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Well, that. And stuff.
I know where I'm going with this, but I don't know how to get there. (Going to hell in a bucket, baby, but at least I'm enjoying the ride.)
Well, maybe more incoherent than semi-coherent; I think I'm feverish, and at a very least my ability to cope and process has BSODed out on me. (Usually I process some eight things simultaeously, and a few minutes ago trying to deal with staying sane and keeping the cat out of my cheese had me whimpering. So. I try to get thse thoughts down even though I am something of a wreck.) Less linear than usual.
I've been (trying not to have a nervous breakdown induced by this proliferation of pop-ups) doing some occasionally highly random research lately, cultural stuff.
I find that I spend a lot of time appropriating things from various places if I find they suit me, for my religious practices or often for my use of symbolism (and my temperature's gone down so I can use grammar again, huzzah). This means that I spend good bits of spare time trying to track down information about things in various cultures (often the various ones of my heritage, but hardly always) approach various issues. I think my mother does something similar with glomming onto symbolism. (For those who don't know, my mother's an artist.)
There's a certain amount of I-am-what-I-art here, and there's a certain amount of wanting to art things _right_, with some understanding of where they're coming from, so that I can be not just a collector and assembler of shiny things, some sort of ghoulish bower bird preying off the sparkly bits of other cultures without touching more than the veneer.
My sixth subject presentation (Art) had as its central theme the four classical elements of ritual and ceremonial magic, Wicca, and a myriad other places. I made four statuettes of female figures; the one I'm proudest of is Earth, a tall figure striding on knobbled feet across a countryside, unglazed but with greenery growing in her gnarls, her hair brown and green. She's a dryad, or perhaps an entwife. Hm. Maybe I can get a picture of her. . . .
I made four necklaces; Air had thunderbirds, while Water had black beads with pendants made out of rich blue abalone. I had poetry worked into the artwork, I had things divided up into quarters, I did something rather like a stained glass window rotated a quarter-turn, with animals fire/air (phoenix), air/water (dolphin, I think), water/earth (mermaid), and earth/fire (salamander).
Stuff like that. My journals (for planning out projects, which I am about as skilled at as I am at outlining stories -- I'm on something like chapter nineteen of A Night's Tale, sixty-five thousand words, and when my father asked me how much more I think there was I said, 'I have no idea.' "Thirty chapters?" "No." "Forty?" "No. Maybe fifty.") had mandalas on the front. And so on.
I have massive conceptualizations built out of this and some other symbol-systems; among other things, I describe myself as a Fire personality. (As it happens, the four people in my family are fairly accurately described as one of each of the classical four elements by personality, which is, I suspect, one of the reasons it feels stable. The first quad I was in seemed to want that pattern, but several people were displaced out of their default roles. I was displaced to Earth, which is what I consider my under-dominant element, but I'm a really terrible Earth as primary role. . . . Flux-creatures don't do well called upon to be stable.)
Anyway. That's an example of art-as-identity, or them feeding on each other or some such.
In any case. Lately the art and identity thing I've been exploring has been tattooing. (Ooooh, the changer's playing that hymn. Mmm.)
And I've been trying to find references for what, in various places, tattoos have been used to signify. Overall, I can't say I've found much; most of the information I've found has been, in essence, "Used to signify group membership and uhhhh, other stuff." Aside from that, though, I've found that aside from group codes and membership, some tattoos have been used to qualify for entry into the spirit world (or as evidence to get a better deal upon getting there), they've been used as essentially advertising of a skill (someone with a craft skill marked on them could get a better marriage), they've been used for various forms of magic (a love-attraction charm in one culture being concealed carefully so the user wouldn't be taken for a desperate old maid), they've been used to mark passages into adulthood (a woman who can't take the pain wouldn't be able to handle childbirth; a man who can't take the pain is no great shakes as a warrior). Edison apparently invented the electric tattooing machine.
Tattoos have been used as political protest in the gulags of Siberia, and seen as a divine gift in the Marshall Islands. They've been pursued in some cultures because they are tabu, and celebrated in others.
