Nimue Brown's Blog, page 442

Lying to Harry Potter

I gather that the impulse to lie to children is widespread. All the plots in Harry Potter depend heavily on it with the ‘good’ adults doing it at least as much as the ‘evil’ ones do. It comes up plenty of other places too. No, fiction is not real life, but the ideas that make sense in fiction do so because they have real life relevance. As a parent I’m familiar enough with the desire to be thought well of by my child. Who wouldn’t want that? There is also the terrible desire to want the world to be a good, fair and lovely place for him, and not to want to have to tell him how awful things can be out there.

It’s normal to lie to children and tell them that everything is going to be fine, even when we’re pretty certain it’s not. (Think about how Umbridge behaves around defence against the dark arts issues). Sooner or later the child grows up and gets some experiences that don’t sit right with the lovely, safe world you wanted to create for them. I remember that transition as not only uncomfortable, but undermining my trust in my parents. Many children are smart and alert enough to pick up on the standard lies, and I doubt there’s much comfort to be had in feeling your parents (or Umbridge for that matter) aren’t willing to be straight with you. Lying to them is more about our comfort than theirs, all too often.

This is one of those issues where what is normal conflicts with what is right. Lie to your children and no one will think the less of you. We lie to ourselves alongside it, we say ‘it’ll be better for little Johnny this way’ when really it will be easier for us. (Think about Snape, Dumbledore, Sirius Black). We can so easily project our motives, needs and feelings onto our own children and then go after the things that will serve those needs, whilst telling ourselves what excellent parents we are (Sirius) . I try very hard to make sure I’m not doing that. But then, the idea that our children should come first in all things is culturally ingrained – especially for women, I think. (Harry Potter’s mother personifies this). Saying ‘I want this for me’ feels a lot less comfortable than pretending to be doing it for them and there’s a lot of cultural encouragement to go about this the wrong way as a consequence.

I still carry a feeling of affront that the world is not a fair place, people in authority cannot be trusted (Ministry for magic), and poetic justice seldom shows up. I know most ugly ducklings do not get to be swans (even if Hermione does), and that wicked stepmothers are not reliably thwarted by the direct consequences of their own evil actions. I grew up with all the stories about what the world should be like – as did most people. What I needed was a little more Han Solo saying ‘life isn’t fair, Princess’ and The Goblin King’s observations on the subject: I wonder what your basis for comparison is?

I’ve run into people along the way who are horrified by my determination to be honest with my child. He knows I’m not perfect. He also has an awareness that it’s not all about him. He is not Harry Potter. I will put him first more often than not, but I have limits and he knows about them. He doesn’t expect the world to revolve around him, nor is he waiting for a patronus to come out of a lamp and grant all his wishes. There are times when we have the news on, or are talking about badgers, or the state of the world when I would give anything to be able to reassure him that it’s all going to be fine. He wouldn’t believe me if I did. He pays too much attention. I’d rather have his earned trust than mislead him.

I cannot give my child the world he deserves, where justice shows up with a wand if all else fails, where happily ever after is pretty much a given and good things eventually find their way to good people. He’s made me acutely aware that I can, and should, do more to try and make that a reality. Unlike fiction, reality does not produce tidy story lines and coherent resolutions. One thing Harry Potter reminds me, is how powerless kids feel when you lie to them, how angry and disrespected (the entirety of book 5). I want to do something different.

Against a dark background

On Friday I saw a memorably dramatic rainbow – the consequence of especially strong light against a really black storm cloud. The vivid colours owed everything to that combination. This is often the case. The combination of sunlight and cloud shadow at play across the hills creates the most dramatic views. It’s the clouds that make the sunsets rich and memorable too. Take out the darkness, and light on its own often doesn’t make a lot of sense.

This is one of the themes at play in Personal Demons, and Hopeless Maine generally. The light shows up better against a dark background. This is a literal truth with regards to the art – the glows, moons and magical lights are so much more vivid when there’s contrast. (www.hopelessmaine.com if you have no idea what I’m talking about). It’s true from a writing point of view as well. It’s difficult showing off courage, heroism or integrity to good effect if the setting is in pastel shades and mostly fluffy. The deeper the darkness, the more brightly lights shine in contrast to it.

