Showing posts with label voodoo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label voodoo. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

I loved two men





There are strange, strange things that happen, things so inexplicable you can only understand them after years have gone by. The camera zooms away, or zooms upward, so that more and more of the picture is revealed.

I loved two men. Loved – that’s the wrong word. It wasn’t a sexual thing, I swear, because both men were known to be gay. They were also arrogant, fiercely intelligent, and possessed of a certain social and media-related power. They were tin gods, in other words, and how I could have remained so attached to them, for so long, I will never know.





Maybe I was flattered when they allowed me to sit at the edge of their bright circle of influence. Maybe. I certainly courted their attention, and got bits of it, crumbs. When I was about to walk away in rage or dismay, I’d be tossed another crumb.

Where do I start? The parallels between these two just came to me tonight. It seems incredible I never saw it before.

For one thing, they’re both dead. They both died of sudden, violent, catastrophic strokes, literally dropping in their tracks. They were not young, but neither were they terribly old. Before they died, they both said and did things to me which now make me gasp at the level of casual cruelty.





Paul was my teacher, so many years ago now it seems like another lifetime, another universe. It was back in 1991. He taught anthropology at a community college in a small town, a strange thing, because I was to find out later he had two Masters degrees and a PhD. If he was so brilliant, as he seemed to think he was, why was he stuck in this backwater?

The Anthropology of Religion wasn’t about religion at all. It was mostly about Haitian voodoo and the power of certain plants to paralyze and zombify – for the great zombie tradition comes from Haiti, where death can be created at will, then revoked with a snap of the fingers.




I was enthralled. In the classroom, this man was charisma personified. He just seemed to know so much. When I saw Paul do mediumship at a spiritualist church, I was enraptured. I had never known anyone like this, a veritable sorceror, and he was actually allowing me to sit at the same table and talk about the same subjects. More or less.

How I stayed friends with Paul through the years is simple – I put in virtually 100% of the energy. Had I let it drop, the whole thing would have fallen apart. Why was I so desperate? I don’t understand it, looking back, except that I wanted some of his zombie power. I already had power of my own, but I didn’t see that then. Whenever it threatened to show itself, Paul would summarily clap it down.

Meanwhile, another friendship – this one really not a friendship at all, but a correspondence, for I never actually met the man. Call him Lloyd, because that was his name, so we might as well use it. He had been drama critic at the local paper for a thousand years or so, then music critic, more or less staying in the same job for all of his working life. Not turning left, not turning right.






As a critic, he could deal blows and thrust his sword with a nearly-indifferent cruelty that was sometimes breathtaking. It was enormously entertaining for people to watch Lloyd eviscerate other people – a blood sport. When they themselves were the subject, their enthusiasm withered somewhat.

One day, wanting to entice him or at least attract his attention, I sent Lloyd a column I had written in my local paper – what was it about? Elizabeth Taylor’s visit to Eaton’s, I think – and to my surprise, I got a very nice handwritten reply, quoting some lines from my column and saying he was going to steal them: “I only steal from the best.”

After that initial contact, it wasn’t as if we passed notes in school or sat around the campfire roasting weenies. As I said, it wasn’t a normal friendship. We never had coffee, never even talked on the phone. But the correspondence went back and forth for more than fifteen years. Mostly forth, for if I hadn’t kept it going it would have immediately died. I don’t know why I let myself in for such treatment, but I did.





In both cases, the connection waxed and waned, but there were bright moments. Occasionally Paul the medium acknowledged that I maybe-just-maybe had had some valid psychic experiences of my own (but more often than not he dismissed them as “dangerous” or “just a fantasy”). Lloyd sent me Christmas cards – yes, he really did, handwritten, cheery things that you would never know came from someone most people perceived as a heartless Scrooge.

I will cut to the chase, because this could become book-length. There was a breaking point in each case. I had lost touch with Lloyd after he finally retired from his only job, tried to leave a message on a blog he was keeping, and heard nothing. Then suddenly – and this was unlikely, because he hated technology – there he was on Facebook! Stupidly, I messaged him and said, “I hope this gets to you.”

