Madison Rye Progress

I suspect there comes a moment in the life of any cladist where we look back on who we once were and ask ourselves not "how did I get here" — for such is the stuff of stories — but "what made me who I am?"

Michelle Rachel Hadje was a simple woman. This is no indictment, mind. She was a simple woman who loved and craved the feeling of being loved in turn. She was a woman who had desires. She was a woman of the stage and of the song. She was a woman who treated her friends as irreplaceable and who desired nothing other than to be irreplaceable to someone in turn. And she was! She was, and that story is known, and not for telling here.

I am a simple woman. I love and wish to be loved, crave and wish to be craved. Whims, desires, cravings, all those wants and needs...these are all things that make up a person — even the simplest of us — and we are what we are because of them.

I am a simple woman, and the thing I simply desire above all else is to serve.

And yet, I look back at all that I was and compare it to all that I am and, yes, I am able to tell the story of how I got from there to here, from Michelle Hadje to Beholden To The Whims Of A Monster, and it feels all but impossible to answer "what made me who I am?"

This name that I have chosen for myself is a gentle dig at a monster, this other me, this Beholden To The Whims Of No-One. She finds this fact endlessly amusing as she toys with me. I can feel her gently twining the curls of my hair around a finger as I kneel beside her chair, a gentle and loving smile on her face as I think of her words: "A monster! Is that what I am, my dear? How cheeky."

I can feel the kindest, cruelest love in her voice. I can feel the way her words tug at me in much the same way her fingers do as she twists harder and harder, a bright spark of pain radiating across my scalp.

We are simple women. We love and have found love. We desire and are desired. We live in the fullness of each other. Do not get me wrong: we are fulfilled. We are happy.

But I kneel beside her chair with my hands folded in my lap and my head meekly bowed as she blesses me with bright sensations, tugging on a lock of my hair or pressing a claw to my throat, and she sits above me and wears her gentle and loving smile.

We never go out together, never leave at the same time. As far as the System knows there is only one of us, only Beholden To The Whims. It is our little game played with an unwitting world.

But when it is me that goes out and a friend says, "Holy fuck, Whims, where did you get that cut on your neck? Who did that to you?", all I can do is smile and bask in that remembered gentle love and answer, "No-One."

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End Of Endings — 2403 / Rye — 2409

The Woman rode the high of lovely friendship for days after that coffee date. For nearly a week, she reveled in the sense of camaraderie and coexistence. How lucky she was! How lucky that she had the chance to exist in the same universe as Her Friend! How lucky, how lucky.

Whenever The Woman felt this way, she would wander around the house and clean. She would take on extra cooking duties and make extra desserts for her cocladists and friends. She would stay in one form for far longer than was her usual, and remained now a panther. She would go for walks around the field, treating the house itself as a signpost at the center of widening circles. She would imagine that those circles might some day spread out across the entire world, never mind the varied infinities housed within the field itself. It was a thing to which she could give herself as she asked her high-minded questions: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?

These words of Rilke's would dance unblushing through her mind, linking arms on one side with the words of Dickinson which ever twined around those of her clade — If I should die, And you should live, And time should gurgle on, And morn should beam, And noon should burn, As it has usual done... — and on the other with the lingering lines of the Ode that made up the names of her clade. "I remember the rattle of dry grass," she would explain to the bees as they buzzed in friendship around her ankles. "I remember the names of all things and forget them only when I wake."

And so she would cook her meals and walk in widening circles around this primordial tower that was her home, perhaps circling around God, though she did not care one way or the other if there was that of God in everything.

These were her joys to go along with the needs of ritual, of brushing her fingers along imagined mezuzot. To walk was her ritual, to spiral outward from her home in the warmth of sunlight and the dance of bees and the tickling of dandelions against her ankles was to cast that ritual in the light of pleasure.

I have never been quite so fond of walking, myself, kind readers. There is meditation in it, I am told. I am told there is the simple pleasure of the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other-ness of it. But friends, I am tired most of the time. I am old and I am tired and my pleasure lies in stillness and quiet. I love my mochas and I love sitting down before the page with pen in paw to put to paper, and I love bathing in story.

I say so often that stepping away from such a task is still writing. When I sit on the patio in front of our little bundle of townhouses and look out at the shared lawn, or when I step — stepped, for it is no longer here — out to the shortgrass prairie of my cocladist, to sit beside a cairn of stones or share a meal, that is still writing! Your narrator has written these words, this story, a hundred, a thousand times within her head. That is my joy, and graphomania my compulsion.

When The Woman overflows, she becomes ever more herself. She is — my attentive readers will remember this, of course — she is already too much herself, too present, too whole, too present. This is the nature of overflowing, you see: we become so much ourselves that it begins to ache, to press at our chest from the inside. For your humble narrator, that graphomania strikes with such force that meaning falls away from my words only gibberish comes forth, or perhaps I will write the same phrase over and over and over, unable to sate my own compulsions.

My astute readers will surely have picked up by now that I am riding that edge here, in these words.

But, ah! This story is not about me. I am not quite overflowing yet, and The Woman most certainly is not. She is reveling in the warmth of sunlight and the dance of bees and the tickling of dandelions against her ankles and the purringly soft touch of friendship.

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(Brief Qoheleth spoilers beneath the cut; apologies to those who got them while wanting to avoid them)

End Of Endings — 2403

No apologia, no exegeses will explain sinkdog. The apophatic definition of sinkdog is a being of thirst and of grime. Do you see? The insight such theologies as those of the sages provide offer us no salve, bring us no closer to enlightenment.

You know, when I started working on @post-self, it was in the context of kink. The idea was, if I could fork, create however many copies of myself that I wanted, I could more efficiently give blowjobs in parallel. When Qoheleth came out, despite the relatively un-kinky plot, that remained at the core of my mind as I wrote it.

The reception to the project was startling. It touched in a chord with plural folks in particular and left them feeling all sorts of ways. Hell, it left me feeling in all sorts of ways! I went into writing these works singular, and came out something else. I wrote Toledot and my fursoña changed from a snow leopard to a skunk. I wrote Nevi'im and my style changed dramatically. I wrote Mitzvot to round out the cycle and, suddenly I was no longer singular. I was one partner richer (or perhaps several, depending on your conception of plurality).

Suddenly this project was more than just myself. Others started writing in the space. Others started calling their systems "clades". So many others became skunks that we joked about Post-Self Induced Skunk Syndrome.

At the core, however, remained the kink. I expanded on it. Others expanded on it. It is just that the project is larger than me, and the kernel of kink that was at its heart is no longer the sole defining feature. I am uninterested in "the death of the artist" except as a descriptive term, watching this world grow larger than I had ever dreamed.

So, yes. Reduce the concept of sinkdog to its barest edges and discard the feelings it engenders in others. Take shootposts too seriously. Lift your nose snootily up into the air as though to escape some rancid smell. It will never not be true that, for some unknown reason, I and so many others have taken from it more than the artist intended.^{1, 2}

1. https://cohost.org/makyo/post/5005430-i-do-not-know-why-a

2. https://cohost.org/makyo/post/5009684-i-am-continuing-to-h