Cindy Holly, Muse of Other

I was infused with some Hawaiian Kahiko and Huna (traditional Hawaiian religion and mysticism) before I knew anything at all about Christianity. Then I was bombarded with Christianity, of two kinds: Episcopalianism, overtly, and Southern Baptism, covertly. The result of this input and a whole lot of agonizing is what I am. I am religious. In some way. But I have no name for my religion. And, my religion is worlds away from any of the religions I see practiced around me.

One dictionary definition of "paganism" is any religion that's not a form of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, or a religion formed out of or in reaction to any of those religions. So, for example, a "Satanist" whose concept of Satan was based on the Biblical Satan could not be considered a pagan by that definition, because his religion would be a reaction to one of those three Abrahamic religions. But another person who called himself a Satanist, whose idea of Satan was based on a pre-Christian Celtic God, say, would be a pagan. Also, a traditional Hindu, or Buddhist, Taoist, or Confucianist, or combination thereof, would be pagan.

So in my 30s, when I finally realized that the Kahiko was more or less winning my soul, I tried calling myself pagan.

That didn't work out. Trouble was, other people who called themselves pagan read too much into it. Turns out, most self-described pagans aren't going by the above dictionary definition. They mostly have in mind European traditions, or (Continental) Native American. The dashed expectations became a big bother.

It wouldn't do to just retreat into calling myself Kahiko either. Kahiko really means Old Ways, and I was only educated in the Old Ways of Hawaii for less than a year as a two and three year old. I learned enough to keep Christianity from claiming me, but not enough for me to claim Kahiko as mine.

So the state of affairs I am reduced to is this: I have a religion that is unique in the world. It has no name. It is informed by an infusion of Kahiko, plus everything else I've absorbed since that was compatible with that infusion.

My religion isn't based on faith in any super-human person. It's based on poetry, drama, comedy, and art, respect of knowing and not knowing. I imagine a vast multitude of subjective realities, realized in human minds, many more than there are humans to house them, and by imagining them I make them as real as they need to be, for the purposes of my religion, a religion which I impose upon my reality, whether or not it likes it. My impositions are all powered by imagination, which is the real mana, the water of life. I know from personal experience that this mana can give rise to subjective realities independent of me, because I ho'omana: At first, mana goes where I dream it to go, then it goes wherever.

One of these independent impositions is very special to me. I have referred to her as Cindy Holly, not-her-real-name, Muse of Other, Muse of Few Words, Ageless, Timeless, Eternal, Beauty, currently brunette.

In fact, I say not-her-real-name, because her real name would be the name of THE Goddess, and I don't speak that.

But I can be a little more specific. She drives my feeble soul. She knows where the key to my existence is kept. I don't really mind when she visits me in my dreams and turns me into a horse. Her eyes never close. She gazes on life and death equally, and dances to the beat of both simultaneously.

Cindy Holly is her comic aspect. She is that powerful, that she has a comic aspect. Very few serious Gods or Goddesses can pull that off.

Rare Serious Poem

[Real Change published this poem soon after I decided I had finished it in 1995. It was illustrated on my Speakeasy website until I cleaned that up recently, along with a Part II, which I might post here later on.]

My Childhood Study of Christianity
OR Gloria in Excelsis Deo Part I:
Why I'll Be a Pagan 'Til Kingdom Come

I'll begin with a little pre-history -
My mother called me wild sometimes, sometimes a freak.
She often raped and beat and tortured me.
While my father just got drunk and shrieked.

At six I came to understand
that my parents were Christian
and that Good Christians are persecuted, not persecuting.
I further learned at seven
that Christ would bless Good Christians
and support them in their suffering,
buffering them, so to speak,
presumably from the
persecutions of the BAD Christians.

I had questions to ask of suitable authority.
Christianity itself was promising.
Somewhere in Christ and Christianity
there should be answers! (There'd better be.)

I learned to read, to speed my way to the grace
by which I would escape my tormenters,
or at least to face their torment.

Abraham, Isaac, and Joseph.
Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Josiah.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
666, Whore of Babylon
Paul aka Saul and all and all...
Shadrach Meschach Abednego
Gloria in Excelsis Deo
Plain of desolation
Mustard seed, Transfiguration
Michael, you row your boat ashore
Now Noah got no shore to row to.
Adam and Eve and Lilith makes three
days and three nights and the
burning lake was three times around
the walls of Jericho burning
incense, the Temple WAS rent
body and bread, blood and wine
Daniel in the den of lions
A generation of vipers
that gets only one sign
Captivity, Ecclesiastes
King Cyrus, Maccabes
Peter, get thee behind me
For it is right and meet
with all the angels to sing
Eli, Eli, lama Sabachtani
Melchizedek, priest-king
Kiss the ring! Kiss the ring!

Job was promising - you know the guy:

"Sorry Life! Woe and Strife! Teeth do Gnash!
Ain't got no Wife! Ain't got no Cash!
The Lord gave Ear
To Satan I Fear
So here I Stand, all covered in Rash."

But THEN God the Old-Testament-Lout steps out.
"I made Heaven and Earth," he says, "what are YOU worth?"
And Job shakes and quakes and begs for mercy, and just happens to get it.

None of which did anything for me, or managed to answer my questions -
- namely -
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?
AND HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO DEAL WITH THEM?

