Later:
"I sank my hands in pearls up to the wrists.
The chest, filled near to the top with pearls ready to be assembled into jewelry, overflowed. Pearls scattered across the table top and rolled onto the floor. I dug my hands deeper, rooting down among the cool, heavy spheres. I pulled my cupped hands upward and scooped them out. More spilled and clattered, a rain of beauty.
Seen through glazed, unfocused eyes the pearls were alike, a simple mass of beads.
Seen close and clearly, they were individuals. Some were as tiny as a baby’s tears. Some as large as hummingbird’s eggs. Some glared pure white, some glowed pinkish grey, some shone blue or gold or green. It took a good, loving eye to see each one’s charm alone. It took cool discernment, too, and a hard mind for price to choose what each might do, where each might go.
That would be for tomorrow. Tonight was for glory. Tonight was for dribbling them through my fingers like water. Tonight was scooping them again and again through my cupped hands, splashing them over my naked flesh like handfuls of water, pouring them over my head in a moonlit cascade, letting them run into my mouth in a stream to fill it up and overflow it and run out again, shining over my throat and breasts...
I woke.
The sea surged around the Hyacinth and bobbed her up and down to no avail. We had no wind. We were dying of hunger and thirst and there was no help for it."
See? Now THIS I would keep reading. I just wrote this, but it has no story to go with it.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Suspense Gimmicks that Work on Me
In a really boring mystery I don't otherwise like, here are things that will keep me reading:
A PLOT THAT KEEPS MOVING
Beautiful setting
Beautiful clothing
Pregnant character who may give birth by the end of the book.
Beautiful animals who may reappear
Romantic interest
Awful character who may get comeuppance by the end of the book.
Wealth, money being spent in abundance
Theatrical or public event to be performed by the end
Is there anyone else who reads books they don't like, just to find out what happens? In my case, whatever vicarious, escapist satisfaction I get from the premise or scenery or themes TRANSCENDS bad writing, bad plotting, etc. I'm pathetic enough to admit that my soul has deficiencies, possibly analogous to nutritional deficiencies. I meet these needs through books.
Based on what I WILL read about in the face of boring or distasteful writing, I can conclude that I have unhealthy fascinations with wealth, beauty, vengeance, romance, and adulation.
I'm not a romance reader ordinarily but I will sit through one if I'm rooting for the couple, or I like the lady's outfits. I will hang around to enjoy a wealth fantasy.
How can I use this in my own writing?
Have the pregnant character give birth onstage during the opening. Oh, wait--that was a season-ender for Ugly Betty.
Have the characters find treasure and reveal it as a public spectacle following a dramatic rescue. Oh, wait--Tom Sawyer!
These strategies won't work if readers aren't invested to some extent. I must've cared about that pregnant character and hated that villain. The writing must've been good on some level for that to be the case.
Puzzles: I stuck through the end of Da Vinci Code because of the brain teasers. It was also a treasure hunt, although a different kind of treasure hunt. The characters raced from exotic location to exotic location, one step ahead of various groups of bad guys. I didn't care about that, but I did think I knew the solution and I wanted to be vindicated.
There's hope for me. I can transcend my own bad writing, if I can exploit human nature effectively enough. I need to convince the reader that whatever turns them on--THEM--is waiting on the next page.
A PLOT THAT KEEPS MOVING
Beautiful setting
Beautiful clothing
Pregnant character who may give birth by the end of the book.
Beautiful animals who may reappear
Romantic interest
Awful character who may get comeuppance by the end of the book.
Wealth, money being spent in abundance
Theatrical or public event to be performed by the end
Is there anyone else who reads books they don't like, just to find out what happens? In my case, whatever vicarious, escapist satisfaction I get from the premise or scenery or themes TRANSCENDS bad writing, bad plotting, etc. I'm pathetic enough to admit that my soul has deficiencies, possibly analogous to nutritional deficiencies. I meet these needs through books.
Based on what I WILL read about in the face of boring or distasteful writing, I can conclude that I have unhealthy fascinations with wealth, beauty, vengeance, romance, and adulation.
I'm not a romance reader ordinarily but I will sit through one if I'm rooting for the couple, or I like the lady's outfits. I will hang around to enjoy a wealth fantasy.
