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This is terrifically long. I've been considering establishing a religious-stuff filter for a while, and might still do so. I don't know whether I'll do it opt-in or what if I decide to do it, but whatever. Thing.
I recently finished reading Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many (the Baines translation of Erik Hornung's work). It was an . . . interesting . . . experience.
One of the things that has been one of my deepest, most atavistic terrors for much of my conscious life has been the concept of what I've called "unnaming", unmaking . . . uncreation. Not existing does not, in and of itself, cause me great distress, but not having existed, being undone, unravelled, that's different.
So I read, there and elsewhere. And I see the driving back of the unnaming, the forces that would uncreate, the creation of, well, creation in the center of this all, but that which is not still striving to dissolve and break away -- the forces of dissolution wearing away at places in the world, and isfet coming from the resulting mismatches. And I find something that feels somehow ineffably true to me, right and real and entirely in accord with what I know.
Uncreation is something I can't handle rationally. Obscurity is one thing, but being undone sends me really nonlinear. This is one of the reason I have a hard time dealing with closets, why I don't choose that route for myself, and why I have serious issues with dealing with them. The closet tends to hit me viscerally as being equivalent to saying that the relationship or the true thing doesn't exist, or can't be allowed to exist under certain circumstances, or some other thing that opens up that gap for the isfet to start wearing away at its reality. Other things wear at me too, like this, but the closet is the worst of them.
I also find myself wishing I had a copy of The Neverending Story to either reread or rewatch; very different stories in the book and in the movie, but both dealing in part with The Nothing, uncreation. And I wonder and try to remember (through many years of distance) whether the creature shown in the movie as sort of wolflike is, as I recall, a sort of avatar-force of the Nothing, whether it is that world's Apep.
I write; that's one of the things that's a large part of who I am down at the core. One of the things that I find true about my writing is that there are people in my head, genuine ones, and if I don't write down their existence, they might be lost. And fictionable (I'll leave that typo) people have as much reason to want their names known as other people.
From the Havamal (which I'm positive has an accent that I cannot remember where to place; an acute on the first a, perhaps?):
And back to The Neverending Story, again, and Kemetic mythology, and the time before there were two things. One of the things that resonated with me in Hornung's work is the concept of existence as some form of dialogue. Before there were two things -- before existence existed. Nun never answered much, so Amun needed to create someone else to talk to. And then there were two things.
The Neverending Story had two worlds, each reflecting the other in its own way, each building on and reinforcing the other. When the connections died, when the dialogue ended, the Nothing came and devoured one; the losses on the other side were less tangible, but I think intended to be seen as no less real. (I need to reread. Grah.)
I do wind up feeling itchy about the common association of Nun and isfet with chaos. I can't find chaos in something that does not exist; chaos is an essential part of existence. The balance between 'order' and 'chaos' strikes me as an essential one, a creative one, not an oppositional one.
The Principia Discordia, now:
This is one of the things that I get wound up about a lot, the equation of 'disorder' with 'destructive disorder'. It bothers me in a particularly irrational way, I suppose; I've ranted about it before.
I can't but point at the fact that both Herw and Set were responsible for part of the ceremonies of crowning the Pharaoh. Orderly succession and the dutiful son and the chaotic, dangerous, and impulsive. And perhaps it's just that Set is my beloved, but I can't help but feel that too much unquestioned order leaves people complacent and vulnerable to the insidious forms of immolation and unmaking. (Such as a relationship that is so stable and content that the emotions don't flow anymore, there's no doing stuff together because there's so much just being together, breathing the same air. What gets called "the romance died".)
So I won't equate uncreation with chaos. Existence requires both stability and motion, both flux and structure. Existence is the dialogue between that which does not move and that which cannot stay still.
Ursula K. Le Guin, from the intro to The Left Hand of Darkness:
So back to dialogue.
I see a lot made of the individualism of the modern era, and its benefits and flaws. And one of the flaws I see a lot is something that I'll phrase as a tendency towards solipsism, a tendency to treat others as objects in one's own personal play. But then . . . then there are not two things. There is no dialogue. There is no other.
And so I come around to Ma'at, at last. And I see the cosmic ma'at, and the societal ma'at, and the personal ma'at. And I see the concept of building structures that affirm the existence of others, the contributions of others, the reality of others.
