Nimue Brown's Blog, page 284

In search of a voice

Finding your voice is a key part of development for any creator working with language. In non-linguistic arts, finding your own style is just as relevant, so all of this can be applied more widely.

Give me a keyboard or a pen, and voice is not an issue for me. I started looking for my voice some twenty years ago. It has changed over time, as I have changed, but it’s not something I have to reach for any more. I know what I sound like on paper. That holds even if I’m working in first person and using a voice not strictly my own.

When it comes to performance, voice is something I’ve not sorted out. I can sing – in the most literal sense of having a voice, that’s been fine for nearly as long as the writing. I used to MC, without much confidence, I do talks and workshops at events and I now spend a lot of time in the company of performance poets and storytellers. It has become apparent to me this year that in terms of performing, I haven’t found my voice. I don’t have my own style.

Who do I want to be when I’m performing? What do I want to sound like? What impression do I want to create? I notice that some people have pronounced performance voices that are different from their personal voice, and some don’t. Some people use their everyday language, and some take on a very different vocabulary for the stage. How words are paced, the tones used, the physical movement or absence thereof all goes into creating an overall effect.

Part of what makes my written voice the way it is, is that I pause to consider my phrasing. I’m not the sort of person who has to sweat out each line, but I don’t rush, either. Then I read it back and check that it does what I want it to do. I care about exact phrasing, because I want to convey specific meanings. I also want to avoid dogma, authority, accidentally excluding people, and unnecessary verbal aggression. When I’m speaking, I can’t edit. I can of course write ahead of time and commit it to memory, but that can result in a more stilted performance unconnected from what’s going on around me.

The only way forward is to experiment. I need to try out different ways of doing things, and see what happens. I need to be willing to make mistakes, change direction, and feel uncomfortable. I cannot expect to magically have my speaking voice turn up and function at a professional level and I am going to have to learn how to do a decent job in the company of people whose experience and ability far exceeds mine. There is no scope for development without some risk taking. While I’ve no great enthusiasm for falling flat on my face in public, I also have no desire to stay put. Overcoming the fear of looking like a prat in front of people I respect has not been easy, but I think I’m there now.

I know that my main aims are to be more relaxed about the whole thing and more able to trust my spoken voice. I’d like to be a better public speaker. Beyond that, I don’t know – which is also why the process is so important. There are many things I can’t figure out by wondering, but will come to understand by doing.

Everyone I know is tired

Everyone I know has too much work to do, but not enough time to do it in and not enough energy to do it with.

Everyone I know could do with a decent holiday right now, but having the time to organise it, and the resources to pay for it – that’s a whole other question.

My facebook feed is full of exhausted people struggling on as best they can.

I took a day off yesterday. A whole one. I’ve been doing weekends for about nine months now, but it is hard getting more than 2 days back to back. Today I have to run to catch up on everything i didn’t do because I took a day off.

If you’re working multiple jobs, or your contract doesn’t have proper hours, getting and affording breaks is hard. If you’re self employed, how do you say no to paying work, even when you really, desperately need to rest? Because there’s no knowing when that paying work will dry up. Trying to get ahead so that if things go terribly wrong, you don’t fall into debt.

All that stands between most households and total financial disaster is the next paycheck, assuming it lands.

Being tired does not improve your judgement, or your efficiency. It makes everything harder. Being tired is a stress on the body, and body stresses increase risks of illness, exacerbate conditions and cause mental health problems.

Everyone I know is tired.

This really, really needs to change.

Security has to be more important than job flexibility. There have to be safety nets that people can count on. The role of rest in health – mental and physical –needs taking seriously. Illness is expensive, it isn’t efficient either.

Shaman and mummers

Let me be clear up front – this is not a scholarly blog post, the evidence is curious but uncertain, and does not constitute any kind of reference, or proof in and of itself.

Mumming plays are a kind of traditional theatre. Some people consider them to be ancient Pagan survivals, others reckon them to be a more recent invention and until now, I feel wholeheartedly into the second category.

