Hello there. Welcome to The Flow and the Ebb, the journal of Eric Scott.

There's a bunch of stuff in here- personal stuff, school stuff, geek stuff. But the main stuff is the fiction and poetry. For ease of use, this post exists as a quick guide to everything like that in the journal.

Here's the directory...

( Stories )
( Songs and Poems )

"A finished thing is a dead thing."

A work in progress, of course.

The Sword Dancer and Other Stories
by Eric Scott

I got lost three times on my way out to the camp, once even before I had made it outside of the Kansas City limits. I guess that's to be expected; I miss highway turns all the time even when I know where I'm going, and about all I remembered from my last excursion to Gaia, five years ago, was that it was approximately an hour west of where I lived. So I found myself cursing the frail portion of the Kansas state budget alloted for road signs and kept an eye out for the elusive 207th Street. I spotted the first of Lucy's landmarks just before I was going to give up, turn around, and drive to someplace with cell phone service: a little church surrounded by a nameless little town, with a message-board that read in blocky capital letters CHRIST IS RISEN, CHRIST IS RISEN INDEED.

( Is it just you, hun? )

( Heartlands Past )


Expect this to be a long one, eventually...

Well, at least my response to the previous predicament was to finally get Surrender Dorothy in the mail.

And I guess start looking for other job opportunities.

I have no mouthjob and I must scream.

Stolen from mad_maudlin: When you see this, post a little weensy excerpt from as many random works-in-progress as you can find lying around. Who knows? Maybe inspiration will burst forth and do something, um, inspiration-y.

( Bandits, a Citadel Story )

( The Philosopher King, a sequel to ARGEN THE DEMON )

( Family Traditions, the eponymous story of my thesis collection )

Finding a particular comic book on the floor of your living room really should not force you to reevaluate the course of your life, but sometimes it happens.

I am completely enthralled by this song. I've been listening to it on repeat pretty much nonstop; my only complaint is that it's not longer, which would make it more satisfying on an ambient level (which is a style of music I've been more and more interested in lately.)

Reply to this entry with the word "words" and I will reply with five words which remind me of you. Then post to your journal describing what those words mean to you. I will be glad to take more word suggestions, if you'd like to add to the list.

These words were provided by zephyrofgod: Asatru, Author, Bard, Music, Panda. She totally spelled "author" with two "u"s, which doesn't make a lick of sense.

Asatru
I've been to the Heartland Pagan Festival three times that I can remember: once when I was maybe 12 or 13, when I was 18, and this year, which happened about a month ago. I had just been initiated into Coven Pleiades a little before the one when I was 18, and one of the coven members gave me a Thor's Hammer necklace as a gift. I'm not sure exactly why, but wearing the hammer meant a lot to me then, and I wore it more often than I wore, say, my pentagram necklace. When I got to Heartland, I met Uncle Alaric (that's saxon_pagan, author of the newly published Travels Through Middle Earth, natch) for the first time as a semi-adult there and was introduced to Anglo-Saxon Heathenry through him. I went to a few workshops and two really good rituals (the first a blot to Woden and the second a very intense seidh meditation) and knew this was something that bore investigation.

I never really took to the whole Anglo-Saxon tradition, though, which is ironic considering I went on to focus on Old English later in my college career. The names were just never right to me. Woden, Thunor, the Freo... The names just never felt natural. I grew up reading The Mighty Thor, the Marvel comic which, while having not much relationship to the deity as presented in the mythology, still filled my head with that wonderful Jack Kirby architecture and costume designs, and led me to an interest in Norse mythology. And the Norse myths, as presented by the Icelanders, have always been the ones that have stuck with me... The names, the nine worlds, Yggdrasil, these are all things I felt a distinct yearning for once I started to investigate it, and Asatru has been one of the key facets of my religious matrix ever since.

