Runnin' Down a Dream

Last night I dreamed my teacher told me to get to know a goddess.

I thought that was interesting, so I did a little research.  (The goddess in question has an odd intellectual presence in my life, so it's not totally random....)

That research was increasingly interesting.

And then I turned up that in her native territory, it is customary to burn offerings for her the first Friday of the month.

And I looked at the calendar....

So then I started looking up what gets burned.  "Herbs", the internet tells me.  I grumble a lot.

Then Little Foot comes home from the grocery store and hands me a pot of basil.

(I looked it up.  Basil does grow there.)

I don't even know, man.

So I got my liege's assistance with applied pyromania and set up a little something.

Religion is weird.

E is for the Elements

Most pagans are of course familiar with the classical Greek conception of the elements, which wound up in ceremonial magic and thence into Wicca. Earth, air, fire, water, and all that associated crud.

What is an element?

An element, according to a handy dictionary I have kicking around here, is "one of the fundamental or irreducible components making up a whole". The stuff that stuff is made out of, you know?

Dealing with the classical elements produces spiritual compounds that have particular traits. These are - both due to their ubiquity in magical language and their clear derivation from fairly straightforward bits of the observable world - particularly tangible and perceptible structures. They are arranged in a particular grid, which is also a structure of balances and oppositions: fire and water suspended between earth and air in a set of perpendiculars and negations, the properties defined in opposition to each other. There is a solidity to this set of checks and balances, which perhaps inspired the addition of a fifth element intended to correspond to the spiritual or animative world.

Consider, though, a different system, such as the Chinese five elements. There is no tidy pairwise opposition to be had in odd numbers. Instead, each element gives rise to another in an organic process, and each element likewise can be seen to destroy another. It becomes readily apparent why many translators say "phases" or "movements" rather than "elements"; these are part of a cosmic flow rather than compartmentalisable building blocks.

The elements you build from will inform and structure what can be built from them. It is the nature of a thing to reflect what it is built from, after all.

I don't do a lot of exoteric stuff with the concept of elements. It does not appear to have been a terribly significant thing for the ancient Egyptians, which means that when I stumble across people trying to wodge Egyptian thought into a Greek elemental system I mostly just kind of avoid; it's not generally a good translation.

However, I have done more than a little noodling at esoteric elements, and in this I draw from my favorite of the major Egyptian cosmogenetic myths, that of Khmun, better known as Hermopolis. The name "Khmun" meant "The City of the Eight", and it is those eight that I ponder when I want to ponder elements. They are:

Nun and Naunet: the formless primeval waters
Amun and Amaunet: the hidden and secret (also associated with the invisible air)
Kek and Kauket: the darkness
Heh and Hehet: the infinite and eternal

In some of my Craft training, it is said that there are titans who hold the boundaries of the cosmos, and here I perceive them: formlessness, secrecy, darkness, and boundlessness. These are things that can only be approached mystically, in a manner beyond what can be contained in the tangible and aware. These are the traits of the borderlands, the edges of things, the unknown, and the uncreated. They neither give rise to each other nor oppose each other; they are serpents and frogs in the realm outside where time and space were created by their inversion.

That which exists has form. It can be known. It can be illuminated. It is bounded, finite, and mortal. These are the inversions of the elements of the Ogdoad, the guardians of the mysteries at the edge of creation. At the first time, the titans touched and polarised and created being. But yet they remain, on the edge of the manifest, between us and the dissolving chaos beyond.

I find those an interesting set of edges to explore. What can you build with formlessness and form, with secrets and knowledge, with darkness and light, with infinity and that which can be measured?

These are my elements.

D is for the Devil

Oh, but wait, so many pagans will say: we are not Satanists! We are not devil-worshippers! We are not the bad people bogeymen in your sensationalised and mostly manufactured news stories! We are normal people, just like you! We are not dangerous! Let us differentiate ourselves from the people we find it acceptable to be the scapegoated Other who might otherwise be numbered among us.

Oh, but wait.

I hang with Set.

I had a friend whose protector - chosen by her parents - was Loki. And I read the work of people who deal with the various jötnar in various ways.

My first teacher in the Craft named her line of the tradition "Morningstar". You know, one of those titles of 'the Adversary' (tee em).

Now, obviously, I have a problem with the whole "We're nothing like them so don't persecute us (we don't mind if you persecute them)" attitude. But really, the whole "but I'm not a devil-worshipper" thing is more deeply problematic than that, as anything other than a factual correction.

It's a factual correction that I cannot provide in that many words. Because, honestly, I don't fucking know if I'm a devil-worshipper or not. Not with any intellectual honesty.

That Christian adversary figure, Source Of All Evil In The Eyes Of Those People Who Don't Do Close Textual Analysis Well? Not so much.

But, again, I hang with Set. And really, Set has a lot more in common with Judaism's ha-Satan than that guy they call "Satan" does. Ha-Satan being the title of Hashem's prosecuting attorney, whose job it is to test and prove the righteousness of others. (I actually have a fascinating book called The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity, which, among other things, manages not to paint Neb.y as the boogety-boo God Of Ee-vile Tee-Em in His, like, two paragraph mention.)

And, as someone who hangs with Set, I've done things like peer at the public information put out by the Temple of Set, because hey, one good Setian deserves another. A lot of it sounds familiar. (A lot of it sounds like someone who's missing the goddamn point already, could someone slap 'em upside the head please.) But oogety-boogety Satanists, right? Not anything like us fine, upstanding pagans.

Sorry, I'm getting sarcasm in your peanut butter.

One thing I think matters about polytheistic systems is that they don't make benevolence into a virtue. (Except, perhaps, those goddess-worship groups often snidely referred to as "Jesus in drag.") Many of the Powers - even the ones who are put forward as "this is one of the good and proper ones to venerate" - are not actually all that nice. Important, necessary, possibly even in some cases in favor of the greater good, sure, but you wouldn't want your offspring to marry one.

Being beloved of Set does not mean that I can go waltzing out in a suit made of copper bakeware waving a conductive antenna at the sky when there's a front coming through. Because one of the things about storm gods is, well, when you have a certain charge built up, the lightning's gonna go somewhere. Not because lightning is evil. Because lightning goes from here to there when there's a particular buildup, and you don't want it to be you in the middle. A storm god taking a fancy to ya is not going to give you electricity resistance 10; this isn't D&D. If you're lucky, it'll give you the sense to keep in out of the rain.

So yes. Lightning strikes. With a combination of indifference and opportunistic exploitation. Does that make Set a devil? Or does that mean that we know something more about Set when we understand lightning?

One of the things that that first Craft teacher mentioned was that most of the lines of traditionally-oriented witchcraft work with some form of Lucifer. That dreaded force in the dark is also the initiator, the enlightener, and "Lucifer" was deliberately chosen as a term, that alternate name for Morningstar: that feared force that illuminates understanding. In the Book of Job, the trials Ha-Satan seeks permission to inflict upon Job are chosen to illuminate his piety and test out the limits of his strength.

She told a story: a vision of angels wrestling in heaven, the Good Angel and the Evil Angel. And the Good Angel won, and cast the Evil Angel out, and closed the gates of heaven to leave that force dying on the rocks. And that fallen Angel was nurtured back to health by a passing herdsman, who won from it the chance to grow through struggle, to learn, to change, to become stronger - so what is Evil anyway? And what form of Good closes the gates of heaven to watch something suffer and die from the far side of that barred palisade?

Fairy folklore has a lot of interesting things in it, and one of them is that the fey lands are those populated by spirits neither of heaven nor of hell. Or, as some put it, there is the road to heaven, the road to hell, and there is the third way, where the spirits are neither. But still dangerous, and in many ways more so than those who have granted their allegiance to a set of laws and principles. So are those devils dancing in the fairy circle, or something like? Or is that something more dangerous?

Even in non-Craft circles, this idea kicks around - the sacred monster. The Jungian shadow, which conceals and reveals the depths of power. The wild god, dangerous and compelling, with the power to transform. Sometimes the stories are clean and gentle, and sometimes that is a bowdlerisation, like a fairy tale purged of its old blood to make it safe for children. But we are not children, and we cannot run from our devils.