I spent a few minutes outside a place that does bodymods in Cambridge last week (it's right next to Pandemonium). They had pages and pages of designs up in their windows, and so many of them were deeply bizarre to me. (I'm still not sure about the one of the bee mounting a slug. Though the one of the bee and the fairy clearly indicates where the biting fairies in Labyrinth come from; blood will tell.) A huge number of them were astrological; Kevin thought that the lion ones were utterly ludicrous. (My husband, the Leo born in the year of the Fire Dragon, it's almost enough to make astrology plausible. . . .)
I suspect my objection to them at some level is that I don't have a sense of the cultural matrix they exist within. Astrology is one of those things that I play with (it's a symbol-set), but the images don't speak to it; the sociopathic-looking lions, or the slightly concussed one that looked a bit like Arthur, don't seem to have much bearing on Leo for me. I suppose there's a certain feeling that these symbols were watered-down and separated from their matrix; finding a way of working a lion into a pattern that connected to other things would make sense to me as Leo, if one wanted to go astrological. But I suppose it's probably unfair for me to judge other people's meaning by my prejudices towards connection.
I don't understand the bee sex either, though. And the pattern that looked like Klingon knotwork, but interspersed with pictures of violets, struck me as a very mixed message.
But I find myself in this strange place in the transition between the white and the red in my perception of my own phases of life, and ponder that there is time to stare at these things and think and make connections, because I don't think I'm old enough to mark that transition anyway.
Even if I do have a fascination with colour.
I know where I'm going with this, but I don't know how to get there. (Going to hell in a bucket, baby, but at least I'm enjoying the ride.)
Well, maybe more incoherent than semi-coherent; I think I'm feverish, and at a very least my ability to cope and process has BSODed out on me. (Usually I process some eight things simultaeously, and a few minutes ago trying to deal with staying sane and keeping the cat out of my cheese had me whimpering. So. I try to get thse thoughts down even though I am something of a wreck.) Less linear than usual.
I've been (trying not to have a nervous breakdown induced by this proliferation of pop-ups) doing some occasionally highly random research lately, cultural stuff.
I find that I spend a lot of time appropriating things from various places if I find they suit me, for my religious practices or often for my use of symbolism (and my temperature's gone down so I can use grammar again, huzzah). This means that I spend good bits of spare time trying to track down information about things in various cultures (often the various ones of my heritage, but hardly always) approach various issues. I think my mother does something similar with glomming onto symbolism. (For those who don't know, my mother's an artist.)
There's a certain amount of I-am-what-I-art here, and there's a certain amount of wanting to art things _right_, with some understanding of where they're coming from, so that I can be not just a collector and assembler of shiny things, some sort of ghoulish bower bird preying off the sparkly bits of other cultures without touching more than the veneer.
My sixth subject presentation (Art) had as its central theme the four classical elements of ritual and ceremonial magic, Wicca, and a myriad other places. I made four statuettes of female figures; the one I'm proudest of is Earth, a tall figure striding on knobbled feet across a countryside, unglazed but with greenery growing in her gnarls, her hair brown and green. She's a dryad, or perhaps an entwife. Hm. Maybe I can get a picture of her. . . .
I made four necklaces; Air had thunderbirds, while Water had black beads with pendants made out of rich blue abalone. I had poetry worked into the artwork, I had things divided up into quarters, I did something rather like a stained glass window rotated a quarter-turn, with animals fire/air (phoenix), air/water (dolphin, I think), water/earth (mermaid), and earth/fire (salamander).
Stuff like that. My journals (for planning out projects, which I am about as skilled at as I am at outlining stories -- I'm on something like chapter nineteen of A Night's Tale, sixty-five thousand words, and when my father asked me how much more I think there was I said, 'I have no idea.' "Thirty chapters?" "No." "Forty?" "No. Maybe fifty.") had mandalas on the front. And so on.