Fiction is not the same as real life though. I am currently tempted to get that tattooed onto my forehead, because the inability of people who ought to know better to get their heads round this one is driving me crazy. Again. Fiction has narrative shapes and a coherence that life frequently lacks. On second thoughts, can I please be allowed to tattoo the words ’fiction is not the same as real life’ onto the forehead of the next person who hits me with this rubbish? Gah. Moving on…

In fiction seeing those contrasts between light and dark is rewarding. It emphasises story and character. Mostly in real life, experiencing the contrasts is an absolute bitch and I for one would be happy to give it a miss more days than not. Yes, the compassion of some shines out a lot brighter for the background of everything else. Yes, the wisdom of some shines forth in just the same way. Yes, I have a growing perspective on the difference, and no, I did not really want any of the dark half of the experiences that have shaped my opinion. I’d have been quite happy going through able to trust and think well of most people. It’s that old innocence/experience quandary again. I miss the state of innocence when I believed that the world was a better sort of place.

What I want is the world I used to believe existed, where trust was not the province of the naïve, greed was not good, and trying to do the right things for the right reasons counted for something. A world in which truth is respected, and people respect themselves enough to want to be truthful. A world in which money is not the be all and end all, and power is used to help, not to abuse.

And on that day, Satan will very likely be skating to work.

I keep coming back to the same issue, that I have choice, and I am not utterly powerless. That whole ‘be the difference’ mantra often seems to be an exercise in seeing how many different ways I can get myself kicked. But if I give up, I have given up and accepted that I can do nothing. I’m still not willing to do that, even though I am bone weary of the metaphorical bloody noses and rounds of getting crushed. I am so tired today, and so short of inspiration, and I feel like the cold has got right into my bones, and into my soul and the darkness of winter before me seems long and harsh too. But I’m not giving up. I’m not going to do anything of any great use today, I suspect, but just holding the idea, the possibility of getting up again and having another go is better than admitting defeat.

There are often more storm clouds than there are moments of beautiful light and glorious rainbows, but there are moments of glorious light and beautiful rainbows, and that is going to have to be enough.

Speculating wildly

I’ve been talking a bit lately about the issues of shoddy history, and crazy interpretation, which comes up a fair bit in the new book, Druidry and the Ancestors. I’m being careful not to replicate content, so whatever comes up here is not in the book, for purposes of keeping life interesting. I don’t actually have any problem at all with wild and creative speculation. It is, after all, the foundation of much fiction writing. Wild speculation can lead to testable theories, new interpretations and other good stuff. It can also create confusion, spread misinformation and generally mess people about.

The first rule of good speculation is to be clear what you are doing. Offering interpretation of facts is fine, but it needs to be said that you are giving an interpretation, not ‘obviously this is the only way of reading the data’. It won’t be. There are always alternative stories available. One good way of keeping your speculation under control is to do a lot of it, ironically enough. Postulate half a dozen interpretations, and then talk about which one you like the most or which ones seem the most plausible.

Giving a bloody stupid interpretation alongside your pet theory and suggesting this somehow demonstrates your theory is the only good one that can fit the fact, is bullshit. Don’t go there.

Be mindful of the stories you already have an investment in. The odds are good that you will interpret in line with existing beliefs and will have blind spots around things you either do not know, or believe. I have an axe to grind about how we interpret human sacrifice into archaeological data, for example, so there’s every chance I will deliberately go the other way, perhaps more than the evidence supports. I am positive about historical pagans and therefore unlikely to give critical theories the same weight as celebratory ones. At least I know this. Many of the people who have written history books about pre-Christian folk had an agenda – to prove the superiority of both Christianity and the more industrialised and colonising culture they came from. As I commented on recently in the post about the trouble with animism, so much of this thinking is still ingrained culturally. Perhaps a little bias the other way is a necessary counterbalance for the time being.

Many of us have work or life experience that calls upon us to interpret information. That may be formal data analysis, but more likely about deciding what someone else’s behaviour means, or who to trust, which expert to follow, which political party to vote for. We are all unavoidably in the business of turning raw information into stories. Sometimes it is the wild speculations that take us forward. Could we…? What would happen if…? Radical things can only come from wild and original thinking. Include Green movements, feminism, new technology and modern paganism in that list. We need wild speculation. Without it, we stagnate.

