sound theories, absurd practices

Tired today after a mainly sleepless night. I woke at 12:30, and with various concerns pressing on my mind, I eventually decided to go downstairs and read. I'd had a mild headache since Kimmie and I got home from our outing yesterday (the annual New Westminster Heritage Tour of houses), but assumed that it was dehydration, since I hadn't had any water all day. So I drank lots of water, and also a couple of whiskies, while I sat reading The Golden Bough in the dead of night. The reading itself was very pleasant and interesting, and made me feel that the night was not a complete waste. Then I lay on the sofa under a couple of blankets, and whiled away the remaining hour or so until dawn. It was good to get up and start making the coffee and so on.

Since then I've made a journal entry, and keyed notes from A History of Israel, volume 2. But my plan is to spend most of today working on my writing-for-hire.

My reading in The Golden Bough was from chapters 49 and 50: "Ancient Deities of Vegetation as Animals" and "Eating the God". I picked it up at the final section of chapter 49, "Virbius and the Horse", and in the first paragraph read these words:

Myth changes while custom remains constant; men continue to do what their fathers did before them, though the reasons on which their fathers acted have been long forgotten. The history of religion is a long attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason, to find a sound theory for an absurd practice.

I was struck, for this was already the conclusion I had formed from reading the book so far, and have been thinking about for the past few weeks. Based on Frazer's evidence, I thought that the definition of superstition ought to be, simply, "a new explanation for an old practice"; and here Frazer himself was dishing up basically the same thought, summarizing what he has been presenting over the past 625 pages (much more in the original work, of course). Those six words, "Myth changes while custom remains constant", portend vast things for our human condition.

Recently too I read a definition of myth that I had not heard before, quoted by Neil Forsyth in his The Old Enemy:

Myths are the stories we believe.

Plugging that idea into Frazer's observation, myth is the believable story we tell to account for a practice we're already doing. The practice itself is a cultural habit, and like all habits, is very difficult to break, even if one wants to, and generally we don't want to break our cultural habits. Why should we? They've always been there; they're part of our identity, part of who "we" are.

This is a rich topic, but I'm afraid I don't have the mental power right now to explore it further. Maybe tomorrow!

from magic to religion

Time to type in a quick blog-post. I'm pushing the pace a bit so I can get to a current copywriting task that has a close deadline. Although very few deadlines in life are "real", as an independent contractor it's well to meet them if possible.

Still, over morning coffee (and I'm still on my second mug) I like to type in some research notes. Today it was from Frazer's classic The Golden Bough, chapters 44 and 45, about "Demeter and Persephone" and "The Corn-mother and the Corn-maiden in Northern Europe", respectively.

Obscure, you say? Maybe. Personally I'm finding Frazer's book, first published in 1922, even more fascinating on this read-through than I did when I first read (most of) it in 1978-79 on my trip to Europe with Tim. I remember back then picking up the hefty paperback with a sense almost of obligation, as something I should read, but usually finding myself more drawn in than I expected. The Golden Bough bogs down only in amassing examples of Frazer's various points, which amassing he did in order to show the truly worldwide scope of his theory, as well as to offer maximum support for an argument that he expected to be resisted by the reader.

For Frazer looked into a great many of the strange, even baffling, customs, rites, and superstitions of the world, on every inhabited continent, and saw order and purpose. We receive traditions, our culture, and act out things as it were automatically, in the same way that our body performs things by habit. Thus, in the same way that we put up and decorate Christmas trees and hide Easter eggs and dress our kids in costumes to go trick-or-treating, other people dance around maypoles or call the last sheaf of harvested wheat the Old Woman or give up their children to be roasted alive in a bronze bull.

