W is for Worship

A pet peeve: pagans who appear to be afraid of the word "worship".

It's really a thing.  "Oh, I don't worship gods.  I work with them!"  "I honor them!"  "I am devoted to...."

But never worship.

All of those acts of religious devotion directed towards a deity? Not worship.  Somehow.

Showing reverence and adoration?  Nope, not worship either.

It's a weird thing to me.  All of this activity that is on a literal level worship is defensively declared to not actually be recognition of the worthiness of the gods to be honored.  And I know it's a connotational thing for some people, the whole history of experience in religion that was big on self-abasement and all, but self-abasement is still a different thing than worship.

I think sometimes it's something more insidious, though, kind of a Buddy Christ phenomenon.  Working with gods, being a kind of professional colleague, it feels like being more important than worship, which recognises and differentiates between categories in a kind of rank-acknowledging way.  And that rank thing, it's touchy, isn't it?

And sometimes there actually is stuff about meeting the gods as a comparative equal, individual to individual, but I do tend to think that that needs to come with respecting the existence of differences.  A god is still out there manifesting on a much more cosmic level than I manifest, so if the standard of equality is "two manifesting beings", well, we've got that, but it remains a difference of kind.  And if worship requires a difference of kind, well, it's there.

I light my candles, I burn my incense, and you know - if you're out there lighting candles and burning incense to me you're a bit confused, and probably have a bit of category error going on.  Different categories, different types of attention paid.

It's a thing.

U is for Undefined

I was in a conversation earlier today that kind of orbited around the subject of what one calls one's religion.  Which is an interesting subject in a lot of ways, because there are times where - if one even has a simple word - the more one goes into a particular path or way of being, the less the simple word describes it.

It's worse, of course, if there isn't a simple word or phrase to run with, if the explanation to "what is your religion?" comes in pieces and assemblages of concepts, not in a handy label that someone can then take away, look up, and gnaw on in quiet.  At least if I say "Kemetic" someone has something to start from, and while they might get it bass-ackwards in practice there's at least a thing to point at that will get all but the most clueless aimed in roughly the right direction.

But of course that gets less and less true the more you look at it - and not because I'm a wacky Crafty mystic.  Or not just.  Because for all that state cultus would be largely the same no matter which Egyptian god was tucked away in the heart of the temple, that doesn't mean I do state cultus.  Or that the gods I deal with were the sort of gods who had temples dedicated to them.  And when you get personal with things, the sorts of things that people are called to do vary widely, and since I'm household-oriented which is not exactly a going thing in a lot of mainline Kemetic practice, it goes ...

... well, pretty sideways, without touching any of theological points, differences in reconstructive practice, differences between mortar choices, concurrent practice, or anything else ....

If you want to know what's really going on with someone, the handles aren't going to be good enough, not unless you get a whole big heap of them in a pile together and achieve critical mass.  (When writing a short bio for a conference I'm going to be presenting at, I cited "Egyptian reconstructionist", "student of the Craft", and "hardworking mama" as critical threads - and that's all religious information, even though some people will pretend that the third one isn't.)

And then there are directions where it has to go undefined.  The same conversation led me to starting to make math puns about divinity, and I suspect there's some truth to this: that the practice of mysticism is pretty much a process of division by zero.  The rules don't work there anymore, and you can get nothing or the infinite or for all I know a ham sandwich out of it, because this is undefined.  The divisor which can be spoken is not the eternal divisor.  There's a tension between nothing and everything, between the bounded and the endless, that rattles around in the asymptote that can be drawn between the infinite and the negative-infinite, encompassing all things when nothing is on top.

I don't think I'm a liminalist.  Or at least I'm not a liminalist anymore, which is a funny place for someone who has for a long time self-defined in shadows and penumbras.  But it's not the fringes I'm there for, anymore, it's the bridges.  That funny place in the world where the entire span of being from one infinity to its negation hums on the one point.  It's not the boundary-zone between worlds, it is Yggdrasil, you see what I mean?

Aleph ... NOT.

V is for Version Control

One of my stock rants about other reconstructionists has to do with footnotes.  Basically: there's a lot of stuff out there, but not a lot of stuff that says "And I got this from this book, this teacher, or this document; this part of it I made up as a bridge based on this related culture, this modern practice, or this looking really shiny."

And in this subculture which talks about resources and references and historical accuracy, there's also a lot of games of telephone, in which someone's offhand comment gets blown into canon, or a personal practice gets taken for ancient procedure, or some other thing gets reinterpreted into unrecognisability by the time it gossip-chains its way around to its original source.

And this means that the corpus of standard procedures tee-em gets turned into a hash - a process which is not helped by the tendency of some recon-types to treat academic research as if it were the Bible in the hands of a particularly pernicious young-Earth creationist.  There's research of various degrees of datedness mixed in with the bridging material someone created for a coven, someone else's interpolations from African Diaspora Religions, a stray leavening of the Golden Dawn, the thing that that priest said once which was certainly an ancient source somewhere right?  It's a mess.

It has no version control.

One of the things that I try to do with my work is footnote.  (I actually, at one point, got an email from my boss when he was putting together the ebook version of my book, saying I owed him a bottle of something because formatting footnotes in an ebook is apparently a real pain in the arse.)  It's not enough for me to come up with answers to things - I want other people to be able to know where I got them.  To be able to check my work, come up with alternate interpretations, or go further without having to first reconstruct my footsteps in order to figure out how I got where I was.  Can't do that without having the work in context.

I have a calendar; it's in its first revision.  I explicitly note that, because version control means that at some point I will supercede it with something that I like better, whether that's for completeness or for accuracy or for fiddly bits of math or whatever else.

I'm a syncretist; I work within multiple religious traditions and construct bridging material so that they do the same thing.  And that's multiple layers of versioning - tracking where things came from, revising things for better fit and coherence in the long run, and so on.

The structure around the system, the stuff that reveals where the system came from, it matters too.

No version control means that thing we did a half-assed job on that one time gets done over and over again even when we have better resources because we've forgotten that that was a hack job.  It's just The Way We Did It, so it might be the traditional thing to do... right?

K is for Klein Onion

A Klein Bottle is a sort of object where what is "inside" and what is "outside" is topologically ambiguous, a 'three-dimensional' equivalent of the 'two-dimensional' Möbius strip.

A lot of the stuff I do is kind of like that, only with onions - where I have no idea which layer - if any - is "inside" and which is "outside", and suspect the overall question of being kind of fundamentally meaningless.

It goes something like this:

I do some research and come up with a notion. I wind up doing more research around it, digging at it in pieces. I have a wacky brain-connection like arc lightning connecting that thing with something else. I look into the something else. That process winds up connecting me to a mystical experience. The mystical experience appears to point to a third thing, which, although it's kind of weird, I wind up researching. That research winds up pointing at the original notion, often in such a way that I suspect that the third thing may actually have been the first thing, or have developed in symbiosis with the first thing, or ....

Anyway. You can come in at any point on this or a more complicated loop and it all winds up being the same - there are pieces of lore, random connections, and genuine spiritual experiences that intermesh in weirdly consistent ways. And then I go take those meshworks and show them to other people because - hey - just because I think it makes sense doesn't mean shit, but then the other people go, "Oh. Shit. Right," and run away to suddenly do new things, which means I think that it all makes sense outside my head. Which can be a little scary.

But that's the interesting thing, the way everything is interconnected.

The one that got me pondering the Klein Onion went something like this (a bit more UPG than the usual one, but the stuff that's more lore-based is waaaay too personal right now):

I'm doing research on the Night Journey in various forms (the Amduat, the Book of Nut, etc.)

