Blurb on Orthodoxy and Dissertation on my Own Awkwardness

This could actually be classified as one blurb, but it is two paragraphs with two main points, so I'll label it as two.  My singular/plural sense is having a fit right now.  The first paragraph is an attempt to concisely explain why I am Orthodox.  Often I say, "my church is amazing," but when people ask why I can never answer.  So  I now have attempted a bit of an answer.  The second paragraph is an attempt to explain why I want to attend a Christian university.  Just for the record, I applied to one Catholic school (University of San Francisco--see that essay here), two Protestant schools (Seattle Pacific University and Westmont College), and am finishing the application for an Orthodox school I only recently learned existed (St. Katherine College).  So far I've been admitted to USF!

I don't know where I'm going yet.  USF looks amazing but is the most expensive.  SPU is, obviously, in Seattle: an enormous plus and rather huge deterrent.  I visited Seattle and fell totally in love with it, but it's just so far away.  I tried this being independent thing once: a rather miserable six weeks.  I couldn't talk to Matthew on the phone because I'd cry uncontrollably.  From Seattle, the fastest way home is a plane from Seatac to LAX, then a three to four hour drive.  The train takes two days.  SPU is also the only university I've visited so far, and I wasn't blown away by it.  By the city I was blown away, and the school seemed great, but I have this thing about being an outsider.  My dearest hope is that I'll visit one of these schools and immediately feel like I fit in.  But that is highly unlikely.  It must be my own perception, because I never feel like I fit in.  With my closest friends I often feel/act on guard.  I don't know why.  I'm rather afraid to speak, so I talk about anything and everything in an attempt not to appear totally freaked out.  Someone will say, "I like your outfit," and instead of simply thanking her I'll go off on how I was just out with my mom and I picked four things to try on and she picked one for me and the one thing she picked was perfect and that the only problem is that it gets shorter every time it's washed and so when I wear it now all I can think about is how short it is and that it could catch on my backpack, which would be so not fun.  My friend DOES NOT CARE.  And I know she doesn't care.  She cares in that she cares about me, but, really, come on.  I don't even care.  I'm really not obsessed with clothes.  I couldn't care less about clothes.  Winter is wonderful, in part, because I can wear a full length coat all day and not spend two seconds thinking about clothes.  But when you're a girl they're important, and a safe topic.  I have wonderful, amazing friends--but rarely can I let my guard down even around them.  Which is just weird because I used to be insanely extroverted and abnormally self-ignorant, and couldn't squelch myself if I tried.

Obviously, though, I have no trouble whatsoever while writing!  I just hate being so trivial.  Words should not be wasted on useless discussion.  Light discussion is fun.  Useless discussion is what I blabber as I run away: I adore the person but can't really speak.

Seattle is far because I will probably never totally fit in anywhere.  I'm a bit awkward around my dad.  I can be awkward around my brother, but he always pulls me out.  I'm rarely awkward with my mom or nana: only when there's some contention building between us.  They call me on it, I bawl my eyes out, and then we're better.  Seattle is terribly far.

That's why I wonder about St. Katherine College.  I do feel awkward at church, but sometimes less so.  I went camping with the college group once and had an amazing time.  I even made an idiot of myself (We climbed up a steep, slippery hill and my shoes had negative traction.  One of the guys had to push me up.), and still I felt absolutely comfortable.  St. Katherine's is just outside of San Diego, which is unarguably south of SLO county.  Not the direction I want to go.  But an Orthodox school: maybe I would fit in a bit.  I worry that I'd be thought a heretic at a Protestant school.  Bad North County memories, I guess.

Then again, I have excellent friends, and am awkward with them.  There's no reason to be.  They're all amazing.

I like the idea of USF.  It's north.  It's in San Francisco, which my mom describes as the Seattle of her youth.  You know I've never actually explored San Francisco?  I've been to Chinatown and Giants' games twice, and to the Legion of Honor once.  Other than that I've only driven through.  
          
I grew up in a modest city on California’s Central Coast, so my family visited San Francisco at least once a year.  Often we merely drove through on the way to see relatives in Novato, but once in a while we’d bustle through Chinatown or attend a Giants’ game.

Evan and I have much in common. Although he clearly grew up in SLO, not Atascadero. If no one else, I'd have Evan and Caleb and Sabella and Anna in San Francisco.

Catholicism is closer to Orthodoxy than Protestantism. At least a little closer! Or maybe not? I don't know. We do watch quite a bit of EWTN (the Catholic station) in my household. We watch EWTN, PBS, and Turner Classic Movies. Didn't know how familiar everyone would be that last station! Did I ever mention that Evan is a big classic movie guy?

