Nimue Brown's Blog, page 256

Changeling, Changing

Three days after the birth, faeries emerged from the wood

To steal the baby, leaving in its stead a thing fashioned

Of mud and twigs and old, dead leaves.

 

At first, no one noticed. It was a quiet baby.

It slept a lot.

Years passed before they realised the truth,

Felt the texture of bark and leaflitter

Under the illusion of baby skin.

They meant well, and so raised the changeling,

The baby that never was. Raised the twig child,

Telling it gently of its nature.

 

The twig child watched the wood margins,

Waiting to be taken home, expecting one day

To fall apart into mud, and twigs, and old, dead leaves.

 

Years follow years and the twig child continues,

Cannot explain itself, feels its difference, grows

Looking human but feeling twigs, mud, dead leaves.

Meets its reflection in a woodland pool, surprised

To see lips and eyes, cheeks and soft hair.

Like some proper human.

Wonders long, and uneasy

At changeling tales, sees no twigs, no mud.

Crawls into human skin for the first time,

A lost child, coming home to itself.

Wondering if there ever was a stolen child or why

It had been told such stories, considers

It may no longer be an it.

It could have a name.

It could be a person.

 

It could be a me.

Life with a donate button

There are a number of ways of putting a donate button onto a blog. I’ve looked at two – if you upgrade your paypal account to a business account, you can have a paypal donate button. There’s also this – ko-fi.com which is free, and I’ve chosen to go with it. I can recommend it as an easy thing to set up, although it does require you to have paypal.

So, what happens when you donate to me, or to any other creative person, be it via this platform, paypal, patreon etc?

First up, donations are a huge validation. We live in a culture where money has a massive role, and is linked, whether we like it or not, to sense of worth. Most creators don’t earn much for their creativity, and small donations can be very powerful as a consequence.

Secondly, that thing about creators often being relatively poor. You may be helping buy a person time when they don’t have to work on other jobs. You may help them pay their bills or buy food for that week. If enough people donate, you may be moving them from their former employment towards doing the thing you love them doing, full time – Patreon is an especially good platform for this. If you want more of what a person does, this can be a way of helping make that possible.

Donations can help a person save up to cover costs – that might be studio time for recording, new equipment, courses, research materials, print runs and so forth. It might mean under-writing the cost of going to events – its hard to get seen and build an audience if you don’t do events but transport and accommodation aren’t provided for free if you aren’t already a big name.

Donations help a creator take risks. If you have to make every creative venture pay for itself quickly, and for your time on it, and cover your rent, then its hard to take risks. Getting a big, original project moving takes time, and involves risk. You can help make magic things happen.

The idea that creativity should happen for love has serious implications. It means creativity is for the independently wealthy, those who are financially supported by a partner, the already successful, and those well enough and with the energy to work a job and work on their thing in their spare time. The idea of creativity just for the love of it is an idea that excludes a lot of people from creative options and keeps creativity for the rich and privileged and I am not cool with that. It might be different if supermarkets gave away food for the love of feeding people and landlords made homes available for the love of sheltering people, but that doesn’t happen.

Donating to me, specifically will help me with study and research. It means I can keep Tom from having to take on paying gigs for illustration so that he can put his time into our projects instead. It helps me afford the time for unpaid work – which most often means supporting the creativity of people who can’t afford to hire a publicist.

You can support me on Patreon if you’re inclined to make a regular donation – https://www.patreon.com/NimueB

Or I now have this for one-off donations (there’s a permanent button on the right hand side of the blog)

 

If you’re wondering whether to donate or not, let me add that I’m debt free, and can afford a social life. I don’t have to choose between heating and eating. But train fares for events terrify me. If that suggests you are more marginal than me, please don’t donate, look after yourself and enjoy what I’m giving away.

Poem: Sometimes by Meredith Debonnaire

I’m a big fan of Merry’s poetry.

Meredith Debonnaire

This is relatively new – a few months I think. I really like reading this one out loud – it’s got an urgency that sort of builds (I think).

