Writing With My Obsessions

I've just been reading Julia Cameron's Write for Life and come across the concept of changing forms. She's written in a vast array of genres, fiction and nonfiction, movies and music. She's not afraid to change forms.

It reminds me of something cutting my mother said to me one Christmas when I went to visit her. "When are you going to write about something other than that alien?"

Never! Never. My immediate and angry response was very telling for me.

"That alien" is Xan, Quaxlagon, a beloved third of my three-part spirit (or is it two-parts? Seven? Twelve, perhaps? Infinite?). He is very much a favorite actor, part of my "star system", or the small collection of personalities I know well enough to write confidently again and again. He is also a spiritual companion, helping me work out problems and understand things more deeply.

Recently, I have decided that it's time to finish out the story of The Audacity series, which generated him as he is now. My entire creative life since perhaps 2010 has revolved around Xan and May, an indispensable fire-ball counterpoint and the other third of my spirit.

But that doesn't mean I'll stop writing about that alien, and here's why: He and May are both a curated collection of parts of myself. A flavor of thought, wrapped in a neat package, and given life. They are archetypal, yet complex. In my paradigm, they each hold half of the Everything and when they come together, meaning and wholeness is generated between them.

I see May and Xan in the golden sunlight highlighting a cluster of distant branches as the sun sets. I see them in the corrugated metal shed overhang that shelters a single leaf of ivy from the rain. They are there as the relationship between my ear drums and the bird who sings somewhere out there in the oaks.

Mythologically aggrandized, maybe, but being able to feel the sense of this passive yet stable connection to all things through the anthropomorphizing of abstract concepts brings me great solace. A kind of solace that doesn't feel like it's trying to hide from anything. They can as easily be the sweetness of two squirrels curled round each other in the hollow of a tree as they can be the image of a feral cat snatching a songbird to devour. Love can be destructive, can't it? Though, admittedly, for the purpose of the novels this kind of Love is usually displayed by my Chaos aligned characters. The reason for this is that May and Xan have begun to gain this awareness that they are each other, and slowly but surely they have started to integrate what that means.

They are not the Western feminine/masculine dichotomy (heck, if they were certainly Xan would be more on the end of the feminine) and they are not Shiva/Shakti, though I often see interesting parallels regarding how exactly they play with each other. Xan is more inclined to sit back and watch, May more interested in grabbing life by the thrusters. But Shiva is so often depicted as either ultimate peace or furious anger, and Xan doesn't have an angry bone in his body. Shakti is either the wild destructor or the motherly protector, and May isn't all that destructive or motherly. She does gain that fiercely protective energy when it comes to Xan, though. And he can do some pretty crazy things for her, as well.

Chaos magicians create their own spiritual structures and paradigms. The traditionalists are right in saying that this can drive you crazy with ego, but the traditionalists also wall themselves off from the things that are possible when we allow ourselves to color out of the lines. I'm willing to go a little mad sometimes (and I have!) with my own magical thinking if it means I get to participate in the unfolding of creation. I think that's the May in me. I'm not willing to do this at the expense of anyone else's vision, even if I don't agree with their vision at all, and I think that confounding element comes from the deep and abiding gentleness inside Xan.

So no, mother, I'm sorry but I will never write anything that doesn't center on that alien. I'll also never write anything that doesn't center May. I'll change their names and their faces and their likes and dislikes, and backgrounds, sure, but the core of who they are, the opposites who are helplessly in love with each other, will always be present in my work because it is within me. It's all I know.