Then there were Psalms.
Psalms, Canaanite Songs
in the Court of King David

"O sing praise to the almighty deity
Who makes sky, pie, and hairy flies alike..."
No, they don't say He makes pie
Mother makes pie and I don't care
Mother makes me cry and I don't care
Mother wants me to die and I don't care
The Psalms say God made the sky so I should shout Hallelujah.
How about I fart at His sky and cry out what's it to ya?
He who hath created me hath in addition created TOO MUCH SHIT!

But THEN, Psalm 23 was promising.
"Verily, though I walk blah blah blah
I shall fear no evil".
How's that work?
"The Lord is my shepherd?"
Framed on my Aunt's dresser.
The Sunday School Teacher Aunt.
HEY, maybe SHE'S the GOOD CHRISTIAN.
An operator lets me make the long distance call.
And I beg her to take me away from them all.

Four hours later I'm tortured by mother more than ever before -
raped by enema and beat an hour and a half and "Clean up the mess,
YOU made it" and HOW could I have made anything I'm not the same person I
was two hours ago. THEN there were two of me now there's one, twice.
"One against you, one against Aunt Snitch."
The Aunt who would have been a Good German in '41,
the one who verily fears no evil because
she hands over to it whatever it wants.
She DOES need a shepherd for a Lord.

So I quit Psalms until the age of ten.
Then one Sunday almost asleep in my pew,
Ready to give up entirely on Christianity,
The Psalm reader began Psalm 22:
"Lord, Lord, why hast thou forsaken me?"
Like it's a question? So I grabbed my Psalm book?
So I could look for myself and read along?
It's no question he read it wrong.
It's: LORD!
LORD!
WHY hast THOU FORSAKEN me?!
It's an accusation, backed up by the facts.
And it demands that THE Lord act NOW!

Why the reader couldn't read it right,
Why the Chaplain couldn't give it light,
No matter I knew it meant something
I'd find out for sure
I'd ask the Chaplain
on my way out the church -

Tell me what it means I said
It prefigures Christ he said
His words on the cross he said
The casting of lots he said
No,
Tell me what it means.
It's not just about
Christ,
It's about ALL people
What-does-it-mean!

After a wary glance at my parents
He bent down to whisper in my ear
"I believe you know too well what it means.
May God help you and forgive us all."

Yes, I did know what it meant -
I just wanted to know I wasn't alone
before my gods called me home
and stood the world upright again.

My Early Humor(s)

As you all should know, the word humor comes from the ancient Greek word for bodily fluids. The ancient Greeks were polytheists. That is why they allowed that different people could have different bodily fluids, or that any one person might have several bodily fluids at once, and that all that was alright.

At first, the Greeks recognized seven basic kinds of humors, or bodily fluids, namely Sanguine (blood), Choleric (yellow bile), Phlegmatic (phlegm), Melancholic (black bile), Pissy (urine), Spunky (jizm), and Mammary (milk). But right from the start political correctness reared its ugly butt, and ruled that the last two were too gender-specific, and had to be replaced by Emissions. That was subsumed into Pissy, even though everyone but the Germans knew Pissy and Spunky were totally unrelated. Yes, they did too have Germans back then. The Greeks called them mounts.

Finally, Pissy was eliminated altogether by the post-Socratic theorists, who said Piss is yellow, Cholera is yellow -- so they're the same, see? Yeah, and like Bush is shitty, and my shit is shitty -- so Bush comes out of my ass, see? I'll talk more about theory, and theorists, and how much I love theory and theorists, later. Right now I'm talking about humor(s) (see title).
Here is a rare photo of my emotional state at age four. As you can see, my Father was still asserting that our family would never in a million years own a television, or wake up out of the Dark Ages, or stop beating me bloody and leaving me in ditches. My main humor at this age is the Phlegm humor. I am cold and moist, sluggish and pallid.

This is a snapshot of my emotional state just one year later. To the untrained eye there is virtually no change, except that I have now divided into a fat man and a weird black cat. But if you look very closely you will see that the Army-McCarthy Hearings have come and gone in the background , and my Father got a TV so he could scream at McCarthy in real-time. Having a TV and watching the Army-McCarthy Hearings changed my main humor to Sanguine. I became hot and moist, amorous, happy, generous, optimistic, and irresponsible. Still moist, but a hot moist. I sought out girls to play "house" with. These were generally imaginary girls, as the nearest house with a real girl in it was a mile away, at the time.

As I began school we moved closer to civilization and I encountered actual other humans and their spawn. Among these were religious bigots. I have since come to understand that Christian religious bigots fall neatly into two distinct classes, and that this is all you need to know about them. The two classes consist of 1) Puritans and their ilk, who don't want anyone to laugh, because amusement springs from the Devil, and 2) Evangelicals and their ilk, who expect everyone to have a big fuckin smiley face and laugh and be joyous because "Haven't you heard the Good News? Christ is here!" -- Halle-fuckin-lujah.

My attitude was and is the pagan attitude of I'll laugh when the Laugh God moves me to laugh and I won't laugh when the Laugh God wants a smoke break. Get your religions off my bodily fluids.

A study of my early humor(s) is not complete without a reference to the man pictured below, Percy Dovetonsils.

This man is wearing funny glasses to view the world. That does not mean he does not see the world. It means he sees the world through funny glasses, as opposed to rose-colored glasses, say. Metaphorically, he uses humor to see and understand reality, get it?

I want to end this post on that note, combined, or amalgamated, with this additional one, said by some guy played by Jack Nicholson, which I would like to place with the first note in a sack, so they can fight each other and roll around the floor for my entertainment: "People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch."