Synthesis Tightrope

[kiya]

Trying to comb the tangles out of my life is a fiddly, fiddly thing. It's a two steps forward, one step back thing at all times, and this has been a rough while - hell, it's been a rough year - which means it feels like a lot more back steps than forward steps even if I look at it closely and recognise that's not right, really.

Possibly it's that I have too much pirouetting and not enough promenade.

KJ likes to run in circles around things. "Baby run circle!" she proclaims. "Run circle mama!" when she's orbiting me. Like that, only I don't enjoy it as much as she does?


Among the things that I'm wrestling with is of course my religious work, because that is a huge portion of what I do that isn't "read Dr. Seuss books to the toddler". And of course there are all the threads of that to tie together.

I was talking with whispercricket the other day about being a neurotic traditionalist, and that really my comfort zone is in that sweet spot of doing the things that have always been done, so that they have that nice wear like the well-trodden marble steps of the public library, the curves that make things lived-in. Which is one of the reasons that reconstructionism in theory appeals to me, the polished smoothness of old liturgy, but of course I have to build the fucking thing, so it's not really lived in, I made it last week. And it's hard to be comfortable with things being the way they have always been when I made them last week.

At the same time, there's a comfort to old liturgies, or even to adapting them; I pulled this:

The doors of the sky are opened
The doors of the firmament are thrown open at dawn for Heru of the Gods.
He goes up into the Field of Rushes,
He bathes in the Field of Rushes.

and used it as part-source for this:

The doors of heaven are opened
And you are born
You have bathed in peace
And are lifted up on the scent of morning.

which is part of something that I wrote as part of my Craft work. I'm a lot more comfortable with old images, worn smooth like riverstones, even when I'm building new things.

And of course the thread of Craft I'm chasing around is transformative, shape-shifting, new-and-old, just like the shadow form of reconstruction, old-and-new, and so it's comfortable in places the other isn't, and awkward and growth-forcing in places the other is. So it's all a thing, a piece, the dance of the equivalent opposites, in search of the place where everything comes together.

And I try to make my liturgies and my poetries not come out in Godawful Pagan Rhyming Couplets, and if you're reading this I figure there are good odds that you know what I mean by that. It was ... jarring when I was reading some nominally recon-oriented stuff, with glorious verse laid out of translations of old liturgies, which then dropped with a tin-eared thud into sing-song. At least Feri witches tend to have a poetic sophistication greater than I did at age seven or so when I wrote:

A house cat says meow
A wild cat roars
A house cat can't decide
To be in or out of doors.

I steep myself in Feri imagery, the dark mother shining with star-sweat, birthing the universe in a surge of erotic power, and then I sink myself in Egyptian stuff, and find Atum, cock in hand, doing much the same. Old-and-new, new-and-old, and then this female-and-male, male-and-female, the Creator a cosmic pangendered figure but everyone picks some set of pronouns. Cultural mediation, ancient and moderation. (But Nit, also a part-time Creator, has the odd appearance as an ithyphallic woman, which is probably the most explicit I've come across this aside from Khnum's "Father of fathers, Mother of mothers" title.)

And I come away with things like Heru-pa-Khered as the Divine Androgyne, and I think most other recons would think I'm fucking batshit, but this is the first Heru-sa-Aset form that I've actually been able to relate to, so fuck it, I'm going to run with it, and mutter about emanationist theologies and Malkuth reflecting back to Kether if you want to steal a whole other metaphor system to parse through something that's not either. King of the world has to be able to encompass the whole world. You know, the thing.

At some point it turns into something else. Even though, hilariously, I can back all of it up with ancient texts. I find that profoundly humorous, actually - the deeper I go, the weirder it gets.

Meanwhile, I agitate against the Standard Problem - the current project stalls out for lack of a book, and I don't have the $140 to get it. (And it's not in the library system. I checked. Because I'm actually resident here now, I have a library card.)

Comments

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

As to your last paragraph: have you tried Inter-Library Loan?

[kiya]

The book search I used to see if the library had it had the entire network in it, alas.

[davidgoldfarb.livejournal.com]

Well, but ILL ought to be able to get books from other library networks. I find it hard to believe that this is a book that is not owned by any library, anywhere. (Hard; not impossible.)

[brooksmoses]

As davidgoldfarb implies, ILL is broader than the local library network. When I was a small and my parents were reading the Swallows and Amazons series aloud to us -- back before more than the first two were reprinted -- the books would come to us from quite a variety of far-off random places like Wisconsin or Missouri. The idea is that your library finds some other library system somewhere in the country that owns the book, and requests it from them and if they're willing to loan it out, it eventually makes its way to you.

The effect of this, though, is that the checkout rules tend to be a bit more stringent.

(FWIW, Wikipedia's ILL article points to WorldCat as one of the ways libraries identify other libraries that have a particular book, when they're making ILL requests.)

[jenett]

WorldCat would be the place to start, yep.

(And Kiya: if you tell me what the book is, I'll do the librarian geekery thing and see if I can figure out some options for you.)

For everyone else: ILL works wonderfully, but these days, there are often a number of restrictions in policy: a lot of places will look in the state, but not further, for example, or not if the lending institution charges money, etc. And individual universities, f'ex sometimes get weird about lending stuff, etc.

[meranthi.livejournal.com]

Did you look in the BPL collection as well? It's not part of Minuteman...

[kiya]

Hmmm, BPL has another book by the same author that was "I might want to read that but I don't need to own it", so that's something....

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Do you have anything like Copyright Libraries there? I use the British Library whenever I need a book that nowhere else has.

Also, have you tried checking university libraries? Some will issue library cards to people unaffiliated with the university if you meet certain criteria (usually, proof of address plus a government-issued ID). There are dozens of universities & colleges around Boston - one of them must have good comparative religion or Egyptology departments?

[coraline]

yes, i was going to ask if you would like help networking to the college library system which might be able to get you something via their ILL. MIT is well-connected, so while it's unlikely to have it itself, it might be able to bug harvard or... somewhere?

[ardaniel]

If it's anywhere, it's at the University of Chicago.

[redbird]

We have one. It's in Washington, D.C.: the Library of Congress.

On this side of the Atlantic, university libraries are often stricter than that. I remember that supergee used to sign up for the least expensive continuing ed course at NYU each semester, for the library access.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

It's hard to get borrowing access here. Libraries don't want to lend books to someone who's outside the university so can't be punished by its bylaws. But you can easily get reading room access to consult books on the premises.

I am amused by your friend's solution and will bear that in mind in the future ;)

[brooksmoses]

I am, rather tangentially, entertained by the stylistic similarity of your childhood poem and the one I wrote at very nearly the same age:

Grass can be brown.
Grass can be green.
Grass is just a leaf
with stem in between

[luellon.livejournal.com]

I sympathize with not being able to get books that you need to finish the project. I can't find Sylvie Cauville's books Dendara: Traduction 1-4. I asked my university library through ILL. They said that the books are not available through any library that they borrow from.

[liminal-spaces.livejournal.com]

Also, almost any library can get books from the Library of Congress; though they're better with books published in the US.

[morningwolfe.livejournal.com]

"...And I come away with things like Heru-pa-Khered as the Divine Androgyne, and I think most other recons would think I'm fucking batshit..."

The recons wouldn't call me recon by a long shot (as we've discussed), but this speaks to me on multiple levels, especially after steeping myself in te Velde.

Maybe you need a donation jar? ;-)