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Friday, November 03, 2000
19:02 
Did I ever say that we are not as mad as some?
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18:59
Too many twins references in the world today. The conjoined twins are to be separated, Gemini was an answer on a quiz show on the TV, there is a robot that splits into two on Robot Wars, and that's just a few of them.
It hurts.
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16:12
Advice for the Dreamwalker...
The Dreaming is a strange place. Boundaries are not the same as they are in the real world. The inside of your head is no longer closed off from the world, it contains the world. Rather like that hippy chap in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams. He built his house so that the inside looked like the outside. He could retire to outside the world, and have the whole of the world in his living room.
Dreams are like that.
People turn up in my dreams all the time. You can interpret this how you will. My subconscious ploughing over issues that are of concern to me, the elastic nature of the Dreaming, Gaiman's Lord Morpheus sending people to me when I need to deal with them. People using their own Dreaming to get at mine.
It doesn't make much difference. The inside of your head is not as safe a space as you might think. Just look at memes.
Oh, by the way, this stuff counts as research for the Hitchhiker's Guide.
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15:16
Sometimes I have experiences which, were I of a different mindset, I might interpret as being abducted by aliens. Some of these are unpleasant. I have had them ever since I was a youngster. I remember once waking up to find myself standing in my pyjamas (the pink, stripy ones I used to have) outside my bedroom door in the corridor downstairs. There was blood smeared across my face, across the wall of the corridor, all the way out to the front door. The door was ajar. In a slight daze I shut the door, went to the bathroom, dampened some tissue (or perhaps it was a flannel) and proceeded to wipe the blood off the corridor walls. Then I went into my parents' room and told them there was blood everywhere. Sleepily my Mum told me I had had a nosebleed and told me to go back to bed.
I don't remember any blood on my pillow.
And sometimes I will find myself in a semi-dream state, perhaps when I am alone in the bath or watching the television, and I will see shadowy forms standing over me, watching me, talking about me. Sometimes I can hear them discussing system requirements and possible changes, efficiencies, flaws, faults, stratagems, performance expectations and results. They always refer to me as "it".
The times I think I hate the most are when this doesn't upset me at all.
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13:14
This time of year is always hard. Particularly hard this year as an old adversary seems to be up to her old tricks again and perhaps some new ones. I decided not to let things slide, not to wait, to get in there first and thus perhaps prevent things reaching the same height of head that they reached last time.
I started off as I meant to go on and it is hard. Physical healing has stopped. I am covered in tiny cuts and scrapes that will scar because they are taking so long to heal. My skin condition is suffering. The tail end of a cold that was on its way out is now hanging on with grim determination so that I feel dreadful. Energetically I am forced to make a conscious effort to keep things on an even keel.
However when I give up the fingertip clinging to normal existence and allow myself to be swallowed by what I have to do there are no doubts, no sense of fragility.
I bought a red rose yesterday. I picked the one with the best thorns and the woman stripped them for wrapping. I avoided losing my temper with her and took another one. The thorns are not as good, but they are long and sharp enough.
Wyrd and partner have been visiting for the last couple of days. Wednesday was a booze and video fest, for which I cooked. Yesterday we spent all afternoon in the Pitt Rivers Museum. It is perhaps the best museum that I know, even though the Natural History Museum that takes the place of a foyer, almost, is a tad disturbing because of all the dead animals. Both Wyrd and I really enjoyed ourselves, as did Frood and M. I confess that I found a lot of the exhibits inspirational and am already trying to work out if I can find the necessary materials with which to make some throat roarers.
Wish I could find a picture of those to show you.
It may be that I keep the skull that is buried in my garden after all.
It is an animal skull.
Some of the exhibits are exquisite. They have a huge totem pole, which was originally erected by Chief Anetlas (c. 1816-1893) and his wife at a potlatch to mark their adoption of a young girl. It was carved before 1882 from a single tee trunk 40 feet high. I think it might be yew, but I'm not sure why I think that. At the base is a raven with certain eagle facets, with a human figure between its wings. Above it is a bear holding a human, and the human is desperately trying to escape the grip, the look on his face is terrified. There are two bear cubs at his feet, looking rather like novelty slippers. Above that is another bear cub, apparently climbing down the pole, and above him is another bear eating a frog. On the very top are four human figures, seated, wearing stripy top hats. The stripes apparently represent previous potlatches.
There is also a carved ivory shaman's drumstick head in the shape of Raven's head. He is holding two small people in his beak and I felt very strange as I looked at it. There is a great deal of NW Coast material in the museum, not to mention the shrunken heads. I thoroughly recommend a visit.
It was difficult to know what to do with our visitors. I am so broke now that the bank won't allow me to use my account, so of course I can't pay any money into the account because when I earn money I earn very small amounts, and can't then demand that they allow me access again because I haven't paid off very much. It's very difficult, because I can't work properly because of my illness. Can't get a "proper job", one that involves me getting into work reliably every day, because some days I am too sick to do that. So when we are entertaining people it is awkward. I want to be able to do all the things that people expect - especially as Wyrd and M earn a considerable amount - but we live hand to mouth and struggle along financially all the time. I wish I could find something I can do from home.
I am so tired. Nights are full of attacking insects and I dreamed of killing people last night. Five of them, one after the other, and disposing of the bodies. One of them was a man I would recognise if I saw him again. They were all men. The last one I didn't mean to kill, merely knock unconscious. I held a gun to his head with one hand then hit him across the back of the head with a blunt object I held in the other. His hair was very similar to Andy's - very short, quite soft, almost, but greyer. I can't remember what it was that they did. As I did it I felt exhausted resignation. They even seemed to understand why I was doing it, perhaps better than I did.
