Sitting in my weedy lair, thinking over creative ambition, doors between worlds, and the way witchcraft works wonders – staring out at blackbirds, hooded crows (and a wren!) flitting between drifting spells of rain – I finally finished two poems.
The first, paradoxically, took over a month.
If fantasies are fractals, then Death is periwinkle.
The second was a classic case of how most of my poems emerge… “No-facing” them up from the gut and barfing them all over the page like so much ectoplasm.
The winter weather continues but I’m not sad about it. On Imbolc, I went for a river-side walk for several hours. Starting in the morning mist and ending in the midday sun through fields and several different woods, my partner and I saw two grey herons fly overhead with sticks in their beaks. The Cailleach gathers firewood! Six more weeks of winter. As it happened, we also saw their nesting place: five full grown grey herons perched in the tree tops overhanging the edge of the river… uncanny in their beauty.
~ Saoirse.
(Decks shown: “Trionfi della Luna (Paradoxical)” – 3 of Coins, Knight of Wands, 2 of Coins – and “Oracle médiéval et merveilleux” – “Colère” – in inverted blacklight)
PS. A personal reminder, “Eviscerate” by Faetooth playing as I post this <3
So, I’m in the middle of a massive change right now and, at the same time, I have also recently done myself the (mixed) favour of getting two full days of colour-work done for a tattoo that covers almost a quarter of my body…
Suffice it to say I’m hecking tired and I’m gonna stay that way for a bit and I did it to myself and that’s what really hurts >_<.
To make up for the lack of posts – but *not* the lack of creativity and general witchery – this post essentially contains a photo dump of (some) recent projects and artistic goings on amidst ::wooooooo:: big change ::woooooooo:: ^_^
Recent shots of my desk – homemade beeswax candles, card readings, and musical practice. You may recognise the first image as the thumbnail for my most recent video post. Terribly cringey and an algorithmic shot in the foot… sorrynotsorry!Before and after mending a rip in my skirt (not pictured is the black cotton backing I incorporated into the stitching) & some homemade earrings (paper layers, glue, varnish; real wishbones, cleaned and varnished; paper mache clay, gold paint, varnish.)Recent shots of glamour altar (including perfumes, paper mache clay horns, and ultraviolet pigments) & a shot of the colours my tattoo artist was mixing and blending directly onto my skin!Adventures in making my own nail polish colours! Ultraviolet green (in various layer combinations)… I called it “Poison Apple” but my partner wants to call it either “Mutant Ninja Ooze” or “Aggressively Green”… thoughts?Random OOTD shots of the general vibe I’ve beeen going for these days! Complete with Evenstar & glow in the dark bugs and sex dice! ^_^
That’s all for now folks. Have fun storming the castle!!!
Love poems are undoubtedly the hardest for me to write. I have composed only a handful that I consider successful in my life time. Here are three of those, all about the same person ^_^ You may note the ‘marriage’ of medieval mysticism and Pagan Otherworlds.
Poetry is such a meandering thing. I can’t say I’m the sort who works on the art of writing poetry or who reads widely or consistently to better acquaint myself with the source material… at least, I don’t do this with the kind of structure or consistency that makes sense to declare anywhere on the internet! But I care very intensely about developing a style, voice, and a sensory reality.
My sister writes BEAUTIFUL poetry that is much like her dreams – often in the style of epic narrative. With a temporal flow and an arc of completion. She once pointed out that my poetry evokes vignettes of mood and sensory experience. A window into a brief mystical moment. This is incidentally also very much like my dreams (albeit with the added potential for positivity since my dreams are almost exclusively terrible & terrifying… horrific, gothic, sublime.)
I am firmly of the view that poetry should be read aloud. At least, MINE should be… with breaks (or ‘rests’?) only as dictated by punctuation, rather than (GASP! HORROR!) at the end of every line. If you take into consideration that much of what I’ve written has included direct musical reference (in addition to those that can already be achieved through metre and so on), you may see that I *try* to extend the audio-visual to include music and dance.
Thus, in the poem “Untitled (Hazel for a Boy)” the hazel in the palm is a reference to the writings of Julian of Norwich on the nature of love… and I have layered this with a common trad descriptor of young beloveds: (nut) brown boy/girl. One long standing favourite of mine is “Ille Dhuinn, S’ Toigh Leam Thu”
The Scottish Gaelic lyrics are as follows:
’Ille dhuinn, ’s toigh leam thu, ’S toigh leam fhìn thu, laochain; Mas toigh leat mi, is toigh leam thu ‑ ’S gur òg a thug mi gaol dhut.