What I got back was, “This was a mistake. I’m not on Facefuck, so you can go fuck yourself. I hope this gets to you.”





I spent considerable time spinning around in confusion, telling myself maybe it wasn’t really him (it was), and then – one day – receiving a kind of vindication when a friend of mine – OK, a psychiatrist – said, “It’s well-known that this man is the most sarcastic, vindictive, narcissistic, selfish, ruthless, heartless. . . “ – and on and on. OH! I thought I was the only one, and here this man’s patients – apparently more than one – had been seared as well. In fact, maybe that’s what sent them to the psychiatrist.

I can’t remember ever being that angry, but I had a plan. Paul had taught me all about it, in The Anthropology of Religion. I wasn’t trying to do harm – of course not. My plan was to show Lloyd  the error of his ways, to hold up a mirror or a magnifying glass, and to make him feel even a degree of the pain that he had caused other people. I had no idea if I was applying the principles correctly, so I winged it, using Haitian music, a great deal of jewelry and beads and crosses, candles, incense, dance, and written statements of intent. Silly, really, but  I just had to do something - he had just told me to go fuck myself! I thought he was my friend, or my "something" at least. When I made the doll it seemed extreme, but what is a doll but a toy, an effigy, a likeness? This wasn’t him. The person I was trying to reach was probably unreachable.





So what happened? Exactly nothing. So that was that. I filed it under "useless attempts to get someone's attention". 

Fast-forward several years, and the news came (in the paper he used to write for) that he had suddenly died, and his life was gone. The saddest thing was realizing that his colleagues (most of them dragged out of retirement for comment) had to awkwardly scrape together nice things to say about him. I didn’t react well and posted something pretty harsh on my blog, which I took down when I realized it was hurting people who had cared about him.

But suddenly, now that he was gone, he was this bon vivant, this sparkling wit, this Oscar Wilde of the Lower Mainland, and far from hating and fearing him, performers had lined up to receive his vicious barbs as a sort of badge of honour. Right. Others said he had wasted himself and should have written for the New Yorker or some other publication that mattered. The saddest thing of all was when someone said that after working with him for 25 years, no one knew a single thing about him – where he was from, if he had a family or an education or any working experience prior to his decades at the Sun. Outside the office or the concert hall, he was a cipher.





My anger fizzled out in pity. My mojo seemed ridiculous, which I suppose it was. I had not affected the outcome of this strange, sad story. But stranger still was what happened years later, and that’s the thing that makes the hair on my scalp prickle. Paul’s death was so similar, it was downright eerie.

Paul too was celebrated in his tiny circle, but his wit was known to be cutting. He seemed to love busting people down to size. Like Lloyd, he had his limited little fiefdom, and stomped away from the spiritualist church he had founded when the other members didn’t want to do things his way.

He lived far away by then, and we had an on-off correspondence, but when I excitedly began to write to him about some information I had received about George Gershwin, at first he seemed supportive and almost enthusiastic. I sent him several documents about how friends and family members had actually “seen” him after his death – a dire and restless death, the kind that sometimes leaves behind that unhappy camper known as a ghost.





I wanted to know more about it, and surely Paul was perfect to ask about ghosts. Mr. Medium himself!  But then I sent something that wasn’t an attachment, but included in the body of the email. His response told me that he hadn’t read any of the other stuff at all.

He told me that, “speaking as a psychotherapist” (which he wasn’t), I should “approach such manifestations with extreme caution. They may either be mere fantasies to restore a sense of personal power and worth, or out-and-out delusions born of your psychologically fragile state of “

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.

I don’t know what it is about me and assholes, me and men like that. I didn’t marry one, at all, and I don’t think there are any left in my life – for Paul just dropped in his tracks, like Lloyd, in a stroke.








































But not before my mojo. For after all, Paul taught me about mojo, and how to create it. I was very specific. I wrote out my wishes, and specifically stated that I meant no physical harm to either Paul or his partner (also named Paul). But it was full-on, and I made a doll in his likeness, with his face on it. It was part of the ritual.

