My Compassion and Infuriating Social Media

We all should know by now there is no right to privacy.  My aide, now essentially homeless, asked me about investments and gold.  I went to Google to show her the current prices of gold bullion.  Let me state clearly now that I have no gold bullion.  I have no savings, and no bullion, but if I were to have any spare change to invest, I would choose bullion over stocks over futures because quite simply gold is beautiful and gold is real.  In fact, the Chinese, always extremely at the top of the curve, savvy as hell, have bern buying gold now from every land on earth.  

So, in this world of the wildly improbable, where my aide has no roof over her head, but is speaking about investments, I did that search on Google for her.

Only an heartbeat later, my Facebook is covered with adverts about coins, coin dealers, and gold.  It is not cool, guys.  First an old friend hacks me, and causes actual significant losses, as well as a total mess where all of my devices are concerned, and now this helpful reminder from Facebook that they have the Eye of Sauron at their disposal.

My compassion is my Achilles Heel.  I basically was hacked because I was compassionate towards the idea of making the bad ending of an old adolescent relationship less hurtful.  Did I pay for that!!!  I went along with my aide’s fantasy about buying gold bullion for herself because I understand her life is really hard, and these fantasies smooth the paths a little.

Abuse as an integral aspect of Romantic Love

Most of the literature and tales created by humankind throughout the world deals with the concept of Love and define it either specifically or by the acts and deeds committed in its name.

I was a voracious reader from the age of five.  I had no inkling of the nature of sex, and therefore entirely missed all references to it in literature as a child who read Greek and Roman classics as well as English novels from Dickens, Thackeray, and even Mary Renault at the age of 8 or 9, as well as plays by Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, as well as Continental plays by Molière, Racine, and so on, but was conditioned by all of that to place Love on a pedestal.   Love always is a principal theme, along with lust for power, greed and war.  Love, however, somehow is defined as ‘good’ when in fact, so-called Romantic Love across thousands of years and thousands of miles, is not good at all.  It is a form of abuse.  First of all, it is based on a desire to possess another human being, and the idea that one is incomplete alone.  Success in love equals possession, and jealousy is an aspect of this.  Requited and unrequited love alike bear jealousy on their backs.  How can jealousy ever be extolled as a virtue?

One could write volumes as well about the way women are differentiated from men in any treatment of Love.   Men fought duels over Women, like two dogs fighting over a bone, and the woman was a prize for the victor.  I think there still are women who allow this nonsense to be perpetuated.  Two men, to my absolute horror, fought over me once.  I went home with the loser, mainly because I felt sorry for him.  He had not chosen the fight.  It was thrust upon him.  I did not stay with him after that, but I did go home with him that night.  He

This leads me to the idea of divinity, of ‘gods’ and ‘demi-gods’.  Our Western civilisation was founded on the Classics, on ancient Greece.  Here we find that the love of any god equals lust, and the need to possess at any cost.  There is little courtship.  It is essentially rape.  Even where a god lusts for an animal, it is nothing more than rape.  There is no concept of nurturing or protecting the object of his or her ‘love’.  

Ironically, it is animals who demonstrate the quality of nurturing , protecting and raising even a baby who is human, the offspring not only of a stranger but of another species.  There are children raised by goats and wolves.  The god rapes the object of desire, plants the seed, and abandons the individual. 

Humans are depicted as lesser beings, inferior to gods.  Yet, gods are never good really, whether it is Odhinn, Yahweh, Jehovah, or Allah.  We use adjectives such as ‘Merciful’ and ‘Compassionate’ but these only can be applied in relative terms! By comparison, as it were, with past divine acts.  For example, Merciful when God does not destroy the entire world with another Great Flood.  

In fact, it is humans who have the capacity and potential desire within themselves to save the world.  God or gods could not care less.  We are their playthings, and they delight in toying with us.

This is why Jesus is superior to God.  God planted the divine seed in a woman’s womb, and she gave birth to a being with the capacity to feel.  Jesus possessed the ability to feel all emotions: joy, sorrow, pain, agony, compassion, and most important of all perhaps, empathy.  A god has no ability to feel empathy.  Their natures are beyond that.

When any human being strives to become a god, that individual usually becomes a criminal guilty of the worst crimes.  A god can take whatever it desires with impunity.  A god suffers no emotional consequences.   Nor does a sociopath.  The definition of a god is the definition of a serial killer.

