Words to live by . . .

. . . for me, anyway.

Always did like this ; lately I keep coming back to it, and it seems to dovetail with some of the spirit stuff going on with me.

Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury,pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

Ashe!

from The Man With The Blue Guitar

XXXII

Throw away the lights, the definitions,
And say of what you see in the dark

That it is this or that it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.

How should you walk in that space and know
Nothing of the madness of space,

Nothing of its jocular procreations?
Throw the lights away. Nothing must stand

Between you and the shapes you take
When the crust of shape has been destroyed.

You as you are? You are yourself.
The blue guitar surprises you.

– Wallace Stevens

Renee Stout

Since I’ve been talking about her work, let me link to her website . . .

Here’s an image from it:

re: jotting ideas

This started out as a reply to my friend Jenn’s comment on my last post.  Three paragraphs in, I realized that perhaps what I was writing should be a post of its own.

Anyway, on Monday I went to a faculty lecture.  I wound ended up being little late; as I snuck in, the professor was saying something to the effect of, “It’s worth keeping in mind that there are artists you love, whose work you love, but their style of work may be wrong for you [to adopt].”

That got my attention, being very close to something I was beginning to suspect about my own relationship with a favorite artist’s work.  Then, he said, “We never reinvent ourselves as something completely new, much as we might like to; whatever we’ve been before will be incorporated into what we become.”

I started to let the two ideas roll around in my head, and began to trace my roots.

Why do I love Renee Stout’s work?  Well, the hoodoo elements in it are fascinating, not to mention the way she explores issues of African-American identity.  But why was I primed to fall in love with her work?  I’d never heard of her before I walked into “Dear Robert,” on the strength of the exhibition title alone.

I sometimes blush to admit it, but roleplaying games formed a major thread in the history of my life.  One of the things I really loved about them was that they invite you to design worlds . . . You need a setting for your players to run amuck in, you need a world for them to inhabit; and I spent a godawful amount of time thinking about societies, customs, dress, foods, and lots of other details that were totally lost on the people I gamed with.  (I can’t blame them for that, we just had different tastes.)

From there, I developed a fascination with trying to make artifacts from these societies-that-weren’t.  (The first time I read “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” I danced around the room with the book clutched to my chest, giggling.)

The salient point about Stout’s art, here, is that she invents characters to use as subjects and organizers for her work; and her works are assemblages that appear as artifacts from the lives of her characters.

(In the “Dear Robert” exhibit, I walked through “Wylie Avenue Juke,” a facsimile of part of a 1930’s Delta bar.  Squee!)

Looking back, it makes complete sense why I would fall in love with Stout’s art — she was doing what I wanted to do!

Anyway, I’ve been so numb about art for so long, and not making anything . . . I tried to deal with that by tying my art and spiritual work more closely together (which goes right on back to the hoodoo motifs in Stout’s art), but I am beginning to think that either that’s not the right thing to do, or I’m going about it in the wrong way.

I’m going to play with the idea of world-making, and making things from worlds (and imaginary books, and fictional people, and other such tricks from the Borges bag); and try to allow myself to stop being so serious about what I make . . . I always did like the process of crafting a setting, then turning people loose in it to interact with the parts.  Perhaps there’s some art in that.

Jotting ideas

There’s a young woman.  Whenever I pick up this thread of thought, it always starts with her, in her 17th century clothes and her leather mask.  Her father is, I think, a tailor, and her mother . . . or maybe her father’s partner in business . . . is a weaver, an artisan who makes fine, soft stuffs to sell to the tailors who sew for the wealthy.

I don’t know this young woman’s name, but I know one crucial thing about her: she was born in Summer.

What does that mean?  Well, I know she’s from somewhere outside this City (“Always you will come to this city; do not hope for any other” ), this endless warren of windowless chambers and halls carved out of a mountain in an unliveable world of bitter snow and howling wind.  Here in the City it’s “always Winter and never Christmas” — the inhabitants (and there are many of them, it’s remarkable how big this thing is) exist in a sort of comfortable misery, warmed by geothermal means; farming roots and tubers and rats with artificial lights and magic; and amusing themselves with baroque social customs, secret societies, cults, and Byzantine politics.  Their Queen is, in some dreadful way, truly an ice queen — there’s a link of some kind between her and the endless winter outside, and she has always ruled over the City.

