Nimue Brown's Blog, page 310

Magical Realism: Contradiction in Terms?

A guest post from Laura Perry

I’m a writer, and a portion of what I write is fiction that qualifies as magical realism. My most recent novel, The Bed (http://www.lauraperryauthor.com/the-bed), definitely qualifies. I’ve had a few people question that term, suggesting that it’s a contradiction. After all, according to mainstream society and “common sense,” magic isn’t real.

I’ve written before about Pagans who practice magic but don’t actually believe in it, a habit that can lead to very unpleasant side effects (http://www.lauraperryauthor.com/single-post/2016/02/10/Pagans-who-dont-believe-in-magic-but-use-it-anyway). Mainstream society puts a great deal of pressure on us to conform to the materialist viewpoint that anything that can’t be experienced through our five physical senses or detected via scientific instruments simply doesn’t exist or is, at best, some sort of hallucination. So it’s an uphill battle against cultural pressure just to consider the possibility that magic is a real thing.

There’s a sizeable portion of the Pagan/alternative/New Age community that explains magic as some sort of psychological effect, which is fine as far as it goes. There’s plenty we don’t know about how the psyche works, so chalking magic up to psychological thingamawhatsies is tantamount to invoking a version of Clarke’s Third Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws) with the human brain in place of some sort of constructed technology. That, too, is just fine, since no one really knows why or how magic works.

The thing is, magic does work. It produces effects—sometimes unexpected or unpleasant ones—in the material world. Whether that’s through the forces of the human mind or the workings of Nature or the intervention of divine beings is up for discussion.

If magic works, then it’s reasonable to write stories about it and say that those stories are examples of magical realism. Bear in mind that fiction, even fiction that’s based on “true life” stories, is still a made-up thing. But good fiction is a believably made-up thing. I’ve seen the results of magic, both good and bad, enough times to be willing to slide it into the underpinnings of my stories. I don’t write about people flying through the air on broomsticks or shooting flames out of their hands. I write about the kinds of magic I’ve experienced myself: dreams and visions, rituals that go well or that get out of hand, customs that are designed to safeguard the practitioner and that can result in disaster if they’re ignored.

These things aren’t fantasy, though not everyone experiences them. And of course, even people who’ve experienced them may choose not to believe in them since mainstream society still says magic isn’t real (I’ve seen that happen—cognitive dissonance is a powerful and frightening thing). That’s another useful bit for my fiction: the conflict with friends and family members who think you’re crazy for even considering the idea that magic actually works. But in real life, it can be less than fun to deal with.

So no, I don’t consider “magical realism” to be a contradiction in terms. I enjoy writing it and I enjoy reading it. But more than that, I enjoy living it.

Questions of worth

2016 is, without a doubt, the year I started questioning my worth in earnest. For most of my life I’ve been willing to accept the value given to me by whoever I happened to be dealing with. As a consequence I have a history of only removing myself from situations when they became so damaging that I had no other choice. Crawling away exhausted, burned out, emotionally flayed, unable to function, crying all the time, unable to sleep… it’s happened repeatedly.

This year it finally dawned on me that one way to avoid this would be to get out sooner. Saying ‘no’ more often, and spotting situations that aren’t clever will help me. The jobs no one else is prepared to do? Maybe I shouldn’t be striding in heroically. Maybe there are very good reasons no one else is willing to do those things. I’ve started thinking that it would be a good idea to hold a sense of worth, and standards for treatment, that aren’t shaped by how other people want me to be.

These are the things I have learned to be wary of.

People who repeatedly push for more than I am happy to give, people who can’t take ‘no’ for an answer.
People who are all about their own importance and ego trip and treat me as a means to promoting themselves.
People who don’t give clear instructions and then get cross because I didn’t do what they wanted, and people who expect me to magically know what they want.
People who think that ‘service’ means they are entitled to whatever pieces of me they want, with no obligation or duty of care on their part.

These are the qualities I look for.

Willingness to listen and negotiate.
Willingness to accept that not everything is going to be done exactly as was wanted at just the right moment, especially when you’re dealing with volunteers.
A default position of kindness, respect, and fairness.
More interest in the project than personal advancement, but no willingness to sacrifice anyone for the sake of the project.

There are times, causes and situations that call for heroic gestures and personal sacrifices. However, there are also a lot of people whose method for getting things done is to push others into heroic efforts and self-sacrifice. It seems to be widespread in conventional workplaces. I don’t want to participate in anything that cultures people to ruin themselves for some small cause that did not need their blood and misery in the slightest. I have to start with me, and with holding better boundaries. I’ve been complicit in unhealthy cultures too many times, convincing myself that letting someone run me into the ground was acceptable, and worth it. I’m no longer prepared to uphold that view. I won’t name names, but it is fair to say there are some things I won’t be involved with again.