There is a scene that crops up in many plays I’ve seen, where a dodgy doctor and his assistant cure a dead man. It is normal in mumming plays for someone to be killed and brought back, this is often the basis of arguments for Pagan survival. The doctor affecting the cure seems to be a quack. He usually talks utter bollocks and his cures are unlikely. He may have a magic potion, he may require a virgin to kiss the afflicted person. I was once summoned from an audience to be the virgin, and my cries of ‘but I’m actually pregnant right now’ made no odds. Often, when the healing is working, the doctor pulls a bloody great tooth out of the patient and claims this was their problem. We all know he had the tooth all along, and we all saw the victim struck down by their opponent. Clearly the doctor is not to be trusted even if his cure does always work.

I’ve run into the idea that some shamans use sleight of hand to show clients a physical object that has been taken from their body during the spiritual healing process. It could be said that this is chicanery in the style of our mumming doctor. It can also be said that people find it easier to invest in the healing process when they can see something happening, and our minds are key healing tools. The placebo effect gets things done! We are more likely to heal if we believe in the healing.

So, could the doctor in the mumming play hold some memory of this process? Could there be a touch of ancient British shamanism in the mix after all? Or a satirising of a remembered practice that had lost favour? Which is still when you get down to it, a folk memory of something Pagan.

An unsubstantiated theory, but one I thought it worth sharing all the same.

How to read poetry

Poetry, especially when offered in the first person, can seem profoundly intimate. I think it’s the most intense form of word expression available if you choose to use it that way. That intensity can help fuel the impression that the poetry is an exposing of self.

I suspect the whole business is further complicated by what we might end up reading and hearing – professional contemporary poetry is rare. The industry believes that people no longer buy poetry. As a consequence, what any of us are most likely to encounter at slams or online or in poetry groups, is people who do very much seem to be writing from the heart. Poetry as catharsis, as healing process, cheaper than therapy.

When I posted ‘my facebookfriend has unfriended me’ a bit back, there were sounds of condolence, ‘sorry you’ve had this experience’. There wasn’t a specific experience underlying it, and the emotional energy came from a different set of recent experiences that had annoyed me, but which I couldn’t write about in a way I found useful or amusing. Alchemical transformations in the writing process turn original experience into something that makes sense.

The ‘I’ of the poet can be as much a device as a story author speaking in first person. The ‘voice’ of a poet can be as much a construction as any other form of art. How much do we read the poet in the poem? I know I do it, encountering the poetry of friends, sometimes knowing about some bits they’ve drawn from experience, inferring something of the heart and soul where perhaps what I’ve seen is craft and inspiration.

A poem can be true, without being any kind of literal truth.

A poet can be honest and authentic, without revealing anything of their own story.

But to what extent do we, as readers and audience, need to feel that the poet is indeed hefting up a bit of their heart, or putting a slice of their soul in front of us?

Spirituality and depression

One of the effects that depression can have is a sense of separation from the world. This can play out in all kinds of ways – a sense of alienation from other people, a sense of dislocation from what you’re doing, distance from your own body and actions. The spiritual consequences of this detached feeling can be vast and deeply disturbing to deal with.

There have been springs when my inner season has remained winter and I’ve just not been able to connect with what was going on. There have been many days when it seemed as though all the life and colour had drained out of the world. How do you practice a Pagan faith when everything tastes like cardboard? When all you can do is skim the surface of life and not experience any breadth or depth? When you can’t feel a sense of connection, depression can rapidly become a spiritual crisis as well.

When I am depressed, I have tended to lose either my intuition or my ability to trust it. I’m not creative, or am less creative. I’m not open, so very little can get in, including the things I really need to have permeating me – the seasons, the time of day, the weather, the songs of birds.

I have a suspicion that depression may be worse for Pagans than for people of many other faiths. In many religions, there are rituals, prayers, songs, actions, regular gatherings for worship. It is normal to show up to these because it’s what you do rather than in the expectation of anything massive happening. Paganism has a far greater emphasis on personal revelation, experience of the divine and the numinous, and for a person mired in depression, these experiences are not very likely at all. We’ve got a priesthood, but it’s individuals working alone, mostly. We don’t have the support infrastructures to help take care of people who run things when they are in difficulty themselves.

