greygirlbeast | Entries tagged with belief

Sometimes, I feel it's most important that people know and believe the truth – which is passion, but also no small degree of arrogance, to imagine I know such a thing. But other times, I feel it's best they believe whatever comforts them, regardless of my ideas of truth (and fact), so long as they do as little harm as possible. But that's pretty much the whole of the Law, isn't it? (Rhetorical question.)

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: I think we're still on Mars.
Current Music: Magnetic Fields, "Nothing Matters When We're Dancing"

Yesterday, I wrote 1,397 words on Chapter Five of Blood Oranges. I also reached page 200 of the manuscript. The revision of my revised schedule puts me finishing the novel sometime between August 31 and September 3, if I can write at least 1,150 words per day. Oh, and I'd love to hear thoughts on Chapter Two from those who've had time to read Sirenia Digest #68.

It's raining today. The rain began last night. It'll be a little warmer tomorrow, but the rain will become thunderstorms.

I'm running so very, very late. There were many things I was going to discuss in this entry that are going to have to wait, if I want to get anything written today. And I kinda, sorta have to get something written today.

Last night, we watched Christopher Smith's Black Death (2010), and wow, this is the film that Season of the Witch tried to be and pretty much failed utterly. And it's a surprisingly complex film. On the surface, Black Death seems to be only another entry in the recent resurgence of the fear-of-pagans genre of film. And it would be easy to walk away from this film with the impression that it's pro-Christian and anti-pagan. But...it's only easy to do that if you don't stop to think about what's actually being said. A lot of this stuff isn't even subtle. It's a film about how power is wielded through belief systems, about fear and obsession and love. About exploiting ignorance and superstition. About egotism. And in the end, the Church, the "witch" Langiva, the monk Osmund – none of these are portrayed as virtuous. All are victims, and all create victims of their own. All are hungry for one thing or another, and all, ultimately, are rapacious in their quest to have this thing, be it power or revenge or whatever. The film does present "good" men and women who mostly exist beyond the boundaries of this power struggle – Wolfstan, Averill, and so forth. But even they are not genuinely innocent. Because the film tries hard to be a true film, and this world is all but devoid of innocent human beings. Black Death is a film about people who try to do good – Ulrich and Langiva are both trying to protect "their" people from the plague, but both are deeply flawed. Anyway, yes. Good movie. See it. Right now it can be streamed from Netflix.

And I must go meet the Word Monster.

Jousting,
Aunt Beast

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: Abus Vallis
Current Music: Arcade Fire, "Sprawl 1 (Flatland)"

1. I thought, the last couple of days, I was getting to that "pulling myself back together" place, having had two halfway decent nights of of sleep without fucking Ambien. Not enough sleep, no, but no hypnotics, either. Then, this morning, at four-thirty I was still awake, so I took half a pill. At 5:45, still awake, I took another half. I got the sleep around six, but was only able to sleep until about noon (all times CaST). I really cannot take much more of this. I've written nothing all damn month. Oh, and the weather here in Providence is miserable again: cold and rainy and overcast.

2. I managed to work yesterday (largely because I was just coming out of the Ambien haze). I signed the signature sheets for the special edition of The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Horror: Two Decades of Dark Fiction. They'd already been signed by Clive Barker and Stephen King and Peter Straub, though still have to be signed by Harlan Ellison and Neil Gaiman. On days like this, when I can't imagine pressing even one more verb against another noun, when my desire to write has dropped away to something very near zero, I try to take solace in the fact that, thanks to my writing, I count four of those five authors as friends, and three as dear friends (I've never met Stephen King). Also, I read back through "Werewolf Smile," seeing as how the book that The Wolf Who Cried Girl is becoming will be built, in part, upon that short story. And I was enormously annoyed to discover I'd missed a metric shit ton of typos when I proofed it for Sirenia Digest #45 (August 2009). I'm considering including a corrected text of "Werewolf Smile" in the March issue of the digest. Anyway, I also answered email and tidied up my file cabinet, which has needed tidying up for the better part of a year. I made notes for two short stories or vignettes, both for Sirenia Digest #52. One may be an indirect sort of footnote to Lovecraft's "The Hound," and the other involves a sideshow and herpetological tattoos. We shall see. I desperately need to get a chapter of the novel written before starting in on the digest.

3. Last night, my blood-elf warlock, Shaharrazad, made Level 78. And it "only" took me 35 days, 21 hours, 7 minutes, and 43 seconds of gameplay (I actually rolled Shah in October '08). I will point out that Blizzard has done snazzy things with the Armory, adding character animation and whatnot. You may note that Shah has allowed her usually close-cropped hair to grow since heading out to Northrend.