Cat Treadwell

I’ve known Cat Treadwell for long enough that I can’t remember when and where we first ran into each other. We have a lot of things in common in our history – The Druid Network, The Pagan Federation, Druid Camp, writing for Pagan Dawn and Moon Books, being a Druid blogger… Somewhere, many years ago, one of these things first brought us into contact with each other.

Cat is a very lovely person who I think is a great example of a Druid Priestess. She does a lot of celebrant work, and prison ministry, she teaches and writes, and lives her Druidry and shares that experience. I have met her in person and she’s someone I would very much like to spend more time with.

This is a video of Cat Treadwell talking for a recent PF Disabilities Team online conference. Here’s she’s talking about mental health and ritual.

This is her blog – https://druidcat.wordpress.com/

Cat is the author of two titles (at time of writing this.) A Druid’s Tale grew out of the above blog, and is all about her life and work. it’s a lovely expression of being a modern Druid and what that means in practice.

Facing the Darkness offers stories, tools and inspiration to help those suffering from depression – all from a Pagan perspective. My other half – Tom Brown – did the cover for this one.

If you’re not familiar with her work, do look her up, she’s out there in social media land, her books are all the places you can get books, she does talks at events sometimes as well.

 

Frankenstein Clothing

I hate throwing anything away – not if there’s any possible use it can be put to. Where I can, clothing that no longer works for me gets sent to charity shops. However, worn out, damaged, stained items have no re-sale value. So, finding re-uses for dead clothing is an ongoing issue, answered by rag rugs, rag baskets, and the like – these are traditional solutions to squeezing the last bit of mileage out of fabric.

I got in to Frankenstein clothing in my teens. I can sort-of sew – I don’t like sewing machines. But, my ability to think in 3D is lousy. Clothes making from scratch requires things I don’t have – flat space where you can cut cloth without being compromised by a cat would be useful, and I’ve not had that in a very long time. Working on the floor in the living room isn’t viable – I’ve tried. There aren’t patterns for the kinds of clothes I really, really want, and new bought fabric can be pricey.

What I’ve done for much of my life is to either pick up cheap second hand clothes, or up-cycle my own dead clothes to create something new, and weird, of my own imagining. Frankenstein clothes are often made of the dead remnants of other items – hence my name for it. It’s cheaper than making from scratch, I feel safer about mistakes if what I was using was on the way out anyway. I’ve got the shape of the existing garment to help me.

Over the weekend I did over a pair of trousers. I’ve lost a fair amount of weight, so they didn’t fit very well, and the cat had pulled threads on one thigh. I took off the old waistband and made a new one, shortening the waist. I turned the garment inside out – hiding the cat damage, and cut the seams and re-sewed them to enable the reversal. Then, with assistance, I took the legs off just below the knees. I’ve elasticated the new hem, and added broiderie angalise (black).

What this gives me is something evocative of the Victorian knickerbockers. An echo of the kind of garment women swimming and cycling in an era where it wasn’t acceptable to uncover, tended to wear. This is a look I can use for steampunk escapades, but it’s also a garment I will wear for other activities. I don’t have the space to keep a steampunk wardrobe, it all has to be wearable in the rest of my life. I’ve always liked trousers that stop below the knee, and I’ve no qualms about going out in attire other people will find weird, ridiculous or bemusing.

Every piece of clothing I can Frankenstein into a second life reduces my need to buy and consume. I keep usable things out of landfill, I get to play, and I get to wear outrageous things of my own imagining despite not having the technical skills to make my own clothes from scratch.

Timeless Land

I spent somewhat over a decade living in the Midlands, where I ran a folk club. I booked Trefor and Vicki Williams repeatedly – lovely people with a mix of traditional and original songs. ‘Timeless Land’ became the soundtrack for going to Avebury, back when I used to do that regularly for Druid rituals. That alone would be enough to make it fairly loaded.

Vicki died in 2010, just a few months before I left the Midlands, and my folk club. I stopped singing Timeless Land, because I no longer could, it just made me weep. But, it’s a wonderful, evocative song with a gorgeous tune, and the only way to keep a song alive is by singing it, and the best thing I can offer to Vicki’s memory is to help keep her music out there.

Months ago, I got permission from Trefor Williams to record this. It’s taken me a while to actually stand in front of the camera, but here it is.

Victims, survivors and new stories

(No triggers, I think)

People who have been the victims of traumatic experiences tend to self-identify as ‘survivors’. It’s a pretty simple thing – ‘victim’ is a word that reinforces the feeling of being powerless and defenceless. ‘Survivor’ is a word with some strength in it, and a reminder that however awful it was, you got through. Not everyone survives of course, those of us who do, know that we were lucky.

Whether you see yourself as a victim or a survivor, those words can come to be the focal point of who you are. The story of what happened can become the biggest, most important story you have. I think in the short term this is necessary – it’s part of the processing of events, and reassembling your life and identity in the aftermath of whatever changed you. We can never go back. We can never be the person we were before *that* happened. What a survivor has to do, is figure out how to assimilate *that* into a sense of self that can move forward, and isn’t defined solely by the experience.

Traumatic experiences take over your thoughts. It’s part of what it means to be traumatised, that something you didn’t want is able to set up camp inside your own head and keep torturing you from in there. People who don’t manage to sort this out are more vulnerable to future trauma. What’s dangerous here is the way in which traumas can normalise themselves, inside a person’s head. It’s when we start to believe that the thing which happened is part of how the world works, that we have  reduced hope of getting free from it. If you can see it as a one off, an accident, bad luck, something that won’t happen again, the inside of your head is better protected.

Of course, with one off trauma experiences, it’s a good deal easier to recognise that it was a unique event, and you won’t have to face it again. What’s really hard is when you live with an ongoing trauma situation – people in war zones being the most obvious example. Trauma really does become normal in that kind of situation, and changing how you view the world is really hard when that happens.

It takes time to overcome things. It can take years to be something other than the person to whom a thing happened. For many survivors, that sense of self as survivor is always going to be there. With support, and opportunities, we may all have the scope to be more than the sum of our scars, but these are hard things to do quickly, or to do alone.

So if there’s a wounded person in your life, and you don’t understand why they’re still so caught up in the past, be gentle with them. It takes time. We all heal at our own rates, depending on experience, and subsequent support, and on who we are. That’s ok. How fast we may think a person should get over it is no measure of how long it will take.

If you want to help a person heal, one thing that you can do is spend time helping them affirm other parts of themselves. Help them remember other aspects of who they are, allow them space to try and be those aspects of who they used to be, and if that’s hesitant, just hold the space and let it be ok. Over time, small things can make really big differences.

Learning to fail

I’m rubbish at failing. Not in the sense that I don’t fail at things – I do so a great deal. More about how I don’t deal with it. Being able to fail is essential for learning. There is no way of learning without making mistakes, and feeling safe to experiment and getting things wrong is essential. Most of us aren’t psychic enough to be able to negotiate all of our human interactions and life choices perfectly, so we need room there to deal with mistakes as well.

When it comes to other people messing up, I think I do ok. There’s room in my head for honest human mess, for good intentions that played out badly, for people not knowing, or realising. Most of the time I can accommodate that.

It’s when it comes to me that the problems start. I expect perfection. It doesn’t matter if I’m under-informed, or under a lot of stress, or haven’t got the skills. I expect myself to get everything absolutely right in all ways for all people all of the time. I know that’s not even possible, but even so, faced with a cock-up or a shortcoming, my body response is panic. I expect to be told off, put down, ridiculed. I expect to be kicked out of spaces for the slightest error. I find it very hard to imagine that anyone can tolerate or forgive me for being less than perfect, and it has to be said that this anxiety puts a lot of strain on my relationships.

It takes a lot of time for me to learn to trust that someone will be ok with me being human.

Of course there’s a lot of personal history tied up in these reactions – I know what of the past is shaping it. Knowing, I have also found, is not the same as being able to not get caught up in something. The head is faster than the rest of the body and unlearning a long-established fear response takes time. I can do it, I have done it in some key relationships.

One of the problems this causes me is that, faced with complaint or criticism, my automatic response is to feel guilt and responsibility and to try and turn myself inside out to appease the person I have offended. I’ve spent much of my life accepting the idea that it is ok for other people to punish me for failing, and the fear of punishment is a big part of my bodily reactions to my own inevitable shortcomings.

One of the big changes this year has been to question this. I’ve become suspicious of the people who want to hurt me for honest mistakes, human imperfections and not magically knowing what they wanted. I’ve become able to hold the idea that I shouldn’t stay in spaces where I am required to hold some kind of superhuman level of all-pleasing perfection.

Perfection is not a human quality. Life is too full of contradictions and conflicting needs for any of us to be able to do all the things perfectly for everyone all of the time. The person who demands that, and who won’t tolerate any kind of mistakes or shortcomings, is basically saying ‘you aren’t a person’. There’s no room in a world where you have to strive for people-pleasing perfection, to have thoughts, feelings or needs that are your own, and that aren’t perfectly convenient to everyone else.

My challenge moving forward is to be kinder to myself around mistakes. Getting something wrong does not make me a failure as a human being. It doesn’t prove that I’m useless and worthless. It doesn’t entitle anyone to attack or hurt me. I don’t have to keep doing on the inside what others have done from the outside. And when someone saunters into my life and demands, and derides, and doesn’t want to hear my side of things, I can use some choice, short Anglo Saxon words to tell them where to go. It’s a theory, at any rate.