Dh’fhalbh mi mar a b’ àbhaist dhomh Air sàillibh coimhead chaorach ‑ ’S beag a bha dhem fhor orra, ’S mo leannan air a’ chaolas.
Nuair dhìrich mi suas Criongrabhal, ’S e m’ inntinn nach robh aotrom ‑ Bha ’m bàta mach gu Saighdeanais, ’S i toidhdidh fo cuid aodaich.
’S ann a their mo phàrantan Gur tàmailt leotha m’ fhaoineas ‑ Gum faighinn fear na b’ fheàrr na thu Le bàtaichean ’s le birlinn.
Ged gheibhinn fear na b’ fheàrr na thu Le bàtaichean ’s le birlinn, Gum b’ fheàrr leam fhìn an gille donn Is e gun bhonn dhen t‑saoghal.
Ged gheall mi dhut gun leanainn thu ’S gun dealaichinn ri mo dhaoine, Cha d’ rachainn dha Na Hearadh leat Air cheannachd air an t‑saoghal.
Ged a bhithinn pòsta riut Is còir agam air d’ fhaotainn, Cha b’ fhada bhithinn beò agad ’S an Dòmhnallach às m’ aonais.
In English:
Brown-haired lad, I’m fond of you, I’m really fond of you, boy; If you’re fond of me, I’m fond of you- I’ve loved you since I was young.
I set off as usual to look for the sheep but scant attention gave I to them, knowing my beloved was in the strait.
When I climbed Criongrabhal, my spirits were low – the ship, with well-trimmed sails, was out near Saighdeanais.
My parents say that my foolishness is a source of shame to them – that I could attract a better man than you, an owner of ships and galleys.
Though I could have a better man than you, an owner of ships and galleys, I would much prefer the brown-haired lad though he hadn’t a penny in the world.
Though I promised you I’d follow you and part company from my people, nothing in the world could induce me to go to Harris.
I wouldn’t survive long if married to you, while pining for MacDonald.
Note that in Scottish Gaelic as well as in Irish the manner of describing hair colour is to pair the colour with the type of person directly, e.g. brown boy. The translation above opts for the “brown-haired” descriptor to make it clearer in English.
There are many other examples of songs that make reference to a nut-brown colour (many of which are super cringe tourist favourites here in Ireland) but this is the one that I have most often in mind due to it’s melancholy sound and its emphasis on the difficulties of separation and limited finances. Having formed and kept a bond across the Atlantic … between worlds, over nine waves, across time and space… lends itself quite well to the shared lore of our relationship. Indeed, this kind of poetic layering also lends itself to the spellbound witchy otherworldly quality of being fascinated and devoted to any human person other than myself. <3
Another such colour symbol, of course, is the azure blue… the medieval link with lapiz lazuli and text illuminations. Or the blue-grey/blue green (glás!) of the sea. The list goes ever on and on.
To my chosen person: “I have walked the world to find you. I’ve worn out the soles of three pairs of iron shoes and my hair is no longer red. But I come to claim you…”*
~ Saoirse.
*From “Hans, My Hedgehog” in Jim Henson’s The Storyteller
A selection of (some) favourite quotations – read or re-read in the last calendar year.
“One of the blotches of reflected sunlight swayed to and fro across the paunch. This particular pool of light moving in a mesmeric manner backwards and forwards picked out from time to time a long red island of spilt wine. It seemed to leap forward from the mottled cloth when the light fastened upon it in startling contrast to the chiaroscuro and to defy laws of tone. This ungarnished sign of Swelter’s debauche, taking the swollen curve of linen, had somehow, to Mr Flay’s surprise, a fascination. For a minute he watched it appear, and disappear to reappear again – a lozenge of crimson, as the body behind it swayed.”
(Peake, Mervyn. “Swelter.” Titus Groan, Gormenghast Trilogy.)
“She tossed her long hair and it flapped down her back like a pirate’s flag. She stood in about as awkward a manner as could be conceived. Utterly un-feminine – no man could have invented it.”
(Peake, Mervyn. “Fuschia.” Titus Groan, Gormenghast Trilogy.)
“Once, long ago, traveling among the marbles of Rome and Florence, he had seen women like this, kept in stone instead of ice. Once, wandering in the Louvre, he had found women like this, washed in summer color and kept in paint. Once, as a boy, sneaking the cool grottos behind a motion picture theater screen, on his way to a free seat, he had glanced up and there towering and flooding the haunted dark seen a woman’s face as he had never seen it since, of such size and beauty built of milk-bone and moon-flesh as to freeze him there alone behind the stage, shadowed by the motion of her lips, the bird-wing flicker of her eyes, the snow-pale-death-shimmering illumination from her cheeks.
So from other years there jumped forth images which flowed and found new substance here within the ice.
What color was her hair? It was blond to whiteness and might take any color, once set free of cold.
How tall was she?
The prism of the ice might well multiply her size or diminish her as you moved this way or that before the empty store, the window, the night-soft rap-tapping ever-fingering gently probing moths.
Not important.
Far above all – the lightning rod salesman shivered – he knew the most extraordinary thing.
If by some miracle her eyelids should open within that sapphire and she should look at him, he knew what color her eyes would be.
He knew what color her eyes would be.”
(Bradbury, Ray. Something Wicked This Way Comes)
“But what word shall I speak?”, asked the Lady Amalthea. “I have said nothing to him, yet every day he comes to me with more heads, more horns and hides and tails, more enchanted jewels and bewitched weapons. What will he do if I speak?” […]
“No, he does not want my thoughts,” she said softly. “He wants me, as much as the Red Bull did, and with no more understanding. But he frightens me even more than the Red Bull, because he has a kind heart. No, I will never speak a promising word to him.”
The pale mark on her brow was invisible in the gloom of the scullery. She touched it and then drew her hand away quickly, as though the mark hurt her. “The Horse died,” she said to the little cat. “I could do nothing.”
(Beagle, Peter S. The Last Unicorn)
“Bioy Cesares had had dinner with me that evening and we became lengthily engaged in a vast polemic concerning the composition of a novel in the first person, whose narrator would omit or disfigure the facts and indulge in various contradictions which would permit a few readers – very few readers – to perceive an atrocious or banal reality. From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us.
(Borges, Jorge Luis. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”. Labyrinths.)
I have collected these quotations here in the same manner in which one writes quotations down in a notebook or journal. I want to look at them from time to time… and turn some things over in my head. I hope to make a modest series of quotations arranged each around a theme… ideally, with as little explanation as possible.
So to close, another quotation from The Last Unicorn:
“One eye opened slowly, green and gold as sunlight in the woods. The cat said, “I am what I am. I would tell you what you want to know if I could, for you have been kind to me. But I am a cat, and no cat anywhere ever gave anyone a straight answer.”
Sincerely,
Saoirse.
The header image (in public domain) is a study of Jane Morris for ‘Dante’s Dream’ by Dante Gabriel Rosetti. A bit on the nose, perhaps, with all the Beatrices, Pygmalions, (and even ‘My Fair Lady’s’) being tossed around… The word “gauche” is used above. I will invoke it again here.
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.
At the moment, I’m in the midst of a massive change. Posts and so on are going to be sparse for a little while…
However, I want to offer some thoughts and updates on how I have been interfacing with the world and raise some perspectives that, honestly, I’ll never be ‘finished’ exploring.
The best feeling of sanctuary is well before sunrise.
Ever since I was little I have been obsessed with the minutiae of what it’s like to live creatively. Have you ever read a favourite book (in my case, mostly fantasy) and then seen a photo (sometimes at the back of the book with a short bio) of ‘the author at home’. Or perhaps you have stumbled across a photograph, blog post, or a short video essay that portrays ‘the artist in studio’. Have you ever seen this and thought I need to know how they got to that point in their life?
Cardboard cutouts I made years ago of Terri Windling and Ursula K. Le Guin. I used to tuck them in my planner and bring them with me everywhere!
I don’t mean ‘art for art’s sake’ but rather something very much embodied in the world and part of it’s extended network of sensibilities. Something that interfaces with real ecosystems or socio-economic environments and real time periods.
Is there any purer form of magic than the little glimpses you get of those lives? I don’t think they require endless descriptive detail because the idea is not to replicate them. You have to make your own for it to work and that’s what witchcraft *feels* like to me. It’s what I spend most of my youtube channel, this blog, my whole life pursuing.
Recent reading right before a VERY intense first time experience.