Frazer's project, which took him decades, had him tracking the gradual evolution of magic into religion--for he contends that magic is the more ancient view of the world, what he regards as a primitive form of science. In his view, an animistic view of the world, in which every object had its own life and soul, not unlike the way we regard the world as young children, evolves into a world in which invisible but anonymous spirits animate things, able to flit from one to another, until eventually these spirits become identified as individuals--as gods, with names and biographies. Ultimately, in Frazer's rationalistic eyes, this view becomes superseded by a scientific outlook, in which the forces of nature are seen in their most objective and also effective way. No doubt in deference to his readers, he pays lip service to the validity of Christian belief, but it seems unlikely that Frazer, having examined so much world mythology, and having described so many beliefs and rites that are essentially the same as the Christian myth, personally bought into any religion as more valid than the others.

Reading The Golden Bough is still an eye-opener for me. Our whole rationalistic, scientific worldview is like a thin shim of ice on an ocean of beliefs and feelings that are alien to it. I'm relatively unsuperstitious, but it's still there within me, a vague fear sometimes of not doing things a certain way, of not following the "proven" path. Even my father used to wear a special pair of red socks to do video-editing, because they made the equipment work. It was a joke, of course--and yet I'm pretty sure he wore the socks. Frazer would understand that immediately as an instance of "contagious magic": probably Dad once wore these unusual socks, which may have been noticed by colleagues, and on that day the editing equipment happened to perform better than usual. The coincidence of two unusual events links them causally in the "savage" (that is, our) mind. Thereafter, if Dad had failed to wear the socks, and the equipment had failed to work properly, he would have had only himself to blame. Who knows, maybe his colleagues would have sacrificed him to the god of video-editing.

I was planning to read only a little into The Golden Bough this time, since I felt I'd never have the oomph to make it through all 934 pages. But I'm on page 610, and still absorbed...

the magic world

Two days ago, in search of some basic information on the phenomenon of taboos, I pulled out my thick copy of J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough and searched through it. He defines taboo as "negative magic"--"Do not do this, lest so and so should happen." I was digging into the ancient institution of ritual purity, which appears to be an extension of the still more ancient notion of taboo.

Frazer's book, originally published in 12 volumes in 1922, is a famous landmark in the study of comparative religion and mythology. I of course have only an abridged edition in one teensy-weensy paperback volume of 972 pages, a very well-made Macmillan paperback with a cover illustration by Peter Goodfellow that I've always liked: a young man, in classical drapery, seen from behind, sits on a white unicorn that lies on a rock, gripping its horn and surveying a fantastic landscape that has strong affinities with Bosch--little naked figures, bearded satyrs, mermaids, all in and around a magic lake surround by rocky bluffs.

I got the book so long ago that it was before I started inscribing the date on the inside along with my name, which I started doing in 1979. But I remember exactly when I got it: in the late summer of 1978. My mother got it for me to take with me on what was intended to be a year-long world trip with my friend Tim (it lasted six months and we only got as far as Italy--no complaints!). She hadn't read the book, but had heard that it was supposed to be a widely acknowledged authority on mythology. I hadn't heard of it, but I packed it with me, along with the white Bible that Tim and I had agreed we would read through as part of our traveling education.

I picked up other books to read on the trip as we went along, but I did start The Golden Bough and kept up with it as a kind of background read, finding it strangely compelling, even though it was mainly, even in such severely abridged form, a long mass of examples of magical beliefs, superstitions, and rituals from primitive cultures around the world, ca. 1900. It was fascinating in many ways--an eye-opener. I felt I was peering into a dreamlike world, which was also the world in which the great majority of humanity has always lived--a world alien to my own upbringing in the comfortable, materialistic suburb of North Vancouver. It seems that most people's lives, for almost all of human history, have been governed mainly by magical thinking.

I didn't finish the book--in fact, I still haven't. But it did form an important thread in that trip. Indeed, the farthest point of our journey was actually Nemi--the lake south of Rome on whose shore the ancient grove of Diana was, where the succession of her priesthood, the so-called Kings of the Wood, aroused the curiosity of Frazer and prompted him to write the book that would turn out to be his entire career. The King of the Wood guarded the sacred oak to which he was also, apparently, married. At any time of day or night he might be attacked and forced into mortal combat. If his attacker vanquished him and killed him, then the attacker became the next King of the Wood, and must stand guard the rest of his life until his own unknown successor eventually killed him. This priesthood was ancient even in Imperial Rome, its origins shrouded in legend.