Author
I am still not sure why I decided to be an English major. I guess it was because I liked Mr. Economon's classes so much in high school, but looking back I really cannot think of a specific time when I said "yep, that's what I want to major in." I came into high school believing I was going to be an astronomer, which really, really didn't pan out, and I don't recall coming up with a new career path during the rest of my high school career. Anyway. I got into Truman State and declared English as my major. And then I got really serious cold feet. I was not a kid who moved around a lot; I had lived in the same house since I was six months old, and while I had never really been one of the street-wandering "city kids" of Saint Louis, I realized as soon as it became clear that I would be moving away that I loved my city very much, and that I was going to miss it more than I could have realized.

There was never a point at which I believed I wasn't going to go to college, of course. That was unthinkable. But at the same time, the waiting was very hard. I would go up to Grand Boulevard three times a week just to watch it, feeling that I'd never appreciated it enough, that I'd never appreciated anything enough. I was so nervous and depressed that I was honestly a little worried about myself. And then I did something about it: I wrote a story called Jumping. Two things happened after I did that. The first was that I felt a lot better about moving to Kirksville; it helped me work out a lot of issues. And the second was that the minute I wrote the last word of that story, I knew that I wanted to write for the rest of my life. And I still do.

Bard
I was never a very good bard while I was in the SCA. It was clearly the aspect of the society I felt the most affinity for, but there were a lot of things about it I just never cared for (filking, songs for the Calon Army, whatever) and I never got as into it as might have been expected. Being disenchanted with one of the areas of the SCA I felt I should have liked the most is, honestly, one of the main reasons I've decided not to play anymore.

When I think of bards, I think of the scops of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, those people who were the tellers of the old sagas and stories, and I feel a strange and alien kinship with them. They were storytellers, yes, but they were far different storytellers than I am; as a professor of mine put it, while my stories will be judged on their creativity and originality, the bards of the pre-literate cultures of the past would have judged originality as anathema. In a world before written words, the bards were the only real link with the past, living repositories of the history of their people, and that made them more valuable than the tribe's greatest warriors. To change the stories was to destroy them.

Occasionally I will sense echoes of that tradition in the songs of Mikal the Ram, and it will send chills through me as I hear the ghosts of those long dead tale-tellers whispering still.

Music
I am honestly a pretty terrible musician. I don't know most of the terminology, and I just barely know my way around a guitar; my chord knowledge is pretty limited, and scales? Forget it. I think I make up for it with enthusiasm and a willingness to let other people show off when I'm playing in a band: there's a reason why Ryan plays lead and I always play rhythm, even when we're both playing six-string guitars.

My favorite band when I was learning how to play guitar was the Ramones, and that probably has stuck with my playing style. I still like the Ramones, but my favorite musicians these days were playing a few years earlier than the 1977 era punk that was my first strong love: David Bowie, Iggy Pop, T. Rex. I like the heady mixture of intellectuality and sensuality that was present on a lot of their records, especially Bowie's Station to Station (which I named a story for) and Iggy Pop's The Idiot. My favorite record is still probably King Crimson's Red, which has the track Starless, which is in my opinion the highlight of western civilization.

Panda
I wrote this as part of an article in the final issue of The Perspective, the Writing Center Newsletter I edited at Truman: As the year comes to a close, a harsh revelation is coming to me: in Kansas City, where I will be going to gradutate school in just a few months, nobody is going to know anything about me being a giant panda. This is surprisingly hard to deal with. The legend of Eric Scott Being A Giant Panda steamrolled to epic proportions, to the point that I have been approached multiple times by strangers and asked “Hey, aren’t you the panda guy?” Kathy and Mary Lou (my supervisors at the WC) have expressed disappointment when I didn’t show up as a panda last Halloween. There’s STILL a Facebook group with more than a hundred members that support the question of whether I’m secretly a panda. Frankly, it’s been beyond my control for so long that I have accepted it as part of my identity. I am Eric. I am the Panda Guy.