In my case, it has output that others can experience because I feel the creativity must go somewhere but I’ve never been the best at keeping track of my portfolio (and, indeed, I was always rubbish at tracking my repertoire when I was a performing violinist too. #myexecutivefunctionsucks)
But this is why I’ll so often mention something in detail, something relatively mundane but *just* off the beaten track (debatable) and then go “see? Witchcraft!”
And the reading AFTER that experience to get a sense of where it was going.
I love scenes in fantasy stories** that describe the seemingly mundane elements of a witch’s living space. Let’s say you’re in the Brooklyn apartment belonging to your aunt (umpty times removed). She has a gas hob that she lights with matches. There’s a colourful pot of coffee on. A fruit bowl sits on the coffee table below a daffy painting of old lovers in clashing robes. You wonder why their necks are so long… A cat lounges near an old pile of yarn or perhaps on a tatty armchair tucked in the corner. You look out the kitchen window to see she’s let the black-eyed susan vine overtake the fire escape …something looks different about the city though. “Honey, pick a different window” or “Sweetheart, come look at this old book of poems… people go mad looking out there too long.”
A reading about a specific… quandary and lived/sensory question.
Is it just because of the city chaos? Or is that the road to an Otherworld? What’s the difference between personal eccentricity and a real witch? Who gets to make that call?
… I’ve taken to washing my hair once every three weeks now instead of the usual two. I’m combing it, which I never thought possible with curls, but it seems that the key lies in using a wooden comb. I oil it with olive oil mixed with peppermint, fenugreek seeds, and rosemary (which I cooked in it myself. Magical intentions included.) Recently, I changed up my henna mixture for colouring too… the henna kept oxidizing far too dark and I prefer a lighter pinker red. I did a whole bunch of research on it and ended up with henna, catnip, and madder root! There are medieval recipes for colouring hair but I went with modern recommendations made by those interested in retaining length. Just in case.
So now I’ve got even more of a medieval-inspired head! Though I have no idea if it will register on camera over time, I’m very happy with the difference.
I’m making myself a new (to me) type of corset. And I’m going so very slow with it … partly because most of my time is eaten up with something else non-negotiable at the moment. But progress is happening! Hopefully, I’ll like it? I’m learning so much in the process though.
I’m still working on my current jumper project… historically inspired with billowing sleeves. And yarn the colour of crow feathers (black, but with many tiny multicolour fibres within so it has the optic effect of shimmering.) I can’t wait to finish it!!!
In other lights it looks more blue green!
I’ve also migrated over to the dumb phone life. I’d wanted to do this for a long time and had steadily uninstalled as much as I could from my old Samsung (having left a certain soul-sucking fruit-named empire behind years ago!) But the thing was still such a drain on my life.
My internet is based in my hotspot so my dumphone does have that capability. It’s the Matrix phone, for anyone wondering. A Nokia 8110 4G – and oddly it’s WAY faster than the old hotspot. I theorised to my techie BIL it might be that I couldn’t entirely keep my smartphone from doing other things in the background. He agreed.
In the absence of so much stimulation elsewhere, I have been getting better at aimlessly browsing less. And my witchcraft has immediately felt more real. More present. It’s colours are more vibrant. My relationship with deity has been reviving. Not that it was ‘dead’ but I had felt like I was fighting some kind of film that lay over it before I could really access it. That is much less the case now and I anticipate it changing further.
I mean, for example, Macha and Badb make an appearance masquerading as artists and tarot readers… They call themselves ‘Melodie Moonlight’ and ‘Breda Fairfoul’. One has blue hair, the other red. They ride a motorbike. They chew tobacco and smoke cigars. They file enamel handcuffs with their teeth and cry acid tears! What more could you want!
The way I keep describing it is, “I feel like I can see things better.” It’s not the best analogy but it will suffice for now.
Which brings us back to the magic in the mundane. Call it aesthetics, but I want to make real what I feel and perceive to be important. It takes sketches, notes, and even pin boards just as much as it takes altar work, moon phases, or wax drippings. Magic is art, art is sensory, and art and magic are visual-tactile-aural living.
The end.
(Or the beginning?)
~ Saoirse.
PS. I’ve been re-reading a lot of old favourites… Hounds of the Morrigan, The Left Hand of Darkness and so on… but I’ve also been embarking on a shocking amount of new stuff for me! Movies I’d never seen… The Crow (1994), What We Do In the Shadows, Witches of Eastwick, Beetlejuice (1988)****. I have THOUGHTS about all of this that links into what I’ve laid out above. Hopefully, I’ll get to post again soon!
