up the necklace, its wrinkled claws dark and shiny in the firelight. "I have this god who follows me around. I don't know why, really, but I think he's Eleggua, an African deity. Anyway, he said that I have to give this to you. It's not old or anything. But it is sacred, and I have never learned to use it."

He looked at me oddly, as anyone in that situation would. But he took the necklace. He told me that he had heard of the god I was talking about. He said his teacher was a Heyoka, the Lakota word for trickster. He said to me, "You know this is a very heavy thing to give to me."

I could only nod and shrug.

He thanked me gravely, and returned to the fire. I returned after a while to my cabin. I felt like something had happened that I didn't quite understand. Something karmic had passed, it was clear, but mostly I felt that I had done a justice to crow-woman, freeing a sacred object whose power needed to be undestood from an unfortunate fate as a trinket bought and sold for money.

In the remaining day of the retreat Raven and I did not talk, in fact, I would say he avoided me. My own burdens seemed oddly lightened, though, and I experienced in the gathering's final ritual an important revelation (the reporting of which I'll leave to another time} which has strengthened me since.

But I learned, finally, the message that Her crows bring.

More than a year passed. I was unable to return for the retreat's annual gathering. Already it was Spring and I received a mailing from the retreat's organizers about a memorial gathering. A memorial for Raven, who had died of AIDS in the winter passed.

The crows are black, and their voices are loud and shrill. They fly in flocks, dark and shiny. Wrinkled and curved talons curl around branches, around bone. Their beaks are sharp, singing songs that cannot be sung. The crows fly carrying Her message. Their burden is unbearable, yet it must be borne.

Pay attention to the crows.

Part 3: Hekate, She Oh Mother, She

Her season is High Autumn. Amidst the falling leave, the shortening days and the chilling air, we speak of the veil between the worlds growing thin. At this time the dead walk the earth as our memories are stirred. At this time She calls to Her children to embrace Her, to walk with Her for a season.

My coven [called the Coven of the Middle Pillar--ish] was planning our ritual for Halloween, for Samhain, for Her holiday, and it was this we leanred when we needed Her presence in a more real, more dramatic way. We realized that one of us would have to agree to take Her on for Her season: that is, to open ourselves to Her, to invite Her to stay with us, speak through us, to change us. And so the crows cawed.

The second year it was my turn to embrace Her, and like my predecessor, when the time came I put on the snake rings that were Her symbol.

In one week I called to Her in three rituals; in each one invoking Her presence in me for the duration of the ritual and for the season. Despite my vow of three years before, I was no prepared for the intensity of the experience. Despite the fact that my coven had formed around our mutual devotion to Her, I was not prepared for the vividness of living with Her in that way. There were many surprises.

What happened was that everything in my life was put on the crossroads. As though a jeweller examining facets through a glass, I was given cause to examine each and every facet of my life. Some I left at the crossroads. Some I gathered up. A flaw here or there led me in search of correction. A particular flicker led me to prideful satisfaction. Fortunately the deaths in my life proved only metaphorical this time, though many of them were painful, as change is wont to be, necessary thing that it is.

And so the winter passed into spring, and the changes began to sprout roots, to depeen.

And then in a whirling moment, the unexpected. It was another ritual. Though I carried Her in my breast, it was not She whose name we called. But I remember being in a trance, moving, maybe singing; dancing among my covenmates also moving, making noise, all of us directed to that inner place where we find our link to Her.

And a voice began to whisper in my head: "Now is the time," it said. "The time has come for changes. This is the crossroads, now, and you must choose." And I found myself ripping snake rings off my fingers. And snapping pentacle chains off my nexk. And She released me.

She, Hekate. Oh Mother, She.

She let me go. She flung me out of her dark embrace, changed, healed. And I realized a time in my life had ended, a season of trial and change passed. I went for a kind if psychic reading, and the man who listened to the whipser of spirits told me to wear more white clothing. He saw me leaving a veiled black figure behind. My path now feels different than before, and while this year I will not don Her black veils and robes, nor light Her black candles, I can never forget that I owe who I have become to Her dark whispers.

On the surface of things Hekate's message is very simple: Without death there is no life. That is, life feeds on life; in order for new life to come into the world, old life must end, and pass its spark of life-force on. The truth of this is revealed in as simple an act as eating, when one being (animal or vegetable) consumes the lifeforce of another -- vegetable or animal -- in order to sustain its own life force. But what this reveals about us, people, queer people, you, me, is the divine part: We're part of a sacred dance of the stars: the life force that fires suns is the same that grows cucumbers and animates our bodies. In this knowledge is a healing gift. The mud and the crows and my dead friends (and yours) and me and you we're all the same, really, the spiral dance of our atoms showing, in miraculous imagining, Her presence in all things, and bearing, in the richness of its season fruit of grace and balance and patience and inner peace.

But words are only signs. Words and symbols are not the things themselves, nor their true knowing, and these words, while shared, are certainly mine and not yours, and this is why Hekate is mistress of magic, the only real way to understand Her voice. Go to Her Crossroads and dare to listen. And in the tears and trials and wonders, may you find... yourself.