But I never expected anything to come of it. It was mostly a catharsis for myself.  It felt eerie when I heard he had died like that, with a lightning-stroke like Lloyd whose little empire crumbled straight down like a tower being demolished. I did not feel good, I was not glad. It felt even worse to find out that his devoted spouse of 25 years had been left completely in the lurch. He wasn’t just left with no money. He was left with a yawning abyss of debt, something like $200,000.00, which he had known nothing about. The spiritualist church had decided to put the past aside and try to help “young Paul” (for he was much younger than the other Paul, and somewhat intellectually challenged, certainly no threat to his many-degreed spouse).

Something woeful had been revealed, not just about these men and their talent for turning their pain outward and inflicting it on others. There was something shadowy about both of them - they were not what they seemed. But what I really didn't want to see was what it revealed about me. Why did I ever suck up to people like this – not once, but twice? These weren’t powerful men at all. Their darts had entertained me – for a while. Casual cruelty can be vastly entertaining, as long as it's not about you.





There will be no more mojos, no more dolls, nor any of that stuff, ever again. I don’t want to need it, and I won’t. I only did it because I felt so damn powerless, and regretted my attachment to a couple of arrogant assholes. I don’t know why all these parallels, for it looks like there are quite a few, and why I did not see any of this until just now. But I do know something for sure, something I have believed for quite a long time now, and as years pass I believe it more all the time.

The way you die is the way you live. It’s an accurate reflection, like a tree reflected in water. Energy, charge, karma, charisma, whatever it is, can only build up in the machine for so long before it backfires. If someone holds up a mirror or a magnifying glass, the concentrated rays can set the person on fire until they are completely consumed.




I had watched two parallel examples of how a person’s life can implode by the way they conducted their life. It was a very strange kind of self-destruction, not by cigarettes or alcohol or drugs, but by a sort of personal self-immolation. I don’t think I stood there with the match, because I don't have that sort of power, but I was powerless to put the fire out. They had created it, fed it, banked it. I don’t know what kind of brokenness lay behind that level of rancor and bile, and I don’t care now because I am busy living my own life. But empty is empty. Leaving the person you love the most in massive debt is not love, nor is leaving your friends with no clue, no trace of who you have been. It’s abandonment. Abandonment of life, abandonment of self, abandonment of those who have made the fatal mistake of caring whether you live or die.





POST-BLOG.  A couple of times I've had to take posts down because people bolted in the other direction. But I simply needed to write this, though I know it is odd and a bit creepy. Long after Lloyd died, I found some references to his death and the way it was perceived that I found intriguing, not to mention revealing. They mostly highlighted his great narcissist's talent for throwing people off-balance, in life and (incredibly) even after his death. One writer was incensed that people had said things like, "He should have been writing for the New Yorker!", implying that he had ended up in a permanent backwater. The protest kind of proved the point, exposing Vancouver's "world-class" pretense like the raw nerve of a tooth. Another person stated in their blog that they were grateful to Lloyd for teaching them to write, but made it clear that "he wasn't a perfect person, and would have been insulted to be portrayed that way". She then went on to say that he was difficult to deal with, isolated himself for weeks at a time, cutting people off and making himself unreachable, and was known to inexplicably dump longtime friends as casually as Sweeney Todd dumping his victims into the pit. 


Friday, May 27, 2016

Things I used to hang around my neck




No, really. All of these. And this isn't the half. There is also the cloisonne cross from the Vatican gift store, the gold Celtic cross from Ireland, the serenity prayer silver cross, the hematite cross, the other hematite - no, wait, I sent that one to a friend of mine. Someone in need. But all these I wore, individually, because I wore crosses then, that was my milieu somehow, as I was deeply devoted to the United Church. Seems like another lifetime, because it is.