Sometimes

In the night I can hear the echoes

of a river that never ran through this street

and the creaks of the not-boats drifting like leaves along it.

Sometimes

in the night I can  hear the pigeons

squabbling and doing magical mundane pigeon things

six feet above me on the roof

and

I don’t sleep,

sometimes,

because to sleep would be to admit another day is coming.

The river is full of secret nighttime commerce,

happening quietly around and beneath the loudmouthed drugdealers

and

I heard from beneath the sounds of my neighbours’ party

mingling with the deep voice of some beast

who stalks me, curious, and is interrupted by Basshunter again.

I try to keep moving

like a shark

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The trouble with countries

I’m not a big fan of countries as a way of organising and getting things done. I mention this in case we ever get opportunities for a radical restructure.

For a lot of purposes, a country is too small a unit to be useful. Many issues cross borders – pollution, crime, climate change, rising sea levels, food security, war, refugees from war and climate disasters, extinction, human rights. These are all things that do not care about borders, can’t be controlled or stopped at borders and where the actions of individual countries aren’t enough.

For many other things, the modern country is too big a unit to be of much use. In the UK (a small country compared to many others) we see routinely how a government operating out of London fails to grasp or pay attention to the issues of everywhere that isn’t the south east. Taking the economy of the country as a whole, for example, means that The City of London money moving operations can make it look like our economy as a whole is healthy. Meanwhile, in most of the rest of the country, local economies are in poor shape. I expect larger countries suffer bigger distortions than this.

Most of us feel remote from politics. We aren’t a big part of the decision making process most of the time. Every few years we get the option to replace the current set of suits with a different set of suits. Sometimes it seems there’s not much to choose between suits. For most people, it’s difficult to tell as well where relevant power is held, and that’s alienating. We have a lot of layers of government – parish councils, town, district, and county as well as country are all in theory democratic, all spending money on behalf of the people. All making decisions that radically impact on our lives, and on the options available to the tiers below them in this political structure.

I don’t know what a meaningful unit of organisation for political purposes would be, but I am entirely convinced that modern countries are way too big. We end up with these crazy stories about national identity that are supposed to bond us to a vast number of people – most of whom we have nothing in common with. These stories are increasingly used to make us resent other people for no good reason. I’d like to be part of a much smaller unit, held securely to world standards. It wouldn’t be perfect because nothing is, but it might be more relevant, accountable and meaningful.

The writings of Jonny Fluffypunk – reviewed

Jonny Fluffypunk is one of the many strange, colourful (and in this instance, stripey) contributors to Stroud being such an awesome place to live. I’ve seen him live repeatedly, and have finally got my hands on his published work.

The Sustainable Nihilist’s Handbook mixes poetry with short prose pieces. The poetry has the energy you’d expect from someone who does a lot of performance. Most of it is funny, but without becoming trivial. Surreal, surprising, uneasy. Mr Fluffypunk is the master of too much information, with confessions from his youth which may or may not be true but will leave you with some startling mental images. It’s a small book and does not take long to read, but unlike many poetry collections, it is the sort of thing you can just sit down and read cover to cover in one go.  I can heartily recommend it.

More here – http://burningeye.bigcartel.com/product/the-sustainable-nihilist-s-handbook-by-jonny-fluffypunk

 

Poundland Rimbaud is Jonny’s second collection and like the first, it contains a mix of poetry and prose. Unlike the first, it also has a steady supply of footnotes. Some of these add context and insights, some whip the rug out from under a poem’s metaphorical feet (I could get a joke about meter in here, but I’m resisting it). Again there’s the kind of comedy that comes from discomfort, over sharing, and a keen eye for the inherent ridiculousness of human beings. The last section of this book is a full script, with production notes for the one man show ‘Man up, Jonny Fluffypunk’. Having seen the show, I found this fascinating, but have no idea how it would read for someone innocent of the experience. In the printed version, the author lays bare the methods by which the audience is to be emotionally manipulated, and its not just about long, uncomfortable silences…

I thought the whole thing was brilliant, and highly readable – as with the first book I devoured it over a couple of sittings.

More here – http://burningeye.bigcartel.com/product/poundland-rimbaud

Jonny Fluffypunk talks in his work about poetry being dangerous, and about being personally dangerous. I can vouch for this, having mistakenly sat in the front row at one of his shows, and consequently had all of the poetry relating to unrequited teenage love directed towards me. She was plump, greasy, not conventionally attractive, and largely oblivious. I was considerably older and there was no scope for obliviousness. There’s been no point in my life when anything like that happened in a real way – it could only happen as a joke, requiring me to look into some personal voids I generally try to ignore. Live art is inherently risky, you never know what a poet might decide to do to you.

Landscape, and fantasy landscape

I’m currently working on a Hopeless Maine novel. Most of the Hopeless Maine stuff I wrote years ago, but as the graphic novels will be coming out steadily from Sloth now, I feel it makes sense to get back into that setting and write more. In the time since I wrote my last Hopeless book, I’ve read a lot of landscape writing and this has had some considerable impact on me.

When I’m writing for the graphic novel of course much of the landscape stuff is down to Tom and the illustrations. It’s his island, he knows what it looks like. However, I’m working on a novel, so I have to do all the backgrounds myself! It’s really interesting putting to use what I’ve learned over years of reading landscape writing.

One of the things I’ve learned is that I don’t like writing that focuses on viewing the scenery. It makes the person in the landscape into a tourist. I’m interested in ways of writing that place the person within the landscape, and that often comes down to how they interact in a bodily way with the place. It’s not just about looking, but moving through, smelling, tasting, touching, eating, and so forth.

In a novel, great reams of description can be dull and irrelevant and slow the story down, so I’m working to make the experience of landscape a key part of the story. It also gives me opportunities to have my characters interact with the strange creatures that inhabit the island. This in turn gives me chance to air another issue that is close to my heart – challenging the idea that human and nature are two separate states.

We’re got some decidedly fantastical things living on Hopeless Maine. In the graphic novels, they are mostly background and the stories are about people. I think that speaks to the way in which humans are so often oblivious to non-human things going on around them. But, I want to do something different with this

Reading landscape literature has changed how I think as an author of speculative and fantastical books. I’m only now finding out how that works because I’m using it. Fantasy fiction is so often seen as an escape from reality, but I’m seeing the scope to make it an act of re-engagement and re-enchantment.

How to be a poet

Creativity starts long before you sit down with the tools to make a piece. For the sake of coherence, I’m going to focus in this post specifically on what needs to happen before a poem is written.

A poet needs a love for and skill with language – I would say more so than any other kind of writer. A poet needs to be alert to the sounds, shapes, and rhymes of words. They also need to be conscious of the implications and possibilities each word they use may hold. Sensitivity to language and to the way it can be used is something to be involved with every day.

Poems tend to be smaller than other forms of writing. They call for precision. To be precise, you have to know what you want to get across. To do that well, you need to understand what the most important features are, or what will most readily evoke it. That in turn requires paying attention.

I think I can tell the difference between a poet who had an idea and sat down to flesh it out, and a poet who starts from keen observation and then whittles it down into a piece. The second instance produces poems that are richer and more surprising, because there’s an alertness to detail that you can’t have unless you’ve been working on it all along.

Any experience has the potential for poetry in it. The person who lives in a state of awareness, noticing the details, the nuances, the processes, is well placed to draw on that wealth of experience.

The person who only looks at their own experience, and does so in a fairly superficial way, tends to write poetry charged only by the feeling of the moment. What they won’t necessarily know how to do is make that accessible to other people. If you work only at the surface, you get the hot anger and the cold resentment, soft feelings of love and hollow feelings of loss… but there are many, many poems out there that talk in superficial metaphors about common human experiences. To have something new to say, you need to know more than this.

Poets also need to be people who read poetry. Other reading certainly helps, but encountering – as text or performance – really good poetry makes a lot of difference. Poetry can take many forms, and exists in many cultures. The shape of the piece is often part of where it comes from and what it needs to say. What you’d try to express in a Japanese haiku is not what you’d be trying to express in Icelandic rap, which is not what you’d find in the rap styles of urban America. Slam poetry has its own rhythms and purposes, but has a different flavour to poetry inspired directly by beat poets. And so on, and so forth. Know the form you mean to write in, and get to know as many other forms as you can, because it all helps.

You should be able to read back your finished and edited poem and justify every word and comma in it. You should know why each is there and why it couldn’t possibly be replaced by some other word, or a colon. You should be confident that no word could be taken away without harming the whole and that equally, no word could be added, without it causing more harm than help. You should reach this point confident that your poem does what you intended it to do, and that a reader or listener will be affected in the right way by it.

Higher Self, Deeper Self

I’m wary of the language of ‘higher self’ although it crops up a lot in New Age writing. For me it goes with a sense that things away from the earth and body are superior. Elevation goes with notions of hierarchy, too, which also makes me uneasy.

Talking about deeper self has an earthy sound to it, evoking something more like archaeological layers. Just as the earth is made up of rock and soil layers that represent history, so the deeper self is a vast accumulation of where we’ve been and what’s happened to us. It does not have authority over the everyday self, but it has resources the everyday self doesn’t.

Who we fully are can’t be expressed in a single moment. Who we are will depend on context, and what emerges in response to whatever is going on. We draw on our deeper selves all the time. Intuition, off the cuff decision, inexplicable whim – this can all be rooted in the soil of our deep self. How we understand the world and what we think is normal can also be part of a bigger identity that we aren’t necessarily conscious of. How we react to different things can teach us a lot about who we are.

Spiritual language is often full of hierarchy and authority. It’s there when we talk about transcendence, and enlightenment. It’s there in any spiritual tradition that tells us to overcome the body and worldly things for the sake of the soul. The language of ascending as a spirit to the sky God, permeates our language and even if you haven’t been raised a monotheist, those ideas are everywhere. Even if you don’t believe in it, ascending towards light can turn up as a layer in your deep archaeology. It amuses me greatly to suggest this. Bodies of course tend to go down rather than up in the natural scheme of things. Our earthy parts make their way back to the earth.

Glass Herons and donations

A glass heron is a creature native to Hopeless Maine. Like most of the resident life forms, they’re a bit… odd.

There’s a glass heron front right in the image above and a second at the back and to the left.

Some time ago, in a fit of enthusiasm, I added a glass heron level over at Patreon. All of my Patreon levels are based on Hopeless Maine creatures, so at $1 there’s small things in bottles, and $5 is the splendid Dustcat level. They are about the size of a cat. I’m writing the dustcats a book about dustcats. I’m not the best when it comes to self promotion, so I put up the glass heron (size of a heron, give or take) and didn’t really spend much time telling people it was there. At glass heron level, you get things in the post – at least four times a year. Tom and I between us generate a lot of small things that can be posted, like cards, and dustcat books, little originals, handwritten things.

This week I was very excited to find that my first glass heron had sauntered in. There is a lot of validation for me in people liking what I do enough that they want to throw money at me. Not least because I appreciate that most of us don’t have a lot of spare cash to chuck about, so the decision to support creativity is a big deal.

Money is, simply, a great enabler. I’m living within my means, which are small. Extra cash means being able to afford research books, the odd course, getting to things that inspire me. Doing events as a creator costs money and you don’t always make it back – I’ve lost money on two events in the last year. Doing a print run for something like a dustcat book costs money. It’s a lot less stressful doing this sort of thing when you aren’t also obliged to carefully count the pennies. I’ve got very talented friends who should be getting their work out there and can’t afford to invest in it. I want to be able to help them with printing costs.