How can I use this in my own writing?
Have the pregnant character give birth onstage during the opening. Oh, wait--that was a season-ender for Ugly Betty.
Have the characters find treasure and reveal it as a public spectacle following a dramatic rescue. Oh, wait--Tom Sawyer!
These strategies won't work if readers aren't invested to some extent. I must've cared about that pregnant character and hated that villain. The writing must've been good on some level for that to be the case.
Puzzles: I stuck through the end of Da Vinci Code because of the brain teasers. It was also a treasure hunt, although a different kind of treasure hunt. The characters raced from exotic location to exotic location, one step ahead of various groups of bad guys. I didn't care about that, but I did think I knew the solution and I wanted to be vindicated.
There's hope for me. I can transcend my own bad writing, if I can exploit human nature effectively enough. I need to convince the reader that whatever turns them on--THEM--is waiting on the next page.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
The Hero Myth in Cozy Mystery
Mystery novels have patterns in common:
1) Opening. This is when the author introduces the hero, setting, regular characters, the fun theme of the series, sets the tone, and lays in the quick expositional strokes that set up the story. Then there's a death.
2) The hero accepts the call. This introduces the middle game. Mostly it's about interviewing one character after another in a series of scenes. The whole purpose is to collect facts about what happens.
What you always get--what makes the mystery fascinating--is contrasting observations, opinion and conclusions about what happened. Some of the misdirection is deliberate, but it's all individually marked. The mystery novel demonstrates the human fact that SHARED REALITY IS A COMPOSITE, and MAY NOT EVEN BE SHARED.
The middle game is all about this phenomenon as applied to a specific example, a specific event. The hero has to compose the one true picture. Often, usually, there's a backlash against this process. Someone is actively fighting against truth, against an integrated, consistent understanding of the facts. This person does more than hide; usually, there's a physical confrontation or a threat at least. Often there are additional deaths. Usually the picture can only be fully assembled by the hero fitting in the final piece: the knowledge of who it is who is doing the hardest fighting.
3) End game. The hero must do more than "know"; the hero must "reveal." Traditionally, the hero figures everything out before the reader. The end game consists in the reader enjoying the suspense of trying to get there first as the hero sets up the dramatic ending. Sometimes all the characters are called together for a final reviewing of all the facts, the whole process the hero went through. This can provide for false climaxes. Sometimes the reveal is sudden, and the process is reviewed afterwards during the denouement.
The World of Ordinary Day is disrupted, or revealed to have been flawed all along, by a sudden death. The Hero accepts the Call to restore order.
The great thing about mystery stories is that, in a good one, things are put back better than they were before: secrets come out, scary destructive people get taken out of the environment. Agatha Christie was great at this. Lots of incidental traumas and problems got resolved as the clues were sorted out and issues unrelated to the crime were disposed of. Sometimes relationships improved as a result. Agatha took every cliche and xenophobic prejudice and trotted them out and examined them: the creepy, implied ethnic or jewish foreigner was universally regarded with suspicion but turned out to be innocent. The fresh-faced English rose turned out to have a guilty romance. The rising diplomat favored son turned out to be a spy. The dumpy servant girl turned out to be a lot smarter than she looked. In a mystery, every Ally could turn out to be a shapeshifter. Every adversary may secretly be your new best friend. Even a Mentor could turn out to be a Trickster with a knife up his sleeve. The point is that during the friendly little cozy genre piece, the whodunit, all this gets sorted out and the World of Ordinary Day, as restored by the Hero, is better than it was before the crime. This makes the Victim's death redemptive. The body in the library is a sacrifice.
What about the Hero's death? In a cozy and in most crime drama, the Hero never dies. (Except maybe in Lee Child's 61 Hours. Time will tell!) In what respect is her death sacrificial and redemptive?
At the height of her ordeal, the Hero will die symbolically. A best friend will die, or some aspect of the Hero will die, leaving the Hero to be reborn in some other form. Kinsey Millhone, hunted nearly to death and hiding in a trash can, did not just kill the murderer in the last line of A is for Alibi: "I blew him away." One of the greatest last lines in the history of all literature. She also killed off her old self. Every part of Kinsey that had not killed someone died in that trashcan. Kinsey Millhone the kickass private eye was born in that trash can. Talk about returning with the Prize.