And I see in some of this time new ways of doing this, new ways of affirming the reality of the other and thus reinforcing both. I'm writing this in my home, alone aside from the cats, the snake, and the dust mites; when it is done I will put it up on the internet, in places where people I know and people I have never met can gather because of a shared feeling of some sort of connection or community. There are communities of people of all sorts, based on something other than geography, and there is something beautiful in that, especially for those people who might feel alone in their personal callings without it.
I'm thinking that living within ma'at may obligate recognizing the existence of the other, not trying to unmake them and unname them in my eyes. I'm thinking that there are times that this is really, really difficult, when dealing with people who feel to me as being entirely out of ma'at, where pretending they don't exist carries its own satisfaction with its price of denial. The people do exist, and could be within ma'at someday, and it would be isfet to dismiss them as people, to consider them not quite human, no matter how it's sometimes tempting.
The Coffin Texts, now:
I'm not sure where that leaves me on thinking about certain arguments, though; the arguments that attempt to unmake and unname people. I find myself dithering between the problem of not giving them legitimacy by attempting to rebut them, and worrying that like an unattended acid spill they might strip away the existence of the things they attack if left unattended.
I'm feeling this sense that there is the construction of community, the building of a matrix in which there are, at least, two things. And when there are two things known to each other, or three, or more, the isfet has less of a place to take hold, the unnaming forces are thin, because there are others who will affirm to each of us that we are real.
To stop the Nothing, the Childlike Empress needed a Name.
I recently finished reading Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many (the Baines translation of Erik Hornung's work). It was an . . . interesting . . . experience.
One of the things that has been one of my deepest, most atavistic terrors for much of my conscious life has been the concept of what I've called "unnaming", unmaking . . . uncreation. Not existing does not, in and of itself, cause me great distress, but not having existed, being undone, unravelled, that's different.
So I read, there and elsewhere. And I see the driving back of the unnaming, the forces that would uncreate, the creation of, well, creation in the center of this all, but that which is not still striving to dissolve and break away -- the forces of dissolution wearing away at places in the world, and isfet coming from the resulting mismatches. And I find something that feels somehow ineffably true to me, right and real and entirely in accord with what I know.
Uncreation is something I can't handle rationally. Obscurity is one thing, but being undone sends me really nonlinear. This is one of the reason I have a hard time dealing with closets, why I don't choose that route for myself, and why I have serious issues with dealing with them. The closet tends to hit me viscerally as being equivalent to saying that the relationship or the true thing doesn't exist, or can't be allowed to exist under certain circumstances, or some other thing that opens up that gap for the isfet to start wearing away at its reality. Other things wear at me too, like this, but the closet is the worst of them.
I also find myself wishing I had a copy of The Neverending Story to either reread or rewatch; very different stories in the book and in the movie, but both dealing in part with The Nothing, uncreation. And I wonder and try to remember (through many years of distance) whether the creature shown in the movie as sort of wolflike is, as I recall, a sort of avatar-force of the Nothing, whether it is that world's Apep.
I write; that's one of the things that's a large part of who I am down at the core. One of the things that I find true about my writing is that there are people in my head, genuine ones, and if I don't write down their existence, they might be lost. And fictionable (I'll leave that typo) people have as much reason to want their names known as other people.
From the Havamal (which I'm positive has an accent that I cannot remember where to place; an acute on the first a, perhaps?):
- Cattle die, kinsmen die,
You, yourself, shall likewise die
But word-fame never dies
For he who achieves it well.
And back to The Neverending Story, again, and Kemetic mythology, and the time before there were two things. One of the things that resonated with me in Hornung's work is the concept of existence as some form of dialogue. Before there were two things -- before existence existed. Nun never answered much, so Amun needed to create someone else to talk to. And then there were two things.
The Neverending Story had two worlds, each reflecting the other in its own way, each building on and reinforcing the other. When the connections died, when the dialogue ended, the Nothing came and devoured one; the losses on the other side were less tangible, but I think intended to be seen as no less real. (I need to reread. Grah.)
I do wind up feeling itchy about the common association of Nun and isfet with chaos. I can't find chaos in something that does not exist; chaos is an essential part of existence. The balance between 'order' and 'chaos' strikes me as an essential one, a creative one, not an oppositional one.
