When I was a freshman at Eckerd, I had a terrible roommate. Well, it wasn’t so much that she was terrible as it was that her boyfriend was terrible. He lived back home in New Hampshire, and it was clear she wanted to be with him rather than at Eckerd. She would FaceTime him almost every night, often without headphones, forcing me to listen to his constant use of racist and homophobic slurs and the casual sexist abuse he directed at her. He was controlling, too; he didn’t like her going out to parties and often told her not to wear anything too “slutty.”
I did a lot of crying that year, mostly because I was very mentally ill and an unconfident, non-confrontational stranger in a brand new place. I never had the spine to tell either of them to fuck off, and it made me feel powerless and miserable. And I was too afraid of confrontation to even allow myself to cry in the room, so I almost always went outside and sat on the curb when I needed to have a good pity party. It was one such night, with me sitting despondent and hopeless outside Kappa Scott, that someone noticed me crying. They were a total stranger, and I’m sure I looked pathetic: Scooby-Doo pajamas and an oversized t-shirt and sleep-messy hair. But they ignored all that, crouched next to me, and asked me with complete sincerity if I was okay. If you think about it, that’s sort of a ridiculous thing to ask, because stable people don’t tend to sit outside in their jammies sobbing at 11:30 at night. But it was really more about the gesture. The fact that someone I’d never met would take the time to let me know they saw me and were concerned about me — something my anxious ass would never consider in a thousand years — meant the universe to me. Of course, I lied and said I was fine, which is equally ridiculous. But again, it’s about the gesture. And over the years, that memory alone has made it hard to chime in when people around me complain about Eckerd. Fade in, years later, on the corner of Goodge Street and Tottenham Court Road. Different city, same shit: after a gnarly fight with my best friend, I was huddled on the sidewalk against the brick wall of Le Pain Quotidien and just really letting loose. The bathroom would’ve been preferable, but the door required some kind of code to open it, and I’m still afraid of talking to people. So I let myself break down on a public street. I figured it wasn’t the weirdest thing Londoners had ever seen on their evening walk, and I seemed to be right; almost everyone was passing by me with barely a glance. So I put my head in my hands and resigned myself to riding it out. That is, until I heard a soft, heavily Italian-accented voice come from next to me. “Do you cry for a man?” asked a woman who was crouching next to me. Her friend looked on, concerned. Both were slender and beautiful, with long dark hair, wearing high heels and black stockings and thick, expensive overcoats. I gave her a watery laugh and shook my head. “No, nothing like that.” She didn’t seem to understand me, though, and she continued. “Listen. You never cry for a man. Men are shit. You do not let them make you feel this way. You are worth so much more than them.” Her friend nodded and said something in Italian. I laughed again at the sheer absurdity of the situation, of these two strange Italian women telling an American lesbian not to cry over a man, and the woman next to me smiled. “It is good to see you laugh and smile,” she said. “I am glad I could make you laugh.” Pretty soon, we were all standing against the wall, and the Italian women were smoking cigarettes and asking me about restaurants and trying earnestly to find the English words they were looking for, and I kept laughing. “It is good to see you laugh,” the English-speaking woman kept telling me. Before we parted ways, she insisted we trade phones and follow each other on Instagram. Later that night, an Instagram notification popped up: a direct message. I checked it. It was the Italian woman. in these months I have suffered so much for a man, she wrote, and when I was about to die I realized that I am more important. it's the same for you, you do not have to cry, you have to cry because he lost you I decided not to explain. It was about the gesture. I wrote back: Thank you so much for checking in on me tonight and making me smile. It was so kind of you, and I really needed that kindness. ❤️ She responded: you see that you are a good soul and you deserve it ❤️ We haven’t spoken to each other since then, and we probably never will again. I haven’t, to my knowledge, spoken to the person who comforted me that night three years ago. But I’m perfectly okay with that, because all I needed – all it took – was that one meeting. Growing up is realizing that the world is a lot meaner than you thought, but it’s also a lot nicer than you expected. And in a monsoon of Trump tweets and alt-right reactionaries and border walls and government shutdowns, sometimes all you need is a lively, confident, and slightly confused Italian woman to ask you how you’re doing.
