My altered-ego DL [Read his blog at https://laskenlog.blogspot.com/] and I endured two weeks of intense covid attack, with
opposite effects on our expression. DL withdrew from polemics, his proofs that he is right and others
wrong. I was impelled to write. It happened one febrile night when we dreamed we were in
India, DL and I, marching in a festival of brilliant colors. I felt
I had left earth to seek sustenance in another dimension, to help me face life
and the covid enemy with renewed will. I went directly from the dream
to my computer and wrote this account of the sweat lodge. By contrast,
DL reported after the dream that his polemics had become "unstable," that he
cannot read his own or others' now without screaming.
Earlier, as the ordeal unfolded, we crouched near the killer for long
hours, close enough to see its awful face. Henry James wrote that
nearness to death makes characters more interesting, and this thought
prompted me to nag at DL that I'm his character, waiting to be made
interesting. I felt a spiritual retreat was required to handle the
challenge properly. We were sweating anyway, so I suggested that
we visit and refurbish an ancient sweat lodge I had discovered in the
Mojave, an assemblage of stones where for centuries men gathered to sit
naked around coals to sweat and reduce themselves to an essence. I
explained that only men were permitted in the sweat lodge because they had
their own essence, which was not the same as a woman's essence.
DL was sold. We went to the Family Dollar Store in Pearblossom and
bought food, water, charcoal briquettes, lighter fluid and matches, then we
located and occupied the sweat lodge.
We sweated so long in the sweat lodge that, as noted, DL's polemics
melted, and he withdrew into me, becoming invisible. Towards the end of two weeks, when it seemed that we were
either to die or find ourselves, two visitors arrived. Usually in the
desert I commune with beings known to my readers- various deities and my
overly practical companion Robert the Telepathic Gila Monster- but the sweat
lodge was for men, so the first visitor was a man who had been so real in
his time that he became real again. He strode into the sweat lodge at
the moment of our despair, naked, tall, muscular, young, with an
ostentatious erection that seemed to broadcast his thoughts. He
announced himself:
Greetings, Harry the Human! I am Standing Penis. I am a man
and I have come here to reduce myself to my essence, so that I may know
what a man is.
Greetings, Standing Penis!
I was in a wry mood, for a change, and asked:
Is it necessary for you to have a prominent and permanent erection?
For purposes here, yes, because an erection is the essence of a man.
Really?, I pursued,
That seems anti-climactic, so to speak. Is a man's essence merely
to supply sperm? Is that sufficiently noble or impressive to justify
all the display?
There is more to it, Harry. The essence of a man is to be
excluded. His mother and his wife have sent him away, to hunt for
food, to be far from home among other excluded men, who then create cultures in which they are the ones excluding others. But they do not belong anywhere (including the wilderness around them) beyond their own closed circle. The erection is a
link to home. There are other links in their minds. They bring
things from the world of their isolation back home.
In my culture, Standing Penis, the man's erection is problematic.
Yes, you have taken over the earth, both your men and women have, and now
there is no distinction between home and beyond, between erection and
aggression.
What will happen to us?
You will stop being men and women. Your essences will combine.
At that moment the door flap flew open and a tall, naked woman stepped
in.
Weeping Vagina!, exclaimed Standing Penis,
You may not enter the sweat lodge, even in these decadent times!
Greetings, Standing Penis! Do not call me "Weeping Vagina."
That name was not given by my sisters, but by you. I have my own
name.
I had stood, seeking some sort of courtesy or protocal, aware of my
diminutive stature among these figures.
Excuse me...I'm Harry the Human, I stammered.
How shall I address you?
Of course, Harry, we know you, she said.
My name is Waiting Vagina. Turning to Standing Penis, she
continued,
Were you not saying as I entered that the essences of men and women will
now combine?
Yes, Waiting Vagina, I was saying that, yet I was hoping for a moment
from the past....
Waiting Vagina joined us to sit around the smouldering coals. Our
bodies glistened with rivers of sweat. She continued, looking
wistfully into the steamy red circle:
It is no joy for me to give up my female essence. We die in here
today. When our essences combine, we will be neither male nor female
any more.
We were silent for a few moments.
I asked,
When we combine in here, will the entire human race outside die, all the
men and women, no longer men and women?
It is already happening, Waiting Vagina said,
Men are killing women for excluding them from the Earth, not knowing that
women are excluded too. Women are killing men for not staying
excluded, for coming home, not knowing there is no home.
Standing Penis stared into the coals.
Suddenly DL called out from within me,
My polemics! How can I be right and others wrong now? At the
least I should know that my politics are right, my view of human life is
right, my interpretation of history is right, my way of expressing myself
is right. Right?
Waiting Vagina and Standing Penis chuckled softly. It was reassuring
to sense a unity between them.
I asked, Waiting Vagina, what is the meaning of your name?
Harry, she answered,
I am waiting to be the type of the new human brain.
What will this brain be like?
It will wait. It will not think it knows. It will know only
that it does not know.
What's the point of that? I had to ask, and Standing Penis added
an approving grunt.
Don't forget, Waiting Vagina, that after women expel them from the Earth, some men will migrate to outer space.
Yes, Waiting Vagina conceded, and some of those men, ironically, will be accompanied by women. Within the boundaries of space they will seek redemption of the
species, but without a successful Earth memory as guide, they will lose
themselves on each celestial body. As your poet Emily Dickinson
wrote:
"Those who have not found the heaven below,
will fail of it above."
Then the face of the covid death appeared in the coals. The rivers of
our sweat carried us into the death, and we merged. There were no more
men or women. There was no more right or wrong. But there were
still people. The people had minds, and their minds were quiet.
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