Are witches insatiable birds descended from harpies?

These are insatiable birds, not the harpies that deprived

     Phineas of his feasts, although it is from them that they descend: 

Their heads are large, their eyes unblinking, their beaks made for hunting; 

    Their wings are white, their talons hooked, 

At night they fly and seek out children separated from their nurses 

    To snatch them from their cradles and rend their bodies; 

They are said to tear out children’s milky entrails with their beaks 

    And fill their gullets with the blood they have drunk. 

There is a name for those birds–striges–so called 

    Because of their strident shrieking in the night. 

Whether therefore they are born birds, or are made such by enchantment 

    And are nothing but women transformed into fowls by a Marsian spell.

                           from Ovid's Fasti

We live in a society where truth and beauty are not the most valued things. This is our dilemma.

“If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.”

— Jaron Lanier

The Ultimate Selfie as my hand and camera are shown in the lens of my glasses.

 March 26, 2021. On the patio listening to my new favorite band, The Backseat Lovers.

Why do people project human feelings onto animals or nature.

“Human brains are tuned to try to understand other human’s intentions, thoughts and feelings. This concept is called Theory of Mind. Specific regions of the brain contain populations of ‘mirror’ neurons, which display the same activity when we’re performing an action as when we observe others performing an action. People with deficits in the regions where these mirror neurons are located correspond to deficits in empathy and Theory of Mind. Unsurprisingly, these are the same regions of the brain that are active when a person is anthropomorphizing.”

         from Emory Graduate Division of Biological 

This is my word for this week.

intertextuality

It's spring and I thought of Carol.

 

It's the first day of Spring and I thought of Carol, a friend of mine when I was nineteen years old. Not a very good photo. It's fading. She was a gardener, the first true gardener I knew outside my mother. The first time I saw her she was planting flowers. I didn't know anyone my age who was wanting to plant flowers. She and I became really close friends for a long time. I miss her letters. She wrote the best letters, too. But today, it's the first day of spring and all I can think about is her and how she loved flowers as much as I did. She was from California, a California girl and she and I got along so well. Her story did not end happily. But I won't dwell on that.  P.S. Carol and I did not wear makeup. We were hippie girls. lol I am still a hippie girl.

The circus is the creative act.

“They are enthusiasts, devotees. Addicts. Something about the circus stirs their souls, and they ache for it when it is absent. They seek each other out, these people of such specific like mind. They tell of how they found the circus, how those first few steps were like magic. Like stepping into a fairy tale under a curtain of stars… When they depart, they shake hands and embrace like old friends, even if they have only just met, and as they go their separate ways they feel less alone than they had before.”
                ― Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus

Social Media is a bad habit I am going to break.

 It's not a secret among those who know me that I struggle with social media. I don't consider my blog or Flickr or Goodreads or Tumblr social media really. I don't engage people on those Internet features. But I do on Facebook and Twitter. I do have an IG account but I rarely go there. I also have Pinterest. I have lots of  boards there where I collect images and note books, etc. I have private boards for images related to my work. I don't engage with others. It's all for me and related to creative work I do. I don't share my work online. I don't commercialize it in anyway. It's private. My life is really private.

Today, I think I experienced the last straw on Facebook and Twitter, the one that broke the camel's back. I had a definitive plan to cut back on Facebook and Twitter. I am quite capable of doing that, but I am thinking right now that I am going to stop Facebook until I finish my WIP. It's become so annoying to me. I already have people snoozed and I have unfollowed all news there. But I still find it distracting. I am not blaming people. I don't do that. I blame myself for being there in the first place. I remember when Johnny made it for me, that and Twitter. Joey set up my IG. I actually made this blog and the features I listed as friendly. John was on both Facebook and Twitter. All my children were, too. But John is gone, and the children have dropped social media except as a rare nonsensical post. Mostly satire and comedy. They text me that. Laughing.

I think, to be honest, with Covid and recent Politics, I have become less tolerant on social media. It's how I feel seeing important things made into entertainment and the increasing polarization and tribalism. I also see things that are not true being passed off as truth. It is just painful to watch. Another time in my life, I don't believe I would be so concerned. And on good days, I never even care, but right now I am distracted for whatever reason. It's real and it's not healthy. Social media is a bad habit I want to break.  I just don't want to do it out of disillusionment.  I may be just exhausted. Lots to think on.

What is Goodness?

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.”
                   ― Leo Tolstoy

This is really important, especially concerning social media. Just saying.

‘A principal rule for writers, and especially those who want to describe their own sensations, is not to believe that their doing so indicates they possess a special disposition of nature in this respect. Others can perhaps do it just as well as you can. Only they do not make a business of it, because it seems to them silly to publicize such things.’

                Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Post Script on Life and Acceptance

 I was looking at my sidebar and I saw the dates in the posts archives and it was there, not spoken, my life, So many things happened. But the worst was John being diagnosed with cancer in 2013, and I did not really feel human again, till the beginning of 2019. I discovered Placebo the last week of September, 2018. I remember it clearly. I was beginning to come back to life. We had a beautiful Christmas that year, the boys and me. I decided how I wanted to live the rest of my life and I have. No regrets. No looking back too often. Choosing life and happiness. Yes, Covid interrupted so many things and presented me with challenges. But I am going to be all right. Ben told me today, "Life is great. It's the best thing. No sane person one wants to give it up."

I love gardening.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Gardening 1864
watercolor on paper
Design for a small panel in John Pollard Seddon's "King René's Honeymoon” cabinet
Stone Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne

It's that time of the year again, the coming of spring. Hope. Time to clean up the gardens. I've been gardening since I was a young girl when I tended to my momma's petunias on the patio of my childhood home. That was my little job. My momma loved petunias, so did her mother, and I am quite sentimental about them. I just love gardening. Of course, this year, I have a great deal of anxiety because of the pipeline incident. To refresh the memory for this post, in December, the week before Christmas, the main waterline that runs from the house to the street collapsed in two places and I had to replace the entire pipe. It was a great expense for me, but not only in money, but in gardening landscaping. A trench two feet wide and at least two and half feet deep or more was dug through my lawn, including a major flowerbed and a rocked pathway. Before that, they had searched for the pipe for two days. Because it had rained for nearly 10 days prior, they were working in a water saturated yard and they were just digging around trying to find the pipe where they could see the most water. I lost plants in that area, too. I think I was too stunned to react until it was all over and then I did get very emotional about what had happened. (Add the unexpected cold and snow in February, and I have lost major plants all over the lawn. Expensive and dearly loved ones.)

I even lost a patio canopy that collapsed under ice and broke. 

Now, I am facing added expense and lots of personal work to clean up what the men and their machines did to my lawn and garden. I hardly know where to begin. Today I had to assess and decide. One has to start somewhere. And it's messy and looks awful and it's hard labor to do this. Most will be on me. It was not an easy day. Another day of acceptance and yes, determination to rebuild. But some things are lost forever.

I think gardening teaches us about acceptance as much as it does hope. One cannot be a true gardener without hope because planting something, anything can mean failure and loss. A gardener must learn to hope for the best and expect the worse as the old saying goes, because nature is a savage garden. And things are always beginning and ending.

I gave away my Daddy's golf cart today.  He died over fourteen years ago. I had always  held on to his golf cart despite the fact that many people offered to buy it from me. I could not part with it. I suppose it's Freudian and somehow I associated the golf cart with Daddy. Today, because my son and I were cleaning up some things around the house, I gave the golf cart away. And I cried. I was really crying over Daddy, over all the people and things I have lost since Daddy died. Over the impermanence of  everything.  It reminded me of what Daddy said about acceptance. I still remember that day...that sad day we talked about how we must accept some things. Loss and impermanence are the harshest things.

But a garden teaches you that. You see the cycles of life, you see things die. That all things that exist pass away into nothingness...

It's almost "Buddha like," being in a garden. Because we learn the most important moment is now. Plants are like that. The best full blooms are really about a day and then the blooms start to fade.

We all fade.

The American Resue Plan cuts child poverty in half.

"Maybe this is just my timeline, but why aren't American progressives dancing in the streets? The child tax credit in the Rescue Plan is a basic income for children. It'll cut child poverty in half. IN HALF!!! The word 'historic' is overused but this seems very very historic to me."

                      —Rutger Bregman

Grief

“Don't be ashamed to weep; 'tis right to grieve. Tears are only water, and flowers, trees, and fruit cannot grow without water. But there must be sunlight also. A wounded heart will heal in time, and when it does, the memory and love of our lost ones is sealed inside to comfort us.”
                                                      — Brian Jacques

I have some thoughts on William Faulkner

When a writer thinks of syntax as style, it's difficult to ignore the master of it, William Faulkner. He created new words, new expressions, forms of punctuation, and wrote one of the longest sentences in the modern novel. He was a master of syntax and manipulated words like no other writer then and since. From one novel to the next, he created new forms and styles. It's almost unbelievable to make comparisons between the forms of As I Lay Dying to those in Light in August, or to note any similarities in The Sound and the Fury where Faulkner, in his genius, told the story of Caddy Compson, through the voices of her three brothers (!), and used several styles at once, including stream of conscious, his syntax so in align to his overall designs that it's mesmerizing. And this is just language.

What William Faulkner did with narrative structure is another wonder. The Sound and the Fury has to be one of the most complex novels ever written. Faulkner begins his novel with Benjy, a thirty-three-year-old, nonverbal invalid, and the reader is inside Benjy's head where the entire novel is foreshadowed! While Faulkner is attempting all that, he is also searching for the meaning of an incommunicable experience.

Breathless just thinking about it.

One would think that was enough, but William Faulkner understands the human condition so well that his stories transcend their place and time. He knows the human heart. If you want to learn to write better, read William Faulkner.