I hold inspiration sacred. I’m dedicated to the bard path, a big part of my spiritual life is about creating and performing. Again, these are things that it is very difficult to do at all, or to do well when the black dog has sunk its teeth in.

I don’t have any tidy solutions to this. It helps to know that you are dealing with depression and not Pagan-fail. You may not be able to do the things you normally would – anything calling for concentration – so meditation and ritual can be too difficult. You might not feel as you normally feel – no sense of the animistic reality around you, no sense of the gods or the voices of spirit in the wind or whatever it is you normally do. That itself can be painful and disorientating and will add to the burden of depression.

Believing that all of this will pass can be the hardest belief to hold onto.

Sex, Death and Blame

Trigger warnings – nothing graphic but the territory is unpleasant.

The idea that it might be appropriate to kill someone because of their sexual activities, or imagined sexual activities, has been with us for a long time. It may be one of humanity’s fundamental problems, that all too often we are happier to deal with violence and murder, than we are to let people get on with shagging people in the manner of their choosing. The control of female sexuality, and the eradicating of any LGBTQ expressions tend to be at the heart of this.

The need to respond to sex with death tends not to be a reaction to rapists, or child molesters (people talk about it, I grant you, but it tends to be all noise). So there’s no grounds here for suggesting that this sort of violence is born of moral outrage, there’s nothing logical or natural about it. Where adultery is more offensive than rape, where consenting adult sex is more offensive than child abuse, we’ve got something seriously wrong. This is not about disgust, clearly.

My theory is this. People who kill in response to other people’s sex lives, may be doing it as an act of control and keeping power over others. Another possible explanation is that some repressed urge is being projected outwards. How often do apparently homophobic politicians get caught with rent boys? It’s become a cliché. If we think about what other people do, and feel things that we can’t deal with, blaming the person who ‘caused’ that feeling is a way of not dealing with desire, or fear of the power of the other. People perhaps kill not to eradicate the other, but to try and eradicate the feelings in themselves that they are unable to own. And when you get down to it, that’s pretty fucking tragic.

For a long time now, many of us have been saying that a person’s body, their clothing, how they dance, how they walk – these are not invitations to sex. We need to get clearer that a person’s sex life is not an invitation to violence and death. It doesn’t matter how promiscuous and unfaithful a person is, there is no justification in this in killing them. Dump them if you need to, but that’s all the entitlement there is. It doesn’t matter who a person is shagging, who you think they shag, or what you think that means. It is not a motive. We have to do away with the idea that a ‘crime of passion’ is in any way a thing.

We have to name these hate crimes for what they are. It was painfully obvious around the Orlando shootings of 2016 that many people didn’t want to deal with this as a hate crime against gay men. So many people were so quick to talk about how mentally ill the killer was. If we don’t name these acts as what they are – acts of violence carried out by people who think that sex justifies death – there’s a kind of complicity. It’s a silence that enables. We’re going to have to keep saying this one: What people do consentingly with other people’s genitals is not a justification for violence at all ever under any circumstances. What people do unconsentingly to others with their genitals, or to the genitals of others is not justified, or acceptable, ever, at all, under any circumstances.

Sitting with resentment

Resentment can bring together anger, envy, jealousy, self-importance, self righteousness, greed and a whole host of other unattractive feelings. So, why would you want to spend time with it? The short answer is anything felt and suppressed only causes trouble. However, resentment is a complicated response and feeling it doesn’t always make you the bad guy. Taking time to sit with the feeling, to meditate on it, explore it and understand it can be very revealing. Having done a fair bit of this kind of sitting, these are the things I have learned.