I remember when Tim and I stopped at the roadside overlooking Nemi, still a beautiful little lake nestled in the Alban hills. In the deep rural quiet we ate our salami, bread, and cheese in our red Westfalia van, looking down at the dark-green trees standing in the very spot where the King of the Wood once guarded his tree-goddess-wife. I felt strange stirrings of both connection to and distance from that ancient practice and the passionate beliefs that underlay it.

The world is mysterious. Our presence in it and our actions in it are also mysterious. Everything we do can be looked at as a straightforward, literal action; but somehow the echoes of our deeds reverberate through a strange chasm of unconscious purpose and meaning, ensuring that nothing is ever quite what it seems.

Sunset Boulevard

After a cloudy morning and a forecast of possible thundershowers, the sky is clear and the hot sun is back. I have returned from a brief errand trip, which involved dropping off a couple of DVDs at the library. One of these was Sunset Boulevard, which Kimmie and I watched last night.

It was the third time I'd seen the movie; I'd seen it once before Kimmie and I watched it maybe a dozen years ago. The digitally restored production was excellent. Again I had the happy experience of finding a movie I knew to be good to be even better than I'd remembered. As when I recently watched Risky Business starring Tom Cruise, it was such an absorbing experience that it seemed I was watching it for the first time. I know that Sunset Boulevard has been extensively studied, but I've not read those studies, so I'm going to make some observations of my own.

The 1950 movie, which stars William Holden and Gloria Swanson, was directed by Billy Wilder and written by him in collaboration with Charles Brackett and D. M. Marshman, Jr. Supposedly, Wilder and Brackett, who had been successful but mutually irritating collaborators before, had started a script in 1948 about an aging silent-film star wanting to make a comeback in a much-changed Hollywood. Dissatisfied with their progress, they brought in the film critic Marshman after being favorably impressed with his analysis of their earlier film The Emperor Waltz, and Marshman contributed the idea of a young gigolo character.

Whatever the case, I see in the story another cluster of elements around the theme of the Great Goddess. This theme was worked out thoroughly, in different ways, by J. G. G. Frazer in The Golden Bough and by Robert Graves in The White Goddess. As Graves observed, the essential story of the myth was that of the immortal Goddess and her two mortal consorts: the reigning priest-king who was, in effect, her husband, and the young man who would overthrow the king to become his replacement. The new king would, in time, be overthrown by his successor in the same way.

In the movie, the goddess is of course the screen legend Norma Desmond. The old king is her servant Max (Max von Stroheim), who, it comes out, was in fact not only her director at Paramount, but her first husband (she's had three), and therefore presumably the first occupant of the "husband's bed" which the young writer Joe Gillis (Holden) eventually comes to occupy. Interestingly, in this story the young protagonist is not seeking to win the goddess; he becomes "attracted" to her by money, because he sees her as a way of paying the finance company that wants to repossess his car. Gradually, without knowing it, he falls under her spell.

In a deeper reading, based on Erich Neumann's The Origins and History of Consciousness, the myth of the Great Goddess and her vying lovers is itself an expression of a phase in the emergence of ego-consciousness from the womb of the unconscious, symbolized by the Great Goddess. One stage of this is marked by the emergence of twin brothers, who are in a sense womb-mates of the Goddess, and who take on the qualities of light and darkness as part of the gradual separation of the world into opposites, which is the function of consciousness. This represents an earlier stage than that of the divine king who is the consort of the Goddess.

The Goddess image is strengthened by the fact that the movie project Norma wants young Joe to rewrite for her is Salome, the story of the biblical princess who performs the dance of the seven veils and orders the beheading of John the Baptist. The dance of the seven veils is actually a much older mythological motif, dating back to Sumerian times, when it was performed by Inanna, the queen of heaven, who had to remove her clothes in stages in order to descend into the underworld to rescue Dumuzi, god of vegetation, who is trapped there.

