Tai-Kuen

When I first met Kuen, I was driving with Larry Morris (of Emerald Rose fame, and at the time my husband). We saw a decal on the back windshield of a truck just behind the driver who was bald. I think we were talking about Lord of the Rings, and no matter the reason we parted ways, we were both rather good at coming up with ideas. The light hit the decal, I thought it was a tattoo. Idea One hit Idea Two and… well… BANG!

There was, of course, more. Joseph Campbell, Kali, Filipino weaponry, Thailand and more. I mean it wasn’t just the guy in a truck with a decal, and Tolkien. I wrote Fate of the Red Queen, and then I wrote Red Geberesh, and then… well… more happened. (And well, the characters, the planet, and the mythology just *wouldn’t shut up*!).

Kuen was faced with a history of her mother’s people. She was faced with who she was supposed to be, as well as who other people wanted her to be. But somehow, after a bit, I realized that even if her mother’s biggest enemy was coming back, that didn’t mean he was Kuen’s enemy. And that’s how things got complicated.

I knew Kuen was supposed to be a god. But after Red Geberesh, two gods found their happiness, which left another sort of hanging. His job was to confront Heroes. He is sort of the bad guy. What is he supposed to do? He inveigled his way into Fate of the Red Queen, and did a really good job doing it.

In writing Red Geberesh I was also working on the language Geberesh. There are funky words, an alphabet, a perceptual philosophy that still rings off of my reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Latosa Escrima. I realized that these demi-gods I’d been writing about were also archetypal. I also wrote a really stupid poem while meditating, and realized that Kuen was no longer just Kuen once she went from not really human to not really human in another way.

The without is equal to the with
Both neither good nor bad
The rapture lies between as
They continually unfold against
Each other. A now, a moment, encompassing
Both past and future.

So far in Geberesh there’s no Yin/Yang. There are no words for either. But the two parts that oscillate between are akin to those two forces. But there is a word for power, magic, the force in The Absolute, the vibration in that just “on the other side of the trees”. It is uwushuru (and maybe one day I’ll show you the Geberesh symbols for it). It’s reminiscent of the silence in winter when the snow has fallen, at night, when the wind is gently blowing. (So, not quite silence). It’s the sound of the seeds in the ground gathering power to “blow” in the spring. That rapture between the without and with isn’t quite so silent. It’s more like the rasping of snake scales as it moves, or gears moving…not just clicking.

Tai is that space in the center. The fulcrum. When I realized that I often felt as if I were in the pendulum swing, and that if I meditated I put my life and my mind in my center, I was no longer swinging, but the fulcrum. The good and the bad constantly moved, rocked, and sometimes hard. But to breath into “Tai” (and not the Tai like in Tai Chi, but a Geberesh “Tai”) I was now in my center.

Kuen, then, somehow moved, shifted, and was renamed. She was Tai-Kuen. The center of the struggle. Where we are the fulcrum, not swinging in the pendulum. As an archetype she was not just someone who fought, but she fought from the center. She represented “our” center. (Or at least the “our” for those in Ihyel, even if they never met her, or ever worshiped her, or ever had her in their cosmology).