4. For what it's worth, my beliefs are not beliefs I hold because I need to hold them. And I did not choose to hold them. I rejected that approach to belief decades ago. Indeed, I have often been frustrated that I cannot alter my beliefs based simply on what my mind needs. I've written about this in the past, especially as regards my approach to witchcraft and magick, and the fact that I remain an atheist, cosmicist, and pessimist*. My beliefs arise from personal observation of the world around me, from conclusions based upon those observations. I believe nothing simply because I somehow need to believe it. Desire or need alone cannot ever lead me to belief. Basing belief upon needs or desires is, to me, no more than wishful thinking.

5. Spooky's latest doll is now available via her Dreaming Squid Dollworks shop at Etsy. We call her Cassandra, for reasons that ought to be fairly obvious.

6. On Tuesday, we saw Tim Buron's Alice in Wonderland for the second time. If anything, it was more delightful than the first viewing (and we still will not debate its merits here).

* I would deny, though, that I am a nihilist, for a number of reasons.

Current Mood: drugged
Current Location: Coronae Scopulus
Current Music: Editors, "Eat Raw Meat = Blood Drool"

A happy and fine Beltane to all who wish to be wished a happy and fine Beltane. I was just looking at my entry from this day one year ago, and there's something from that entry that I'd like to repost:

For a long time, I could not allow myself to involve choice in matters of belief, as I held belief back for objective science and material concerns. I did not see how one could ever choose to believe. Partly, the epiphany simply required a different perspective on things I've been saying for years. The Cosmos (=tripartite goddess/horned god/divine adrogyne/etc.) may, in my veneration of it, assume any form. It contains all forms within it that can be realized or conceived. It hardly matters if I "worship" Brighid or Mórrígan or Aphrodite or Kali. They are all merely attempts of a conscious being to sum up an incomprehensible and nonconscious universe. They may, perhaps, each function like characters in a novel, avatars that grant access to the story of existence. It does not matter if they are not factual in their existence, as their existence is true, if they are true in our minds. If they contain within them useful truths, as is the way with all myths. It is not their objective existence which makes them useful avatars, but their subjective truth, what these deities mean to each of us. For me, this is the heart of Neopaganism. Designing ritual and godforms to function as conduits between conscious organisms and the remainder of the Cosmos, which is generally a nonconscious entity.

This is still pretty much where my head is, though I've added Panthalassa ("all seas") as my primary "deity." Which is to say, I may look to and venerate the Mórrígan, and Hecate, and Demeter, and Cernunnos (and a small host of others), but the concept of Panthalassa acts as a sort of godhead, freed of any connotations of gender or consciousness, morality or anthropomorphic form. Panthalassa is, by definition, a vast, impersonal, and almost inconceivable force. Anyway, yeah, I'm still getting better about belief as choice. And, by the way, this is what works for me, I'm not the least bit evangelical in my paganism, excepting where the beliefs of others attempts to infringe upon my day-to-day life or my ability to practice witchcraft as I've chosen to practice it.

---

Yesterday was just about as tedious as expected. The image behind the cut, multiplied by a whole bunch, will give you some idea:

( Yesterday )

We read back over "At the Gate of Deeper Slumber" and "The Peril of Liberated Objects, or the Voyeur's Seduction" (formerly "Untitled 34"), and I made lots of line edits to both. I wrote the prolegomena for Sirenia Digest #41. I did the layout on the issue, and realized that we really need to do an article on Virgil Finlay. When the issue was all nailed together, I sent the files off to Gordon (

thingunderthest) to be PDF'ed. And then we read through Chapter 3 of The Red Tree, which got us to page 138 of the page proofs. And that was yesterday.

By now, all subscribers should have the new issue of the digest. Just let us know if you didn't get it. I'm pleased to have included Sonya Taaffe's (

sovay) poem, "The Coast Guard," in this issue, along with the two new stories.

And now..well, it's Beltane. I'll do no more work than I have to do.

Current Mood: been worse
Current Location: Sisyphi Montes
Current Music: The Cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Something to Sing About"

I made myself promise I'd do a LJ/Blog entry this morning, if only to thank the many, many people who've taken a moment to express their sympathy over Sophie's death. You have all helped, every single one of you. It's times like this that I find it particularly hard to hold to those things I believe are true. Like I was saying the other day, before the rain when I wanted rain so badly but knew there was no one and nothing out there listening. I see death as a passage, but not the way a lot of other people do. All things, living and inanimate, are a part of the Cosmos, equal parts of the Cosmic Whole. Some few of those things, some living things, experience the phenomenon of consciousness and self-awareness, and then the body ends, ending the consciousness, which is one of the functions of the body. The body ceases, so the consciousness ceases. It's that cessation that makes death hard for me to face. But. Nothing truly ends. The Cosmos, which is my "goddess," is the great recycler. Things merely pass from one form, from one state of being, into others. There should be no sorrow if each unique consciousness is not as "eternal" as the molecules and atoms which briefly made that consciousness possible. Katharine — Jada's partner — sent me a much appreciated e-mail yesterday. Katharine's a Buddhist, and while it's not a belief system that works for me, I was glad to read the following, for reasons all my own:

May she ride through the bardo on a carpet of squirrel tails....

