Hearth & Horn

I think I'm going to experiment more with using this space as a diary.

One of those ole internet canards is you should never share too much about yourself because of the Dangerous People; and that's deep in our habitmaking somewhere. For this reason, I'm more likely to know that a person I follow is a biracial PTSD demiboy who is pro-Mao and anti-incest than I am, say, to know about what they do in their day and how they feel and what their hobbies are. It's almost as if...there is a different set of rules for internet intimacy.

One might assume that disclosing your marginalised identities and political convictions were actually pretty private, some of the most trusting information - - the kinds of thing a stranger in real life would generally NOT know about you. But online that tends to be reversed. What school you're at and how studies are going and bringing the things of offline life into this sphere is the big taboo. It's boomerposting to be sharing bits of your life in that way.

Is it bad? I think it might be bad. Because those details are some of the highest stake things about you, the things most likely to lead to terror and rage around others: there's a reason why these things are, traditionally, kept private. In contrast, it's quite hard to start a provocative discourse around the dopey things of my small day. You get so used to people's internet presences which are All Discourse All The Time that you stop thinking it's weird, but it IS weird; and it's bigger, systemic problem how hard it is to wrest back control of the internet as a tool you can use to extend your life (writing about your day, books, your hobbies) instead of being pulled into these particular patterns of relating. Like, the amount of follows you get for updating people with what you're reading vs being in YA discourse hell motivates one over the other.

& i think it's grounding; as I move into this next phase of Fen things (I'm considering going out on the big wide internet again), there's something about posting more about ordinary life which is a buffer against becoming some kind of lifestyle influencer or personal advertising brand, like, making good on what I want people to believe about my work - which is that it is simply a record of what I'm doing, my personal work, that I'm sharing because I have had so much value from what others have freely shared. Part of making that so is refusing the persona of leadership or, the persona of competence or being a provider or being the embodiment of what I do (as tempting as that last one often is) & and like, hoping that attracts the right people. What I do is not for everybody, & what I want is 30 good followers not 30k anonymous ones; I want peers and friends I know interpersonally and learn from in turn, not a customer base. There's just no pleasure to me in that much attention, and a significant amount of pleasure in being unseen.

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.