I have massive conceptualizations built out of this and some other symbol-systems; among other things, I describe myself as a Fire personality. (As it happens, the four people in my family are fairly accurately described as one of each of the classical four elements by personality, which is, I suspect, one of the reasons it feels stable. The first quad I was in seemed to want that pattern, but several people were displaced out of their default roles. I was displaced to Earth, which is what I consider my under-dominant element, but I'm a really terrible Earth as primary role. . . . Flux-creatures don't do well called upon to be stable.)
Anyway. That's an example of art-as-identity, or them feeding on each other or some such.
In any case. Lately the art and identity thing I've been exploring has been tattooing. (Ooooh, the changer's playing that hymn. Mmm.)
And I've been trying to find references for what, in various places, tattoos have been used to signify. Overall, I can't say I've found much; most of the information I've found has been, in essence, "Used to signify group membership and uhhhh, other stuff." Aside from that, though, I've found that aside from group codes and membership, some tattoos have been used to qualify for entry into the spirit world (or as evidence to get a better deal upon getting there), they've been used as essentially advertising of a skill (someone with a craft skill marked on them could get a better marriage), they've been used for various forms of magic (a love-attraction charm in one culture being concealed carefully so the user wouldn't be taken for a desperate old maid), they've been used to mark passages into adulthood (a woman who can't take the pain wouldn't be able to handle childbirth; a man who can't take the pain is no great shakes as a warrior). Edison apparently invented the electric tattooing machine.
Tattoos have been used as political protest in the gulags of Siberia, and seen as a divine gift in the Marshall Islands. They've been pursued in some cultures because they are tabu, and celebrated in others.
I spent a few minutes outside a place that does bodymods in Cambridge last week (it's right next to Pandemonium). They had pages and pages of designs up in their windows, and so many of them were deeply bizarre to me. (I'm still not sure about the one of the bee mounting a slug. Though the one of the bee and the fairy clearly indicates where the biting fairies in Labyrinth come from; blood will tell.) A huge number of them were astrological; Kevin thought that the lion ones were utterly ludicrous. (My husband, the Leo born in the year of the Fire Dragon, it's almost enough to make astrology plausible. . . .)
I suspect my objection to them at some level is that I don't have a sense of the cultural matrix they exist within. Astrology is one of those things that I play with (it's a symbol-set), but the images don't speak to it; the sociopathic-looking lions, or the slightly concussed one that looked a bit like Arthur, don't seem to have much bearing on Leo for me. I suppose there's a certain feeling that these symbols were watered-down and separated from their matrix; finding a way of working a lion into a pattern that connected to other things would make sense to me as Leo, if one wanted to go astrological. But I suppose it's probably unfair for me to judge other people's meaning by my prejudices towards connection.
I don't understand the bee sex either, though. And the pattern that looked like Klingon knotwork, but interspersed with pictures of violets, struck me as a very mixed message.
But I find myself in this strange place in the transition between the white and the red in my perception of my own phases of life, and ponder that there is time to stare at these things and think and make connections, because I don't think I'm old enough to mark that transition anyway.
Even if I do have a fascination with colour.
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I didn't get the impression that these were putting together things specifically -- I'd have guessed that the pages up there were pages of flash. (Thanks for the term, yay terminology.)
I think I have an overall suspicion that most such things have meanings to the bearer that aren't entirely obvious from the outside; I can see an internal rubric of intimacy based on whether or not they make sense. (Hm. Story idea. *files it away*.) I can't personally imagine being comfortable asking about such things outside a certain level of intimacy, I guess it is, and so while I came to a tentative guess some time ago that your cardinal was possibly in some way totemic for you, I wouldn't have the . . . gall? . . . to ask.
I think there's a sort of . . . hm. More noodling. In a tattooing culture, there's a certain set of meanings and messages that are already encoded, to a certain extent. (I seem to remember
In some ways, I'd guess the flash is establishing that sort of shared meaning-pool and community; in others an expression of the lack of one. I think I'm feeling about it like the line drawing of the young/old woman.