Typically there's a denouement where everyone talks and the Hero winds up the loose threads. We the reader/worshippers need a transitional phase to take us out of the climax and get us out of the reality of the story. (Part of the reason A is for Alibi is so compelling is we are denied that denouement. All the other letters of the alphabet series, in a way, comprise the denouement of A is for Alibi.) This denouement is when we experience the new reality the Hero has created, the redeemed world. The new ordinary.
That's not all that's happening. As with the other type of climax, we became one. We identified wholly with the Hero during that excitement. The Hero's sacrificial death was ours, we were reborn along with her into new strengths and new insights. The Prize she achieved and brought back into the new world, we get to keep. We need to savor this identification for awhile. We need to try the insights and strengths on to see how they fit. We are still identified intimately with the Hero as she walks with our new steps. We can't hurry this process if it's going to keep. The desire to get back into that identification is part of what makes us go back for the next book.
Our symbolic death is possible because we've identified with the Hero, but that's foreshadowed and even made possible because during the middle game the Hero becomes identified with the Victim, who really did die. The Hero begins the investigation by learning for about the Victim. Early than that, the Hero embarks on the investigation in the first place because the Hero cares about the Victim. Maybe it's not an empathic, emotional caring but a practical one: maybe the Hero was the real target and the Victim died as a warning or by mistake. Maybe the Hero is being wrongly blamed for the crime and must clear her name, which actually forces the Hero into identifying with the Enemy, the priest who wields the blade. Through our identification with the Hero, we find ourselves not only represented in the story by the Victim (so that by continuing to read through the ordeal we vindicate our sacrificial deaths) but also by the Enemy, the Adversary. On one level mysteries are suspenseful because they represent an intellectual puzzle that we want to solve, on another level they may actually be frightening. On the deepest level they create tension by subconsciously evoking our identification with the destructive and evil. We read through it so that the bravest and best part of ourselves can defend the weak and innocent part of ourselves against the worst part of ourselves.
1) Opening. This is when the author introduces the hero, setting, regular characters, the fun theme of the series, sets the tone, and lays in the quick expositional strokes that set up the story. Then there's a death.
2) The hero accepts the call. This introduces the middle game. Mostly it's about interviewing one character after another in a series of scenes. The whole purpose is to collect facts about what happens.
What you always get--what makes the mystery fascinating--is contrasting observations, opinion and conclusions about what happened. Some of the misdirection is deliberate, but it's all individually marked. The mystery novel demonstrates the human fact that SHARED REALITY IS A COMPOSITE, and MAY NOT EVEN BE SHARED.
The middle game is all about this phenomenon as applied to a specific example, a specific event. The hero has to compose the one true picture. Often, usually, there's a backlash against this process. Someone is actively fighting against truth, against an integrated, consistent understanding of the facts. This person does more than hide; usually, there's a physical confrontation or a threat at least. Often there are additional deaths. Usually the picture can only be fully assembled by the hero fitting in the final piece: the knowledge of who it is who is doing the hardest fighting.
3) End game. The hero must do more than "know"; the hero must "reveal." Traditionally, the hero figures everything out before the reader. The end game consists in the reader enjoying the suspense of trying to get there first as the hero sets up the dramatic ending. Sometimes all the characters are called together for a final reviewing of all the facts, the whole process the hero went through. This can provide for false climaxes. Sometimes the reveal is sudden, and the process is reviewed afterwards during the denouement.
The World of Ordinary Day is disrupted, or revealed to have been flawed all along, by a sudden death. The Hero accepts the Call to restore order.