The Principia Discordia, now:
- To choose order over disorder, or disorder over order, is to accept a trip composed of both the creative and the destructive. But to choose the creative over the destructive is an all-creative trip composed of both order and disorder. To accomplish this, one need only accept creative disrder along with, and equal to, creative order, and also be willing to reject destructive order as an undesirable equal to destructive disorder.
This is one of the things that I get wound up about a lot, the equation of 'disorder' with 'destructive disorder'. It bothers me in a particularly irrational way, I suppose; I've ranted about it before.
I can't but point at the fact that both Herw and Set were responsible for part of the ceremonies of crowning the Pharaoh. Orderly succession and the dutiful son and the chaotic, dangerous, and impulsive. And perhaps it's just that Set is my beloved, but I can't help but feel that too much unquestioned order leaves people complacent and vulnerable to the insidious forms of immolation and unmaking. (Such as a relationship that is so stable and content that the emotions don't flow anymore, there's no doing stuff together because there's so much just being together, breathing the same air. What gets called "the romance died".)
So I won't equate uncreation with chaos. Existence requires both stability and motion, both flux and structure. Existence is the dialogue between that which does not move and that which cannot stay still.
Ursula K. Le Guin, from the intro to The Left Hand of Darkness:
- Apollo, the god of light, of reason, of proportion, harmony, number--Apollo blinds those who press too close in worship. Don't look straight at the sun. Go into a dark bar for a bit and have a beer with Dionysios, every now and then.
So back to dialogue.
I see a lot made of the individualism of the modern era, and its benefits and flaws. And one of the flaws I see a lot is something that I'll phrase as a tendency towards solipsism, a tendency to treat others as objects in one's own personal play. But then . . . then there are not two things. There is no dialogue. There is no other.
And so I come around to Ma'at, at last. And I see the cosmic ma'at, and the societal ma'at, and the personal ma'at. And I see the concept of building structures that affirm the existence of others, the contributions of others, the reality of others.
And I see in some of this time new ways of doing this, new ways of affirming the reality of the other and thus reinforcing both. I'm writing this in my home, alone aside from the cats, the snake, and the dust mites; when it is done I will put it up on the internet, in places where people I know and people I have never met can gather because of a shared feeling of some sort of connection or community. There are communities of people of all sorts, based on something other than geography, and there is something beautiful in that, especially for those people who might feel alone in their personal callings without it.
I'm thinking that living within ma'at may obligate recognizing the existence of the other, not trying to unmake them and unname them in my eyes. I'm thinking that there are times that this is really, really difficult, when dealing with people who feel to me as being entirely out of ma'at, where pretending they don't exist carries its own satisfaction with its price of denial. The people do exist, and could be within ma'at someday, and it would be isfet to dismiss them as people, to consider them not quite human, no matter how it's sometimes tempting.
The Coffin Texts, now:
- I did not ordain that they do isfet.
Their hearts disobeyed what I had said.
I'm not sure where that leaves me on thinking about certain arguments, though; the arguments that attempt to unmake and unname people. I find myself dithering between the problem of not giving them legitimacy by attempting to rebut them, and worrying that like an unattended acid spill they might strip away the existence of the things they attack if left unattended.
I'm feeling this sense that there is the construction of community, the building of a matrix in which there are, at least, two things. And when there are two things known to each other, or three, or more, the isfet has less of a place to take hold, the unnaming forces are thin, because there are others who will affirm to each of us that we are real.
To stop the Nothing, the Childlike Empress needed a Name.
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The concept of unnaming and ultimate retroactive destruction comes through very clearly in Madeleine L'Engle's A Wind in the Door as well, where the forces of creation are Namers and their foes are the Echthroi, the X, those who would unName and thus consign their victims to ultimate oblivion. Might be worth a reread (or a first read, if you haven't already-- I cannot see where you *wouldn't* have, honestly).
I should get you to chat up
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Mmmmm, yes. I'm now wondering if L'Engle is part of where I got some of that concept from. And wondering how many of those we actually own. (Vast numbers of them were things I checked out of the school library.)
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Also, in Le Guin's Earthsea, the true name of a thing is the essence of it. And the world goes all whacky when the names start to get lost.
I'm big on names for things. Goes hand in hand with the fetish for knowledge and information. More information good. More knowledge even better.
(I have a copy of Left Hand of Darkness, I think. I've never read it. I should. I think I'm also going to go hunt down some information on Dionysius.)