Reflecting.

 

“In yourself right now is all the place you've got.” ― Flannery O'Connor

Fall.

“Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.”

— Thomas Hardy

It's your choice, I've made mine.

Maybe you went out of your mind
You can lose it all if you wanna
Maybe you went out of mine
It's been so long

You can live your own dear life
And you can lose it all if you wanna
But I can't let you out of mine, oh no

                  the Kills

Happy Birthday, Tanith Lee.

Tanith Lee cast such a wide influence on my art in the early days. Her work is really indescribable, and I kind of love that, though I would not call it weird fiction, ever.  At first, it was her language and use of color that attracted me. I'd never read an author (past or even present now) that used color like Tanith Lee did. It was amazing. And I love color used in a book in uncanny and delightful ways to enhance imagery, and imagery was Tanith Lee's special gift.  Oh, her imagery!

Next it was her themes, which often moved around girls, women, and sexuality. Around power dynamics. Around feminism. She wrote of despair, too. Despair so palpable one could almost reach out and touch it as a substance laying separately on the written page. It was all rather dark and beautiful at the same time. You know, like that statement you often hear or read: "beautiful is not always pretty."

In that way, it was pure literary Romanticism. It was never really postmodernism. It was never really fashionable. It never evoked current politics or gave clear lessons. 

Even after writing some 90 novels and who knows how many shorter pieces, she fell out of fashion several (if not more) years before she died in 2015 at the age of sixty-eight. I think many people found her idiosyncratic in ways that are exasperating, almost annoying. She was her own person, she possessed great agency, and she was a little eccentric. All these qualities went into her work, which was just wonderous. 

WONDEROUS.

I don't think she ever really wrote for the crowd first, it was always for herself, though that could be debatable. Laughing. She was an original and I really do lament that there will be no new words from her.

I always think of Tanith Lee on her birthday. And yes, on the day she died.  

She said in an interview: "I must admit, I never thought, after all the years of working as a professional writer in and out of the genres, I would end up at sixty-one, back where I was at twenty: unknown, unpaid, unincluded, uncertain."

I'll never forget that interview either, those singular last words, and I live by them.

Rufus Wainwright - Sonnet 29 - Shakespeare

Just feeling it. I've posted it previously on this blog. But Sunday is for Shakespeare and I just wanted to play this one. Since I discovered it, I have learned it by heart. I choose Beauty over Destruction. I choose Life over Death. I choose Desire and will not go Missing.

My Little Introductions to Witches

It's that TIME OF YEAR AGAIN.

From about 900-1400 CE (AD) the general idea was that witches didn't really exist and if they did, no one really wanted to talk much about witches, maybe out of fear and superstition, maybe out of doubt, and maybe because it was just not a popular descriptive in their culture and language, and the local authorities in power just didn't see much advantage to it. There were lots of cunning folk, which is often confused in this conversation and I am going to be posting about them lots for Halloween Time here. Data confirms, witches were just not very important politically until later.

[Yes, witches were mentioned here and there and mumbled in dark corners, etc. and so forth. But these were not the 'Burning Times' which is sort of a misrepresentation, too. Witches were also beheaded, hanged, and drowned. Some were strangled in other ways, some crushed under stones, or simply tortured to death. And let's face it, were any of them really witches at all! Like witches on broomsticks?]

Then came the Reformation and the Catholic Church was under assault. Popish superstitions were banished in many countries. And the word witch became common vocabulary. I mean, it was out there, everywhere. I've read so many books and papers on this topic that I now see The Burning Times, which is an iconic symbol of female oppression, as a financial competition between Protestants and Catholics fighting for the religious market. And along the way, that market aka people became political capital. People have been collecting data for years now, going through historical papers, trying to document just how many witches were tried and how many died. Most of them were tried and died between 1530 and 1630 CE (AD) (though witch trials went on for another 150 years.) That period of high witch trials is often referred to as The Great Hunt. "Sorcerers will suffer eternal fire." Many of those died within a 300 mile radius in France. Yes, it's true. Most of the others died in Germany and Switzerland. This Great Hunt was really religious and political wars where people became a capitalistic product to win that war. In predominately Catholic countries, where Catholicism was not in any danger, there were few witch trials at all. Witches persecuted in those countries were usually political targets and their trials and executions were like political rallies and ads between Republican and Democratic USA parties today. The parallels are striking. But where Popish ideas were banned, and people resisted, witches burned and burned. The data is striking. England's Reformation was mild compared to that in Germany.

Were there any real witches as we think of them?

