asakiyume | Entries tagged with religion

I don't read half as much as I'd like to, but now and then things spur me to read something and then wow! Amazed and delighted.

The first is a novelette in the December 2024 issue of Clarkesworld: "Lucie Loves Neutrons and the Good Samarium," by Thoraiya Dyer. It's an intimate story about a lesbian couple, Lucie and Izzy, both scientists (respectively from Tahiti and Australia, but living in France), and Miron Król, the Polish astronaut who fathers their baby. A nuclear war is going on in Europe, and where they live is dangerous because of its proximity to a research reactor (a research reactor that Izzy uses, in fact), and Izzy is nearly breaking from the mental strain:

In that moment, alerts [of possible nuclear strike] go off on their phones, and Izzy is overwhelmed. A new life has come into the world, Izzy and Lucie have just met their beautiful baby, and there is a fucking amber alert yet again, threatening to take everything away.

Izzy throws her phone at the wall.

“I can’t take this,” she screams. “Why can’t anybody make it stop?” She knows she shouldn’t be the one losing control. Lucie has just given birth ...

“Izzy,” Lucie says softly. “Izzy, I’ll make it stop. For you, and for Luc, I’ll make it stop. I promise. Now, forget about that. Come here, and kiss your child. It’s his birthday.”

And then Lucie does.

She does it. I don't think that's a spoiler because the drama of the novelette is not the in if, it's in the how, the many small moments, some funny, some painful, some joyous, as the characters live life, do their various researches ... and Lucie comes closer and closer to being able to keep her promise. Now there's a case of writing the change you want to see in the world! From Thoraiya Dyer's imagination to reality, please!

The second is probably also a novelette--it's "The Speech That God Understands," by Jonathan Edelstein, from the April 4, 2024, issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. This one takes place in 1194, in an alternative Tuluz, where Muslims, Christians, and Jews live and work together, where magic and science exist side by side, and Avram the Blind, a Kabbalistic magician, and Maryam of Wadan, a Berber scientist and a nonbeliever in any religion, join forces to deal with spreading incidences of people having their ability to speak scholarly languages essentially knocked out of them--they lose their Arabic, their Latin, their Hebrew and are left with their vernacular tongues only. But it's not just a physical brain injury, there's magic involved.

There's *so* much richness in this--Avram's summoning of various sefirot, the depiction of the hurly-burly of the city, and the discussion of language, translation, and reading--just great. I can share these beautiful lines from the end without spoiling anything:

From the silence, [Avram] conjured a vision of what Maryam might see if she found her reading-stone, a mental image of the night sky of Yetzirah. Who was it who’d said there were many more stars in heaven than human eyes could see? One of the Persian philosophers, or one of their poets? Did it even make a difference?

Those stars, as much as the sefirot, were outpourings of the divine, and messages were surely written in them. Isaac wondered what language those scriptures would follow. Or maybe they would be like the speech of the crickets, written in no language at all.

It didn’t matter, he decided. God would know them even so.

Current Music: Johnny Flynn & Robert McFarlane: Coins for Eyes

The tall one had acquired a Holy Family statue from somewhere. It had seen better days: the paint on it was peeling horribly; Mary and Jesus looked like they had terrible skin conditions, and Joseph looked even more beaten down than he often does. More than a year ago, I asked him if I could repaint it, and he said yes ... and then it took me more than a year to do it.

Putting aside issues of oppressive evangelization, I really love localized madonna-and-child representations--from Vietnam, Ethiopia, the Arctic, anywhere. Hell, that's what all of Renaissance art's depictions are: localizations to Europe. And to different eras. In that spirit, I painted a more melanated version of the Holy Family. Maybe they're from southern Asia. Maybe somewhere else, I don't know.

The statue also came with an electric lantern, but the wiring was fried, so

wakanomori got a solar lantern to replace it. In the photo you can just about see the light it casts. (... everybody is shiny because I coated the statue with something so it can resist the wear and tear of outdoor life, UV rays, all that...)