Every so often I toy, in my fiction, with writing a universe in which angels and demons exist. And angels are the Powers of Virtues, things to which people may aspire. The demons ... are the powers of Passion. And if this were the world, would it look all that different from the one built as virtue and temptation, where asceticism and restraint rather than that visceral, blood-filled joy in being are celebrated?

I mean, it's easy to kick everything back to "define your terms".

But when people ask me about devils, I truly don't know how to begin.

Weighty Contemplations

So, I recently joined FetLife just kind of for the hell of it, and discovered that it's full of all the same stupid arguments I see on the blogs, only with maybe a little more kink acceptance. (Sometimes that maybe is a little thin. It's depressing.)

Today I decided to poke around the Submissive Women community to see if there were interesting discussions there. I found "interesting", though not the sort I think that one might be hoping for.

There were two threads in particular that caught my attention. One was "Would you let a dom give you a buzz haircut?" and the other was "Would you let a dom put you on a diet?"

Guess which one got the more vehemently hostile reactions from the community?

Guess which one had, in the first comments to the discussion, something along the lines of, "I bet this one will go over better because it's serving vanity!"

Oh no, I thought, people will be just as harsh if not harsher on the weight-loss thread, because it's so much more invasive, because health concerns are involved, because ...

Wait, what. "They're about equivalent in invasiveness"? The vast choruses of, if not enthusiastic support, "Yeah, that'd be okay, I think, so long as she's not at a healthy weight already". A few lone voices in the wilderness suggesting things about that sort of thing being bad for self-esteem were scattered among the generalised quiet murmurs of assent and one or two "If you're going to do that sort of thing be sure you have your medical shit together, you know."

I'm left kind of half-speechless. Even knowing that there is so much derangement around weight and the possibility of losing it, a community of people who spit fire at cutting their hair but would acquiesce without complaint to being ordered to lose weight? Who consider these things roughly equivalent, but only the latter acceptable?

I wish I had clever commentary. I'm just too stunned.

Non-Ranty Mamablogging

It's hard for me to figure out how to write about this whole motherhood gig, because I'm pretty much convinced that the stuff I can't turn into some kind of political rant or interesting bit of introspection about the nature of my personal reality will be boring to the entire rest of the universe so why write it? Which tends to bias me towards only writing about stressors, because stressors are for blogging.

I don't think that's entirely well-balanced, so I want to fix it.

Here's Little Foot, vigorously waving a toy lion made for her by Vieva, who appears occasionally in the comments here. (Little Foot's a Leo. This was pretty much the logic under which the animal was chosen.)

She really loves her lion. It is one of her two favorite current toys (the other being a small fish with a jinglebell in it gotten off Etsy). If she's lying on on the floor and presented with the lion, her face will light up, she will grab it by two limbs, and then (usually) roll onto her side as if she's attempting to bodyslam it and gurgle happily. Up until she flings it up over her shoulder and then fusses because oh noes the lion it has ceased to exist.

The rest of the time she manages to drop the lion on her face and then flips out because it's eating my face it's eating my face get it off get it off get it off!

She also grabs the corners of blankets and often winds up pulling them over her face, which leads to what I call an Object Permanence Crisis: "The cosmos has ceased to be, for I cannot see it! Alert! Alert!" I am perhaps not as sympathetic to this as I ought to be, I merely free her from the predations of the reality-annihilating spit rag.

I am reasonably confident that we have done horrible things to her sleep cycles, as they have settled in at this point to semi-conform to mine, and I keep really weird hours. She does, however, willingly sleep something like five hours at a go almost every night, which is pretty good for not quite four months old. She's a little fussy lately, we think because she's contemplating the possibility of teething part time when she remembers to, but not terribly so, and she rarely cries all that much - though the last few days she's frequently woken up from a sound sleep going from zero to howling, and I suspect babynightmares.

Much like the family has one night a week for dinner prep obligations, we've divided things up so one of each weeknight one of the parents is on primary baby duty, which means they handle diapers and so on as much as is possible. This is a great system, and I highly recommend that anyone thinking of having a baby accumulate as many allomothers as they can handle, because the level of sanity this enables is amazing.

Today, the other half of the family returned from Thanksgiving away from home, due to complexities of compromise and family obligation; Little Foot went down for a nap after nursing at about 11:30, giving me two hours in which I could put together a perfect little family dinner to welcome them home with. This worked out brilliantly, and she didn't wake up until they got back, which meant other people got to deal with the next diaper.

I'll not deny that doing the full-time daytime parent thing is very hard for me. I'm a pretty extreme introvert, and an infant is, of course, demanding and in my personal space a huge chunk of the time. The help I can get from the rest of the family is critical to my ongoing stability and competence as a mum.

But I'm becoming increasingly convinced that post-partum depression rates have a lot to do with support structures. I'm aware that my long-term history with clinical depression makes me really high risk, and there have been times that I've felt the stresses pushing on the edges of toppling over into a depressive state. But I haven't been there yet. (I suspect, if it happens, it'll be when the other half of the family moves back into their house after they finish their renovations, because having the people around both for company and babyassistance is a big deal.) And part of not having been there is being able to say "Hey, could someone get me out from under the baby for a bit?" before I hit some kind of internal meltdown crisis point. It's leaving me feeling increasingly militant about the need for real social support structures for mothers, and that if the sort of feminism I'd been exposed to had been, say, the stuff from Mothers for Women's Lib and blogs I've found from there I might have a much less bitter relationship with the word "feminist" these days, as opposed to the reflexive comparisons between being a stay-at-home parent and the 1950s with their subtextual suggestion that there's a necessary equivalence. (I saw an instance of this yesterday. But this is supposed to be a non-ranty post, not another "Oh look, I get to be a brainwashed pawn of the patriarchy, Donna Reed style!" post.)

Anyway, out of the politicalised bits. I love watching Little Foot work on figuring out the world. We got her a bouncy seat to set her down in at times, and then we got a toybar for it. At first, she flailed her hands vaguely and was stunned when things moved. And then, slowly, over time, she moved to deliberate manipulations: that bead will slide from side to side, that flower spins. (A bit after that, she got bored with it, so I took it off the seat for a while and now she's willing to play with it again.) The process of cognitive development is amazing.

For example - this was something my liege noticed - I have one of those hawk silhouette decal things intended to keep birds from flying into windows stuck to my bathroom mirror, because I'm a weirdo. For a while, when we brought Sad Baby in there to dampen a wipe to change her diaper, she would stare at the decal and Fall Silent, because of the primitive mammal reflex that goes SHIT DEATH FROM ABOVE at raptor silhouettes. Now she looks at the baby in the mirror (or the parent in the mirror) instead.

When she sees me for the first time in a while - and some values of 'a while' are 'five minutes' - her face lights up with joy and she kicks enthusiastically two or three times with the sheer exuberance of it all. And I wonder, sometimes, if I have ever before had in my life someone so unreservedly happy to see me. There are times it makes me think of the stereotypical imaginary teenaged girl who has a baby 'so someone will love her unconditionally', and, weirdly, being a mother has given me more sympathy for that half-myth than I ever thought possible, even while it gives me an ironclad, hardcore, "Oh no no no no, hon, you don't have any idea what you're getting into."

I look at the world and I try to find ways to protect my child from parts of it, to introduce it to her so she can navigate it without taking grievous harm, to show her how to be strong and secure. I know that nobody escapes childhood unscathed, but I pray every day that she escapes it unmaimed.

More politically flavored post later, riffing some on these links assembled by Elf of Dreamwidth. I've been reading more and more of what gets called "mommyblogs" lately, for obvious reasons. (Psst, Mamacrow, you have a parenting blog somewhere, right?)

I leave you on this note:

Monster of Mothers

I am the monster under the bed.

(Apparently under the big bed, the one that holds 'all of you'.)

