2 kind of dead friends

i have two kinds of dead friends: the living dead and the dead dead.

persephone was alive in the land of the dead, she was living dead. demeter understood that persephone had lost her connection to life: incapable of feeling or desire.

once persephone had experienced helplessness during her abduction - it was her father who arranged to have her stolen and given to his brother: persephone would never know whether she was a pawn in her father’s game to hurt her mother or a pawn in her father’s game to appease his brother - her situation was clear: she was an object, not a person. any possibility of agentic action was nullified by her appreciation of herself as a thing, as an it. her will was broken.

every day

every day i wake up women and girls, even really little girls and really horrible women i might not even like and some who could be violin virtuosos or mathematical polymaths, are sold. literally sold. every day i wake up and i know women and girls are being sold. every day i am not sure whether living is collaborating in that slaughter of life or not. i try to come down on the side of or not. but i'm never sure how much my freedoms are bought at the price of theirs. it bothers me. every day. sometimes when i'm cranky for no reason, there's a reason.

dates and times

contemporaneous to the writing of the old testament there is evidence of the writing down of the demeter/persephone/hades myth. so the stories were alive enough to be written down during the same few hundred years time, in the vicinity of @ 1500 BCE

i have always easily grasped hades' perspective as glad to have a spark of youthful grace and beauty to spend time with while otherwise engaged in the pursuits necessary to keep hell running smoothly. and demeter's shock and grief at the sudden disappearance of her daughter is staple stuff on every tv prime time night; so, clearly we almost all of us understand her plight and the emotions that she expresses.

but persephone. it never occurred to me to wonder what she was feeling. how she was thinking.

we have a hint: that persephone kept herself calm while she was being abducted and flown through the air (before plunging into the earth) by singing to the world. and the world, in sympathy, carried the vibration of her song to her mother.

persephone is a singer and a brave soul.

and, initially surprisingly, you never hear of her complaining while she's in hell. even when she comes up to the surface again, when the deal is cut so that persephone is able to return for half the year to help her mother make the world beautiful with new growth, persephone never complains, objects or even gossips about what it's like in hell.

i think she likes it there.

i think hades, like most introverts and geeks, is a sensitive guy and, like the elemental gods, is well practiced in sexual intimacies. i think she doesn't actually mind it in hell and maybe even thinks of her time with her mother above ground, traveling all around making sure the plants are growing and the people are eating, as work, duty, something owed. but playtime is in hell.

another possibility is that persephone is merely a cypher, used by both her mother and her lover and none of her life is expressing anything that she wants to do or believes in.

but i don't think the daughter of zeus and demeter could possibly have turned out w/o a personality or purpose of her own. her story, though, has not yet been of interest to the story tellers.

faith

demeter, da mater, the mother, the sea; also known as ceres cuz some people think that the de or da was barley and this is the barley mother, the grain mother, the goddess who knows how to grow things to feed people; and, through the combined disciplines of an agricultural life (astronomy, meteorology, planning, saving (seeds) and storing in an easily restorable manner i..e. creating systems of abstract organization, cooperative work, mechanisms to ameliorate greed and theft); she is also credited with presiding over the concept of a law-abiding community (as opposed to the kind of community run by a "strong man" also known as a bully, a dictator, a prince, a king, a tyrant)

persephone was stolen from the earth by zeus to give as a present to his brother hades, who apparently was not satisfied with the females in hell. little is known about the relationship between persephone and hades. but much is known about how demeter dealt with the disappearance of her beloved daughter.

demeter goes nuts. she doesn't let anything grow. after this traumatic incident, she will teach others her knowledge and it won't be up to her alone any more to keep the necessary crops growing for the benefit of the community. and also, a new cyclical approach is introduced. an approach that incorporates the darkness, the silence, the lack of growth.

and when the community becomes responsible for feeding itself, it must face the challenges of the disciplines necessary to successfully carry out self-care.

what did demeter expect? persephone was the result of a rape. zeus, yup, the same zeus who kidnaps persephone and gives her to his brother hades, that dude, demeter's brother, rapes his sister, demeter, and then steals their daughter, persephone, to give to his brother, hades - and these guys were worshipped? yes, for centuries. and by new names, they are worshipped still. in fact, this myth sounds suspicously similar to the mechanics of the typical post-modern corporate maneuvering.

pluto

when their parents, time (kronos) and space (rea), moved further into the past, their 3 sons divided up the rulership of the invisible world, zeus took the sky (air), poseidon the under(water realm, and pluto took the under(earth realm. all, earth, air and sky, then mysterious invisibles. not today of course: we see far into the sky, deep into the ocean; we have sophisticated maps of her terrain. and the earth, we have explored much of those heights and depths, to climb, to mine, to paint, to live, to hide.

so then one day, apparently, according to the story which is sort of like trusting the star to tell the truth today, zeus abducted persephone for pluto.

well, what's with that? pluto couldn't do his own abducting?

is pluto the shy one? the geek maybe? the guy who likes being in the dark with the germinating life and the endless creatures and mechanisms of decay breaking down what was once alive so its matter can compost for the living germinating?

72 virgins

i bet that many men, in many cultures, and of various ages, if offered even a day with 72 female virgins, much less eternity, would be exceedingly happy in the thought. i can even imagine that gay men, in many cultures, if offered even a day, much less eternity, in the company of 72 male virgins, would be exceedingly joyful in its contemplation. however, i cannot imagine or bet that any woman in any culture, or any age, would find the prospect of being alone with 72 male virgins even remotely a happy prospect, even for a day, much less for eternity.

mary & the holy ghost

what about mary and the holy ghost? what goes on there? is the holy ghost the mother in the trilogy of father, son and ? ghost? i never once had a ghost fuck my husband (well maybe once or twice) or do the dishes (never) calm one of the children (never) make appointments (never) keep appointments (never) clean toilets (never) so what kind of mother is this holy ghost? a floating ephemera? a chimera? an inspiration? a muse? kept around to be amusing? to lift stray objects and move them around the house?

i think that's how i often feel. like an invisible wraith passing through and among the full bodied souls of men. we women are everywhere and nowhere. we mean everything and we are so small inside our own assessments of ourselves that we put up with the most egregious abuse.

chappelle and pryor ran to africa to be among equals. to take a break from the enrelentingly superior gaze of oppressive masters. i think i understand the urge. but how can i understand the results? where is my africa? and i don't want an amazon state, somehow like israel, created because of past abuse, sitting amidst her enemies all around. no, i choose to accept my integration with the community. i am in it and i cannot escape it, if i am to have any dignity it must be found and/or created within it.

and mary, the sea. the ocean that all life emerged from. the essence of the natural world. as long as we hate, blame, despise nature for our conditions, we cannot genuinely appreciate mary. but we can't get rid of her either. i mean, we somehow sort of, kind of, can't help having to acknowledge, just a little bit, that we need babies to be born. we need life to continue so we can hate it some more. so keep those babies coming mary while we deny your power, your glory, your partnership with the eternal aesthetic abstract we call god.