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aftaabmagazine · 5 years

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Kharaabat

By Yousef Kohzad Translated from Dari by Aziz Ahang Herawi

From the January-March 2000 issue of Afghan Magazine | Lemar-Aftaab

[caption: “Performing” by Ustad Yousef Kohzad, watercolor]

The late Ustad Yousef Kohzad travels back to the second decade of the last century and navigates through Kabul's musical quarter, Kharaabat (خرابات).

We go back about half a century to the 1920s and enter one of the old streets of Kabul. If one looks down from the tip of Asmai or Sher-Darwaaza Mountains on to the city, the old Kabul seems like a sleeping dragon laying on the chest of these two mountains. Its sweet memories seem to converse confidentially with a river that looks like the dry and thirsty artery of this dragon.

Houses with muddy roofs and colorfully sectioned windows are so close and almost attached to each other that it seems like no power on earth can separate them. Winding streets between broken walls that appear ready to fall look like basements through which only unknown ghosts would wander.

The districts of this city are known as Shor Bazaar, Muraad Khani, Chendawol, Baagh-e Ali Mardaan, Baaghbaan Kocha, and Deh Afghanan. Each has its protective fortification.

A first-time visitor entering the city encounters hundreds of problems trying to find his relatives and friends. Although the body of the city, because of wars, has received plenty of wounds throughout history, it has kept its national pride.

Shor Bazaar used to be one of the main areas of this old city. It had become the most crowded center for trades. Fashionable gentlemen, peddlers, poets, and working people lived in the mazes of this district and kept in touch with each other.

If outsiders contemplated entering one of these streets for the sake of cultural curiosity, they would have to observe its local traditions.

Now, in light of this curiosity, we will enter this district where our primary goal lies.

As we stand at the entrance at first glance, a skinny man with a black mustache and beard appears. He is deep in thought, sitting beside his bins of snuff, watching passers-by.

On the colorless walls of the store, there are crooked writings that are hard to decipher and that raise the curiosity of the newcomer.

This tiny man, Sufi Ashqari, is a witty and good-natured poet who although illiterate, has friendly relations with such famous poets as Ustad Betaab, Shaayeq Jamaal and Ustad Hashim Shaayeq.

Time after time, these great men have kept in touch with their colleague and spent some time in the quiet shelter of his store.

These visits are beneficial to his poetry and are always remembered with reverence. Ashqari has risen from the lowest depths of society and has portrayed the deepest secrets of his people in his writing.

This man is a symbol of the Shor Bazaar district and is respected by everyone.

Although his faith has locked him up in the dark corner of his store, from time to time, his thoughts brake the strings of this cage and rise above the noises of Shor Bazaar. Today, a perceptive observer can still hear the poet's famous words:

"With this dignity that the cup-bearer fills up the cups with wine By the time our turn comes, this tavern will turn into a shrine."

It seems that Sufi Ashqari is still sitting in the corner of his small store and reciting a poem complementing the tobacco dip. If a diamond falls in the dirt, it would be Sufi Ashqari who lived in the arms of Shor Bazaar until the last moments of his life. His store was the beginning of many interesting sights in this historic district.

If we go a few steps further, we come to a narrow street to our right and enter the maze of this street. This muddy area is always full of water running down from the gutters of houses and was the pinnacle of hope and happiness of weddings for the citizens of old Kabul. Its residence was of the Kharabatis (musicians, singers, and performers) and was the most famous part of this region.

From every window, the boisterous voices of artists like Ustad Qasim, Ustad Nabi Gul, Ustad Natoo, Ustad Ghulam Hussain and the tunes of musicians such as Ustad Chacha Mahmood, Ustad Qurbaan Ali Rabbani, Ustad Nawroz and Ustad Muhammad Omar fill the atmosphere and seem as though the sorrows and pains of life no longer exist. As if it is safe from every human tragedy.

These talented personalities brought music to its peak but also had students so that after their deaths, the doors of Kharaabat would not close in the face of their fans and classical music wouldn't disappointingly run away from its birthplace.

These great hearts had much patience and with their endless love, tried to provide pure and authentic Afghan music to their listeners. A world of happiness and hope sprouted in every turn of Kharabat. Passers-by would spend long moments sitting in a corner listening to these songs and for a few moments, forget problems from their daily lives. Day and night, Kharaabat would beat like the heart of this historical city and kept newlyweds warm-hearted.

Everything that meets the eye in this street is old: grounds, doors, walls. The sky looks like a thin thread from the intersection of the walls of multi-story buildings. It seems like a song has escaped from under the strings of a musician flying around and above.

If we keep walking a few more steps, we approach a house with raw brick walls. As we enter this house, we notice a more modern green-colored window on the third floor belonging to the capable and experienced singer Ustad Qasim. This artist is one of the more renowned residents of this street and is known as Pir-e Kharabat (the Sage of Kharabat).

His artistic presence has made Shor Bazaar twice as famous throughout the country. Ustad Qasim, with his talented sons and students, has turned this house into a small Kharaabat in the heart of big Kharaabat. All of his pupils have had extensive artistic education and nourishment. From its walls, the poems of Bedil could be heard which only meant that agnosticism and art had shaken hands with each other and created this artist named Qasim.

It didn't take long for this house to make its way into the court of King Amanullah Khan (r. 1919-1929). It tied a knot through the immense talents of Ustad Qasim. Through this link, the music received attention, and Kharaabat became the foundation of hopes for all the residents of old Kabul.

New and original Afghan songs spread their sounds throughout Kharaabat and the royal palace. They illuminated the dark nights of the city with the torch of music. Although Kharaabat received this pride, it did not become deluded from its extravagant ambitions. Instead, it made closer relations with ordinary citizens-- even the poorest of them. Any hand that extended towards them for help was not turned away empty.

On the other corner of this street, Ustad Ghulam Hussain, with his particular school, chose a different path for music and was busy teaching a few new singers. Ustad Chaachah Mahmood, Ustad Qurban Ali and Ustad Muhammad Omar would accompany Ustad Ghulam Hussain and Ustad Qasim, the masters of music, and would return with handfuls of gold coins.

With all these comings and goings, the market of peddlers and shopkeepers was becoming lucrative and attracting new customers. When the darkness of the night fell on the city, this street with its oil lamps, illuminated like the sun in the arms of tranquillity. The songs that symbolized the passionate feelings and sacrifices of the Afghan people would caress the ears of listeners until sunrise. These songs had become a relieving medicine for sleepers who had more and more interest in hearing them.

Although music had its unique value in the time of Kharaabat, some people did not welcome the music of Kharaabat as a respected art. There was still religious bias in some people's minds, and those people considered Kharaabatis as lower class and did not associate with them in any way including marriage. Later this golden era of music passed by with time and today's music together with the growth of social matters appeared as a different style of the art form.

However, we must remind ourselves that yesterday's music, although distinctively different, and today's music originates from the same roots. They are inseparable. The ever-powerful classical music still lives, and the place that it has in the heart remains. The lazy eyes of people did not open up to the real sunshine of music that was shining in the songs of yesterday's Kharaabatis and how it fulfilled the tastes from its light. Today, these eyes have opened up, and this music has risen to the top as art.

Traditional music is going through very harsh times because it has not been able to compete through modern media (i.e., radio, television and cassettes) with the Western music that has taken over Eastern countries. This attack is similar to a virus attacking a human body.

We must find a way to recover and not let this traditional music be left in galleries and museums like dead mummies. Something should be done so that this manifestation of art comes to life as a powerful movement. It should be given a chance to succeed and block the path of destructive elements as soon as possible.

God forbid that history to break up its relationship with us, shut down the hatch of its heart that is full of much sweet and sour memories in our faces and gives our thoughts to the moments of today and tomorrow. We need old memories. We should not allow anyone to tear up this series of our history which is an audible mirror from our beautiful pages and our worse deeds of our past.

We have unbreakable ties to this phenomenon. By using our history, we get to know ourselves fuller. There was a time that our nation was similar to other countries: hungry, raped and ravaged. However, with great national pride, it saved itself, and among humankind, it has risen its head again and has courageously started an honorable life.

Acknowledgment: a special thank you note for the magazine Farda for forwarding the original Dari article.

About Ustad Yousef Kohzad

[caption: Youssef Kohzad, By Farhad Azad, Palo Alto 2001]

Youssef Kohzad was born in 1935 in Kabul, Afghanistan. During his high school years, he wrote plays and created artwork for Kabul Theater. Kohzad graduated from Nejat (Amani) High School in Kabul in 1953. He finished his formal art education from the Academy of Art in Rome, Italy in 1965. After returning from Italy, he traveled to the former Soviet Union, India, and former Eastern Germany to exhibit his art along with other contemporary Afghan artists. In the Middle Eastern Studies museums in Moscow, his works have been showcased. From 1966-1969 he held executive positions at the Ministry of Media and Culture, in which he was the head of the Fine Arts Department. In 1971 he became the artistic consultant of Kabul Theater. He wrote eight dramas and all were played on stage. In many of the plays, he played the lead role. In 1975 he returned to the Ministry of Media and Culture and held the position as the president of the ministry until 1992. In 1976, he founded the National Gallery in Kabul, which included 700 paintings, and some work dating back a hundred years. Unfortunately, out of the 700 works of art, only 30 remain today. From 1992 until August 2000, Kohzad became a refugee along with his family and was forced to immigrate to India. In August 2000, he moved to the US and had been residing in Northern California since then. He held his first art exhibit in the US in August 2001 in Palo Alto. Along with painting, Kohzad was also an accomplished poet, short story writer, and novelist. He published three books: Aspects of Beauty in Art, Kohzad: A Collection of Poetry and a novel When God Created Beauty. He passed away in February 2019.

