![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
14 December 2021 14:59I'm thinking at the moment about the way my work is tending back around towards a mean. "You know, even though this aspect frustrates or is unintuitive to me, there's a reason why people do it this way"
Some of the things I have in mind are...
> Not doing gender stuff (which is less true now than when I started; possibly because resolving my own transgendering makes me understand where I am in gendered imagery enough to use it; possibly because of the massive cultural weight of gender winning out)
> Experimenting with the directions of energy (I had this design goal sparked by a friend's idea of dwarven magic, which would see under the earth as the source of power, and up in the air as dangerous or uninteresting; this is still here, in part, as a Stellar thrumming coming from underneath your feet, and yet...you know, the concept of Doing Magic requires a sense of a power source that is human-friendly, so yeah the Stellar is *there*, but what do you do with it?)
> Humano-centric magic (like, the "i am empowered and at the center of all things" of the QC. It makes you feel good and amps you up for magic. Nothing I've experiemented with comes close and anyway, what does it look like to have a central magical concept which is opening yourself up to the terror of the infinite wild? that's profoundly opposed to what the QC does. But, why would someone want that?)
> What a basic circle practice looks like (this one is mostly entropy and frustration, I think; just wanting to do some freakin magic and struggling so, so hard to get a new conception into place)
> Even the importance of working on meditation for focus has come back into my work (because meditation is a great "idk what I should do but I want to do something, let's just meditate" practice; and because my focus for visualising or even getting through an entire prayer is scattered
> having "a great god" who is this abstract impersonal nightmare-wight of memory and non-anthropomorphic presence (like OK the Landweird is real, realer than anybody else's gods; but how do you actually interact with that? And how does that work with the day to day of wanting a god that is comfort, who you can call on to protect your loved ones? There's a Reason we anthropomorphise the divine, it turns out! It may not be what They need, but it certainly what We need)
There's a couple of explanations I have for what's happening. The first is "picking up the detritus of popular culture" which, ultimately, means reflecting what's in that culture. Folk horror leans hard on the early Gardinerian/Murray-theorem that's sex heavy and all about the genders; I've been a Pagan for close to two decades now, of course the ceremonial frameworks are deep in my psyche.
A second is that perhaps I'm just independently discovering and verifying things that have always been true, but are revealed as truer by encountering them for yourself (or I just have the kind of noodly brain that needs to do that work to be satisfied); this is where I'm at with the meditating, for example. It works, so fuck it.
Another is just that I'm settling; that I could be putting in that additional effort to articulate a profoundly non-Christian Christmas, for example, but am too tired to resist the pressure of it. That's definitely true of circle processes; like, perhaps I'll refine something truer to my ethos over time, but for now I just need some kind of Beginning Of The Rite process that feels traditional and functional so i can get on to the next stage of Interfacing With The Divine.
I definitely do feel a sense of inner frustration and resignation about this, but I'm also approaching it from the sense that "some work is better than no work", and that the parable of the class of potterymakers has taught us that attempting to pass your class by making the most pots lead to making the best pots, and attempting to pass your class by making a single perfect pot gets you nowhere.
Some of the things I have in mind are...
> Not doing gender stuff (which is less true now than when I started; possibly because resolving my own transgendering makes me understand where I am in gendered imagery enough to use it; possibly because of the massive cultural weight of gender winning out)
> Experimenting with the directions of energy (I had this design goal sparked by a friend's idea of dwarven magic, which would see under the earth as the source of power, and up in the air as dangerous or uninteresting; this is still here, in part, as a Stellar thrumming coming from underneath your feet, and yet...you know, the concept of Doing Magic requires a sense of a power source that is human-friendly, so yeah the Stellar is *there*, but what do you do with it?)
> Humano-centric magic (like, the "i am empowered and at the center of all things" of the QC. It makes you feel good and amps you up for magic. Nothing I've experiemented with comes close and anyway, what does it look like to have a central magical concept which is opening yourself up to the terror of the infinite wild? that's profoundly opposed to what the QC does. But, why would someone want that?)
> What a basic circle practice looks like (this one is mostly entropy and frustration, I think; just wanting to do some freakin magic and struggling so, so hard to get a new conception into place)
> Even the importance of working on meditation for focus has come back into my work (because meditation is a great "idk what I should do but I want to do something, let's just meditate" practice; and because my focus for visualising or even getting through an entire prayer is scattered
> having "a great god" who is this abstract impersonal nightmare-wight of memory and non-anthropomorphic presence (like OK the Landweird is real, realer than anybody else's gods; but how do you actually interact with that? And how does that work with the day to day of wanting a god that is comfort, who you can call on to protect your loved ones? There's a Reason we anthropomorphise the divine, it turns out! It may not be what They need, but it certainly what We need)
There's a couple of explanations I have for what's happening. The first is "picking up the detritus of popular culture" which, ultimately, means reflecting what's in that culture. Folk horror leans hard on the early Gardinerian/Murray-theorem that's sex heavy and all about the genders; I've been a Pagan for close to two decades now, of course the ceremonial frameworks are deep in my psyche.
A second is that perhaps I'm just independently discovering and verifying things that have always been true, but are revealed as truer by encountering them for yourself (or I just have the kind of noodly brain that needs to do that work to be satisfied); this is where I'm at with the meditating, for example. It works, so fuck it.
Another is just that I'm settling; that I could be putting in that additional effort to articulate a profoundly non-Christian Christmas, for example, but am too tired to resist the pressure of it. That's definitely true of circle processes; like, perhaps I'll refine something truer to my ethos over time, but for now I just need some kind of Beginning Of The Rite process that feels traditional and functional so i can get on to the next stage of Interfacing With The Divine.
I definitely do feel a sense of inner frustration and resignation about this, but I'm also approaching it from the sense that "some work is better than no work", and that the parable of the class of potterymakers has taught us that attempting to pass your class by making the most pots lead to making the best pots, and attempting to pass your class by making a single perfect pot gets you nowhere.