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It’s strange, participating in religious events when you’re a religious studies scholar. It’s kind of a catch-22 for me. I was fascinated by the way going to church made me feel as a child, and I wanted to pursue an understanding of that feeling. Now that I’m a college senior and know words like “numinous” and “collective effervescence,” the feeling is a little harder to inhabit in a genuine way. I still experience a unique sense of peace and awe when, for example, I visit St. Paul’s — I won’t deny that. But peering behind the kimono brings a stifling sort of self-awareness to the whole shebang.
That was, at least in part, my experience with London’s Woodland Witches and Pagans, a group of Wicca practitioners who meet regularly in public spaces to perform rituals. I want to stress that my interest in religion, and by extension watching and participating in all kinds of religious rituals, isn’t some weird anthropological voyeurism thing. It fills me with pure, genuine joy to be able to experience firsthand what religion can do for people, how it can shape their world and affect their lives. As Professor Lopez loves to say, the study of religion is the study of people. But it’s far from detached or academic. It’s intimate, challenging, and compassionate. And in that vein, meeting the Woodland Witches was a delight. The high priest, Mani, greeted me with a hug so warm it was as though we’d known each other for years. He was gracious and patient and generous and often silly, explaining that in Wicca it’s important to keep a healthy balance between reverence and fun. The ritual — a full moon, post-lunar-eclipse ceremony designed to cleanse and empower the spirit — was held on the banks of the Thames, as close to nature as possible. That was nice in theory, but about a third of the way into the ritual it became clear that standing under a bridge next to a river in complete darkness for multiple hours on end wasn’t going to be the most fun I’d ever had. Perhaps that contributed to my lapse in the infamous numinous (for non-religious studies scholars, by the way, in religious studies we apply that term to the indescribable sense of awe and sometimes fear that can come with religious experiences). It’s hard to get swept away when you’re trying to will circulation back into your toes. Standing in a circle around the altar with a dozen and a half other people brought a small sense of wonder in itself, though. I even let myself pretend for a few minutes that I was reconnecting with my Celtic pagan ancestors, even though I know damn well all these rituals were invented in the 1950s. But it was fun. It was fun to gather with other human beings and celebrate the most basic building blocks of our world, things I think we don’t spend enough time thinking about: the moon, the ocean, the trees, the stars. It was fun to repeat a ritual that people have congregated to perform for at least a few decades. And I did find myself getting a little carried away at one point. Mani had us move clockwise in a circle around the altar and sing a simple chant. Lady, spin your circle bright / Weave your web of dark and light / Earth, air, fire, and water / Bind us as one. Our voices were tentative at first, and we moved awkwardly on the sand, stumbling as we lost traction or stepping on each other’s numb feet. But Mani’s strident tenor joined the mix, and he beat time on his thigh, and as we followed him we grew loud and confident. Even if I couldn’t quite will myself to believe in the magic that was supposedly working, there was something poignantly human about that. Rilke said humanness was heavy, and sometimes it is, but that evening it was buoyant, free, alive, jubilant. After Mani closed the circle to end the ritual, we raised our clasped hands and cheered, giggled with the youthful ecstasy of having made something together. Afterwards, Mani brought me in for another enthusiastic hug, thanking me for joining him, and I rode the wave of joyful energy all the way back to the tube. The term for that in religious studies, by the way, is “collective effervescence.” I hope knowing that never takes the magic away. In St. Louis, Missouri, there are about a dozen things to do, give or take, depending. You can, of course, visit the Arch, which most residents of the greater St. Louis area have done by the third grade. You can take a rickety elevator ride up to the very top and gaze 630 feet down into the shit-brown waters of the Mississippi, which is awesome the first time you do it for one to three minutes. You can stand at the bottom of the Arch and raise your phone at a steep angle to capture the silvery curve meeting the sky, which was also really cool the first time someone did it. Until recently, you could not visit the pathetically shitty Museum of Westward Expansion in the basement, because the city government was remodeling to make way for a less pathetically shitty Museum of Westward Expansion.
