Been a minute

[kiya]

Regalia

It used to be
People
Put on names
And a suit of clothes,
And were known.

The unknown god
Takes up his staff,
Puts on his beard,
His signs of power,
And when so garbed can say,
"And now you know me."

What raiment is mine,
What tools,
What adornments,
That will make me known?

I know not.


Footnotes on this one are: conversations about names on bsky, the lecture I went to tonight on queer/trans experience in the American colonies, a passage quoted in Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods, and graydon's comments about how gender is the means of signaling what sort of improv one is doing....

Comments

[graydon]

It's difficult to avoid thinking that presenting gender was a lot less complicated back when there were sumptuary laws and women could not wear trousers. Fewer, and less diverse options about what to present, but people would see the hat or the coat and you were more or less done.

On the one hand, our rather fractal age of transition will get through itself and there will be a common set of signals again, one way or another; on the other hand, slogging through it is entirely weary.

But by whatever appendage, it's (at least I think) also permission to do any darn thing you prefer; the center cannot hold, fine, the center can't complain, either. One of the things the future shall contain is that thing I choose.

[kiya]

According to the lecture I was at last night that was pretty much how it happened, too. And the social consequences for getting caught at it were often just "don't do that again, you". Which many people refused to comply with; they would move towns and resume doing that.

And yes, on constructing the possible futures. I will widen that gyre as pleases me.

[kiya]

The bit that was the middle stanza is a fascinating thing, an ancient Egyptian text I've seen quoted, where even the gods couldn't recognize each other when they didn't have their accoutrements in place. The whole thing is something about the god putting on his familiar things and then announcing himself once he is fully dressed.

Mind, I can imagine being unknowable when I take off my hat, that is how I go semi-incognito when I am at a con.

[graydon]

Our cultural moment is massively contaminated with the notion of faith; that it matters what you believe, all by itself.

At least as I understand it, the ancient Egyptian understanding was that you did the thing; you had to do it correctly, but your feelings on the matter didn't much enter into it. Which would presumably apply even to gods; if you're not doing the thing, you aren't the god. And a text that got metaphorical about that would plausibly sound a whole lot like gods not knowing who they are when undressed.

[kiya]

Oh, that's an interesting thought, yeah. The performance of divinity necessarily including the appearance of divinity, and if not performing....

(There is of course also a thread of myth of successfully impersonating other gods by stealing their hats. But also the complex internally syncretic stuff that one can get into when they overlap so hard as to become identical.)

I'm gonna go chew on divinity as performance and possibly contemplate that I ought to read Judith Butler.

[graydon]

Permit me to admire "possibly contemplate".