Don’t Push a Giant

I’ve an essay published in Walking The Worlds, entitled Awakening The Land (Madness and the Return of Welsh Gods)

An excerpt:

My boots are wet. I’m wet. Shirtless, covered in mud, hanging by roots and rocks.  I am the water pouring down my skin, I’m soaking through myself into the rock and becoming the lake at the source of the river, and he’s coming.  They’re there.

You don’t have to go mad to see them, but you must abandon reason to keep them around after the sight.  Giants, nymphs, ghosts—they’re there, you’ve seen them maybe once but then looked away and forgot.  Shaking off and away the vision, looking again, changing your view so they’re not there on the second glance. Dis-enchanted.

We don’t do this just with The Other, we do this with ourselves, particularly with desire.  The Other is queer, sometimes we are, and like the man denying desire for another man in a world where only women are allowed, The Other is the queer we disallow.  Easier to deny different desire when surrounded by others who also deny; easier to disallow god-giants when no-one else admits to them.

To dis-allow is to forbid; to dis-enchant is to de-ny, repudiate, withhold from ourselves what we thought occurred.  Self-abnegation, sacrificial poverty of spirit so we can be what we’re supposed to be, what is demanded of us.  Resist the trembling lust for what your flesh desires and no thing queer enters into the world of self-controlled workers selling time for money.

    Money is extracted time, he shouted at me, and I shook.  I shook like the time he pushed me back, wouldn’t let me pass.  I tried, he pushed again.  I pushed back.

Don’t get in a pushing match with a giant.

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