Which got me pondering the nature of the Tree Goddess (a form of Nut, Hetharu, or I believe occasionally Aset, but in materials I've come across usually Nut or Hetharu).

Chatted with a friend about the Tree Goddess, mentioned a few things, got a detailed blat of feedback about stuff that exactly matched things that I didn't say. Huh. Well. That's interesting.

So, okay, I've done Axis Mundi stuff lately, and what pagan hasn't stumbled across one goddamn tree meditation or another, right? What can I do to explore this more thoroughly, especially as this is a theophany of my patron?

Shit, I wrote another goddamn tree meditation.

Well, let's work with that. And explore more of it.

Well, the Nut/Geb polarity always has a solid erotic zing to it, but that's in Their myths - that They were so into being together that They had to be forcibly separated, after all.

... wait a second. Hetharu is often paired with Heru - it's in the names after all - which is another consort relationship, and Heru as a sky power is very ... there ought to be a branch-level erotic connection.

(Did I just find an MFM threesome in my mysticism? This is the point at which I took a break to laugh like a drain.)

Okay, so how the fuck do I deal with the branch-level eroticism? Root to earth is easy, all the twining of tree through the dark moist richness of the ground, and the tendency of growing things to be phallic in their reaching for the sky.

... shit. My head is full of stars, that's some of my d/s kink, isn't it. And thus the eroticism is that cosmic world-spanning thing, and it's threaded through with power and ...

... uh-huh. Hetharu/Heru is reigning king and queen, no wonder it's threaded through with power.

... and of course Heru is the ruler of Malkuth, the seen world, the entire visible cosmos as made fully manifest (which was the end product of another completely different branch of crackpot mysticism involving the kabbalah, which I almost never play with at all)

... but the Geb/Nut pairing is the first manifestation of the non-theoretical (if we're still playing kabbalah, which I wasn't when I did this but hey it's sequitur to writing this post and adds another layer for the bloody onion...)

... more precisely, Heru is said to inhabit the throne of Geb, the pharaonic/kingly seat of Egypt. While Wesir, Heru's father, is the deceased king from which Heru inherits, that is the throne of His father.

At which point I commented to a different friend about all this, and she said that it all sounded kind of dynastic, at which point I said something along the lines of, "Gee. The dynastic power flows through the Goddess who is responsible for feeding the glorified dead and allowing them to rest in Her branches when they return to the living land." Because it's all about ka-energy in the end.

Which is back to the beginning, in so many different ways.

B is for Black

"The blacker the body, the whiter the light – the incandescent, active virgin heart from which all comes." - Victor Anderson

I first encountered that line in a training group run by Thorn Coyle (and in fact when I pasted it into a search engine just now the top hit was her book, Kissing the Limitless). I responded with some pretty crazed mysticism about astrophysics, which is neither here nor there.

One thing that modern pagans have to deal with is our common origins in a culture that valorises whiteness. This is not just a racial thing, but yes, racism is threaded through it. (And the question of why so much of pagandom is pale is perhaps not as unrelated as some might want to think.) Anyone who has done more than a little time in a pagan discussion board will probably have come across someone asking about the coloration of their magical work: Is this black magic? When might it be okay to do black magic? Is black magic being worked on me?

And here we come across is: Black is bad. Black is malevolent. Black is scary.

"Even semantics have conspired to make that which is black seem ugly and degrading. In Roget's Thesaurus there are 120 synonyms for blackness and at least sixty of them are offensive, as for example, blot, soot, grim, devil and foul. And there are some 134 synonyms for whiteness and all are favorable, expressed in such words as purity, cleanliness, chastity and innocence. A white lie is better than a black lie. The most degenerate member of a family is a "black sheep." Ossie Davis has suggested that maybe the English language should be reconstructed so that teachers will not be forced to teach the Negro child sixty ways to despise himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of inferiority, and the white child 134 ways to adore himself, and thereby perpetuate his false sense of superiority." - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Whenever someone asks me about "black magic", I reply with another Victor Anderson quote:

"White magic is poetry. Black magic is anything that actually works."

Reframe your paradigm.

What is whiteness, what is light?

Some people talk about white as a symbol of purity - talk about that.

And talk about the cruelty of concepts of purity, too.

Talk about the treatment of children with multiple ethnicities, and consider how many of them live in exile from the worlds of all their ancestors due to being insufficiently pure. Talk about the madness of ideological purity that makes those who will listen to other positions anathema and only the wildest, most outrageous, most pure positions put forth. Talk about the spectre of the Holocaust, talk about the murders of trans women who died because some man thought he would catch a contagion of gayness from them, talk about menstrual blood taboos, talk about the madonna/whore complex, and talk about which people never have a chance at being shoved into the tiny box labelled 'madonna' because they're already socially impure. Talk about the whole concept, not just the - here's that color again - whitewashed versions thereof.

Symbols are complicated. Using them is a precise and delicate art, and sometimes they say other things than one thought they meant, too.

"Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number--Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysos, every now and then." - Ursula K. Le Guin

When I tell you I am Kemetic, I am aligning myself with blackness. This is what the word means, if you chase it back - an English noun form, from "Kemet", one of the Egyptian words for their nation: The Black Land. Black for night and black for death and black for the flesh of a mummy prepared for wrapping and black for resurrection and black for hands deep in the wealth of rich soil that comes like a miracle when the floodwaters part. Black for life. Black, also sometimes written in green.

And the Black Land is not opposed to Whiteness; its counterpart is the Red Land. Red for the desert, the barrenness of that space untouched by the sort of earth that can become rich with greenness, the earth which cannot be substituted one for one with green. Red for fire and blood, but blood is what unifies a body into a living thing, the pulse in every limb proof of wholeness. Red for the fire serpent that is the essence and protection of the sun.

Red for danger, anger, destruction, death, but black also for death and the night is not without its dangers. [*]

When I tell you I am Kemetic, I am telling you that I am black and red, and black means death and black means life, and red means death and red means life. I am telling you that it is not as simple as black and white thinking.

And when I tell you I am Feri, I am telling you to look to the night sky.


([*] Reference for these few paragraphs can be found in Wilkinson, Symbol & Magic in Egyptian Art, by the way, if you want to check my notes.)

Relational Tinkertoys

One of the previous posts got into discussing fiddly bits of constructing relationship systems and how one looks at them and so on, and so I've been chewing on that. Which I've also been chewing on in terms of this CFS for kinked relationships in a polyamorous context, which I'd like to write something for if I only had a brain. (Or a diploma.)

And there are bazillions of things talking about terminology out there, and some of them even get it mostly not wrong for how it works in the wild (the number of sites that talk about "primary/secondary" or "heirarchical polyamory" under the notion that people only ever have one primary-typed relationship is gargantuan), and none of them are actually all that useful, as far as I can tell. (And this is getting all crossed-up in my head with an old post I just read from someone who left me a comment on 'what's the difference between "bedroom kink" and "24/7", anyway?' so that may wind up in this ramble.)

So. Relationships. Structures.

One of the things that I think drives a lot of people's responses is the way that the model of what a relationship is like is sort of presented as monolithic. He and she become they and we know it's right and true because they get married and live happily ever after gazing into each other's eyes. And there are variations along the way, but this is the thing that I saw presented as the Correct Model - heterosexuality, marriage, starry-eyed monogamy, fairy tale ending. All the ingredients.

