Nimue Brown's Blog, page 81

Enough Love

We humans come with some innate urges – to learn and explore, to express and communicate, and to feel. Pretty much everything beyond that, is what we develop from those basic starting points. One of the things that startled me as a parent was watching my child learn how to be comforted. At the first few goes, touch wasn’t comforting, but the association grew with safety, problems being solved, physical warmth and so forth which caused that to change.

Most of us crave love. Many of us have no idea how to love ourselves, and it struck me recently that this also is learned. Or not. Whether we manage to learn it depends, I think, on whether we are loved in the way that we need to be loved, for long enough to get that properly into our brains.

We don’t all love in the same way and we don’t all have the same needs. I had one grandmother who (I think, but I’m not certain) expressed love primarily through making food for people. I’ve always been a words-oriented person, so without verbal affirmations in the mix, that didn’t work for me. Some people are much more touch-orientated. Some people hate being touched. If your formative experiences didn’t match your innate needs – through no fault of anyones – you’re going to be adrift when it comes to knowing what you need. It’s very hard to know what you need without having had some experience of it.

All too often, the messages offered to people who don’t know how to love themselves are demoralising. How can you love someone else if you don’t know how to love yourself? I’m not sure why anyone would imagine this makes sense. We’re all capable of having and expressing feelings, after all. It’s often helpful to understand yourself and your own needs, but that isn’t the defining factor in whether you have anything to offer anyone else.

I think sometimes the things we are most moved to do for other people are good indicators of the things we also crave. I also think this sort of thing is easier if you learn it as a child and don’t have to think about it. However, for all kinds of reasons, many of us are not perfect matches for the families we start out in. The larger and more sprawling our families are, the more people we are cared for as we grow up, the better a chance we have of encountering people who can show us what we need and whose care will teach us about the ways in which we need to be cared for.

I’m finding the reframing helpful at the moment – I have not known how to be ok with myself because I’ve needed someone else to show me how that works. Sometimes all it takes is the right support to be able to see what you need and how to go after it. Alongside that, we all have the potential to be the exact right thing for someone else and to do or say the perfect thing that allows someone else to make sense of themselves – which is a rather lovely thought!

Developing a song

A few weeks ago I shared a song in progress as The Ominous Folk work on a song about Annamarie Nightshade, written for us by Keith Errington. Annamarie is a character from the Hopeless, Maine project and The Ominous Folk started life as a Hopeless project too, although it’s definitely now a project in its own right as well.

In the first blog and video, we were breaking the song in and just getting a feel for it. By the time we got to this second video, we’d had time to think about the song. Susie has taken the lead with arrangement decisions, particularly in changing the pace and establishing an underlying beat to sing it to. We usually handle arrangements in this way. We try things, we discuss them, we see what ideas arise and we go with those. No one goes into a song with an exact sense of how it should work, and the process of figuring it out is always collaborative.

I’ve changed my harmony line slightly – the last note at the end of each chorus, and a rather more ambitious high note at the end. I’ve kept the uneasy harmonies. I have work to do with the first verse – nothing unusual there. One of the things we’re able to do as a group is sing together without using an instrument to give us the notes, and without pitch pipes. This takes a lot of practice. We will get to the point where Susie and I will just look at each other and then hit the starting notes. It’s the sort of thing that looks like witchcraft when you do it live, but actually depends on putting in the time and work.

With current conversations around use of computers in art, I’m conscious that a lot of people see the magical bit and not the process that gets you there. The difference between people who create and people who don’t isn’t magic, or luck. It’s just a question of spending the time on it. Equally, no one needs a machine to do the creative process for them, it’s just a question of patience and effort. In this case, being willing to sing the same song, over and over until it works.

At the next round of developing this song, we’ll have a harmony line from Tom underneath these two – that’s most of the way there as well, and James coming in to bolster up the chorus.

Defining success

As we plunge into a fresh new year, many people will be setting resolutions, and considering their hopes and aspirations. It’s therefore a good time to think about what success means. All too easily, the idea of success can become a moving goal, where no matter what you try and what you do, the feeling of success seems always out of reach. Capitalism perpetuates this through feelings that we have to compete against each other. The new shiny thing that was going to prove something about us is always replaced by a newer, shiner thing we don’t yet have.

Set the bar low. Imagine the smallest thing that would be meaningful as a marker of success. With this blog, I set that bar at getting one ‘like’ or positive comment. If what I write works for one other person then my post has done its job. I apply this to a lot of things – if I can make one person laugh, or one person smile, if I can do something in a day that helps one person – good enough.

For me, success economically means being able to afford to live, and having enough to spare for nice things, and the scope to bail out friends in need. I don’t think my income level proves anything about me as a person, and I don’t judge other people based on what they earn. 

I don’t measure success in terms of material goods. I’m a scruffy goblin, I use things until they wear out, I don’t need the newest anything. I don’t see people who have a lot of stuff as being successful, but I do sometimes wonder whether they are happy.

Happiness is definitely a measure of success – mine or other people’s. Causing happiness, enabling it or supporting it is also a measure of a successful person. The person who can enrich or improve life for another being, is a successful person. 

Feeling unsuccessful will lead to feeling powerless, and unhappy. We’re social creatures and we tend to suffer when we think other people may have low opinions of us. However, we get to choose how we define success, and that can be a really powerful choice. If you focus on the good you are able to do, then your sense of self doesn’t have to be rooted in money or status. We all have scope to contribute to the wellbeing of other living things. We all have scope to make beauty in the world, to bring joy, offer comfort and to lift up those around us. Small everyday things done well are successes that merit taking seriously.

Resolutions and looking ahead

For many years, I’ve taken time at the end of December to reflect on where the year has taken me, and to set intentions for the year ahead. I will also take time through the year to reflect and assess, because living in a deliberate and conscious way is very much part of how I do my Druidry.

One of the things I’ve managed to do in terms of following through on intentions, is being more open to my intuition. Right now, my gut feeling is that many aspects of my life are hanging in the balance and that much depends on other people’s decisions. The intentions I hold might not amount to much unless a number of other people decide to align their intentions with mine.

Where I’m most confident at the moment is around the writing side of my life. There are good things going on around my old Fast Food at the Centre of the World novel – so good that I’m going to write a sequel! David and I will be working on the second Wessex novel, and that’s a creative partnership and process  I entirely trust and feel very good about. There are other projects that I hope will work out but are less certain.

One way or another, I’m going to invest more in music this year. Exactly how that works depends on who else wants to do what, and this is an area of my life that is definitely going to be informed by other people’s choices. There are lots of interesting possibilities and a number of people I want to work with, or at least jam with.

In recent months I’ve seen a version of me I like a lot – more confident and more able, emerging a bit from the crushing despair and from the restrictive influence of panic. There are things I can work with on my own here, but change so far has not been a solitary project, and is unlikely to be so going forwards. Some of this depends on what other people choose. I’ve had some really powerful and encouraging conversations with Tom about what we can choose as a household, and that has the potential to make a lot of difference. I’m on a trajectory that feels powerful and hopeful.

I’m aware at this point that improving my mental health, and for that matter, my physical wellbeing, is going to call for decisions on my part. I’m going to need to hold better boundaries, and to be more willing to do things that feel selfish – like saying no to people when I’m under-resourced. I need to pick my fights more carefully, and focus on the situations where I can do some good, rather than being exhausted by things I cannot change. 

I’ve got a lot of uncertainty on the work front, because so much depends on whether I can get my body well enough to support taking on anything else. I’ve had too many days in the last year where I could not have made it out of the flat. I don’t know what I’m going to be able to do, which makes it hard to set intentions. If I get the low blood pressure sorted out, I will have more options. With two new books coming out next year with publishers, and some self-pubbed stuff on the way as well, it would be good to be able to dig in with that, too.

I’m going to invest in learning more about Latin dance – youtube tutorials mostly. I like learning new things, I love dancing and it feels like a project that will align with other things I want.

It’s a much less focused and coherent set of thoughts that I usually come up with. I have very little idea where I’m going or what I’m doing with my life alongside a vague but appealing sense of how I want to change and who I want to be. More than anything, I want to deal with the mental health issues and get to a point where I can be happy. It’s thinkable, and I can see how to do it. I think I’m underway, I’ve got the support I need, and I think a great many things are going to change as a consequence.

Imagination as virtue

“Reality can be beaten with enough imagination” Mark Twain

To change anything, we have to be able to imagine that it could be different. One of the biggest problems with this planet destroying late stage capitalism is what a good job has been done persuading us that no other ways exist. We’re sold the market as a natural, inevitable force people are powerless to resist. We’re sold consumption as the peak of human progress. We’re told there’s no way to stop and that it would be pointless to try.

One of the things imaginative experiences can give us is the simple idea that alternatives exist. If our sense of alternatives first looks like a fantasy world, or Star Trek, or even a horror scenario, it’s still an alternative. If we can imagine the derranged outpourings of an ancient, mad god (with all due reference to Lovecraft) we can also imagine that the outpourings of our irresponsible politicians might also be deranged, and not representative of our only real choice.

People who benefit from us believing in their way of doing things will try to persuade us that no options even exist. People don’t fight back against things that seem inevitable. There is, after all, wisdom in not trying to fight things that cannot be changed. Except that anything humans have made can be changed, wasn’t inevitable and isn’t the only option.

So, while it calls for imagination to make change, any kind of imaginative thing we might share contributes to that. Being able to imagine is a necessary precursor for imagining the things that will make good change possible. To begin to imagine, it helps if we are exposed to imaginative things and if our minds are encouraged to imagine things that are beyond our experiences. 

I think there’s a case to be made that art is a moral necessity – more so than ever at the moment. All art, and all art forms, simply by existing, show us that possibility exists. Alternatives exist. Without culture, without creativity, we are more easily persuaded that what we have is all there is. Arguably, the less realistic, more speculative and outlandish things are, the more they do to open us up to possibility. If we can imagine vampires in outer space, we might better be able to imagine being ok with human diversity. If we can imagine aliens with radically different ways of living, we might be able to imagine changing our own lives.

It’s not enough to beat the reality we have, when it doesn’t work for us, we have to be able to imagine something better.

Puddings, tradition and magic

The tradition goes that everyone in the household has to stir the Christmas pudding, for good luck, and everyone gets to make a wish. A traditional pudding would have been made weeks ago, but I don’t have anywhere suitable to keep a pudding dry and cool for that long. For some years now, I’ve assembled my pudding on Christmas Eve, or the day before intended consumption, but I keep with the stirring traditions.

Kitchen magic

Grating the apple, first

I am making puddings

With my great grandmother

Who cooked them up

In a copper boiler

Lit in the scullery

That became a kitchen

Long before my birth.

Orange peel, lemon zest

Breadcrumbs, suet.

She was long buried

Before I started making

Festive puddings,

She is with me, each year.

We make puddings for people.

Rum, whiskey, beer, spices,

Dried fruit, not traditional

Fewer currents, more apricot

Stirring for good luck,

A household makes wishes

Spooning hopes into the mix.

Boiling. Great grandmother’s anxiety

Becomes my ease, slow cooker

My friend and accomplice.

Feeding friends, family, futures

Comfort, fruit, sweetness.

Wishes, witchcraft,

Pudding magic

Offerings. Hope.

Animism and artificial intelligence

One of my core principles as an animist is to relate to everything as though it might be capable of intention, feeling and preference. This is not a position that requires either belief or evidence, it is first and foremost an ethical position about treating everything kindly and with respect. When it comes to natural things – including inanimate natural things and places, I do not find it difficult to assume the presence of spirit.

When it comes to objects made by humans, my scope for understanding things as having spirit is variable. I like the Japanese idea that given enough time, anything will develop spirit – older items made with love and used with care and respect over time certainly develop character. I’ve always experienced music instruments as being people in their own right.

