Invitation

When I was a wee lass the woman down the street was very concerned that I was out of touch with "reality."
My mother assured her that I was playing pretend.

I was a very good play pretender. I rarely said things like:
"Let's pretend there is a little man living in an underground house beneath our own house."
Instead I said:
"The little man won't answer the door under my bed. Something might have happened to him. I'm going outside to find him."

I knew the trick to the best kind of play was not saying "Let's pretend," or "I'm only pretending." I knew that all play was equally real and unreal, that bravery, kindness, and trust were true whether you were dreaming, pretending, telling a story or playing "real life."

Certain truths are especially hard to grasp in "real life." Fairy tales and certain types of pretend can remind us, show us, and teach us the things that are not allowed or are undervalued in "real life."
They can remind us that "real life" is a game we began to play long ago, a very dangerous game in which you choose masks to wear and insist they are the real you, a game that demands that no other games, no other stories, no other worlds are "real." They are ONLY pretend, and only the "real life" game is important.

And if you play "real life" with us and play it well we will love you, and be proud of you, and you will feel safe, never needing to worry about the unknown, about the dark, about the mysterious, or about the possibility that you yourself are less "real" and not in fact the masks you have been wearing, but rather an innocent traveler who stumbled into a deadly serious game with eternal consequences; that you may never be able to leave the game because you will be convinced that you are not playing a game but rather are having a "real life."

And what if you were so lucky that someone stronger, someone with a better memory of the multicolored land beyond "real life",  started to play a different game with you, a game that bleed into "real life", and you started asking yourself, "What is real?"

Not just, "Is this a real game? Or something else?" but "Is 'real life' real?"

And what if by asking yourself these questions, rather than asking your benevolent benefactor (who could never actually answer these questions for you) you began to remember that you aren't "real", that you are a pretender, a storyteller, a dreamer, a liar trapped by deadly seriousness (a.k.a gravity) in a heavy game. A game in which your abilities to play have atrophied, a game that didn't just start when you were born, because actually time is a function of the "real life" game and you have been trapped on the wheel of "real life" for much "longer" than you realized.

And what if you remembered this for a moment and began to learn to play again thanks to a trickster who started playing a game within a game with you and called it deadly serious...

What if? What if?

“If you are a dreamer come in
If you are a dreamer a wisher a liar
A hoper a pray-er a magic-bean-buyer
If youre a pretender com sit by my fire
For we have some flax golden tales to spin
Come in!
Come in!”

― Shel Silverstein


So let's not say, "let's pretend." We're better pretenders than that. Let us be open hearted and true whether our experience is real or imagined. Let us play in earnest, let us play with levity, and flexibility (fluxability?) and bravery, and kindness, and trust.

Let us play in bright axiom.

Queen

At last the darkness envelops and comforts me with its sweet anonymity and gracious propensity for allowing all things to be as they are without judgment. THOUGHTS POUR out like the blood of my womb, the life force of my own body expelled or released before it could be tampered with by the seminal poisons of the sun.
Three men stood around a large chess board balanced on a concrete wall in a park filled with tents and vendors pedaling their wares. The black man stood tall and lean dressed in white, his bald head shining under what sun there was that afternoon. Around his neck a large even armed silver cross gleamed. Another man was from the south and sat upon a drum and beat it while his opponents worried over their next move. He wore a straw hat. The third man left no impression. He was only a man.
They asked my name and I told them. At first their eyes all widened and they begged to know if it was true that my name was "Gitana" - Gypsy. I corrected them and explained the spelling.
“I know this name.” the black man said, “It is the name of a Sumerian Goddess and of Adam's first wife. I know you.“ His eyes like black suns scorched my white flesh, reading the story of me as if it was written in sinew and bone this time around. “Don’t ask me how I know these things.” he said, closing the matter and returning his attention to the board.
Adam's first wife. You know me black man, wherever you meet me. You see the woman who would not submit to organic dominion. The witch who would not be a wife. The demoness who eats children. In the light of day we meet in our present guises and you recognize me. You remind me of who I am even as I am on the brink of forgetting for a moment.
Startled, I try to ask your name. You do not answer, as if you do not hear me, but I know that you hear. You hear but you will not utter your name in the presence of a witch, you will not utter it lest any others hear it, lest anyone else recognize you.
Men will mistake me for something else, they will long to run fingers through brassy hair, will hope to posses, to consume what they take to be another daughter of Eve placed on this earth for their own uses, to breed more men. But you are older and wiser than men.
I have no choice but to retreat to the shadows. You play these games still, with utter seriousness. You must yet fear the darkness that was bequeathed to me. I do not.
I live here as I did before ever there was a world, before ever fools juggled flaming torches or knelt at my feet and begged for my love. Before ever there were lips to stain or fruits to stain them. Before ever there were games to play.
You have here a queen of heaven, of the stars, a virgin queen. She who will not submit. She who will not join the other beasts of burden in serving Adam born of the dirt.
But you play games, on squares of black and white, endeavoring to capture the king of the opposing color, ever watchful and fearful of the queen, the queen whose movements are unrestricted, whose experience and relation to space and time is unlike that of any other piece on the board.
You play the game with utter seriousness, and if we meet you ask me to play with you. My willingness to play only serves to deepen your suspicion of me. How could you trust the one who has agreed to be your adversary?
It matters not at all to me. I return to the place where I have always been, in the darkness that envelops and comforts me  with its sweet anonymity and gracious propensity for allowing all things to be as they are. Without judgment. Without divisions or categorizations.  Into the chaos of the abyss. I withdraw from the sun spun world of dirt to breed something other than men.
Whether you know this name or not, whether I remember it or not,  I am who I am.