And of course there were little cracks in that obvious from the beginning: in my youngest years it was the knowledge that divorce happened. Then an awareness of homosexuality. By the time I was fourteen or so I could comment that I figured there were people who were monogamous and people who weren't, and the ones who weren't should let people know so that people wouldn't get hurt. (At fourteen, all this obvious shit is simple ...)

But a lot of what I saw was ... still tending back towards the Correct Model. He and she become they transforms into he and he become they. The divorced woman finds the one who's actually the right one, and we know it's right and true because they get married and live happily ever after, etc. All sort of edging towards not being different, even if there were a couple of cosmetic things not in accord with the Model; trying to minimise the ways in which people varied, relationships varied, and so on.

And I think this makes it hard for people who venture into non-normative relationships, because the shape of the Correct Model casts a long, long shadow. Some people luck into areas or subcultures that give them models that work better - or get stuck with a choice between the normative models and the subcultural normative models, neither of which works for them. And some people have to rattle around a lot and figure out which bits work for them and which don't, and sometimes, well, this hurts. So people have scars.

That looks tangential to the question of relationship structures and how people go about things, but it isn't, really. Because all of this is part of the cultural stew that people are steeping in when they go about their relationships, and even being consciously aware of some of it and what it does doesn't mean that one's got it all down and sorted. And some of it is something specific people like, and some isn't.

So that's all backdrop.

If you frame some of the wrong questions in terms of the backdrop, you can see some of how they get asked. Only one relationship fully exists in reality; that relationship is arranged with cohabitation, mutual sexual interest, long-term commitment, and all that stuff that's part of the Serious Package; other relationships (if they exist) are more trivial, flighty things, maybe focused on addressing desires that the real relationship cannot satisfy, like kink, sex with a same-sex partner, the nebulous thing called 'variety', the 'I don't think it's healthy to expect my needs to be met by one person', etc.

And this is what the default model of A Polyamorous Relationship is.

Me, I say that I don't have any polyamorous relationships. Because for the relationship to be such by my standards, there would have to be more than two people in it. And I can't figure out how to make that work, so I don't try to do it; all my relationships are dyadic. (I'm not attracted to groups of people; I'm attracted to specific individual ones. So that's how I conduct things.) So I don't add people to relationships or have to balance things in a relationship or whatever; all of that stuff is system-level, which a lot of people don't recognise as an important distinction in the first place! (World on a slant strikes again.)

And only doing dyadic relationships simplifies some things. Some people like and prefer the one big relationship model, and more power to 'em. They're doing something I can't, for sure, and I don't know how they manage it. I note that they exist, but decline to comment further on grounds that I'm incompetent to do so.

But what goes into a dyadic relationship in a poly system? Obviously, one scraps the "And if I ever find myself attracted to anyone other than you, clearly our relationship has failed and is defective in some way" part that crops up in some implementations of the normative model, if one's having other relationships at all. Though some people have agreements and preferences that can look like that from funny angles, that include things like "Don't love anyone else", "Don't have sex with anyone else" ('sex' being variously defined), "Don't have a serious relationship with anyone else"... all of which I've seen work for some people, provided adequate term-defining.

But there are other nuances. I know people for whom the critical part of polyamory is that they be able to have another relationship if they decide they want to. And in a fair few of those cases, when they have that option, they don't actually have any desire to start another relationship. In other cases, the critical thing is the ability to have and have acknowledged attractions without any necessary follow-through (or maybe no more than a cuddle or what have you), and that satisfies all emotional requirements the poly person might have. And on the other end of things, I know people who don't want to miss out on an opportunity or turn down a potential, and a few kind of messed-up people who seem to think that saying "No" or not being interested in a new relationship now is proof that one isn't really polyamorous at all.

I know of relationships in poly systems that are pretty much vehicles for sexual release, relationships in poly systems that have no sexual activity or desire for same, and pretty much anything in between the two. When my liege and I started our relationship, as I believe I've mentioned, we were shooting for something like friends-with-benefits or a probably long-term fling - turning our established friendship into a friendship that happened to include fucking on occasion, more or less. (That notion didn't last terribly long.) Some people have agreements for looser rules on business trips, conventions, and other prime sources of fling time, too; not all relationships are long-term.

And speaking of long-term, one of those questions that comes up is "How often do relationships like this fail?" Which amused me for a while, because there was a string of people asking me this question in a time frame where I'd recently had a successful relationship come to a conclusion (it was done, and we didn't drag it out too badly) and another relationship that was in a state of continual slow failure not quite energetic enough to cease. But the model for 'failure' was about 'ending' - and often any change in a relationship system was called "ending", so the fact that, say, I'd been with one partner for a decade didn't matter if I broke up with someone else in the interim. Success in a relationship depends on the relationship, not the duration - and not whether the relationship is ongoing, either.

I think one of the things that I'm finding as I burble along semicoherently is that, well, a lot of things are up for negotiation and discussion. In a lot of ways, this is a really scary part: instead of there being a simple, straightforward, and above all known pattern for what a relationship is like (insert digression here), all this other stuff is in question, like what it means for a relationship to succeed, the meaning of fidelity (literally keeping your promises and commitments), who is involved, to what extent, how many ....

Digression: The single thing I've seen cause the most drama in poly relationship setups is the quesiton of who owns the time. There are people who figure that being in a relationship means that all their unspecified time is spent With Partner; there are people who specify time With Partner and figure that their unspecified time is theirs, though it will often also be spent With Partner. When these two types of people get into relationships, there's often a lot of low-grade sense that there's something off here. When these two types of people start up in a poly situation, the drama explodes all over the place and the shrapnel is killer. Those 'of course we know what the rules are for relationships' assumptions bite and the wounds bleed - and they still bite in a monogamous situation, but the damage often feels less acute because people are generally perceived as more threatening to relationships than ... well, all the other stuff that a partner might be doing. (End digression.)

One of the big standing-wave flamewars in poly groups is the concept of heirarchy and, more importantly, what heirarchy means. If anything. (Some people just let it be, if it is, and I appreciate that, being inclined that way myself aside from an obvious tendency towards overanalysis.)

Some people don't do heirarchy. They have their partners, those relationships are what they are, and that's that.

Some people don't do heirarchy. They have their partners, those relationships are what they are, and that's that. They also have the other people they're in some way involved with, who may be romantic friendships, or sex buddies, or whatever else.

Some people do heirarchy. They have their primary partner, and everyone else is required to be of less importance. Often, there is some sort of control that the primary partner has over other relationships, such as the ability to veto. Sometimes called 'prescriptive heirarchy' (as opposed to 'descriptive heirarchy').

Some people do heirarchy. They have their primary partner, and don't have any particular interest in having that sort of relationship with anyone else, but they also have other relationships, romantic, sexual, and both, of lesser centrality to their lives.

Some people do heirarchy. They have their primary partners and other partners by whatever standards and particulars suit the people involved.

Some people do heirarchy, with a tidy sequence of succession such that if one relationship goes away, everything lower than it moves up a rank. Or something. I've never been able to parse this one, and it pretty much never happens in the real world so much as in people's fantasies about how this all works, so it doesn't matter much.

A primary relationship may or may not be a close match to a mainstream-normal real relationship. Various factors that some people have insisted are essential to primary partner-ness have been marriage or other commitment ceremony, cohabitation, sex, shared finances, shared responsibilities, power to control other relationships, the ability to trump commitments to others with desired time (even in non-emergency situations), there can be only one Highlander-ness, um, probably some other stuff. The rules that any given primary relationship run under are probably only known to the participants, though they may well think that it's obvious and all clear-thinking folks will agree.

A secondary (or tertiary, as we carry on down the line) relationship is one that does not contain all the traits that someone thinks of as necessary for a primary relationship. What that actually means in practice is fuck-all with a side order of 'this is a distinction we think necessary to make'. Some people treat this category of relationships as disposable fun-toys. I think those people need to be smacked with a haddock.

Some people get all tangled up in sex and romance and which is more important or if they're all the same thing. And my feeling on sex and romance is that they're different things, and some people can have one without the other, and some people have the two tangled together, and that's life and among the zillions of things that people can be varietable about. Same thing with kink and sex and romance, for that matter. I can have romantic love without sexual attraction but not sex without romantic entanglement; some people can do sex without love/romance/whatever. Life is complicated. That's fine.

Digression two, since I don't think it'll ever be sequitur. 24/7 kink vs. bedroom kink? For me, in my fulltime kinked relationship, it's always there. I'm 24/7 d/s like I'm 24/7 married, y'know? It's always a factor in my life and my calculations and my interactions with people, especially, y'know, the relevant person. My bedroom kink with my other primary partner is ... he's kinky, I'm kinky, sometimes we're kinky in similar directions, it's not a part of our relationship per se (I think we'd both like it if it were a little more so, but it doesn't work out that way), it's just a thing that we do sometimes. And it's not like we stop being kinky people when we're not in-scene or whatever, it's just that it's not a defining trait of our interactions - it may be a defining trait of our selves, but that's a different locus. End digression.

Some people make up abominable unwords like "sexualove" and "compersion", meanwhile, and expect other people to appreciate the brilliance of their ugly jargon. At least one of those has a functional etymology and merely sounds stupid, rather than like a disease symptom.

Some people think their whatever makes them far superior to all of those peons who are still monogamous or who are doing their poly thing differently. These people also need to be smacked with a haddock.

Ugh, I'm sure I had more to say when I started but since this has now been written over something like a half-week full of gaps and staring into space I've lost a fair fraction of it.

But I think that should illustrate, more or less, why I get frustrated when I'm doing my wee activist thing (over a decade of answering questions about polyamory and counting, but not very precisely) and, after explaining what my life is like, get the response, "So the people I met before who [hurt|upset|confused] me are doing it wrong?" (This has happened more than once.)

No. They're just doing it not like me.

They Have A Word For It

Okay, let's shift some gears a little; I've been doing ancient history for a wee bit, and that's not going to be relevant to all the pagan values month folks. (This is still Egyptian theology, just applied. Heh.)

I was discussing with someone the other day names and roles for "the woo" (for general reference, a lot of 'the woo' is tagged 'madness in motion' in here); at other times I've discussed things like the meanings of the words "priest" and "witch". I wrote a while back about reconstructionist sensibilities and clergy roles, which is one of the reasons I'm not redoing it right now; go read that one if you want it. And I'm a student (currently on maternity leave) of a teacher in an initiatory Craft tradition, too, whole different sets of meanings in there - but my teacher loves words in a nicely Egyptian-theology-compatible way.)

And among the things that we need to do is figure out what the roles are for these words, what they mean, what shape they have in the world. There are assumptions about what people with titles will be doing in religion, defined in reaction to the surrounding culture and its hegemonial Christianity - that a clergy type, whatever title they have, whatever role, will conduct public services, provide pastoral counselling, do marriages, and so on. Even in religions where the clergy-types don't have that role officially, they often do it just because it's easier than arguing for cultural space to do it properly (I believe many of things that rabbis can do can, strictly speaking, be done by any adult Jewish male, for example).

So take a word like "priest". A lot of modern pagans accuse Christianity of requiring some sort of intermediary between the devotee and the divine, and thus talk about everyone being their own priest -- where "priest" means "someone who's able to talk to the divine without requiring an intermediary". (Never mind that "priesthood of all believers" is, y'know, a Protestant term and many of these people are coming from a Protestant background.) Which means there are a fuckton of pagan priest/esses running around, many of whom don't know their asses from their elbows.

I am reluctant to speak too much about the practices in religious witchcraft traditions, as I am not an initiate, and I am entirely too aware of the differences wrought by initiation and the understandings thereof. However, my understanding is that (in coven-based Craft traditions) the appropriate analogy is of a monastic order, in which a group of ordained people (and trainees) gather for the purpose of honoring and serving the divine in a shared context. (I am even more reluctant to speak about my own non-coven-based Craft tradition, because it is much more weirdly touchy to get that wrong. My teacher appreciates my quoting Terry Pratchett on witches, with comments such as "the natural size of a coven is one", though.) In any case, 'priest' here means someone who is dedicated to a particular mode of interaction with the divine, according to the strictures of the tradition.

"Priest" in Egyptian context means a servant of the god in the house of the god (the temple). The temple is the god's private estate, not open to generalised exploration. There are no services; there is no pastoral counselling. The rituals are for the benefit of the god and, more obliquely, the community, because the community is well-served when the god is pleased. It was, further, historically speaking a part-time job, and also often a sort of sinecure. I've done a godawful amount of religious work, and fought off the priest label because damnit, I am not the servant of any god in Their house. (The madness in motion sideways exception of that between myself and Neb.y is weirdly complicated, and I don't actually talk about it much even though there are times I'd kind of like to, but, y'know, a lot of people think that shit's crazy.)

Which means that I was left short of words for what it is that I do. Because what I do is in many ways more rabbinic than anything else: I'm a scholar, though self-taught, of the relevant texts, I make interpretations, and - perhaps most importantly - I expect people to argue with me, disagree with me, and go off and form their own fucking schools of thought because damnit, we need more thinking. One of these days I'll find a good Kemetic word for that, and then I'll have a title for my public work.

For now, I'm stuck with a sort of uncredentialed ministerial jobbie, which I whimsically refer to as being jackaled (this is like being hounded, only with more Anpu (Anubis)). (Though it's primarily Wepwawet (Ophois) that I deal with, people have at least heard of Anpu.) And a lot of that is what I'm doing here with my pagan values month series of posts: putting forth structure and underlying thought and giving people chewy things to take away and gnaw on, at least in theory, because that's what that particular job is all about. My pastoral counselling is interestingly nondenominational, not because I step out of my religious structure to do it, but because what gods - if any - the person who needs help deals with are completely irrelevant to the question. Wepwawet is the opener of the way; Anpu is the guide to the lost. If someone comes unstuck and finds their way, that's a win on the 'doing god's work' front for me.

Other things that people lose words for are devotional. One can see a lot of pagans looking for "their patron god/dess", without any sort of clarity on what that means to them. Some are seeking a personal relationship with some deity, which may or may not be in the offing. Others pull back to a more historically accurate sense that a patron is the god who looks over one's profession - and I will note that I consider Khnum mine, for all that I have not properly had my hands in clay for years. (Man, I want my studio set up.) Some would find Djehwty a more reasonable patron for a writer (inventor of writing, after all), but my writing is very much about creating worlds in many ways, and thus the maker of souls (Father of fathers, Mother of mothers) looks over my work.

I don't even have a word for how I'd characterise my devotion to Hetharu. In many ways, it's very much in keeping with the ancient structures of worship: the idea of attempting to embody the values of the deity in question. (A Greek travelling in Egypt commented that there was not a woman in Egypt who was not giving her due to Hethert by putting on her makeup, and wasn't that a remarkably devoted population! ... not that I'm femme enough to do makeup most of the time, but that's beside the point.) I do not fear service (obviously), and I can say I pledged myself to Her service some fifteen years ago at this point; I can point at the curve of my belly and talk about the goddess who governs motherhood right now, hell. But this is a subtle and personal thing, not clergy, not something that most people will ever meet clear and in the open, even. I do not fear the word "worship" as many pagans do, nor do I equate it with abasement and grovelling. I sort of hover around "devotee" a lot of the time, as "follower" is not strong enough.

I have no tidy segue for "witch", which is one of those words that rattles around and causes controversy. I was actually sort of peripherally discussing that with a friend recently, who commented that she doesn't care for the word because she thinks that it's used too much for historical shock value, that it's not a reclaimable concept. (I seem to recall that my liege feels similarly, though we haven't talked about it recently.) And it's a word I've been ambivalent about for a long time; for a while I would only self-describe with it using a modifier - specifically "kitchen witch", which describes my style pretty appropriately, as my magical remedies for burns include live aloe plants. (And similar such approaches.) I'm not actually sure what started to shift me on that front, away from the 'this is not me' thing, aside from my deeper Craft studies and perhaps reading too much Terry Pratchett. I don't use it often, and I still often use it modified -- but it's not an entirely alien space anymore.

As posts go, this is not a terribly coherent arc of one, but whatever. I'm allowed to blither on a bit every so often. I think I hit my high points, someone else can fix the transitions. Summary: words mean things. Think about what they damn well mean. Use nuance. Build the world true.

In the Aftermath of Prop 8: Please Correct Your Fucking Ignorance

Dear the internet:

Marriage is not a religious ritual.

It may be a ritual in your religion. It may be treated as a ritual in common implementations of your religion in order to 'pass' under the hegemonial status of Christianity. You may be sufficiently swamped in the hegemonial status of Christianity that you can't imagine a religion that doesn't treat it as a matter of theology.

Your ignorance is not the same thing as historical fact.

You know when the Christian religion held sole sway over marriage in England (the law of which supplies the backstory for the legal systems of many and probably most of the people who might have a chance of reading this rant)? Between 1753 and 1837. There's your historical basis for the exclusive ownership of marriage by the Church (with exceptions for Jews and Quakers, IIRC).

Before that, in England, people could, if they so desired, get married by claiming they were married and fulfilling certain social parameters (common law marriage). Afterwards, there was established a public registry of marriages (civil marriage). In England's colonies, things varied widely - my Puritan ancestors were totally squicked out by marriage as a religious thing, as I've noted before, not that anybody damn well noticed. Various other cultures have treated marriage as falling under forms of trade, of contract law, of sundry other things.

I don't want to hear anymore about how this upholding Prop 8 separates church and state. I don't want to hear anymore about how this religious thing should never have gotten legal status in the first place. I don't want to hear anymore about how the government - enforcer of contract law - should be out of the business of enforcing the contract of marriage because somehow marriage is magically different because the right-wing asshats think they own it.

Marriage is a human universal. Anthropologically, it is the formation of a family under the witness of the community, with the creation of the responsibilities and benefits that that community considers a part of that process.

You may think it weird that I don't consider marriage a religious thing.

That's fine, I think it weird that the loud religions in my vicinity don't consider childbirth a religious thing.

Now We're Grown Up Orphans

Here's an interesting little tidbit: I don't have a real name.

Not in the sense that certain people frothing about on the internet would like me to have, at least. I've been using a consistent handle online since I got an email address that had the option of letting me pick the username (and I picked something I had already been using for years) - a handle which happens to be more connected to my legal name than I am, because I have a potently dissociative reaction to my legal name.

For a while I kept my legal name in my .sig line elsewhere on the internet, until the combination of my dislike for being identified by a set of sounds that felt actively not-me and the harassment I received in my private email for being identifiable by an extremely feminine name led me to change that to initials. My current usenet provider requires a "real name", I satiate it with an initial-surname combination and post under that and the handle I have used since I was fourteen.

The name that I use in common social gatherings is more mine than my legal name (I have occasionally considered changing it legally), but it is still an aspiration, a thing I chose because it fit who I wanted to be and had sounds that suited me well. It means "jovial lady", at least according to web searches, and that seems to me to be a reasonable ambition to pursue. It is more me than any other name I have, but I am not entirely sure that it is either mine or real.

When I started up this blog, I did so with conscious attention to matters of identity; I have asked people not to link my established handle or my legal name to this space. I wanted to be able to talk freely about things for which there might be "outing" concern. (I have things on the internet under my legal name and associated pseudonym, largely discussing polyamory; I went through a period where I was vehemently out as a matter of political activism, and am content to be passively so these days for the sake of my safety and sanity.) But here I talk about kink; I talk about abuse and assault survivorship; I deal with protecting the anonymity of my partners, my family, my child. I know about Kathy Sierra; while I doubt my little World on a Slant will ever have a high enough profile to draw that level of attention, I am quite aware that I am a woman, in many ways a woman on the fringes of the vulnerable who is actively drawing attention to that vulnerability, on the internet.

So there, a double-pseud, clearly just an excuse to get out of being thoughtful and considerate or something like that. Nobody is really threatened by information about themselves being tightly affiliated to their "real names", presuming they have "real names", and I am presumed dishonest because I do not post under a legal name so unconnected to me that I have consistently forgotten to answer to it for years - and so unfamiliar to the people I'm talking to on the 'net that it's effectively an alias.




(There is a hell of a lot to be said about this thing that's being called "RaceFail '09"; I have not been saying most of it because I am totally flabbergasted and also incapable of being coherent about it. Someone who wants to get some context for it can look here at a collection of the sources that are still accessible, or this timeline of the early sequence. For those people who are interested in actually doing something about the mess, I draw your attention to this excellent post and this response. Do not neglect protecting yourself.)

A Whole Other Ballgame

My sports newsgroup has been taken over by political ranting. It's maddening, and not just because when I'm reading there I'd rather read about the pennant race than the Presidential race, damnit.

There's one thing about it that particularly bothers me, though. Not just the vicious factionalism and the screaming and the offtopicness. Not even just the name-games, though this is one of them (I hate name games in rhetoric), but...

There are a couple of folks who go on ranting about "the Obamasiah".

And I keep cringing at the anti-Christian subtext.

And I'm sure the people who are saying this would consider themselves good and proper Christians who are mocking the behaviour of others, but ...

... the others aren't the ones directly conflating a God and a Caesar.

... the others aren't the ones who are directly mocking a major religion's sacred concepts by using them as terms of derision.

... the others aren't treating politics and salvation as one and the same.


It makes me horribly uncomfortable. And I know it's tied into the attempt to dogwhistle the antichrist into the campaign, and I know I'm reacting at some level to that, but...

... mostly I'm just looking at the blatant impiety of it all, the horrible twisting of the process and symbols of religion, and wondering if I'm the crazy one for noticing it.

Gaming Dog-Whistles

So one of McCain's bloggers called potential Obama voters the D&D set living in their mother's basements, which was, y'know, standard and laughable.

I didn't notice the dog-whistle. WordWeaverLynn at livejournal did, and decodes it for the rest of us.

(Corrected 'McCain' to 'minion'.)

The Quality of Language is Strained

I just watched a bunch of writers seriously arguing that the usage of the word "gay" to mean, more or less, "something I don't like", is not homophobic.

Because, you know, that usage indicating sub-par quality has gotten so general in the culture that it's unremarkable, it clearly doesn't refer to actual gay people, and its spread and usage has absolutely nothing to do with any sort of underlying flow of homophobia in the culture such that the shape of things might be predisposed to using a word aimed in the generally queer direction as a generalised slur.

I'm ... boggled.

This is a bunch of people supposedly sensitive to word nuance - many of them professionally published - and several of them are seriously arguing that it has no homophobic connotations. "Oh, no, my kids aren't homophobic, they're using a word they don't know what means."

The usage is homophobic. Whoever uses it. Whether or not it's being chosen consciously as a slur. It buys into and supports a cultural universe in which "gay" is equated with subpar, low-quality, obnoxious, broken, defective. It hooks into the same cognitive space as and partially replaces the equivalent usage from my generation - "lame" - which I never noticed as problematic before I saw someone point out how ablist it was. Which is, again, tapping into the extensive cultural characterisation of people with disabilities as being subpar, low-quality, broken, defective.

The clear direct response to this was made by someone I happen to know is queer. Who got nothing in response but "How horrible of you to say that about someone's children", "some gay people have that usage, how dare you!", "you're being an asshole", "the word means happy!", and the like. Someone seriously brought up "When I was a kid, we were taught to say 'jewed down', and I'm not an anti-Semite".

The assumptions of the culture are homophobic, are ablist, are anti-Semitic; to the extent that one takes those in and breathes them out, one will be homophobic, ablist, anti-Semitic. (Racist, sexist, ...) Because that's the baseline for normal: a steady, grinding, degrading wearing-down of groups with less power with a constant grit of low-level disgust.

I left a response saying that the usage was so blatantly homophobic that I was shocked that anyone was arguing otherwise.

Because I am that shocked.

And because nobody should have to stand alone.

Under the Surface

So among the many, many places I lurk is a mailing list for Slavic reconstructionism -- people who are interested in reviving/recreating/whathaveyouing the polytheistic religions of the Slavic peoples.

I only lurk there because it's not the path I'm called to, and because many of the people there come across as assuming that it should be the path I'm called to because of the blood of generations before me -- or, if not that one, one of the other potentially legitimated-by-heritage paganisms that I can claim by chasing lines of ancestors back to pre-Christian times.

Recently, someone came up with a word-phrase -- in Russian -- for this family of religions. And raised it as a possible thing to use more broadly than in their own personal use. And this went around a little bit, debating the usefulness of more ethnically-specific phrases and whether or not other people might object.

And someone in there made a comment about how maybe some people would prefer something in their own language, say, the Poles, and wonder if that speaker knew about the attempt by the Tsar to obliterate Polish language and culture in the late 1800s. I can't say that it read as aware to me, but maybe it was a thrown bone to mention the Poles as people who might maybe want a word for their thing that wasn't in Russian.

What awareness lurks under the surface? What blood descended from subversives who loved their home and their language enough to risk being murdered for preserving it lurks under my surface?

The past is another country, which sometimes invades this one with old bitterness and old wounds.

Advertising Futures

I saw this billboard when I was doing the mad holiday travel and relatives-placating thing:

"SEX CAN WAIT. YOUR FUTURE CAN'T."

I just want to ... take it apart. Look at all the subtexts of this. What the hell makes this a good message?

I mean, off the top of my head, the metamessages I pull out of this are:

• "Sex" and "Your Future" are in direct opposition; pursuing one precludes the other.


• People who are interested in sex are frivolously discarding their futures.


• "Your future" requires constant vigilance and attention; letting your eyes get off it means it will surely get away.


• Sex is not a part of your future. Or, if it is, it happens somewhere in the distant not-to-be-thought-of parts thereof, presumably after the Sex Pixie magically bestows upon you the knowledge of how it works so you don't have to actually develop any skill or comprehension experientially. (Presumably, this is similar to how the Beer Fairy bestows knowledge of how to drink responsibly on the twenty-first birthday, when the taboo lifts.)


• Sex will ruin or destroy you and your future.


• It doesn't matter how much you want sex. That interest should be set aside For Your Own Good.


• It doesn't matter how responsible and mature you are and how capable of making choices and evaluating risks. Just don't, your nebulously-defined existence will be placed at risk.
  

Why is any of this shit a useful message?

You're Mine Now, But You're Not My Slave

(Title pulled from this song, which is entirely in keeping with the sense of perverse humor that my music collection frequently exhibits.)

I was chatting with Annwyd the other day about, among other things, kink stuff, and she asked me about the words I use in public discussion of my relationship with my liege. Such as whether terms such as 'my liege' were common in the community, or whether that was our personal thing.

We actually have spent a lot of time talking about language and connotations of language. Trying to talk about what we're doing with reasonable accuracy matters to me a great deal.

I don't use 'my liege' in private space with him, generally, but I imagine I might well when I feel like playing high protocol in a whimsy; I have other language for the personal. But after a lot of discussion, we came to the conclusion that this was a useful model for what our dynamic was: an exchange of service for protection and territory. (Love? Wikipedia reminds me that one of the services a vassal owes is "counsel". Scolding reinforced.)

The territory is an interesting thing -- in an early conversation I said something like, "So, if you're my liege, what's my fief?" But there's this whole scope of space and resources available to me in order to provide service, difficult to articulate; a discussion on a BDSM community on livejournal suggested that the relationship itself was the relevant form of territory, which is close enough for government work. The whole thing is an abstraction -- I mean, an original-framework vassal's primary service is military rather than sexual -- but it works for the shape of things.

It works for the notion that I am valuable, that my strength supports his; a weak vassal is less valuable to the liege, after all. It makes my power something worth developing, turns being strong of itself into a form of service. (And I can get antsy around 'power exchange' language, because, as I've written before, my experience of a stable d/s relationship is not 'power exchange' but 'power unleashing' or maybe 'power revelation'. And this is not unrelated.) Which gets around to my incomprehension at the notion that a dominant must be better or more skilled than the submissive in order for the relationship to be successful, when that's so orthogonal to the lines of power, the creation of the space of the fiefdom in the dynamic and the choice to grant it in exchange for service.

And it's an abstracted and idealised sort of version of flow of power, but that's not exactly uncommon in the kink community for framing structures. Witness language like master/slave, after all ...

Part of our discussion about terminology came down to connotations on words. For example, while I refer to him as my master in some discussions (mostly where the kink aspect to our relationship is relevant and I don't want to get bogged down in "what was that word?" discussions), I do so with permission. "Master", unadorned, suggests to him rather a lot of breadth of scope; a term for, say, Lugh Samildánach. Similarly, 'slave' carries a heavy connotation of nonconsensuality rather than chosen service, and he values greatly that I choose to offer these things to him.

Which isn't to say that we don't wander off in the occasional sex slave direction as part of occasional interaction, but more often I am called 'hetaera'. To play with a completely different historical practice abstracted outwards.

I'll close off with something from Annwyd, 'cause I asked her for permission to quote her and then didn't actually cite anything from our conversation the whole post: "I find that sort of...not exactly roleplaying, but *use* of these very dramatic, elegant roles...to be kind of hot. ;) Don't know if I have the discipline to keep it up in a relationship, but man."

*grin*

You're missing the whole point-- you're not my little pet
Don't throw away your life-- the game's not over yet
I do not own your soul--don't want you in a cage
I only want your heart to find a special place

You're mine now but you're not my sister
You're mine now but you're not my slave
You're mine but you're not my child
You're mine now but you're not my slave
You're mine now but you're not my slave

The Fiction Mirror

It's actually an interesting question, what one can tell about a person from the stories they tell and the way they tell them. And I think a lot of the things that certain types of literary analysis go into miss much of the point.

There are a couple of things that can with reasonable reliability be derived from a text about the author:

1) The author cannot write something that does not fit within their imagination. If the author cannot conceive of something as a possibility, it will not appear in the text.