Indeed and ahmet. And here, for me, the Tibetan bardo ("intermediate state") does not have to mean the time between two lives. Rather, for me, it means simply the brief space between the incarnation I knew as Sophie and all the countless transformations and reassemblies of that constituent matter into other no less valid and no less lovely forms. The matter that became Sophie and which produced her consciuosness, existed for billions of years before her birth. It came from the nuclear furnaces of stars. It drifted across interstellar distances on cosmic winds and comet tails. It was here during the days of the first cyanobacteria and then the trilobites and then the dinosaurs and then the woolly frelling mammoths. Because a particular and transient form may pass away, but the Cosmos endures. The atoms that were Sophie, and were trillions of things before Sophie, will become soil and stone, trees and grass, atmospheric molecules and the dust about which great rain clouds form. They will live again, and they will not live again. For me, this is immortality. It matters not if some particular consciousness or body ends, because its constituent parts go on almost forever. To quote Charles Darwin (1859), "There is grandeur in this view of life...and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."

We all have our myths, and they make life bearable. For me, there's no afterlife and no "soul" beyond living consciousnesses. Ego, which craves conscious immortality, is only a transient artefact of consciousness. But, in my eyes, Ego is only another thing which passes away. I hope I don't sound like I'm proselytizing. That's most emphatically not my intent. I just want to say these things, so I'll have written them down. That's all. We all have our myths, and they make life bearable. These are some of mine. I'm not presently disposed to challenge anyone else's myths. I'm taking a few days vacation from mythbusting, so to speak.

The hard part, for me, is not allowing myself to fall back on more immediately comforting beliefs which are not my own, simply because some hurting part of me might need them at this moment. As Anne Sexton said, "Need is not quite belief." I'd be a hypocrite and would betray myself were I to take solace in someone else's belief of conscious immortality. Times like these are the tests of just how confidently we hold our myths to ourselves, as a part of our conscious selves, in all their comforting and uncomforting aspects.

But I miss her. I miss her like hell.

There were other things I was going to say, but I'll say them in some other later entry. Maybe later this afternoon. Today, I'm going to clean this messy house, try to get eBay started again, lose myself in a little unfinished Wikipedia, and so forth. My contributor's copies of John Betancourt and Sean Wallace's Horror: The Best of the Year (2006 edition), which reprints "La Peau Verte" just arrived. I'll look at those. I'll stay busy. I may be able to start writing again tomorrow. We shall see.

Postscript: Does anyone know what's happened to

sclerotic_rings, why he's deleted his LJ?

Current Mood: very sad, but moving
Current Location: Bag End
Current Music: VNV Nation, "Further"

Awake too early after falling asleep a bit too late (or too early, actually), awake at four but I got to sleep again, and now, after oceans of nightmares, strange and terrible things which I can only now recall in disconnected flashes, awake. Spooky's still asleep. I let her sleep in the mornings. She need not share my premature wakefulness. The dreams really were difficult last night. This is one of those mornings when I feel as if I've just survived some bizarre amalgamation of seven alternate versions of my own life, merged with the works of Lovecraft, any number of sf authors, Stephen King (especially The Stand), all the mythologies crowding my mind, a dash of Harlan, a pinch of Neil. I wake disoriented, frightened, wanting to go back there, wherever there might have been, because for several hours after waking, there seems far more real than here. Once, more than a decade ago, I asked my therapist if there weren't simply a pill that would make the dreams stop. She looked at me with that knowing, somewhat amused, somewhat sad, can't-help-you-there-kiddo expression she must have perfected in graduate school. I think she must have had a seminar in casting that look. And I'm awake again. And here it's Sunday morning, and the sky is grey. Here, the apocalypse is a slow sort of thing, so gradual that hardly anyone notices. Here the heroes work in secret, when they work at all, and only villains can stand the light of day. Here I am a writer. Here I have this name and this face and this particular history. Here I can scarce sleep for dreaming.

