kiya

My nano project is the Kemetic 101 I've been saying I was gonna write for over a decade, which is differently brainstretchy than fiction and in many ways easier to keep nano pace for. (A lot of it is 'let me regurgitate things I have been studying for many years, here, blat, there they are.')

But anyway I wrote a thing and came away with "this is a genuinely new thought I haven't had before" and I'm going to put it here so that I keep it.

The Egyptians were very much nervous about extraordinary events. Even festival celebrations were routinized, with those things that differed from the regular daily ritual kept fairly minimal, and the core of the practice being "we do the regular daily ritual and then add these specific bits". Things that were out of the routine were places that the chaotic and dangerous might seep in.

So I'm writing about rituals for major life events and a thing strikes me (this is not the new thought; this is ritual 101): the thing about ritual is that it leaves one not-alone, there are the other participants, there is the idea that this ritual is something that has been done before, will be done again, it is brought into the ordinary and routinized, even while remaining a potentially-unique personal event. (And how unlike a lot of cultural expectations this is, that ritual sets things apart and sacralizes them by separating them from the routine.)

The new thought part is: any action taken as a unique, personalized individual is high-risk.

(And I ponder that one of the things that has made me better able to do lots of story submissions is that I have both routinized and de-personalized them in many ways; I have a stock cover letter, I have stock this, I have stock that, the events may be individual and unique but it is just part of the perpetual cycle of them. It is no longer something that feels high-risk to me as an individual.)

“Reality is a small bubble in an ocean of imagination, and reality is slowly getting larger as little bits of imagination seep through the outer shell.”

- KJ, demonstrating a canny grasp of core ancient Egyptian theological concepts for a ten-year-old

"Little Gidding", first part of part V, by T. S. Eliot:

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.
We die with the dying:
See, they depart, and we go with them.
We are born with the dead:
See, they return, and bring us with them.

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?

( It's always a third way. )

This is a first draft, I'm trying to get my thoughts in order. Suggestions for useful revisions are extremely welcome.

( 'God' is a service role. )


The Unitarian Universalist church I attend opens each ceremony with a short prayer, an affirmation, which begins "Love is the spirit of this church and service is its law." (Or 'goal'. Some do it differently, and I can't recall which one is in the order of service right now.) It and I are both descended from the Puritans, who would probably not approve of aspiring to godhood or teachings about finding the divine, holy spark in each other, but nonetheless here we all are.

"I'm better at stylised than representational."

"Most people are. That's why humans didn't develop representational art for ages. You do a human, you don't try to make it look like Bob. You put stuff that Bob likes around it, everyone who knows Bob knows it's him."

"And you put his name on it."

"Yeah."

"And if you're Egyptian, you put in a fishing float!"

"... why?"

"Bob... bob... bob..."

"Oh."

"Also fishing is symbolic of sex and regeneration, so you really want it in there."

A couple of quotes pulled out of context:

"My backbrain just said 'It is bad spiritual engineering for your landwight agreements to have single fail points on loadbearing royalty.'  This is why I'm not allowed to talk to normal people."

"... Tain Bo Kachina...."

I think 'Loadbearing Royalty' is probably my favorite phrase for this week, by the way. It's hard to work it into a conversation, though.

In other news, I just wrote a serious theology essay about American Idol. (Well, using bits of this past season of American Idol as prime illustrative example, to be fair.)

I am becoming increasingly convinced that one of the critical things I think people need is some serious work on dealing with their transgressive elements.

I return to the quote from this weekend, which I didn't get attributed, and google around and still don't get an attribution but a nice phrasing nonetheless: "The perfect law--is the law of liberty--liberty is the freedom to do what is right/righteous--not to be confused with license which is lawlessness."

( Cut for rambling explorations of ethics and theology. )

One of the things that I quote often is a translation of a bit of an Egyptian creation myth, referring to pre-creation: "before there were two things".


I draw many things from this phrase(  and will now ramble at some length about them. )

Today I had reason to tell one of the myths as an explanation of something. I don't tell them the same way twice when I tell them; the rhythm of the language when I'm storytelling is something that has its own demands, its own life, its own soul, and constraining it to pinned-down language seems wrong to me.

I can tell stories in different registers, in different levels of detail; storytelling is one component of my calling as a writer.

As I was talking to teinedreugan while we were out doing some errands (getting fabric for the thing my hands want to do, kibble for the cats, and a feeesheeee for the lily tank), I realised that this is something that matters to me: that the stories, the storytelling, the rhythm of the language and the tales, this is one of the things that gives me a resonance of having a living faith, a living religious system.

There are only a couple of myths I can do this with easily, just drop into storytelling mode and tell the story as it flows out of me, making the rhythm of the language sing. I need to learn more stories, more stories so that I can tell them, make my breath the breath of the living Kemetic faith.

Kheperu!

Addendum: And since I told the world, I also told the Real Live Preacher. (preachermanfeed, I believe.)