You can always visit Forest Park, which is bigger than Central Park and contains a host of free attractions: the Municipal Theater, the History Museum, the Art Museum, the Science Center, and the Zoo. These are all wonderful, renowned organizations and great ways to spend a lazy summer day, unless you, like me, have lived in St. Louis your entire life, and by the time you are old enough to drive a car will have visited each of these places approximately eight billion times. The intoxicating fervor of being the architect of your own plans wears off quickly when you can’t think of anything more interesting to do than a grade school field trip, and by the time you turn seventeen your friends start suggesting smoking weed in the Science Center parking lot to make your visit even mildly interesting. If you, like me, were not actually raised in St. Louis but in a Catholic suburb forty minutes to the north, you’re at even more of a disadvantage. Your friends grew up listening to the Talking Heads, reading coffee table books about Mark Rothko, knowing the crisscrossing streets of South City like the lines on their palms. The closest thing you ever got to cultural diversity was when your Catholic grade school celebrated Cinco de Mayo and you made a sombrero out of newspaper. When you started going to high school in the city, you and your pasty, chubby, chocolate-milk-drinking, Dixie-Chicks-listening ways had a lot of catching up to do. You still feel behind sometimes. You feel that right now, as you gaze across the street at the food stalls that have sprung up like mushrooms all around the Goodge Street underground station. You have had to pretend this whole trip: pretend you are artsy enough to wear earrings shaped like large plastic fruits, pretend you are smart enough to understand the exhibitions in the Tate Modern, pretend you knew what a “gyro” was before the age of fourteen. This is another one of those little charades. You want so desperately to be cool and cultured, and to do that you have to be the kind of person who decides on a whim to eat a late breakfast of Korean food you picked up from a roadside stall. It’s not that you don’t want to. I mean, you fucking love Korean food. You just wonder what kind of person you’d be right now if, eight years ago, you didn’t feel like you had to try so hard. The people at the stall are super nice, offer you free samples of spicy pork until you tell them you’re vegan, and then they get all excited and tell you they have a crunchy tofu dish with white rice and chili sauce. They ask if you want some kimchi on the side, and of course you do. Cool and cultured people never say no to kimchi. You get back to the hotel and sit down in the lobby to eat it. It’s fantastic. At least you’re not faking that part. For a moment, you are cool. You enthusiastically stab at another bite of tofu, glad you made this decision. Your fork snaps in half. You stare at it for a moment before you breathe a heavy sigh, stand, pick up your stuff, and head to the Waterstone’s across the street to pilfer some cutlery. It might not ever get better. Tuesday came, and we piled onto the tube. Destination: Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Islington. There was a considerable buzz of excitement; Chopan couldn’t have overhyped it more. One of the first things he told us at our initial group meeting was that we were going to be seeing an all-male production of Swan Lake. I think I speak for everyone in the group when I say my initial, visceral, unprompted reaction was “it better be gay.”