Yesterday was a good day. I finished "pas-en-arrière, " which only needed me to wait until it was time to finish it. I think I managed the ending I wanted. I did 961 words yesterday. The finished vignette stands at 3,233 words before proofreading. I think the ending's right. Gentle, almost sweet, but not in the treacly, cloying way that too many people mean "sweet." I want to say it has a maturity that most of the Sirenia Digest/Frog Toes and Tentacles pieces lack, but that's probably not true. It's just my favourite of the moment. I think I'll not have Vince illustrate this one, that it will come in #5 without an illustration. It isn't particularly graphic, though it's fairly visual. Maybe you'll understand what I mean when you've read it. It speaks as softly as I can. "pas-en-arrière, " is one of the longer pieces of erotica I've yet written, though not the longest. That would likely be "Pony," which came in at 3,866 words. It's also notable that "pas-en-arrière, " is a true vignette, a single scene. I've played fast and loose with that word, vignette. At any rate, it's done, and I'm glad I didn't rush the ending, and now I'm actually a little ahead for a change. How weird is that?

We had a good walk yesterday and talked to the big orange tom who lives down the street. He carries himself like a thug, but his voice always gives him away, tiny and timid and sweet. There's that word again. Also, I wrote a Wikipedia entry about the ankylosaur Tarchia. I did a little housecleaning. We watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban again. I love the iris shots.

We'll spend most of today preparing for Ostara. We need to drive up to Sandy Springs, to the Phoenix and the Dragon, for a few supplies. I'll spend part of the day polishing my wording of the Ostara ritual I've stitched together from five or six different people's Ostara rituals. I need stones and flowers, jasmine incense and basil seeds. Last night, we worked on some very basic stuff, casting and taking up circles, rending and closing the veil, using the wording from one of Jane Raeburn's rituals. It's the "easy" stuff I worry over the most. The "hard" stuff seems like something I've known all my life, even without knowing that I knew it. I've taken to using my willow wand exclusively until I can find an athame that feels better in my hands. Tonight, I'll do a consecration ritual.

I feel as though the tone of this entry is off somehow. Too much of me still back there in the dreams, I suspect.

I also feel as though I'm walking a thin, strange line these days, balancing witchcraft and art and science. Rationality, empiricism, critical thought in one hand, Wicca and "shamanism" in the other. That leaves no hand free for art, so I suppose it lies in the center, which makes sense. I constantly feel as though I'm some massive contradiction. On the one hand, what else is new? I've spent my life in between one place and another. It's the only thing I do best. Why should things be any different now? On the other hand, I know that, in truth, there is no divide between science and art and magick, except for the walls our minds build from fear and insecurity. Science is a systematized, rigorous observation of Nature. Art is a wild, uncouth celebration of Nature. Magick is the conscious or unconscious veneration of Nature. I'm beginning to see more clearly the points at which these three spheres intersect. I think. Magick, for example, is very much like art. It doesn't come when you call it. It comes when its ready, and you're either there waiting or you're not. And you may well call your whole life, sincerely and with the best of intentions, and never get a glimmer, or it may come to you effortlessly, whether you want it or not. Art's exactly like that. For me, at least. I'm in no danger of abandoning relativity, as it applies to morality or physics. These things are true for me, whatever I am.

Indeed, lately it feels that my greatest hurdle isn't my innately, insistently rational mind, as I first feared, but the tattered vestiges of the Catholic upbringing I thought I'd discarded twenty-something years ago. All those fears that were so deeply instilled in me. I became very angry about this last night. I try not to. I tell myself that the people who put those hateful, fearful, superstitious, prejudicial thoughts in my mind, who almost blinded me to the world around me and inside me (both scientific and magickal), were trying to do good. If I ever had a child — and I know now that's never going to happen, for a variety of reasons — I'm not sure how I would go about keeping it free of my own fears. I only know I'd try. I certainly would not teach it superstition and hatred dressed up as divine revelation.

Sorry. I'm going on and on and on. But it's my journal, to do with as I please. And being the only one awake in the house makes me nervous, and when I'm nervous, I talk too damn much. If this has been TMI, well, I won't apologise for that. There was a poll, after all. Please do have a look at the current eBay auctions, and keep in mind that the "choose your own letter" FT&T auction ends in three days. Okay. It's time to see where this day will lead...

Oh,

aoniedesade asked yesterday where I got the images I'm currently using for icons, and I thought others might be curious, so: They came from the website of a Japanese photographer, Naoyuki Iitaka, from a series he did using Shironuri make-up on his models. You can see much more from the series here. It's beautiful stuff.

Current Mood: awake, as far as I can tell
Current Music: Sarah McLachlan, "Ice"