So I’m reworking the first disc of my “You and Me and the Devil Makes Three” mix-set to be less of a randomized selection of the others’ tastes and, instead, more in line with mine… and focusing on what it is to be a changeling (child) witch. It reminded me that I wanted to post a few videos (three, in fact) that capture what my dreams/nightmares were like as a little kid. While no single of one of these videos is an exact replica, taken as a group and sort of …meshed together… you get a near-perfect representation of what they look(ed) like.
Right down to painted faces, labyrinthine city structures and old parking garages, strange dingy forgotten tenement buildings, grown-up-children, poverty, splitting wounds, blood, and disease… and a lot of very sad lonely people crying for things I couldn’t even give myself.
The earliest and most ‘proto-typical’ of these dreams that I can remember was from when I was six. Many of them are recurring. Many show up in my poetry (of which I have included some examples in this post). And they are, of course, on-going.
… When the Morrígan makes sense to you, I guess it’s because REASONS. 😉
The medieval clothes, sad smiles, strange long wooden hallways with dusty floors… so real.
I know it’s supposed to be tense by cinematic design but I literally can’t watch this one without every muscle clamping in my body. So fucking scary! And good!
This one reminds me of a figure I encountered in ‘dreams’ inspired by the song “Golden Slumbers” which used to frighten the fuck out of me as a kid… A strange painted man in a suit, surrounded by other theatrical faces fading into the night on wide & shallow concrete steps under a single street lamp telling me “Once there was a way to get back home…”
Do with all that what you will… it makes for great creative fodder.
The first among other things, makes reference to the dragon-dreams in Laurence Yep’s work “Dragonwings”… the mental image of sore shoulders after intense dreams had a huge impact on me as a kid. The other two are “simply” more narrative descriptions of specific dreams.
~ Saoirse.
PS. The featured image on this post is a photo of me that is no less unsettling in it’s original form… Sweet dreams, witchy children 😛
I have been working on categorising my poetry. I knew there were a few themes that, in general, a lot of my poetry might fall under… but I have spent the last week or so slowly charting, dating, accounting for and making sure I had back ups of my poetry and the first realisation that came out of this is that I have written over 70 poems since the beginning of 2021.
There are almost no poems before that until you travel back about 10 years.
Turns out field-working autistic burnout and shuffling personal care away from heavily medicated *misdiagnoses* brings the poet back out in a person… but I digress.
What is challenging about assigning organised and uniform categories to my poetry is that, of course, there is organic overlap. This is precisely what it is to be an archivist (i.e. why we don’t rearrange physically what we categorise intellectually) …Or if I were to try and write up a descriptive summary of each poem and derive collection schema from there… THAT would be more like the work of a rare books librarian wrangling unique/historic items into DCRM(B) and MARC-XML friendly formats.
…I digressed again.
The point is, it’s tough but I LOVE doing this sort of thing… ad infinitum, it seems.
Here is a pie chart I have constructed and colour-coded to represent the themes and distribution of my poetry as of right now. Representing 71 poems written between January 9th, 2021 and October 15th, 2024. (I’ve written a few more but for various reasons they are not included on this list.)
(Interestingly, there are a few I cannot find copies of though I know I at least have physical copies somewhere. Bad LIS-professional! No cookie!!!)
The colours are loosely significant but the important thing to absorb here is that a) poetry is one of the main ways I channel my anger… especially as an autistic who goes largely non-verbal under social/interpersonal duress and b) I actually think of the Tower Quartet and (Channeled) Anger as subsets of a larger intellectual fonds …which is called “Excavations”. You will see that title in the pie chart as pertaining to a single slice, but really you can also view “Excavations” more broadly as occupying just over 45% of the chart! …The unifying emphasis is on digging deep, getting into the chthonic, and shadow-working my shit… oh, and a little revenge poetry here and there.
The thematics in the rest equally relate to each other pretty intensely. My poetry is always devotional in nature but some poems are more direct forms of near-audible gnosis. This makes sense to me from a mythic perspective as it is (personally) derived from the function of verse, alliteration, sorcery, ‘supplication’, evocation, and so on in medieval Irish literature.
I have made “Death” green mainly to evoke a #deathpositive association – ‘verdure from void’. I could equally (and perhaps should) have made it some kind of gold colour:
“I know you’ll remember me when I’m gone
remember my stories, remember my songs
I’ll leave them on earth, sweet traces of gold
oh, they’re calling me home, they’re calling me home.”
