Now I Know Why They Say To Keep Silent

Now I Know Why They Say To Keep Silent

Due to my ongoing isolation from the entire world, i am reflecting more on Disconnection (something friends have urged me to do, friends with a lot more innate comfort with living their whole lives online - for whom it gives a genuine richness of connection that they cannot find nearby); and i find myself in a complex place with it. I know that my onlineness creates a block between paying attention to the world and otherworlds, I know it locks out the essential boredom that left my ancestors hours to hang about on the shoreline or their boats or in their fields (or someone else's fields they were working), paying slow attention to the slowness of the world. Against that, there is my own loneliness and inability to commit to that boredom, regardless of my ideal. I roll out of bed and onto twitter. i fill up the gaps in my day with a nothing that is better than emptiness. I'm working on a way to recommit; but am very tired.

Anyway, i freakin loved QABALISTA - a sort of hyperpop sound visualisation which, look I'm going to say it - but it has an immediately recogniseably trans sound, and I love that for us, I love that sense of feeling on the inside of something, and I love someone doing a magical work whose final form is music.

selkiegirl has written something about her experiences of her music hitting viral rise-and-fall from TikTok sensation to internet villain of the week, how it interacts with all parts of her life - the spiritual, the private, the professional, the social, and it turns out that not only can she write incredible music, but also incredible words. There is so much to reflect on in this article (and I don't want to pick up on the hair-trigger appropriation stuff she says, even tho I think it's very wise - in part because i've been writing about it a fair bit recently in ways that don't take the conversation anywhere new or interesting),

but more importantly about the commodification of practice, how that intertwines with the algorithm, how the algorithm goes on to reshape creators and consumers, how the promise of exposure to all traditions and all wisdom paradoxically creates space for misinformation and alienation; the transformation of something personal into something public; selkie's own weird feelings about "well this sucks and is spiritually degrading but I'm getting paid and don't have the privilege to be dismissive about that"

(and i wonder too if some of the "oh this is a closed tradition" pressure is a response to the infinity available; like, oh shit, gotta get some rules, some boundaries, something to make-small the noise of this; back in the day, pagans were confined to what books they could order and what people in their town were doing, something that imposed a structure and gave some initial guidance that advancing occultists and pagans could bristle against and flourish out of. I wonder if there's a comfort in naming whole swathes of our tradition as totally off limits.)

There's so much to this article, aside from being a pleasure to read as writing; she touches on so many subthemes, and it's an angry essay too - but if you've had any level of vulnerabilty to this sort of online dynamic in the past, it's forgiveable - raw and alienating and disturbing, and I hope folk won't react to what maybe seems like contempt towards certain aesthetics here to the politics those aesthetics are interconnected with.

reading between the lines of her tweets and her writing nowadays, i can feel the trauma that can attach itself to ideas that were previously loved and safe and welcoming, like a prickly unsafety engaging with anything tagged as "witchcraft" because you associate it so heavily now with an ideology of cruelty towards you. it's an under-explored form of trauma, one that sounds overblown - but anything that happens online happens in your psyche, in your bedroom, and when it's a faceless infinity of tireless, interchangeable strangers trashing you and your ideas and your art and your spirituality and nothing can make it stop except changing your name and never going online again...

and it's a dynamic most easily wielded against independent artists, who rely on these same platforms and algorithms to market what they make, who have to do their own promotion and answer their own DMs; and a dynamic most easily wielded against marginalised people, like anyone with a hyper-raw response to shame, and women (generally) and trans women (specifically) and people of colour and so forth.

when i get onto my critiques of the internet people often respond quite defensively, i guess because I am not a good writer; but it's this, all of this, not being heard or making friends you will never see face to face, or new ideas or international online cultures and linguisitics, and gaps made for independent artists, and gaps made for people trying to work from home; it's the dream that we could have all that without this as well - those same utopian hopes being one misstep away from harassment that nothing will end.

also, you can access her notes about the album on her Patreon, which Sucks because i'm not able to do that right now, but this is definitely an example of the benefits of this kind of gating: the only people who can access my interiority are those who make a notional sacrifice to access it. And you should check out QABALISTA as well, it is a cool bit of music.

idk. Good article. Lots to think about. Gonna go listen to her album again, which i absolutely love, and wish i knew how to engage more with as a spiritual text; but maybe part of how visionary work goes is you hear it as art first, and find the depths yourself. and i hope her next year and her next works of art and magic end more happily, but it probably won't be, because these things tend to kill your desire to create or exist in any way at all, ever again.

Now I Know: response continued

"Perhaps there is nothing more poisonous than succeeding at selling something, hence the title of this article. The internal areas that once practically VIBRATED within me have slowly and methodically been replaced by shame, disappointment, burnout, and regret"

(there is a reason why only share my Profound Spiritual Insights into the One True Religion on dorky websites with a readership of six that are stubbornly hand-coded and not accessible on mobile; despite intermittent desire to be present on tumblr and twitter and the rest, the desire for community, the desire for existence - when one goes offline, in a world that is so digital, one is struck with the marked sense of sudden nonexistence; the pleasures of using a tool to organise and display one's work; the desire that anyone with a spiritual conviction has that what they are speaking with must persist and survive; the human desires to be noticed and valued; the egotistical desire to run my own cult; and all of that;

but it's very specifically what selkiegirl talks about; how can the intimacy of religion endure against the wall of triviality and hate and sheer boredom the internet represents

in many ways, it perhaps calls for the return of the mystery school. I loathe hierarchical religion, the way i loathe hierarchical anything; i find it inevitably tends towards domination, even in the smallest of contexts. And yet, the move towards discord - that is, a platform that has fine-grained tools allowing in-groups to do their own moderation, to gate channels, to lock and unlock users from particular areas, to have a lock on the community as a whole - in short, the move towards a more LJ-era of the internet, away from shouting-to-the-galleries social media which is the emotional equivalent of being spreadeagled and tied to posts in the desert with honey smeared on your skin

perhaps the model is open information but closed community. That is, there is no reason to gate prayers and diagrams and texts behind the approval of your elders, so that only the elect may learn their secrets; but there is perhaps a need for community to be done in spaces that are intimate and policed, where ground rules can be set and relationships formed in safety; idk)