So, the young woman is from somewhere else, and though she came to the City at a very young age, she has a few memories of sunlight, and grass, and voices speaking another language than the one she knows.  This is a dreadful secret — the lore of the City states that there is no life outside the City, and it’s treasonous to speculate on the origins of the City, or speak of life outside.

(Of course there is something outside.  There are doors to the outside, and they’re always guarded.  Nobody talks about the guards’ duties — they’re officially a squad of the Queen’s honor guard — but everyone knows they’re there on the doors, and that occasionally they get things from outside.  Bottles of strange wine.  Books.  Unusual materials.  That kind of thing.  There’s a black market in the City, and these items from outside fetch insane amounts of money when they appear for sale.

The guards are, of course, how the young woman got to be in the City.  Where she came from, though, is anyone’s guess.)

What else?  Well, in the City, one must always wear a mask.  Immutable social custom dictates that a naked visage is tatamount to a naked body (that is, obscene), so everyone but the youngest children goes masked.  There’s a great deal of leeway in what the masks can look like, from rags with holes cut in them for the destitute, through gilded, plumed fancy-dress diamond masks for the well-to-do (most masks leave the mouth visble for ease of eating and talking), and it’s frequently easy to tell a stranger’s social class and affiliations by the sort of mask she wears.

The very wealthy have, in recent years, taken to shocking the bourgeoisie by not wearing masks — but they make up for it by using tattoos, surgery, carving, piercing, and sorcery to sculpt their faces and forms into un-human designs.  Some of the old and conservative families disdain this and keep their masks, but most of the wealthy and nobles  are instantly recognizeable by their eldritch beauty (or eldritch hideousness).

It’s illegal to belong to a secret society of any sort.  Naturally, nearly everyone belongs to one.

Roses carry much the same symbolism as they do for us — love, beauty, memento mori.  In the City, they’re also a symbol of Summer, very sacred to some, very illegal to possess in any form or fashion.  (Twenty years ago, a rich young man got a tattoo of a rose on his forearm, evidently to impress his friends with his devil-may-care attitude.  Both he and the tattooist were publically executed by burning, and the friend who accompanied him to the tattooist’s was blinded.)  Of course, in the City, if you should happen to be lucky or unlucky enough to find a rose, it’s likely to be a single thorn, or a vial of faintly sweet-smelling brownish powder, or a picture scribbled in the margin of a book.  Anything that was once part of an actual rose is treated like the relic of a saint.

That’s it for now.  I’m not sure yet what, if anything, I will do with this.  I used to think it would make an interesting setting for a roleplaying game, but, alas, my gaming days seem to be over.

from Tom Waits’ ‘Come On Up to the House’

Well the moon is broken
And the sky is cracked
Come on up to the house
The only things that you can see
Is all that you lack
Come on up to the house
All your cryin’ don’t do no good
Come on up to the house
Come down off the cross
We can use the wood
Come on up to the house

(Chorus) Come on up to the house
Come on up to the house
The world is not my home
I’m just a passin’ through
Come on up to the house

‘The Pickaxe’

tear down

this house. A hundred thousand new houses
can be built from the transparent yellow carnelian

buried beneath it, and the only way to get to that
is to do the work of demolishing and then

digging under the foundations. With that value
in hand all the new construction will be done

without effort. And anyway, sooner or later this house
will fall on its own. The jewel treasure will be

uncovered, but it won’t be yours then. The buried
wealth is your pay for doing the demolition,

the pick and shovel work. If you wait and just
let it happen, you’d bite your hand and say,

“I didn’t do as I knew I should have.” This
is a rented house. You don’t own the deed.

You have a lease, and you’ve set up a little shop,
where you barely make a living sewing patches

on torn clothing. Yet only a few feet underneath
are two veins, pure red and bright gold carnelian.

Quick! Take the pickaxe and pry the foundation.
You’ve got to quit this seamstress work.

What does the patch-sewing mean, you ask. Eating
and drinking. The heavy cloak of the body

is always getting torn. You patch it with food,
and other restless ego-satisfactions. Rip up

one board from the shop floor and look into
the basement. You’ll see two glints in the dirt.