#afghanmusic #afghanhistory #afghanart

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planarfates-blog · 7 years

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Magic of Pan-Tyrel

The Weave

The weave is the lifeblood of Arcane magic, where clerics and paladins draw power from their faith and deities, wizards and other Arcane spellcasters draw power from the weave. This net of raw power is maintained by Saekra, The goddess of magic. Where the Weave touches Pan-Tyrel it manifests as Ley Lines. When there is a tear in the weave you will often find dead zones where no arcane magic can be cast, other strange areas are wild magic zones where the weave hold little control over the flow of arcane energy in that area and spells may not have the desired effect.

Ley Lines

Ley lines are paths along which magical energies are emitted. They are the mystical tendrils of the Weave and can be thought of like faults lines in tectonic plates. Magic is amplified along them due to the concentration of energy.

Ruptures and Rifts

The abuse, disruptions, intersections of Ley Lines or magic can cause one of these different types of disturbances along ley lines

elemental distortion: elements mixed/gone haywire

wild magic: rift gone wrong; gravity, Strange lights, and physics gone wrong

void maw: energy drawn away; rifts between planes can be torn through the over use or the collision of different types of magic.

Anti-Magic zones: Areas where all the magic has been depleted from a Ley Line or where the Weave has been torn, this can only be fixed by using a Wish spell.

Arcane

Wizards study and understand properties; able to recreate those effects through magical script.

Sorcerers are their own well of magical power and must learn to tame and shape the innate magical energies within them.

Truename Magic

Using words of power, true naming, and songs of power a melody can be created with a duet of arcane and divine, the harmony between chaos and order, and the beauty between good and evil. Various types of magic use the power of sound, of names or words to craft and shape the mystical energy of the world, whether it is a cleric using words of power that pulls from their deity or a bard that uses sound or words or song to shape and manipulate the flow of energy. This is a binding type of magic that is often used in conjunction with deals or contracts made by mortals with powerful entities like deities or fiends.

Magic Creatures

Ley Lines have a high concentration of magical creatures.

Knowledge

Commoners are aware of zombies, goblins and deities, either god like powers or conversely weak but common magical creatures.

Commoners are not aware about details about vampires, werewolves, other uncommon monsters, troll weaknesses, and ley lines. They may have knowledge if they have a higher level of schooling yet those that live on farms may or may not have any experience with magical creatures short of a goblin or the occasional giant bird in the sky.

Most commoners are aware of magic, but not how it works or if they do have a general idea of it the it is the most basic and simplistic view of Magic.

Warlocks

The power of a warlock does not operate the same as a sorcerer or a wizard where those two shape and manipulate raw Arcane energy drawn from the Ley Lines whereas warlocks gain power through a third party source.

Where a wizard or a sorcerer will lose power like in an anti-Magic zone, a warlock will not lose access to their magic or abilities unless their patron is cut off from them in some way.

Bards

Manipulate magic not through incantations like wizards and are not gifted with the innate well of arcane power the Sorcerers have instead they use the power of word play or song to manipulate or shape the raw arcane energy from Ley Lines into the spells or abilities that are often used and well known.

Bards will lose access to spellcasting while in most Anti-Magic Zone.

Cleric

Clerics much like warlocks gain their power through a third party, typically a deity. The devotion of a cleric toward a deity allows them to become a living conduit of said deities power and is what grants the their ability to cast rather than shaping the raw arcane energy of Ley Lines. Rather clerics with pull power from their deities and faith.

Clerics will not be affected by Anti-Magic zones unless they are for some reason cut off by their patron deity.

Wizards

A deceptively common occurrence in the world of Pan-Tyrel, while the pursuit of wizardry is often on that many give up due to lack of funds or an inability to find schooling that they can pay for. Various countries have organizations that will taking magic users and guide them into control and power. These organizations are like the neutral Arcanum Council or the nation of Drakkin itself.

WIzards if exposed to Anti-Magic Zones will lose the ability to cast spells while in said Anti-Magic Zone.

Sorcerer

A relatively rare occurrence among the populace of Pan-Tyrel Sorcerers are among the most powerful of Arcane spellcasters that can directly draw upon the weave for power. This is due to the innate well of energy that is embedded within them. These Sorcerers can often be plagued by fate and thrown into bad situations, whether that is uncontrollable magic or where they are seen as important or struck down as a threat sorcerers will often struggle to remain alive.

Sorcerers will lose access to spellcasting while in Anti-Magic Zones.

Eldritch Knights

These are often the same as wizards with the exception that they often focus on integrating magic with close quarters combat.

Eldritch Knights will lose access to spellcasting while in Anti-Magic Zones.

Arcane Tricksters

These Arcane casters are very similar to wizards with the exception of more close quarters combat and often tailoring spells to stealth or charming people.

Arcane Tricksters will lose access to spellcasting while in Anti-Magic Zones.

Druids

These special type of casters can draw power from various sources depending on who they are and what they are connected to. They can operate much like the Coven of Matern and draw their Druidic power from a third party source like the goddess Matern or they can draw power directly from the nature around them.

Most druids will not lose access to spellcasting in anti-magic zones.

Ranger

Rangers are similar to Druids in the style of magic they cast however they draw power from Ley Lines and like with Eldritch Knights often tailor their spells to their style of fighting, typically ranged combat however there are close quarters rangers.

Rangers will lose access to spellcasting while in Anti-Magic Zones.

Paladin

Warriors of justice and champions of their causes paladins are a type of divine Spellcasters that can draw power from their unshakable faith in their deities and their oaths they take that set them upon their paths.

Paladins will not usually lose access to spellcasting while in Anti-Magic Zones.

#homebrew #d&d #d&d 5e #world building #magic #Planar Fates #planarfates #dungeons and dragons #dungeons & dragons #d&d 5e homebrew #d&d 5th edition #wip #work in process

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long-way-down-rp-archive · 7 years

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Medb

True Name: Yes Face Claim: Gina Torres Nickname and Aliases: Medb is only how she’s known to her equals and the bold; some among that number may also speak to her as Autumn, or Mab. To her courtiers and other spirits, it’s My Queen; Your Majesty, Your Grace, or Your Highness will also do. To mortals when she chooses to walk among them disguised as a human woman, she introduces herself as Maeve. Date of Birth: Unknown Apparent Age: Ageless beauty Actual Age: Unknown Gender: Fay gender is often nebulous, but Medb has long embodied and been worshipped and perceived as a deeply feminine figure. She/her pronouns. Kind: High Fae Calling: Ruler of the Autumn Court

Distinguishing Marks: In High Fae form, she almost always has the wings of a hawk, though her other features may vary. In disguise as a mortal, the faint traceries of some birthmark or tattoo can be seen about her shoulder blades and back. Children or the magically inclined might have the brief taste of over-ripe fruit in their mouth when she passes by. Or they might sense a lazy warmth and a strange heady almost inebriated sensation of dizziness. Most mortals who glimpse her will remember only her beauty, and that only vaguely.

Her dark brown eyes glitter with amber sparks, and – only when she’s truly furious – the same crackle at her fingertips. The sharp tang of a thunder storm, the stench of rotting fruit and meet, and the sound of angry wasps overwhelms the senses of anyone who have the misfortune of earning her ire.

Personality: Medb embodies all the contradictions of autumn. She is warm as the midday September sun shining on a bountiful harvest; cool and unknowable as the moon luminescent in the Samhain dusk; sweetly melancholic as decaying fruit; lethal as Amanita mushrooms.

She is capricious, as all her kind are, but she is inclined towards a sense of justice and seeks peace and balance. She is proud and fierce and does not suffer fools but she also has a sly whimsical sense of humour.

She is not without compassion and she watches the mortal world with curiosity but also a certain distance – suffering will not move her to intervene, for all things suffer, even in this time of waning, her own kind, let alone the fragile creatures of the mortal world whose destiny has always been to wither and become death.

Her season is that of death and transformation. And in this time of dying magick she is torn between a bittersweet embrace of the death she sees slowly enveloping her people and the hope that transformation and rebirth of one kind or another might be possible.

History:

Medb came into being as an embodiment of Autumn and fertility and death and sovereignty over the green Isle that her kind ruled over as gods when the world was full of magick and the Fair Folk were vibrant with power and the belief of their mortal subjects was full and heart-felt.

For centuries Medb presided over the abundance and decay of Autumn in splendour and power. Sickness, hunger, wars, family feuds might sweep through the mortal land from time to time but the turning seasons also bought bountiful harvests and babies who grew to blossoming adulthood and marriage celebrations that lasted a fortnight – and through it all, the mortals feared and respected the Fair Folk, the bright and the beautiful, and thus she and her kind flourished and frolicked and feasted.