I am off the edge of your map, and I am prowling. You make noise and flash lights as if I might be driven into the imaginary by your denial, you pretend I am not there, and by that pretending you cast my shadow large and misshapen, huge and slavering and consuming things you thought you knew.

I come in the night and seduce away what you thought was yours, what would live by the rules of civilised climes, the way you thought things should be. I am nothing but a shadow, not a creature of substance; what you know of me matters not against what I mean. Perhaps I am the shadow of a real evil, nothing but the hound of a cult trailing along in the footsteps of other unreality. Perhaps I am the demoness herself, spiked and sorcerous.

But - I tell you this - never forget that in the shadow that you made there is a child.

Because there is where you will meet the real beast.

Do not forget my daughter, treat her as an irrelevance, dismiss her. Do not attempt to use her as a leverage point to peel away one or another of her parents. Do not attempt to wail and claw at the horror of a child cradled in such darkness as mine, because I will want to introduce you to darkness then, I will want to and I will hold back because her innocence will not be stained with blood so unworthy.

I will hold back a while. I will wait you out, I may try to laugh because the fairy tales are so comically twisted and unreal. I will let you tell your stories if they help you sleep at night. I will swallow up my own pain at being driven away and warped into shadows, my reality ignored because you must have your stories and hold them up over what is real. I will bleed for you, you who live in the light and order of civilised lands and must have tidiness and hold the borders of your world strong, and believe me, I bleed every moment my humanity is less important to you than your fictions and your "It's just wrong, I can't tell you why." I will let you fucking flay me alive with your weapons of annihilation, without denying that that is what you are doing to me.

I will do this for you.

So long as you leave my child alone, cradled within the arms of her family.


I am the monster of mothers, and you who live in Heorot should leave us be.

Enter Little Foot

WARNING: The following post contains descriptions of a reasonably difficult labor and delivery. If this is liable to distress you, just scroll down to the photo. ;)



The contractions started at midnight on 31 July, but were spaced out at an hour and a half or two apart, fairly dull. In fact, early labor is pretty much entirely boring, as far as I can tell; just this sort of anticipatory waiting punctuated with the occasional contraction. I called my parents to chat, thereby weirding out my father. ("I don't think I've ever had a phone conversation with someone in labor before. I'm sure they happen, like, in the movies, but generally with the father, not the grandfather..." "Star Trek!" "RIGHT! Star Trek! ...still the father.")

Midwife arrived at about 1am on the first of August, after a day I'd spent feeling kind of at loose ends, really. I believe I was in the birth pool when she got there, I seem to remember floating there and hearing her voice say, "Yep, looks like labor." Various things happened over time. Mostly I tried to rest between contractions, though I got increasingly irritable by little things. (Like, "Do you want some [insert foodstuff here]?" "No." A little later. "Do you want some [different foodstuff]." "No." A little later. "Do you want some [food of some sort]?" "I WANT PEOPLE TO STOP ASKING ME!")

I didn't feel like labor was actually going anywhere. The midwife said I was doing fine, that things were progressing well. I was getting tired, mostly, and aggravated, and frustrated, and finally we did an inspection to see how dilated I was, and the water broke. Which was a fascinating sensation....

Contractions got worse. Working theory is this thing called "back labor", generally caused by the baby position being unideal in a way that approximates agonising. This was not helped by the fact that, like my mother, I do not have normal-duration contractions (something like two minutes); mine ran to 4-5 minutes straight. And there was Stuff (subtype: green) in the waters. We first decided that the Stuff was not a risk to the baby, and then, a while later, found fresh meconium - perhaps caused by the stress of the long contractions.

After some discussion, discretion was declared the better part of valor, and we packed up and went to the hospital. There was ... mild drama, that I fortunately found out later; the hospital didn't want us. They spent a while trying to convince us that another hospital was closer than they were, but eventually relented before the information that our chosen pediatrician was on their staff.

How much of this has to do with an idiot midwife who only transports to hospital when things have already gone to hell in a handbasket and has afflicted that particular hospital twice (as opposed to what we did, which was say, "Hm, that looks like a handbasket; let's avoid it with caution") and how much has to do with local politics regarding midwifery I do not know; I suspect a fascinating combination of things.

Anyway, it was for the best that I was unaware that my condition and my child's health had been treated like some kind of hot potato as I limped up to Labor and Delivery; I might have killed something during a surge.

There was initial friction with the OB - he was hostile to our midwife coming in (see above paragraph) up until he sorted out that we had transferred as a precaution, not because I was about to detonate or something, and got a look at my prenatal medical records and saw that they were, in fact, competent. And that we weren't going to refuse all interventions like the filthy hippies we were, or something. I curled up on my side and listened to him talk with my lion (formerly referred to as legalhusband). Paperwork was wrangled. Every so often someone wanted me to lie on my back, which I find uncomfortable at the best of times, and which at that particular time was roughly like being drawn and quartered.

They put monitors on me, which I disliked, but wasn't really up for arguing about, and it didn't matter, I wasn't going anywhere. They put an IV in me, which I also disliked - I hate the damn things, though it was less bad than the one when I got my CAT scan, it just left my hand feeling bruised all to hell - but that enabled me to get some fucking painkillers, which at least removed me from the state of "Kill me now and extract the baby from my steaming corpse."

Forty hours of back labor are disrecommended, by the way. Which is about where I was by that time. Exhausting, unproductive, discouraging, and it fucking hurts.

After that, I floated on some narcotics, half-listening to paperwork wrangles and family support, waking up for only the most intense contractions and snarling for assistance getting through them, for about two and a half hours, at which point I was nearly fully dilated. They wanted me to hold back on pushing for a bit, and taught me some breath techniques for that, which were hard to focus on but manageable, more or less. Somewhere in there I got a second dose of the painkiller, and vehemently refused an epidural. (I was not allowed to sign a health care proxy giving medical decision-making power to the whole family because I was stoned, but I could consent to an epidural while stoned. I don't know, man, I didn't do it. I can sort of see the sense in it, but at the same time, if I'm not competent to consent, I'm not competent to fucking consent.)

After a bit, I stopped having the capacity to restrain my reactions to the surges, and we worked out a position for the actual labory bit, with the advice of the nurse on duty.

And my liege held me cradled against his shoulder, and my lion supported my leg so that I could work and helped me when my hip siezed every so often. And going through the experience between my husbands, held, supported, ... now, okay, I've hit the moodswingy bit of post-partum here, but it makes me all weepy, okay?

The doctor had mellowed out a bit and at one point said, "I see green hair!" Apparently the rest of the family chorused "It's a Muppet!" whereas I, on the floaty strange space of the labor, just driftingly thought, "Probably just more stained mucus" and carried right along with what I was doing.

Tearing during labor is like lines of fire. And nowhere near as horrifyingly squicky as being cut would have been.

I had to hold for an infinite while while they cleared air passages, and then there was a little more, and then the release, and another rush of fluid, and there was the other side. It was a strange, spent, empty space on the other side.

People were talking, bustle, I was following half-threads of conversation, bits and pieces. Eight pounds, fifteen ounces. I had two tears, a small one and a moderate one (I presume it wasn't huge, there was no drama about it, just a "... not so small..." sort of flavor). I needed to lie on my back, could I do that? It didn't hurt horribly. I could do it.

My liege was on my left. He had knelt for most of the seriously active part of labor, to hold me, and his knees were wrecked. My lion was on my right, stroking me when he could, when he wasn't needed to answer questions, or taking a few photos. The OB sprayed something almost hot on me, and started to stitch me up.

(Turns out lidocaine isn't effective on me for more than a couple of minutes. They sprayed me with it three times.)

They put pitocin in the drip to make me pass the placenta faster so they could do the stitches properly without the cord in the way. I barely noticed, still in the dreamspace of post-labor, still there. I had wanted to let the placenta empty its blood supply into the baby, and there was a part of me that was angry and frustrated at that failure, a distant, shouting, too-tired-to-speak part.

I wanted to hold her.

Eventually I could, hold her, hold her with all the agitated medical mess done with, feeling the flow of everything around me. Feeling in love with the universe, with my daughter, with my mates. Her skin was soft against my skin.