Most of those comments are still true. However, my experience at Heartland this year added another wrinkle to the Panda situation, because of how I ended up channeling the panda as part of my Vision Quest station. The panda now represents some element of my personality- I guess we have to call it part of the religious matrix I alluded to above- that is very contemplative, receptive and giving. I suppose it's the Taoist aspect of my spirit, which has always been kind of a background player: always there, never really the dominant aspect of my life, but a constant presence. So Panda has evolved beyond just a goofy nickname for me, I suppose, into something more than that. I guess this is what people mean when they talk about having an "animal totem"- it's not quite what I expected, but then again, what is?

-E

Email inbox is a lot smaller since I left all the SCA lists. I guess that's probably a good thing.

I just submitted my first novel to publishers. Rejection is likely, success is a very faint possibility, and there are many years of toil and trouble ahead. Time to live the dream, dudes.

Last week I managed to acquire, through doing some work for my parents and later through a totally unexpected gift from my grandfather, some money- a little over a thousand dollars. This puts me into an interesting financial position; for the moment, I can pretty easily cover my rent for the next two months and still have enough money to live decently (meaning it won't kill me to eat out or buy a couple of books.) However, it isn't enough money to do anything large with (such as paying for the New Letters Writing Conference next weekend, sigh.) In other words I can have some fun, but I can't make any serious purchases with the current amount of cash I have on hand.

My grandfather had a phrase for situations like this, which he used around me many times when I was young: to be in this financial situation was to be "nigger rich," implying a number a things. 1, it makes a blanket assumption that no black person could be rich in the conventional (white) sense (not that most white people will ever be rich in that sense either); 2, it implied that black people were incapable of using their money wisely, because the rejoinder to being nigger rich was that one would quite soon be back to one's normal economic situation, i.e., broke. And of course, it uses the word nigger which has more emotional baggage than probably any other word in the American lexicon.

For obvious reasons, I find the statement pretty appalling on a number of levels: it goes against virtually everything I stand for as an English teacher, because it encourages simplistic, racist interpretations of a particular culture (in this case, black America) and inherently impedes communication between people of different backgrounds. It's a divisive phrase that encourages thinking of people as enemy groups rather than individuals worthy of respect as fellow humans.

And yet for the life of me, I cannot help but think of being "nigger rich" every time I open my wallet this week. It bothers me a lot that I have so thoroughly internalized such a statement, which I'm sure I have not heard aloud since I was thirteen or so, that it comes to mind so easily, yet this also speaks to the sheer power of linguistic influences at a young age. It's for the same reasons I will also always hear my aunt condemning gays in the back of my head (the old "God didn't create Adam and Steve" line, which I am sure I repeated to my parents a few times) when meeting gay people and will always hear the voice of a boy from the second grade in the back of my head when thinking about American perceptions of religion (I told him that Jewish people weren't Christian, and he replied "No, everybody's a Christian," and I think I might have believed him.)

These kinds of statements simply stick in the craw of the brain long after one would hope they've dissipated: even when a person has been so thoroughly enmeshed in socially liberal political stances as I have, the phrases still appear, and possess an ungainly power through their sheer unwillingness to go away.

Good news: I've just finished editing part X of Argen the Demon in preparation for the Bet With The Universe, which comes due Saturday.

Bad news: The last three stories are by far the longest ones. *L*

No shit- Christian Civil Liberties Union wants to be able to burn a library book as legal restitution.

Seriously, what the hell?

"Every Girl I've Ever Known"

She is working at a gas station
Hoping to earn the money
To get off her best friend's couch
She is sitting in a South Grand bar
Drinking rye and water
And trying to hide her doubts

She is guarding all the thresholds
and waits in airports alone
She is guiding through labyrinths
And texts lovenotes on her phone
She is more than words can tell
She is maiden mother and crone
She is every girl I've ever loved
She is every girl I've ever known

She lives alone in Saran
Playing with the cat
And wonders if she wants to go home
She is away in California
Selling drugs some mornings
Down by the Disney Dome