It becomes clear that Norma Desmond does represent the devouring dragon aspect of the Great Goddess after all: through her wealth, power, theatrics, and emotional instability, she seeks to draw Joe to her and keep him there forever. His independence and his artistic creativity become bound to her, sold for a luxurious lifestyle.

He sees the potential for freedom and creativity again in the person of young Betty Schaeffer (Nancy Olson), a reader at Paramount, who sees potential in him and wants to work with him at developing one of his ideas. She also falls in love with him, and he with her. She is like the captive princess in the Neumann analysis: the young, beautiful aspect of the Goddess, who represents the good things in life that the hero can attain if he can overcome the dragon and free her. Betty's captivity is expressed in the fact that she can't write the script on her own; she needs Joe in order to realize her own dreams.

But Joe does not slay the dragon; the dragon slays him. He does not have the strength to overcome her overwhelming power. In Neumann's terms, he does not make the transition to manhood; he is the adolescent who dies because he doesn't yet have the inner resources to defy the Goddess. Consciousness is snuffed out; it will have to await another rising, another hero, who may have more moxie.

There is so much more to say about this movie. To name only one element: Gillis shows up at the house and is mistaken by Max and Norma as the undertaker for their pet chimpanzee who has just died! The movie places much emphasis on this element, later showing a grotesque scene in which Max and Norma inter the chimp in the yard in a child's coffin. I could only shake my head in awe and admiration as I watched.

Yes, much more to say. The short summary is that this is one of the best movies ever made. It was a privilege to watch.

when reading is writing

Today: a blog post. It's hot again. I've just been for a run and I feel sweat actually trickling down my bare torso--ticklish. Through the open window: the rumble of a small front-end loader on Keith Road, which has been blocked off to enable the loader to ferry manured dirt up the block. Translucent green leaves sparkle across the brick patio. The large flat windows of the neighbors' cubic townhouse are plunged in inscrutable shade.

Morning notes: From Eden to Exile, A History of Technology.

On to the main course. I opened up chapter 17, which I keep thinking wishfully is almost done. And so it is, I think--in terms of length. But conceptually I'm not there yet.

My musings on the precessional ages had come to focus more specifically on the Temple of Hathor at Dendera in Egypt. This was the site of the famous Zodiac of Dendera, a circular ceiling-plaque depicting constellations, planets, and the so-called decans (ruling symbols of each of the 36 10-day ancient-Egyptian weeks--one for each nome, or administrative district). The original plaque was carried off in 1820 by Sebastien Saulnierin and now resides at the Louvre in Paris. A reproduction has been installed in the temple. John Anthony West, following R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz and some others, believes that the temple, which was built over a much more ancient temple site in the 1st century BC, was intended, in part, to mark the beginning of the Age of Pisces.

When I first came across a reference to the temple and its zodiac a year or two ago, I filed away the information, just in case it might come in handy. I didn't have any existing story plans for it, and it wasn't anywhere near what I was working on at the time, so I just parked it mentally somewhere in the back, in the dark. But, as noted in a recent post, the Age of Pisces is my project, so I knew I'd have to look into it more at some point.

Today I realized I was at that point. I could not progress with my current scene without knowing more about this temple. So: I opened a Word document I had made based on the text in a very good web-page I'd found on the temple at Dendera, and started reading. I sighed. Reading, not writing.

Pretty darned interesting reading, though. I revisited the web-page. There are images of Cleopatra VII and her son by Julius Caesar, Ptolemy XV, carved on the rear wall of the temple. Hmm. Starting to feel very relevant. What does this mean? I enjoyed the feeling of folding this information into my brain, like, say, eggs into pancake batter. Something is cooking, and I don't know how it's going to play out. I read all that material, including a very good article by a certain Joanne Conman (can I trust that name?), who seems well versed in the astrology of the period.