The great thing about mystery stories is that, in a good one, things are put back better than they were before: secrets come out, scary destructive people get taken out of the environment. Agatha Christie was great at this. Lots of incidental traumas and problems got resolved as the clues were sorted out and issues unrelated to the crime were disposed of. Sometimes relationships improved as a result. Agatha took every cliche and xenophobic prejudice and trotted them out and examined them: the creepy, implied ethnic or jewish foreigner was universally regarded with suspicion but turned out to be innocent. The fresh-faced English rose turned out to have a guilty romance. The rising diplomat favored son turned out to be a spy. The dumpy servant girl turned out to be a lot smarter than she looked. In a mystery, every Ally could turn out to be a shapeshifter. Every adversary may secretly be your new best friend. Even a Mentor could turn out to be a Trickster with a knife up his sleeve. The point is that during the friendly little cozy genre piece, the whodunit, all this gets sorted out and the World of Ordinary Day, as restored by the Hero, is better than it was before the crime. This makes the Victim's death redemptive. The body in the library is a sacrifice.
What about the Hero's death? In a cozy and in most crime drama, the Hero never dies. (Except maybe in Lee Child's 61 Hours. Time will tell!) In what respect is her death sacrificial and redemptive?
At the height of her ordeal, the Hero will die symbolically. A best friend will die, or some aspect of the Hero will die, leaving the Hero to be reborn in some other form. Kinsey Millhone, hunted nearly to death and hiding in a trash can, did not just kill the murderer in the last line of A is for Alibi: "I blew him away." One of the greatest last lines in the history of all literature. She also killed off her old self. Every part of Kinsey that had not killed someone died in that trashcan. Kinsey Millhone the kickass private eye was born in that trash can. Talk about returning with the Prize.
Typically there's a denouement where everyone talks and the Hero winds up the loose threads. We the reader/worshippers need a transitional phase to take us out of the climax and get us out of the reality of the story. (Part of the reason A is for Alibi is so compelling is we are denied that denouement. All the other letters of the alphabet series, in a way, comprise the denouement of A is for Alibi.) This denouement is when we experience the new reality the Hero has created, the redeemed world. The new ordinary.
That's not all that's happening. As with the other type of climax, we became one. We identified wholly with the Hero during that excitement. The Hero's sacrificial death was ours, we were reborn along with her into new strengths and new insights. The Prize she achieved and brought back into the new world, we get to keep. We need to savor this identification for awhile. We need to try the insights and strengths on to see how they fit. We are still identified intimately with the Hero as she walks with our new steps. We can't hurry this process if it's going to keep. The desire to get back into that identification is part of what makes us go back for the next book.
Our symbolic death is possible because we've identified with the Hero, but that's foreshadowed and even made possible because during the middle game the Hero becomes identified with the Victim, who really did die. The Hero begins the investigation by learning for about the Victim. Early than that, the Hero embarks on the investigation in the first place because the Hero cares about the Victim. Maybe it's not an empathic, emotional caring but a practical one: maybe the Hero was the real target and the Victim died as a warning or by mistake. Maybe the Hero is being wrongly blamed for the crime and must clear her name, which actually forces the Hero into identifying with the Enemy, the priest who wields the blade. Through our identification with the Hero, we find ourselves not only represented in the story by the Victim (so that by continuing to read through the ordeal we vindicate our sacrificial deaths) but also by the Enemy, the Adversary. On one level mysteries are suspenseful because they represent an intellectual puzzle that we want to solve, on another level they may actually be frightening. On the deepest level they create tension by subconsciously evoking our identification with the destructive and evil. We read through it so that the bravest and best part of ourselves can defend the weak and innocent part of ourselves against the worst part of ourselves.
Hero Bride
Reflection on the nature of the hero myth structure:
It could be that the Ur-structure underlying myth structure is act of sacrifice during worship. I believe that the basic form of ritual sacrifice is constant throughout human history, varying in its details. I believe that the meaning, the cultural and spiritual significance of the ritual, varies even more widely. I believe that ONLY the basic form is constant. I believe the form is also universal, such that it has accumulated power through the tens of thousands of years. I believe that the hero myth is a remnant of this structure, and that stories are powerful to the extent that they invoke this form. We can't help but respond to it, any more than we can control the effect of pressure, temperature, and humidity changes on our souls.
Here's how I think it breaks down.
At the center of any sacrifice is the hero victim.
(I also believe weddings derive their form from ritual sacrifice, and the identity of the hero victim is caught up with the identity of the bride/groom. In a sense, all weddings are ritual sacrifices and all ritual sacrifices are weddings. In this hugely broad sense, the type of death story that involves a sacrificial death is more of a comic story than a tragedy. Even Uncle Tom's Cabin is a comedy, understood this way. That's why it ends in reunions, revelations, and nuptial bliss. If they all joined hands and danced in a circle it would be appropriate.)