It is reasonable to resent what is unfair. Be that abuses of power, or people taking more than their fair share, or any other kind of unbalance you might encounter. If that seems to be the shape of it, dig deep, because sometimes we’re mapping a sense of unfairness on to what is really envy. When we see the success of others, we may assume it was unfair. Women who are accused of sleeping their way to the top are an obvious example of this manifesting. If you can see real evidence for unfairness, then your resentment calls for justice. It’s important at this stage to remember that justice and revenge are not the same things.

It’s more comfortable to see the situation as unfair than it is to recognise our own envy. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with envy as such. If we look at what’s going on for someone else and wish we had the same or better – that seems human and natural to me. It’s what we then do with it that is the question. Seething bitterness over what they have and we don’t is profoundly unhealthy. The desire to take what we haven’t earned is not usually a good thing – although there is also the desire to redistribute what others have not earned, Robin Hood style. If envy is a spur to action, if it shows us where we want to be and sets us on a path – why not? Recognising envy and allowing it to motivate us to positive action is no bad thing.

Resentment can be born of projection. It can mean we take the worst of what we think, the worst of our impulses and attribute it to the other. We think they are getting away with the things we want to get away with but can’t. Or think we couldn’t. The real challenge here is to grapple with your resentment until you can see your own inclinations in it. What you do from there is up to you, but denying our ‘shadow’ selves never helps. Know it, own it, deal with it.

It’s easier to put something down after you’ve looked at it properly. A feeling that has been met and explored is far more easily let go of. It is better to know ourselves, to know that we aren’t saintly, and to accept our less than angelic moments. To be human is to be flawed, and when we make more room for our own shortcomings rather than trying to deny them, we are likely to be better adapted to dealing with other people’s too. Sometimes, it’s entirely reasonable to feel those ‘negative’ emotions. Sometimes they are the only appropriate response in the circumstances. Sometimes they are a necessary spur to changing ourselves.

Mapping the territory

For some years now I’ve been interested in mapping the things that we don’t normally make maps of. I ran into the idea first in Jane Meredith’s Journey to the Dark Goddess where she talks about mapping the journey to help others find their way.

Sometimes, all we have is our own story about an experience. How big, important, unusual it seems may be entirely due to having no map. Further, without a map of some sort, where do we go in the new territory we’ve entered? Much of our standard mapping comes from the cultures we inhabit – consider the romance map, the maps we have for success which are all about owning big shiny things. There was a period when politicians liked to talk about their moral compass, but a compass without a map is of limited use and a direction that makes good sense in one context won’t always work the same way in another.

At the moment most of my personal mapping has to do with the body. I’m looking at the diversity of how bodies work, and the narrow path we give as the map for what we are supposed to do. What helps with this is when people share their stories with me. I’ve found putting things on facebook and on here is really effective for generating stories. Of course there are always people who respond to questions by feeling the need to tell me what to do, which is less helpful. That kind of response comes, I think when we assume the map to be small, and one person’s experience likely equates to what everyone else gets.

When we share stories about life experience, what rapidly emerges is the diversity. I’ve been talking about what we eat, and body size and stress, and exercise, and the breadth of what people want, what they need, what worked for them – we are so incredibly different. We can learn a lot from each other without having to succumb to the idea of total similarity.

When you offer the map of your own terrain (here’s what happened to me, here’s what I did, here’s what happened next) the person gifted with your map is free to take up any bits that connect to their map, and not explore territory that isn’t theirs. There’s no judgement implicit in saying ‘this is what happened to me’. There’s none of the power-over that comes with saying ‘this is what you should do’. We’re entitled to our own choices, even the bad ones. I’ve been round this with the issue of heavy periods, told I should get myself medicated into not having a problem – it is useful to know the medication exists, it is essential to have the right not to have to normalise my body on those terms.

A year ago, when deep in depression I asked how you tell when to seek antidepressants. A great many generous people shared their stories with me about what they had done and why, and as I worked through that, it became apparent to me that medication wasn’t the answer I needed. There have always been people keen to tell me that medication was the answer for me, but I’ve found the answer is to deal with the underlying causes, and that’s working well, finally. What the majority of people on or who had used antidepressants told me was that it gave them the time and space to sort out the issues. Not a magic cure, just a holding place. It only works as a cure for the people whose issues are fundamentally chemical in nature. That’s some of us, not all of us.

