Zombie

Isn't it time we went back to the origins of this extraordinarily well-worn trope? Hipster Psychonaut Hamilton Morris's documentary, Nzambi, explores those origins.



As a postscript, I have to say I've enjoyed these A to Z days, and loved meeting so many new bloggers and writers and writer-bloggers. I am moving on (tomorrow!!) to the Story a Day in May challenge. I hope you'll join me.

Yin

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I've mentioned before that I've spent a lot of time training with a tai chi master who is also a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine. Yin and Yang are the two primal forces that make up the phenomenological world (the world as we experience it). Mostly the western understanding of these two forces is pretty superficial. You've probably heard about yin and yang as feminine and masculine; earth and sun or heaven; dark and light; cold and hot. They flow into each other and become each other, too. In eastern systems, they aren't "yin and yang" - they are "yin yang," two sides of the same coin, but interpenetrating.

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Yin energy is earth energy: soft and cool and subtle. Yang energy is sun energy - hot and fast and hard-hitting. According to my teacher, men carry yang energy on the outside, and yin energy on the inside: think marshmallow in a steel drum. Women carry yin energy on the outside, and yang on the inside: think steel rod inside a pillow.

When we sleep, we use yin energy to cleanse our bodies.

When you meditate, you can draw on yin or yang energies, depending on how you do it. To grossly simplify things, if you meditate with eyes open in a room with a light source, you will draw yang energy. Eyes closed meditations are yin.

Deng Ming-Dao's book Chronicles of Tao offers a narrative account of his master Kwan Saihung's experiences training in the Huashan mountains of China. When Kwan Saihung is still a boy, his teacher takes him to visit an immortal, a Taoist practitioner who has achieved mastery in the practice of his choice. As a sometime fan of vampire fiction, I found this account fascinating. I hope you do too. (From Chronicles of Tao, pages 70-71.)

Master and disciple walked for over an hour until they came to a tiny stucco cottage. It was plain, with only a few square windows and an old tile roof. It was summer, and every building on Huashan had its windows propped open to admit the warm sunlight. The windows of this one, however, were tightly shut. The door was slightly ajar and, after knocking, the two stepped inside.

The small interior was dark and quiet, and a flow of cool air blew on them as they entered. Still blind from the bright sun, Saihung's vision adjusted slowly. Set among a few modest furnishings, was a large coffin.

Saihung saw his master drop down to his hands and knees, and Saihung automatically followed. He was puzzled. He had only seen his master bow during ceremonies. But there was no altar here, and his master couldn't be bowing to the coffin. Saihung completed his bow and looked up. There was a tall figure standing before them.

The figure remained standing and acknowledged their bow with a slight nod. 

"Hey, you!" cried Saihung, "Why don't you bow too? Don't you know how important my master is?"

"Saihung!" said the Grand Master sharply. "Don't be rude. He is the master here, not I." He turned to the man. "Greetings to the Bat Immortal." 

The Bat Immortal smiled slightly. He was tall, thin, and moved in an almost feminine fashion. His face was small, his beard and hair braided with ribbons, his skin unwrinkled, pale, and bloodless. Narrow eyes were sunken, the skin around them blackened, and they were almost closed all the time. But from the narrow slits of his eyes there seemed to shine an inner light, a hidden glow. 

"I've come to ask a point about the scriptures," said the Grand Master.

The Bat Immortal acknowledged the request by stepping forward. He avoided the sunlight coming through the door, and his steps were soundless. He stopped in front of Saihung. His eyelids lifted slightly; the glow from his eyes intensified.

"Is this the boy you mentioned?" he asked in a thin and hollow voice.

"Yes," replied the Grand Master. 

The Bat Immortal turned back to Saihung. Saihung looked up, and he had the uncanny feeling that the Bat Immortal gazed directly through his eyelids. Saihung's attention lapsed, and when he again became aware, the Bat Immortal had turned away.

The Grand Master sent Saihung outside to wait. 

When he emerged an hour later, the Grand Master walked directly away. Saihung followed him. After a half hour of silence, the Grand Master told him about the Bat Immortal.

"The Bat Immortal practices extreme yin training. That's why he has taken the name he has and sleeps in a coffin, avoids sunlight, stays only in cold places, and never eats anything hot. He cultivates the Great Yin, and this is the source of his spirituality." 

"He seems like a wicked man, with those dark circles and ghostly movements," said Saihung. 