There is also the wild speculation of politicians who want to make us afraid of the wrong things to keep us pliable. There are the wild speculations of creationists, and the incredible theories of people who can imagine rape as part of God’s Grand Plan. Think about it and you will see some interesting differences. The most dangerous, sick and deluded of wild speculations assert themselves as unassailable truths.

Where there is even a small margin of doubt and uncertainty, there is hope. We need uncertainty. A wild speculation that is not complacent about its own merits will be tested, explored, and only taken forward if it starts generating some kind of evidence. The sick and mad speculations automatically assume their own veracity and will mow down anything that fails to agree. Thus when a misguided vision in the hands of the right people turns out to provably not work, it gets dropped, while those who have no grip on reality keep peddling their madness. People who cannot tell between what is real and what they have imagined can get things right – by accident, if by no other means. But an argument you do not know how to back up or verify is not a very useful thing to take out into the world.

The Pagans I’ve met have all tended to be speculative people, and we do like our wild theories (Atlantis, aliens, dolphin priestesses, the burning times, conspiracy theories etc.) There can be a lot of fun to be had playing with ideas, but we need to keep our feet on the ground and make sure we can test what we think is true, and not rely on our beliefs to reinforce our beliefs.

A sense of self

I know from the self esteem help book that to have good self esteem, it has to be internal and not too dependent on what anyone else thinks. I’ve not merely had sense of worth issues of this shape, but for much of my life have depended on looking outwards to get some feeling of who I am. I’ve not had a terribly coherent sense of identity. Now, the business of looking outward is fine and dandy when there are smooth clear mirrors to look into, but most of life hasn’t been like that. Most reflections are a bit wobbly, some have been downright distorted. But with little intrinsic sense of identity and not much innate self esteem, how could I tell what was useful feedback and what was rubbish?

The short answer is that I couldn’t, and that it caused me a lot of trouble.

It’s been a testing week. Many of them are, that in and of itself is not unusual. Partly because of that habit of looking outwards. Partly because there are a great many things I care about and partly because it is not in my nature to choose the easy options.

I know what I do and I know what I have done, as well as anyone can reasonably hope to. I know my intentions as well as anybody ever does. I know what drives me, and what gets me out of bed in the morning. (Needing a pee, mostly.) Judging myself on how well I fit other peoples’ expectations and interests is not a particularly useful measure. Not least because I fail to come out as ‘normal’ in so many ways and there are people who keep on not liking this about me.

I saw a beautiful thing this week, thanks to Paul Newman. It was a photo of a Nazi rally. (Stay with me). In the middle of the sea of raised arms, was one guy with his arms folded. One failure to conform. One questioning face. It made me cheer. As an image it pinned down so much of what I feel and believe, and I think this stuff matters, and apparently I’m not alone in this.

I know that I do the best I can with the resources I have. I know that I try very hard to do the right things, for the right reasons. I also know that, being human, I muff this up sometimes. I no longer accept that I deserve to be beaten to a bloody pulp for every shortcoming, real or imagined. I also try very hard to accept people on their own terms, see the best in them, tolerate difference and celebrate diversity. This does not mean that every bigot and idiot who crosses my path has the unassailable right to treat me like shit. I’ve let that happen far too often.

I realised, this week, that its no good talking about doing the right things for the right reasons whilst letting total assholes push me around, belittle me, and otherwise make my life unnecessarily difficult. I do not have to accept the bendy freak show mirrors they offer as reflections of who I am. I do not have to internalise every piece of criticism that comes my way. I am not the sum and total of how everyone else perceives me. I am the sum and total of what I do, think and feel. Only I can ever really be the judge of that.

I do know who I am. I do know people who share in that sense of my identity and who consequently like being around me and treat me as though I have innate worth. The other ones I can do without. Of course the people who put me down tell me that they are cleverer than everyone else, they see more, understand more, and so forth. I do not have to believe them. I have a choice. I also think I might be a lot more useful and functional if I stopped trying to please people who are innately unpleasable.