Light, art and wonder

On a few occasions now, Tom has taught art in a spiritual context. Why? Because if you approach it in the right way, then trying to draw something leads to a depth of engagement with it. Most of the time our eyes slide off surfaces and our brains see what we think is there, not what is actually happening. Slowing down to really look creates an entirely different engagement with the world.

For the first half of this year, I spent most of my afternoons as a graphic novel colourist. While I’ve always been interested in visual art, I’ve never worked on this scale before, and it taught me a lot. One of the things it taught me was to really look at light. The quality of light has a huge influence on how everything appears. Twilight is wholly different from noon. Indoors lighting with candles is very different from being outside, and so on and so forth.

One of the direct consequences of doing the art, was a radical increase in how much time I’ve spent paying attention to the sky. I have discovered that a lot of the time, what the sky really does is wilder and weirder than anything I would dare to put on a page. Skies that look painted, and where the ‘brush strokes’ are visible. Skies full of wonderfully improbably colours. Clouds in shapes that are far too representative.

Light affects mood. Cold and harsh light has a very different emotional impact to warm light, and while we might not process that consciously, the impact is with us every day. Natural light has a different effect to artificial light. Having periods of fading light, twilight and gloom affects me in significant ways. We tend to wipe out the lower light periods from our lives with artificial light, and we don’t get as much proper darkness as we should.

Colour of course is nothing more than light bouncing off things and interacting electronically with tiny sensors in our bodies. Your distribution of rods and cones affects what you can see, if you can see. Some of us see more colours than others, some of us better process light than others. There are some people who don’t see colours in the same ways as the majority, and others for whom a colour is also a note, or a smell or some other thing. Colour is a very subjective thing. We all have emotional responses to colour that have elements of personal experience in them. Whether red is sexy or angry for example. Whether pink is girly, or a strong colour. Whether lots of white is soothing, or maddening…

When we come to a place, or an image, we bring all that personal history of colour with us, getting an experience purely our own. Trying to make a visual thing impact on people in specific ways is nigh on impossible, but art isn’t really about what’s possible, when you get down to it.

New Edition of Kevan Manwaring’s The Immanent Moment

I’ve read this collection and very much liked it, so, here’s some poetry news, do have a read.

Awen Publications

by Anthony Nanson

I’m delighted to announce that Kevan Manwaring’s poetry collection The Immanent Moment is back in print in a new edition. This is the collection that Kevan regards as the best of all his many collections published to date. This third edition includes a number of new poems.

I’d like to acknowledge the team effort behind the scenes to bring this book back into being: Kirsty Hartsiotis on design, Richard Selby on proofreading, Nimue Brown on blog, and yours truly on synthesiser and drums.

This is what it says on the back of the book:

‘The sound of snow falling on a Somerset hillside, the evanescence of a waterspout on a remote Scottish island, the invisible view from a Welsh mountain, the light on the Grand Canal in Venice, the fire in a Bedouin camel-herder’s eyes … These poems consider the little epiphanies of life and capture such…

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Until God

‘Adieu’ in French doesn’t simply mean goodbye, it means goodbye forever. One of the things I love about French as a language is this need for the dramatic farewell. ‘Until God’ – because we’re not going to see each other again before then.

Of course we often don’t know when we’re saying goodbye for the last time. Every farewell has the potential to be farewell forever.

Say ‘farewell forever’ in English, and most people will hear melodrama. It’s not the sort of thing we have a cultural habit of saying seriously. That’s true of all big, dramatic emotional expression. In this language, we find it hard to take big things seriously – we hear irony, fuss-making, silliness. Say ‘this is goodbye forever’ and most people probably won’t believe you.

There are of course times when ‘goodbye forever’ is necessary. Some people, and some situations are intolerable to the point whereby leaving and never coming back is really the only sensible thing to do. Having ‘goodbye forever’ heard in that context might help others take onboard how serious it is, which could in turn lead to change. If not for me, then for the person who comes into the same situation after me.

Because of course it is personal, and not broadly hypothetical as I write this post today. I didn’t say ‘goodbye forever’ but I doubt what I did say will be heard as it was meant. I’ve made choices that mean there are people I will probably never see again, and to whom I said goodbye in person not knowing then that it was most likely an ‘adieu’.

Would a change of language have changed anything? Would the enormity and finality of ‘adieu’ have shaken people up to take me seriously? Maybe. Maybe not. English lacks the words for some situations, and as speakers of this language, we lack the mental framework for dealing with emotionally serious situations.

Until God, then, for some of this. (Curiously, ‘adios’ in Spanish has the same literal meaning but not the connotation of finality.)

Which as a Maybeist, is a fairly weird thing for me to say anyway, because I have no gods. There will be no afterlife for me that has everyone I care about in it where people can be re-united and past wrongs overcome. If it doesn’t happen in this life, it doesn’t happen, most likely.