I like the gift economy angle with Patreon. I put free things into the world – here, on www.hopelessvendetta.wordpress.com, on my youtube channel, my Sage Woman blog column. I write regularly for Pagan Dawn and for the PF international. No one pays me for these things because there’s no money with which to pay.  Pagan magazine publishing does not make anyone rich. I know what it’s like to have no budget for fun stuff, and what a difference free, online content makes in that scenario. Now that I can afford to, I do buy books and music, and tickets for gigs, I support the creative economy as best I can. In turn, people who like what I do and who can afford to support me are doing so, and it really helps me make ends meet and feel like it’s worth carrying on.

Money of course is not the only thing to have that effect. Likes, shares, reblogs, comments, sharing my stuff on social media – these things cost nothing and they have a massive impact on me from one day to the next. At my lowest points when I’ve not known how to keep going in the desperately difficult economic environment of ‘creative industry’ it’s been this blog, the support here and the comments that have kept me moving and saved me from despair. That’s gift economy in action, too.

So, here’s a question. I’ve been wondering about putting a donate button of some sort on the blog. I appreciate that the commitment to regular Patreon funding is going to be too much for many people. A donate button is more like being able to throw small change in the pot when you have it. Would that be a thing? If you think you might like to chuck a dollar in a virtual hat now and then, can you let me know? No commitment required, just I want a sense of how people feel about this. If everyone following this blog chucked a dollar in the hat once a year, it would change my life radically. I’m also at the kind of level where small sums of money make a difference. I’ve resisted the idea of a donate button for a long time because I want people to feel comfortable about having things for free. I choose to give this stuff away, and I hate it when people tell me things are free and then demand a five pound donation… so I’m not doing that. Thoughts?

Identity, change and consistency

I can tell you a story of my life in terms of change. What I was not able to do as a child that I can do now. What I was able to do in my teens that I can’t do now – all those late night things, and coping without sleep. I can tell you stories of constancy, how things from my childhood are still with me, how things that I consider integral to myself have been with me a long time. All of those stories would be true. It’s like observing light as a wave or a particle.

Every experience I have lived through has influenced me in some way. Every opportunity, every setback, every person I’ve interacted with. I’ve changed, year on year. Some of that change was good, and some of it has taken me years to unpick and recover from. As those experiences shape and shift me, I behave differently, react differently, feel differently and that in turn forms part of how the world seems to me. My own behaviour and responses shape the world I inhabit – for years now I’ve been getting faster at removing myself from drama. If I find someone exhausting to deal with to no good purpose, I step away. I say yes, emphatically, to activities and people that make me happy. As a consequence my life is calmer and richer than ever before. I feel more secure.

At any moment, who we are can seem like a substantial thing. Pressure to change is often threatening. There’s good reason to be wary of anything or anyone that demands you change against your will. Being asked or told to be what you are not is seldom good news. However, the opportunity to grow, stretch and change is usually a blessing. Given room to be more than we were, we can evolve on our own terms. We can flourish. That kind of change often comes slowly and feels more natural.

We are all full of potential and possibility. If life gives us scope to explore those possibilities, we can grow into identities that feel more real than where we started from. We are born into contexts of stories, history, opportunity or lack thereof. We are born into other people’s ideas about who we should be. Given time, space and opportunity we may find we aren’t the person we started out as. That can be a great relief, a shedding of unwanted and restrictive skin. Each choice we make can set us on a new path – and there is always scope to come back and change direction.

It’s when you’re changing that you can most easily see what doesn’t shift. We may label those qualities as virtues and vices, styles of being. “I’m a kind person with a strong work ethic.” “I’m easy come, easy go.” “I’ve got a short temper, I’m wild and passionate” and so forth. These are interesting things, but I think fairly superficial aspects of self. I don’t have a language to talk about my sense of inner self, any more than I have language to talk about the essence of a flame or a river.

I know there are some traditions that identify the core self as absence, emptiness. I don’t experience it that way. For all that I change and flicker, grow taller or smaller, changing shape in response to breezes, the quality of my flame remains flame. Or whatever it actually is. If I explore something new, I soon know what is for me and what is not. I know what fits me and what does not. I know what I respond to. It’s not something I can express in words, although I can dance it, and sometimes I can find tunes that reflect it.