How about Westmont? I'm terrified of Westmont, but keep hearing that it is a highly intellectual school. By applying, though, my mother and I earn a day in Santa Barbara. Totally worth it.

Do you want to read my blurb(s) now? You better! Thanks for suffering through all that.

 

My family was Chrismated into the Orthodox Church just over two years ago.  Before that we were Protestants, but rather odd Protestants.  We never quite fit in.  We jumped from church to church, desperate for a place where God was the focus, not us.  All is empty without God.  How empty, how utterly empty, is all the world when faithful gather at the cross’s very foot, and yet still look only at their own faces.  As we began attendance at the Orthodox Church it grew ever clearer that we were in the right place.  To friends I describe our Orthodox family as being the way Christians always describe themselves, except that they never breathe a word of themselves.  

I grew up in a Christian elementary, middle, and high school, but then progressed to the local community college.  My beliefs are solid enough to remain unmoved when a biology teacher attacks “those religious people” or an English professor rolls eyes at a poet’s obvious faith.  But dearly, dearly do I miss the assumptions.  My faith is never irrelevant to the subject at hand.  Even if Christianity is discussed in neither the religious nor the non-religious classroom during a given lecture, the unspoken assumptions make all the difference.  If the assumptions do not correlate with my faith, then every word must be questioned.  Always must I be on guard.  Is this true?  Can I believe this?  We are taught to question all we learn anyway, but when the assumptions acknowledge God at the center of every answer, then the questions actually get us somewhere.

Recalled

Remember this little sentence?

[Caleb] was a young man at Telson’s: locked away from the sunlight so he would age faster.


Yeah? So?

“Anna,” I said.  He stopped.  “Anna’s in the living room.”

I felt his heart pounding through the hands holding mine.

“She didn’t die.  She’s been in that house all along.  I found her.”


What are you getting at?


"I don't know anything." [Caleb's] clenched jaw twitched; his eyes looked rapidly round at nothing at all. "I don't even know how old she is."
"You were seven."
"Yes."
"You're twenty-five now."
"She was three."
"Now she's twenty-one."
"Twenty-one. She doesn't remember me."
"I don't know."

Twenty-five minus seven? Twenty-one minus three? Eighteen years.

'Buried how long?'
The answer was always the same. 'Almost eighteen years.'
'You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?'
'Long ago.'
'You know that you are recalled to life?'
'They tell me so.'
'I hope you care to live?'
'I can't say.'
'Shall I show her to you? Will you come and see her?'
The answers to this question were various and contradictory. Sometimes the broken reply was, 'Wait! It would kill me if I saw her too soon.' Sometimes, it was given in a tender rain of tears, and then it was, 'Take me to her.' Sometimes it was staring and bewildered, and then it was, 'I don't know her. I don't understand.'

Yes, Anna's story is absolutely one of being "recalled to life," as the phrase is in Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. The time span, even, is eighteen years. I'm not telling you this because I don't think you could figure it out. I'm telling you because it was entirely unintentional. I didn't see it until a week ago. Apparently my brain wakes up during a two a.m. shower.

I didn't add the Telson's comparison after noticing my own theme. Oh no: Telson's was already there. Evan compared Caleb's workplace to Telson's bank long ago.

Isn't that weird? And kind of awesome? I only wish it had been intentional.

If you feel like ditching this blog in favor of Dickens, I can't say I blame you. In fact, I encourage such action. My excerpts against Mr. Lorry's dreams: yeah, I better get started on that revision thing. Leave this blog. Go read some Dickens and come back in twenty years. Or eighteen, if you want to be all poetic.

Two Letters -- Enlightenment Essay

The periods of literature embody man’s continual search for that which is real.  During the Enlightenment, real things were factual things.  Things which could be spelled out and enumerated; things which held strong through testing and sharpening.  Here there are two letters: Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal and Mary Robinson’s A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of mental Subordination.  Both letters represent core Enlightenment ideas while concurrently mocking the Enlightenment movement and concept.  These pieces, which both advocate the time’s possibilities and scorn its shortcomings, embody the heart of the Enlightenment.

A Modest Proposal satirizes the Enlightenment tendency to discount morality as a viable source of knowledge.  “It is not improbable that some scrupulous people might be apt to censure such a practice (although indeed very unjustly) as a little bordering upon cruelty” (Lawall 344).  There was virtually no probability of locating one person in the year 1729, in England, who would ever consider marketing children as a food delicacy.  But why not?  If morals are utterly disregarded, all Swift’s arguments make absolute sense.  At the end of the letter he specifically enumerates seven advantages of his proposal.  For the good of our country, for the good of our stomachs, for the good of our religion, for the good of the ‘breeder’ parents, for the good of the children themselves: put into action this modest proposal.  At the same time as he screams against the boorish nature of so-called enlightened truth, though, he epitomizes the Enlightenment virtue of thoughtfully considering all ideas.  Even if a respected mind claims support from other respected minds, one must not accept any teaching without close scrutiny.