First, the victim is named or called out. Identified. The Herald does this and performs other communicative functions during the ritual. He's like the MC or the stage manager. I'm not familiar with Catholic ritual, but in our chapel it would be the ushers who bring in the bread.
Then the victim undergoes a period of preparation. Mentor.
There are stations to pass, tests and trials. Threshold guardians. In a Chinese wedding, the groom has to give money to the bride's dad FOR REAL! The dad makes a show of refusing to relinquish his daughter. The game is to make the groom sweat. He really does! There's no question the wedding will take place (it's paid for), but the ordeal is real and it has to be gotten through. It demonstrates the value of the bride.
There are Allies. Sidekicks, bridesmaids, disciples who aren't quite Christ and can only do so much. They all get winnowed out.
Some of these turn out to be Shapeshifters. The shapeshifter exists to alter all of our states of consciousness. There has to be confusion on the part of the victim. There has to be a breaking down of ego and identity. The Witnesses share the confusion to some extent. We are in on some of the joke, but deep down, we want to be fooled. If we don't identify with the death of ego and the body, we won't identify with the resurrection either. We need the shapeshifter to break us all down.
Meanwhile the Herald is conducting us to the heart of the holy of holies. The Herald brings us right to the altar stone.
The Enemy is actually the priest performing the sacrifice. Even the Devil is God's devil. Call him the shadow if you want to, call him the shadow of the hero if you want to. Someone has to hold the knife. In a good story, in a real good ritual, the victim gets blocked and blocked and blocked on his way up those cold stone steps. In a good story, in a good ritual, the sacrifice goes up those steps of his own volition, in spite of fears, betrayals, wounds, loss of faith, etc. In a good story or a good ritual, it's a WILLING sacrifice. The higher the cost on the way up, the more willing the sacrifice has to be, the better.
The Antagonist/Enemy/Officiating priest, like father Abraham, raises the blade.
Someone dies, and we all live.
Because that's the POINT of every death scene, it's a fake death. Jesus' death, Gandalf's death, Kinsey's long minutes in the trash can...
We blow them away.
It could be that the Ur-structure underlying myth structure is act of sacrifice during worship. I believe that the basic form of ritual sacrifice is constant throughout human history, varying in its details. I believe that the meaning, the cultural and spiritual significance of the ritual, varies even more widely. I believe that ONLY the basic form is constant. I believe the form is also universal, such that it has accumulated power through the tens of thousands of years. I believe that the hero myth is a remnant of this structure, and that stories are powerful to the extent that they invoke this form. We can't help but respond to it, any more than we can control the effect of pressure, temperature, and humidity changes on our souls.
Here's how I think it breaks down.
At the center of any sacrifice is the hero victim.
(I also believe weddings derive their form from ritual sacrifice, and the identity of the hero victim is caught up with the identity of the bride/groom. In a sense, all weddings are ritual sacrifices and all ritual sacrifices are weddings. In this hugely broad sense, the type of death story that involves a sacrificial death is more of a comic story than a tragedy. Even Uncle Tom's Cabin is a comedy, understood this way. That's why it ends in reunions, revelations, and nuptial bliss. If they all joined hands and danced in a circle it would be appropriate.)
First, the victim is named or called out. Identified. The Herald does this and performs other communicative functions during the ritual. He's like the MC or the stage manager. I'm not familiar with Catholic ritual, but in our chapel it would be the ushers who bring in the bread.
Then the victim undergoes a period of preparation. Mentor.
There are stations to pass, tests and trials. Threshold guardians. In a Chinese wedding, the groom has to give money to the bride's dad FOR REAL! The dad makes a show of refusing to relinquish his daughter. The game is to make the groom sweat. He really does! There's no question the wedding will take place (it's paid for), but the ordeal is real and it has to be gotten through. It demonstrates the value of the bride.
There are Allies. Sidekicks, bridesmaids, disciples who aren't quite Christ and can only do so much. They all get winnowed out.