Even when a new God’s followers invaded their Island and brought new beliefs to the mortals, still they worshiped her and the other Quarter Kings and Queens. Still, they believed. They took in the new God but they wove the substance of their true gods and goddesses all through the new faith and the Fair Folk cared naught. In truth, few of the Fair Folk even noticed the arrival of Christianity and most of those who did dismissed it as simply another mortal ephemeral folly.

It was a visceral shock when magick and the mortal’s belief in Medb and all the Fair Folk began to wane and grow thin. The mortals’ bodies grew thin too, and their spirits even thinner – subjugated by conquerors who stole not only lands and harvests but children and the right to sing their songs and tell their stories. Medb’s mortal subjects and their belief in her were being crushed and stolen from her.

The Fair Folk fought back, but too late, oh too late! Deep they had slumbered in their mounds where the passage of time warped with their own capricious nature, and carefree they had trouped through the green woods. In their age-old arrogance and contempt for the petty dramas of fleeting mortal lives, this enemy had taken them by surprise. Their powers faded as their mortal subjects weakened and broke.

Medb, unlike many of her kin, began to see that the fight was in vain. Death comes to all things – and for the first time she considered that might stalk even her and her kind. Still, she was a Queen and she must tend to her peoples’ welfare even in such impossible times. She watched her mortal subjects choose to abandon their fight, abandon their green Isle and feel to another land far across the sea. It is not an option she or any of her kind would ever have conceived of. It is…wrong. But it is also…hope? The mortals, they believed that life would be better in this New World and deep in their hearts, their stories and their songs, they still carried the kernel of belief in the Fair Folk like a seed to plant in new soil. Perhaps their escape could be the Fair Folk’s escape as well.

It is pain, pain like nothing Medb or any of the Fair Folk had ever experience or could ever have imagined, to uproot themselves from Ireland’s rich dark soil, even poisoned as it is by a crop never meant to grow there that withers and rots stinking in the ground in a terrible corruption and parody of the decay natural to Medb’s season. But they did it. Some of them. They followed their Kings and Queens and Medb followed her mortal subjects to the ports and into the foul, unclean holds of barely sea-worth vessels, captained by the corrupt and wicked. Above decks the air was bitter and burning with salt spray and below decks the mortals succumbed to fever and thirst and starvation, their emaciated bodies too weak to do more than lie in their own filth, the lucky ones on wooden bunks and the rest helter skelter on the floor of the vessel. And with each mortal death, the Fair Folk faded and weakened further. But some survived the long voyage and so too did Medb and others of the Fair Folk.

The New World is cruel too. But Medb’s people, mortals and Fair Folk alike, are tough and resilient and they carve out lives for themselves in these unfamiliar wilderness and shanty-towns. There are other inhabitants – both mortal and spirit. This, none of the Fair Folk had anticipated, though they surely should have. There are so many others, some friendly and some hostile. Some native to this land, and others refugees like the Fair Folk. Fighting and skirmishes erupt, wars are waged, and truces brokered. Medb is among those who call for peace – she cannot abide the wastefulness of such slaughter when they are all already so weakened and their numbers few.

The mortals wage war too – a war that splits and ruptures the new land they’ve found themselves in. The mortal blood seeps into the soil and in the desperate heat of battle, belief thickens just a little. Irish soldiers clutch trinkets and pour a libation on the ground for the Fair Folk. The Kings and Queens make their home in one place where that call, that pull of belief, resounded loudest – land that becomes Tennessee.

Magick still declines and the mortals are fickle and peace in the mortal world brings weakened belief. But still, there is enough. Enough for the Fair Folk to endure. Medb’s court may no longer glow resplendent as of old, her powers may falter, but Autumn comes to this land too and when the leaves of unfamiliar trees turn crimson, she wears her crown and wields her scepter and holds court as she has always done.

Time never ceases to turn. Everything gets louder, faster, brighter. There is beauty and filth, there is riches and rot, there is – a home. Even in the waning of her people, even in their slow fall from grace and power, there is home and kin and the rhythm of her season. She will rule over each Autumn and walk these new glittering streets for as long as there are still stories for children, for as long as the drunk in the corner of Jeb’s pours out a measure on the floor, for as long as some farmer remembers to leave just a few fruit on the tree in offering for a good future harvest, for as long as some remember to pay all accounts and debts by Samhain, for as long as some shout “seachain” when they toss the dishwasher out of the door into the night – even if these things are insubstantial muscle memory. Still, in all these things the thread of belief still vibrant and powerful no matter how worn and thin, sustains.

But for how long?

Family:

A beautiful younger sister, who she adored, died on the voyage. Medb does not speak of her.

In the New World, yearning for the sister she had lost, she chose once to have a child, but it was born a changeling, imperfect and damaged, and there was nothing she could do but abandon it to the mortal world. She also does not speak of it, but she yearns for it still and recently has begun to consider that the old ways may no longer serve them, that as magick fades from the world even the faded imperfect magick of changelings might be…needed? But then, she dismisses this as wistful and weak.

Sexuality and Relationship Status: Panromantic, asexual, polyamorous. She has had many rich and complex relationships – romantic and platonic – that she allows to drift closer and farther and dance in the winds of change, growth and decay like autumn leaves

Other Ties:

Sol - Medb’s path has often intersected with a certain black dog. Unlike many of her brethren she has a fondness for the creature. It’s a beautiful thing he does and if death must ever come to her or to all the Fair Folk, well, she hopes as gentle a guide will be there for them.

Wanted Connections:

The other Quarter Court Kings and Queens.

Possibly her changeling child.

Autumn Court subjects, allies and enemies, including and especially: the fairies of her court, the cabbage fairies, the farm brownies, pucas, etc.

Elemental solitary fairies and spirits of earth.

A small host of lovers; fay, spirit, and mortal, past and present.

First Nations allies and equals including: Selu and Kanati, the Yunwi Tsundi, and others.

Likes: The strange blackberries of the New World when they’re so ripe that they explode in the mouth and there’s the musk of mold hidden just behind the sweetness. The warm smell of meat and grease flooding out of an anonymous diner on a cold grey afternoon. The full red harvest moon shining over freshly mown hay fields. The swirling headlights and garish flashing neon of the city at night in the rain. The delicate beauty of a spider’s web and the neat precise way the spider wraps its next meal to keep it fresh. Dislikes: The sterile empty sharp stomach-lurching smell of modern hospitals. Fields left fallow and empty. Styrofoam cups and plastic bags and six pack rings and all the things that fail utterly to decompose. Dishonesty. Hobbies: Walking unseen or unremarked through the glittering cities, squalid slums and humble farm-houses of her mortal subjects, or rarely, dazzling those she favours with a smile that shines with more beauty and terror than such minds can quite understand. Lingering in places of death, decay and transformation and revelling in the power of her season. Watching over the small moments of red leaves spiraling down to the black dirt, of the slow desiccation of the corpses of small furry creatures, of plums turning wine-ripe and rotting. Skills: Leadership, the crafting of precious gems and finery, the tending of gardens and the harvest, the easing of death. Places: The Autumn Court’s mound, in which they slumber and dream away the other seasons, lies within the great cavern that mortals call Rumbling Falls Cave. Marked as dangerous and closed to the public, few humans venture there though Medb’s fay tend their glamours and barriers to ensure that even the stray daredevil sees and senses nothing but a faint chill and prickling skin.

In the waxing of Autumn, Medb’s Court troupes forth and riotously parties through all the Irish pubs and bars of the city, through the farms and markets full of the bounty of the harvest, feasting and revelling in all the rich abundance of the season, visiting and renewing all their sacred spaces.

In Autumn’s Great Hall, an ancient abandoned barn on the outskirts of Nashville, Medb holds court in as much dusty splendour as the waning of her and her court’s powers permit. She settles disputes, reaffirms old alliances, holds to account boons given and favours owed,

Other spaces sacred to the Autumn Queen and her court include: St. Dunstan’s Catholic Church, a very old and very large hawthorn tree in the middle of a corn field, an ancient abandoned barn on the outskirts of Nashville, wishing wells throughout the city of Nashville, a ring of tiny standing stones placed by a child in an suburban Nashville yard beneath an oak tree, a number of rag trees scattered through the suburbs and farmlands, all the old cemeteries, and many other small and large places of lingering power and magick. Pets: Einin, a massive Red Kite – larger and more beautiful than any mortal Red Kite – who came with her from Ireland. It rides upon her shoulder or circles far above and returns to whisper in her ear. And Una, an equally out-sized copperhead snake, who sometimes coils around her upper arm in a cuff or about her neck like a necklace.

Known Magic: She draws her powers and a raw elemental magic from and of earth, decay, fruitfulness. Glamours, healing, some enchantment and telepathy are in her purview as is the ability to sense another’s magic-working. Magical Items: Apple shaped scepter carved from amber. Crown woven of dried grass, sticks, briars and flowers from the Old Country.