  Mary Robinson’s letter mocks the thin quality of two Enlightenment jewels: natural rights and justice.  She writes that “woman is denied the first privilege of nature, the power of SELF-DEFENSE,” and, “Man is not to be deprived...but WOMAN is to be robbed” (Lawall 285).  Enlightened thinkers battle for the natural, born, innate rights of every human being, but seem not to consider women as whole human beings.  Men run high and fast with the call for justice, but would crush a woman underfoot without one warble of the voice.  “She is expected to act like a philosopher, though she is not allowed to think like one.  If she pleads the weakness of her sex, her plea is not admitted; if she professes an equal portion of mental strength with man, she is condemned for arrogance” (Lawall 287).  Robinson attacks Enlightenment scholars on the audacity of this incredible double standard.  Yet the ideas she urges are clearly of the Enlightenment: women as equals with men was a radical, counter-history thought if ever one existed.  If truth can only be found through the careful testing of every idea, then even the notion of equal mental capabilities between the sexes must be considered.                

“But, as to myself, having been wearied out for many years with offering vain, idle, visionary thoughts, and at length utterly despairing of success, I fortunately fell upon this proposal; which, as it is wholly new, so it hath something solid and real” (Lawall 346).  Here Swift mocks the Enlightenment’s rejection of the old.  Though the rejection is not absolute.  Scholars form and foster new ideas, but cling to the old ways which benefit them.  Man has innate natural rights: a new idea.  Although, throughout history, only landlords were treated fully as men, so it seems only they are privileged to these natural rights.  Swifts connects the poor to the rich exactly as Robinson connects women to men: you say ‘truth for all humanity,’ but who is all humanity?  The new initiated by the Enlightenment was a good new, but much of the old’s worst easily stayed firm in society.

The final apex of good rarely sees daylight, because it poses threat to those in power.  Strange how those with bounty are so loathe not only to part with some bounty, but even to permit others’ pursuit of decent quality of life.  Swift states, “let no man talk to me of these and like expedients, till he hath at least some glimpse of hope that there will ever be some hearty and sincere attempts to put them in practice” (Lawall 346).  Robinson more directly reveals this assumed threat: “Man says, ‘you shall be initiated in all the arts of pleasing; but you shall, in vain, hope that we will contribute to your happiness one iota beyond the principle which constitutes our own’” (Lawall 288).
These are the true Enlightenment thinkers: those who wrote against mediocre enlightenment.  When someone puts a cap on ideas and who can have them, then that someone loses credence as any kind of scholar.  Swift and Robinson, through attacking what claimed itself enlightened,  proved themselves authentically enlightened.  That is why they are still around.  That is why they are still read.

Anna Mithun: December 6th

“You knew me first.  I didn’t think you were real.  I didn’t dare think you were real.”  I inched toward her, slowly extended my hand to her back.  “Tell me a little of you.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Your name.”

“You know it.”

“Anna Mithun.”

“Mithun?  Maybe.  I only know Anna.”

Anna, Caleb's younger sister, died when she was three years old.  At least that's what Caleb's mother told him.  That's what the hospital told him.

The dream I had centered around Anna.  A boy had a dream of a girl he'd never met, but the girl acted as if they'd grown up nearly as siblings.  They'd always been in love with each other.

“What are you?” I asked.
She giggled and cupped her chin in my hand.
I thought.  “My sister!”
She nodded, turning her eyes in a playful circle.
“Sort of my sister?”
She shook her head.
“All my sister, but not at all my sister.”
She jumped and clapped like a child, then took my sleeve and pulled me further into the house.

But as the dream went on the boy saw inferences of the horror the girl lived in. The images darkened and darkened and darkened, until the girl died. Of shame? Because she couldn't take being alive anymore? The clearest memory of my dream is the boy saying, "He killed her. He killed her, so I killed him."

Caleb wasn't even in my dream, but the boy (who, of course, became Evan) has a friend. In his dream the girl takes him to their childhood bedroom, where there is a single bed and a set of bunks. The girl also gives him a set of three identical rings. Originally I meant to use some sort of token in the story, but rings were just too LOTR, and the whole token thing wound up not working. Anyway, in my dream there was an understanding of a friend, with whom the boy (in the non-dream world) sets out to find the girl.

Anna is just over five feet tall, with a small (though not especially thin) frame. Her eyes are green and bright: identical to Caleb's. Her hair is brown with definite red undertones.

I know: her hair and eyes are like mine. That wasn't intentional. She was quite clear in my mind--she had green eyes and reddish-brown hair. She really doesn't look like me, but the basic description hints otherwise!

I personally think Evan gives the best description of her. This conversation in one of the first in the story. Evan has just dreamt of Anna, but he doesn't know her name is Anna or anything else about her.

“Tell me how she looked." [Caleb said.]
“Remember that sculpture exhibit last summer?” 
“Absolutely.” 
“She looked like one of the statues.  If you could take one those beautiful marble faces, and crush a peach over it to bring it to life, it would look like her.” 
He smiled.  “Poet.  Tell me of her eyes.”  
“Green,” I said.  “A whole lot like yours, actually.”  
“Well that kills the poetry.”

As I'm sure you've all deduced, Anna is not actually dead. I don't want to tell too much, because I want my finished story to hold at least a little interest!

Falling Asleep

I don't know what is is with me and sleep.  It's just so important; my characters are always drifting gently to sleep.  Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that most of my writing happens after eleven, but I don't think so.

“Now let me see your leg,” the boy said. “Nasty hounds! But I’ll take care of you.” Daniel shivered with fright; though only a kit, he very well knew to trust not any creature, whether it be dog, or cat, or bird, or bear, or human, or even other fox. Every creature meant harm to every other, especially to defenseless ones! But he couldn’t escape, because his leg hurt too much, and head spun as if in a whirlpool. The boy’s face turned sad when he noticed Daniel shaking, and pet him, over his pointy ears and down his furry back. This felt so nice that Daniel forgot to be afraid, and quickly fell asleep. 

I think the only story I've written which doesn't involve one character easing another to sleep is Danger Davie. That was my first story: a Halloween present for my cousins. As an aside, when I named Davie the computer tried (and is, this very moment, trying) to correct him to "Davy." My mother commented on this apparently unusual spelling, but I thought that was how the name was spelled. I'd become attached, and left it. Some time later I picked up a book I've long loved, Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped. The main character is David Balfour. Guess what Alan Breck calls him? Davie. Davie. Now I know where I got the name!

Want a friendship novel? Read Kidnapped. Or any assorted Sherlock. But you knew that.


Lise lay to his shoulder. “I don’t even want to be brave. I just want to stay here. I’m safe. I get tired, everywhere else.” She lay still, Ean blinking to preserve his face from re-streaking.
“You seem tired now.”
“Yes, and I can sleep. I can’t explain--but, but maybe you already understand. It's a different tired now, than before. I’m tired from walking and swimming, and because I’m too comfortable to stay awake. It's not like the other tired, the tired of being afraid. I can't sleep, when tired that way. But now I can sleep. I want to sleep.”

That must be the thing. You have to feel some sense of safety to fall asleep. Even if that safety comes only from stillness. You're being hunted, but now you've fallen to the ground and you're still. You can sleep.
I have to mention Caleb here. Doesn't it seem that when something's wrong, the first thing we lose is sleep? And all you want to do is sleep. Yet you only lie awake wishing for sleep. The dark is cool and still and safe. The dark is close and empty and lurking. A soothing hand across your eyes or a blindfold of terror.

My friend was sleeping.  I had been.  I lifted my cheek from where it lay against his head, which lay against my shoulder.  Anna in the laps between us.  A tiny, dark room.  Hiding.  Not safe, but together so that we had to sleep.  I wished I still slept.

But I didn’t.  I wrapped my arm about the friend sleeping soundly on me.  He’d grown a little older.  A little thinner, since last I saw him.  Anna shivered a little.  Held one of Caleb’s hands.  Held one of mine.  Wrapped her little body around the set they made.  My friends had to sleep.  I could stay waking, but must keep them asleep.  One would not sleep again.  One would never wake.

The closet closer.  We were in the closet.  Where Anna once pushed me through.  But now the walls stifled.  I heard noises.  Voices.  Hard, hard voices.  And Caleb woke.  Held the small girl as near as he could.  Let me try to hold them both nearer.  She seemed still asleep, but started to cry.  Trapped in our nightmare.

Step.  Step.  Step.  Not careful and quiet.  Not timid and shoeless like those which saddened and comforted me if I woke in the middle of some cold night.  Anna shook violently, now.  Hush Baby.  Sing.  Too loud.  Sing please.

The door flung open and we were blind.  Not by light.  The closet seemed dark until the real darkness came in.  Saw only splotches.  Heard only screams.  Felt my friend fighting, fighting.  Just like before.  The fight he never won, that he fought more desperately because he knew he never could win.