1a) These limitations of conception are sometimes cultural. I forget which of the discussions of Athena I've seen kicking around the blogs in the past few days this came up in, but there's a bit in the Odyssey where She takes the form of a young man to provide someone advice, and apparently there was a discussion about how horribly sexist it was that She needed to take male form -- and the pointing out that in that culture and in that time period a female form would not have been listened to didn't make a difference. People are aware of that bit of cultural blindness now, more or less.

For one that people aren't so much aware of, try this one: How many movies are there where "Which person will get chosen in this love triangle" is an essential part of the plot? Especially where both potential parties are loved and loving, distinguished primarily by 'socially acceptable' and 'socially marginal'? (Where I come from, we call this YAFMA: Yet Another Monogamy Accident.)

1b) These limitations of conception are sometimes personal.

Sometimes this is a simple lack of experience, and something that can be corrected with research or even 'consciousness-raising' -- for an example of this, I'd point at John Scalzi's piece "Being Poor". Someone who simply does not think to consider the effect of, say, ethnicity or sex or orientation on their characters is probably dealing with some level of cultural blindness on a personal level, and as they become more aware of these issues may well start doing this differently. (I commented recently that I have been deliberately working on illuminating different ethnicities in my own fiction, because that's a place that I'm less well examined than I would prefer.)

Sometimes this is a more complicated to articulate "I don't think that way; I can't figure out how to understand that." There are plenty of people whose cognitive processes are opaque to me; I can make models of how they work that may in fact be reasonably accurate, but which I do not put a great deal of trust in, because they're sketchy things based in, "Okay, if I posit that this is the case, what would make sense?" I keep the people who are this level of alien to me as minor characters, people who are sufficiently unexamined in the course of the story that the flaws in my modelling how they work are unlikely to come up. I know that such people exist, but I can't explore them in any depth, because I know I'd hit the limit of my understanding mightily quickly.

I know people who can't read C. J. Cherryh -- who is one of my favorite authors -- because they simply cannot penetrate her prose. They don't think that way. I do think that way; I don't always express that way because constant exposure to other language frames shifts my default sentence processing a bit more towards 'comprehensible' than she writes. I read enough of her, though, and I wind up with glorious tangles of verbiage with peculiar punctuation, like I think. I don't hold it against people that they can't read Cherryh because her mind is too alien; one of my current criteria for killfiling people on usenet is "I could not render this person plausibly in fiction."

2) It may be possible to get some understanding of issues that an author is wrestling with by looking for generalities in a broad body of work. A single work will have a number of themes and images to explore (and I think very few authors consciously work to a theme; I know one multiply-published woman who has said that she learns what the themes of her works are when someone tells her in an interview); when one considers a variety of pieces, it is possible to tell which of these are persistent across works and thus likely to be specifically illuminating of the author. This may be a political position, an issue the person wants to explore, something about their background that makes an indelible mark on their view of the world, whatever else, but it is really only discernible from study of a variety of works, especially in multiple genres if those are available.

To any literary critics reading this in the future in which I'm published: the underlying universal theme in my fiction is the experience of the outsider looking in. Please acknowledge this in your thesis. Also, The Devil's Dance is about the madness of grief. That's all I know about themes.

3) Writing will reflect the author's unexamined axioms and perspectives. Taken to an extreme, this will generate cliches -- how many movies have the black sidekick killed off at their climax again? (How many cliches are there in the phrase 'black sidekick killed off at the climax', for that matter?) This is not unrelated to questions of blindness, but is not the same thing. Someone who, for example, is aware at one level that issues of racism are important to consider in the world may nonetheless write a story in which all the characters are white, because that's what they know. Someone whose sole experience with religion is conservative Christianity is unlikely to write a plausible polytheism. And so on. And people will argue about what that means, too -- Scalzi (again) notes that he puts very few ethnic markers in his books, so while he knows how much of the population is of a variety of ethnicities, the cues in the text itself are very thin. Other people note that this opens the text to interpretation as 'all these characters are white'. (He also has a character who is completely sex-unspecified, I believe.) So that doesn't resolve the question of whether these are adequately examined axioms interpreted in a particular way or not.

4) In the ideal sense, writing will not betray the author. Fiction is a mirror we hold up to the world, and it reflects ourselves as we wish to be or as we fear we are. It illuminates us, expresses our beliefs, and is part of the iterative process of culture propagating into the next generation. What stories we tell about ourselves, our world, the people we imagine, contain some level of truth.

Truth is a complicated, slippery thing, and it exists in the nexus between the text and the reader as much as it does in the author's creation of the text, which is why this gets even more fiddly than unexamined axioms. What a person may pull out of a text can vary so greatly vary from what was put in (even taking into account the unexamined and invisible) that it is unrecognisable. And the, "Oh, this is an excellent allusion to a myth the author had never actually heard of" sort of thing is a richness to a work as it wends its fractal way in the world, not a betrayal.

I'm finding it hard to articulate what I mean by 'betray the author'. I can say ... I want to say, "Go read 'The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas' and think about what it means, what it illustrates -- what meaning Le Guin would shudder and deny if someone thanked her for presenting it." But Omelas is illustrative, explicitly sketching an idea and inviting a response, and fiction doesn't have to be didactic to do this. But maybe going to Omelas for a while and looking in the wretched basement room would reveal something. I don't know.

It goes into responsibility -- to write the dystopic aspects of reality in a manner that makes it possible to recognise them as dystopic, to make the principles I believe in seem plausible even if I'm not writing something set where they are implemented. To not undercut myself as I shape the world by writing the reality I want to see out of existence with implausibility and the ability to twist it into something corrupt. I may not be writing to express a truth, but I still need to write such that I do not deny it.

Name Games

So I am now back from my vacation, and had one of those little thoughts-to-travel by.

We handed over our passports/miscellaneous information at the border crossing, and one of the things they tend to do is read off the names to make sure that people respond properly to the name (it's a really shaky way of checking for fake ID, but it's something, I guess).

I have never responded consistently to my legal name, even when I used it regularly. I haven't used it socially for on the order of magnitude of two-plus years.

It's just a weird, weird place to be in, expected to react to a name that was never really mine, which I don't even pretend to use in my real life anymore.

Which of course left me pondering the complexities of people who change their names for whatever reasons, and the transfolks I know, and ... yeah.

Names. They matter.

Who Do You Want To Be Today?

It's been one of those weeks for gnawing on questions of identity for me, which happens every so often, especially when I get moody. Being fed into by Annwyd writing about self-definition and identity and appropriation, some, and Ren's "Walking Away from Feminism" winds up oddly apropos to where I am at the moment, sort of cognitively, though not specifically.

I got a 'run along, little subbie, and get your dom to talk to me' comment recently. When I refused -- partly on the basis that why should I ask him to waste his time, partly on the basis that I'm the one with any relevant experience whatsoever -- I got completely blown off as a sub because I asked him to be my master. Because this wild communication shit is only for tops, or some such blithering nonsense. (And we get back to my embittered, "You can't expect people to do something as radical as communicate, honestly" snarkling comment elsewhere.)

But it comes around to the tangle that is the question of identity and meaning, and cycles around that a lot. There are all these adjectives and descriptive nouns kicking around, and people get all tangled up about what not only they denote, but the connotations thereof.

I've been wrestling with religious obligations, like. Gods know my religious community (in the sense of 'co-religionists') is pretty fucked up; I've no patience for any of its organised manifestations at the moment. And yet I'm trying to build something sane that can last in the same framework, even knowing that by my standards nobody has done it. (Kemetic thought takes some work to apply to moderns, and I am not satisfied that any of the extant groups has done it successfully, let alone successfully and non-abusively.) And I'm doing it off on my own -- into the desert, be a heretic, claim your elbow-room. Which is perverse for something as communitarian as most any of the ancient religions was. And so there's the whole question of what's real, what qualifies as within the faith, and these things matter.