Do not offend the baby. She can kill you with her mind. See?

Intersecting Works of Fiction

I had commented to a friend of mine a while back that the Star Trek: Rebooted movie had reawakened my long-lapsed Trekkieness. (I went to Star Trek conventions when I was in high school, level of Trekkie. Wrote some fanfic, too, though mostly because the people I was hanging out with did. I didn't like the right characters, though, heh.)

She gave me this link yesterday, and that is fucking fantastic. One of those things that suddenly cleans up the goggles, as was said in the comments - talking about the importance of the romance subplot in Rebooted. And I'd been already outraged by the people who talked about Uhura as a token girlfriend, as if she hadn't been the linchpin of the entire possibility of resolving the movie plotline in a manner of appropriate heroism, as if she hadn't been clearly the pursuer and not the pursuee or woman-who-melts-suddenly-when-confronted-with-the-asshole-turned-hero. But that post reveals a big, big piece of something I missed, and I loves it forever for making me a little tiny bit wiser.


That being said, racist fail in another SF media project:

The Avatar live-action is an inexcusable debacle.

And here's a really sharp visual representation of why.

Seriously, when Heroes does a better job on race issues (Heroes of the "Have we gone an episode without killing off a woman or a POC?" fame, in which it rather takes after its pulp superhero comics origin perhaps a bit too well) than you, well, that's ... unspeakably ... I'm out of words here, someone hand me a cue card.

Especially when starting with a show that had a rich Asian cultural background, stuff like "We want you to dress in traditional cultural ethnic attire. If you're Korean, wear a kimono. If you're from Belgium, wear lederhosen" from the casting director? Casting calls for "Caucasian or other" on POC characters?


And, so Rebooted doesn't feel entirely left out of the scolding, an open letter to Winona Kirk on the subject of sexism in the Reboot portrayal.

Reality is Messy

Okay, crawling out of my horrible state of incoherent illness or whatever the hell is wrong with me for at least one more pagan values month blog post. This will wind it up for the month, hope you've enjoyed the trip.

I've done a whole bunch of these things, and I haven't talked much at all about gods. Which may be a bit odd for a sequence of posts about religious values. So here's a goddy post for all of you god fans.

I've found that a lot of people steeped in a monotheistic background of whatever flavor have a really hard time parsing their way through polytheism. Enough so that in a lot of discussions, when I point out that monotheistic assumptions don't apply to my religion, I just get ... ignored, passed over, as if someone turned on the Somebody Else's Problem field, and people keep going on arguing about religion as if they were actually talking about religion and not some subset thereof. And when people actually respond, it's often ... I pointed out the flaws in a monotheism-assuming argument to an angry atheist once, and got the fascinating response of, "Well, why would anyone want to worship a god who isn't omnipotent in the first place?"

What an alien world that is to me, though that's unsurprising with my little postcards-from-Gehenna schtick.

For context, I gotta tell you what I think about gods. Gods are elemental. I don't mean this in the sense of that earth-air-fire-water shit, I mean elemental, I mean like the periodic table, only with a lot more little boxes and squiggly abbreviations that require context and opaque numbers. Gods are exactly and precisely what they are, a coiled knot of consequences around a pure idea.

This doesn't mean that gods aren't complicated. You can't take a pure idea and fractal* it out to encompass all its consequences without getting complicated. The stories we tell about gods aren't the shard at the center of the god, they're all the stuff out on the edges that we can relate to and understand. Getting at that elemental core requires figuring out in what way all the stories are the same -- finding the part that iterates.

If I talk to you about Neb.y, sometimes I'll talk about transgression, sometimes I'll talk about sex and power, sometimes I'll talk about the initiator, sometimes I'll talk about the twinning of the desert and the fertile land, or the king and his twin the usurper, or deviancy and the foreign, or the strength borne of the individual, or the difference between destruction and annihilation, or the force of the storm, or the dread of the dark and the things that may go bump there. All these and more are part of His mythology, after all. But nestled into the centre of all of those is the Other. Edge of the map stuff, here be dragons - and will you be a dragonfriend, or will you be lunch?

Set as god as storms is the same thing as Set as god of redheads is the same thing as Set Who (in one set of myths) killed His brother is the same thing as Set in the prow of the solar boat as the one strong enough to break Apep's neck every night is the same thing as Set on the stolen throne waiting for Heru-sa-Aset to kick Him off is the same thing as sexually insatiable, pervy, queer Set with His foreign wives is the same thing as Set clasped hands with Heru and crowning the king. Dig into this and one can learn the mysteries of this god. It's all of a piece, the same thing, just requiring the right understanding to find the elemental equation that is the god.

Now, obviously, within this sort of system, this conceptualisation, one can't have just one god. If we got nothing but hydrogen, the universe looks a hella lot different than it does now.

Reality can be seen as being made up of this complicated tangle of all of these fractalised deities, twined through each other, rubbing up against each other, this glorious profusion of blended iterations. Just about everything we run into is composite, a sticky fornication of thousands of different raw principles: is the mask on my wall the Other? Is it Transformation? Is it Creation? And that's just a superficial getting into it being a mask, without considering what face it contains.

And this reality, this twined-together mass of composite being, answers things like the "Problem of Evil" quite simply - in a world where the millions of different pure fractal being-concepts are all tugging in their own particular directions, the composite is not in for an easy time, simply because there are too many flows. And that's without getting into the fact that being-concepts can include things like Strife For Glory or perhaps Appease The Abyss. And some systems want to suggest that all these arguing-combining-twining fractals, that entire fecund pile of conceptual DNA with its frantic combinations and recombinations, is sort of an intercessory layer between the composite and the ultimate, but even if true, that's a long way off into actual practical irrelevance.

Why worship a god that is not omnipotent?

Why not ask, have you ever fallen in love?

This is not a flip question, this is the core question. To be in love with the messy tangle of reality, to maybe find in the twisting apparently-contradictory convolutions something that speaks to what one loves in the manifest universe, something that makes up a little of one's own compositeness, or maybe something that answers a part of that, meets the valence number of some loose end and energises a system -- to be in love with this and to accept that that means all of the things which are not tidy, friendly, which are not matters of perfect benevolence.

And if the gods are flawed in their incompleteness, their lack of encompassing all of everything and thus having unquestioned power over it, then They are flawed, but They have the virtues of Their flaws.

And the virtues of our flaws is something that we, finite, composite humans can aspire to.




* Verbing weirds language.

Ear to the Ground

Okay, some serious theological musings now, without pop culture at all. Next in the Pagan Values Month blogging.

Value systems evolve in environments.

This is both more and less complicated than modern ecopaganism (the ancients, as I have noted many times, really stank at environmentalism); rather than a straightforward concern about preserving the health of systems with a modern understanding of how they work, those values are derived from those systems, grow up as a part of them.

I am going to paint a landscape for you now.

Start with the river, a pulsing, throbbing artery that cuts through the land. Everything here focuses around the river, not just in the way that its banks are bathed in seasonally refreshed fertile land, but the way it divides the world into halves: east and west, upstream and downstream. Imagine it clogged with boats, little reed things most of them, with the occasional hefty barge made mostly from imported wood. The current flows north; the wind blows south; the great highway of the river is made to connect the place its feet are sunk in cataracts with its mouth. It is full of fish and fowl, yes, and also dangerous animals, whether predator or simply huge by human scale. The banks are covered with flowers and useful plants. The river is a living, essential entity; its god is painted in blues and greens, with pendulous fertile breasts and a great well-fed belly, and His crown is made of reeds like those that the people pluck from His banks.

Expand out, now, from this view of the river, and look at the land, its stark divisions. The fertile strip runs along the fat blue god's sides, covered in fields, fruit trees, gardens, sliced through with canals, all feeding grain and flax and vegetables. The range of floral scents is amazing; travellers from foreign lands come here in search of perfumes. And beyond that rich wealth of fertility, there is the stark desert, punctuated with monuments and tombs and graves, reaching to the horizon under the cloudless sky. Out here there is wealth, for those who brave the starkness, of a different kind: wealth of metal and gemstone and quarried rock. The two lands, it is called, the red land of the hostile and protective desert; the black land of rich life.

