Nome for the Holidays

I've been thinking a lot about nomes.

There's this illusion, you see, of a unified religion in discussions of ancient Egypt, usually a variant on the Heliopolitan cosmogony, with Amun-Ra instead of Atum-Ra, and sometimes with bonus Ptah in around the edges.  The different myth cycles of each nome vanish in a kind of vague, generic lens of past culture unification.  (Much like, I imagine, the particular mythologies of Athens dominate discussions of Hellenic culture, though for different reasons in that case.)

But each region had its own myth cycle, its own stories, its own emphases, its own take on things.  A book I'm reading at the moment had a Roman-era mention of a fight breaking out between delegations from two different towns on the subject of crocodile veneration or crocodile smiting - the subtext of which was "honor Set" vs. "execrate Set".  And that isn't, as is usually handwaved, the "Oh, Set's reputation tanked as one went on in Egyptian history", that's two contemporary groups with profoundly different theologies.

And every so often I run into someone who is deeply agitated about some bit of myth - often Set, not always - and I am coming to think that the perspective of "You have to be okay with this god, here's why" is a bad idea.  Or at least an unnecessary one.  The ancients certainly never sorted that shit out, if they were having slapfights about it while bemused Romans took notes.

Here's a complete approach, entirely supportable by mythos:

The regular workaday patterns of the world are a seamless whole which must be preserved.  Into that smooth fabric of being, disruptions are introduced, things that do not need to happen: the storm blows your roof in, or someone dies, or some other needless and painful moment happens.  This happened in the sacred stories, too, and restorative justice only goes so far: Wesir was not returned to his wife and family, but was established in the Duat.  Set becomes the beast of burden, confined to the polar stars so that he may not threaten the fragility that he created, one whose name is cursed.

Not only is this or something like it functional, supportable, and findable in multiple places, it's something that satisfies most people's needs.  Wrestling with the question of those unnecessary disruptions does not require tangling with grey areas; they did harm, so we cast them out, we curse them, we make wax figurines of donkeys to go with our wax figurines of snakes, trample them and burn them.

Here's another complete approach, also supportable by mythos:

An unchanging system is a stagnant one, a vulnerable one, and its weaknesses will reveal themselves in time.  To be powerful, it needs to be tested, prove itself, and overcome that which challenges it, and thus the function of challenge is essential to the health of the system.  Whether it is Heru-Sa-Aset winning the potency, cunning, and self-determination required to become an archetypically powerful king, or Wesir himself learning the secrets of rebirth rather the hard way, the road to revealed power cannot go the easy route that has no conflict.  The workings of Set, while not necessary to the functioning of an ordinary stable reality, are signposts marking the way to a change of condition.

This is a road for revolutionaries, for kings, for spirit-workers in the shamanistic style who are torn to pieces and put back together by the spirits, for those who can afford to imagine a different world and for those who can't afford not to.  Those are the people who need Set, or something like him.

I tend to figure most people don't fall into either group, and they can choose which they feel more aligned with - or something else entirely.  Theological conformity isn't that important.

U is for Unexpected

One of the basic tools of humor is surprise.

Juxtapose something expected with something surprising and bam, there's that funniness creeping in, the sudden jolt of rupture.  There's the unexpected, and the unexpected often makes people laugh.

Religion - if really done right - often works the same way.

Doing the work, really doing things, eventually it makes shapes that will shift suddenly.  And religions are work, they come with obligations.  (This isn't to say that everyone who claims a given religion is good at doing its work - but that doesn't change the nature of the thing.)

If the work is to comb through one's life in order to figure out how to be better to other people, well, eventually some realisation is going to demand a change.  Sometimes a hard one, and that's not going to be expected, it's a result of doing the work.  The same for any other religious principle - of adhering to the rules, of developing personal strength, of whatever else.  It changes people.

Initiations are of course one of the more dramatic forms of changing people, and they - also - work with the unexpected.  The sudden putting together of pieces to make for the moment of sudden realisation.

If it just keeps being the same, all the time, nothing calling for change, for deeper work, for more dedication, for more something...

... is it really having any effect?

J is for Juxtaposition

It's not unrelated to syncretism, actually, the setting of things against each other to form a contrast, the way contrasts and shifts produce enlightenment.

But it matters, really.

It matters to see that the crown is placed - the plants of south and north bound together - by both Heru and Set, that order and chaos combine to produce this whole.  It is not something achieved by one overwhelming the other, but a tandem function, strength as an individual and the collective heart of the community.

When a symbolism works with contrasts - the bird and the snake, red and black, male and female, whatever other things are framed as dynamic balance with each other - there are always those stark places where one meets the other face to face.  And those places matter, fundamentally.

One of the things that bothers me about my surrounding culture is the mutually annihilatory contrasts.  Good and evil, say, that whole Manichaean god-and-devil dance in which each is attempting to destroy the other, or whatever the fuck that's on about, and the world doesn't actually work that way at all so it all comes across as trying to turn reality into a big game of chess to me.  There Are Two Sides, They Are White And Black, And There Is Nothing But War.  Doesn't look a whit like the real world to me, so whenever I run into this kind of cosmology I'm at a loss.  It's like talking to people who are seriously waiting for their Hogwarts admission letter, really.

The real world is predator and prey, and there is no mutual annihilation there.  If the prey 'loses', vanishes away, obviously the predators die off.  If the predators vanish, the prey die too - starving in the winter because there are too many of them to survive on the forage, if nothing happens because their weaker members are no longer culled.  You put those together and you don't get Good Vs. Evil World-Annihilating Cagematch, you get a self-balancing ecosystem.  You get synergies and transformations and all kinds of interesting and flashy stuff.

That's what real juxapositions produce, this flash of something larger, more complex, in the give and take available.  These create edges, liminal spaces, in which one can find transformational magic.  This and that has its realm of thisandthat, even when it is an interplay of opposites.

O is for Obligations

A post I made on a message board got reposted - with permission - recently, and made a bit of a stir in a certain corner of the pagan blogs.  And part of that was, I think, that I talked about the big scary O: obligations.

It's all well and good to say you want a relationship with a god or goddess, that you want to be special and important in your religious practices, but that's not something that comes for free.  You may love and adore that particular entity to amazing levels, but your adoration does not obligate a response.  If you want a close relationship, there's going to be something you have to do.

"But the gods love us!" some people cry, in that usual kum-ba-yah kind of way.  But when love is generic - when you appeal to the concept of agape in the divine - it isn't that sort of intense, personal connection that some people want to have.  That's not "my god loves me because I am me", that's "my god loves because I am", and that's a different sort of thing.

The sort of thing that gets personal connection is personal work, personal dedication.  It doesn't just come for the wanting.  It doesn't matter how much you want if you're not stand-up enough to do what it takes to get it.  (And really, if you fill yourself up with desperate need, there are plenty of entities out there that will say "That looks like a tasty snack!" and will happily impersonate whatever deity you fancy in order to nosh on your spicy brains.)

I was seventeen or so when I fell in love with a god, and you know something?  He wouldn't fucking speak to me.  There were things that I needed to do to be worth His time (one of which was "get out of this Wicca phase and start actually paying attention", as it happens).  And that's only the beginning.  It doesn't get easier with more intimacy, and people don't always get what they want immediately.

And even if it's not a relationship with a deity that commands obligations, there are obligations that come with religion itself.  Some of those are devotional or ritual acts.  Some of those are social behaviour standards.  Some of them have to do with relationships and how one conducts them, with care for friends and family, with relationships one forms with entities native to the unseen realms.  Some of them have to do with self-care and taking responsibility for one's own actions.  There are various things which, if you say you are part of a religion, if you just don't do them, eventually people will wonder if they can take you at your word.  (At a bare minimum, if you, say, routinely defraud people, you're bad at most religions.  Incompetence may not be a sin, but it's certainly not a virtue.)

The sort of relationship you have with anything has dependencies on the sort of work you're able to do for the relationship.  Just like you're not gonna be an appealing date if you never bathe, never pick up the check, and never show up on time, you're not gonna be an appealing devotee if you don't do things that a deity values, offer useful veneration, or otherwise act like a worthwhile investment.  The first responsibility of deities is to maintain the useful running of the cosmos, and if you're not contributing to that actively, you're not helping, and you're not going to get the sort of personal caring attention that gets given to people who actually contribute something to the work.  (You might get the sort of personal smiting attention that gets given to people who are actively in Someone's way, but that's probably not what you're hoping for.)

Religion isn't something that you put on like a set of earrings and then get showered with adoration from the cosmos.  It comes with obligations, and the deeper you want to go, the more you'll be expected to carry.


Related reading, this post that I saw at Aedicula Antinoi while I was thinking about writing this one.

A is for Authorship and Authority

Today, my first book went on sale. (So if any of the people who said they wanted to know when I got something published are still following this blog, there it is.)

There's something about having a book out that makes me feel like a grownup. As if, up until this point, I was just another amateur kicking around chewing the fat about religion, and now, all of a sudden, I'm filed as The One With The Information. Or at least some information.

It's a little uncomfortable, as a feeling. It's not like the fact that I study this stuff in depth hasn't gotten me a few people who wanted to fling themselves at me and take me as their guru or something. It doesn't matter that I'm not looking for disciples, there are a few people who'll come at me with the "You're so smart! You know so much! I am pathetic and low! Take me on!"

(If you are pathetic and low, I don't want you.)

I mean, yes, there's something there that I think is valuable; if I didn't think that I wouldn't have spent years researching, writing, and putting together the thing. I think it's got a lot of information, and I think a lot of the information is pretty good.

But I'm still just a person. A person who wrote a book and sold the publishing rights to it, yes, but a person. The skills I used to put together the book are skills that people in general can acquire. The books I read to do the research for it are books that people in general can read (though honestly it takes a certain amount of monomania to get through a few of them). The fact that I did all that makes me something of an authority as well as making me an author.

But you, out there, you're your own critical authority too. You have responsibility to evaluate the books you read, not just venerate them and their authors. You get to figure out what works for you.

I can't do your work.

Imaginary

Holly of the Pervocracy is taking apart some internet weirdo named Roissy, who has put forward "tests" to evaluate female attractiveness and male attractiveness according to some wacked out fetish pick-up artist subculture paradigm.

It is ... very strange.

Especially since the usual suspect is in there arguing that the Conventionally Attractive Woman totally benefits from this detestible set of social upfuckery and thus if one wants to have a Conventionally Attractive Woman one must learn these rules.

Now, as I mentioned over there, to the extent that that's an accurate description of "club culture", it's a brilliant argument for never going to a club, but there's more than that going on. As Holly notes in one of the previous posts she's written about this nonsense, the nonsense ignores the huge number of ordinary guys with partners. All of the Conventionally Attractive Women are off clubbing, right!

Er, no?

Unless, of course, one defines Conventionally Attractive Woman - and Roissy might - as someone who goes to trendy clubs. (I am pretty sure that people who go to goth and punk clubs don't count.)

I mean, I know more than a few women who pretty much meet the basic standards for Conventionally Attractive Women as I understand them - fairly thin, non-invisible bust, dress in an attractive manner that is compatible with their figure, and ... I don't think I know anyone who goes to trendy clubs. Or if I do they consider it the sort of shameful secret that doesn't get mentioned in polite company. Closest I'd get is people who go to see favorite bands in clubs on occasion, in which case the trendiness of the club is completely irrelevant. Hell, I've done that, to see a goth rock group. I have no idea if the place I went for that is fashionable, though the bartender didn't know how to mix a lime rickey and I had to tell her.

But it comes around to that thing that got said there - to get a patriarchy-approved woman apparently one has to become a patriarch. Okay, that's as sensical a thing as any.

What I don't understand is why this is an appealing relationship goal to have, at least as anything other than "Look at me I have a hot chick hur de hur hur". I mean, I know that humans are profoundly status-driven in ways that often fly under the radar, but that particular status jockeying just eludes me entirely in its appeal.

Somewhere recently I read a chunk of a post that went something like, "Nerdy types are rarely popular because they don't want to go to the effort of popularity" or something like it. Which, well, makes sense. The goalstates are different. And setting aside the fact that I was cast as the smart one, not the pretty one, even if I had had the option of being the pretty one type, I didn't want to pay the cost.

And there is a cost. Maybe it's a more obvious cost to me as someone who had that weird outsider fringe status but maybe could have paid that pound of flesh if I had had the social acumen to do it - but the cost is immense.

I don't even mean the time and money investment required to manage the beauty ritual, make sure all of the shaving-required bits are shaved, mastering the skills of makeup and coiffure, and so on, though that's certainly a cost - if nothing else an opportunity cost on acquiring other skills or spending that money.

I mean the social cost.

Let's say I go to the effort to convert my more-or-less Conventionally Attractive Woman presentation into something that hits the PUA crowd's buttons, something I could probably do because I have the privilege of having a base template that is fashionable. Let's even say that I would enjoy presenting myself that way, so that we can neglect the mental stress of investing myself in something that is at best neutral to me on the appeal front. Let's even go into the wild hypothetical mode and suggest that this hypothetical me is unpartnered.

This hypothetical me would have to deal with more creepy approaches. Real-world me is sufficiently nondescript in clothing and presentation that she can fade into the background and read a book on the bus rather than having to regularly fend off the inappropriate and unwelcome strangers who will occasionally glom onto a woman and try to demand her attention.

This hypothetical me would be attractive to pick-up artist types. Real-world me has not been subjected to that sort of attention since the regularity of sexual harassment in junior high school.

These costs are magnified by my experience of sexual assault, which makes unwelcome male attention extremely stressful. My particular (major) sexual assault has its roots in my being a wallflower, in part, so perhaps if I had achieved Conventionally Attractive Fourteen-Year-Old it would not have happened. But that sort of breaks the boundaries on this speculation, because if that were the case I would not be the person writing this blog at all, even in hypothetical.

This hypothetical me would be perceived as not unattractive but unlikely to be suitable as a partner by the sort of men I do find attractive - because the assumption runs very strong in certain subcultures that a woman who is not only conventionally attractive but who puts significant effort into the elective portions of conventional attractiveness will only interact with those men either to demand service or for purposes of mockery. I might well have to go to extra effort to integrate myself with these communities - which can be doable, I know and have known several women who cared about fashion and similar matters who have done so - but it would still be a cost.

So, yeah, I could theoretically remake myself to gain certain forms of status in certain subcultures, because I'm thin, could probably pad out a bra a bit if I wanted to, and know a bit about what flatters me physically. But I don't see that I'd derive much benefit from the "patriarchy-approved woman" template, so I can afford to be lazy on that front and pursue other forms of status.

It just always bemuses me to be invisible.

Though it often beats the hell out of being seen by some people.

Listening

And here is my response to The Adult Privilege Checklist, now.

When my mother was up visiting, she had a lot of commentary, as she will do, and one of the things she said was something scornful about Inappropriate Parent-Child Relationships, specifically that my father wanted to "give me a vote" in how family things were conducted.

I have no idea if he did this. I have no idea if she is correct that this fell into the weird dynamic he had with his mother. I have no memory of any such thing, but I don't believe I necessarily would have.

What I remember, though, is that I always felt that my father took my opinions seriously, even when he disagreed or thought that I was uninformed or not able to think things through. And I know that she thought that this was inappropriate, was "treating me like an adult", as opposed to treating me like, as I thought at the time, a person.

It frustrated me no end as a child to not be treated as a person. To know that my input was dismissable solely because of my age. I carried that resentment into my teen years, and it got sharper and more bitter when I saw adults doing things that I had never been idiot enough to do and still figuring that they knew better than me.

(I came to some sort of political consciousness during the Reagan Administration. One afternoon I drew Federal budget pie charts with made-up numbers, trying to figure out where I thought the money could go, because I was sure that I could make the budget work right. I never knew where to find the figures; if I had had the internet back then, I would probably have gone looking so I could make it work. This was naive - but it also came with this intense need to be taken seriously in my contributions, and a need to think deeply about those things that entered my awareness. Also, I was a weird, weird kid.)

I've settled into being a sort of attachment-parenty mum, and I think that's settled into the whole 'listening' thing that was what I wanted as a child. It's hard, when Little Foot wants to be held all the time, or when she's fussy and I can't figure out what's wrong, or whatever else, but I can't bear for her to feel unheard. I recognise that she didn't ask to be here, or to have a wet diaper, or to be maybe-probably-teething, or any of the other indignities of infancy, and that she has definite opinions about the world. (One of the latest appears to be "Cats are fascinating!")

And we talk a lot of theory about what's best for Little Foot. She's four months old and we talk about schooling already, and I wonder if I could bear homeschooling/unschooling/whatever her without going mad from the sheer pressure of parenthood (and look at my spiritual teacher/mentor, who likewise was not sure she could do this, but took up homeschooling her special-needs child because the school system could not serve him well). There's a maternity-and-childhood consignment store, and the gelfling (my husbands' wife) has commented we can bring kids there and say, "You get to pick one piece of clothing" or whatever, and everything is under ten bucks, and that addresses parts of the whole nonconsensuality of clothing thing. I plot out how best to raise her without my twitchinesses around food, whether it's possible to raise a child more socially ept than I am granted that I don't have skills to convey to her, and similar. I think about how to feed her, how to nurture her, how to make sure she's aware of her own self-possession. I remember the story of the little girl who snapped "SAFEWORD!" when people wouldn't stop tickling her, and think about how to teach that.

I cuddle her when she cries, which is not often, as we try to be attentive to her needs and she spends much time curled up with one parent or another. My lion currently has her downstairs bouncing on the exercise ball because she wouldn't go down to sleep and I took her last night; earlier I heard her laughing and burbling as my liege read his flash cards for school out loud to her (and apparently she was grabbing them out of his hands and putting them down in the 'done' pile, having figured out that the cards go from the pile on the left to the pile on the right in the game that Da was playing). As she grows older, she will grow broader opinions, she will think about politics and the world, she will be frustrated by, among other things, department stores and counters that are too tall to see over and shopkeepers who look past her when she has a question (to remember particularly persistent things from my own childhood).

There's a lot I can't plan for, because I don't know what she will have to say once she gets words to say it in. (Or signs. I've been doing intermittent bits of babysigns at her, though she's still too young to get it, just so there's context for her to get it from when she hits the right cognitive stage.) And I have to accept that, and remember that my first job as mama is to listen, not to force her into the space that is convenient for me to allocate.

She tells me what she needs, when I pay attention. The trick will be not breaking that.

Unwritten Letters

Dear ____________,

You don't know me. We met in passing at your son's first wedding; you asked something about the logistics while I was setting up the centrepieces on the reception tables, I answered you, and when I was done with my task I fled to the bride's room to hide from you. I'm sure you figured out that I was his lover when they insisted on taking photographs that included me (as well as my husband) over your objections. I'm sure that it was not lost on you that we helped clean up the place as if we were part of the basic logistics, not merely guests, and were the ones who said the last goodbyes as all the wedding guests drifted away.

There was a time you liked the idea of me, wanted to meet me - back when you thought of me as a human being. A fellow potter, perhaps, or someone who could provide useful advice. Someone who was important to your son, yes, and I suppose that was a part of why you said you were looking forward to the opportunity.

I have this thing, though, that I won't meet people under false pretences if I can possibly avoid it. I most particularly will not step under their roof with the expectation that I will be lying to them, and pretending to be anything other than his partner would be a deception. I have a particular sense of hallpeace that I will not be so easily brought to violate; it would be an insult and a dishonor to my host were I to do so.

I know that I stopped being a person to you as soon as you knew. I was no longer someone with a set of shared interests, someone who was a major presence in your son's life; I was a symbol of so many things gone wrong, and that symbol overwhelmed any human fellowship we might have had.

I know and understand that you were hurt badly and betrayed by a partner who was unfaithful to you. I wish I could tell you that I will not betray your son and be heard, or that his devotion to me was not a betrayal of his legal spouse. I do not know how to mend this at all, or even if it is mendable; it is certainly not anything I can touch, because you have made me your enemy whether I will it or not.

There is nobody in the world beyond my immediate family whose recognition matters more to me than yours; nobody I want more to acknowledge me as his wife. I think that you are one of the people who has mattered to him most in the world, which means your regard matters to me. It might be better for me if I could dismiss it as a matter of insignificance, but that is not within my power. I am vulnerable to you; I cannot say I like it, but I acknowledge it and accept it. My dedication to your son means that you have that gut shot available to you, and that is okay.

When he and I got married, we had long, long talks about who to invite. We brought in our community as witnesses, because marriage is a thing about community. I invited my father and my brother. He wound up inviting no relatives, because he could not expect you to understand. I know how much it meant to me to have my father there, especially recognising that he is not perfectly comfortable with the structure of my family. I wish we could have opened our ceremony to include you.

I wish I could spare him the pain of all this. Or at least that I could set my own pain and anxiousness aside and just hold him rather than be plagued with tearing weakness that means that he must comfort me instead of the other way around. Every time you and he talk, I see his pain and frustration, not just at your refusal to see me or your refusal to see him, but at losing you. I wish things were different, that he did not feel forced into a choice between his mother and his wife, that ... I just wish things were different.

I wish I could talk to you and put it right, never mind that what is wrong is in a place I could not touch if I tried. There is a part of me that fervently believes that if you could see us, spend a little time with us, get to know us and our family, that you might come to forgive us for not being the white picket fence family you wanted your son to have. I know this is a fantasy, a little dream world that I spin to make it seem like this could possibly be under my control and thus something I could fix, something that could fall into a realm I could affect. Something that I could change, make better. Something that I could heal.

I know that I cannot, and it may never be better, never be different. Which is why, while I may write you letters in my mind, I cannot send them.

Some Things They Don't Mention About Pregnancy

In honor of me now being officially past my official due date and also past my personally calculated because dammit I know when I ovulated due date, my long-pondered "Things they don't tell you about pregnancy" post.

May not apply to all pregnancies. Some assembly required. Contents may settle during shipping.

(Next time I do this, I totally want a t-shirt that says 'Contents may settle during shipping.')

* I seem to have swallowed my spare change.

First-trimester symptom: everything tastes like metal. Everything. Breathing tastes like metal. Faded out a bit after a while, but still has reappearances, like right at the moment as I'm typing this.

* Where did my seasonal allergies go?

This, this is wonderful. The horrible head cold I had during the worst of the morning sickness was the most miserably sick I've been in my life, but an entire better part of a year in which the tree sex didn't make me feel like crap is amazing.

* My joint pain went away too.

For someone who lives with chronic low-level ache and what my midwife elegantly referred to as "loose hips", the six or so months free of that was really nice. Of course my bad hip started popping again at the end of month eight, as if to make sure I didn't get my hopes up too high, but one can't have everything.

* Pregnancy update websites are probably not written with me in mind.

I first realised this when every single one of them I read one week saw fit to inform me that really, the major body change I was likely to notice around here was my breasts getting bigger, and that this was the best and most thrilling part of being pregnant.

The one that said something about my pregnancy now having lasted longer than any of my high school relationships was a nice garnish. (Gods, I hope not. Legalhusband and I have been together since I was sixteen.)

On the other hand, the Vegetable of the Week game was an excellent way to pass time. How to play Vegetable of the Week: Google "pregnancy week #" and see what article of produce the fetus is the same size as now.

* It turns out that 95% of the weird shit that happens and freaks me out is a normal pregnancy symptom.

Increased rate of heart flutters, say.

Skin tags, too.

* Your hair and nails will grow like whoa.

The nails thing is the part that throws me - as someone who had low thyroxin most of her life and is barely used to fingernails growing at a particularly noticeable rate, having to cut my nails all the time is almost upsetting in its "this is not normal" way. And it's even more fun now that I can't reach my feet.

Also, "Hair grows like whoa"? Includes pubic.

* Pregnancy is weirdly and subtly racialised.

Being someone who's in lefty-natural childrearing circumstances, I'm occasionally struck by how white things are.

By going to baby supply stores and having, on the wall, images of lots of babies and toddlers - all white, most blue-eyed.

By having people seriously suggest that the nipple-darkening during pregnancy is so babies can visually track the food source better, never mind that sight doesn't develop that clearly for a bit, mammals track by scent, and dude, where are you getting this bonus contrast concept from if you can't think of anyone other than a white person as human?

I just wow.

* Trying to get a ballpark figure for an appropriate amount of weight gain during pregnancy from the internet is not a good idea.

Take all of the crazy, interfering, I-know-better-than-you stuff that gets directed at pregnant women.

Take all of the crazy, interfering, I-know-better-than-you stuff that gets thrown around about weight and health issues.

Combine.

Or hit yourself in the head with a brick a few times. It's faster, and just as informative.

* Moods are not unstable. Moods are turned up to eleven.

Instead of "cranky" I was achieving "kill it and devour its heart that its lifeblood might sustain my offspring."

Instead of "I don't want to deal with this" I was achieving "I need to go live in a cave and contemplate the hopelessness of human interaction."

* Childbirth classes with any sort of natural bent will spend at least a quarter of the time in class talking about how to protect yourself from hospitals.

This is epically fucked up. Completely, totally, epically fucked up. Legalhusband and I would leave our childbirth class every time, exchange glances, and then he'd say, "I'm so glad we're not planning on a hospital birth. I'm so glad we don't have to go through that."

And this ranges from stuff like the friend of mine who went in for a post-term ultrasound to doublecheck that everything was okay and had the administering nurse lie to her in an attempt to panic her into admitting herself to be induced immediately to horrifying shit like a woman having her baby taken away because she refused a C-section.

They will lie. They will not talk about the risks of epidurals. They will insist on putting an IV shunt into your vein "just in case" and not mention that it's possible to refuse. They will pressure. This is why people hire doulas - when they can afford them - to help protect their families from the crushing stress and pressure. This is insane.

* Hospitals are insane. Did I mention?

If you had to go to a hospital to get a special blood test done to confirm that you were healthy enough to not have to go to a hospital for your delivery - consider the stressiness in the context of previous point please - what would you like to be hearing in the lab waiting room?

There was a television there, turned up too loud, of course, because this culture is sucktastic.

But what was playing on the television?

Medical programming, of course, it was the hospital.

What medical programming?

What would you put on?

What would you put on if you were a complete idiot?

How about a special on medical mysteries in which a family could not get treatment for their newborn's skeletal abnormality because the medical community wouldn't believe that it existed?

(Present in the waiting room: receptionist, three third-trimester women, and my liege, who had brought me there, looked at the television, and put in earplugs so he could study.)

* Heartburn can be bad enough to make you throw up.

'Nuff said.

* You will become a D&D dwarf.

The ability to detect the slightest of grades will suddenly appear. "This is an upslope." "Is it?" "Yes."

* Water is the best thing in the universe.

Go swimming. Take a bath. Get an inflatable tub that's deep enough to float the belly. It doesn't matter. Bathliness is next to godliness. I am totally composing this post in the tub.

I get in the water and all the pain and strain go away. And when I get out, I don't hurt for a while, because my muscles have had a chance to relax and unwind and rest a little, because water is totally supportive.

I am completely and totally convinced of the water ape period theory of human evolution. I found it convincing because of the whole, dude, where did our fur go thing, but experiencing pregnancy, and then experiencing pregnancy and water? Completely conclusive.

* How debilitating pregnancy is depends not merely on who you are, but random unknown factors that for all I know include the phase of the moon.

I went around and around on "Why can I climb the stairs without a problem today when I couldn't yesterday?" Damned if I know.

Pregnancy is hard physical labor, and the hard physical labor of it is completely invisible, so it's like an invisible disability only of course there's the giant belly so it's not invisible-invisible, it's just that it's implausible to people who haven't been there.

* No matter how crazy the experience makes you, everyone around you is crazier.

I've been in and out of tears. I've muttered about needing to be off my depression meds because of complications on SSRIs in the third trimester. I've wrestled with the fact that gestation takes all of my energy except enough to run the braingremlin that thinks I should be getting more done.

This is nothing compared to people around me.

In the birth class, the teacher told us that we should think about delegating someone to field all the "Is the baby there yet?" phone calls. To which one of my classmates said something to the effect of, "Who would do that?" I said, "Pregnancy makes people crazy. Not you. The people around you."

I went to a baseball game last Friday, minor league game 20 minutes from my house and probably 10 at the outside from the backup hospital. Was chatting with a woman with a toddler-in-stroller in the elevator back to the car.

"So when are you due?" she asked me.

"Monday."

My deadpan made her laugh nervously, and she said, "... cutting it a little close there, eh?"

Cutting it close? Is the baby going to erupt from me in a splash of drama during the seventh inning stretch? What?

* Relaxin feels so weird.

My pelvis is in, I think, four pieces, and every so often when I move it feels like it nearly falls apart. The muscles that are, of course, completely unused to holding my hips on are exhausted from the effort.

On the one hand, I'm glad it's all loose because it'll make it easier to expel the fishie. On the other hand, having my pubic bone pop near-audibly weirds me the fuck out.

* The belly is gyroscopic.

It does not like to change orientation. Rolling over in bed while nine months pregnant is a feat of athleticism worthy of a medal. The belly objects. If the process involves rolling over onto the back, there will be the moment of hazy, dizzy fatigue in which the vena cava is compressed which leaves one feeling like an upended box turtle. Begging for assistance at rolling over is embarassing but sometimes necessary.

* Sharp tearing pain in the foot is something that happens to a certain fraction of women in the third trimester.

It's caused by the normal pregnancy edema, and trying to talk to medical professionals about it appears to lead to flailing panic and lack of any clue of what to do. Also, it hurts like fucking hell.

* There will come a point at which the belly gets in the way of everything.

By everything, I mean everything.

I mean I can't pee without the belly getting in the way, it wants to exist in the same space as my thighs unless I take my clothes off so I can move the thighs out of the way. (Lately I've been taking my clothes off a lot.) And trying to pee on the diagnostic stick at my regular medical checkups? HAH. It took me a couple of sessions to be able to consistently find the piss.

For a while getting places by crawling worked better (especially steep staircases, like the one at my liege's house). Now ... the belly is in the way.


I'm sure I'm missing a few things, but that will do for a nice overview.

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.

Asking the Wrong Questions

One of the things that I find most difficult to deal with are the wrong questions that people ask me (or ask in my vicinity). Things where ... in order to really answer that question, I have to dig back into the assumptions that make the question possible in order to point out that they're misapplied, inaccurate, or just plain wrong. And people are resistant to having their axioms argued with, a lot of the time, and reject, mock, dismiss, or otherwise just fail to adjust to actual encounters with reality.

One of the places this gets particularly egregious is around subject of polyamory. Everyone has their vision of what someone like me's life is like, and very few of these visions have even a passing relationship with reality. I mean, it's a running joke in some poly circles that the universal response to being tagged as someone polyamorous is, "Do you all sleep in the same bed?", which is, of course, a veiled enquiry about the target's sex life.

But try to take that apart, and you have not only the sex-centric nature of the question, the invasion of personal space required to immediately leap to asking a veiled question about sex, but more fundamental things like the assumption that 'you all' actually means something.

Taking apart 'you all'? There's the One Big Relationship notion, some sort of Stranger In a Strange Land collective mishmash. Probably with transitive relationships, in which my partners are presumed to be partnered to each other in some fashion, in order to form this magical 'you all'. And who's in and who's not? And ...

... and my husbands have another wife, and I'm not married to her or romantically involved with her, and is she a part of my 'you all' like we're in the same family unit? Is my long-distance partner, with whom I do not have a sexual relationship in any case, part of this entity known as 'you all', despite neither of my husbands having met him? How about my [legal] husband's long-distance partner and her husband - my ex (who has met my long-distance partner) - and their local poly family grouping, are they part of 'you all' despite being three thousand miles away and the posited bed being somewhat implausible by the laws of physics by this point? What is this 'you all', where are its boundaries, what does it mean?

I have three romantic relationships. Two of them are marriages. For the situations in which sharing a bed comes up as a relevant concept, all the people in the relationship share the bed. The value of 'you all' that actually has some bearing on reality is 'two', for which the scope for prurient investigation into the strange lives of other people rather fails on the 'strange' point.

I'm sure from that the astute reader can figure out some of where "How did you find someone to add to your marriage?" falls down, too. And I don't even have to go into the bit where I start jumping up and down and shouting about how people are not marriage accessories and why the fuck would I want to be munged onto someone else's relationship rather than having one of my own thankyouverymuch.

Though the rant would be a segue into "How do you share your partner?" where I either want to jump up and down and shout about how my partners are not my property to dole out or store in a trunk because I failed at kindergarten playtime or fume about how, no, actually, I'm not sharing a damn thing, my relationships are mine (and the relevant partner's) and someone who wants a piece of that can get their interloping arse kicked for 'em. They want a relationship with one of my partners, they can build their own rather than trying to cadge a piece of mine.

One of my favorites is "Why do you put up with that?" because I'm the one who refuses to consider monogamy. So I'm left with, "I'm ... putting up with ... being treated like someone who has input in her relationships? The problem is?" Of course, under this question is the sexist notion that women are intrinsically monogamous and men just want to fuck around and so any sort of open, poly, or nonmonogamous structure is for the benefit of teh menz and leaves teh wimminz suffering and alone and certainly never suggesting something like, "Why don't you go spend the day with your other wife because I can't stand having humans within about twenty feet of me right now?"

This is related to "What happened to you that you don't feel you deserve someone all to yourself?" Which I have been asked, in so many words, though it may have been a rhetorical question. And to which I could get nasty about the 'all to yourself' and the overwhelmingly broken social construct that one's romantic partner is the be-all and end-all of one's social interaction, but I don't generally bother, because I'm too busy wanting to snap people's heads off over their imaginary abuse wank fantasies.

"Why isn't one person able to meet your needs?" takes the nexus of presumed damage out of my past and plonks it in my current psyche, inventing some sort of greedy defective with a checklist of requirements, looking for other human beings to fill the niches created by projected deficiencies in each partner. There is one person able to meet my needs; me. Projecting that onto other people does not strike me as healthy. I'm not poly because I have 'needs' in excess of others'; I'm poly because my 'ooh, that person is shiny' meter shuts down at two serious relationships rather than one and I'm happier under those circumstances. (And I also learned - by painful experience - how to parse more subtle forms of shiny and fondness.) Related questions: "Why isn't your partner enough?", "What's wrong with your relationship?"

Or, "How can you think of bringing children into such an environment?", which mostly leaves me wondering what's wrong with a loving, stable family situation in which everyone is more or less supported in their sanity and emotional stability needs, work is well-distributed among the family members with reasonable flexibility, and people are happy with each other. I'm pretty sure that this is one of those really intensely veiled sex questions, predicated on parade-of-lovers and soap-opera drama, but I'm generally not interested in breaking my intrinsic boringness for long enough to dig that deep.

I seem to have gotten off on a run of the really annoying ones, rather than the just silly, which is unfortunate, but they do remind me of each other a lot so I suppose it's to be expected. Ah well. I think I've covered most of "What do you think this adds to your marriage?" before, aside from the whole, y'know, not having the single-relationship-plus-others model in the first place and not pursuing relationships for spicing.

And nobody comes right out and asks me how often I have sex, so I can't disabuse them of their notions of vast orgiastic parties every evening. I'm pretty sure my imaginary self gets laid a whole lot more than I do, and in much more exciting ways. I'm okay with that.

(Then there are the 'questions people don't ask but probably should instead of just running on the assumption that they know the answer', like, "Are you hitting on me?", "Are you into casual sex?", "Are you bisexual?", "Are you looking for someone new right now?", "Are you trying to convince me that I should open my marriage?" Sigh. I mean, some of the comments that come in on that are just plain intended to be nasty - the one I remember was full of how clearly emotionally unstable I had to be to be 'sleeping with all of these different people'.)

The whole illusory assumption thing is wearying, really. It's hard to be funny about it in the long run, just because of being imaginary all the time. It'd be nice to have a bottomless well of funny to throw at some of this stuff, but instead I have a bottomless pit of aggravation, occasionally leavened with funny.

More Heat Than Light

Recently, a friend of mine posted to a local board looking for a roommate. Like people who do that sort of thing will do, she posted about what she was looking for in a roommate - which happened to include not having children.

And there was a resulting kerfluffle, in which one person replied suggesting (after some 'people who don't want to live with children are defective in some way' and 'why aren't you willing to modify your landlord's property to be more childsafe?' comments) that this was the sort of thing they expected of polyamorous people and their dubious state of priorities, that they'd rather have their orgies than have children around.

And I'm sitting here consulting with the belly, hey. Ha.

But seriously.

(Not even getting into the whole "... what the hell is wrong with not wanting to room with children?" thing here. I'm not capable of being surprised that a twenty-to-thirtysomething urban techie roomshare happens to have childfree people in it and, y'know, there's nothing wrong with reality here.)

This sort of thing just ... quietly exhausts me. In that 'nibbled to death by ducks' way. Because while it's not one of those Grand Oppression things, or even a major big deal, just the sort of wearing grinding everyday grit in the gears that means there's so much less available for dealing with the world. Emotional entropy, lost as heat.

I'm coming to think that this is one of the hardest things to convey about being one-down (or more-down) from normal in the social ranking thing. The way that ... it's not always someone's kids being taken away, or an eviction notice, or a punch in the face, or a death. And it's not always the major setups that say, no, you can't get married, or no, you have to decide what's safest to mark down on this form as your sex, or having to go the long and ugly way around for an accessible entrance, or all those other things that are the legacy of a system passively constructed in a manner hostile to people like you.

It's the middle stuff.

The stuff where it's clear that someone's basically hostile to people-like-you, may not have the power to do anything significant with it (though oftentimes, horribly, these people do) but just want to make sure you have an emotionally difficult day. A little more stress, a little more awareness of hostility, maybe even a little less safe.

But oh, it's just some person on a forum, or some overheard conversation, or something like that. It's not like it's hurting you, people will say; and it's not like it's the system keeping you down, the system isn't alive and argumentative like a person, so it's safe to rail against. It's just ... a little more friction, not anything worth paying attention to. Sticks and stones, you know, sticks and stones. This stuff isn't real, it's at worst a little friction.

But thermodynamics hits the emotions too. And the more the world wears away, the more people have to grind against these abrasive notions about who we are, for whatever values of who we are are being scraped at, the more just gets lost. The energy is gone, drifting away into nothingness, unrecoverable: the price of entropy. And that's energy that could have healed the world, maybe, or at least just been better able to deal with the real nasty shit out there, or the tedious grind of the impersonally cruel system.

I don't even know if I'm making any damn sense. It's not about being poly, or childfree, or anythign or everything else: it's about the hurt of being in a world where there's this constant exhausting pecking away, where any random person might just say something randomly hostile, where that's normal, unless one seeks communities specifically to protect oneself against that - and even there, there will be the moments that someone says something that grinds a little more grit into something the space wasn't defining as part of its protection.

Attacks I can deal with. Systems I can rail against and change.

People? People are harder.

Living the Mystery

Another Pagan Values Month post, now, which may be a wee bit more coherent than the last one.

I'm going to talk about mystery religion.

This is a matter of particular relevance to initiatory religions such as traditional Craft lines, but it's not unimportant to the reconstructionist lines either. A value most often explored in mystery work is the experiential exposure to the ineffable, and this is something that a lot of modern pagans value highly - as I mentioned yesterday, the whole concept of no intercessor is one of the things that a lot of pagans feel strongly about at some level.

First, a little terminology definition.

A mystery is, at its most straightforward, something which cannot be explained accurately; it can only be experienced, and afterwards offered explanations can actually make sense. Mysteries are not limited to the mystical or spiritual, though the ones that aren't are rarely described as mysteries, and the ones that are common human experience (sex, say) are often spiritualised by at least some people. The Greeks - who coined the term and set the stage for how we think of it - recognised two classes of mystery, the greater and the lesser. Lesser mysteries can be fucked up with spoilers, like a movie with a twist ending. Greater mysteries are immune to that sort of thing, because whatever experience is being evoked cannot be broken with partial preknowledge.

"Greater" and "lesser" may be misleading; I consider learning to turn while skiing a greater mystery. It's also my standard explanation for what a mystery is, so I will tell the story in brief: the one time I went downhill skiing, my parents sat me down and talked about their ski experiences, and explained to me how to turn. The explanation they gave was, "You go down, then up, then down." And they told me I would not understand this until I did it. I thanked them for their useless advice, went skiing, fell over a few times, and then I went down, and then up, and then down. And, as the koan ends, hearing this, the man was enlightened.

And those of you who have done downhill skiing will probably nod and understand this story entirely, because you have partaken of the Mystery; those of you who haven't will nod and smile and, perhaps, thank me for my useless advice.

We, obviously, know very little about ancient mysteries, because we haven't been down that hill. Some mysteries, such as the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries, had huge populations of initiates, all of whom were earnestly sworn to utter secrecy about the content of the ritual. In other cases, though, we know a great deal about what was going on at the point that the mystery happened - but not necessarily enough to be sure we can reconstruct the mystery and have it happen again. We can try, but we can't be sure it will work.

(This actually came up in a conversation with a Canaanite reconstructionist a few years ago, who had done one portion of a well-recorded ancient ritual, and had a fellow practitioner say, "That was great, let's do the whole mystery next year!" In the end, my advice, which she wound up agreeing with, was to try adding factors from the historical record into what they actually did, and if the mystery happened, well, now they'd know the secret and could honestly say the time after that that this was a mystery initiation. If it didn't happen, they'd know they were missing something.)

Again, historically speaking, the mysteries were often presented as gifts from the gods, sacred treasures to enlighten, instruct, or transform the initiates - who might be the local citizenry, who might be devotees of the god who gave the mystery to the people, who might fit some other, more complicated criteria of citizenship, heritage, affiliation, role within the community. Initiates might be aware of each other as a sort of semi-secret society, or might have no further connection to each other than the shared experiential knowledge.

Now let us transfer to the modern day.

Many modern pagans are interested in experiential knowledge in various forms. I submit that this is one of the reasons for the popularity of modern Craft religion, as many of the principles thereof are rooted in the manifest world rather than the commonly interpreted as transcendent values of Christianity. (It is, of course, not this simple, and the treatment of Christianity as purely transcendent is erroneous. But that's off to the side, a bit.) I wrote, elsewhere, at one point, about Neb.y, that while He is not the storm, if one cannot encounter Him within the storm, He's not likely to be terribly findable, because the storm is an expression and manifestation of what Neb.y is. This is experiential knowledge; most pagan gods have similar manifestations that can be touched, felt, or known (and what Egyptian woman is not honoring Hetharu when she does her makeup?).

An interest in experiential knowledge almost inevitably leads to the Mysteries.

In many reconstructionist circles, people who claim to be performing the Mysteries are considered pretty fringe. The studious religion-with-homework attitudes of reconstruction tends to be very logic-brained, unlike the intuitive experience of the Mystery -- and, of course, we don't know how the Mysteries were conducted, for the most part. Someone who claims to be able to initiate you into the Eleusinian Mysteries is probably talking through their hat or their nether regions, because we have no data.

This doesn't stop the interest, it just treats some forms of it with contempt, causing unfortunate fractures within the community. There have always been and likely always will be people with a mystical bent, who will be interested in some form of mystery work; if that pursuit is made incompatible with reconstruction, these people will be driven out of reconstructionist work. And I think that's a major loss, because the sorts of stuff people can pull out of mystery work is the stuff that keeps a religion alive and engaged with the experiential world. Those people who take a reconstructionist-leaning attitude towards the Mysteries - that the gods will reveal whatever mysteries they think appropriate when the time is right - barely manage to stay within the fold, at times. Coloring within the lines becomes almost de rigeur for reconstructionists, unless they have sufficient clout within a community that people will take their inventions and revelations as just as good as historical information. Needless to say, I think that's unfortunate.

Of course, the initiatory mystery religions have the opposite problem. Instead of losing people who are trying to find an authentic mystery experience, they are accumulating people who don't think their mysteries are important. The historical and sociological reasons for this are fiddly to track down, but a lot of it comes down to the difficulty of articulating what a mystery is. In a culture where things written down are highly significant, this experiential process is denigrated. Further, in a culture where people think they should have access to anything they want (heard anyone say "Information wants to be free!" recently?), there are a lot of people who are deeply hurt when they're not accepted as candidates to experience a particular mystery. Religion is for everyone, right? It's universal! Only ... not so much.

Mystery paths, historically speaking, were mostly offshoots and side paths, away from the mainstream religion, something that the particularly interested would seek out. For those who didn't want the mystery investment, there was the mainline stuff they could do. For Craft religions, well, there was no mainline for a good long time. And now the Craft community is bewildered by all of the people out there claiming to be a part of their traditions who haven't actually encountered the mysteries - because they're inventing the mainline stuff, partially out of dribs and drabs of what people have let slip, partly out of whole cloth. When one's rooted in the assumption that the mystery is fundamental, this winds up looking tremendously messy - as well as unrooted in not only the actual meaning of the traditions thus transformed, but, potentially, reality. (And some of the more fascinating neo-Wiccan groups have some fascinating notions about reality ....)

I would not be surprised, in the long run, if the pagan world winds up with more people like me, with one foot in the reconstructionist camp, and one foot somewhere in mystery religion of some sort (whether Craft or not) -- looking to bring the possibility of repeatable ecstatic experience back into that book-crusted treatment of religion on the one hand, and matching modern religious expressions with ancient roots on the other. I'm not thinking in terms of the sort of "[Culture in the blank] Wicca" or whatever else might come to mind here, where a loosely Wiccish structure is meshed with a selection of gods from a particular culture (though I consider Ellen Cannon Reed's Circle of Isis an excellent book, even if alien - in part because she passes the god sniff test in her descriptions, rather than doing the common bastardisations of myths to fit an alien structure) but an actual syncretistic form that is really neither reconstruction nor straight-up mystery based religion.

And now I am up far too late, and Neb.y is storming gloriously at last, so I am posting and appreciating my experiential world.

The Cleanup Crew

(Semi-set off by a thread of commentary at SM-F.)

A number of years ago I was working the local polyamory group's table on Pride Day. Just talking to people, being visible, that sort of thing. I bought a t-shirt (I think it was the one with 'Sharing is a family value' on the back), changed into it in the freedom of the clothing-semioptionality on the Common that day, and just chatted with people.

At one point I went for a walk through the crowds, possibly looking for a drink, as it was reasonably hot; possibly wanting to browse through the vendors. I wound up snagged for conversation by a woman who spotted the shirt and wanted to demand an explanation.

It's been long enough that I don't remember the details of her story precisely and have quite likely replaced them with archetype, but the truth of the matter is that this happens often enough for me to have an archetype to substitute for lost details.

She was a lesbian who had been, briefly, in a relationship with a married bisexual woman. She had been told that the woman's husband expected to be involved in their relationship as a matter of course, at least as a jacking-off observer, and, further, that if said husband was unhappy with the way their relationship was going, she would be dumped without a second thought. She found the interaction understandably disappointing and frustrating, and because she had been told that that was a perfectly normal way of conducting polyamory, widely accepted within the community, was more than a little pissy about the entire thing and, I rather suspect, wanted to know why the assholes were invading her Pride event.

About half the resulting conversation consisted of me assuring her that no, it didn't have to work that way. That everything they'd said about how that's what polyamory means was a lie, in fact, by the simple fact that plenty of people don't do that sort of thing. Much of the rest was talking about what I do, in matter of fact terms, peppered with more assurances: no, I don't expect everyone else to do it that way. No, I don't think that I'm a better person because of this. No, my way isn't What Polyamory Means either, it's just what I do. No, it doesn't bother me that she wants a monogamous relationship, I think that people should have the sorts of relationships that work for them.

I think, though I'm not sure, that we parted with her somewhat baffled by the weirdness of humanity, but at least familiar with the fact that the poly community consists of more than entitled bisexual women and the creepy voyeurs they're married to.

Another time I got into a throw-down fight that I don't think escaped beyond the bottle of the poly community with someone who wanted to create an organisation claiming to speak for the interests of polyamorous people - that was not actually about polyamory at all, but about a certain left-anarchist set of politics that he assumed was the reason people were poly, because who would have multiple relationships who wasn't interested in Breaking Down The System and proving the superiority of their liberationist worldview? I hammered on consent, that he did not speak for me unless I gave him permission and I explicitly denied him permission, and that no, I was not interested in subscribing to his newsletter until he snarled about evil reactionaries who had destroyed his happy fluffy vision of what Polyamory Was All About and were just there to subvert Teh Movement and probably didn't have more than one partner anyway and finally, blissfully, shut the fuck up. I hope he took his sooper-speshulness somewhere pleasant so he could be superior in a more congenial environment.

I get aggravated by the whole thing. I write about pretty much this thing when I wrote about the word 'lifestyle', pointing out that some people hook into Gor Is The Way What I Want Is Okay and try to universalise it, as well as, from the flip side of that particular kink perspective, the people who have an ideology of universal female superiority and abuse any woman who doesn't agree. Hell, I explicitly drew attention to someone making up just-so stories about an anti-BDSMer once upon a time, because someone claiming to be on my side being a fucking hypocrite does me no favors.

And this is the thing. My polyamory, my kink, my religion, my whatever else, these do not make me sooper-speshul. To the extent that I may be sooper-speshul, it's because sooper-speshulness is my birthright as a human being, and expecting everyone to bow down before it is unrealistic; if we were all bobbing and genuflecting to the sooper-speshul all the time we'd never get anything done 'cos there just isn't the time. Yeah yeah yeah namaste but the onions still need hoeing.

A couple of weekends ago I got into a long conversation about sex and power and individual choice and similar matters, and among the things that came up was using kinkspace to recreate and reprogram a trauma. And there was a story of someone who did this on a second date, which horrified all of the kinksters (and everyone else for that matter) in the room, even (perhaps especially) those of us who had done some sort of work of that sort in a controlled environment with trusted partners. There were discussions with people who had been interested in BDSM until they ran into someone who used it abusively, who wanted assurance that their perspectives on the existence of abuse was justified. There was exploration of what it meant to do power exchange sex in the context of an ethic that does not tolerate the bending of the head to accept shackles from the outside. (And I did not talk about the time, in a similar context, that I said I refused to submit my life-force to an ethic that required me not to do d/s, that I was too settled and secure in my power to put up with being lesser like that.)

There are no cure-alls and panaceas; there are only people working out what works for them. I can scream my story into the void all I want, but I have to take care to not drown out the stories of others, the people who do it differently. Monocultures die in plagues.

I've spent too long cleaning up spaces that have been damaged by people selling their social and sexual snake oil. "Take this, and your problems will be solved!" "This is the way the best people do it!" "This is just the way things are!"

In the memory of that confused and hurt woman at Pride, who went away maybe a bit more confused but also maybe a bit less hurt, I will always strive to be part of the cleanup crew.

Foolish Inconsistency: Also a Hobgoblin Of Small Minds

So here's the thing.

People get to define their own lives. People get to define their own narratives. This is one of the perks of being people: this whole own mind, own life, own decision, own responsibility thing.

This is one of the reasons that I have been railing about how reprehensible it is that the anti-BDSM crowd keeps making up little just-so stories and lies about motivations and false images of what the life of a female submissive is really like and not listening to the actual narratives of actual real people who don't agree with them. The fantasy is not more important than reality.

It is no less reprehensible for a kinkster to do this to one of them. If you want your own narrative, give everyone - even your ideological enemies - the space to define themselves.

And stop being a smug, condescending asshole. There are too many of them in the world as it is, and we're over quota on our side.

Actually, there was something I hadn't said

It was an odd beginning.

I had spent the day in screaming rage, pacing in frustration, gesticulating broadly, trying to work my way through the seething tangle of emotions that a dying relationship had mired me in. Eventually, exhausted, I flung myself down on the couch, and he asked me if I wanted a hug. I don't remember how I responded - probably with a grunt and shrug - and he got up, moved to the other end of the couch, and put his arms around me, pulling me gently to rest my head on his shoulder.

I sobbed.

When they got up to leave, he gathered me into another hug, holding on longer than friendship, just wanting me well and hale and whole again. As I stepped back, I thought about the feel of his body against mine, thought about long conversations swapping stories, discussions of religion, all the other things.

And, anxiously, with memories of a truly bad relationship that had started on the rebound to keep me sober, I started to flirt with him, a little, quietly, trying to feel out whether my reactions were attraction or not, exploring things quietly. When I got more serious, I made sure to get his partner's permission; she said, when I said I wanted to flirt some more, "Oh, please do. It might cheer him up."

He was mired in a complicated tangle of helpless depression; my early explorations had gone unnoticed entire. When I got more overt, I was not sure still if they were perceived; he can be hard to read at the best of times, and the wrenching low-affect of the consuming melancholia made sure the times were not the best.

One night, he kissed me, and we snuggled a while, and I crashed on his couch reasonably contented. When he brought me home the next day, after a reasonably pleasant gals'-day-out with his partner and some other friends, we talked about relationship histories, patterns, where we were coming from, what we were looking for. We agreed that a reasonably stable fling would be a nice thing for each of us, just something light and undemanding and friendly.

In the ensuing snogging, I dropped far enough submissive to be completely nonverbal. When he realised this, and realised that he did not have explicit consent for what he was inclined towards, he dragged me back out of that trance-state to ask.

I stumbled on words, and eventually found, "It probably would have been okay at the time, but I don't know about afterwards."

"Yeah, I thought that might be the case."

It was a thrilling, frightening experience, to go that deep with so little context; somewhere in the years we had known each other, in the comfort he had given me, in the stories we'd traded, we'd built a trust as well as a chemistry that let me simply drop into his arms. Perhaps if I'd thought about it at the time I'd have realised that the whole friends-with-benefits idea probably wasn't going to work out that way in the long-term.

We talked a great deal, working through things as up-front as we could. I talked about my assault experience and the flashbacks and traumas of that. We discussed limitations and agreements with our respective other partners, and spent several nights together, curled up skin-on-skin, hungry for flesh and holding, no matter how difficult, to our agreement to refrain from intercourse.

I asked, for when those agreements might be relaxed, that we not have sex without me having a whole night with him, to hold on, to take comfort in case the demons came for me - because the assault demons come strongest on first times with a new lover. In times of lust when I might have discarded that desire, he would murmur in my ear that he had promised me a night, and he would not go back on that; that was what I needed to be safe, and that was what I would have.

First declarations of love were made before we got to the fully vested 'benefits' part of the friends-with-benefits, an almost hissed triune, "I love you" followed with "What I tell you three times is true" that made him tilt his head back and close his eyes with the intensity of it.

When we got our night, he held me gently for a long time, feeling the fear rippling in me as the demons circled. I watched him, watched his eyes, full of love and concern and caretaking as he slowly tried to ease the fear, to let me relax, felt myself sliding into that altered state again, just a little, into a place where I could consciously choose to trust enough to work through the fear, unlock the chains of the trauma, and embrace. I saw the spark of joy in his eyes, dark and wild, when the fear left me, and we were able to be with each other without having to wrestle my old terrors.

Physicality was easy for us; so was that slip into that gentle cradled wild space that I so readily circled around with him, that twist into altered consciousness, mind suddenly expanded to fill an entire universe full of stars to match the hungry darklight I could see in him. We talked about kink, about sex, about relationships, about desire, about dreams and goals, about all these things, trying to find the place we could have in each other's lives.

One night, shaking with fear of rejection, I looked up at him and asked, softly enough to be bare more than a mumble, if he would be willing to have a d/s relationship with me.

It was a while later, when I was having one of my fits of anxiousness about having my sexuality and my preferences drive, shape, and command the form of the relationship, I asked him if he had ever considered anything like this before.

"It had never occurred to me."

The Marrying Kind

I went on one of my "Well, I'm behind again" runs through the blogs and livejournal and came across a couple of posts about relationships and marriage, which of course is one of the umpty things on my mind at the moment. (I'm more preoccupied with depression, celiac diet, and wrestling with work, but marriage is at least mostly more cheerful.)

One of the things that I've been chewing on is the space between the private and the community; marriage is a liminal thing, really. And where the boundaries on community are.

And it's hard to write about the stuff in my head. It's odd, the way marriage is much more a publically stated thing than, say, my d/s, but the d/s is mostly easier to write about. But there's the thing where a marriage -- at least an unmarked case thereof -- doesn't require much in the way of explanation. I can say "my husband" and it just floats off on discourse, and maybe something gets misapprehended because some people have dippy notions about what that means, but for the most part that doesn't even hit undertow.

A bit of my brain wants to make wedding plans right now. Work out the format, the structure of asking people to witness, the contract. It's been kicked into my mind because of poking at the question of rings and their design, and it's not shaking loose easily. And it's maybe early (though some people do much more long-term planning on such things), and it's certainly busy, and yet ...

... I fret about things. Like trying to navigate the nightmare of parents, who might well have been happy about our respective first marriages, but have varying opinions on the validity of the second. I want to talk to my brother about the nightmare of trying to figure out the lowest-drama solution for dealing with my mother. (My brother, dear sane fellow that he is, took my announcement of my engagement with a, "Congratulations. I guess I should meet this person sometime, huh?")

And maybe it'd be easier to do the private little oathgiving and ring exchange with a few loving hecklers as witnesses, but I'm too much of a liturgist and ritualist to have that feel like it works for me. Easier to just skip the whole question of what to tell the parents, if anything, and have it come up when it comes up, if ever, easier for someone whose mind doesn't have the same shape as mine.

And an acquaintance just came out poly to his parents, someone who's been poly for long enough that his children, half a generation or so younger than me, were raised in a household in which that was normal. He'd gotten worn down by it all, I gather from his writing about it. And there's meaning there, and recognition, though I don't know what sorts of relationships he has.

What does a marriage mean? This shape of placing that relationship in a context that I cannot right now articulate. And my context is complicated and full of family and friends and the eloquent tangles of the past, and for all that I've had this ring half a year it's only started to feel real in the last half-month, the thing that I never thought would work out for me, the thing that leads me to snuggling up in a discussion about plans and parents and marriage and saying, wonderingly, "How did we get here?" to get the answer, "We really failed at casual sex."

What does it mean to do this, to stand up and say it, even though the society as defined by that which holds the laws cannot and will not hear it said? What does it mean, to do it damn well anyway, without religious imperative, just because it matters?

I think that's what I'm wrestling with, under all the flailing at other things, that deeper grappling with why. Superficially, the ability to answer the drama if drama comes with an understanding of why is provoking it.

But the thing about doing it is knowing what I'm doing.

Meant for Someone Else

Do you believe?

The voice spoke, murmuring theology in the tones of trance, with cadences of sensuous eroticism; the voice spoke, talking about souls and connections and the flow of the universe, self and other, serpent and avian, union, transformation.

Do you believe?

I have never believed.

I just do. That which works, that which is, the flow and shape of things, the symbols that are used to frame it. This experience: what is it? I have no belief. I take it as it is.

The voice speaks, teasing, drawing out response; even in the heat of the day, it raises goosebumps. I can feel the knot of responsiveness, letting the shape of the visualisation flow in my mind, knowing my reactions, a thin thread of pining for company to share these effects with.

Do you believe?

Is it real?

The slick of sweat is real. The fluid tension knotted up beneath my belly is real. These are sensations, tangible, physical.

Another time, two voices, his and hers, calling to each other across the throng, over the chant, over the sound of drums and the singing bowl an armspan across, teasing, pleading, taunting, loving, as they circle.

Do you believe?

Is it real?

Is it all in your mind?

I have never believed. Belief is a foreign country to me, perhaps too much science, perhaps too much mysticism, perhaps simply the acceptance of the scope and span of the unknowable, the limitation acknowledged of the intrinsic subjectivity of my own senses.

Do you believe?

I feel sometimes, a little, around the edges, that I almost might be able to imagine what belief is.

Gnosis, I can do. Trust, I can do.

Belief?

No.

And yet, when the gods touched, the heavens opened.