** Urban fantasy is great for this but I can think of a few Patricia A. McKillip moments or Patricia C. Wrede moments and many others that do this really well too.
*** The header image is just a bunch of old photos of me aged approx. 16-21.
What if Madame Nostradamus, our “witty little knitter”, wanted her OWN scarf? Things are gonna get properly nerdy with this one. Strap in – I have no chill!
Note ~ my knit gauge was a little tighter than called for in the double knit weight, so I used the inches chart. I preferred the slightly denser look so I didn’t bother adjusting my gauge too much.
Paintings featured (anti-clockwise):
The Arnolfini Wedding by Jan van Eyck, 1434
Portrait of Christina of Denmark by Hans Holbein the Younger, 1538
Portrait of a Young Woman/Isabella of Spain and Denmark by Jan Gossaert, 16th c.
Portrait of a Lady by Rogier van der Weyden, c. 1460
Cornelis Aerentsz van der Dussen by Jan van Scorel, c. 1535
The Wedding Dance by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1566
A Young Princess (Possibly Dorothea of Denmark) by Jan Gossaert, 1530
Music featured:
Je suis d’Allemagne – Je suis trop jeunette by Ensemble Unicorn (Album ~ “Art & Music: Raphel – Music of his Time”)
Comment qu’a moy lonteinne by Falsobordone (Album ~ “1350 Music for a Plague”)
Recently, I have been trying to give form to certain ideas. At a snail’s pace, my kind of speed. One of these ideas has to do with a burgeoning awareness that something I have always been able to feel and certainly always yearned for is taking shape… Simply put, it can be called ‘lifestyle’ or ‘vocation’. It’s about the sensory experience of every day. It’s about how that intermingles with the hopes and dreams of the past. It’s even about certain life goals that have recently become a little more tangible.
It can be glimpsed in my thoughts about ‘between’ spaces. I’ve been calling this place ‘the Labyrinth’.
In the Labyrinth, rooms are often arranged according to discipline or genre. Style of activity. Or by medium. It has places that are dominated by memory. Or by myth. Rooms and halls devoted to presence. It has a rotting fairy Versaille, sidhe mounds lie just beyond the walls of it’s outer gardens. I know what grows in it’s crevices. I know what areas get built vs. which simply materialise and I know why – I know what I’m trying to do there. It can only be entered or exited from this side of reality… on the far side it might be infinite. I have not checked.
Though Hilary’s performance style isn’t my favourite now, her work & THIS ALBUM were deeply formative… This cannot be overstated.
In the Labyrinth are all the scariest saddest most soul crushing things I have ever personally encountered. In the Labyrinth are also the scariest saddest things my loved ones have encountered…
In certain rooms in the Labyrinth, it has windows to Nazi Germany. To two little girls in the rubble of Cologne. In other rooms hang portraits of Sarah Chang, Ani Kavafian, Hilary Hahn, Nathan Milstein, Andrew Manze – the violin room. In another, Carter Brey, Andre Emilianoff, Rostropovich, and Jacqueline Du Pré… though I hasten to say the cello room is much scarier than the violin room. More horror and shadow. In the violin room, baroque music echoes from an old scratched record player that I can’t find. It floats between sage green curtains with gold fringe, it gathers in gusts of dusty leaves strewn along the floor. It’s faded tiles are arranged a little like a chess board (but not quite). The violin room has a fallen wall that leads outside. It’s almost always Autumn from that vantage point.
Imagine… Sibelius echoing through the ghostly gallery of memory.
There is joy in the Labyrinth. Some of the most beautiful sunlit gardens I have ever seen. Bright and fresh of a cool morning. In some parts of it I have lots of little demon fairy friends… absolutely inspired by the work of Brian and Wendy Froud, Jim Henson, and others.
“Step out of the page into the sensual world.” ~ Kate Bush
Many parts of the Labyrinth give me the eerie feeling I have seen them before. If you have seen The Storyteller series with John Hurt (and Brian Henson as his dog!) you’ll recognise much of the look of my Labyrinth – including the way a room filmed from a different angle looks like a different story.
If I have something big and overwhelming to face, I walk the number of steps and turns and corridors and gardens it takes to get there. And then I come back.
And therein lies an important nuance – Big and Overwhelming Things. These are not just bad things. Not just lost things.
Yesterday, I sat down to work on sketching out wardrobe ideas. The goal has been taking shape in my mind for quite some time of what colour palette I want. What silhouettes I like that also work on my body and my sensory preferences. What works where I live and what I can have ethically shipped or acquired? What layering? What technique? What cheeky little references? How shall I paint myself? Where will I hide symbols & sigils? Which tattoos will I allow people to see? How semi-permeable do I want my persona to be? What kind of variations do I want to build into that without always causing getting dressed to be such a cognitive burden (as fun as it ALWAYS is – I even enjoy pjs!)
JEEZUZ! 7 of Cups, this is getting personal!
It’s hard to go from basic learning to a cohesive finished result. I’m convinced a practiced artist is able to make something and 51% of the time say to themselves, “that was deliberate”. >_< In performance, they always said that the true masters spend their whole lives practicing to make the hardest things seem easy. No one wants their audience to wince in anticipation of a famously difficult passage!
But if I have a flare for aesthetics and a knack for getting my hands to make what I envision, that’s all I have. “Flare” and “Knack”. Good fairy names, to be sure… good to have on side, but not synonymous with a finished project. Not yet the bit where I’ve crafted and lived in my visions. Not yet corporeal. And the tension or dissonance of this arises in a few key places:
Clarity of vision requires honing and specification. Decisions in favour of one thing at the expense of another. Do I have ‘talent’ for this kind of executive functioning?
NO. (It’s one of my specific autistic ‘traits’ that I suck at this.) It will not just take practice. It will require a lot of frustration, erasing (::gasp!::), paper with pencil dents in it that won’t erase any more, bad stitching… and quite literal ‘blood, sweat, and tears’ because I really shouldn’t be trusted with so many sharp implements.
Do I know how to manage my fabrics to minimise waste without being over precious?
Ehhhhhhh… always a question, never an answer to that one.
What happens if I change my mind?
What happens if my tastes change?
What if my body changes?
Should I plan contingency into these patterns?
Could I remake them into something else?
Where should I store repair-remnants so they don’t get eaten by moths?
Shit, I ripped something… again.
But if I draw something after a lot of work and swear words (while also being happy and absorbed in the process) and I show that sketch online and “it looks well enough to the untrained eye” (as it has been drawn by an untrained person!) and some people like it… is that ‘talent’? Or is it burgeoning skill. Is it diligence? Or is it bare minimum that I managed to draw it at all…
Found some old stuff!Self-portraits. 2021 & 2023?Experiments – derivative but useful!
What then if the drawings truly do become clothes. (Doesn’t that sound like magic!?) Is THAT talent? Or is it… propensity? Am I pretentious? Am I ‘talented’ or am I just a fucking handful? Who’s gonna hoover up the trail of threads and linen dust…
Maybe I have a talent for being a handful!
If I share process online, who is my audience?
I literally have no idea… but I HAVE always felt that documentaries about creative process, textbooks and lectures about the preparatory sketches and intentional symbolism of art, and old photographs of ‘artist in studio’ were the most magical Otherworldly thing on the planet.
I want to make the clothes I find in The Labyrinth. I want to come back along those corridors still wearing what I saw there. I want to help that stuff cross the divide – not just the clothes but the air quality, the poetry, the paintings, the furnishings, the music, the ideas.
It’s a stormy yellow-green coloured day today. Deeply blustry and misting with rain. I have a massive headache. But I want to build Otherworlds and I want to learn what it takes to do that.
The word ‘talent’ is a value judgement that has no objective significance at all. In my experience, ‘talent’ is a word used to diminish not only the hard work of others but also the reality of what it is to try something and kind of suck at it until you kind of suck a little less! Perhaps people accidentally sabotage themselves in using this word. If it’s always someone else that is so talented… What do we think their talent is? Is it the same as what they want it to be or thought it was? Have we ever seen what their work looked like not just when they started but at every point along the way? Good days? Bad days? Days where they had a dentist appointment and forgot to cover their paints so everything dried up? Days where they’ve LOVED baking until they realised they mis-measured their yeast …or the oven stopped working but the light stayed on? Days where the internet told them they were great but a favourite family member grimaced at their ideas?
What if you’re a 60 year old man who wants to learn to swim after years of being body shamed. What if you used to dream of talking to fish and you want to explore that again in the physical realm? I bet you could become an expert at loving water – not just a ‘talented’ swimmer.
Some people have opportunity, privilege, & support. Too many people don’t. Maybe most people have an incorrigible mix of these things. A pervasive paradox.