Rumors: The Fairy Queen lives woven through Irish and English literature and oftener than not, it’s Mab, Medb, Maeve, or some other linguistic derivative they name. It’s her and it isn’t her in every Queen of a dangerously beautiful underworld. It’s her and it isn’t her in the garish and tarnished modern remnants of the rituals of Samhain. It’s her and it isn’t her in older tales of goddess of sovereignty and the land corrupted by Christian monks and twisted into smaller roles. Her silhouette flickers in and out of focus in so many stories and it’s hard to know what fragments are her and what fragments are of her sisters of other Courts and Seasons. Rumours of her are like a broken mirror – shards of it glitter in the strangest places but it will never again reflect her face whole and entire and magnificent.

Here in Nashville, Medb presence is felt in strange and little ways…

She is certainly most strongly felt in Autumn and in the spaces and rituals of Autumn.

Also unsurprisingly, the Irish pubs and churches and communities feel her presence the most.

The dying often feel her presence. She is especially drawn to women who have died in pregnancy and to still born children – that contradiction of death and fecundity at the same time.

She is often known to those who live in the street as Our Lady Maeve. She bestows blessings of golden coins and easy deaths upon them.

Within the Fair Folk she is known as one of the most powerful they still have. She’s also known as an arbiter of peace. Lately she’s been withdrawn and thoughtful and there are worries and whispers that she may be the next to…disappear. Others say that instead, she’s working on a salvation, some majestic return to their old powers.

Writing Sample:

It is not yet her season, but sleep eludes Medb. In this mood, the beauty of her boudoir fails to soothe her. Instead, twisted about within sheets of silken glamour, she feels the crunch of dead leaves against her skin. She should sleep, she knows this, allow the erratic passage of time to roll over and through her slumber and conserve her strength – as all the Fair Folk must do now. Most of her court sleeps around her – their myriad forms curled in hammocks and green bowers, perched on gilded roosts and nests – but she is restless. Restless as a young thing, restless as those precious few young ones they still have.

Medb’s faithful Una and Einin are awake as well… Una’s red-golden scales shimmer as she boils and uncoils about her mistresses’ arm. Einin’s feathers rustle as he grooms himself, perched on the great carved knob of her bedpost. Impatience seizes her and she swirls out of bed and with a gesture wraps herself in the garb and guise of a human skin. A Queen may indulge her whims and fancies and tonight she shall not resign herself to boredom. She slips out through the towering majesty of the Autumn Court’s caverns and halls and into the sultry night. The Summer King and his people’s revels will be in full swing now, but she will not join them.

Una glides along the ground beside Medb and Einin soars on the warm updrafts above her. She breathes in the smell of fruit ripening and she knows that soon it will be her season with all its attendant responsibilities, but for now she is free and follows her whim to the great glittering city the mortals have built here. Such bright lights and cacophony of sounds. Such filth and beauty. It is all such rich excess – it still surprises that her mortal subjects should be capable of such. They are so fragile, so weak, and so ephemeral, but this city of theirs is a thing of delight and wonder.

Currents of love and loss, growth and decay, swirl over Medb’s tongue and she is so thirsty for it all. She follows her thirst to a bar, and laughs softly at that. Warm golden light spills out of the windows and she is content to watch and lean against the cold stone walls. She casts a golden coin in the cap of the old homeless man she shares the corner with and he smiles up at her, grateful as the penitents of old.

Men spill out of the door and she smells beer, onion rings, bloodlust and the thrill of the fight. They watch the rough fisticuffs for a moment, Medb and her familiars, but something more potent is in the air and they drift onwards.

Streets away they watch paramedics wrest a pregnant woman from a wreck of molten metal wrapped around a lamp post. The paramedicas are all lightning quick efficienciy and they move flawlessly around her without ever breaking stride when she moves closer and lingers by the dying woman. For a mortal, she is beautiful, and as she whispers, “Mother, help me,” Medb allows her to see her as she brushes the scarlet curls from her face – a small benediction. She can smell the dog already and knows he’ll be here for her soon so she leaves her.

There is a heavy weight upon Medb, always now, questions she must answer, a slow death to embrace or transformation to fight for, but she sheds that tonight like Una sheds her skin. She follows the taste of magic. Loses herself in the swirl of the city until time’s flow matters little. They watch it all – Medb, Una and Einin – and it is such a pageant, oh! The stories repeat, yes, but always with some differences, some new twist. They always end in death, of course, but death has its own beauty and Medb has her own kinship with it. Though whether she can accept its embrace is another thing entirely. And there, those thoughts intrude again. There are responsibilities that cannot be shirked and already she begins to feel the tug deep in her bones as Summer begins to cool and her seasons begins to rise with the moon. There are ancient duties she must attend to and the little passion plays of these trifling mortals must continue without her.

When Medb returns to her boudoir, her servants have begun to stir and hurry to attend to her. They dress her in splendour and she, as always, crowns herself before her mirror. It is a mere glamoured echo of the one her aunt stood her before when she first placed this wreath of flowers and brambles upon her head, but it suffices. They have all learned to live with less. These caverns are beautiful in their way and as their glamours wink on one by one there is something akin to the old finery and luxery.

And tonight, tonight, the first new moon of Autumn rises and Medb’s power rises with it. It is her time, her season, and she is Queen. Tonight the Fair Folk rides out, over hill and dale.

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reomanet · 6 years

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Reckoning With Pinegrove | Pitchfork