She is going to make movies
Direct a couple plays
And someday maybe write a book
She is finding little pleasures
Eating her own dinner
In her own breakfast nook
She is dancing by the fire
Swallowed up by shadows
Except for one heart-stealing look

She is guarding all the thresholds
and waits in airports alone
She is guiding through labyrinths
And texts lovenotes on her phone
She is more than words can tell
She is maiden mother and crone
She is every girl I've ever loved
She is every girl I've ever known

"Flyting"

I came to your house and I called you a bore
I talked to your mother and I called her a whore
When our father tried to show me the door
I told him his best son won't come any more

I tell lies but I mean every one
I tell lies but I mean every one
I tell lies but I mean every one
I'm going to hate myself when the morning comes
I'm going to hate myself when the morning comes
I'm going to hate myself when the morning comes

I said that the Lady took dwarves for a ride
I said that the Lord dressed like a bride
I nocked the arrow when the bright one died
And I am the one who never cried

I tell lies but I mean every one
I tell lies but I mean every one
I tell lies but I mean every one
I'm going to hate myself when the morning comes
I'm going to hate myself when the morning comes
I'm going to hate myself when the morning comes

You told me a messenger had been sent
You told me the Thunder would not relent
In came the Thunderer who was my friend
I guess all things come to an end
I guess all things come to an end
I guess all things come to an end
I guess all things come to an end

I tell lies but I mean every one
I tell lies but I mean every one
I tell lies but I mean every one
I'm going to hate myself when the morning comes
I'm going to hate myself when the morning comes
I'm going to hate myself when the morning comes

So, here's where my mind is at right now.

I have felt very disconnected recently. It just seems like many of the touchstones of my life broke off, one after the other, in a very short period of time: Kenny and Harry both graduated from Truman for good, meaning that my connections to Kirksville are very few. Kenny is back in Saint Louis, but Harry will soon leave for Japan; Harry has been the friend I turn to more than any other for so long that the thought that he's going to be that far away feels very strange. I became officially single again for the first time in almost three years. We put Amy to sleep. All of these things that I suppose I counted on as stable elements in my life went away, and I found myself sitting in my apartment in a city where I have only a couple of friends I see on any kind of regular basis.

I didn't feel bad, per se. I just felt alone. It is my tendency to be alone. I didn't fight it.

I went to the Heartland Pagan Festival on Thursday and got set up. I saw Uncle Alaric and Taran, both of whom were good to see again. I saw Sarah, constantly busy with some responsibility or other. I met the rest the camp I was staying with. And I spent the first two days of Heartland setting up camp and going to a few workshops, mainly Uncle Alaric's. Throughout all of this there were things I want to say, questions I had been wanting to ask for a very, very long time; I never did. And not to ruin the story for you, but no, I never ended up asking them by the time I broke camp on Monday, either.

During Alaric's main talk, we did a brief meditation in which we were asked to call upon a spirit we had connection to. I would have expected that I would have invoked Odin or Thor, personally, but instead I had a fairly intense sensation of Freyja: particularly, I felt her hand holding mine. She didn't say anything, which was the damnedest thing. Just held my hand. And that didn't especially help my feelings much.

Anyway. This is not to imply that I wasn't having fun; I was. I really did enjoy uncle Alaric's workshops, and I liked being outside. It was good to be out in the woods, sleeping in a tent: this was an experience I hadn't had in years, maybe not since the last Heartland I went to several years ago. But my pleasure was a pretty self-involved pleasure, and I found myself leaving the group of people I thought of as my family pretty regularly to go be by myself- as though I had some need to decompress, perhaps.

I was one of the aspects in the vision quest this year, which meant that as people walked along the vision quest trail, they would eventually come to me and we would talk for a little bit. The animal I chose to invoke was the panda, partially, I admit, because I had the costume for it already and partially because of the long running Eric-is-a-panda joke. But when I settled into the role, I found Panda to be a very centered, connected, and oddly social creature... Still me, in most ways, but me in a very different state than I had been feeling for a while. Panda's central theme was mystery, and the very Taoist ideal of embracing mystery as the source as wisdom rather than a constant need for definition and understanding.