Show me another twisted, misleading mirror and I’m going to put my boot through it.

Belling the cat

Belling the cat is a fabulous song by Talis Kimberly. On the surface there’s a story about brave mice putting a bell on the cat so that every mouse knows. Protecting the mice from predation. Of course this is a song about people. It’s about not turning away when you see something happening that should not be happening. It’s about taking risks to keep your fellow mice safe rather than just covering your own furry bottom. It’s not an easy thing to do.

There are lots of fear based reasons not to go belling the cat. The cats are invariably bigger and more powerful than you, it’s what enables them to be as they are. They have status, money, lawyers, or they are government bodies or official in some way. You know if you step forward holding the bell, you are going to be bitten. Probably.

Quite often you know you’re seeing a cat because you’ve just watched it chew some other mouse’s head off. If you start running now, you may be safe. Running towards the cat, bell in paw, is dangerous. Suicidal. It will bring cat-attention you might otherwise have avoided. You just have to hope that next time the cat comes round that you’ll spot it in time, or that some other mouse bells it to give you a chance.

What stops us belling the cats is the fear that we cannot do it, and that we will be punished more for taking them on than we would otherwise have been. Self preservation comes first. Many of us will only try to put bells on cats in the handful of seconds before our cat is pretty much bound to destroy us. Mind you, that has been known to work and it’s never too late to try.

They rig the games so that we mice cannot win. They control systems and make those systems serve them. They get elected into governing bodies and they seek high status jobs that give them extra cat powers. They see it as their divine right to destroy mice, and we are all mice. The truth is that the ‘cats’ in this story are not a separate species, they are mice too, wearing cat suits and bighting heads off anyway.

It may not be enough to bell the cat so that everyone else can hear it coming. You may need to get in there and tear the cat suit off, revealing the evil mouse underneath. It is a high risk activity, but the alternative is a world in which any mouse willing to dress up in a cat suit and bite heads off, rules. I for one, am not going there.

I’ve got my bells. I’m going to use them. I also have a growing obsession with sinister mice as protagonists in fiction, but that, as they say, is another story…

Interpreting mysterious signs

I get angry about this one. I suppose in Pagan circles where people explore arcane things, the idea of secret, mysterious knowledge at least makes sense, kind of. Even then I still find it offensive when it is used to justify otherwise insane leaps of logic. Would that it were just a Pagan issue. It turns up all over the place: People who assert that they can interpret the runes, the stock exchange, the entrails, or whatever else they latch onto, and tell you what it really means, based on no more evidence or logic than their own assertions. That might be harmless when it’s your handwriting, but far less so in other circumstances. I’ve no issue with a reasoned argument, logically developed, it’s the great leaps of illogic that make me reliably furious. A+B clearly equals nine hundred and fifty kind of logic. 2+2 equals a Freudian metaphor. You get the idea.

It happens a lot in books about history. You’re offered a piece of evidence, and then the author says something like ‘clearly what this means is that…’ what follows is often neither clear, nor obvious. It’s amazing the kind of logical leaps that can be made this way. It’s a nightmare when the statement goes ‘clearly this is pagan’ because other things will then be figured out based on that. Assuming for example that violent death signifies sacrifice, not murder or formal punishment and that this in turn means something about beliefs for example. Where would that leave the hanging, drawing and quartering of Guy Fawkes and his friends? Strange rituals can exist with no reference to religion.

When it’s a case of being down the pub and listening to some random person asserting random things, this is merely irritating. I hear it on the radio in the way politicians interpret and use data. I hear it in every selective bit of journalism, of which there are many. So often when we start ascribing meanings to data, what we do is roll out the story we had all along, the prejudices we cherish most, with a view to making the data fit. Look at anything long enough and you can join up the dots in it to get a nice unicorn shape. When bullshit comes from people who claim or hold authority, disbelieving it is a hard sort of job. How can I, with no doctorate, no formal training, no proof that I am clever, go up against the words of academics, politicians, media folk and the rest? Well, I do anyway, because I have to.

Hallucinogenics in a grave do not prove Druidry and divination practice, for example, although I’ve seen that one claimed in newspaper reports. They could just mean we’ve dug up the world’s oldest raver, for example.