I don't really hate them, but church and mainstream Christianity really ran dry for me at a certain point, and yet I stayed. I probably stayed on for another two years after it ran completely dry, due to my wretched misguided loyalty and the sense that if I just hung on a little bit longer, it would all get good again. And it didn't.

So much for the cacophany of internet memes screaming at us to "never give up! Never give up! Never give up no matter WHAT!" I really should've given up back in about 2002.




In some sense, it was a crisis of leadership, and it got so bad at one point that our minister was ordered to leave. This reflects a church which has lost its way, but most of the blame went on "him", that dastardly devil - the one WE chose over four other candidates! But he simply had more glamour, and on some level we believed it would be a feather in our cap, not to mention a badge of our liberal-ity, because you see he was a black South African. Though no one ever admitted this, it was a blatant bid for status so that we would outshine all the other United Churches in the area.




I had to leave not just because of that meltdown, or the pallid non-leadership that followed, but because of a massive (though gradual) shift of the tectonic plates of my beliefs. I simply began to see through the isms of Christianity, and to see that ANY church I was part of, no matter how supposedly liberal-ish, was really hidebound and expected its members to adhere to a certain kind of belief system. But I had a problem. I used to get far too emotional. I used to feel I had an actual relationship with Jesus, and almost everyone thought this was either crazy, or deeply embarrassing (even though we were constantly exhorted to do just that).

I ended up feeling very alone, in a church I had attended for fifteen years.




But no matter. I recently re-found these little crosses, took them off their individual chains (and they DO come from all over, including the drug store on Granville Street) and strung them with glass pony beads on a single chain. I like to look at them now, drape them over things, display them. Sometimes I even briefly wear them, but not in public. Just for the mojo, and when I'm going to cast a spell or throw a curse (and after what happened to Paul, it looks as if it works, at least some of the time). And when I've got my mojo workin', you'd better look out.

I am not sure what these seven crosses mean exactly, but I think it's kind of nice they're not relegated to the drawer any more. And that is all I have to say about it.


Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Got my Mojo Working


Got my mojo working, but it just won't work on you

Got my mojo working, but it just won't work on you

I wanna love you so bad till I don't know what to do




Going down to Louisiana, gonna get me a mojo hand... oh yeah... 
Gonna go Louisiana, gonna get me... get me a mojo hand
Then right here... gonna have em at my command.... yeah...






Got my mojo working (got my mojo working)
Got my mojo working (got my mojo working)
Got my mojo working (got my mojo working)
Got my mojo working (got my mojo working)

Got my mojo working, but it just won't work on you
.... yeah yeah...





(lead)

Got a gypsy fella that's givin' me advice

Got a gypsy fella givin' me givin' me advice

I gotta whole lot of tricks for keepin' you here (?) on ice.... yeah...





Got my mojo working (got my mojo working)
Got my mojo working (got my mojo working)
Got my mojo working (got my mojo working)




Got my mojo working (got my mojo working)
Got my mojo working, but it just won't work on you









Friday, August 3, 2012

Teeny tiny terror: the doll that pees!






My doll history: frightening.

Actually, I didn't have much of a doll history until now. Until I cracked the code, or something, and came to realize with a subversive little shiver just how pleasurable it can be to dress and undress dolls. . .especially with clothes you've made yourself.

As a kid, I was sullen, uncooperative, usually bad-natured and mainly interested in bugs and half-metamorphosed tadpoles, awful blobby things with legs that my mother wouldn't let me keep in my room. Murky jars abounded in the basement right next to the preserves.





I just wasn't a proper little girl. At all. My mother, at a certain point, noticing I wasn't Quite the Thing, pressed a doll on me. Her name was "Deb" and she wasn't even a real doll, not a baby doll or a Barbie. In fact, she looked a little bit like my mother, bland-faced, her hair a perfect helmet of black. Deb was short for Miss Debutante, and how an eight-year-old would understand that word or be able to prounce it is beyond me, but my parents howled  when I referred to her (coldly) as "Miss De-BUTTON-ty." She was quickly discarded along with the manicure set designed to make me stop biting my nails.