Sky and earth are similarly starkly divided, for the horizon is painfully sharp in the desert, and for all the rich wet central heart around the river, this is a desert land. Day and night are sharp and clear.

Let time pass. Watch the red land swell and grow and swallow up the fields in its time, the river dwindle. Watch the river swell again, in a great surge that devours the encroaching desert, bringing with it not just the new year's rich earth but malaria and other plague, a dual-edged sword of life and death. Watch the river secede, now, and the people clear their fields and once again plant flax, wheat, barley, cabbages, onions.

This is the land of the Nile, in ancient days.

What are the values of this land?

Look at it, see how it is divided into pairs: east and west, north and south, riverland and desert, earth and sky, fertility and starkness, life and death, all in the same packages. See how these pairs dance with each other, sometimes one ascendant, sometimes the other, all in intense, dynamic balance. This is not a land that lends itself to easy absolutes, not in a place where the river's rising brings disease that may kill your children or might swallow the foundation of your house and wash it away, nor a place where the terrifying and dangerous desert both holds wealth and forms a barrier that foreign raiders so rarely dare to cross. It is a place where twinned forces, equal and opposite, dance with each other in perfect balance, and the greatest value is that balance. All cosmic energies have ambivalent natures, even the ones that seem most friendly, and are dangerous out of their proper place.

It is a precarious land, balanced entirely on the grace of that androgynous reed-crowned god, and yet its wealth is amazing. In a good year, and most years are good, it can produce more food than it needs to feed itself, even while supporting the presence of many craftsmen, priests, scholars, artisans. That precariousness is aligned so perfectly, though, that it reveals an obvious divine order; why else would the wind blow so consistently southward, letting travellers reach the inner cities of Egypt by raising sails, and return to the Great Green simply by letting the current carry them? And thus it is apparent that so long as that divine order is preserved, maintained, encouraged, there will be wealth almost beyond imagining, and people will lead happy lives. The price for falling out of balance is harsh and generally immediate; the bounty of right action is equally dramatic.

And so this is what their land taught that set of ancients: that the world was made of synergistically opposing forces, in the center of which is the perfect balance of utter abundance. That even the most benevolent power might have a bitter edge, and even the most dangerous have worthy and valuable secrets. That preserving the order laid forth in these monumental terms was a delicate line to walk, and that falling from order was ruinous. That all these powers were necessary, a part of the intricate design that made for the land of Egypt, Gift of the Nile.

And thus we find, when we dig further, that the concept of order, also of justice, rightness, right action, truth, is represented as a feather: a delicate thing, light and balanced. And we find that in the end, people's hearts are laid in the scales to see if they have lived in the center of balance, held all the interconnected forces with appropriate love and appropriate fear, and thus was abundant rather than scarce.

This is what that land taught.

I do not live in that land. I live in the land where the Three Sisters teach the lesson of balance and synergy, not where those lessons are writ to the scale of giants. My bones are New England granite, and my land teaches me endurance, stability, order, ritual, and pattern in its own language. My bones are New England granite, and my heart is full of the dance of loving brothers in constant opposition.

Embracing the Shadow

This was not the post I was expecting to write next for the Pagan Values Month blogging thing, but the post I will be linking to is just too beautiful to let slip away.

Both of the religions that I follow have, in places, an aesthetic of duality. There are repeated myths of the siblings or pairs, exact opposites, exact equals; their conflicts, their parallelisms, the fundamental creative tension between the self and the shadow, however one defines the self, however one defines the shadow. The thing that comes closest to expressing this in common consciousness is the yin-yang symbol: the two shapes curling around each other, each having a spot of the other at its core, the essentiality of both of them.

What does it mean to be in a world in which one's opposite is one's beloved brother, in which love and conflict build the glorious?

Hold that thought.

I will now take a turn into the ridiculous and talk about this past season of American Idol. And in the end, when this thought embraces its shadow, it will achieve the sublime.

I'm not much of a reality TV person - I'm not much of a TV person at all, let alone specific manifestations thereof - but my family wound up watching much of the end of this season of American Idol. There is a whole cultural thing tangled up around this, but our household attachment to the drama orbited around the three figures who were the final three contestants left standing. We talked about musical skill, we talked about impressions, we talked about what we liked and did not like about the voices of the performers, and we talked about the nature of the contest, the way the judges attempted to skew results to get particular performers to pass to the next week or off the show.

And we were cheered every week one Kris Allen managed to beat expectations, beat the harsh criticisms of the judges, stay on the show despite having someone we felt had an inferior voice and a far inferior attitude consistently pimped as a superior singer. Adam Lambert's progress was almost a given, so his continued victories were simply a sign that the world was functioning as it ought, but Kris Allen's progress was another story, one with actual dramatic tension, pitting him primarily against Danny Gokey, the other 'Christian contestant' and obvious judge favorite.

And the narrative in some circles was not the music, it was the package the music came in. Here's the big story: the flamboyant, theatrical gothling who was, in a phrase I saw recently, born fabulous, but whose unmistakable vocal brilliance and skills overcame whatever reticence some might have about his outrageousness; the down-to-earth Christian performer with a traditional relationship background. But which one of the latter?

In the end, it was Kris Allen.

And now I direct you to An Unapproved Road and a post titled We Get To Carry Each Other, from which I will quote (found via The Moderate Voice):

I know next to nothing about Kris Allen’s non-musical life, except that he’s married, he calls himself Christian and he’s done missionary work across the world. I heard about the exchanges among the other contestants that made reference to what is supposedly “godly” and right in relationships, but Kris’s name wasn’t part of that. I don’t know what kind of Christianity he practises, or how he envisions his God. I do know this: he declares himself Christian to the television audience – i.e. to the world; and he freely, publicly, verbally, and especially non-verbally, loves Adam Lambert like a brother.

and

In an interview the day after the finale, Adam departed from the usual breezy soundbytes required of him to emphasize what he felt was most important about the competition -- that the friendship and respect between himself and Kris might be an example for others in transcending difference, for the reward of becoming enriched by it.

Now do you see why I started out talking theology and then started babbling about American Idol?

(Go read that post, by the way. I mean it. It's gorgeous. Read at least some of the comments, too. Like this one.)

Look at the glorious nature of the duality. Look at the one young man, pianist and guitarist and singer-songwriter sort of voice, skilled musician, dedicated Christian; look at the other young man, whose coming out as gay in Rolling Stone isn't so much a revelation as an incidental footnote that he throws out on his way to 'Let me talk about my music.' Look at some of the narratives about the heartland vs. the coasts, culture and counterculture, down home vs. the clubbing scene, modest and self-effacing vs. charisma that can smack ya like a club, all the ways these two young men were supposed to be at each other's throats. One could imagine introducing them, telling each, "This is your Shadow. This is the Other. This is Not Like You."

And we are so readily taught that when there is that division between the two, that they are enemies, that there is hostility: this is the story of heaven and hell. This is not that; that is not this; they are locked in an eternal combat, jaws locked on each other's throats. This is everywhere, in politics (an us-and-them display if ever there was one, these days), in social things, all over the place, this antagonism between Self and Shadow.

But Self and Shadow are reflections off the same divide; that which is other to me is my negative space, the shape of the world that embraces. It can conflict, yes, but it can also twine and reveal the most amazing things, things like the friendship of two young musicians who recognised across that line that their exact differences made them, in the end, exactly alike.

In the tension between Self and Shadow, the world sings.

When Monsters Call Out the Names of Men

I want to be more cheerful now damnit and get the post about being triggered all to hell off the top of the page, so I'm going to do something I've been chewing on for a while. I mentioned to Hope that I had been sort of semi-compiling a set of songs into a playlist of kink expression, and at this point I've put together enough to make a post with, I think. Though I haven't found anything to express my thoughts about bondage, I suspect that's a wee bit tricksy to make it into music readily.... (And the religious intersection is complicated.)