Culturally agreed upon standards for what looks like talent totally exist… but they are relative at best. Not very nice and of limited use. Picasso, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other such humans dwell in the realm of talent and genius only because they deny entry to others. Sabotaging others with jealousy and aggression. Their work is good, just not THAT good. The idea of ‘inherent talent’ (to me) just screams ‘big fish, little pond’.
The concept of ‘perseverance’ exists but I think it gets misapplied to the point of losing a lot of what’s useful about it. Can you persevere at being scatter brained? Do we value that word internally or are we waiting for it to be applied externally?
Play TOTALLY exists. But if ‘play’ is ‘talent’, then can talent be ‘lost’? And if talent can be lost, then I think it must not be inherent. Which, to me, means you could be 96 years old and still decide to redevelop it if you chose… just because you can. That sounds more like curiosity and skill-building! Achievable things! Real magic.
If ‘talent’ exists, then everyone must have it. I think it’s down to the inherent tension and dissonance of asking yourself what yours are… and inventing them when necessary!
~ Saoirse.
P.S. It’s a total joke that I put my own work next to all these amazing true geniuses. I laugh at myself, not them!
Something that has gripped my imagination my entire life is the idea of ‘Building Other Worlds’. Importantly, I don’t mean only as ‘substance behind narrative genres’. World-building for a fantasy novel or for game play, though deeply interesting, is only one popular iteration of a much broader interdisciplinary creative drive to make and experience other worlds. What of Art? Architecture? Costume? Music? Theatre? Ecological experience? Folklore? What of symbolism or spacial awareness? Where do we get ideas for what our worlds look like and what tools do we use to build them?
I have been wanting to write about this for a long time but have been puzzled about where to start. Do I start by explaining some things about art history? About perspective, image composition, numerology? Do I dig into how tiered worlds in late medieval and renaissance literature make their way into contemporary visual language? What about modern art? What about tarot or oracle? Witchcraft, sewing, or poetry? Would tracing themes of port cities and their proximity to marshland or wetland habitats get the message across? What about folkloric recordings of Victorian vs. Medieval streets in Irish town centres!? Ultimately, I realised I’m going to have to start where I am and, if you wish, you can follow me down each corridor as and when I get there.
Here are some purposefully drawn 18th c. Minchiate cards illustrating how card visuals can help you construct doors to Otherworlds and populate them in turn with architecture, characters, and landscape …with pips for ‘scaffolding’!
Recently, I revisited some books that were instrumental in helping me to identify myself when I was young. These follow very much in a similar vein to other favourites of mine such as Pish Posh, Said Hieronymus Bosch, The Books of Earthsea, The Chronicles of Prydain, The Hounds of the Mórrígan, or Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell… and I took special care to obtain secondhand copies of the specific covers I grew up with as well.
I have yet to re-read The Raven Ring although I know I will love it as I can’t remember how many times I would have read it growing up.
There are five books in all (for now) – each of which features scenes relating to tarot, tarocchi, or otherwise emphasise attention to historical detail within their fictional plots.
* Midnight Magic by Avi (part of a series that didn’t exist yet when I was younger. I won’t talk about this one much because – as it turns out – it wasn’t as good as I remembered and it’s representation of tarot is tangential to the plot and seems fairly ignorant of what tarot is. I still LOVE the cover though!)
* Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman (no, I am not going to watch the new film abomina…I mean, adaptation of this beautiful wonderful highly intelligent book.)
* The Midwife’s Apprentice by Karen Cushman
* I, Coriander by Sally Gardner
* The Raven Ring by Patricia C. Wrede (part of the Lyra series but I have not read any of the others.)
The Midwife’s Apprentice is pictured here with selected plot-relevant cards from Oracle Médiéval et Merveilleux by Gulliver l’Aventurière & Julien Miavril. (No spoilers!)
For one thing, all of these books (except Midnight Magic) were aimed, perhaps, at Young Adult readers generally socialised as feminine but at no point did they talk down to them. They were an excellent foray into how creative and narrative detail coexists wonderfully with good historical enquiry. There is an emphasis on trade and commerce. Some of these feature port cities or otherwise thriving commercial principalities and their conflicts with rural living and tradition. They discuss textiles as if their readers can and will care about how they affect plot. And they treat Otherworlds and/or magic with the same expectation: that readers are curious to know detail and will put in the imaginative effort. To me, this is how the imagination grows.