Games

The round table surrounded by four tall chairs and long gangly figures draped over them, elbows on table fists on chins, heels on the rungs of the tall chairs. Far below outside the abyss of shadow and chatter, the lighted stage awaits aglow with golden warmth, silent instruments engaged in patient respite like old idols once the center of a forgotten religion. Their smug demeanor communicates their certainty of a comeback. And lo! They are quite right to think as much, if they were truly thinking as much, for the musicians come tromping out to the stage. Old ones, young ones, fat ones, skinny ones, famous ones, and mysterious ones, they fill every corner of the stage, taking their places by the well rested idols, flipping switches and turning keys and knobs while pressing on pedals.
The sorcerer comes in by a different route and for him the crowd cheers, hurrah! He shouts the name of each performer in turn but the names are lost in space, sound waves that break against nearby tables never to reach the balconies above.
Then crash boom roar ta da! We’re off, all at once, idols revived to full godhead. They’re no longer cold dead things but wild writhing living creatures that wail and groan and shout. In this manner they converse. Sometimes all at once, sometimes two or three at a time, occasionally one croons alone while the others listen, carefully weighing their responses, holding their questions for the right moment. The musicians listen, the musicians urge them on with both gentle and harsh caresses.
The audience listens, they urge the renewed gods on with applause and shouts. They grin, they drool, they bob their heads and bump knees under tables and whisper questions in the gaps. What is that thing? Who is that man? What are they doing with the hats and headbands? For indeed the musicians are taking on and putting off headbands while the sorcerer is taking off and putting on his blue cap.
The assembly holds perhaps five or six sessions if that many. There are gentle moments and rough moments, but every moment is a moment that demands attention. These are not tired familiar old songs come to renew our sense of stability. These are new noises erupting from the inferno, new worlds of sound forming in the hot forge, their shape is unique like that of a snowflake, never before made, never to be made again. A shape unfolding through time, sounds as new as each moment. The noise, the noise, the glorious noise!
The silence that gives the noise more impact. The noise that makes the silence a sound never before heard. They’re passed back and forth like a ball, like a game of red like green light. A game, a game, a beautiful game, played by Gods and mortals together on a golden semicircular stage and in the immeasurable gloom upon which it is suspended, until at last the Gods once again beg respite and the mortals rise to take a bow for having been such goods sports, such obliging instruments of divinity.
Then we say game over and evacuate the round table surrounded by tall chairs to stagger out into the darker darkness, long gangly figures crowding halls and filling up doorways, cigarettes between fingers, coats draped over shoulders, hats obscuring eyes.

Velveteen

I want to tell my Dad that he shouldn’t have gone to jail, but more importantly, I want to tell him that they, (he and my mother) should have told me that he was in jail. Then, at least, I would have known that his being away from me was not optional, he didn’t choose to leave me, somebody else had locked him up.
I want to go back in time and tell Peter that my heart was broken, that it mattered very much to me, that I cared a lot that he had suddenly disappeared without explanation. I would tell him that he was my friend and if he had only told me that he needed to go and be with Janarai I would have understood that. At that time it would not have hurt my feelings too much. But suddenly and inexplicably loosing my friend and musical companion, that was painful. Agonizing. It made me less than a friend, a nobody. I would tell him now, if I could, that after that, I wasn’t able to sing again for 7 years.
I would go back and tell my weeping awkward teenage sister,
" I’m sorry, but I don’t know anything. I’m not sure what anyone should do."
But most importantly I wouldn’t say more than that, instead I would listen, and maybe suggest we go roller skating afterwards.
Maybe there is nothing that I can say or should say. I am just a character in a sad story. But something strange has possessed me so that now there is something more to do, something other than being that sad character. Now there is devil’s work to do. I will always be the same sad puppet, but I will do more than play my part. It would seem that I am a salvaged play thing for the old devil, and like any good toy I will happily serve in games the manufacturer never intended. Perhaps the old devil is like me and hopes to rescue sad toys from sad games by inserting them in strange games that adhere to outrageous rules and are filled with unusual circumstances. For that I am grateful.
If all of this is the product of a cracked or warped mind, then nothing is lost. There is no chance for me to be made right. I was already made wrong. So now we will take this broken thing we call Etanna and make it something neither right nor wrong. We will invent a new game for it, a game which suits its warped disposition. We will play with it until the day comes when it can no longer be manipulated, but even should its head pop off, we will find a use and a new game for it until time has ground it to no more than a fine powder.
Then we will say farewell Etanna. And in her most secret pocket of hopes, she may cling to the notion that, like the velveteen rabbit, she might be given new life after she has been burned to ash. If not, there was never anything to loose, and there is always something to gain by wild striving.
Put your tender ear to my lip child and I will whisper a story to you, a new story, a secret story that the dolls from the old sad story can never know about. Rest your head on my chest child, for a moment, and know that I am not the kind who throws broken things away. I mend them if I can. I make them other than they were and I breathe new life into them.
So cry if you must, for I think your first maker drew a tear drop on your cheek, but if you give me time, I will turn it into the petal of a flower opened wide under the moon’s pale kiss. Such horror and delight will be ours in these new games we make together. We shall do it all on tipped toes with fingers pressed over our lips, and though there are things that we might want to say, we shall never tell anyone anything at all.