Links in song titles go to YouTube videos. Band-release videos when I can find 'em, stills or weird constructed videos when I can't. I know there are other ways of pointing at music online, but YouTube is the most consistently available I know of. Other links go to prior blog posts about some of those concepts, when I could be arsed digging them up.


"Tonight and the Rest of my Life", Nina Gordon. (Link appears to be a movie trailer, and a slightly different version than the one I have.) Refrain in particular is a lovely description of subspace for me, both in the dreaminess of the rendition and the words themselves.

"Deep as you Go", October Project. Descriptive of deep substate and the altered-consciousness craving that underlies a lot of my kink - as well as some of the risks involved.

"Faster than the Speed of Night", Bonnie Tyler. Can't go without at least acknowledging my switchy bits, and this is the best me-domminess song I've got. And wow, is that an 80s video. And terrible quality. Ah well, the sound is fine. Alas, that the song about what the pretty boy should be doing so lacks in actual pretty boys.

"The Music of the Night", Andrew Lloyd Weber (The Phantom of the Opera). I certainly cannot neglect my first Master.

"Sleepwalkers Dream", Delain. Spiritual content, some, and some more about the experience of the altered consciousness state. In a lot of ways, this one is probably one of the most evocative in the total shape of things for me -- "the truth lies out there".

"Eye of the Storm", the Crüxshadows. The best I've got at the moment for some of the straight-up religious stuff, both in my relationship to Neb.y and in my sacred Work as a submissive partner. If that sounds a bit uppity for the sub, well, that's not my problem. That's still my Work here.

"Nothing Else Matters", specifically the cover by Apocalyptica. Not explaining this one, just enjoy the sensual rendition of Metallica. Never seen a cellist headbang? That's fixable!



And to round us out a bit, a couple of things that didn't quite make it with relevant lyrics quotes:

"Beauty of the Beast", Nightwish

You told I had the eyes of the wolf
Search them and find the beauty of the beast

All of my songs can only be composed of the greatest of pains
Every single verse can only be born of the greatest of wishes

"Sweetness Follows", REM

It's these little things, they can pull you under.
Live your life filled with joy and thunder.

At The Beginning

I got a lot of laughs this weekend commenting that I finally had everything in order, and now I was at the beginning. There was a gesture made at my six months pregnant belly and a "Just you wait."

It's a big deal, though. Because I do.

One of my long, secret fears was that the empty space I had that just wanted these things to be satisfied would not, in fact, be satisfied by them: that it was like my mother's empty space, a yawning chasm into which all the universe could be poured and never be enough. That every time I achieved the milestones or got things settled that my gut told me I needed to have in order something hidden in the next layer down would reveal itself with an, "And before you get settled, you need to deal with me," and send me off on some new chase into the wilderness looking for something to feed the emptiness. That, perhaps, the emptiness was something within me, a crack in my personal pot that would leak out anything that I might possibly try to fill myself with and greedily try to suck up more.

But no.

I have everything I need, and I am finally at the beginning.

I have had my [legal] husband in my life as a partner for the past fifteen years, and he has been a tremendous and amazing support to me all that time. Without him, without his unfaltering love and support, I could never have made it this far. He is my lion, my love, my mate.

I spent years afraid that I would never have partners the way my heart and mind seemed to settle: first, the fear that a second partnership would never last out much beyond a year; then a fear that no time in such a partnership could ever lead to a commitment, a settling down, a place where I could relax and be confident in my possessiveness without it feeling like it was crossing a line or demanding too much. Years and years of this, and now I can take my liege's hand and feel the ring that I put on his finger, and the release of it makes my eyes water with tears of relief as much as anything else.

I never truly believed I would have anything even remotely like the partnership I have with my liege, something where my kink could be uncramped and live wholly, where my religious life could interweave with someone else's, any of those things. It was not even on my plate as something to want, to think a part of the beginning, but having it and being as whole as having it has helped me to be, I do not think I could really begin without something that at least let me find that wholeness.

My spiritual life is settled into a course of knowing where I am going, with roots deep enough to nourish me where I am. I am at peace with not knowing everything, and learning.

I have worked hard on my mental health, and am finding myself in a place where - overall - I suspect that I am okay. I have untangled huge reams of complexes, including my fear of motherhood, and can now open myself up to wanting what I want, taking steps towards the future.

And in overcoming that fear and taking on this life tucked under my ribs, I found a last piece that I did not know that I needed: I have found peace from the yearning for motherlove. It is not unattainable, not something that cannot be hauled out of the bottomless pit of need for any price. It is something that I have in sufficiency, not only for my child to be, but for myself, sufficient to make up for all the yearning after something that I could never have from my actual mother. This amazing gift leaves me awestruck each time I notice it, each time I realise that I am no longer bound.

I have built my foundation and made it secure. This is not to say that I will never step in a hole or get in over my head - life is not so tidy - but I am at the beginning now, and I have everything I need to begin.

I am grateful, beyond grateful, to be able to be at the beginning.

For Heaven and the Future's Sakes

Earlier today I was directed at this post on the nature of vocation and art. And commercialism and art, which I wrote about before, a bit.

In my religious toolbox, there is this word, 'shai'. As it was first taught to me, shai means fate -- but not fate in the sense of predestination, fate as a calling, a vocation: that which one will accomplish unless rendered incapable. Another way of expressing it, to rummage in another bit of my religious toolbox, is the phrase, "What is the work of this God?"

I have spent so much of my life looking for the foundations I needed to chase my vocations. Feeling the lack of things, the absent portions, not having it arranged where I wanted. And feeling an underlying fear that if I got what I thought I needed, I would be so hooked on the seeking the parts that I would never be satisfied, never be able to move on and take the next step, would be always looking for new criteria to meet, new standards to set, new avenues to perfection.

But I am where I need to be. I am where, if one believes in fate, in shai, in whatever you want to call it, I am supposed to be. I have the tools laid out before me to do the work of this God, the circumstances for it, the conditions are right.

Even if I have lost the writers' discussion group that I once loved, I am still capable of writing, spinning stories and theories and shapes of worlds. The child I have wanted for years is kicking me in the poor abused ribs, and has been all day; that deep draw towards motherhood is satisfied, without ache, replaced with a bit of backache and a tendency to sleep in more than I would otherwise do. I have two wedding rings to wear, at least if the pregnancy-induced swelling of my fingers would go down enough to fit them over my knuckles safely; I have security in the love and devotion of my husbands and my place in their lives. I have space to pursue my dreams and be a part of the foundation of all of these.

The prelude is done; the work of this God is now.

Diamond in the Rough

(Editorial note: One of a pile of posts I've been chewing on (I'll try to get the others done soon; at the moment they include some sexual assault processing, meditations on my pregnant body, possibly some crazed mysticism, maybe something about the financial mess, maybe some bisexuality and homosociality, and a couple of other things). I'm writing this now in part because becstar - a poster from Feministing quoted in two previous posts - has dropped by, and I'd like to give her someplace less cranky to comment if she's so inclined.)


One of the things that comes up a lot in some flavors of discussion is about the "influence of patriarchy" or similar things. Basically, cultural environment and such. I wrote about this a while back in terms primarily of homophobia and ablism as promoted in language, but I'm writing a bit more broadly for the nonce, though I'll drag it back to sexuality again somewhere.

I don't think I can honestly describe the cultural flavor I grew up in as "patriarchal". I would call it, instead, "corporatist". Which is interesting, as neither of my parents had 'mainstream' jobs - my mother a freelancer and fine artist, my father a professor, then working at a startup, and eventually a consultant-type - so I didn't get the Company Man indoctrination at home. It was almost all surrounding culture.

In that surrounding culture, the central question of identity was "What do you do?" What is your form of employment? How do you obtain money? This was a fundamentally depersonalised question: the individuality did not matter, all that was significant was this sense of what position one was holding in the mechanism of production. The answer had significant class effects - from the answer, one could extrapolate a rough expectation of income and associations, and from there determine who was 'appropriate' to associate with.