I’ve seen people talking about AI art software in terms of this being a genuinely emergent intelligence. That’s not something I agree with – we aren’t all helping to train an artificial brain that will spontaneously create original and new art in the future. We’re teaching software to steal and recycle on command. But… if everything is potentially capable of intent and feeling, why am I so reluctant to attribute those qualities to the art-theft software currently being used to make products?

Having been round this a lot in recent days, I come to the conclusion that it is because the software being used to steal art is doing exactly what it was intended to do. At present, it seems to be doing what it was designed for, in brief bursts that depend on other people using it. I’m responding in much the same way as when I don’t attribute a great deal of presence or intent to crisp packets, even when I’m trying to remove them as part of litter picks.

There are bits of software I’ve related to in ways other than this. Many years ago, before social media, when Yahoo egroups were a thing, we used to joke about what kind of sacrifices you might have to make to win the favour of Yahoo and to stop it from randomly punishing you. I’m finding Facebook much the same – an erratic and jealous entity that does not reliably cooperate and that may lash out at you for no obvious reason. Things seem more capable of intent when they aren’t simply doing what we made them to do. 

It’s interesting to consider what seems like an entity in its own right, and what seems like an expression of human will and desire where that’s simply been expressed through something outside of a human form. Clearly there’s nowhere a hard line can be drawn, but I think there’s a lot to be said for asking about our own relationships and feelings. What defines something as an entity in its own right? 

Looking back

These brief days and long nights lend themselves to introspection. If you aren’t overwhelmed by the practical realities of winter, it can be a good time to turn inwards, to reflect and contemplate. With the changing of the calendar year it is an especially good time to consider where we are in our lives, where we’ve been and where we might be going. For me, contemplation has always been an important part of the Druid path, and is part of how I undertake to live consciously and deliberately.

The first half of 2022 was a series of disasters and setbacks for me. I was bodily ill to the point of not being able to function at all, some of the time. The physical unwellness certainly contributed to the abysmal state of my mental health. I had some personal things go badly awry that altered what had been two relationships I was previously really invested in. I’ve had to do some serious thinking about how to deploy my time, who to invest my energy in and how I want to proceed with my life. One of these experiences really dented my confidence, especially around being humorous or playful, and that’s taken a lot of rebuilding.

The first half of the year also brought an enormous blessing in the form of David Bridger. He sent me some of his books when I was ill, and I was instantly smitten with his ideas. I sent him something of mine, and this led him to ask if I’d like to write with him. Hell yes! Thanks to David’s gentle support and guidance I was able to keep writing during a period of deep depression.

Many things changed for me during the summer. I started getting on top of the anaemia that had been making me desperately ill. My periods settled down a bit so that I wasn’t losing as much blood in the first place. Other things shifted that are still a bit too much like fledglings for me to talk about, but this autumn brought considerable riches of heart and mind, and I found myself inspired again, hopeful again and creating. We had a lot of good gigs with The Ominous Folk, my son wrote his first song for the band. This flurry of gig activity also brought Robin Burton into my life, and while it’s early days on that score, we’re shaping up well as a folk duo and I’m looking forward to seeing where that goes.

Taken as a whole, the challenges and hard times are already fading into the background. Memories of 2022 will be dominated by gigs and events, and the delight that is the rapidly growing Gloucestershire steampunk community. This was the year I became a musician again, getting back to the viola and pushing to be able to play. This was the year I made sense of parts of myself, my body, my mind that had been challenging to me in the past. I will look back at this year and remember time spent with the people I love most.

Connecting with an audience

When you’re performing, connecting with your audience is a major consideration. There are people whose audience connection and engagement is so strong that they can get by with weaker technical skills for other parts of what they do. Audience engagement can be the centre of how you perform. In most circumstances I prefer to focus on the quality of material and how I use my voice, but there are many ways into this.

The person who taught me stagecraft was of the opinion that primarily what a person needs to do is fill the space with their own personality. If you’d got a strong enough personality, everything else would flow from there. He was certainly able to work on those terms. Much of that approach depends on confidence. You’ve got to be able to walk into a space and demand attention, not just with your voice, but with your whole self. You’ve got to know in your bones that you are entitled to be there and that it is in everyone’s best interests to pay attention to you.