We're watching The Makanai (舞子さんちのまかなないさん; Maikosanchi no makanai san）on Netflix; the present-day story of two sixteen-year-old best friends who leave their northern Aomori town to go to Kyoto to train as maiko (pre-geisha). One of them, Sumire is exceptionally suited to it; the other, Kiyo, isn't--but Kiyo finds her feet as the makanai, the cook, for the house.

In the episode we saw the other day, the mother of the house is walking with a male friend, and she's talking about all the good-luck charms and talismans she has all over the house. "Isn't that kind of burdensome?" her friend asks. And then she gives such a great description of why it's not, and how she feels:

( explanation in screen caps )

I love everyday beliefs like this.

Later on there's a hilarious moment when Sumire asks the accomplished geisha Momoko, whom she's been assigned to as a helper, what Momoko was praying for earlier in the day, when Sumire happened to see her at a shrine. Momoko is super sophisticated and a very cool cucumber--but in that moment she's tired and drunk. Nevertheless, she comes up with the perfect answer:

( There's only one answer to that question )

In another entry maybe I'll talk a little about Kiyo, who manages to be preternaturally sweet without being cloying--I have theories about why, or at least, why for me she hits that balance.

On Thursday I sat in on a workshop critiquing some recent papers relating to Timorese culture. (It's one true blessing to come out of this pandemic: people from all over the world can meet and talk with ease via Zoom: participants were in Japan, India, Brazil, Timor-Leste, Canada, and the United States, and I, a non-academic, was allowed to audit.) All of the papers sounded fascinating (the one that critiqued NGO activity as, in some regards, a continuation of colonialism had me nodding like a bobblehead doll, as it's something I often think).

But what seized my imagination was Alberto Fidalgo Castro's discussion of the concept of lulik, which usually is translated as "sacred," as in uma lulik, sacred house. But Alberto and others point out that it's not that some things are lulik and others are not: anything has the potential to become lulik. He referenced an earlier paper of his (which I tracked down and downloaded) that gave five everyday cases of that--like the case of the knife. In the paper he writes:

One Thursday, when I was drinking breakfast coffee in the kitchen, I couldn't find a spoon to help myself to some sugar, so I used a knife that was on the table. Ms. Rosita saw me, and scandalized, she asked me to stop doing that and ordered her son to find me a spoon. I didn't want to cause any trouble, so I told her that it wasn't necessary, that the knife was fine. Ms. Rosita was surprised at my response and explained to me that I couldn't take sugar with a knife, because it was lulik: it would give me an ailment of the heart¹

In person he was more detailed: he said that a knife is for cutting, and if you stir in sugar with a knife, you are cutting the coffee, and this will cut your insides, your heart.

In the paper, another example was when he came back to the house where he was staying and, being tired, rested his head on the table. In this case he was told

Kole, ba toba iha kama. Toba iha meza ne'e lulik ("If you're tired, go sleep in your bed. Sleeping on the table is lulik." I sat up right away and asked why it was lulik to sleep on the table. They told me, Ema mate mak toba iha meza ... Ita ema moris, toba iha kama ("It's the dead who sleep on a table. We living people sleep in beds")²

I realize as I type this out that the people are saying the situation is lulik, not the object, whereas when he was talking about the concept, he seemed to be stressing a transformation in the object, too. I don't know whether it's accurate to say that both things are true or if it's even a distinction that's made in Timor, but that's what my mind fixes on: how the status of the object changes when it's misused--it seems so very, very applicable to so much of life.

¹ Alberto Fidalgo Castro, "Personas y objetos en Timor Oriental: Relaciones lulik entre entidades," Ankulegi 21 (2017), 30 (my super rough translation).
²(same, 31).

On Thursday I picked up Wakanomori from the airport--he's back from the UK. We stopped around 7 pm at a rest stop on I-90, and as I was coming out of the bathrooms, I noticed a Verizon payphone, and on it, this remarkable sticker.