Luckily, it was; Matthew Bourne was gracious enough not to slap a “no homo” disclaimer on a two-hour celebration of sweat-drenched man-flesh. And I was thankful for that, I really was. Because, jokes aside, the story of Swan Lake is uniquely suited to a gay retelling. Don’t get it twisted: I love the original. But Bourne’s version did, I think, hint at a kind of truth the original isn’t quite able to reach, especially in this day and age. “Protect me from what I want” is a Jenny Holzer truism. I saw that plastered over and over on the wall of her artist room at the Tate, a hundred truths staring me down. Like most people, I suspect, some of the phrases in her Truisms project really resonate with me – “sin is a means of social control,” for example, or “fear is the greatest incapacitator,” or “myths can make reality more intelligible.” Likewise, though, some of them don't, and “protect me from what I want” was one of the ones I never quite understood. At least, I didn’t until a few weeks after I watched Bourne’s Swan Lake. In the moment, though wrapping my head around the retelling sometimes presented a challenge, the emotional response it produced in me was raw. The story may have been jarring, but the feeling was all too familiar. Watching the prince get his way and still be unhappy. Watching him reach for the white swan and finally understand. The question hung in the air: is this what you really want? Being gay is a ballet of wanting. More specifically, it’s a duet of wanting and having, and that’s what I began to understand in the process of digesting what I’d seen. The claustrophobic constraints of high society tore the princess away from the prince in the middle of the first act, but the wanting of something he couldn’t have was deeper than that. The image of the swan, the representation of his damnable desire, invaded his dreams, snuck up on him when he wasn’t careful. It does that to you, no matter how hard you try to distract yourself. For instance: you pick the most beautiful boy in school to lose sleep over because then you don’t have to think about the possibility that you might not like boys at all. And then, when the prince makes the connection with the white swan, when he finally understands, act two turns into having something he can’t want. And you remember that, too: how you felt like an ocean when a girl’s lips first touched yours. Expansive and steady and constant. Of course, you thought. Of course. But remain too long in the feeling, lie to your parents and your priest about the waves that threaten to burst forth from you, and your stomach sinks as you lose sight of the shore. The courtiers onstage laughed when they found out. You have it, but you can’t want it. It would ruin you. It does ruin him, in what’s perhaps my least favorite ending to any kind of gay story. Repression kills. But so does confession. Like the prince, you take what you can get: small moments of safety and moonlit tenderness in dreams. Yesterday I achieved a lifetime goal: I held a pigeon.
Those who know me know that this has been an obsession of mine for awhile. It confounds them. To be honest, it also sort of confounds me. Let me take you back, regression therapy-style. I visited St. Mark’s Square in Venice, which is essentially a pigeon convention, when I was about sixteen. The pigeons there are fat, fearless, and much more confrontational than I’ve ever been. I watched them swarm all over Swedish children and young French couples and was, in no uncertain terms, terrified. My mom encouraged me: “Go stand over there and hold your arms out. They’ll come right to you.” I watched, waiting for my own fearlessness to arrive, trying to absorb it from the pigeons, but it never came. Here’s a secret: I loathe being afraid. It actually makes me mad. I think it’s some combination of OCD and leftover Gryffindor pride I’ve had since I was five, when my mom started reading Harry Potter to me. It’s my twenty-two-year-old conscience telling me you’re better than this and my five-year-old subconscious stubbornly adding if you don’t hold that pigeon (or climb that tree, or jump off the high dive, or squash that scary-looking bug, or whatever) you’re letting Harry down. So now you know what got me started on my odyssey: a deeply ingrained compulsion to conquer any fears I possess. And I’ve done it before. I’ve successfully trained myself not to be afraid of heights through years of exposure therapy involving lots of rock climbing and zip lining, and I’m working on spiders. This was just another thing to cross off the list. I’m not sure where it originated. I do have some petting zoo-related childhood trauma — once, when I was three, the goats at Grant’s Farm nearly devoured me before my mom pulled me to safety — so perhaps that has something to do with it. I also had a pretty intense phase of being afraid to swim in the ocean, in case fish touched me. But no matter the source, I certainly wasn’t about to let it go. So, with that, here we are in medias res again. Cut to a montage of me trying and failing to get the pigeons