Winning an audience over is an act of will that can feel a lot like magic. It’s a relevant ritual skill, as well as a performance skill, and I think it’s well worth considering on more magical terms. To captivate an audience, you have to assert your will. When an audience is cooperative, that feels fairly rational as a process.

I have taken less cooperative audiences by force on a few occasions. Noisy pubs are the worst in this regard, where you have a lot of people who have come along to chat and who treat the performances as audio-wallpaper. Even an audience like this can be made to fall silent. I’ve done it as a solitary singer, and at poetry events, and on one occasion when we were out with the band. In some ways it’s easier with an exposed voice rather than instruments because most people aren’t so used to hearing that.

Uncooperative audiences can be intimidating, but stepping out there with the intent that they are going to be quiet and listen is an essential starting point. You can’t expect an unruly audience to become polite and attentive, but you can demand it of them. Audacity can get a lot done.

Given the kind of material I take out, the best measure of audience engagement for me is often silence. Not merely that people stop talking, but that they don’t move. The absolute stillness of an audience means that you’ve successfully enchanted them. It’s an entirely different process with comedic material because there, the small sounds of amusement through to the unmissable guffaws will give you a lot of information. Then there’s the material that demands toe tapping and that calls upon bodies to move, and even if they don’t jump up and dance you can feel when an audience is responding that way. It’s all in the sounds, and it’s much easier to judge sound as a whole than to try looking at individuals. 

Be it in ritual or on a stage, there’s often nothing more powerful than silence. Most especially, the silence that falls sometimes at the end of a piece where no one wants to move or break the spell. If you can hold an audience in stillness and silence, you’ve got them.

It’s difficult to pin down the precise mechanics that make this possible. However, magic is in essence about putting intent into the world, and good performance always feels magical, so perhaps it makes most sense to approach this as an act of magic and prepare accordingly. Believing in your own power is a very good place to start.

AI and the making of art

There are lots of things that need saying about ‘ so called ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and art, and for this blog post I’m just focusing on one thing. I’m seeing a lot of people claim that AI levels the playing field and allows people who are normally excluded from doing art to be able to make art. I think this is total bollocks, so here we go.

Creativity takes effort. It’s not about having a rush of inspiration and then being magically and swiftly able to make the thing you imagined. Every kind of creativity takes time. People who put genuine creativity into the world have spent years studying their forms, learning skills, developing ideas, practising, striving, messing up, starting over. Creativity is not held in some elitist way by a lucky few who are keeping everyone else out. Creativity is a lot of work, but being creative is available to anyone willing to put in the time.

Putting in the time is good. If you’re so excited about something that you want to be able to do it, then the process of learning is a wonderful thing. Investing years in something you are passionate about gives you joy in an ongoing way. Being able to pull something out of the ether, using a few words and someone else’s work won’t give you that. It might be briefly satisfying, but it’s not like having developed skills and understanding that allows you to really create.

Whatever kind of creativity you’re exploring, every time you make something yourself, you have an experience. You learn, grow, refine your ideas, find new things to reach towards. Yes, I could persuade a computer to make viola noises for me, but what would that give me compared to the day to day process of trying to manage the bow to get the best possible sound from the instrument I have? I’m not much of a visual artist, but there’s something exciting about being able to compare what I can draw now with what I was doing a few years ago and seeing how I’ve improved. 

Tools are good. I’m typing this, after all and I’m glad of the technology that allows me to share what I’ve typed. Nothing would induce me to use the AIs that claim they can write your blogs for you. I write because I want to develop my own thoughts, and I am at least as invested in the process as I am in having something to show at the end of it. Tools are good, but anything that offers you something for nothing is lying, simply. AIs do not enable creativity, they rob the people using them and teach little or nothing about what it takes to grow as a creator. It might be amusing to use in the short term, but there’s little satisfaction in that sort of process, as I suspect the people trying to use it will find.

If a short-cut takes out some awkwardness, that’s always worth considering. However, much of what’s good in life lives in the details, the experience and the process and the more we undertake to have done for us, the less room there is for our humanity and our souls.