1995. How often has the unpublished writer thrashed at “lowering” his or her standards just to be published? Ha. There was the flirtation with writing a “dirty book.” Hell, the times saw a deluge of pornography—at least it meant getting published! So, I won’t back off this happening. The Confessions of Friar Killian began as a sit down to write purple prose—hell, again!—I couldn’t even get past the first page before I was off into the Tradition and St. Augustine’s rumored riff on his Pauline mentor, “… sin well!” Or, was it Luther? … Not the point. Rather, a disturbing truth bit the good Friar on his celibate ass, namely, that I had never truly sinned! Coward that I was, I had never been blitzed by Grace because I had never suckled Depravity in all its manifestations.
At least, that’s how I told the story—or how it came via his confessor, the Primate. I have to trust myself here, I guess. So, Friar K offered me this challenge. Truly Sin! Boldy. Courageously. Turning inside out, and outside in.Of course, in a religion for which Sex is the Original Sin, the challenges were prodigiously erotic. Whew! This old O.S.O. of mad passion and torturous virtue will take you to depths of your Faith … and Eros … which, I believe, no other spiritual director has ever explored. You may think that you have fucked. That Hugh Hefner is your Sugar Daddy … but if you truly confess the Confessions and then The Disciplines of Friar Killian (1996) and aren’t pissed-off at the impoverished sexual and erotic education and experiences you’ve had, well, just jerk-away!
1997. The rumble within is spewing linearity. Ha. A year of many words, one after the other. Of sentences. Completed manuscripts. Dove and Dragon. I have to admit—two ventures into screenwriting which are more pleas for inspiring others than a claim for production! But Dove and Dragon is another attempt to sum it all up. The past up to that point. The novel, Hand: a millennial imagining. In theme a continuation of The Bodywanderer—but, oh, so much more! I begin to move out here. Individually and in group. There is robust and fruitful contact with presences in other dimensions. There is the opening which the chronological Millennium was not for so many! A subtle crack of the astral door … hmmm, when I go back and read, I sense the movement from walk to jog to full lung bursting sprint! Truly, the first spying of the Long Distance Run. What is to come. What will unfold for the Family: Holy when I am no longer in this dimension. Yet, always the nagging pedagogical doubt: to write even more linearly than fiction allows; to venture into “nonfiction”—where there are thinner lines, skinner images, nudges rather than delivering full upside the head whacks of imagining!
SilverSex: an erotic spirituality for Earthfolk. For many still too theological or thickly tongued. Yet, it is the thematic capture of various short-stories written in the interstices of waiting upon the Fiery Tongue. “A Different Kind of Fire” is one such seminal work. Possibly I am disclosing my advanced age—Ha!—but it was the reading of my own ribbon of flesh. Of observing my many selves, singularly and as One: molt, evolve, transmute, whatever—flow into unexplored segments of my bodies, minds and souls. Fifty is a great age. One no longer has to prove anything! Except, possibly, to one’s self. … Dying. When younger I had fearlessly (and with the requisite companionship of foolishly!) embraced dying. In family. In society. War as ritual, and all that. But now it was what folks feared even more: the mottled hand, the sagging breast, the fickle erection, the confusion of orgasm—for what purpose, if no longer procreating? … I ventured—jumped off, fell, slipped, tangoed—into the most amazing yet truly unexpected discovery of my life: that of Belovedness.
SilverSex (source for the 2010 Earthfolk website) from another perspective was the celebration of a chthonic discovery. That there was another mythos emerging, that of Earthfolk. So many of my own years as a radical activist finding the uneasiness of those quiet moments when you are unnerved by the haunt, “What the fuck are you doing?” meaning not doing: not being a mainline this or that—fill in the blank: professor, executive, author, performer, legislator … wanting a Ground, yeah, the old Tillichean desire for a Ground of Being, but with a smile, here, an Embrace. Finding everything wonderful which was not in Genesis, but then was: the what is not … and so hopefully penning words for others who are out there in different gardens: tending to the body, mind and soul of Mother Earth, the Family: Holy … living as if they are no one’s enemy …so much raucous, belly wobbling, buck-fucking humor … ha!
1998. The novel, End-Time. The ongoing flirtation with the mythic wrinkle from the Splotch! Landing of “Americans”—those Europeans, now so termed—whitey wapiti who boiled over in the conflagration of the Mormon imagining. Hey, Joseph Smith! Ya gotta love ‘im. As with any Revelation, any breakthrough it was at a time of great breakdown—what some historians call the Burnt-over District, meaning, of the Holy Spirit. Look if you think that the Secular is anything but a mobius twist on the Sacral, well, you’ll never figure out America and its Messianic Complex. The Mormons dealt with outer-space long before that Beantown Vatican puppet, ole JFK, gave us the Moon Mission … some subtle Mariology there, eh! … But it is always End-Time. Whether the end of the game or the End of the Game.