It starts with a blessing and a prayer, then turns to special needs: a job, help with Social Security and EBT (for people overseas, this is government food assistance), and then on to the lesser financial deities.

After snapping the photo, I wandered back to the table where we were eating, but my curiosity got the better of me. What happens if I press *10? What happens if I press *12? Or any of the others. So I went back. I picked up the receiver, but there was nothing.

It said on the machine that it was 50 cents for a local call, so I put in two quarters, but they fell right through and came out the coin return. I felt more than disappointed; I felt bereft. A scam and a prayer--but then the phone goes and doesn't even work. When I wrote about it on Twitter, a friend said, "This feels like a metaphor for ... something," and it really does. There's some kind of archaeology of desperation and last-ditch hopes there.

Current Music: Ordinary Time: How Long

Wakanomori alerted me to this incredibly moving story of human compassion, imagination, and religious syncretism. I'm posting images of the tweets, but the actual Twitter thread starts here.

In response to a question, he also posted the name of the tattoo parlor (My Tattoo, Alhambra) and a link to its website.

The ~ everything ~ that comes together for this--I don't just mean the many faiths, but also daily life and the afterlife/otherworld, sorrow and consolation, creativity, community spirit. It's a mandala of everything good about human beings; I just love it.

By the way, my screen shots don't capture the complete hungry-ghost image; here it is:

I read a play, Our Lady of Kibeho, by Katori Hall. It's about three girls in a Catholic secondary school in Kibeho, Rwanda, in 1981, who have visions of the Virgin Mary. The play is beautiful--sharp and funny and light and deep and sad and true and profound, but not at all pretentious, if you can believe it. Here's just one quote, from one of the visionaries:

I saw a girl. Running down a hill. She had legs so long they could take her into tomorrow. She had feet so quick they could cut down blades of grass.

The girl is herself, but the vision gets grim, as she sees her own death. That was one of the striking things about the visions of Kibeho for the rest of the world--that they predicted the genocide of 1995. But even though the play does go there--not to the genocide, but to that prophecy--it's not an oh-my-gosh-they-predicted-the-future thing, not at all. It's more about what the intrusion of something as big and strange and extradimensional as a vision does for everyone in the circle of the visionaries. It made me think about how hard it is, actually, to accommodate that intrusion. Krishna may be able to fit the whole universe in his throat but we mortal types have a harder time with that stuff.

ETA: I forgot to mention that the play is based on historical fact. Our Lady of Kibeho is an approved Marian apparition.

* * *

In totally other news, my dad sometimes reminisces, when we're on the phone together, and some of those reminiscences can be wonderful. Even really brief ones. He was talking about a friend of his from high school: the friend lived in East Lexington and my dad lived more in the center of Lexington. They would bike to meet each other at some middle spot... "We'd sit there, smoking Parliaments," he said. That detail. My dad as a teenager, smoking Parliament cigarettes.

Okay folks, that's it for tonight. I just wanted to post *something* because it's been more than a week.

Current Music: KOOROKO: Abusey Junction

The Diocese of Springfield, MA, has a new bishop, and bishops apparently get ecclesiastical coats of arms. ("They are princes of the church," Wakanomori said. "Their residences are called palaces." I wonder if that's even true in Springfield...)

The new bishop's coat of arms, as best as we could tell, seeing it via a televised Mass, looked like it was designed by a very imaginative child.

"Is that a rocket ship on the right?" I asked Wakanomori.

"Maybe it's a very thin castle?" he suggested in return.

"The stuff on the side looks like a genealogy--only a parthenogenic genealogy, because everyone descends from a single person instead of a couple.

"I think there's a flying saucer up top," Waka said.

We really, really needed to see the coat of arms up close, so we did some digging, and the interwebs came to our aid.