As I observed the adult world surrounding me, I saw a lot of reinforcement of this essential framing of identity. Long working hours were the rule rather than an exception in most cases - the job was more a part of many people's lives than anything else. I became dimly aware that things like medical care depended on employment, as well as the ability to maintain food and shelter. I heard on the news about people who had less good employment than my parents, and consequently poorer health, and the message I got was quite clear: job is quality of life, and worthiness of person.

At the same time, I watched the way certain forms of work were treated. One category of these was the "women's work" category - housework, childcare, other domestic labor. Often times this didn't count as "doing" at all (in response to "What do you do?"), and thus meant that women doing these tasks had no access to a legitimate identity. ("Didn't you used to be Ann Crittenden?") The other category was work in the arts - whether as a fine artist like my mother, or a writer, or a poet, or a musician, or a sculptor, or whatever else, giving that sort of answer to "What do you do?" got "No, I mean your real job." Art was a frivolity, a triviality, perhaps allowed to be considered a "real job" if one was very successful, but (vide the Dire Straits): "That ain't working, that's the way you do it, you play the guitar on the MTV. That ain't working, that's the way you do it, you get your money for nothing and the chicks are for free." (And for the concept of 'free chicks', I'm left with referencing Figleaf's "worthiness trap" posts, like this one.)

The short version is that it was a cultural setup where, broadly speaking, there were sets of roles, and one's value as a person depended on fitting into those roles properly and suppressing anything untidy (keep your head and hands inside the vehicle) into those few bits and time that were not the property of the Job.

And I have always been ... quirky. In my childhood, I was much more comfortable with younger children (I was the oldest child on my block by three or four years, so spent a lot of time in the company of children my brother's age) or adults, and very uncertain about fitting into the roles and groups that were part of the social system for children. And because I went about unprotected by a pubescent monkey troop, I was a prime target for sexual harassment; it was very much shaped by my experience as The One Who Does Not Conform, who is therefore sexually available or exploitable or at the very least can be abused without repercussions from any of the other local primates. If I had been able to pick a role and stick with it, if I'd had a "job" in the junior high school world, a legitimate identity, I would have been a less appealing target.

Overlaid upon this depersonalisation, a Momo-reminiscent obession with conformity and fitting in and keeping up with the Joneses and similar things was the world of "Just Do It" philosophy. Just about everyone I know from something roughly comparable to my background has talked about the secret sense of obligation they had from very young: to be the one who Fixed The World. And that intense, isolating sole pressure to be saviour to a world much larger and much more impersonal became a dominant feature of the zeitgeist I grew up with; not for nothing did I have a conversational exchange that went, "My goal: have children who need less therapy than I do," "I think that's the goal of our entire generation."

So: harshly enforced conformity to a world defined explicitly defined as defective and in need of saving; isolation even in a community context due to unrealistic imposed expectations; enforcement of these conditions managed with compulsion, shaming, and occasional violence. In the world of my childhood and in these terms, it was primarily the case that the girls were the enforcers and the shamers and the primary inflictors of severe harm, while the boys' threats were for the most part simpler, less abstract, more physical, and of lesser significance. (It's easier to talk about the menace perpetrated by the boys because there's more often a specific thing to poke at. The whole experience was full of hostility, though, with many of the exceptions nonetheless including accidental harm.)

On the one hand, I was recognised as Exceptional by parts of the adult world. I advanced ahead of my age group academically and was promoted accordingly. I had opportunities that others did not as people tried to figure out how to manage me and using the advantages of my class background.

But.

All of that difference fed both the "Just Do It" illusion that I was capable of changing the world, not-so-secretly special, and the sense that I was recognised as significant not because of anything about the core of me, but because I was particularly suited to the facelessness of my current Job: student. I was lavished with privileges and academic attention and so rarely felt that I was recognised as a person. I was an Early Reader, a Mathematically Gifted, The Logical One, Science Girl, whatever.

Out of that morass of culture and personal history and everything else came a deep, intense, and powerful drive: to be recognised as whole and complete. To be something other than an animated role-fulfiller, something personal and real.

I wrote before about how the first boy who told me I was beautiful broke open my walls and what that meant, and that was all responding to that need, that hunger, to be complete, to be seen: and that was what laid me open for the assault. To be treated as something other than an instrument to the Job; how could I find the will to turn that down when I was screaming for it inside? I suspect sometimes that that, more than anything, is why the assault broke me like it did.

I don't talk about the details of my young fantasies, but I can speak in generalities.

And the generalities of the kink that I built for myself were: that in a world of depersonalisation, reduced to soulless bodies and skills kept in lines, owned and exploited by faceless organisations, there was someone with a face, a soul, a devotion, who would defy all custom and tradition to treat me as an individual, precious, cherished, important, who would see and value all of me, no matter what the risk, no matter what the cost.

Ask me what effect patriarchy had on my kink?

It made me want to be found: the diamond in the rough.

I Want To Be Holy

There is a place where my soul fills up with starlight and the vastness between stars, when I open and unfold and bloom and blossom like the universe. Macrocosm and microcosm.

I open up, I spread out, I am the land that is the ground of being, I am the rock upon which the temple will be built. These are the old rites, and I am no Blodeuwedd; this is mortal flesh and breath and bone and I a willing bride.

I am the axis mundi, the life growing beneath my heart is the center of my universe and I its pillar. My roots are in the shadows and mists beneath the earth, and my branches touch heaven, like the feet and plumes of God Who shakes the seven heavens with His thunder and whose tears extinguished all the fires of hell.

I am of the soul-maker, the ordeal-master, the guardian of gates, the reigning queen of life. I am a warrior of joyfulness, and I will not be approached without respect. I know what I am and what I must be, and I am the one I have been waiting for.

Is the word for this hierodoule? Vessel? Gatekeeper? Who is the master and who the servant here when the land demands its marriage bed? What is the nature of power and lust when gods touch?

The witch is one who walks the lines between worlds, neither one nor the other. These are the pillars and the gate, these are the embracing shadows and the sharpness of light. This service demands worship from its master as its price.

I. Love. My work.

Writing the Real

My mind has been full of wanting to comment on the RaceFail thing in more substance for a while, and I haven't been able to articulate much of anything. So I will start out by pointing at things that were part of what I wanted to try to respond to, because they're worth noting at least, and then get on to what I have capacity to articulate.

For context on RaceFail, rydra_wong is collecting a complete set of links.

Wordweaverlynn writes Shame and Racefail. Queenofhell writes I am not the moderator. Miriam_Heddy writes Some thoughts on the impossibility of opting out of the economy of privilege. Inalasahl writes Because there aren't enough spoons on the planet.

Then the stuff that congeals some of the things in my head right now into something semi-comprehensible:
Let Me Tell You A Story
Mary Anne Mohanraj Gets You Up to Speed, Part I
Mary Anne Mohanraj Gets You Up to Speed, Part II
Taking One for the Team

A few years ago I realised that the characters in my stories defaulted to white. In some cases there was reason for this - such as the books set in a largely European-ish climate in which there was very little long-distance travel and no colonial history. But even so, I recognised it as a flaw in writing, and started thinking about how to address that.

In that European-like world, I thought about what I knew about it. I knew that one group of people in the area I was writing about travelled, and that they were more ethnically mixed than the rest of the population as a result; that had been in the bits I'd already written. I thought about people in the places they might have travelled to, and whether, say, a group of people displaced from their home might buy passage to another area and try to build a new way of life there.

That group of people happened to be black. They took up residence in one of the poor areas of the city the story was set in, as that was where they could afford the space, and settled in. They get their food the way the locals do; their family customs are not that different from the customs of the poor of the city, so the blend there is smooth; they trade like the locals do, too, and do reasonably well for themselves because they know techniques that the locals do not. There is some level of intermarriage. And, because this is genre fiction, they maintain their traditions of how to teach and work with psionics, which are very different than the local ways.