Then I got wondering: who exactly was Hathor? I knew she was an Egyptian goddess of women, fertility, and childbirth--but what else? I went to my floor-to-ceiling office bookshelves. Where to look... I pulled out Middle Eastern Mythology by S. H. Hooke--couple of mentions but nothing much. Life in Ancient Egypt by Adolf Erman--some stuff, mainly quoting ancient texts. Grimal's History of Ancient Egypt...a few mentions but the focus of the book is wrong. I tried The Great Mother by Erich Neumann...fair amount of material, but wrong orientation--psychological. Nothing in The Golden Bough. How about Joseph Campbell? Does he talk about Hathor? Must. I pulled out Oriental Mythology, the volume of The Masks of God in which I knew he deals with Egyptian mythology. To the index: yes! Pages 52-53, 54ff, 75f, 90-91, 93, 100, 111, 128.

I opened my good old Penguin paperback (bought in December 1980) to page 52 and found myself in the middle of Campbell's discussion of the Narmer palette, an especially ancient (2850 BC) two-sided palette depicting a King "Narmer" (= Scorpion, thought by many to be the legendary Menes) conquering the Northern Kingdom and thus uniting Egypt into a single state under himself. I felt a little burst of excitement, because I remembered being especially impressed with his discussion of the Narmer palette last time I'd read the book, maybe three or four years ago.

Since the text was already highlighted, I went back to the previous subheading, The Hieratic State, and started keying. Yes, I thought with pleasure as I typed--jackpot. Here is a partial extract:

On both sides of the Narmer palette there appear two heavily horned heads of the cow-goddess Hathor in the top panels, presiding at the corners. Four is the number of the quarters of the sky, and the goddess, thus pictured four times, was to be conceived as bounding the horizon. She was known as Hathor of the Horizon, and her animal was the cow--not the domestic cow, but the wild cow living in the marshes. The neolithic cosmic goddess Cow. Hathor stood upon the earth in such a way that her four legs were the pillars of the four quarters. Her belly was the firmament. Moreover, the sun, the golden solar falcon, the god Horus, flying east to west, entered her mouth each evening, to be born again the next dawn. Horus, thus, was the "bull of his mother," his own father. And the cosmic goddess, whose name, hat-hor, means the "house of Horus," accordingly was both the consort and the mother of this self-begetting god, who in one aspect was a bird of prey. In the aspect of father, the mighty bull, this god was Osiris and identified with the dead father of the living pharaoh; but in the aspect of son, the falcon, Horus, he was the living pharaoh now enthroned. Substantially, however, these two, the living pharaoh and the dead, Horus and Osiris, were the same.

The "house of Horus," the cow-goddess Hathor, was not only the frame of the universe, but also the land of Egypt, the royal palace, and the mother of the living pharaoh, while, as we have just seen, he, the dweller in the house, self-begotten, was not only himself but also his own father.

Hathor--the "house of Horus"--was the frame of the universe, and simultaneously the land of Egypt, which was considered the earthly reflection of the night sky. Hmm. Cleopatra regarded herself as an incarnation of Isis, the mother of Horus. That would be Ptolemy XV. Which would make his father, Osiris, Julius Caesar. Hmm...

These thoughts tumbled through the space of my mind, not really alighting anywhere, but feeling suggestive, provocative, while I typed and typed from Campbell's book. I typed till I was fed up with it, and then some. Finally I broke for lunch.

myth and life

Sunny, warm--like high summer, but with the fresh translucent greens of spring still.

Morning notes: True Believer and Alexander the Great by Robin Lane Fox.

When I wrote about Joseph Campbell back on 14 May, I thought that Creative Mythology was the first of his books that I bought and read, but it wasn't. My copy of The Hero with a Thousand Faces I got in December 1979--right around the time when Dr. Whitehead was recommending him. This volume I have also read several times, highlighted, and keyed in compressed form into a Word document. My edition is the black-covered Princeton Bollingen trade paperback, heavy, with nice paper. The spine has come unglued and the pages are starting to break away. Now at least once a year I read it again--the highlighted portions, so I can read the whole book in one or two sittings.