Behold! A flying saucer hovers above a shield, the left side of which shows a single-person skull rowing on a river and the right side of which shows a rocket to the moon. On either side of the shield are parthenogenic octopus genealogies, whose ultimate origins are The Flying Saucer

And my interpretation:

my drawing of the ecclesiastical coat of arms

In her latest Patreon post,

sovay talks about two frustrating films and one id-tastic one. The first of the frustrating ones, which, she reports, in large part "feels like someone drew a line through the set labeled "GOOD TASTE" and everyone kept getting CAD injuries trying not to cross it," reminded me of something hilarious and awful that happened at my church's All Saints Day mass.

For All Saint's Day, the religious ed program always has a few teens pick a saint, dress up as them, and then tell the congregation about them in the first person: "Hi, I'm Saint Peter, and Jesus and I go way back." There are actually interesting female saints out there, but aside from the frequent Mother Teresa (now officially St. Teresa of Calcutta), the girls mainly pick the most revolting examples of simpering victimhood, and this time that meant St. Maria Goretti, who was canonized for fighting off a rapist, getting stabbed, forgiving her attacker, and dying. At age eleven. She's now the patron saint of rape victims, which ... let's not even talk about how emotionally unhealthy that is.

But what made this teen's portrayal of this saint extra ludicrous and sad was that someone--her family? The religious ed instructor? She herself?--had decided that rather than ever say "rape," she'd refer to that act as "taking my virtue." Just so you know, even Catholic websites use the word "rape." Nihil obstat! But instead we got this:

"I was a poor girl growing up in near Rome in the 1890s, and when I was only eleven, the neighbor's son wanted to take my virtue, but I didn't want to let him take my virtue, so he stabbed me. But on my deathbed I forgave him. Now I'm the patron saint of people who've had their virtue taken."

It was that final passive construction that really took the cake. The whole thing made me wonder what year I was in. And it made me want to prescribe a feminist reading course. I know, I know.

Anyway! Go clear your palate by reading Sovay's reviews. They'll cheer you up.

Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/936016.html

"Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone?" (Matthew 7:9)

.... I think you might be forgiven for giving your kid a stone if you came across these loaf-like specimens. I altered the color (crudely; I blame my tech like the TOOL I AM like the tool it is?) so they approached bread color--but it's more the shape, the texture...

Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/935128.html

I heard a quote last week from Lynn Margulis, of Gaia Theory fame: "Life is matter that chooses." My immediate reaction was that I liked it ... but then I started having doubts. It's appealing, but what does "choose" mean? If a single-celled organism moves toward light or engulfs a food particle or away from a predator, is that a choice? In what sense is it a choice? How is it different from a shadow's movement across the ground in response to the movement of the ~~sun~~ earth around the sun? For that matter, how is it different from the earth's own movement, or the sun's? Or if those things are too physical, then how is the single-celled organism's action more choice-y than a chemical reaction like rust forming on metal?

Maybe I'm too pedestrian a thinker in this case, but to me choice involves weighing alternatives, and while some things that are alive do weigh alternatives, I think it's a stretch to say all living things do, so I don't think this formulation really can be used to define life.

Completely unrelatedly, it hit me at 5:45 this morning that there's a good reason that various flavors of Christianity (maybe all of them?) tell people to imitate Jesus and not God, and it has entirely to do with the fact that on the face of things Jesus was just a person walking around doing person things--despite the central tenet of the faith that emphatically says we have to erase the "just" from the previous clause. You could say imitate the Dalai Lama or Nelson Mandela or Greta Thunberg or anyone else who's admired, and the effect is the same--you're picking a fellow human who's setting a good example for you in some way. But if you decide to imitate God/a divinity, then you and those around you are in for a world of trouble. (I mean, possibly you'll/they'll be in for that anyway, depending on the human you decide to choose as your model, but it's a guarantee if you take it into your head to imitate a deity.)

