The Lightning Room With Dawn Sperber

Welcome  to the Lightning Room, where DeWitt Brinson & Simon Jacobs take turns asking PANK authors extremely difficult questions about their work.

 “Our Master of Psalmody,” by Dawn Sperber, appeared in our February issue. Below, Simon talks with Dawn mutable pronouns and religious ecstasy.

 

1. I’m really curious about the origins of this piece – what possessed you to write it, or what was the first image or phrase that struck you and had to be written down?

I actually wrote the first draft of this story when I was 20, almost half my life ago. I’d picked a handful of words from the dictionary to write about (neuter, psalmody, saffron, glissando), and as a result, this weird story pushed out of me. I loved it back then, but it was more like a story seed. A couple years ago, I opened a box of old writing and found it inside. I still felt the story, so I decided to refine what had inspired me.

I’ve always felt that the sacred parts of life don’t stay in cordoned-off areas, and the idea that God disapproves of sexuality sounds like a set-up for self-deceit. Instead of trying to control our passions out of existence, it seems only natural to look for balance with who we really are and find the divine in every aspect of life. This is one of the reasons established religions make me nervous. If we’re going to find balance in our crazy selves, shouldn’t we start out being as honest as possible? To me, Lee embodies a lot of the messy sacred richness that doesn’t fit in prescribed boxes.

2. I love the casual shift between Lee’s gender pronouns in this story. It creates an indeterminate yet mythic figure, with this mysterious yet subversive power. Who is your favorite person to hear singing?

Mm, it changes. I get song crushes and haunt certain songs for weeks, knowing I shouldn’t fixate, that it’ll weaken a song to hear it too often, but I love being in love. Those song crushes end up fueling a lot of my stories. Some recent ones were sung by The Civil Wars, Anais Mitchell, and Jeff Buckley.

3. “Our Master of Psalmody” also offers, in its quiet way, a release from repression, a transformation from the holy into the erotic. Is this a release we all crave? Who else can help us achieve this?

I think what we’re craving is that ineffable state where we’re so present in the moment that we’re more like ourselves than we’ve been before, as we’re also so connected with an understanding Other that we’re lost in the ubiquitous mix. How does that not sound like experiences with the divine, and also orgasmic climax?

Fully being alive incorporates the erotic. Desire is sacred too, necessary to the whole existence game and our life force. Instead of getting confused by religious or social judgments, I believe we need to listen to ourselves, let our own voices guide the way to balance with and honor our passions.

4. Does this story arrive from a particular spiritual experience on your part? Some eruption amongst those sacred hills?

Really, I’m trying to translate a fundamental idea into a receivable shape. To me, life is woven through with presence and paradox and connections to the divine found in everything, like how I get excited by sunlight or when the coyotes scream – my connection with Spirit is lush and sensual, so I wanted to address many religions’ opposing ideas about sexuality and bodies as being sinful in the eyes of God.

As far as this story’s mutable pronouns, one inspiration was Fe Fox, my dear friend. Fox is transgendered and not attached to one gender pronoun or the other, leaving it the speaker’s choice, so I’ve gotten agile at switching pronouns according to the situation. If we’re in dressed-up sister time, it’s her I’m with, and when I compliment his curly mustache, it’s him I wink at. I wrote Lee’s character long before I met Fox, but she was the inspiration for this revision’s pronoun fun.

5. Can you transcribe a bit of passion for us here?

These days, my life is mostly words – words and pink earth, trees, and birds flying, beautiful-weird dreams that haunt me all-day, and throughout it all, a presence sharing, an I love you. It does have its passion. Over and over, without thinking, I love you, I say, when I turn and greet a soaring hawk that lands on the willow, an explosion of cumulus frozen mid-air, the hills moonlit blue, a meteor flashing right when I think something true. I get real aware of my body, my hips, my lips. A current trills up my spine, my chest shares gold light, and it just feels like Yes. Like leaning back into finally. Together now, thrilling me, filling me, and also a little unattainable. Yes and yes and yes.

6. And here: a private excitation (in a holy sense). How much of religious experience do you think is just contained lust?

I think part of what people need to express is their wild, fervent nature that authentically experiences life – that follows the call, lets go, really tries at last, is all God- or hell- or fuck-Yes. Really, that Yes to life doesn’t require certain conditions to explode. Like how you can use flint or lighter fluid or sunlight through crystal, but fire is fire.

It makes me think about how the Milky Way is in this ongoing dance around a black hole at its center, as is each of the universe’s galaxies. That black hole seems like desire, ultimate gravity and attraction. Everything revolves in a graceful spiral around it, but if we got too close, we’d be sucked in and annihilated. Somehow, that dance holds the key to all balance.

I see contained lust, holy excitations, and the cosmos’s electromagnetic dance-moves all demonstrating the same pattern. In that breathing balance between resistance and attraction, containment and release, there’s transcendental power.

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Simon Jacobs curates the Safety Pin Review, a wearable medium for work of fewer than 30 words. He may be found at simonajacobs.blogspot.com.