Share on Twitter Open share drawer On a muggy July night in 2017, Pinegrove guitarist Nick Levine was stabbing a hot needle of indeterminate origin into my flesh. I was getting my first stick-and-poke tattoo. The design was a single square. Sitting next to us on the hardwood floor of a bedroom in Kinderhook, New York—a small, sleepy country town a few hours north of Manhattan—was Evan Stephens Hall, the band’s frontman and primary songwriter. We were at the spacious, light-filled house where the members of Pinegrove had been living and recording. Hall was giving himself a much poorer version of the same tattoo. The unassuming shape is a loaded one for Hall. “It’s very hyper-aware of narrative layers,” he said, delineating the logic of the square, or frame, in between spiritedly mumble-singing along to the Spice Girls’ “Say You’ll Be There.” Technically, these were not Pinegrove tattoos. A Pinegrove tattoo is two intersected squares, like a cubic Venn diagram; the band’s iconography also includes an ampersand, and both symbols are inked to Hall’s inner bicep. They are meant to indicate an ethic of tolerance and coexisting perspectives. The squares featured prominently on the cover of Pinegrove’s 2016 breakthrough, Cardinal , and in that album’s wake, the band began retweeting dizzying numbers of kids with identical Pinegrove tattoos. They retweeted quoted lyrics and fan art and endless bedroom-recorded covers of their earnest songs. At least one fan wrote a high school English paper analyzing Pinegrove lyrics. These young people called themselves Pinenuts. In their honor, Hall put a line about Pinegrove tattoos into a new song called “Rings”: “I draw a line in my skin,” he sings, “I’m pinning down inchoate meaning.” Though Pinegrove’s sound hews closest to alt-country-flecked indie rock, it is sometimes labeled emo, and this affiliation makes sense: Their music is open-hearted, communal, earnest, lyrical, with a discernible ease, and Cardinal was released on the emo-aligned Boston label Run for Cover. It bears the influence of Gillian Welch’s gleaming twang and the angularity of early Death Cab for Cutie. If you are someone who grew up on emo before getting into supposedly more “sophisticated” artists, you could hear your whole musical coming-of-age packed into a Pinegrove track. Their signature song peaks with a line about calling your parents and telling your friends that you love them. But the rabid obsessiveness of Pinegrove’s youthful fanbase was the most emo quality of all. Those tattoos felt cultish and symbolic—of empathy, of aliveness, of artmaking in general—as if denoting a more tender but no less radical update on the Black Flag bars, as if each square sung that timeless mantra: Our band could be your life . Once, I admit, I considered searing those two squares into my skin. Pinegrove’s songwriting had come to represent, to me, a positive force within our ever-awakening music world. Where the pop-punk subculture of my youth could be hostile to young women, I saw something like true progression at Pinegrove shows and in their Twitter stream. They defied the all-white-male image of so many emo-adjacent bands and pushed progressive politics; by January 2017, they had donated over $21,000 in Bandcamp sales to Planned Parenthood and released an album, Elsewhere , to benefit the Southern Poverty Law Center, the civil rights advocacy nonprofit. Whether emo or indie, Pinegrove were compellingly thoughtful; they pointed in a better direction. I had gone to Kinderhook in 2017 to report what I thought would be a fairly triumphant profile of Pinegrove as they worked on their new album, Skylight . The band had already fulfilled the promise of DIY self-manifestation, having formed in 2010 around two lifelong friends, Hall and drummer Zack Levine, in their suburban hometown of Montclair, New Jersey. They had played music together since childhood and spent years roughing it on self-booked tours, playing to no one, subsisting on personal convictions. In Kinderhook, I paced across some springy fields with Hall while he philosophized about the practice of “peripatetic discourse” (that is, walking and talking at the same ti me). I list ened to him muse on the genius of Elena Ferrante. We caught sight of monarch butterflies and deer. I sat around while the band—Hall and Zack Levine, plus a rotating cast of Nick Levine, Nandi Rose Plunkett, Adan Carlo Feliciano, Sam Skinner, and Josh Marre—recorded music and made tacos. I observed while they scrolled through drafts of Hall’s semi-surrealist tweets and decided which to publish to the band’s account. From the time Hall picked me up from the train, with Loretta Lynn on the speakers, he had also been excitedly confessing about a musician he had recently met and become infatuated with. They had just spent several days hanging out—even duetting on his favorite song of all time, Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman”—and Hall had stayed up all night writing a song about her, which he played for me and his bandmates. He said he ought to be honest: She would no doubt be occupying his mind throughout the duration of my trip. Hall was an open book, an intellectual chatterbox, a compelling storyteller. His personality met the honesty and high-wire energy of his songs. I still went for just the one square on that July night. Perhaps it was my own ingrained skepticism, but even in the summer of 2017, true Pinenut ink already felt too daring for comfort. I knew not to put that much faith in a male public figure, even if his songs have saved you. On November 21, 2017—at the height of the watershed #MeToo movement—Hall wrote a strikingly long, puzzlingly vague message on Pinegrove’s Facebook page acknowledging that he had been “accused of sexual coercion.” The statement described a “short but intense” relationship with an unnamed woman, and it carried an apologetic but defensive tone—not least of all when Hall attempted to rationalize his behavior by noting, “i believed all of our decisions to be based in love.” Following his opaque chronicle of the relationship, he also wrote that he had once said he “could sense who from the crowd would be interested in sleeping with me based on how they watched me perform.” The statement ended earnestly—“i have never felt remorse like this before”—but it raised a monumental number of troubling questions and answered few. After posting the statement, Hall did not deflect responsibility. In accordance with the alleged victim’s wishes, which were communicated to Pinegrove via a mediator, the band began a year-long hiatus from touring. Hall entered therapy. Skylight was shelved. A band who once prioritized clear and open communication went completely silent. The mediator clarified to me that, in this case, the alleged sexual coercion took the form of “verbal and contextual pressure” and that “the accusation is not of a physical nature at all.” The alleged victim requested that she remain anonymous in public discourse and declined to speak with me on the record for this piece. Hall’s statement was only the beginning of a story that has persisted, this year, in finding new ways to unravel. As an April report by SPIN revealed, the statement and ensuing fallout was instigated by a series of emails from the Philadelphia-based organization Punk Talks, which purports to connect touring musicians and music industry workers with free therapy. Their motto: “You don’t have to be sad to make great music.” Sheridan Allen, 27, founded Punk Talks in 2015, after she received bachelor’s degrees in social work and sociology from Northern Kentucky University, where she also completed graduate courses involving intimate partner violence and forensic interviewing as part of a child welfare program. On November 14, 2017, Allen emailed Pinegrove’s label, Run for Cover, and the promoters of a Cleveland, Ohio festival called Snowed In, which the band was set to play on November 25. In the email, which was obtained and reviewed by Pitchfork, Allen wrote that she was moved to reach out after speaking with an alleged victim of Hall’s, with whom she had connected via social media. “In the wave of people in influence being called out for dangerous behaviors,” she wrote, “I was approached today concerning Pinegrove.” Allen proceeded to describe Hall’s “predatory and manipulative behavior toward women attending Pinegrove shows and women he has been sexually involved with.” She stated that the alleged victim was “NOT THE FIRST” (emphasis hers) to tell her as much. She shared her belief, “as a mental health professional,” that Hall should “step away from music to receive intensive treatment.” She noted that the cancellation of Pinegrove’s tour and album release would be “nearly impossible to do without making a public statement,” though she did not specify who ought to write such a statement. Allen offered to speak with Hall herself and also suggested that Punk Talks could offer him “rehabilitation services.” She copied one of the organization’s licensed therapists on the email for “further guidance or clinical direction.” But even by sending that initial instigating email to Pinegrove’s label and promoters, Allen was possibly overstepping her boundaries. If Allen’s mission was to facilitate mental health treatment, then, as one licensed therapist told me, it would be unusual “to offer that service and then also be engaging in these unofficial accountability processes.” Mental health support is a markedly different resource than a community-based accountability process. “It would be incongruent with the mission [of a mental health provider] to approach this person and say, ‘You’re a perpetuator,’” the therapist told me. “If a therapist is going to engage in reparative accountability work, that would be extremely confidential. Everyone would be consenting to engaging in that.” Two days after Allen’s email, in an internal update sent to the Punk Talks team, she wrote that if Pinegrove did not step away from playing so that Hall could enter therapy, “the original victim and another identified victim plan to speak publicly, which we support 10000%.” She added, “I hope you will stand with me on this, it has not been an easy time working directly to take down the biggest band in indie right now and I am very tired.” (Five months later, Allen walked back those comments on Twitter, writing that Punk Talks “are not and will never be in the business of ‘taking down’ bands; this was a poor choice of words on my part and not an indication of the work we do.”) Allen had been approaching her effort from a few angles. According to Snowed In promoter Cory Hajde, Allen first contacted him to vaguely say that someone came to her “outing Evan as an abuser.” He considered removing Pinegrove from the festival, but without concrete details, Hajde said, he was “legally obligated” to keep the band on because they were in a contract. Allen pressed on. Hajde said she then proposed the idea of telling the opening bands on Pinegrove’s upcoming tour, Adult Mom and Saintseneca, about the allegations in an effort to cancel the shows. Hajde declined to intervene. “I think she felt like she had something to gain, which was very bizarre,” Hajde told me. “I felt bullied by the way she was talking to me throughout the whole process.” Steph Knipe, who performs as Adult Mom, is a trusted queer feminist voice in underground music. Knipe told me they received a text from Allen a week before their scheduled tour with Pinegrove, warning them about an issue with the tour but offering few details. “She put me in a weird position,” Knipe said. “A lot of people, myself included, don’t have the tools to know how to deal with situations like this. I was under the impression that Sheridan was a licensed therapist or social worker or counselor. Sheridan—coming from [Punk Talks], saying, ‘I’m trained to deal with this’—was basically abusing that safety, which made it doubly confusing and hard. When I got that text, I was like, ‘Oh thank god, this is exactly what we need in a situation like this—this will be handled really well!’ And it wasn’t.” Knipe said Adult Mom ultimately decided to cancel their dates with Pinegrove after they spoke with the alleged victim directly. Fellow opening act Saintseneca arrived at their decision similarly, according to band leader Zac Little. The same alleged victim, who knew a member of Saintseneca, contacted the group to say she had been sexually coerced by Hall. “We took this account seriously and decided to withdraw from the tour,” Little told me. The morning after Adult Mom and Saintseneca dropped off—just a week after Allen’s first email—Hall posted his statement; Pinegrove canceled the tour. But the alleged victim, it turned out, did not want her allegation to be made public. “Sheridan Allen did many things without my knowledge, support or permission involving the Pinegrove situation, even after I had already asked her to remove herself entirely from the situation,” she wrote in a statement to SPIN earlier this year. “I never asked for her to request or demand any type of statement from Pinegrove or Run for Cover. I’ve never said or implied to Sheridan that I wanted to ‘take down’ Pinegrove.” Allen inserted herself in many ways, she continued, “without my knowledge or consent.” When I reached Allen via email—she declined to be interviewed by phone—she said she knew of the victim’s wish for the situation to remain private, which is why she emailed band affiliates “rather than putting Evan or Pinegrove ‘on blast’” via social media. She denied asking Pinegrove to make a statement. “There was no motivation other than to help a survivor move forward from their trauma,” she wrote. In her email to Punk Talks staff, Allen mentioned a second “identified victim” of Hall’s. That person was—in Allen’s mind—Autumn Lavis, a Phoenix-based organizer and educator who has helped run an organization called Safer Scenes, which traveled on Warped Tour teaching bystander intervention to bands, crew, and fans. “I have been a victim of sexual assault and I have spent years working to make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else,” Lavis told me. “But my involvement with Evan wasn’t like that.” Lavis and Hall first met in the summer of 2016. They had a brief, intimate relationship that, Lavis said, ended when Hall got back together with an ex-girlfriend. “The aftermath made me feel bad about myself,” Lavis said. “But I never felt that he was abusive towards me at all. If someone did have a negative experience, I want to validate that, but mine was consensual.” When the hurt of their relationship was still fresh, Lavis said she vented to Allen, who was her friend at the time. In the fall of 2017, Allen contacted Lavis to discuss Hall again. “She kind of made me feel worse about the situation,” said Lavis, who grew concerned when she saw a screenshot of Allen’s internal Punk Talks email circulating. “I asked Sheridan if she was referring to me [as a victim], because I had a strong feeling, and she said yes. I told her that I felt like I was misrepresented. She was apologetic. But it didn’t fix the situation.” (Allen confirmed to me that Lavis “was absolutely misrepresented in this email,” adding that she “misunderstood their interactions” and takes “full responsibility” for the error.) “I felt it was invalidating,” Lavis said, “not only towards me as someone who has been sexually assaulted, but to other people who have as well.” Lavis is in school to be a teacher, where she studies restorative justice—the idea that a perpetuator can reconcile with the community. “In that email, Sheridan was talking about ‘taking down Pinegrove,’” she said. “Restorative justice doesn’t look like that. It’s not a vendetta.” Before they became entangled in turmoil, Allen and Hall had actually been mutually supportive of one another. They met in April 2016 at a Pinegrove show in Columbus. Pinegrove were reaching the end of a nearly two-month tour; they made $100 per night and drove themselves around in a Ford Windstar. According to Hall, Allen told him about Punk Talks and said, “If you ever feel like you want somebody to talk to, you can talk to me.” Hall was unaware that Allen was not a licensed therapist. “I was like, ‘Awesome—being at the end of a seven-week tour, I could really use someone right now, if you have a minute,’” Hall recalled to me this year. “She said, ‘sure.’” According to Hall, they then went to the Pinegrove van; he sat in the driver’s seat, Allen in the passenger’s seat. “I confirmed confidentiality, and she said, ‘Of course, only if you’re a harm to yourself or planning harm to others would I say anything,’” Hall said. “Which is of course invoking a therapeutic context. I understood us to be having a session.” (Allen did not recall the specifics of their conversation.) Allen later checked up on Hall via text, and Hall referred a friend to Allen. Hall claims that Allen represented herself as a therapist and used confidential information from their session in her original instigating email, which he felt “violated” by. Hall comes from a family that valued therapy, he said; his mother was once a social worker and the director of a women’s shelter. Allen denies offering Hall therapy. “I did not at any point act as Evan’s therapist,” Allen wrote, calling their initial conversation only “personal in nature.” But others besides Hall told me that Allen represented herself as