Some of these turn out to be Shapeshifters. The shapeshifter exists to alter all of our states of consciousness. There has to be confusion on the part of the victim. There has to be a breaking down of ego and identity. The Witnesses share the confusion to some extent. We are in on some of the joke, but deep down, we want to be fooled. If we don't identify with the death of ego and the body, we won't identify with the resurrection either. We need the shapeshifter to break us all down.
Meanwhile the Herald is conducting us to the heart of the holy of holies. The Herald brings us right to the altar stone.
The Enemy is actually the priest performing the sacrifice. Even the Devil is God's devil. Call him the shadow if you want to, call him the shadow of the hero if you want to. Someone has to hold the knife. In a good story, in a real good ritual, the victim gets blocked and blocked and blocked on his way up those cold stone steps. In a good story, in a good ritual, the sacrifice goes up those steps of his own volition, in spite of fears, betrayals, wounds, loss of faith, etc. In a good story or a good ritual, it's a WILLING sacrifice. The higher the cost on the way up, the more willing the sacrifice has to be, the better.
The Antagonist/Enemy/Officiating priest, like father Abraham, raises the blade.
Someone dies, and we all live.
Because that's the POINT of every death scene, it's a fake death. Jesus' death, Gandalf's death, Kinsey's long minutes in the trash can...
We blow them away.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Boldt from the Blue
This is the smoke-filled room, the kitchen where the sausage is made, the backstage, the drawing room, the atelier.
What I'm making here is an identity: Eroica Boldt, my homonculus and possibly my Frankenstein's monster. A ME who can go forward into the second half of my life as my duly appointed representative, with powers and problems that are different from me as I know me from the first half.
It's going to be important to differ from myself in the following ways:
1) Immediately and practically I have to know new media, and that includes having a blog. This is like the stem cells of all the new media that will comprise my public self in future decades. Everything is non-specific and kind of disgusting right now: but as the tissue firms and divides and changes into a cosmos, each part will have both recognizable form and efficient function. Trust me.
2) I'm going to be rich. This is because the first half of life was conducted among different systems, which didn't conveniently reward the gifts I have. Society has changed, community has changed, patterns of wealth distribution have changed; I have changed. Also, I want to be rich and previously I have wanted not to be rich.
3) I'm going to be old. Mary Kay Ash said that between the ages of 20 and 40 a woman can get by on looks, from 40 t0 60 she can get by on personality, but from age 60 she needs cash. I have ten years to earn enough cash to replace the beauty I never had and the personality that grows less charming every year. There's only so much you can do to preserve your health. I want to use mine to make money. This is a change from what has gone before; my health has been used to preserve, not to produce.
4) I have a career. In the sense that Marlo Thomas' character That Girl had one in the 60's: one that she passionately believed in, worked to promote, and defended, but which did not exist yet in the real world. My career is still incipient in that sense but like an unborn child it has changed everything with its inevitability. I have a career being Eroica Boldt, an author who became an electronic publishing group and eventually a brand. Eroica Boldt's ebooks do more than line her pockets: they inspire young people globally to recognize and use their strengths well. Eroica Boldt's readers are subversive against terror, mind-control, and learned helplessness. Eroica is wise, kind, healthy, brave and rich yet her greatest contribution is to promote wisdom, kindness, health, bravery, and wealth in others.
5) I have passed through the belly of the beast of fertility. I have outlived the thing that swallowed me whole at 13. Fertility is not evil. I don't resent it; I'm grateful to have had it. But it is a force of nature that is bigger than every human being. Fertility is more all-consuming for women than for men. Fertility for women is like being eaten alive, and then you have a different personality and set of priorities...that's putting it too mildly....while you're in it than when you're out of it. While you are fertile you can be killed by different things and for different reasons than when you are out of fertility. And you don't have to be medically fertile to be in it. Your body is a tool of God and nature to get certain things done. You don't get to choose, no matter how you feel about it. Sometimes you don't even get to choose how to feel. And this absorption into the force of nature that is fertility is so complete, it can take over how you identify yourself. It becomes a factor is what you think of who you are, and the phenomenon is so universal that it goes unremarked. There's an period of grief and anguish which is written off as adolescent mood swings, and then we identify with our breasts and our periods and our nubility and we care a lot about what guys think of us, or we care about hte degree to which we care. No one can ignore it!