Jesus was not placed on this Earth to atone for humankind’s Original Sin, but to create a being who would be a bridge between heaven and earth, one who could FEEL, and thereby be fully invested in US.  

Gods are not invested in us more than in anything else they have created.  That propaganda that purports to place us above all animals and other living creatures was written by humans in the same way that the ‘Land of Milk and Honey’ as a prixe for the ‘chosen people’ was nothing more than blatant political propaganda designed to justify the invasion and appropriation of land that belonged to another.

So here we descend from the general to the personal.  When I was a little girl, I fell in love with a little boy.  Two little boys in fact, although as that would have been improper, I could not admit it even to myself.

They both were ‘gifted’ like me, which meant that a decade or so later, they would have bern called ‘freaks’.

They both embraced my fantasies to some extent.  One was blond with the face of an angel, and an ectraordinary voice.  I still would respond insrtantly if I were to hear M.’s voice again.  He had a very precise diction, a sort of cold precision in voice and words, but he was not cold at all.  There always was an undercurrent of passion there, even as children, although neither of us knew what to do with it.

We did have a lot of fun.  Both of us were fascinated with cypers and codes and would leave coded messages to one another in Butlers Lives of the Saints at the library.  I saved my money to buy a fencing sabre, and M did the same.  We then had duels together, and invented reenactments of 19th century fiction, like Twenty Years After.  He was the brother I never had.  We should have come together easily and naturally, but his mother was a dragon, as was mine.

D. was a different story altogether.  I thought he was very cute, and sort of rakish.  The rumour was that his mother dressed him, but that meant he wore better clothes than M.  Moveover, he had chipped a front tooth, so had a silver cap, which gave hima a vaguely piratical air.  I barely saw D.,but we spoke of our ultimate plans to marry.  Fo some reason, I felt that was my destiny, however long it might take. 

Fast forward to the 21st century.  We do tend to be vulnerable to our first loves, but this one proved to have an uglier ending than I ever would have imagined.  When D. got in touch with me again, ostensibly it was to offer his condolences on my mother’s dearh and sympathy for my cancer.  This all was arrant nonsense, and I should have realised it, but when he wrote about healing the emotional wounds of the past by rewriting the history of our relationship to give it a more joyful resolution, I felt it was a positive idea.

In fact, he was data mining.  He was trying to provoke me into adding little intimate details about my homes and family in California.  He was inserting bizarre references to an auto parts shop as well.  I kept protesting, not even knowing the place at all, but now I suspect he may have been involved in the disappearance of our antique MG.  Perhaps he was trying to get texts from me to claim somehow that ai had agreed to let him take the car.  I never agreed to allow him to take anything for himself.  He is not my partner, my manager and sadly, alas, as events proved, not even my friend.  He certainly is not a beneficiary of my mother’s trust.

FX’s Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll: a series about being old and fucked up and Empowered

I have seen a few excellent series in the course of the past yesr or two.  The one I am watching now is Sex &Drugs & Rock & Roll by FX.  Contrary to the title, it really is a story of love and redemption, of a daughter’s dedication to her relationship with her father as well as her decdication to her own self and soul.

Along the way, however, it shows a wonderfully witty satirical view of the world of music when the characters are over 50, after their careers drifted in different directions or fizzled out.

I love these series that are unashamed of youthful indulgences.  If you had multiple partners, own it.  If you were not monogamous, own that, and if you used drugs, whether legal or illegal, whether for recreational or medical use, do not repudiate that either.

Most of us have changed or been changed by life, and sobriety is an aspect of maturity to some extent, but do not make it into a fetish or some sort of moral high ground.  Every one has the right to experiment and experience life in all of its aspects.  How can you define yourself without challenging boundaries at some point and making devisions that come from your own heart?  Furthermore, a list of prohibitions will not make you an ethical human being, and actually may reduce your ability to feel compassion.

I have watched the first episode of the second season now, in which Ava looks at a video of her youthful self and announces she wants a threesome.  Her young self had threesomes.  She wants to experience that again.  

The Worship of Loki

Recently I reconnected with a childhood friend who, inter alia, apart from being an amazingly intelligent and innovative thinker, worships ‘Loki’.  I was a little surprised, I confess, to see how this old trickster has managed to reinvent himself in the past couple of decades.