a therapist, and Allen referred to herself as a “professional therapist” on Twitter this April. When asked whether she ever represented herself as a therapist through her work with Punk Talks, Allen responded, “I have referred to myself as a therapist because, at that time, I was working as a therapist under the supervision of an individually licensed professional. I tried my best to make it clear to everyone that interacted with [Punk Talks] that our therapists are individually licensed and that I am not licensed to practice therapy independently.” Allen, who’s currently working to earn master’s degrees in social work and nonprofit management, acknowledged that, “I made egregious errors and mistakes throughout this situation. I was acting without any guidance or a board and I have done absolutely everything I can now and in the future to ensure adequate checks and balances, as well as ensuring this will never happen again.” Punk Talks has since assembled a board of directors, which Allen says she formed because she felt “unprepared” to handle the Pinegrove situation. Punk Talks and Pinegrove are now equally embroiled in a story that has no doubt perpetuated harm from both sides. It has become an almost gross magnification of the cultural moment we are living through, in which social media call-outs stand in for real resolution, when situations that ought to be accounted for in private are haphazardly made public, when definitions of consent are only flimsily and selectively applied, when what we believe as right or wrong feels impossibly far from what we might ever know as true or false . It is our inclination to cancel people, to nullify them. This makes some sense, particularly when considering that this burdensome question — What do we do with people who cause harm ? — so often falls onto people who have themselves been harmed. “I know that casting people off is not a permanent solution. It doesn’t really fix anything,” Adult Mom’s Knipe told me. “But the way to heal is to get this person out of your sight.” In some sense, I related. After reading Hall’s perplexing statement, it was my instinct to abandon this Pinegrove piece. But to ignore the story ultimately felt like a denial—of nuance, of truth, of the complications of the world we live in now, where these stories are objectively not all the same. “Everyone is capable of hurting other people… it’s just very ingrained in our behavior,” Knipe said. “And that’s why talking about it and accountability processes are so important.” In the wake of these newly public traumas, the conversation—the forum, the hearing, the entangling narrative threads—is profoundly crucial. It might be all we have. A year after my initial visit, I went back to Kinderhook this summer. The house was more lived in: Records were on the shelves, studio soundproofing had been built out, and Hall showed me a sizable plant named Orlando, after the Virginia Woolf novel. In a dining room, the stuffed toy monkey that once served as the band’s mascot on tour sat on a shelf presiding over the table where Hall, Zack Levine, and I talked for four hours. The year has been still for them and it showed. Hall’s demeanor has calmed; he’s grown his hair out. Since late 2017, both the band and the alleged victim have focused on coming to a private resolution via a trusted mediator. Until that resolution was reached, Hall said, “there was really no way for us to offer any clarification” to their fans. It was the alleged victim’s request that Pinegrove take a year off from touring and that Hall enter therapy. “We wanted to honor that,” Hall said. “She recognized that we’ve honored it, and has since approved our plan to release an album and play some shows later on this year.” (Their mediator confirmed this.) The uncertain extent to which Hall was being accused of abuse has now loomed over Pinegrove for nearly a year. That uncertainty is due to the absence of the alleged victim’s voice as well as the fact that sexual coercion, the term Hall used in his statement, can take many forms. T he mediator elaborated on the alleged victim’s account: “She and Evan had a brief relationship, and she was in a relationship when it started. She felt that he coerced her into cheating on her partner with him, and she felt that she said no to him several times… and he continued to pursue her.” Hall maintained that their relationship progressed mutually but acknowledged the alleged victim’s “right to describe her experience however feels true to her.” He added, “I definitely could have conducted myself better.” Hall has spent the year reflecting, reading, taking walks. He started skateboarding at a nearby park. He said he has been listening to “Kacey Musgraves and drone music exclusively.” He is attending therapy weekly in Montclair and has generally tried to slow down. He said he has been thinking about how consent applies to all relationships, about how to “live more democratically” among peers . “This situation has demanded a full re-inventorying of myself,” Hall added. “I’ve tried to approach that with humility and with focus.” H e said the band never considered breaking up. Being off the road has been crucial since, as Hall put it, “Touring a lot prevents you from dealing with your emotional ecosystem because it’s so demanding and decentralizing.” Hall has been reading Canadian novelist Rachel Cusk, more Ferrante, and the intersectional feminist writer bell hooks’ 2000 classic All About Love —a book that has been especially helpful in the #MeToo era as we collectively search for answers in the wake of so much public trauma. hooks promotes living by a “love ethic” over a “power ethic,” and emphasizes the necessity of open and clear communication in achieving that. When I asked Hall what he has learned from it, he mentioned hooks’ definition of love as “actions that nurture the soul of another person or yourself,” the fact that “patriarchy promotes dishonesty,” that “love is incompatible with abuse.” I asked Hall about how his perspective has changed since the day he posted his statement to Facebook last November. “At first, I felt defensiv e. I was trying to understand what the accusation was. It really didn’t jive with my memory of what had happened,” h e said. “I take consent seriously. All of our encounters were verbally consensual. But, OK, certainly this isn’t from nowhere. If she came away feeling bad about our encounter, feeling like she couldn’t express how she was feeling honestly at the time, that’s a huge problem. So I have been reflecting a lot about how a relationship that promotes honesty is an active process, and that maybe there are conversations we should have had that we didn’t, or maybe there’s something else I could have done to make her feel like she could have said how she was feeling. I’ve been thinking about that all the time.” Of his chosen language in the statement, Hall said, “A lot of people took issue with the phrase ‘sexual coercion,’ because they understood it was evasive, like I was obscuring a more serious accusation. But I included that phrase because that was the language used by the person I was involved with. It was meant as a symbol of respect to have her dictate the language of the conversation. In the context of our relationship, she felt that I had sometimes pressured her into having sex—not physically, but verbally and contextually.” Hall characterized the statement as a direct response to what he calls the “elevated and inflammatory language” of Allen’s email, which he said “felt like a threat.” For Hall, the notion of an alleged second victim “contributed to me kind of spiraling out, like, ‘Holy shit, if there are multiple women who have complaints about me, maybe I’ve been completely delusional.’ I was really trying to address that possibility.” It put him in a headspace of “paranoia and fear.” “I was responding very specifically to one person,” Hall said, referring to Allen. “I wanted to appease them. I don’t know. I was not thinking clearly, and I said some things that I can’t totally stand behind.” Hall spent three days mulling over the statement, with one day and night of focused writing. He said he has “probably 100 drafts” of thoughts in his phone. Hall and Levine enlisted the guidance of trusted friends and people on their team, but the statement was ultimately their doing, or as Hall put it, “something we really need to own.” No one tried to stop them. “I mean, I remember my mom being like, ‘Are you sure you have to do this?’” Hall recalled. “And I was like, ‘No. I don’t know if I have to do this. But a lot of people are telling me that I do. And I think I do. I wanna do the right thing. I’m not sure what it is.’” Hall said he included the part of the statement about how he “could sense who from the crowd would be interested in sleeping with me based on how they watched me perform” because it was mentioned in Allen’s email, and he felt compelled to address everything brought up against him. According to Hall, that line was based on something he told the alleged victim once in private. “I was noticing people act towards me in a certain way, from the audience,” Hall said. “And then those same people would sometimes approach me at the merch table or in person after the set, and be very directly solicitous, or proposition me. This was an observation based on a correlation. I was not objectifying people from the stage.” I told Hall that, when I read the statement in November, it seemed to insinuate that he had sexualized fans in the crowd. He clarified, “I categorically do not target fans for sex. Nevertheless, I understand why reading what I wrote would make people reflect on their experiences at our concerts through an uncomfortable lens. And I’m so sorry to anybody who read that and felt uncomfortabl e. When I really think back about the statement, the language is just so dissonant and horrible. It’s not ever what I’ve meant to convey. W e have always prioritized the safety of fans at our concerts, and we always will prioritize the safety of fans at our concerts.” If he could do it all over again, Hall said, he would make the statement shorter. “I’ve gotten into all sorts of trouble throughout my life just not knowing when to stop, verbally,” he continued. “Being honest in situations when I’m not supposed to be.” He murmured, “Honest to a fault, I guess.” For a long time, after posting the message, Hall didn’t look at the internet. When he did, he was destroyed by “the emotional impact of seeing people calling me a rapist, which is not even what I’m being accused of, with such authority,” he said. “Or even seeing people call for my death on Twitter.” While reflecting on his attempts to not internalize it all, he began to cry. Even so, Pinegrove have not appreciated uncritical support, either. “If the band defended ourselves, it would have required us to basically be representing ‘the accused,’” Levine reasoned. “We’re not looking to defend that group of people.” “We don’t want listeners who are like, ‘We don’t care about this sort of thing,’” Hall added. “ We care about this sort of thing. I’m way more sympathetic to people who are like, ‘I don’t understand this situation, it seems fucked up, fuck this band,’ than people who are like, ‘I don’t understand this situation, fuck this situation, I love this band.’ We are thoroughly in favor of the dismantling of patriarchal structures, and the movement right now to elevate survivors and victims of abuse. And we are not interested in a listenership that doesn’t care about that.” As the only woman in Pinegrove, Nandi Rose Plunkett had a singular perspective on Hall’s situation. (A multi-instrumentalist, she left the group’s full-time lineup at the end of 2016 to pursue her own project, Half Waif, though she still performed on Skylight ; she is currently engaged to Pinegrove’s Zack Levine.) Plunkett made her support of her bandmate clear: “I do not think Evan is at all a threat to young women attending shows,” she wrote via email. Plunkett added that she has had “many productive conversations privately” about the allegations against Hall, but said it has felt “daunting” to speak in public. “Still, I’m hopeful that the space is beginning to open up for these challenging conversations,” she said. “ I want any young female fans and fellow musicians to know that I’m fighting for them. I’ve dealt with a lot of challenges as a multiracial woman and I’ve been thrust now into the middle of a situation that I never imagined I’d be a part of. But I’m learning a lot from it, having tough conversations and pushing myself and those around me to dismantle the structures of privilege that have built and bound us. In order to grow into a more loving and understanding community, we have to work towards healing through sensitive and open communication. And that’s what we’re trying to do.” Pinegrove plan to release Skylight on September 28, though they will be putting it out themselves. The band was not dropped from Run for Cover, according to label head Jeff Casazza. But according to Hall, there was “some discomfort expressed” from other artists on the label about Skylight ’s release, spurring the mutual decision. (Pinegrove plan to work with a different label in the future.) The band will donate all proceeds from Bandcamp sales of Skylight to three charities: the Voting Rights Project , the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention , and Musicares , which offers mental health resources to musicians among other services. The album’s cover features a pale blue square inside of a navy one. Hall said Skylight has not changed in any significant way since it was recorded in mid-2017, which gives it an eerie prescience. Its opening lines find Hall committing, “I draw a line in my life/Singing this is the new way I behave now.” And then there is the ecstatic “Intrepid,” which wonders about “what type of world we wanna live in” and what might happen “if we learned to love ourselves better.” Skylight ’s stark centerpiece, “Thanksgiving,” is perhaps most uncanny of all considering how closely the fallout overlapped with that holiday a year ago: “Warm night before Thanksgiving/What do I have to be nervous for?” On the album’s closer, the pedal-steel weeper “Light On,” Hall pleads, “I wanna do much better.” That same sentiment echoed throughout Hall’s Facebook statement, and I was so befuddled that the song was completely written before the public Pinegrove reckoning—as all of the lyrics on Skylight were—that Hall had to remind me, “The same person who wrote the statement wrote that song.” Pinegrove made its name on a song called “Old Friends.” The Cardinal opener is, in its three and a half minutes, a song about ambition, defeat, introversion, autonomy, happiness, humility, love (platonic, romantic, familial), and the complex familiarity of home. Its central lines, however, are purely a matter of life and death. They form what Hall calls “a summary of what we’re about… the logical conclusion.” I saw Leah on the bus a few months ago I saw some old friends at her funeral My steps keep splitting my grief Through these solipsistic moods I should call my parents when I think of them Should tell my friends when I love them It sets a mood: vulnerability, introspection, compassion, severity. “It’s about saying what you mean and having the confidence to say it,” Hall explained to me in July 2017, sitting on the floor of his Kinderhook bedroom. “There was someone who was an acquaintance—a friend of a friend, really—that died in a very sudden and tragic way. It was an accident. I had always sort of distantly had a crush on her, but I had never taken the time to really get to know her. We don’t have much time. So why do we withhold our true feelings? Why are we playing it cool?” “Old Friends” reminded Hall of his dim, dusty bedroom in Montclair, where he would spend long, lonely afternoons in his mid-20s, without direction or purpose, smoking weed and staring at the mess on his floor. “I was coming from a pretty dark place,” he said. “This moment shook me out of that. Eventually I imagined my way out. I was just writing a song that I needed.” In 2016, I needed it, too. I was already obsessed with Cardinal by that fall, when I learned that an old friend of mine had died. The friend and I had been on uncertain terms for many years, and I was devastated by the realization that we would never fully reconcile. I listened to “Old Friends” as a reminder to never let that happen again. It really was one of the only things that helped. I was mourning a deeply complicated relationship. It had ended, mostly, with an instance of sexual harm that nauseates me to mention; with me cutting him off, him getting help, and surfacing, years later, to apologize. I really felt he had changed. I half-heartedly accepted the apology, and carried on with my life. The relationship ultimately made me see and feel—with a gravity that has staked itself into my heart—the entanglements of mental illness, addiction, predation, and depression. We bring ourselves to music; it’s the only way. The song is there, but so are we, processing it in tandem with our personal inventories, the rolodexes of pain and trauma and fortitude and joy that make us the people we are. When clarity is in short supply, we still have the agency to think our way through. Our experiences dictate what we are comfortable with, what we can possibly forgive, and what we cannot accept.

