Prime

Slowly, I am regaining my mornings, now, welcoming the hour of Prime.

This seems just right as the earth tips into Autumn, a gentle easing through the predawn dark.

The darkness holds me as I check news and texts, lends a sense of ritual to making tea and putting on gym clothes. My trainers feel like a uniform as I secure the laces and walk out of the building with the first rays of light. 

This is my favorite time of year.

The air is a perfect chill, inviting me to walk around one block, then another, before going up the steps to the gym, the glass doors sliding open to spill cool light onto the concrete steps. Inside, the October greetings are quieter than summer greetings, but no less welcoming. Good morning, good morning, hi girl, good morning, good to see you our convocation litany invoking the new day and tolling the canonical hour. The laps around the track are walking meditations -- jogging seems reserved for brighter hours. The sun comes up fully as I leave the track and head to the steam room, the sauna, this restoration before I face the day's toils. 

There is reading, and then there is writing, but before either, there is tea, comfort in a cup as I kick off the trainers and shed the gym clothes, molting into my awake self, dropping the clothes into the washer. 

Reading.

Then writing.

Then, with a second cup of tea, the day begins. 

Perfect Storm Book Club

Aldus Huxley's Brave New World reinterprets Shakespeare's Tempest with a then-modern twist of displaying technology as the poisonous vehicle that spawns the new world order, a division wrought by imperious, impersonal logic, the depiction of our twentieth century unshakeable faith in the redemptive power of technology, all answers cloaked in science as we are shown "the best society." This new order is one no less hateful than Prospero's passionate machinations, and perhaps even more horrific for its sterility. Emily St. John Mandel continues the Bard's legacy in Station Eleven, leaving off of either magic or science, and giving us, instead, art and a cultish adherence to our own role in the story at hand. Mandel opens the scene onstage with King Lear, an immediate signpost to the folly of imagining ourselves kings, making divisions among those who flatter him and banishing those who loves him, courting rejection of everyone in the process, leaving us to wander alone in the storm.

In many ways, I believe Mandel's work succeeds more genuinely for placing our own egos in the middle, reflecting the post-apocalyptic mire as a snare we set for ourselves, and one we could not help but spring, with the ego at the helm. 

William Gibson continues the tempestuous theme (though with less of the Bard on display) in his Jackpot series, again returning to the ugliness and destruction that ensures after a perfect storm destroys the planet, rendering it nearly uninhabitable, and the deployment of technology to save us, all while creating a better new world, sterile and deadly and false. 

I confess that I wasn't a fan of Neuromancer when it came out; I fond it a bit predictable, unsatisfactory, and superficial. I did like Pattern Recognition,  though, and if this series makes good on the themes and depth Gibson introduced then, this will be a nice addition to works that plunge into the depths of our need to sacrifice our souls on the altar of science and technology.

It feels like today would be a perfect day to launch a Perfect Storm Book Club.

Samhain

"I am a foreigner/ in my own land, a ghostless shadow begging/ to be remembered for more/ than solitude."

Louise K Waakaa'igan (from Within, This is Where)