Last, a couple of pictures. I probably (most assuredly) won't do all of Inktober, but here's Day 1: "ring"

And here is some pointful stencil graffiti from Keene, NH, where we were this past weekend because Wakanomori was running a marathon

Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/931222.html

I tuned into an episode of The Moth Radio hour about halfway through a segment called "The Hat," by Omar Musa, a Malaysian-Australian author, rapper, and poet. The things he said about machetes and words stuck with me enough that I want to share them--those things, and an almost fable-like story of his father, which comes in the middle.

First, the machetes. At one point, as a teenager, Omar goes to visit his grandparents in Borneo, and they go to some family land, and his grandfather has to cut a path for them to get to the house. Omar reflects that the parang, the Malay machete, is associated with piracy and headhunting, but as he saw his grandfather clearing the path, he has a different impression:

suddenly in my head I realized that the parang ... can be something that forges a path between places that don't usually connect, places that don't usually communicate.

Hold that thought for the end, when he talks about words. And now comes the entrancing story of his father:

So we get to this hut in the middle of the jungle, and there's a family of orangutans living there, and we have to shoo them out of the house. And my grandparents tell me that when my father spent time at this little piece of land, he would sit in front of the hut, and he would read the Quran with this very deep, mellifluous, beautiful voice, and suddenly dozens of orangutans and families of monkeys would start climbing down from the trees and sit in front of him like a rapt audience ... and listen to him reading the Quran.

I couldn't stop thinking of it: his dad, like Saint Francis, sharing sacred text with the animals. I could picture it so vividly, all those orangutans and monkeys, gathered round, listening.

And then the last part: when Omar goes to his cousin's wedding and his cousin asks him to come on stage and do some hip-hop:

"Hey Omar, I want you to get on stage, I want you to do that thing that you do, that type of poetry, that hip-hop, that thing that you do in Australia, I want you to perform for us for the first time."

So he does, and then afterward...

And I stood there, and they were cheering and applauding, and I went and I sat down next to my grandmother, and my grandmother looked at me with these piercing eyes, and she said, "You know, I never learned how to read or write ... I've been illiterate my whole life; I left home at the age of nine, and tapped rubber and lived on the streets ... but I have 150 poems in my head that I created when I was living out there, kicked out of home at the age of nine, A-B, A-B, pantoums, the traditional improvised form of Malay poetry. This poetry that you're doing now is like the poetry that I used to help me get through these hard times."

And it was then that I realized I had found my own parang, my own machete, my words, my words that could cut through worlds, that could cut through time and even generation.

And I thought that was brilliant, because it was was the cutting that was doing the connecting, the sharp slicing not to hurt but to cut down barriers, so that people can find a connection.

Link to the complete segment: "The Hat"

Crossposts: https://asakiyume.livejournal.com/896209.html

What if Lent isn't just for ketchup? Maybe there are other inexplicably Lenten things in our world?

Please share with me any particularly Lenten cities, cars, surgical procedures, fossil fuels, fossils, celestial bodies, or deciduous trees (or things in other categories) you can think of. It's good to have a list.

(I promise this is the last entry on this theme.)

Current Music: Dolly Parton: Silver Dagger

In case you'd like to hear *more* of what I liked about Alif the Unseen, here is a copy of what I wrote on Goodreads.

Characters I absolutely loved, talking about philosophical, intellectual, and spiritual questions and ideas, while meanwhile moving through an exciting, imaginative plot, and with liberal doses of good natured humor throughout—what more could I possibly ask for! I loved this book.

Alif (that’s his handle, not his real name) is the rather clueless, somewhat emotionally obtuse computer hacker who has the misfortune to be the ex-lover of a young woman who’s just been betrothed to the head of the secret police in an unnamed Middle Eastern Gulf Coast country. Worse, he’s a talented hacker, and he’s designed a program that can identify a person from their keystrokes, word use, etc., regardless of how they disguise themselves. You can imagine what would happen if the state got hold of that. Double worse, his ex has sent him a mysterious book, an ancient manuscript, which, if it falls in the wrong hands, may set dire events in motion.