There’s a whole chapter in Druidry and the Ancestors about how to deal with the melons. How to go in as an unqualified reader and work out if a line of logic and explanation is dodgy and should not be trusted. I wrote it with an eye to shoddy history books, of which there are many, but it works for other things too. Try it on news reports and pretty much anything the politicians say. Try it on advertising jargon too. In fact, try it anywhere someone who claims more authority than you is trying to ram an idea down your throat without having the decency to explain it properly.

You see, if an idea or an argument is good, the logic of it can be traced through. The person who invokes secret hidden knowledge that they alone understand, is bullshitting you. The person who claims that they alone are capable of making the all important interpretations, based on their vast knowledge, is not playing fair. We are smart enough to understand. If there’s a sleight of hand magic moment to make the argument work, you’ve been conned.

From which we can obviously conclude that I was hatched out of an egg and spend my waking hours constructing BDSM toys out of old cheeses.

Trust your own judgement. Read closely. Do not accept the magic tricks and claims of secret knowledge. Demand the details, and if they are not forthcoming, know not to trust what you’re seeing.

The art of breaking

Every time we use our muscles, there’s a complicated process of tearing down and rebuilding going on. I don’t pretend to understand the mechanics, only that our bodies grow and develop through a constant process of destruction. I’ve had conversations on and offline with other people, Druids especially, about the importance of breaking in other ways too. You can’t build a new way of living, seeing and being without breaking the old one.

From a training perspective, the easiest way to get rid of old ingrained habits / conditioning is to simply train yourself into a new set and replace them. Old behaviours disappear, but if the ideas, feelings and beliefs that gave them sense are all still hanging around, it can get messy. New behaviour plus old thoughts equals total chaos.

I’ve learned to see breaking as a helpful thing more than a fearful one, but this has taken practice, and the practice has been messy. I remember the fear I felt knowing that I was not going to be able to hold together, that emotionally and mentally I was falling apart. I also remember the words of the dear friend who gently explained to me that I was going to have to do it, that my whole sense of self and world view were in such a mess that the only way to heal required me to first break down the old. It hurt like hell, but I walked through it, crawled my way back and started the rebuild.

I know there are more coming. We did a little experiment last week. I drew my body shape. Tom drew my body shape. They clearly weren’t the same person. I had a strange experience which triggered it, seeing myself by accident and thinking I was seeing a fairly slim person, realising it was me and watching the reflection become fat. My body image is clearly not the same as how Tom sees me, and I need to deliberately break the beliefs that are making me see myself in certain ways. I’m going into that one voluntarily.

I can see other things ahead that are going to be emotionally intense, and bound to take me down into the darkest places in my own mind. I fear this. I fear the inevitable pain. I also know that trying to protect myself by not facing it will hurt a lot more in the longer term. There are things that have to happen. Only when the egg cracks can the chick emerge. Only when the seed splits open is there a new shoot. Birth is never clean, tidy, or painless. Mending broken things is a bloody, visceral sort of process. Healing hurts. Dead things coming back to life always hurt. (bonus points if you can place the quote). I’ve spent time in the numb, dead place that is depression, and I know that however bad it is feeling pain, not feeling pain is one hell of a lot worse. Where there is pain, there is life. Not feeling, is hideous and whatever else happens, I am determined not to go back there.

So, as my muscle tissues break and reshape, so does my mind, and my whole emotional system, which is also innately biological. I break to rebuild, I look round for examples of how this works other places in nature, and I am hugely grateful to the people who have helped me get through.

Swan Mysteries

The Bewicks are here. Every year, they fly in from Russia, coming just before the cold, racing the worst of the weather. The winds that carry them from the distant north east also tend to bring us the snow. They come by night, navigating by the stars, and the young swans travel with their parents to learn the route. It is not a matter of instinct, but of knowing.

As I write, a hundred or so swans are a matter of yards from me, out grazing in fields near the canal. I hear them calling to each other at dawn and dusk. The whiteness of them against the fading light is ghostly and haunting.