in Hyde Park to come within a foot of me. I’ve never met pigeons so suspicious. I even tried that whole approaching them backwards thing, because apparently (?) they don’t have great depth perception and thus can easily be confounded if you walk up to them with your back turned and take them by surprise once it’s too late. But these birds were crafty. Before them, I was but a hapless James Bond villain, talking a big game and then losing to a really dope wristwatch or something. The clouds parted when we went down to the banks of the lake. Saunder assured me there was bird food available for purchase, and I knew that, much like me, if there was one thing these idiots were willing to risk their physical wellbeing for, it was food. So I sat, £4 box of duck food in hand, waiting for some particularly stupid pigeon to give up the ghost. Nothing happened for a good twenty or thirty minutes, which started to irritate me because, honestly, how hard can it be to grab a pigeon? But still they evaded me. I was beginning to give up hope when Emma pointed out a man sitting on a bench, who was absolutely covered in pigeons. “That’s what you need to do,” she said. “You need to bring them all into one spot and make them comfortable with you, and then one of them might jump into your hand.” It seemed easy enough. I found a few square feet of non-poop-covered ground and posted up. Before long, I had a good-sized congregation of pigeons, assembling to receive their communion of overpriced food pellets. I tried to draw them in slowly, sprinkling a line of food leading up to my lap, but they weren’t buying it. Occasionally one would run up and grab a pellet near my shoe, then dart away before I could even register what was happening. And just to reiterate, being continually outwitted by a bunch of pigeons is not a great feeling. Eventually, I settled for holding a handful of food in my brand new gloves and staying absolutely still in the hopes that one of them would get desperate enough to make the gamble. The rest of the group was starting to leave at this point. Only Saunder and Emma, who were now thoroughly invested in the whole pigeon drama, stayed behind. I was lamenting the death of my dream to them when it happened. It was simultaneously sort of underwhelming and the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me. A small, round pigeon perched on my fingertips and nibbled at a few of the pellets, then took off as quickly as he’d arrived. Not before Saunder and Emma had managed to take about a dozen pictures each, though. I spent the rest of the day totally effervescent and not really sure why, because the second it happened I realized how little of a deal it was. But, whatever – I’m not in the business of denying myself joy wherever I can find it, no matter how silly it is. I hope that pigeon knows how happy he made me. A manifesto for our times. Camden High Street, 1/23/19. Still life with vegan cinnamon banana bread, black Americano, and the Placebo CD I finally found after two years of searching. Cookies and Scream Bakery, 1/23/19. These knives are 3500 years old! That's pretty neat. British Museum, 1/23/19. The portrait on this sarcophagus predates the European Renaissance by... well, a lot of years, and yet it rivals anything produced during that time. Ancient Egypt was a cool place. British Museum, 1/23/19. My last meal in London: vegan bangers and mash. Mildred's, 1/23/19.
Thankful for small wonders. Wanamaker Playhouse, 1/22/19. I had a great view, but the pole had an even better one. Wanamaker Playhouse, 1/22/19. Jeanne Mammen, "Brüderstrasse (Free Room)," 1930. Tate Modern, Magic Realism exhibition, 1/22/19. Jenny Holzer, Street Posters, 1982-83. Tate Modern, 1/22/19.
I have a bad feeling this may have been me after one too many glasses of Prosecco. Berwick Street Market, 1/21/19. I was lucky enough to participate in a full moon ritual with a group of local Wicca practitioners. I met lots of lovely people. Also, my feet went numb because I stood on the banks of the Thames for two and a half hours. South Bank, 1/21/19.
Thanks to Little John Guelfi of The Black Evil Blood for letting me snap his mug. Camden Market, 1/19/19. Another day, another god-tier vegan burger. Vburger Camden, 1/19/19. Almost heaven, Camden High Street. Camden Market, 1/19/19. Forgive us - we realized we were in the Sherlock opening and got very excited. Piccadilly Circus, 1/19/19. And to round off our self-guided Sherlock tour, here's the room where it happens. Can he solve the mystery of why his door is so hard to photograph well? Baker Street, 1/19/19. Apparently, when the menu lists "violet" as part of the drink ingredients, it means they put an actual violet blossom in the drink. We're not in Kansas anymore. The Shard, 1/19/19.
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AuthorEleanor Marsh is a senior at Eckerd College with majors in creative writing and religious studies and minors in literature and keeping it real. She enjoys knitting, roller derby, and reading Christian apocrypha. ArchivesCategories |