 

– Rumi

Auf weidersehen

Well, I finally did what I’ve been thinking about doing for a long time, and left Idhavelli Hof  a couple of weeks ago.

The big reason was that Heathenry has never sat easily upon me.  I wanted to like it, wanted to love the Aesir and Vanir, love the cultures . . . The Hof, for a while, was a very good place for me to be.  I learned a lot, got to worship with smart, funny, together people, became close to several of them, and grew a lot.  Since the folks at the Hof come together in their Heathen faith, I tried awfully damn hard to make it mine.

It was a lost cause, though.   For whatever reason, the Norse myths are unbeautiful to me.  I do respect the Tivar, and like some of them a lot, but their stories never inspired me.  The culture/s never inspired me, either.  When I started back at school and enrolled in a Western art history class, I realized that the Greeks and Romans, their art, legends, and societies, always moved me a great deal more than anything Germanic did.

And then, there are the threads of racism that run through the cloth of greater Heathenry.  There are plenty of Heathens who are not racist, but unfortunately there seem to be plenty who are; and plenty more who aren’t . . . but whose philosophies emphasize “heritage” and “lineage” in ways that make me uneasy, because they seem to be heading towards the edge.  Idhavelli Hof is blessedly free of that, but my brief foray into Heathen listservs and websites left me unwilling to have anything to do with the broader community.

And eventually, the discomfort got to be too much — and I kept trying to hold on and be Heathen even then — but I exhausted myself, so I left the Hof.

Frolicking under the ymp tree

Okay, you probably-imaginary people reading this: I bet you’ve looked at the url for this blog and are wondering what the heck an “ymp tree” is.  Or maybe you read the earlier iteration of my “About” page, which was pretentious and used the word a lot, and are wondering the same thing.  (Of course, you could be a well-read imaginary person, in which case you might already know the term from Sir Orfeo or some such.)

Anyway.  An ymp tree, or imp tree, is a grafted tree.  Since grafted trees are artificial, neither wholly one tree nor the other, but a splice, in the Middle Ages they partook of a little of that old faerie weirdness.  In other words, you might risk meeting the Others if you lingered too long under the ymp tree.

Not to say that you’re in danger of being carried off to Elphame if you linger too long in my company; I’ve known a few people who might be hazardous that way, but I’m not one of them.  What I am, though, is what some folks in the Heathen community like to call “dual-trad.”  I’m a practicing Heathen (though lately, that’s been “practicing” in the sense of “Do your homework, darling, or no dessert for you”), and a practicing neophyte in Lucumi — and never the twain shall meet, except of course when they do and, say, Eleggua tells me via obi not to quit my Heathen practice.

I find that the gods and orishas (by the way, I don’t think they’re quite synonymous) will cheerfully blur the lines between traditions if you give them half a chance.  I also find that it’s not such a bad thing to give them the chance:  it seems that whenever I try to nail down a particular experience, or expression of spirit, or, occasionally, ritual form, to a particular tradition — you know, run a pin through it and stick it to the board with a neatly-typed label — I lose touch with it.

If I want to keep the ashe, the maegen, flowing, I have to let it all flow.  Like water through the connected tissues of a grafted tree.

Starting over

I began this blog in July, with the idea of writing about Pagan religion.  I just messed around with it, though, never finding a sense of direction.  I liked the “Vegetarian Taurobolium” post, but hell — the number of people who look for stuff like that online can probably be counted on the fingers of one nose.  So I decided to scrap the old posts (all two of them) and drafts, and clear the slate.

This is still going to be about Pagan religion, but I’ve decided to quit struggling and write the personal stuff.  This is going to be something of a journal, as I work on crafting my spiritual path and learn to love and serve my gods.

What are probably the usual caveats for a Pagan blog apply here: Read at your own risk; Respectful disagreement is fine, but please refrain from bitching at me, ranting at me, or trying to convert me; Remember that I make no claim to having the Right, True, and Only Way.  Also, I’m a big fan of manners; and if you can manage to use correct spelling and punctuation, I will bless you for it.

With that said, onward!