In my opinion, it's one of the most important books of the 20th century. A few years ago I noted how 3 such important books appeared almost simultaneously in the late 1940s: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), The White Goddess by Robert Graves (1948), and Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947). These three geniuses were probably not even aware of each other, but they were working with similar themes in their different ways.

The basic message underlying each is that the fiery cauldron of myth is as hot today, this second, as it ever was, and that what we are pleased to call "myth" is actually the life-force that animates our existence each day and each moment. Graves was showing how all European poetry had as its basic theme a single subject: the eternal story of the Great Goddess and her consort/child the mortal but resurrected king, the god who appears only in a twinhood of alternating roles. The new young lover kills the old and takes his place by the side of the Queen of Heaven, to be killed in his turn by his own successor. It's the story of the Golden Bough, examined at length by J. G. Frazer.

Under the Volcano tells this story in modern-day Mexico on the eve of World War 2. Geoff Firmin, His Majesty's (alcoholic) consul in Cuernavaca, lives through his last day on earth trying to reunite with his estranged wife while his half-brother Hugh replaces him in her affections, all in the shadow of the great smoking volcano Popocatepetl. Lowry gives the story urgency, pathos, and great symbolic depth, suggesting that the political and military paroxysms of the 20th century are themselves the manifestation of this same volcanic mythic force. Brother kills brother to take possession of a stretch of fiery Mother Earth.

Campbell's book takes a step further back to look at the phenomenon of myth as such, rather than any one myth. Here is an extract from the opening of Hero:

Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, the myths of man have flourished; and they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind.... Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

In one sense, he's simply providing a definition of myth--his own. But in reality he is doing much more: he's trying to reintroduce us to the wonder of our own existence, and make us curious about it again in a new way. What could this thing myth possibly be, such that even what we term God is simply a manifestation of it? The book provides a kind of X-ray of the structure of all myths, all stories.

Campbell spent his career investigating and answering that question. This book, Hero, published when he was only 44, was the first sign-marker on the route of his quest. I am so glad that I have been allowed to follow.

I don't specifically remember the first time I read it. At that time I revered Carl Jung, and had read a few of his books. This no doubt struck me as being in a similar vein, and speaking with a similar authority. Incredibly, in this one book he is able to show how the myths of the world, of history, reveal the entire spiritual journey of each of us, as far as it can be revealed. The achievement is staggering, and, as I've said before, underrated.

Here's an extract from a section called "The Ultimate Boon", which was to have importance for me years later:

The prodigious gulf between those childishly blissful multitudes who fill the world with piety and the truly free breaks open at the line where the symbols give way and are transcended.... Here is the line beyond which thinking does not go, beyond which all feeling is truly dead: like the last stop on a mountain railroad from which climbers step away, and to which they return, there to converse with those who love mountain air but cannot risk the heights.

Whatever my first impression of Hero, it made me hungry for more of Campbell, so 4 months later I bought myself Creative Mythology and continued on my own personal quest. It's still on, but has been a very fruitful and fulfilling one so far.

reading chapter 12

Flaubert said that a key test of any piece of writing is to hear it read aloud. As I finish a draft of each chapter, I read it aloud to Kimmie. It's a way of sharing my progress with her, as well as of hearing it myself to test my own reaction. Yesterday afternoon I read chapter 12 to her.

It was actually a rewrite of chapter 12. I read my first draft of it to her on 11 February, and was so dissatisfied that, contrary to my usual policy of "hold your nose and keep moving forward," I decided to rewrite it. It's the first chapter of Part 2, set in autumn 48 BC, after the events of Part 1 which are set in Palestine in the preceding summer. I had been looking forward to chapter 12 because I would be bringing together my protagonist Marcus, the retired Roman centurion, with a new character, Gaia, a woman just expelled from the Jewish spiritual colony of the Healers on the shore of Lake Mareotis outside Alexandria. Gaia was to add a much-needed female presence to my story, and provide a challenging and unexpected relationship for the depressive and solitary Marcus.