I don't know, I guess a Barbie or two drifted my way, I'm not sure I recall, though I do remember one of them ended up in a sarcophagus wrapped in perfume-soaked strips of white pillowcase. Most Barbies, no matter how impeccably dressed, always seem to end up at the very back of the closet, naked with their legs obscenely splayed, their hair in a feral, impossible frizz. No one knows what happens to the clothes.




Not long ago I became fascinated with the dolls of Marina Bychkova, a Russian-born Vancouver dollmaker who creates disturbing pubescent creatures that exude an air of captivity, their eyes often brimming with tears. Their alabaster skin suggests a strange sort of necrophilia, their identical bodies (all hideously jointed) a uniformity that is kind of scary. They're often naked, elaborately tatooed, with realistic genitalia and even pubic hair, or  else heavily costumed to the point of suffocation. Here is where Bychkova truly excels: it's hard to believe what she is able to create with beads and brocade. And those tiny, tiny shoes.








I couldn't own one of these dolls because they cost upwards of $10,000.00. But some time ago, a couple of years maybe, I was scouting birthday presents for my granddaughter Lauren, a sunny soul who so valiantly carries what might be the burden of Type 1 diabetes that she seems to send it whimpering into the corner.

Every year the family takes part in a jolly occasion, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation Walk for the Cure.  Our team is called Lauren's Ladybugs (or "wadybugs" as she used to call them), so anything ladybug-esque is of interest to her.

I was dithering around not finding anything, standing in an upscale toy store too expensive to think about buying in, when!




I saw THIS.

Me, who hates dolls? who never played with dolls? who thought dolls were dumb? who didn't know why anyone would even purchase a doll? let alone play with one? Oh my goodness. This was LOVE. Then I turned and walked away, talked myself out of the whole thing. Far too expensive! I was on the other side of the mall when I realized Lana Ladybug was only twenty bucks, and how could I NOT buy her anyway??

But that's not the last of it, or even the beginning, because as L. L. slept in my closet awaiting wrapping, "something" began to eat at me.




I WANTED that doll. I wanted to hold that doll, take its dress off and put it back on again, set it on my bookcase to watch over my most cherished books.

It took a while before I gave in, and even at that, it's only recently I've started to make clothes for it. Actually, not for mine (and I have two of them now - only two - so far, that is - ) but for my granddaughters'. They must have at least ten of these Groovy Girls stuffed in a box (and they're almost always naked, perhaps a sort of tribute to their ancestral goddess, Barbie).

 These little doll-smidgens are ideal to knit for: long, slim and tubular, so that you can make tops, skirts and dresses all along the same lines.




So that's what I'm doing, to surprise them. I had to try them on my own dolls, of course, and that's when I got this strange feeling. What was it? Intimacy? Can't be that. The doll's pliable arms and legs made it possible to bend her limbs in half. So she was malleable. Vulnerable. Recognizably human. Her face was sweet, her hair a tousle. I don't know! What's happening to me? Am I going all soft? Is this weird or what?

It feels good to dress these dolls, as if the little girl in me, the one who never had a chance to develop because she was too busy being a tough little survivor, is finally coming out to play.





I see my blondies, my grandgirls, all done up in their sparkly butterfly tshirts, their glittery shoes that light up when they run, fluffy little tutus, stripey candycane tights, and I think: I missed that. All that. I was all done up in my brother's castoffs. In some cases they'd been through two brothers, who were five and ten years older than me.  So those clothes were very old and very shabby indeed, usually held on me with big safety pins.





Is this Cinderella awakening in me, or what? Why now? I'm not happy, don't ever get that idea. I'm one of the unhappiest people I have ever known. But I'm not dead inside. Not quite. Bad mental health, rotten luck and being thoroughly cursed has not quite stamped out that tiny ladybug of joy at the centre of my heart.