Well, yes and no. Cunning folk were out there, everywhere. These are folk people, and they were making herbs to heal and offering advice on failing crops and even livestock. So yeah, if you want to call them witches, have at it. Superstitions were plentiful in the Medieval times. People were paying for curses and blessings and potions and that sort of thing. (Rome did it too) A lot of so called witchcraft was a preventative effort against personal disaster. In Italy some witches were were working and controlling the crops with a hidden magic. Oh, my! Some people were diviners. There were all kinds of seers and fortune-tellers. There were all kinds of rural people who looked odd and were odd. There was unexplained mental and physical illness. (Vampires anyone).

People wanted explanations. But books were rare and most people could not read and so an eclipse, a falling star, a comet invited confusion and fear, only explained by superstitions. There were no TVs, nothing to tell people that a storm was even brewing. They lived in mostly candle light and the dark, waiting for the sun to rise. Superstitions were everything. Even royalty employed seers. I am stressing this because superstitions, folk medicine, love potions, and ordinary fears are why we have any witches at all. A lack of any science, a lack of understanding nature, although these people were really closer to nature than modern urban dwellers. But they did not have the knowledge we do.

Modern witches are their descendants in ways. In some modern cases, religion and witchcraft coexist, such as in Hoodoo and other folk traditions from specific cultures. Some modern witchcraft is purely aesthetics and a form of personal representation and psychology, even a trade. But witchcraft still has history shadowing it, weighing on it. Because that is what history does. And one can hardly separate, even in these modern times, the forces of religion and witchcraft. (I am going to talk about Belief and Faith in the Medieval Ages and how it developed in my posts.)

Today, some of the religious in many countries, in many faiths, use talk of witchcraft and sorcery as a way to control heretics and modernity and politics. And yes, a way to control women. It is true, that women have been the center of witchcraft hunts and burnings. Mostly because many of them were expendable in cultures controlled by men. Most women had little power. The tone and the context of the image I have posted, which I love and keep, a modern mailbox in a rural area in the USA, is that we who use sorcery will be burned in hell, so says the believer who put this on his/her mailbox. I think that we women are the real blasphemers, shouting out our resistance against oppression of any kind. It is no small thing that Alito used a witchcraft source in his defense of nullifying a law that served specifically women's issues. It was perfectly medieval.

As one of my Facebook friends often writes, Hex the Patriarchy.

EDITED OCTOBER 23. I never did return to discussing witchcraft at all here. I decided not to, as I was ill and I posted about vampires on Facebook for some fans. I wanted to reread Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat, her finest book, and then a couple of other vampire books. I haven't felt myself. I've also had to make new plans on how I move forward on social media and even this blog. I have too much writing to do in the next several months to play online. SO much for good intentions.

Barrow Family Cemetery, Afton Villa, St. Francisville, LA

 

Elmwood Cemetery, Memphis TN

 

I learned this the hard way and have tried to pass it on.

"The cure for melancholia involves a continual discovery and rediscovery of the possibilities of life."

— Harold Bloom

I love all men who dive with bloodshot eyes.

“I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; and if he don't attain the bottom, why all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plummet that will. ... -but of the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving and coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began.”

                           —  Herman Melville

Reading Project with my sister.

 

This is a reading project put together by my sister for us to do this month. Reading aloud. Although I am reading Faulkner aloud, too. Laughing.

Reading now but not sure when I shall finished.

 Started. Not sure when I shall finish.

Reading and Posting Story by Story The Collected Stories of William Faulkner

 

I will posting a few comments along, as I read each story.

Beauty and the Beast illustrated by Angela Barrett

 Angela Barrett's illustrations for Max Eilenberg's Beauty and the Beast are absolutely stunning work. I'll post more of them in October when time is available to me. The fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast was first written by Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve in 1740 and was influenced by ancient Greek stories. 

(Note: This is my last post until the end of September.)

This is part of our identity problem. No history.

“For without some sense of the past the future can be only loneliness: amnesia is a solitary affliction.”
                     ― John Lewis Gaddis

I have been thinking about this quote off and on for a week. Postmodernists do not believe this. They do not believe we can ever really do history. And for years I felt some kinship with them. It is not age that has changed me, it is history itself, the history that I have lived through, seen, heard, read about, witnessed, and then some, and how it is now written or interpreted. Yes, I, me, the Leftist person in the room. It is a bold thought to write this, not only this quote from Gaddis, but from me, to come to a quaint understanding. How do historians map the past? And why? Can we ever really know anything about the past? Gaddis is not a man I would have looked to, for answers years previously. He is not one of them at all. The fact that I have read him now and that he totally challenges me is also frightening. I have much to think about and I only know one thing. We should teach more history. We should look to history. Faulkner was right. The past is always present. omg....