I think I must have believed that their unexpected meeting would be interesting in itself. They meet on a sailboat bound for Alexandria, just as the city is being occupied by the Egyptian army, which has arrived to eject Julius Caesar and his 4,000 troops from the palace where he's holed up. Marcus's meeting with a strange, single woman would naturally provoke curiosity about what form their relationship will take--will they become lovers? So I wrote my first draft without doing all the necessary preliminary work on studying the characters' "backstories" (their stories prior to the time of their appearance) and motivations. The result, I felt, was disappointing, and even Kim thought the chapter lacked the oomph of some of the earlier ones.

To me this meant I must go back to the drawing board. In my haste to get pages out I had taken a shortcut in working through the preliminaries. I returned to the document called "12 - Notes" and started making new entries, asking questions about my characters, their backgrounds, and their motivations. On Valentines Day, the day of the death of Kim's eldest and last surviving brother Freddie, I made a new dateline and started keying notes. That day's entry was brief:

"Chapter needs more spine: more definite goals and motivations for Marcus and Gaia. Not just chit-chat, but things they definitely want to achieve, want from each other."

The work took me down byways of thinking and research. I tunneled more persistently into Gaia's backstory. Where had she come from? Why exactly had she joined the Healers? To me she had been a free-spirited Jewess who had become a traveling poetess--for these existed in the Hellenistic world. But as I dug into where she had come from, I came up with the idea that she had been born at the temple of Aphrodite at Paphos, Cyprus--a child of the goddess, and so divine herself. A divine orphan. I loved this idea. It speaks directly to my emerging theme of the sacred and the profane, the divine and the human--this great dichotomy that Mircea Eliade characterized as the distinction between being and nonbeing: for this is what the divide really is. The divine, the sacred, is; while the contingent and profane are not. The thirst for the sacred is the thirst for being.

Looking into this past had me taking down my old fat copy of The Golden Bough and my bright-yellow copy of The White Goddess. I typed passages from these books into my research documents. I typed material from my copy of The Oxford Classical Dictionary on Cyprus, and from The Greek Myths by Robert Graves. I gradually, with effort, fleshed out a backstory for Gaia--a backstory that will be only glimpsed in Chapter 12.

I did my rewrite. It was an uphill job, since I don't like revisiting material in draft 1 before I've finished the draft. It prolongs the journey to the end, making eventual completion feel even more like a mirage, and creates a sense that I am multiplying the eventual workload, since this chapter, even though rewritten, will still need to be revised along with all the others for draft 2. I kept what I could, and tried to inject more conflict in the Marcus-Gaia interaction. The chapter grew 5 pages in length, to 41 typed pages.

So I read this to Kimmie. She said she enjoyed it, although she was feeling preoccupied and fragile from all the drama unfolding in her family in the aftermath of Freddie's death.

Later, while we were watching TV (Taking It Off, a reality show about a group of obese Canadians trying to slim down), we got talking about it some more during a commercial break. Some offhand remark of Kim's, that Marcus is "old," provided an entree to more honest probing.

"Old?" I said. "He's only two years older than you!" (Marcus is 52.)

"Yes, he's manly," she said. "But we just haven't seen much of him yet. And it's hard when you're comparing him with Menahem or Herod."

Menahem and Herod are two other protagonists, the main actors of Part 1. They are younger and, so far, more dynamic characters--even sexier.

"I mean, Marcus is depressed," she said, "and he tried to kill himself."

True. Marcus wanted to off himself in Chapter 1.

"And we don't know why yet," I said.

Interesting. Kimmie was seeing Marcus as kind of a dead letter, a gray-haired has-been with no interesting life left in him. A quitter. Yes, he's strong and resourceful, but he has no future.

I felt indignant on his behalf. I'll show you, I thought. I'll get Marcus moving his butt in this thing. I'll make you care!