"Don't think he is evil," cautioned his master. "He frightens you because he is an unfamiliar person. Naturally. He is immortal, and immortals are rarely glimpsed."

"But, Gong-Gong, I don't understand why you bow to him. Everyone always bows to you." 

"Saihung, there are always greater and greater masters, and we must always show our respect."

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Xanthippe

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Xanthippe was the wife of the philosopher Socrates. Think about that for a second: you're a hot young thing, married to the ugliest and smartest man in Athens. He's running around town, being wined and dined by all the hip younger dudes, and he's screwing them, to boot. You're stuck at home with three kids and nothing to feed them.

You want your husband to smarten up when it comes to keeping you happy.

Xanthippe was a scrapper.

Head, meet shit.
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The iconic image of Xanthippe is this one, of her emptying a chamber pot on Socrates's head.

Socrates claimed he married Xanthippe because she wouldn't back down when it came to arguing. Away from home, he boasted that he was only trying to challenge himself by choosing to marry her. In the Symposium dialogue, he claimed:

It is the example of the rider who wishes to become an expert horseman: "None of your soft-mouthed, docile animals for me," he says; "the horse for me to own must show some spirit" in the belief, no doubt, if he can manage such an animal, it will be easy enough to deal with every other horse besides. And that is just my case. I wish to deal with human beings, to associate with man in general; hence my choice of wife. I know full well, if I can tolerate her spirit, I can with ease attach myself to every human being else. (Symposium 17-19 [= 2.10])

In my view, any man who compares his wife to a horse and himself to a rider deserves to have a chamber pot emptied on his head. (No matter that her name meant "yellow horse" - some plays on words are not clever.) So hard did Xanthippe fight for herself, she became the iconic figure of the fractious woman throughout the Renaissance. To this day "a xanthippe" is a shrewish, argumentative woman.

I Challenge You!

Got my dueling boots on and everything.

Woot! Story a Day in May is swiftly approaching.  I officially challenge y'all to join me and a band of piratical fantastical writers in attempting to climb Mount Crazy.  Some of you are on the fence about this. It is going to be great.

What's the worst that could happen? You flunk out horribly and end up with a mere five or six new short stories under your belt by the end of May? That's five or six stories you don't have right now.

Those stories need to be written, and you are just the ones to do it. Rules over here. Sign up. Do it. Do it now.

Wasps

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Putting this post together made me itchy.

I've been thinking about wasps lately. It's just about time for them to make their annual assault on my backyard. The dog has been stung several times on his face. I'm not into spraying or killing bugs at all, and I could not figure out what they were attracted to in the yard. (We've got a lot of flowers, no fruit trees, but the flowers could do it.)  I found a good solution to this problem in a fake paper wasps nest that I hang outside, on my porch, in the spring time. Apparently wasps are intensely territorial, so having something that looks like a nest in your yard will keep them away.

The more I learn and understand about social, colony-dwelling insects, the more I think they are great models for alien societies in speculative fiction. Their behaviour is single-minded yet complex. Their capacity for interacting with their environment and with other species is positively mind-blowing.

(The second video is super, super gross, by the way.)





ETA: More details on the virus that the wasp injects along with its larvae in this New Scientist article. It seems the wasps are hijacking two separate live forms - the caterpillar and the virus - in order to pull off this parasitic stunt that is so vital to their reproductive cycle. Amazing.

Vice

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When I was studying early drama, my favourite character was always the Vice. In medieval allegorical drama, Vices are spin-offs of the Seven Deadly Sins. They have names like Mischief, Covetousness, Nought, Nowadays, and New Guise. They are nasty, troublesome characters who want nothing more than to cause the downfall of the protagonist by leading him into temptation.

The thing about Vices is that they have boundless energy, and are virtually immortal. Even if they are beaten, they always bounce back in the end. They are the original supervillains. Onstage, they are often in cahoots with the audience, getting their participation in the corruption of the main character. Essentially, they are clown figures, always goofing off and telling dirty jokes, even as they work on behalf of the forces of chaos and evil.

They are so very wrong, so very bad, and so very fun to watch.

Physically, Vices are often exaggerated in their forms, as these images from the National Library of the Netherlands Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts show:

Hypocrisy and Gluttony confront a wandering monk. Note Gluttony's enormous mouth and maybe barf? maybe food? protruding from it. 

Pride borne by Flattery. Pride is depicted tooting her own horn. 