Catherine, Called Birdy is pictured here with two cards from the Oracle Médiéval et Merveilleux that are… relevant to the story. 😉
Artistically, a glance at these covers will possibly explain a thing or two about my own preference for facial portraiture and the art of the late middle ages and early renaissance. The time periods in the books vary a little more widely than the covers. I, Coriander, for example, is set mostly in Cromwellian England and the time period represented art historically on Catherine, Called Birdy is about 200 years later than the setting of the book (i.e. 15th century visuals [1] vs 1290-1291 book setting.) I was lucky enough, however, to have an aunt who overlooked things like that. For example, she focused instead on showing me how the play in perspective with the rope and bucket and the figural proportions on the cover of Catherine, Called Birdy were all little art historical jokes that the artist had borrowed from real historical painters. The implication was that if I was clever and curious, I could find them out …and I did!
Obviously there is so much to say even just about these books… so for now I will draw a few connections between I, Coriander and a few tarot and oracle decks that I have.
I, Coriander pictured here with selected cards from the Nicoletta Ceccoli Tarot. Once again, the penchant for strange emotionally intelligent portraiture!
In the first place there is reference to a pair of wedding portraits in I, Coriander …a woman in the foreground holding an oak-leaf, a tiny hunting scene nearly hidden in the wooded middle-ground behind her, and a citadel in the distance. Her spouse is positioned in front of a fantastical city with a river or estuary intended (thematically) to mirror his connection with trade and the Thames. But in this city, there are mermaids and fantastical boats in the water among other things… I couldn’t help but picture certain cards from the Trionfi della Luna (paradoxical pictured below.) Or perhaps wander into a landscape just beyond the borders of such a city… might we find the world of the Somnia tarot there? People in old robes and linen shifts wandering in among the wetlands and sedge grasses gazing at the stars or riding silent sad horses?
Cards chosen from the Trionfi della Luna to mirror aspects of the story in I, Coriander… along with various imaginings of my own about the space we inhabit in the Somnia Tarot.
I should note I have also recently read Witchfinders by Malcolm Gaskill and am currently working my way through The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present by Ronald Hutton… Of course, in so far as witch hunts in England overlapped with civil war tensions between Royalists and Parliamentarians (and occurred along Puritan vs ‘Popish’ lines), I, Coriander made for an excellent fictional backdrop! Also, I really enjoyed drawing cards from the Oracle of Black Enchantment (also by Deviant Moon Inc.) while reading Witchfinders as a visual processing exercise*.
Pages from Malcolm Gaskill’s Witchfinders featured here with various cards from the Oracle of Black Enchantment (Samhain edition.) Patrick Valenza’s art historical source material (at least in part) should be fairly evident…
Lastly, this emphasis on the detail of Otherworlds – their textiles, buildings, landscapes, emotional experiences, social relationships, flora and fauna etc. – is playing a huge role in my current artistic endeavours. I tend to see pip decks as decks full of concepts/characters (in the majors and courts) and their scaffolding and architectural surroundings (in the pips). Sometimes this visual architecture is metaphorical and sometimes it is fairly literal. It depends on the reading. But it’s also helping me to tease out what it feels like to think of tarot decks in this way and what that might mean for creating a tarot deck of my own. Furthermore, I have been rebuilding a former world of mine and have recently begun sewing some clothing that I envisioned there…
And, of COURSE, the Pagan Otherworlds Tarot… featured here over (deadstock) cognac red crushed velvet ::drool::
Perhaps the act of sewing my own clothes is really the process of bringing fairy clothes over the divide? It would explain the time traveler vibes, don’t you think? 😉
So… this post has mostly been about my own personal explorations and impressions. I plan to return soon, however, with some better grounded and CITED analytical material about art history and technique.
Sincerely,
Saoirse.
* Please note! Literally any deck will aid in visual processing or reinforcing thematic content for literally any book. There is no need to acquire any deck not already within your means or comfort zone. Decks/products/material items are mentioned here for illustrative purposes only! It’s PRAXIS that matters.
** All decks featured here of my own volition and arising from my own use of them. I have neither been invited nor commissioned to do so and I have no affiliation with any of their creators. The TdL (paradoxical) was a private gift from a friend. All others were purchased by me.
[1] See images by artists like Petrus Christus (especially ‘Portrait of a Young Girl’, 1460s) and his contemporaries. The cover here has a very Burgundian look with a single truncated hennin among other distinguishing features…