I am a Pagan Roman Catholic, which means that I believe in the worship of the Great Mother and her epivine son who sacrifices himself for the world.   The Protestants do not believe in the ancient sacred symbols or mysteries shared by all mystery religions, including omphagos.  Yes, as a Roman Catholic, I believe in transsubstantiation, in the magic of the transformation of bread into the body of Christ, and when He is made Flesh, we consume him and thereby become partly divine ourselves.  This is the very centre of any mystery religion.  To gain nearness to the Divine.

The old Northern religion simply appealed to me always because it is my heritage and because it speaks to me in a very profound way, but I never mistook the Aesir for kind and compassionate gods.  Certainly neither Odhinn nor Loki ever demonstrated any kindness or mercy towards humankind.

I admire and respect Odhinn because he had the balls to sacrifice himself for wisdom and a far view of other realms.  He achieved these by hanging himself from the World Tree aand then plucking out his own eye, to theow it into the Well of Memory.

Odhinn is complicated, and has not shown ethical behaviour towards our kind always, but he does not commit evil delliberately to destroy.  Loki does.  Loki is the Trickster known in many culttures by many different names.

Now Loki is being worshipped as some sort of saviour of the transgender inndividuals, but shapeshifters not only can take animal form, but can transform into any species or gender or like Lucifer, show themselves s their elemental nature which in his case is Fire.

In fact, not only was Loki indifferent to human suffering, but he placed the dart into blind Hodur’s hand and tricked him into killing his twin brother.  To add injury to insult, when the dead god’s distraught mother pled for her son to be restored to the land of the living, she was told this could occur if every single creature wept for him.  Loki promptly transformed into an old etin woman who refused to shed a single tear.

Loki is instrumental in bringing an end to this world.  He rides towards us from the South, in the ship called Naglfar, bringing the destructive power of untamed fire in the form of Surt to lay waste to our planet.

There are those who dismiss these tales, but why should they not have been part of his history?  Of all the gods, it is Loki who is the natural choice of a Judas figure, and I do not revile Judas either.  His act was preordained, and necessary in the Sacrifice of the aGod.  Without the kiss from Judas, obviously an ancient ritual gesture, the pageant could not have moved forward.

Loki’s children are ‘monsters’, and include the wolf who devours the Sun, and the serpent who encircles the world and emerges as a major force in the Ragnarok catacllysm of destruction of the world.

I do not think Loki is a god to be dismissed or reviled.  The Trickster gods are powerful agents of change and chaos is a part of change.  Laufey is a name connected with Loki, as son of Laufey and that does give him a connection with Earth, as that is probably an association with a tree.  Trees have major importance in the old religion.  There are the two that propagate the Earth, the Ash Yggdrasil, and tthe sacred Birch of the Mother.

I personally believe he is descended from Prometheus, and like him, gave Fire to humankind, and was punished for his interference.  He and Odhinn have a curious relationship, sometimes hostile, at other times, boon companions.

There are those who called upon Loki for aid in times of great trouble.  His name appears in place names throughout Northern Europe, but the old word for ‘Lock’ or ‘Loch’ is nit connected to the god.  I see no hard evidence to link him to water, even though there is a late tale of one king who cried out to Loki during a terrible storm at sea.

To me, Freyr would be a better choice for transgender supporters.  Freyr, very much male, sacrificed his manhood for love of the giantesss Gerd.  He self-castrated in the best mystery religion traditions.  He is the twin brother of Freyja.  Both are agricultural gods, bound to the land and its fruitfulness.  The Earth has an inseparable bond with humankind and gods of this kind who form the Vanir.  The Aesir, of whom Loki is a member, are really sky gods.  The only one who shows trustworthiness and chamionship of our species is the god Thor, which is why his hammer symbol was so popular.

On the other hand, gods can be reinvented as much as history, and ultimately even so-called ‘original sources’ do not always give facts.  Most of what survives for many ancient religions was written by outsiders.  The Northern religion as described by the Poetic and Prose Eddas really was not an old faith.  It was whatever had survived the onslaught of Christianity as well as centuries of land explorations.  The Vikings founded Russia, after all, were mercenaries for the Byzantine Empire, and pobably migrated from the Caucasus originally.  

When I read messages on forums and in groups about Loki, and their exuberance about their devotion to him, I instantly think of Swinbutne’s caution:

‘Yes, even is not Apollo, with hair and harpstring of gold, 

A bitter god to follow, a beautiful god to behold?’