~ “They’re Calling Me Home”, Rhiannon Giddens
I will likely include little blurbs illuminating each category on a basic level whenever I manage to post them.
At any rate, I still need to figure out how to create a poetry gallery where poems that can’t occupy a single slide might appear… Until then, here are some of the poems I’ve written in September and October (minus “Athame”… which I have posted already.)
I suppose this set is all rather on the nose, but the themes of each are as follows: Love, Excavation, Death, Anger, and Anger.
For what it’s worth, I guess.
~ Saoirse.
* Get it? Theme-attics and Scheme-attics? Because it’s a post about poetry thematics and schematics? And I have a thing for sad attics? Ba-dum-tssshhh!!! Genius at it’s finest. I kill me.
My aim with my online presence in a holistic sense is to do the work of further developing a unique and authentic artistic style and to build that as an inseparable part – maybe even just an outward expression of – my witchcraft and personal paganism. (In some ways, my goal is also to work myself up to a place where I can open my etsy shop and trust myself to handle things like paper work and post offices with reliability.)
There are many topics that get poured into this massive cauldron of bubbling inspiration and what I want to do is explore that process in a conscientious, intentional manner so that whatever comes out (at any given time) does so as fully considered, balanced, and informed as it can be at that time. Some recent ingredients (or topics) of focus have centred around revamping my altar and strengthening the practical aspects of my devotion to the Morrígan.
I wanted the art on my altar to function more directly on the Morrígan in her many aspects. I have felt for a long time that I was placing too much emphasis on her bird forms (Badb), her horse forms (assuming we take Macha to be a facet of the same goddess or even her sister), and to some extent her association with war and death. Thus, the altar has the bird, the horse, and the more cosmic otherworldly aspect accounted for but no wolf, cow, or eel… and also no succinct representation of triplicates either! (It used to but hasn’t had for a while – long story.)
The next question I had was how could I represent so many new animal forms without entirely dismantling my altar for a new layout? I generally take a medieval inspired approach to Irish myth so the first place I looked was medieval manuscripts for representations of the animals in question (or near enough). Below are some examples (including source information) of wolves, cows, and…anything like a snake or fish to give a stylistic basis for drawing an eel. (Oddly, eels were fairly commonplace food items in the middle ages but I’ve had a hard time sourcing properly cited examples. Thanks Pinterest 🙄)
Psalter of Robert De Lisle, c.1310Rochester Bestiary, c. 1230Der Naturen Bloeme of Jacob van Maerlant, c. 1350Harley MS 4751 (ft. additions of Gerald of Wales’ Topographia Hibernica, late 12th-early 13th c.
I am also always itching to paint on my furniture (and my walls…as with my altar space) and this seemed like a very good, risk free chance to work on developing my own technique inspired by medieval aesthetics and mimicking various folk styles such as Scandinavian (esp. Norwegian) rosemaling. I also grew up and worked in an area of the US with a lot of old houses that featured strange old paintings in their attics from the folk arts movement – an artistic tradition that included painting folk motifs on furniture as well. Below are some examples that I used as a basic reference as well as a page of my Book of Illuminations where I had some fun practising brush strokes!
Examples of rosemaling style painting – largely uncredited on Pinterest.
So I went to the vintage/antique shopping. Among other treasures such as a white rosary specked with what I assume is years of incense resin and a really beautiful old green glass bottle…I found a black wooden statue base. Bought it, took it home, cleaned it up and worked on designing how to paint it! Yorick was being fussy about the box he had been on anyway. 😉
Out of all of this I designed three panels for the statue platform. I incorporated a few William Morris/Arts & Crafts movement/stained glass inspired elements as well (most notably in the birch trees and the leaves behind them.) Note! The cow faces forward and is also somewhat based on modern highland cows… The part of the Táin where the Morrígan takes this form describes Her as a ‘hornless red heifer’. I decided to lighten the colours on her head and keep her ears red as a slight nod to otherworldly cows or cows from the sidhe which are often described as white with red ears. The final product also shows three drops of blood, one for each animal, which are placed spatially in such a way as vaguely indicates where Cúchulainn’s sling shot injured Her in each case. Below are my notes and sketches!
Astral egg symbols abound!Paint experiments.Sketches based on medieval examples – focusing on directionality of brush strokes. Eel modeled loosely on a fresh water species.
The final result up close and in situ! This shrine feels so much more complete now. Best believe the gold of Her eyes lights up in reflected candle light.
A video showing some of this process will follow in a day or so, so stay tuned for that! I will endeavour to update this blog post with the embedded video when it is ready.