Heh.
"Dammit, someone was in my dream. My head feels violated. I'm cross."
Well, yes. That's what happens. It's kind of the point. I'm not entirely sure where the sense of violation comes from. It's a perfectly valid form of attack/interrogation.
If you accept that sort of thing, of course (and note I didn't say believe).
Can smell Winter now. Feeling a sense of displacement very strongly. Feel I ought to be somewhere else. It's rather like déja vu. I will turn round or look up and get this almost flash of being somewhere completely different, in a different life. Most of the time I am happy in that other life. The work is hard, but I am happy. It seems to be a smell thing, when the scent of the world turning becomes overwhelming. The most awful thing about this is that this other life is something which could have been achieved in this life in other circumstances, perhaps still could. That dream of living on a small farm with loved ones, a sheepdog, an aga, a couple of cats. Is it so impossible? In ten years, should I live that long, that is where I would like to be. Working hard, outdoors in all weathers, but happy. Settled. I sometimes wonder, when I have just had one of these flashes, if that is where I am supposed to be now, and which decision, or set of decisions, prevented it happening.
And my good friend Denial tells me that a while is 5-10 minutes. Can feel the time coming up soon now. It's going to be a very busy year. I can see it coming, a wall of water with a foaming crest.
The Raven Clan is descended from Foam Woman. There is a tale that Raven's Grandfather was Mouse. There are lots of tales about Raven. Most of them aren't true, but they all contain a grain of truth. The sand in the oyster.
On an email list I am told that "17,000 scientists have signed a statement: 'There is no convincing evidence that human release of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will cause in the future, catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere....' "
What rubbish, I think. How did that happen?
Apparently some of those scientists include the crew from the television programme MASHH. I found one scientist's explanation of what happened when he received the petition quite enlightening.
Sometimes I despair with the world, I really do. And people are already queuing at the pumps. Idiots.
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Monday, October 30, 2000
21:53
Yes, I have a twin again. And it was hard work. It was not an entirely pleasant weekend. There was much that I wish had not happened. There was some that I do not even wish to relate.
But I am also angry. This is not because of anything that happened over the weekend, but because of the attitudes of people around us that mean certain things do happen, are caused to happen.
Let me describe my twin.
My twin is someone I would know anywhere. What he looks like is irrelevant. How would I know him? The same way I knew him when we first met eyes, two strangers nearly three decades of age, across a rickety wooden gate on the Oxfordshire-Warwickshire border. A spark of recognition, the feeling of times past spent together, the feeling of a history. When those two strangers first met they spent time searching through their adult memories, looking for an experience that might have been shared. We hunted through our pasts, mentioned events to one another, asking each other if we had been present at such and such an event. Folk festivals, conferences, anything we thought might have been relevant. We couldn't find any such event, because we had not met before, but the feeling of having met before did not fade, it became stronger.
We do not have sex.
Some find this hard to believe. There is no sex in this relationship. As it happens I am not physically attracted to this man who is my twin. I am rarely physically attracted to any man. What attracts me is something more ephemeral, something more felt. However, even if he were the most sexually attractive man in the world, I would not wish to have sex with him. That is not the basis of our relationship.
We are not having an affair.
I suppose, if you were to stretch the semantics, you could say that because we love each other it is an affair of the heart. But this would be to do the relationship a disservice by forcing it to be subject to cultural stereotyping. This is not an unconsummated love affair, with each of us bound by honour to remain faithful to our respective partners, leaving a desperate, unfulfilled, passionate longing. No.
He's my brother. If we were long-lost twins in the accepted sense there would be newspaper articles written about us ("Separated for a quarter century - long-lost twins together again. We find out what it feels like.") If we could produce blood samples that declared us to be genetically related, he wouldn't be accused of being "insensitive and inflexible" and people would give us that little bit of understanding.
"They've been apart for so long, they'll want to catch up, it's bound to be intense for a while."
We don't get that, no.
I accept that other people can't look inside our hearts and see our affection for what it is. We are accused of detracting from our primary relationships, of being unfaithful. How I hate that. Unfaithful.
I love my parents. Does that mean I cannot love my husband? If we were to have children, would my love for my offspring mean that I cared less for the man with whom I had made them? If I have a brother, does it mean I cannot have a strong emotional bond with another man? If a man loves his sister, does it mean he cannot love his wife?
It might be that others don't see us as "true" twins. We might feel as though we were once conjoined, might even be able to recount the memories of the moment we were split, but we understand that others do not share those memories. How could they? They were not there. We are not even sure that we were. We have no photographs, no clips in family album - none that we can bring out to show at parties, anyway, none that we could scan and post for all to see. There! We are twins! Now will you let us love each other?
The Fidelity Meme, he calls it, and it has caused us untold pain and misery.
"It's not what you do, it's how you feel..."
We can't help how we feel. You can choose your friends but you can't choose your relations. We didn't choose one another. We met eyes across a gate and felt a spark of recognition that for months had us racking our brains for an explanation.
What happened to make me lose that sense of recognition? Nothing I can adequately describe, although I can perhaps summarise it. Desperation. In one word, desperation. The pressure of a narrow-minded society.
How did we get it back? Through a long and painful process that had both of us in tears. We are still feeling the effects of the entire experience, the loss and the retrieval. It will take us some time to get over it.
We want to get over it. We don't like being made to feel as though we are doing something wrong.
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