If indeed Loki is associated with the ‘dog star’ Sirius, and there is evidence of that,  he is a major force, with links to the Egyptian mystery religion.

Madness of Childhood and ‘Mad to be Normal’

 David Tennant always is an interesting actor.  He takes challenging roles, including that of R. D. Laing in ‘Mad to be Normal.’

This is not a film review, but I look back on my childhood in the Sixties and the way my mother behaved almost in a schizophrenic fashion throughout my life.  There was the ‘liberal’ woman who was a party girl, some one who actually smoked pot on at least one occasion, knew Timothy Leary, was quite happy to embrace the philosophy of Aldous Huxley, and yet coldly declared that any one who took drugs ‘should be lined up against a wall and shot.’  What sort of statement is that?  What is more terrufying was the constant threat that, if I failed to behave properly, or ceossed some invisible psychological line, she would send me for electric shock therapy.  

I kid you not, as a friend of mine used to say.  She did use that as a threat frequently.  I have tried to suppress many of these facts since her death.  I truly did love her deeply.  She gave birth to me, and she was my mother, and she gave me many beautiful traditions, and an appreciation of elegance and beauty, but...   BUT... if I cannot tell the truth now, I will go to my grave with the impossible weight of a childhood and adolescence that was overshadowed by her almost careless sadism.  

I look at my sister, and she has become the monster my mother created and supported through six decades.  I fled in order to avoid that fate.  

My sister, like the very emotionally damaged childhood sweetheart, became the recipient of my mother’s determination to brand some one with the taint of lunacy.  Omce I moved on, she would say to all and sundry: ‘Well, V. Is mentally ill, of course.’ I never told my sister this.  It would have been rather cruel.

Memento Mori

 

Some one posted this on social media, and the comments all were flippant or negative.  ‘Gross’ was one simple denunciation that appeared again and again, but why is revulsion so deeply ingrained in our culture that the photograph of a tooth of a loved one set in precious metal to be worn as a memento  mori or talisman inspires negative responses instantly.  Instantly, without any hesitation.

I always have felt that we do not treat Death with the respect it deserves, nor in fact do we even consider any real relationship with this inevitable force of Nature.  In fact, like the horrible phenominon of the ‘nursing home’ substituting the basic care of the elderly and infirm by their own families with a sort of long term storage until Death, we entrust the preparation of our dead to professionals.  

In Islamic tradition, when any one dies, the body is taken to the mosque where members of the family of the deceased wash and prepare it for burial.  There are no artificial fluids piped into the corpse, no elaborate artifice to stiffen or alter, no cosmic makeovers.  The family washes the body lovingly and thoroughly, and burial usually occurs shrtly afterwards.

Just as we pay for the care of our infirm and elderly, we pay for the entire business of bidding farewell to our dead.  We somehow believe that money is an acceptable substitute for our natural duties.

We therefore have little firsthand experience with the last chapter in the life of any human being.  Is it any wonder then that people recoil from any REAL part of an individual who has died even in the form of a single tooth?

Our own heritage includes cults that honoured human heads.  There are many tales of severed heads who acted as Oracles, including the Northern god Mimir, the Celtic Bran, and others.

Necropolis 2020: The City of the Pandemic

(Above, my self portrait with a photograph of the original drawing done by my grandfather, Condé)

All my life, since I wrote my first story at the age of five on paper towels taken from my school’s toilets, I defined myself as a writer, not a painter.  It was a definition that I had to make in a way, as my grandfather’s vocation as a painter was the ultimate family role model.  From the earliest age, the philosophy of devoting all, to ART rather than any practical pursuit of wealth or security in life, was drummed into my brain.  Along with that was its corollary: ‘Art demands suffering.  All great artists must suffer.’

The effect of that philosophy essentially produced a childhood and adolescence wherein my mother, rather than empathising or sympathising with any traumas I endured, patted me on the back and congratulated me for taking another beating in the service of the almighty god of Art.  

I do not exaggerate here, and I loved and still love my mother, but that principle was toxic.  Childhood is hard, but a good parent should lend a helping hand when a child stumbles or is struck by a blow.  Acceptance of sadism as a natural even necessary agent in the creation of an artist should be repudiated.  

Well, that is neither here nor there.  I took up painting after I was diagnosed with breast cancer, and created my first significant oil painting after radiotherapy.  It is a self portrait that was based on a portrait my grandfather did of me when I was five.