Treachery and Calumny (aka Slander) riding upon Envy's back. The arrows protruding from Envy's eyes show that she is always ready to stab those of whom she is jealous. 

If you're at all inclined to think allegorically, these are amazing images, I think. Note that almost all these figures are women, with the (possible?) exception of Hypocrisy. As I'm sure you know, the Virtues (Faith, Hope, Charity, Prudence, Justice, Temperance, and Courage) were traditionally personified as women. After all, Faith, Hope, Charity, and to some degree, Prudence are female names. (I did know someone who named her son Justice, but that's beside the point.)  Later on, the Vices / Seven Deadly Sins were commonly depicted as men, but originally, in the very early days of the Church, they were also women. The Virtues and Vices, two opposing forces, fought for sovereignty over the human soul (also traditionally depicted as female, regardless of the gender of the soul's owner).

I have wondered if it wasn't the rise of drama that killed the depiction of the Vices as women. As the stage developed into a commercial enterprise, it became illegal in many parts of Europe for women to act in dramas. (They were still allowed comic roles on some parts of the continent, but not in Britain, at least not until the late 17th century.)

Just as Vices almost never died onstage or in allegorical works of fiction, they never quite leave us. They are still there in films (see the early part of Jim Carrey's career, Jack Black, and other over the top comedians). For those of you who spend a lot of time online, the Vice surfaces again and again in the form of the internet troll.

While your mileage may vary in terms of encounters with actual internet trolls, the iconic version of this figure can be pretty darned amusing.




If you run into serious trouble, though, there is an antidote. (The makers don't allow embedding - click through if you've got a couple of minutes and you want to be amused.)

Underworld

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As long as there have been people who could look up at the sky and wonder, there has been a concept of an underworld, a heavenly alter-ego, a dark shadow space where the bad things, the repudiated things, or maybe just the dark and squiggly things live.

I'm not talking about the Romeo-and-Juliet-cum-werewolf-and-vampire movie series, much as I love Kate Beckinsale and love her even more in PVC.

You're welcome.

This dark realm, underneath the earth's surface, "below," is a realm of danger, and represents the constant threat that we might be captured by it and dragged to our doom.

Hades, god of the Underworld, stealing away Persephone
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It's easy enough to relate the concept of an underworld to the Christian hell, but there are other underworlds to explore for those of us interested in the unusual, which tell a different narrative about the world below.

In 1945, Richard Sharpe Shaver wrote a letter to the editor of Amazing Stories detailing what he claimed was a real encounter with the Teros, underground-dwelling supermen who educated him on a longstanding battle with the Deros, a degraded version of the Teros who had returned to a brutish mode of being. These cave dwellers delighted in tormenting humanity with the machines left behind by the ancients, and occasionally indulged in a little kidnapping, rape and cannibalism. Shaver acheived a sort of pulp fiction stardom with his stories, which appeared in 75% of Amazing Stories issues from 1945 to 1948. Eager readers wrote to the magazine to report that they'd had experiences with the Tero and the Dero. Shaver's stories continue to raise questions about his sources and convictions.

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Proponents of the Hollow Earth hyphothesis have long sought to revise our understanding of the basic construction of our planet. Among the strongest advocates for the hollow earth hypothesis was Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, who claimed that he had accessed a lush new land during his investigation of the North Pole (source):

In his diary, Byrd allegedly tells of entering the hollow interior of the earth, along with others and traveling 17 miles over mountains, lakes, rivers, green vegetation, and animal life. He tells of seeing tremendous animals resembling the mammoths of antiquity moving through the brush. He eventually found cities and a thriving civilization. The external temperature was 74 degrees F.

His airplane was greeted by flying machines of a type he had never seen before. They escorted him to a safe landing area where he was graciously greeted by emissaries from Agartha. After resting, he and his crew, were taken to meet the king and queen of Agartha. They told him that he had been allowed to enter Agartha because of his high moral and ethical character. They went on to say that they worried about the safety of planet due to he bombs and other testing done above the surface by governments. After the visit Byrd and his crew were guided back to the surface of the planet.

Byrd stated that the North and South Poles are only two of many openings into the center of the Earth. He also wrote about seeing a sun below the Earth.

Map of Agartha

For men like Shaver and Byrd, the hollow earth is a place of mystery, wonder, and secrets, keys to long lost civilizations, and the storage house of the real history of how we came to be here on planet Earth. To me, it's a testimony to the power of the human imagination, always willing and able to revise and remake our collective mythos.