Let me state here that my marriage and my children are my chief joy. Let me also state that the countdown to menopause is going too slowly for me. There's a griefstricken, lost girl waiting for me on the other side of it that I haven't been able to be for going on 35 years. How would you like to lose someone you love for 35 or 40 years? How would you like to lose YOU for 40 years?
For most of human history girls were swallowed by this dragon and became women and died inside of it. Died of childbirth, died of abuse or disease or starvation or heartbreak, died of old age as grandmothers or as virgins but mostly died before menopause. Anyone who outlived the dragon, who felt it die and rot away around her to emerge blinking into her old/new self, emerged as an old or dying person whose health and strength had been lost long ago. Now, for the first time in human history, a generation of women is outliving fertility with health and strength intact. Some of us have decades ahead of us. Some of us are still young in every respect except what our hair or skin looks like. Previously, those whose fertility died young around them were considered prematurely old, they were considered to have lost their femininity and their primary identity along with losing the beast that had eaten them.
I won't have to cut myself out surgically, probably. Probably it will die a natural death. And yes, I will grieve. I'm grieving the youth that got eaten. There is no little girl left to be. It's all gone. And I'm grieving the children I didn't have. No matter how many you have, the ones you wanted but couldn't have will always be lost and missed. Those ghost children are more gone than ever when fertility and the illusion of choice go for good. When fertility dies around me and I blink around in brighter light, ankle deep in death I have to find a way to step and step and step forward out of, I will do it with the heart of the girl who went down, appalled, 40 years ago. A girl who couldn't stop the teeth or the throat or the crop. A girl who resigned herself to 40 years of waiting to get out, waiting for the accommodation to be over, waiting for things to get back to normal.
During the second fifty years of life I won't be a girl. I'll just be me. Again. Finally.
6) Did I mention that I'll be rich? As a corollary, I will have choices that I've never had before. This will be a big change. For those without means, all choices are defensive. They are reactions to situations we don't choose. Yes, we can choose how to react. But the operative word is react. As a person with money, I will be able to proact. I'll be choosing situations, not just responses. I'll be creating effects in the world. I'll be making situations for other people, better situations than the ones they have, I hope. I'll be creating opportunities for myself and others. This is what I think money's real job is, and I will be its boss instead of its employee for the first time.
7) I used to think of the death of loved ones as an appalling aberration, but soon I will see it as normal. The older I get the more goodbyes I will have to say. Some of my classmates have already died. I didn't know them well. This knife will cut closer and closer to home as time goes by. Unless I die first, which I don't want to.
8) Other changes will happen but I don't know what they are. As an exercise in humility, let me list them, too. Change eight: I don't know yet.
9) I don't know yet.
10) I don't know yet.
What I'm making here is an identity: Eroica Boldt, my homonculus and possibly my Frankenstein's monster. A ME who can go forward into the second half of my life as my duly appointed representative, with powers and problems that are different from me as I know me from the first half.
It's going to be important to differ from myself in the following ways:
1) Immediately and practically I have to know new media, and that includes having a blog. This is like the stem cells of all the new media that will comprise my public self in future decades. Everything is non-specific and kind of disgusting right now: but as the tissue firms and divides and changes into a cosmos, each part will have both recognizable form and efficient function. Trust me.
2) I'm going to be rich. This is because the first half of life was conducted among different systems, which didn't conveniently reward the gifts I have. Society has changed, community has changed, patterns of wealth distribution have changed; I have changed. Also, I want to be rich and previously I have wanted not to be rich.
3) I'm going to be old. Mary Kay Ash said that between the ages of 20 and 40 a woman can get by on looks, from 40 t0 60 she can get by on personality, but from age 60 she needs cash. I have ten years to earn enough cash to replace the beauty I never had and the personality that grows less charming every year. There's only so much you can do to preserve your health. I want to use mine to make money. This is a change from what has gone before; my health has been used to preserve, not to produce.
4) I have a career. In the sense that Marlo Thomas' character That Girl had one in the 60's: one that she passionately believed in, worked to promote, and defended, but which did not exist yet in the real world. My career is still incipient in that sense but like an unborn child it has changed everything with its inevitability. I have a career being Eroica Boldt, an author who became an electronic publishing group and eventually a brand. Eroica Boldt's ebooks do more than line her pockets: they inspire young people globally to recognize and use their strengths well. Eroica Boldt's readers are subversive against terror, mind-control, and learned helplessness. Eroica is wise, kind, healthy, brave and rich yet her greatest contribution is to promote wisdom, kindness, health, bravery, and wealth in others.
5) I have passed through the belly of the beast of fertility. I have outlived the thing that swallowed me whole at 13. Fertility is not evil. I don't resent it; I'm grateful to have had it. But it is a force of nature that is bigger than every human being. Fertility is more all-consuming for women than for men. Fertility for women is like being eaten alive, and then you have a different personality and set of priorities...that's putting it too mildly....while you're in it than when you're out of it. While you are fertile you can be killed by different things and for different reasons than when you are out of fertility. And you don't have to be medically fertile to be in it. Your body is a tool of God and nature to get certain things done. You don't get to choose, no matter how you feel about it. Sometimes you don't even get to choose how to feel. And this absorption into the force of nature that is fertility is so complete, it can take over how you identify yourself. It becomes a factor is what you think of who you are, and the phenomenon is so universal that it goes unremarked. There's an period of grief and anguish which is written off as adolescent mood swings, and then we identify with our breasts and our periods and our nubility and we care a lot about what guys think of us, or we care about hte degree to which we care. No one can ignore it!
Let me state here that my marriage and my children are my chief joy. Let me also state that the countdown to menopause is going too slowly for me. There's a griefstricken, lost girl waiting for me on the other side of it that I haven't been able to be for going on 35 years. How would you like to lose someone you love for 35 or 40 years? How would you like to lose YOU for 40 years?
For most of human history girls were swallowed by this dragon and became women and died inside of it. Died of childbirth, died of abuse or disease or starvation or heartbreak, died of old age as grandmothers or as virgins but mostly died before menopause. Anyone who outlived the dragon, who felt it die and rot away around her to emerge blinking into her old/new self, emerged as an old or dying person whose health and strength had been lost long ago. Now, for the first time in human history, a generation of women is outliving fertility with health and strength intact. Some of us have decades ahead of us. Some of us are still young in every respect except what our hair or skin looks like. Previously, those whose fertility died young around them were considered prematurely old, they were considered to have lost their femininity and their primary identity along with losing the beast that had eaten them.
I won't have to cut myself out surgically, probably. Probably it will die a natural death. And yes, I will grieve. I'm grieving the youth that got eaten. There is no little girl left to be. It's all gone. And I'm grieving the children I didn't have. No matter how many you have, the ones you wanted but couldn't have will always be lost and missed. Those ghost children are more gone than ever when fertility and the illusion of choice go for good. When fertility dies around me and I blink around in brighter light, ankle deep in death I have to find a way to step and step and step forward out of, I will do it with the heart of the girl who went down, appalled, 40 years ago. A girl who couldn't stop the teeth or the throat or the crop. A girl who resigned herself to 40 years of waiting to get out, waiting for the accommodation to be over, waiting for things to get back to normal.
During the second fifty years of life I won't be a girl. I'll just be me. Again. Finally.
6) Did I mention that I'll be rich? As a corollary, I will have choices that I've never had before. This will be a big change. For those without means, all choices are defensive. They are reactions to situations we don't choose. Yes, we can choose how to react. But the operative word is react. As a person with money, I will be able to proact. I'll be choosing situations, not just responses. I'll be creating effects in the world. I'll be making situations for other people, better situations than the ones they have, I hope. I'll be creating opportunities for myself and others. This is what I think money's real job is, and I will be its boss instead of its employee for the first time.
7) I used to think of the death of loved ones as an appalling aberration, but soon I will see it as normal. The older I get the more goodbyes I will have to say. Some of my classmates have already died. I didn't know them well. This knife will cut closer and closer to home as time goes by. Unless I die first, which I don't want to.
8) Other changes will happen but I don't know what they are. As an exercise in humility, let me list them, too. Change eight: I don't know yet.
9) I don't know yet.
10) I don't know yet.
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