One of the older guys in the village told me that when he was a child, the swans came in their thousands, and flew around the church spire sometimes. He spoke with wonder in his voice, and sorrow for a magic now almost departed. The swans come in hundreds now, not thousands. Years of hunting, years of pollution and the legacy of lead fishing weights has taken a toll. Large and slow flying, they can’t easily change course to dodge things like pylons and wind turbines. Making those more visible from a distance is helping, but there’s so much to do, and the swans do not have all the time in the world.

As a child I used to go to the wildfowl trust to see the swans each winter. I have a lot of good memories of doing that, and it’s lovely being able to take my son to see them as well. He’s captivated by their magic, fascinated by the beak patterning that allows you to identify individuals, and far more intrigued by the facts and figures than I ever was. I wonder if one day I will get to be a grandmother. I wonder if there will be swans still coming then, and whether I will get to share them with a future generation. With climate change taking a toll on so many habitats, there’s no knowing.

I watch the swans grazing in the fields, and I hope that there will be more of them next year, and the year after, and that in a hundred years when I am long gone, the swans will still be here.

Interfaith Druid

I spent the weekend at the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust in Slimbridge, selling art and books as part of their Christmas market. For those of you who are either further away or not devoted bird watchers, this is a big nature centre, lots of water birds, and a big foyer suitable for doing events in. I had Druid books on the table, unshockingly, and I did sell some.

I also had several conversations with random people who saw ‘Druid’ on the book covers and wanted to talk about what they’d seen in the news, something about interfaith and charity… half remembered stories that made them uneasy. I ended up filling in gaps as best I could. I only have a partial grasp on what’s going on, but, The Druid Network – a registered English charity, applied for a place on the Interfaith Network (I’m pretty sure that’s what it’s called.) This is a big, publically funded interfaith group. The Druid Network were turned down, ostensibly on the grounds that it would cause disruption, despite no evidence of any Druid ever having disrupted any of the smaller interfaith groups where Druids attend.

It looks a lot like prejudice. Worse yet, it is prejudice in an organisation that gets its money from the state, and has therefore some sort of mandate. If you want to be a bigot in your own private playground, I for one don’t have the energy to bug you about it. I’ll go someplace else. But, if you are a big, official outfit and there is no ‘somewhere else’ that makes a viable alternative, I am not a happy bunny.

I like interfaith work. I’ve had a little bit of formal exposure. I like the kind of random informal stuff I end up doing at events. I also like the Druid Network (I’m a member but in no way qualified to speak on behalf of said outfit). I do not like what’s happened here. The whole point of interfaith is inclusion. I’ve heard plenty of protest against the idea of ‘fringe nutters’ getting a toe in the door anywhere. Usually from people who assume ‘fringe nutters’ are all the people they haven’t heard of, and the odds are good they’ll include folk like the Bahia and Jains in there. As well as us, of course. Tabloid thinking, we all know how it goes. ‘I haven’t heard of it and therefore it’s a worthless pile of rubbish’ is not the mindset that makes interfaith work. ‘I don’t like it so I don’t want to have to deal with it’ is another attitude you cannot take into interfaith work. It all starts to sound a bit like ‘don’t take my toys away!’

Some of the bigger UK faith groups have not been getting good press lately, for other acts of exclusion (Church of England saying no to women Bishops). Politically this sort of behaviour just isn’t clever, and it doesn’t help anyone. We need to be able to talk to each other. We need to foster open communication to reduce fear and prejudice. We need to accept at the table anyone who feels moved to be there, no matter how fringe, or weird or ‘not us’ we think they are. Exclusion is a good way of breeding resentment and entrenching bloody stupid ideas on both sides. We need something a lot better than this. I wait with interest to see what we actually get.

Druidry and the ancestors

Just a quick heads up to announce to the world that Druidry and the Ancestors is officially published and out there and available and all that! Got the notificaiton last night.

The other reason this is short is that I’ve been out all day doing an event, and shall be out all day tomorrow and am a bit tired as a consequence. But, if anyone would like to see me, buy books, fondle Tom’s art, and see all the other lvoely crafty people we’re sharing as space with, we will be at Slimbridge Wildfowl Trust, Gloucestershire, all day tomorrow. Which will not help anyone in distant lands, but I know oneor two readers are from round ‘ere…. normal service will be resumed on Monday, probably.