Thunder Pidgin

Well, this month our blog tour guru has decided to shake things up again, so instead of passing our blog tour posts to the left, we're all posting on our own blogs and linking to the central hub post. Which is to say, my guest this month is ME! 

I usually write a little introduction for my guests, if I know anything about them at all. Not sure how well I know this month's guest, but here goes:


I've known David Sklar my whole life. I've seen the best in him and the worst. Never quite understood what he was about, but I still keep trying. As a writer, his work confuses me--I'll look at something he wrote and think "Wow, that's brilliant!" And then the next day I'll look again and see a million things I think he ought to change.

In his teens, David wrote heavily rhythmic, allegorical light verse that dealt with dark topics in bouncy rhythms and playful imagery. As he grew into his twenties, influences crept in from Surrealism and mythology, and these poems grew stranger and darker, and delved into the subconscious. Around the turn of the Millennium, he started billing himself as a genre poet and appearing as a guest at science fiction conventions. This led to urban fantasy and other  genre work, and of late the big bad weird has been creeping in again. You must check out his novella, Shadow of the Antlered Bird, from Drollerie Press, if you haven't already. David is currently coediting the 2-headed anthology Trafficking in Magic/Magicking in Traffic with Sarah Avery (dr_pretentious ) for Drollerie Press and trying to find the time (while raising two kids) to finish his novel in progress The Skin We Wear: A Cynical Romance about Shapeshifters and Anti-fur Activists.

So, without further ado, I present you with. . . ME!


This ought to be an easy post to write, because I was at least partially responsible for the blindingly obvious topic "The Fool." I was thinking of the archetype, walking off the cliff with a dog at his feet, while most of my compatriots seemed to prefer something about their own experience making fools of themselves. I did the self-flagellation thing in my last blog tour post, so I'd like to try something different this time around. But I'm finding that it's much easier to speak convincingly about the Fool, crazy wisdom, sacred clowns, etc, when you're in your twenties and running through sprinklers in public parks and earning your living in a costume store than when you're just past forty and working a freelance career by day while spending your down time wondering whether the zombie story you just accepted will be offensive to actual Vodounists.

I'd love to talk about how in certain mystical traditions, things often are the opposite of what they seem, so the Fool represents a wisdom beyond understanding. But a thousand tiny material concerns make me feel so much less qualified than I was a dozen years ago.

(Side note: I wonder how much our mystical traditions derive from political concerns. I thought about this the other night when, researching whether a story we'd accepted would offend others, I learned that Kali--that laughing, leering goddess who dances with a sword on her husband's corpse with her tongue hanging out of a fiendish grin--that she is not the devil figure I had thought but in fact associated with such concepts as "eternal energy" and "ultimate reality." And I wondered was it always this way, or was she once vilified? Or perhaps sanitized from her berserk martial aspect to appeal to the thinking of a different age? The Egyptian god Set, malignant and terrible in the recorded myths, was once the god of half the Nile, until the worshippers of Horus took over their land and demonized the rulers who came before. Was Kali once like Set, before her followers resurged? The scholar Haym Maccoby posited that Christian mysticism may have started this way, when Jesus failed tu establish a physical kingdom on Earth.)

The Fool, of course, doesn't bother with parentheses. He speaks without tiers, without tears. In the world fo the Fool, every idea is on the same level, as is every person. In Court, the Fool can speak freely, because he knows no other way. This lets him speak truth to power, but it does not bind him to truth. And this is why, in the Tarot, the Fool is unnumbered, because it makes no sense to give him any rank.

The Fool dwells in flux, without borders, in a state of constant Creation, where everything is, and everything can be. I pondered this in "Wind in the Reeds," [if using explorer 8.0, click Compatibility Mode when clicking on this link; otherwise author and title are missing for the 3 stories on this page] where a wandering minstrel watches the gods make the world and then locks them out, and I explored its boundaries in "Behind the Tower" (which will appear in the Drollerie Press anthology Straying from the Path: New Tales of Little Red), inspired when I discovered that the brother I'd never liked had become a sister I've never met.

And no, I'm not trying to put one over on you, distracting you with a startling detail so that you won't notice I've contradicted myself.  How can there be boundaries in a realm that has no borders?  The answer, alas, is that the limit to life without limits is that nothing there is fixed, that everything you change can change again, because there is nothing to hold it in place.

And that is the eternal conundrum of art: that all imagination, all creativity resides in the land of the Fool, but all you can put on the page (or carve in stone, or capture on film) is the part that you manage to carry home from there.