When we share our stories, we help each other put experience into context, and that can make it far easier to make sense of what’s going on. So, a big thank you to everyone here on the blog and out there on other social media, coming back with stories and insights, and to everyone blogging your own maps of the territories you have encountered.

The Hopeless Maine Arts and Crafts movement

At present I’m spending my afternoons making horrible fish art, painting profoundly wrong willow pattern onto household objects, and imagining the arts life of Hopeless, Maine. I’ve never taken world building so far or so literally before.

I’ve been involved with the isolated island of Hopeless Maine for about a decade. It is the brain child of Tom Brown, who first lured me in to writing about it back when we only knew each other online. I married him, and that came out of working together for years on this project. He’s a man with a lot of tentacles.

Opportunities to take Hopeless things out in public have had me making, pondering and inventing for some weeks now. For example, I’ve been making fake dead moths. The Victorians were keen on collecting moths and butterflies, killing them and pinning them to boards. I had a display case turn up full of dead flowers – a rather garish bit of tourist trash. Clearly, the only way forward would be to make the moths from scratch. Mostly out of left over, found, or recycled things. Making them has led naturally to naming them, so we’ve got Granny’s Shroud, the Most Inedible Land Moth and the Poison Druid amongst others (so named because it is partly made of mistletoe, in case you were wondering).

Willow pattern is a widely subverted thing, but I’ve learned a lot hand painting it onto objects. What we see mostly today are factory made, printed to be all the same willow patterns. A foray to my local museum showed me hand painted porcelain, no two quite the same. The idiosyncrasies of the individual painter become a thing, and if there’s one thing I can do, it’s idiosyncrasy. Even so, letting go of the standards of factory produced items to do something that is unique, is not easy. But, what else is an arts and crafts movement for?

I’ve worked out why Hopeless Maine has a tradition of horrible fish art. It’s placatory. People refer to fish (both the main food source and one of the things most likely to kill you) in the way other communities talk of faeries. The Kindly Ones. The Good Neighbours. They don’t call it horrible fish art, they talk about the lovely, generous fish. But, most of the fish are horrible, and the art is no better, so there we are. This is one of the points at which I’ll be generating flash fiction cards to go out in public with the objects.

I also know what’s going on with Werewolf mark making. There’s a fashion in fine art at the moment to talk not about drawing but about mark making. Tom and I do not identify as fine art. Most of the time he’s an illustrator and I’m a colourist and crafter. We do identify with folk art, and things made for people – arts and crafts of course being about mixing the beautiful and the useful. So we are taking a little side swipe at the language of Art, with the werewolf mark making. And there is a little story to tell about the controversies caused because the werewolves probably don’t make the marks deliberately, does that disqualify it is True Art?

If this sort of twisted whimsy appeals, do saunter over to www.hopelessmaine.com where all manner of related other silliness goes on.

A prayer

Do not speak the names of killers.

Let history forget them.

Let us not talk of the causes

For which they claimed to kill.

All their acts were betrayals

All their words were lies.

Let us silence their hatred.

Let our silence be a refusal

Of everything they stood for.

 

Let us speak of the innocent dead.

The honoured and beloved dead.

Let us name them and remember

The lives they led, the causes they cherished.

Lives greater than their killers aspired to.

Let us share our grief and anger now,

Blaming only the guilty,

Whose names shall be dust.

In time, let us rejoice in the memories

Of those we have loved and lost.

 

Let us speak the names of healers,

Of helpers and comforters.

Professionals brave in the line of duty.

Let us remember the fortitude of the many,

The courage, integrity and grace,

The best we can be.

 

Do not speak the names

Of those who discard their humanity

In the name of hatred.

 

(One of the things I learned while working on When A Pagan Prays, is that prayer itself is sacred expression, and there are no inbuilt assumptions about where it might be directed. You can pray to anything, or anyone, we can pray to each other. That fascinates me.)