Which gives rise to the most story-significant character from that culture: half-immigrant, half-local in heritage, trained in her enclave's techniques in psionics, and adopted, as per local tradition, by one of the local psionic families and trained their way. She is sixteen, twists her hair into dredlocks, and quite certain that she's not old enough or knowledgeable enough to be a bridge between worlds.

Not that she really has a choice in the matter: her mixed heritage means that she will always be needing to navigate the question of where she came from. I wrote a little from her perspective on that state of dubiousness, of uncertainty, of not knowing how to make the synthesis between her heritage and her home, because that is the nature of her story. (I shared it with Little Light the other day, who simply said, "Yes.")

When I was working on constructing this character, as I wrote before, I had lunch with a friend who had written extensively about the spiritual nature of her hair and how she takes care of her dreds. Even though my character was not from an Earthly culture, I knew that she was going to be seen and read by people who were, and so I wanted to be sure that I was treating her well. She lives in a city where people with psionic power mark their affiliations with coloured hair ribbons; she comes from a culture where people with psionic power have dreds. She takes care of her hair carefully, quietly, in a place where nobody knows what it means, where the only person who comments is a child she saved from predators who has developed a juvenile crush.

She gets asked by a little girl - of similar mixed heritage - to teach her the things that go with having "the hair". And despite her self-doubt, she starts to do so - coming into mild conflict with a young man of the dominant culture who is well-steeped in young adult arrogance and certainty of complete knowledge (who spends most of the book being taken down a peg every so often). Her story is not a major part of the book (if I write a third book in that universe, her story will be central, and the bereaved gay man I mentioned in the discussion at Scalzi's will find love again too), but it's a part of the themes that I'm constantly exploring: stuck between worlds, the outsider looking in, the alien trying to make sense of the world.

Another story I had been thinking about on and off for a while was an expansion of a short story I wrote in college. And I thought about it, and figured that what I had was a fine short story, but for an expanded thing, it needed more depth and exploration of what was really a trio of generoteenagers, two boys and a girl.

I spent a while exploring the ethnic origins of the spirits that the boys wound up associated with, thinking about what backgrounds would lead to their affiliations, and so on. (The boys are shapechanged, she is not, so what sort of thing they were was pretty well set in the story.)

I wound up getting a multicultural dictionary of fairy creatures and reading it straight through, taking notes on things to look into, trying to find a humanoid supernatural creature to affiliate her with. When I found something promising - from Peru - I decided her name, Jule, was short for Julianna.

Dealing with a Latina main character gave me a whole lot more resarch to do. I bought a book of Quechua folktales; I listened to my collection of Andean music; I bought a Spanish slang dictionary to supplement my somewhat faded school-based knowledge of the language. I wrote to a Californian educator of my acquaintance asking her for tips, not only about the Latina character, but the white boy who lived in the barrio, and wound up with some understanding of things that I would need to rewrite for depth.

And because this was set in something resembling the Real World, I wound up dealing with Real World racism. An accidental friend's WASP mother was blatant about it; the friend herself had a more incidental flavor and immediately noticed that she'd made a misstep. Julianna, more overtly than either of the other two main characters, has to navigate between the worlds - not only the mundane world and the faery world that they have been caught in, but between her Hispanic heritage and her American desires. Her friends wrestle with poverty and dreams, with middle-class white "culturelessness" and deeply closeted bisexuality.

The themes of the book - finding oneself and coming to an understanding of identity, and as always the between-worlds and outsider-looking-in, were profoundly enriched by the introduction of Julianna's "new" (I hadn't thought about it before, so she was generically whiteish) ethnicity.

And it caused me to add a snide cat-shaped storm demon of Peruvian origin, who rapidly became one of my favorite minor characters ever.

A shorter note on the space opera I'm not working on at the moment - in a fit of aggravation at the stereotypical post-ethnic space opera, I spent a while pondering colonisation efforts and wound up having a large chunk of novel set on a planet settled primarily by Caribbean-origin Francophones. Which gives my Catholic narrator a sense of almost, but not quite, having a sense of the religious rhythms of the place.

I don't expect that my writing will be perfect, or anything near it. But I know that I have gotten more wealth of exploration and more depth in the themes that I was already working with, as well as just more interesting stories, from trying.

Sufferin' Succotash

Kicking around in my head for a while has been a comment on Trin's recent "examination" post, in which an anon commenter said, "It hurts to be beautiful? Damn, I'm glad I wasn't raised a woman."

The version I heard was "You have to suffer to be beautiful." I went and googled it the other day, after being reminded of it by Belle's post about bras, and found dozens of hits on that phrase -- and all of them were attributed to women. Mothers. Sisters. Aunts.

Beauty is a thing that women are obligated to, need to police their bodies over, denied to those who were not the chosen ones, a messy tangle of stuff abstracted into checkout-counter magazines and movie stars, sucked out of the rest of us and injected into the chosen ones with a little airbrushing.

No.

Beauty is your birthright.

How vulnerable are we to the people who say they see our beauty? How much is that vulnerability preserved by the sense that beauty is rare, a hard to come by commodity, something for which we must suffer? And how much suffering is ensured by this artificial scarcity?

How much do we have to chase after the secret codes, the tricks, the way to find beauty, rather than actually claiming our birthright and our power? Why do we excuse the uncomfortable and inconvenient with the notion that suffering is the price for what we have already?

What the hell?

Interventions

When I was a very young child, probably around when my brother was a baby, I started accumulating dribs and drabs of information about pregnancy. Very little of it made sense, and very little of it stuck with me, but there's one thing I remember: the concept of amniocentesis terrified me.

It just seemed like a thing of horrors - sucking out someone's insides through a giant needle, what's not to be scared of here? - and somehow I picked up the notion that it was mandatory, that every pregnant woman had to do this. It never occurred to me that people had been having babies for a long, long time before this procedure was even invented, it was just presented as utterly normal, default, part of the medical procedure that goes with this thing.

It wasn't a shock when I realised that nobody was going to force me into this, sort of a gradual dawning of relief. And it gave me this edge of jadedness about the presentation of the pregnancy-as-pathology-requiring-treatment thing in common culture. And I read Suzette Elgin (author, among other things, of The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense) talking about concerns of women and the elderly as constantly medicalised, pathologised, turned into Graeco-Latin terminology, and took that away to chew on.

I am, for various reasons, prone to hypochondria; every pulled muscle in my abdomen at the moment is good for a moment or five of panic before I can kick the analytical self into recognising the sensation. But one of the things that being pregnant has done for me at a gut-deep certainty is make clear that this is a normal thing, not a pathology, not a medical crisis; I may be impaired in some ways from my ordinary functioning, but the process I am going through is a natural one, and not something that I need to panic over, get tested every-which-way, micromanage. I'm achieving a state of calm that has been implausible to me in the past, naming my little freakouts as little freakouts, looking up a few things to check on them, and then letting go and being in this straightforward process of development.

I'm asked at least once every three or four days if we know the baby's sex yet, and I don't know how to explain from inside my head to the world outside that we're not going to any special effort to find out in the first place. This child is my child, whatever the gonads are, and I don't need to build up expectations now to care for the life tucked away under my heart. I don't need to rummage and inspect to find these things out right now. If we find out along the way, we find out along the way, but there's no need to go to special effort.

I've cleared my medical history and concerns so that we have a baseline to know what may be cause for concern, I've got blood tests to do to make sure everything is in order. But I have not been stabbed in the guts with a giant needle, to suck out my insides.

I have a guppy occasionally bouncing off my innards, and last night my husband and I heard the heartbeat for the first time. There is nothing to fear here.

Inauguration Day

My patchwork heritage
Of Puritan blood on thieved land
New York millers
German soldiers
Migrant Irish workers
Polish woman driven from her heritage by hate
Painters and poets and patriots
Ministers and madmen
Scientists and subversives
Buried in Arlington
Stones and bones and old silver
Alcohol and backroom deals
Hardworking union workers
Ivory-tower elitists
Sewn-together pieces of history
Quilted by this land
Extending from then into now and beyond
And with the child resting beneath my heart
Conceived the fourth of November
We've all come to look for America.