One of the people I/Panda talked to was a young woman who thought I was meant to be a raccoon. She had a fascinating relationship with the question of mystery, and had questions about her spiritual path. (A lot of people did. By far the two most common responses to my opening question- "Tell me about something you don't understand"- were something along the lines of "how do I know I'm on the right path?" or something about a relationship.) It was one of the better conversations I had while invoking Panda.

The vision quest eventually ended, and I went back up to camp. I was still very full of the energy left by the invocation, but Panda's centered nature was gone, and I was back to feeling very scattered, except now that feeling was enhanced by the spiritual high. I wandered back to the fire circle, and eventually went down and took a shower to finally clean off my makeup. On the way back up, I ran into the woman who thought I had been invoking a raccoon, and we talked for a long time. I ended up spending some time with her the next night as well, at the big final bonfire; you can look at the poem "Sword Dancer" in my last entry for some of my impressions of her from there. We ended up talking and hanging out at the bonfire until about dawn, when I left her at her camp and headed home to write poetry and watch the sun rise.

I noticed, in talking to her, that I was acting like the Panda again. And I felt very connected and open and happy to talk, generally; I didn't feel so isolated. And I realized as I was driving home from Heartland today just how calm I felt, how content in comparison to how I felt the first day or two- and really, the past couple of months. And while I think that a lot of people at Heartland itself might have said that was the result of the sacred land or something like that, I honestly have to think it's something a little more basic than that: she was the first friend I had made in a long time, the first new connection. The fact that it happened in the outdoors only reinforced the fact that this experience was honestly quite different from my normal, static, solitary urban life.

So I drove back from Heartland thinking about all of this, and what my sudden contentment implied about the rest of my life. It sure seems like it's saying I need to make some changes. I'm not entirely sure what all those changes should be yet. I do think that I, for one, need to just get out and walk around a lot more than I currently do; I need to actually get outside and feel that grass and stand beneath those trees. And I need to actually meet people; I need to do something more than be solitary, even if that feels natural, because in the end I think it's hurting me.

I still wonder if I'll ever ask the questions that I've been stumbling over; I still don't really know what Freyja meant in that sudden vision during Alaric's workshop. And though I feel content right now, I also know my eyelids are heavy with sleep, and I'm very unsure how I'll feel in the morning. I just know that Heartland has pointed out that there are a few changes I should make in my life. I don't really know what they are yet, but I'll be looking.

Watch this space.

-E

I'm back home. My head is in a strange place right now, and I need a little time to work it out. I may write something about it later. In the meantime, here is a Heartland Miscellany.

( Random Quote Department )

( Poems I Wrote at 5:30 AM Department )

( Worlds Colliding Department )

( Poems I Didn't Finish At Heartland Department )

( Poems Written After Brief Mystical Visions of Goddesses Department )

( Questions I Generally Have No Reason To Ask Department )

Off to Heartland until sometime Monday. Hopefully.* Five days without a computer should be good for me.

-E

*Assuming registration goes well and they realize I'm an HSA dude who is listed in the program as a workshop giver, and don't try and charge me $200 I don't have. *crosses fingers*

Yes, the sound quality ain't great. Yes, I recorded it in my living room last night. Welcome to the internet.

And three and a half hours later, we have a seven page essay where once there was but void.

BTW: I hate all final essays. Why? Because they're pointless. The prompt for this essay for modern poetry was to examine all FIVE poets we studied in class in comparison to Robert Frost's statement that "poems begin in delight and end in wisdom." She said to spend about 2-3 hours writing. Y'know what? You can't say anything meaningful about five poets in a seven page essay. You might be able to say something worthwhile about one or two. Instead you have to just try to write five decent paragraphs that don't have enough evidence or nuance because you have so much more ground to cover.

Seriously, these assignments are dumb.

-E