Sacred things we have lost

Music used to be a sacred thing, a living thing. In Bali, the instruments of the gamelan, imbued with the spirit of the Gamelan which lived in the big gong, were treated with respect. The gamelan performed concerts in the village square, on street corners, with no divide between the musicians and audience. Connection between audience and performers was immediate and unmistakeable.

Storytelling used to be a sacred thing, with the shaman or the shanachie telling mystical stories and tales of their people while sitting surrounded by listeners. The oral tradition lent itself to changes in the way the story was told, tailoring it to the news of the day, the needs of the listeners. Respect flowed from teller to listener and back.

Dance used to be a sacred thing, with a select group of the villagers, and sometimes the whole village, dancing in a communication to the gods, dancing in joy, dancing in sorrow.

These forms once were people's entertainment, their TVs and MP3s and concerts. The difference was that the experience of earlier peoples wasn't that of consuming entertainment passively and choosing with a flick of the fingers which was worthy. The audience celebrated skill, true, but they didn't depend on the curators to know what to choose -- the bestseller list, the popular vote, the movie of the week. They didn't need to -- they were part of the performance, and that was more exhilarating than the large venue concert.

We try to meet our curated heroes today, with backstage passes and autograph sessions and photographs, in a way of trying to make ourselves sacred or at least special. It is not the same, because they are on the stage high above us. We are not part of the creative process. We don't become something bigger than ourselves, even for a moment.

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I grew up in the world of small performance. All the local Girl Scouts and their petty, squabbling leaders gathered yearly for four weekends of Singspiration, where we learned folk music from Blondie and Comanche, despite the attempts of the petty leaders to shut down the annual event because the leaders were presumed a gay couple.

I wrote poetry for my teachers to read and gained a loyal following of three classmates in high school. I later wrote a song about the frighteningly intense jock John Elliott, who died in a car crash right after high school:

John told me he would marry me/right in the middle of Civics class/I guess I never believed it/you had to know how I was/a girl who lived inside her coat/startled at shadows, wrote poetry/that Marsha and Tammy read to him/but I never wrote a poem for John ...

 I knew several talented storytellers, most of them in my family. My father's side, a jumble of Welsh, Ojibwe, German, and French, told hunting stories with decidedly Celtic humor twists and one story I've been told was a Native American teaching tale updated to 1940's Wisconsin. My mother's family told stories that almost invariably featured 1) bad puns and 2) my grandmother as the vaudevillian "straight man".

I grew up to write poetry, songs, short stories, and essays. I would occasionally put the poems and short stories on PLATO, which was an early predecessor to the Internet. PLATO was much more interactive than today's Net, and we PLATOites made it a point to meet each other in person. I won 6 bottles of lovely dark ginger beer for one of my stories, which also caused a good chunk of the male readers to say "(*gulp*) I better check myself." People noted what I wrote in that small world. I've also had poetry published locally and one essay in a liberal religious journal.

My first novel (the early draft of Gaia's Hands) happened not because I wanted to write a novel, but because I kept writing short stories to explore the meaning of a dream I had (which, if you need to know, was about a sexual encounter initiated by a much younger male stranger.) Then, when I found I could get through the NaNo prescribed 50k words, I got innundated by inspiration -- more tales flowing from Gaia's Hands. I wrote what I knew -- academia, emotional beauty, the banal evil of greed, green things, semi-communal living arrangements, Gaia, Buddhism, Shinto -- in other words, a world within this world where the misfits live.

My novels don't sell within what is called "the marketplace of ideas" -- that is, the mass production of the arts. In fact, I am not a "seller" -- I am a storyteller. I want to reach people and make them laugh, make them think, assure them that they're not alone.  I don't believe this will happen in the selling of Big Entertainment.

But yesterday, an acquaintance of mine (Hi, Jeanne) told me she really enjoyed reading my campaign for Gaia's Hands. This felt more gratifying than I was prepared for, because she spoke my language -- in the aesthetic of small performance, we connected.