Madison Rye Progress

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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

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Patrons get the whole of part 2 here!

End Of Endings — 2403

The Woman decided to go walking one day. Perhaps she was driven by restlessness. She had an errand to run, sure, but this day she decided to go out rather than perform this task at home. Perhaps she was bored! I do not know.

Either way, she was feeling good and she was feeling stable and she was feeling feline, so she found herself a nice set of slacks to wear over her legs, ones that looped up over the base of her tail in such a way that the same would be just as possible with a skunk's tail, and yet which would not fall down for those moments when she does not have a tail.

She found herself a nice shirt that felt good on the fur and which would not look too weird if she poofed out into a skunk. It was not her favorite shirt, I am sure, otherwise maybe she would wear it every day, but it was good enough. It had the word 'fiend' scribbled across it in angular, glitchy graffiti, and The Woman is absolutely allowed to feel like a fiend some days.

Thus clothed, The Woman stood for a while in front of the mirror and admired herself. She felt good. She felt good, reader! It was not often that she felt more than just okay. Because even with all that I wrote about before, her life was not bad. It was an okay life. She liked this life in her own way. Her thoughts on unbecoming were not thoughts on suicide, I do not think.

She stood before the mirror and preened for a moment, adjusting the way her shirt sat and fluffing out her slacks to see how they might fit with a thicker coat. She combed her claws through her short fur to straighten out some mussed-up spots and ensured that her whiskers were all neat and in those rows that cats have that she always found fascinating.

The trip to the city was as it ever was. She said to herself a little prayer and opened the door to her closet. Taking a deep breath, she stepped through, and as she did so, she brushed her fingertips against the jamb as ever, and today it felt right enough that she stepped lively out onto the city streets, out where the leaves skittered anxiously around her footpaws in the faint February breeze.

Stuffing her paws into her pockets, she made her way down the street, where her entrance was located, to the main drag. The city was on the small end — more large town than full on city — and so it was still the type of place to have a main drag, a street built for cars that it does not actually have, with wide sidewalks paved in brick and a trolley that ran down the middle.

The Woman waited for the next trolley car to come and stepped aboard, tucking her tail down and around her leg as she held onto one of the railings — she never sat, and never could tell you why — to ride it for three stops. This was part of the ritual. Even when the car was busy and she was not feeling so good, there was a part of her that was happy that she got to stand on this trolley and hold onto this railing and feel this rattle-buzz of the wheels rolling along the track through her feet or paws. It was not even particularly pleasant for her, I think, but it was fulfilling.

She made it her three stops and stepped easily from the trolley to find herself before her usual coffee shop. There was so much comfort in routine sometimes. Not all routines are rituals, after all, sometimes there was just a coffee shop that you really like because it makes good mochas and always gives you extra whipped cream without being asked.

And so that was just the routine that she engaged with.

Once The Woman had her mocha with extra whip, once she had one of her usual tables over by the windows, once she had taken a seat, then at last she let her shoulders relax, let the tension drain out of the small of her back, let her tail curl around a leg of the chair so that she could simply exist out in public, just sit in her chair by the window and watch the life of the city roll by outside and listen to the rumble-chatter of the coffee shop and, in turn, be watched, be heard, be witnessed.