A rip, a tear--my heart wrenched out by poisoned teeth.  Never.  Never.  Something was never.  Then the blackness again.  Anna gone.  Never, never, never Anna.  Never Caleb.  Never really Caleb.  They took him, too.

There he was on the ground.  I ran to him, knelt at his side--and he vanished.  Again I found him.  The scar.  Not yet a scar.  The skin of my friend’s neck flayed and bleeding and I couldn’t reach him.  He didn’t move.  Caleb!  Caleb!  I cried and cried again.  They trampled him.  A mob.  Thousands upon thousands crushing my friend.  Weren’t bothered to raise their shoes a little higher.  Toes bruising his face.  Heels catching strings of flesh.   No sound came from him.  His eyes rolled like dead things.  I ran but came no closer.  I ran but the mob thrust me back.  I dropped beside and the feet and legs and dark and death and blood devoured him.  My hand reached for his but fell numb.  Fell like lead.  Caleb!  Hardly Caleb anymore.  A shadow growing from the darkness and seizing him.  Crawling up and over him toward the gushing wound.  His child’s body convulsing and his eyes dead.  Caleb!  Squirming up and bearing its teeth.  Caleb!  Caleb!  Caleb!

Sleep is wonderful or horrible. If someone slept "okay," then he really didn't sleep at all. Real sleep is another world. Perhaps a silent one, but one all the same. Does not a happy dream keep your heart light all day? Does not a nightmare cast shadows in the sun?

Think I'll end with Afton and Kiva here. I love them so. I think I have to fall in love with my characters. If I didn't they'd have no shape.


“Afton,” I called softly, after opening my window. “Afton?”
“Here,” he said, pulling himself from the sky to hover before me. “Are you well?”
“Of course. Won’t you come in?”
He looked surprised.
“Oh. Are you not coming in?”
“I didn’t think so.”
“Then why are you out here? You should’ve gone back to wherever you sleep.”
“I don’t need much sleep. You don’t mind my standing by the window, do you?”
“No, but I’d rather you came in.”
“I’ll keep the cold out; you won’t even know this is open.”
“I can’t leave you outside all night.”
He glanced downward. “Would you believe me, if I told you I’ve never been in a house?”
“You’ve been in a bus.”
He smiled. “Only once, and for but a minute.”
I reached out and took both his hands, guiding him inside. He followed, rather warily.
“Not so bad,” I said. “Is it?”
“Shouldn’t be.” I guided him around the room: showed him where I hid journals in the closet, the space between the bed and bookshelf where I’d sit to read.
“What’s the matter, Afton?” I asked. “You’re holding my hand so tightly.”
His grip loosened. “I’m sorry. There’s something wrong in this house.”
“What?”
He shook his head. “My heart is racing, and I can’t calm it.”
I pressed his heart; it beat like boiling water. “Would you be easier outside?”
“I don’t like you in here; I must stay here with you.”
I sat on the bed and bid him sit beside me, then eased his head into my lap. Just that relaxed him some, though as my fingers moved across his neck the skin there squirmed a little.
“May I ask what you’re doing?” he said.
“Caring for you a bit.”
“Caring for--”
He stopped, because I began to rub his back as well as I knew how. It must have been well enough; in the moonlight his diamond eyes glinted. He shifted uneasily, looked shyly about the room as his human muscles tensed and complained and softened. After some minutes I found a spot that held him still and breathless as I rubbed deeper and deeper into it; then he melted. Melted into my hands with a single acute sigh.
“Kiva?” he said.
I giggled. “Yes?”
He smiled. “You’re laughing at me.”
“You whisper so soft; I nearly can’t hear you.”
“Forgive me, I...” He swallowed, bit his lip as my thumb sculpted a circle on his spine.
“What, Afton?”
  A shiver ran through him, and he shook his head.
  “What’s the matter?”
   “The matter? Nothing at all is the matter.”
     “You quivered.”
   “You said my name. I love it when you say my name.”
    I lay myself down at his back, still rubbing. “Afton? What were you going to ask me, Afton?"
    He only sighed.
   “Answer me, Afton.”
    “It is nothing.”
    “You meant to ask something.”
    “No.”
     “Afton.” Truly, each time I spoke his name he pressed closer into my palm. “Afton, please, please ask me.”  He hesitated, and I set my ear against his mouth. “Tell me.”
     He shivered again, then answered so that I felt and not heard him. “Kiva? Would you kiss me once more?”
     I slid my hands up to his neck, kept them moving and kissed him on the mouth. When I let go he was asleep.