And even on the edges of the structure, the social obligation stuff, there's my personal things, which go off into weird dark places full of lightning, and I don't even begin to know how to talk about any of that. And I come across a line that might be helpful, a reference to something in an old document, and it's ... a sentence summary, something that doesn't illuminate a damn thing. I'm chasing ghosts. (And I idly contemplate whether there's a seidhkona on this side of the continent that I could talk to, outside the boundaries of the norm, but this is all about outside the boundaries of the norm.)

These big words take wrestling. What does it mean to be ... and here's where I actually do the examining, where I sit down and try to work out what it means, if I believe this, if I am that, how that actually fits in with the world, whether that's something I want to do, whether that's someone I want to be. And I look at how people use the words, and ask myself if I can use those words on me if I differ on this, that, and the other, and sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes it's no. And it's all part of defining how the world is working for me and around me.

I get chewing on it too hard, though, and I wind up feeling hollow; all these words making up a whole lot of nothing. It comes out feeling like it's all chasing ghosts, conjuring false meanings, what does it mean to be a woman, to be a submissive, to be a Kemetic, to be any of fifty thousand other things that are tangled up in that spooky verb 'to be'. Too much clawing at the mirror opens up the void, and then there's nothing, just the mirages of dancing photons. (And metaphysically, if 0=1, is one zero? Off to disappear up my own existence, too much looking back to figure out how I got to where I am, not enough of the actually being.)

I'm gonna go read a book. Maybe I'll find a little real in there, in memories of the lives of dead priests, servants of the gods.

People Are Weird About Words

(And I'm not just saying this because I'm once again being croggled by someone with a partially shared nominal religious affiliation having the little 'labels are bad' dance. Though that happening while I'm being weirded out by other people's language is at least one of those nice synchronisities of complete bafflement.)

Anyway, to be on my intended topic.

So, one of the fora I read is a discussion group for science fiction and fantasy writers. A reasonable proportion of the population of the group is made up of people who have made professional sales, including people who make their living off their professional sales; probably about half are people who hope to make professional sales someday, or (like me) who intend to write no matter what and consider it appropriate to see if that can be parlayed into income; the remainder are interested hangers-on, writers with no particular interest in publication, former writers, people who hope to write, and so on. Strictly speaking, the newsgroup bans advertising in its charter, though exceptions are made for venues offering professional pay rates, which should mention this in their posting; this is noted explicitly very early in the newsgroup FAQ, which is posted regularly.

(I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this.)

So someone came in to invite people to submit to the second issue of their small press magazine. And someone replied to say, "Okay -- your post doesn't say what you pay. Neither does your website. We're largely a professional group, here, we're not interested in being scammed or in giving away our work for free."

This gets a response from the original poster of, "Don't include that in a cover letter." And the claim that quoting rates isn't "classy", and that they do not pay for journal submissions -- those are for the fame and credential on a CV. (Er?)

Which was, well, rude enough; the other responder told her to drop dead.

Which was, well, rude enough, but at least he left after one or two posts; the next one, the original spammer's husband, informed the newsgroup that it was composed entirely of "fucking cunts", and whose next post was suggesting that all of the female posters in the newsgroup (a fair fraction of whom I've met face-to-face, incidentally) "are just male nerds who get off on using a female pseudonym" and masturbating over the responses they were getting. (I would note that I post somewhat gender-neutrally. My strongly gendered legal forename and middle name are not in my headers, and my usename is; while said usename is probably guessable as female, and is strongly gendered in its culture of origin, I doubt that many people are familiar with the names of any of Akhenaten's wives other than Nefertiti Neferneferuaten to be certain of that.)

I'm just croggled by the notion that someone thinks this is an appropriate way to enter into a group. (When I found out that the fellow was married, my response was, "And he's still got a mouth like a fourteen-year-old trying to shock great-aunt Sadie?" Kids these days, wandering the internet unsupervised ....)

I'm profoundly croggled by the whole coming in with slavering misogyny to defend one's wife. Okay, maybe the riding in on a white horse thing crosses into vaguely understandable somewhere, at some level, but I can't think I'm alone in thinking, "You know, I'm not going to be terribly impressed by, 'I defended you from those meanies, dear! I called them fucking cunts and fake women!' If he thinks 'fucking cunt' is a useful term of insult, he's not gonna be fucking mine any time soon."

I have similar thoughts about some of the trolls that hit in the alt.sports.* newsgroup I read, who seem to think that "cocksucker" is one of the nastiest things one can say about someone. I have to wonder what their girlfriends think about this. One of these days I'll have the story that that thought goes into.

It's not like it's all directed at women and bottoms either -- when I commented on this, someone responded to point out the number of synonyms for "penis" that are used to mean "obnoxious and somewhat stupid".

And then there's this PS2 ad campaign with the slogan "PS2: Because Your Girlfriend Bores You Shitless". This whole ... sense of what's appropriate, the playing to stereotype and contempt, and ... it's almost tangential, but it's the same damn noise, too.

Here is one of the demons of the culture this guy is writing from. Male genitalia are obnoxious and stupid; female genitalia (and bottoming) are venomously contemptible. This is what the encoding of the slang that gets grabbed carries with it, down in the subliminals of the use of language. These things are insults to be, these things are insults to have. Be ashamed; be especially ashamed if you are encoded 'done-to', because that makes you sickening, rather than 'doer', at which point you're merely some variety of jerk. By definition in the metamessage.

We build this world with our hands and our voices, and some people choose to build it with words that mould it out of sexual shame and contempt even for their own partners.

People are so weird.



(Hey, wait, didn't Little Light write about this back in May? Why yes, yes she did. More broadly, too.)

Fractal Liturgy

I love liturgy.

I was having a lengthy pontification about liturgy this evening, which is tied up with a poem I'm working on at the moment, though that's sort of incidental to it. And I came to the realisation that liturgy, good liturgy, has a fractal nature.

Look at it this way: someone who's first encountering a religious ceremony isn't going to know what's going on. The liturgy provides action guidelines and a set of imagery that should be able to convey the basics of what's going on and serve as a pointer to the basics of the action for someone who doesn't know a thing about it.

It also, for someone who does know the basics, goes deeper, pointing out and evoking points of the Mysteries of that particular faith.

If it fails at the former, then new people will be unable to smoothly begin to assimilate the religious material; if it fails at the latter, it will be ineffably shallow.

I got here because I'm trying to write about a Mystery, and because of my study in the relevant religion, I don't have much liturgical knowledge. This is, in part, because people are supposed to be constructing their own religious material -- which is, in fact, why I'm trying to write about it -- to serve as pointers to and illumination of their understandings of the Mystery.

The problem is, I only have one strong verbal pointer to this one. I can wave that around a bit, but it's not enough to get me parallax that includes language. And Mysteries are hard to talk about; all we can really do is exchange pointers. And I caught a new layer of fractal, I've gone deeper than the surface, than the basics, and I want to articulate an image of where I've been, leave it as a signpost saying, "I am here". And I don't have enough to interpolate from to do it easily or smoothly.

Liturgy is a form of dialogue, engaging the people, the experiences, the ways of relating to the faith, moving these things around so they can be grasped and grappled. New liturgies develop in part because of this exchange, this way of talking about faith, the generating the images of meaning.

I've got a single line. In iambic pentameter.

And an old pointer to where I want to go.

And the stars my compass.