It is significant for a number of reasons.  By the time I painted it, my mother was dead.  The original was in one of the houses my sister and I inherited jointly as beneficiaries of the most dreadful Trust one ever could create, a surefire path to torture, given the fact that we were made co-Trustees as well, and my sister, like Sauron, does not share power with any one.

It may lack technique and skill, but it makes up for that in its unflinching honesty.  It remains a record of everything that child had to endure.  And the cancer and the death of my mother made a part of me a child again, a terrified little girl at a point where the world she knew suddenly lay in ruin round her.

I used to look at the original, and see the innocence of childhood there, but it was a portrait, even then, of a victim.   It was, after all, when I was five that my mother divorced my father.

I never thought of that before.  I simply thought of being a little girl who wanted to be a writer, who could read and loved books even at that early age.  I slept on a mattress on the floor beneath a big easel in a flat that my mother and I assume my father had rented in the same building where my grandparents had a flat as well.  My father and mother fought constantly, and his long absences either were the cause or the result of these borderline violent altercations.  I was five.  My sister was two.  She emerged essentially unscarred from this marriage, as she simply was too young to have any knowledge or memory of the years when my parents actually were together.  

Memories of this period are seldom good ones.  My mother rewrote history to make it all appear otherwise, but here are realities I suppose I should attach to the portrait.

My Uncle Charles was an alcoholic and had a bad car accident.  He came to visit, and I, never having seen any one damaged like that before, was terrified of him.   His face was covered with cuts from shattered glass.  He looked like a monster from a horror film, not like the Uncle I knew.   So much so that his visit, coupled with my general sense of misery and apocalyptic fear, prompted me to run away from home. I had a clear destination.  There was a beautiful church about half an hour’s walk from the flat that had a little play area for children that included a kitchen with a pretend cooker and pretend food and dishes.  Somehow, I felt I could live there by myself and, as it was the house of God, be safe and secure.

Some one rang the police, however, and I do not think I ever reached the promised land.  I was brought back to that uncomfortable world where I knew that my father no longer would be included.

My mother changed the story into some quasi-religious pilgrimage by a child who wanted to see Christ at the age of 5.

My other memories of that time are of the budgie who dashed its brains against a window, and my mother consignimg my baby blanket to the rubbish bin.  Why would a parent do that to a child against her will at a very uncertain time?  My mother repeatedly got rid of the things I most treasured, never ever asking for my permission or consent.

My other prized possessions were little Matchbox dinosaurs.  I do not know the maker, but they individually were boxed, with a portrait of the dinosaur on the box.  I did have an actual Matchbox toy as well.  It was a cenent mixer.  

My mother blithely gave all of these to a male cousin while I still was very young.  I was heartbroken.  She could be so oblivious  to any one else’s psyche.

Now we come to my other significant painting.  I have been struggling with it for almost two months.  It began as a view of the hillsides of Umbria.  Somehow, it lacked something, so I added two rivers that met in the centre.  That still did not complete the landscape.  I added a little cave.  Still not quite right.

Last night, I realised it was not an ordinay hillside with houses, but a necropolis based on the visit to Tarquinia, and the way the Etruscans made their dead part of their lives.

So here is my Necropolis of 2020, honouring the victims of the Pandemic, even if the death or loss of some of the tombs was due to another cause.

I want people to look at this and finally acknowledge the pain and loss.  I want them to be ashamed of ther attempts to lay blame somewhere, whether it is to point a finger against China, against the bats, the minks, the government of any nation, or any one or anything else.

This is Nature at her most brutal, culling this planet.  If you respond with hostility towards others, or refuse to join a common cause for all humanity, then you have been weighed against the Feather and found wanting.

China was the first to suffer, but what did we do?  Did we acknowledge the grief and pain of the Chinese who had lost family and friends to the virus?  No, we blamed China and in doing so, neglected to arm ourselves to wage a very grim war against an enemy that is more powerful than any human being.

Then the world drifted insanely in some countries to a political agenda, to a spurious link between a virus and a political map.   In doing this, we enabled hostility and magnified differences of thought to an absurd degree.  In nations where the pandemic was addressed as a medical issue, and people simply obeyed the necessary dictates of science and reason, there was victory, and lives were not lost.

From the first, loss of lives in many cases were unnecessary, but humans sacrificed other humans.  The way that the nursing homes became death traps comes to mind.