The post Reckoning With Pinegrove | Pitchfork appeared first on TBNT Have The Solution.

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jenmedsbookreviews · 6 years

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I make no bones about it – I am a fan of the Charlie Parker series by John Connolly. I came to the series exceptionally late, I believe after seeing a tweet about what was, by then, the 13th book in the series A Song of Shadows. Yes – I know – I was that far behind. Clearly being the conscientious and balanced individual that I am (?) I didn’t buy book 13, but I was suitably intrigued by the sound of the series that I went straight to Amazon and purchased book 1 – Every Dead Thing.

Now in another of those ‘what were you doing when you first read this book’ moments, the opening to said book left such a mark on me that I can tell you – 100% no question – that at the time of reading I was sat on an exercise bike in my front room, trying hard to focus on keeping my legs moving while simultaneously becoming more engrossed in what I was reading, to a point where I could probably have fallen off the bike and not noticed.I will admit it – I didn’t immediately like Charlie Parker. There is much in his character in those early moments that takes time to warm up to, but by the end of the book I was hooked. I read Every Dead Thing in April 2015. By the following April I had read every single book in the Charlie Parker series – all 13 and they are not short books – and was waiting patiently for book 14. I was all blithering idiot (nothing unusual) when my local library won the chance to host an evening with John Connolly as part of his promotional book tour, and duly went along for what was a highly entertaining event, where, after a huge amount of personal motivation to find the balls to actually talk to another human being, the extent of my conversation with him was to say that I loved the book. (I’d managed to read it in a day – it was so good!). In fact A Time Of Torment was the first book I ever ordered as a signed 1st edition (love Gutter Bookshops in Dublin!) quickly followed by pretty much every Charlie Parker book I could lay my hands on. My collection now looks a bit like this …

What does this waffle have to do with The Woman In The Woods? Well – the fact is that I just love this series and each new book (which always feels too long a wait for) is highly prized. So I was delighted when this finally landed in my mailbox and I could sit and read one of my most anticipated and awaited books of 2018. Did it live up to expectation? (you’ll be hoping so after all this build up …) We’ll see in a moment after I’ve shown you what it’s all about.

About the Book

The new thrilling instalment of John Connolly’s popular Charlie Parker series.

It is spring, and the semi-preserved body of a young Jewish woman is discovered buried in the Maine woods. It is clear that she gave birth shortly before her death.

But there is no sign of a baby.

Private detective Charlie Parker is engaged by the lawyer Moxie Castin to shadow the police investigation and find the infant, but Parker is not the only searcher. Someone else is following the trail left by the woman, someone with an interest in more than a missing child, someone prepared to leave bodies in his wake.

And in a house by the woods, a toy telephone begins to ring.

For a young boy is about to receive a call from a dead woman . . .

Ah. Ah-hahahahaha. Oh yes. I loved this book. I’m going to have to say that this is most definitely one of the best yet and completely ticked all the boxes for me. Well – all but one but more on that later. Maybe.