( Read more... )

The novel that I'm inching forward on (more like millimetering forward on) is set in the future, and that's got me thinking about what does and doesn't change in the future, or, to put it another way, how far in the future you'd have to go before something had disappeared or was forgotten entirely. Tech is easy to lose--it can be lost in 20 years, if it's replaced by other things. (This may not seem like a loss, but it is: the skill to use anything is still a skill, even if it's an obsolete skill.)

But other things really stick around--like religions. Go back a thousand years, and the big players that we've got on the religious field today were still there. A THOUSAND YEARS.** And not nation-states, but senses of peoples--they're tenacious, too. Tribalism I guess is the negative-connotation word for this.

I think of this, because some of the things authors want to get rid of by setting novels in the future are things like particular religions or national/tribal identity. And the truth is, I can pretty much accept that, if the story catches me up. It's only when I look at history that I get to thinking about plausibility and implausibility.

**It's true that how religions or the sense of being a people manifest themselves change--flavors of Buddhism or Christianity in 1015 was a lot different from those flavors in 2015, and that leaves lots of room for fun imagination. But the actual thing itself doesn't just disappear. Even religions that are no longer actively practiced remain alive culturally.

Current Music: After Forever: Energize Me

I'm not Muslim, but the fact that people in my online spheres are celebrating Eid reminds me of a time, many years past, when our phone number was the same as the phone number of a mosque in Quincy, Massachusetts--but with two of the digits reversed.

It took us a while to realize what was going on. All of a sudden one day, phone calls started coming in asking us when the sun was setting. And other calls began with the greeting salaam alaikum, which I hazily recognized for what it was, though I didn't know how to respond. Finally one day someone asked, "Is this the mosque in Quincy?" We called information and asked for the phone number for the mosque in Quincy, and everything became clear.

From then on, it was easy enough to say to callers, "Oh, you must want the Quincy mosque," and give them the correct number. Regarding the time of sunset, I remember thinking it would be handy just to have the information present--save people making another call--and I have some vague and confused memory of somewhere, somehow obtaining it on a small card, but I'm not sure that I actually did, and if I did, I'm pretty positive I never had the nerve to actually volunteer it.

The most memorable conversation was one call that went like this.

Caller: "Hello, I need to speak to the imam."

Me: "I'm sorry, but this isn't the mosque. That number is [number]"

Caller: "No, but I just have one question, which maybe you can help me with."

Me: "I really think--"

Caller: "Is there a fee for remarriages?"

Me: ". . . I think you'll need to ask the imam."

Eid mubarak, for those celebrating.

The birds sit on the wire, shoulders hunched, while overhead the clouds and sun fight for mastery of the sky. It's like they're the battle's foot soldiers (wing soldiers?), too battle-worn (except for that one on the left) to take to the air.

Below, there is a bright and narrow road. You walk balancing on it, poised four inches above the earth, almost touching it. Almost. Like a ghost, not quite through the veil into the living world.

( Bible lawn signs )

Current Music: Neko Case: John Saw That Number

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Two remarkable (longish) short stories
Holy Family statue, repainted
horizontal as well as vertical
the proper use of a knife
Free Calls
Feeding the hungry ghosts in southern California
Our Lady of Kibeho / Parliaments
a coat of arms
patron saint of ...
breadrocks
a couple of random thoughts and pictures
machetes, words, orangutans
Other Lenten ideas
Alif the Unseen--a big fat review!
How many years in the future is your story set?
post on the occasion of Eid
(no subject)

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Asakiyume mita

Entries tagged with religion

Two remarkable (longish) short stories

Holy Family statue, repainted

horizontal as well as vertical

the proper use of a knife

Free Calls

Feeding the hungry ghosts in southern California

Our Lady of Kibeho / Parliaments

a coat of arms

patron saint of ...

breadrocks

a couple of random thoughts and pictures

machetes, words, orangutans

Other Lenten ideas

Alif the Unseen--a big fat review!

How many years in the future is your story set?

post on the occasion of Eid

(no subject)