The Woman In The Woods really is the perfect combination of everything I have come to love about this series. The wonderfully complex investigation which provides the basis for each story, one which our dear hero, Charlie Parker, feels often honour bound to partake in, and the presence of the supernatural or otherworldly – not in a Ghostbusters kind of way – more spiritual in a fighting for your soul and to prevent the damnation of the world and the ending of our entire existence kind of way. In that respect this series is unapologetically biased towards that which cannot be easily explained, and will entertain and disturb, bringing forth both the macabre and mysterious in the most delectable melding of genres – the kind of thing that would happen if Horror and Crime started dating, breeding and having book babies. It is not gratuitous, although possibly still capable of turning your stomach if you are of a delicate disposition. It is, however, quite marvellous.

On a very basic level – as there is always a very basic level in every book – this is the story of a young woman whose body has been discovered buried in the woods in a remote part of northern Maine – hence the title. There is every likelihood there is some connection between the woman and the Jewish faith and so in a fit of conscience, and it doesn’t happen often, Parker’s friend and sometime employer, Moxie Castin, asks Parker to try and identify the woman and what happened to the child she appears to have been carrying just prior to her burial. On a wider level … oh it is so much more than that but I am not going to tell you how much more as the fun in this book is in the reading and gradual reveal of a most complicated and disturbing story. It links in beautifully with the ongoing narrative behind the series and sets Parker against a new and wholly disturbing foe – Quayle.

What I love about these books is the way in which John Connolly weaves such diverse and colourful set of individual threads into what in the end becomes a very rich and beautiful tapestry. There is no doubt about it, these are long books, rich in narrative and deep in terms of language and, on occasion, explanation of history. And yet it never feels as though this is a long journey. If anything it never feels quite long enough. There are so many elements of the story to articulate, so many characters whose lives, at one time or another, seem to intersect with that of Parker and his friends, who inform and redirect the ongoing back story which filters through each preceding and subsequent tale, enriching your understanding of what has gone before and what is yet to come, that you cannot help but find yourself lost within the pages, often for hours at a time. This is a story, much like most of the others, that can be read on its own, but I would question why you would want to as to read them all is to fully understand the beauty of what you are reading.

Parker himself is a very complex character. As I said earlier, I didn’t immediately like him and yet he is someone I have grown increasingly attached too, in literary terms of course, and I am fully invested in his story and his quest to discover his true purpose, as this most surely is a quest. He is flawed, but those flaws make the man, and he will always fight for what is right, no matter the personal risk or cost. His partners in crime, Louis and Angel, are just the perfect antidote to Parker’s occasional melancholy and between them the three possess such a keen sense of humour, sarcastic but astute, that you cannot help but love them. It is largely Louis and Parker in this book, Angel notably absent, which is my only regret (and unticked box) for the book as I do love Angel and I missed his hideous shirts and banter with Louis. His presence is mostly certainly felt in the few scenes in which he appears, his and the Fulci brothers who I am developing a soft spot for too, but with his larger than life persona his absence is also felt and he was greatly missed. Hopefully only a short term departure as I refuse to consider the alternative.

Parker is always given a very dark antagonist to battle and it is no different in this book. I don’t want to say too much about Quayle, but he is English (not British) and despite his vile nature, there are moments of mirth in his interactions with others. They are few but they are there. There is something inherently creepy about this man from the off, and the author excels at making this live upon the page without the character ever having to do anything in particular to make you wince or make your skin crawl. He is not the only person in this book to try to make Parker’s life a living hell, and it is certainly a case of equal opportunities for the sexes in this book, with John Connolly demonstrating that when it comes to exacting pain, the female of the species – whatever species this may be exactly – is most definitely more deadly than the male.

And then – oh that ending. Such promise. Such threat. Such a fantastic way to make me desperate for the next book and no mistake.

Gah. I’m making such a horlicks of this review aren’t I? Well this is for a good reason. I want to tell you how beautiful and lyrical, almost mythical, elements of this book are. There is just something so – I don’t know – poetic maybe about the way Connolly forms his prose that it is so hard to review a book, refrain from spoilers and say all you want to say to do it justice. I know. I have tried so many times before.

So I will just say this – if you love this series – buy this book. You will not be disappointed. If you haven’t read this series – you could still buy this book – it’s very good and can easily be read in isolation – but you will benefit so much more if you read the whole series in order. In each one you will find a puzzle piece and slowly they will fit together and a gradual picture will emerge. I still don’t know yet what that final image will be, I’m not so sure that it matters, because right now the work in progress is pretty flipping fabulous and I’m loving every moment of it.

If you would like to own your own copy of this wonderful book then you will find it at the following retailers.

Amazon UK ~ Amazon US ~ Kobo ~ Waterstones ~ Goldsboro Books

About the author

John Connolly is author of the Charlie Parker mysteries, The Book of Lost Things, the Samuel Johnson novels for young adults and, with his partner, Jennifer Ridyard, the co-author of the Chronicles of the Invaders. His debut – EVERY DEAD THING – swiftly launched him right into the front rank of thriller writers, and all his subsequent novels have been Sunday Times bestsellers. He was the first non-American writer to win the US Shamus award, and the first Irish writer to be awarded the Edgar by the Mystery Writers of America.

Follow John Connolly on Social media: Website ~ Twitter ~ Facebook

Now if, like me, you are lucky enough to be in the area on Monday 9th April, John Connolly will be appearing at First Monday Crime at London’s City University. First Monday Crime is a monthly gathering for authors, publicists, agents, editors, students, and avid readers of crime fiction. Each month a new panel of authors is lined up to discuss writing, the world of crime, and their latest novels. This month the panel’s line up consists of John Connolly, Stuart Turton (The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle), Rachel Abbott (Come a Little Closer) and Leigh Russell (Class Murder), all overseen by the expert moderation of Barry Forshaw. You can find out more about First Monday Crime and book your place at the panel here.

Review: The Woman In The Woods by John Connolly @jconnollybooks @HodderBooks @1stMondayCrime I make no bones about it - I am a fan of the Charlie Parker series by John Connolly.

#Charlie Parker #Crime #Hodder & Stoughton #John Connolly #Private Investigator

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merrynewtonmas · 6 years

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December 31 - Season of Reason Day 7 - Learn Something New

December 31 Season of Reason Day 7 Learn Something New Today's Celebration Pledge to learn something new every day this year. You can learn in a formal setting like a school or with a coach or you can learn by reading a book or watching a video. Your goal is to become a lifelong learner. The gift of learning from the Muslim tradition While Europe was mired in the Dark Ages, other parts of the world were experiencing scientific golden ages. In the far east China was experiencing a rapid expansion of technology during the Song dynasty from 900 to 1100 AD. In the Muslim world, which stretched from India to Andalusia (Spain), a scientific awakening was occurring at roughly the same time. It is a matter of intense academic debate as to which culture influenced who to become smarter and more advanced. Some scholars maintain that the Chinese took technology from the Muslim world while others accuse the Muslims of ‘borrowing’ Chinese advancements and spreading them around the Muslim world. I’m going to leave most of that historical debate for another time and place. There was one technology that the Muslims blatantly stole from the Chinese which made their advancements in technology much easier to acquire. That technology was paper. After the battle of Talas in 751 between the Abbasid Caliphate and the Tang dynasty led by Emperor Xuanzong, Caliphate forces had the good fortune of capturing some very special Chinese soldiers. These soldiers knew the secret of papermaking. The Chinese had been making paper for hundreds of years and were adept at using paper to aid in administration of government and the military. It is not surprising that the forces of Emperor Xuanzong were carrying papermakers since the army needed paper to issue orders and keep track of the million and one things an army needs while marching and fighting. Once the Caliphate realized who they had captured, they sent the papermaking soldiers to Samarkand to show Caliphate administrators how to make it and spread this knowledge all over the muslim world. In fact by the year 795 paper was being made with the Chinese method in Baghdad. Baghdad was the capital of the Caliphate, the intersection of every major trade route on earth, and would become the home to the House of Wisdom. Once the secret of paper made it to Baghdad it was only a short time before paper started showing up in Europe, Africa, and every corner of Asia. Some historians maintain that paper was the one of the fastest spreading technologies in the medieval world. Papermaking was second only to gunpowder which skipped across Eurasia in less than a generation. The Muslim world was ready to exploit the introduction of paper because Islam placed such an emphasis on literacy. In Christian Europe most of the people who could read were members of the clergy, an overwhelming majority of regular people were illiterate and dumb as rocks. There was no requirement that you know how to read in order to be a Christian. In fact, if you did know how to read it probably would not do you any good since everything was written in Latin, a language that only the clergy understood. The situation was much different for a practicing muslim. Muslims believe that the Quran is the direct word of God given to the Prophet Muhammad in the early 600s. Muhammad spoke arabic the language of the Quraysh tribe he belonged to that inhabited the area on the Arabian Peninsula around Mecca during his lifetime. Naturally, the Quran is written in the language that Muhammad spoke. Muslims believe that the only true form of the Quran is in Arabic. Once the Quran is translated into another tongue the translation is not longer the pure form of God’s word. Also, another major difference between Medieval Christianity and Islam is that in Islam there were no established clerics for the vast majority of the muslim community. There were formal and informal leaders among muslim communities of faith but there was no bureaucracy that existed solely to explain and interpret the word of God to the common person. In fact, in Islam followers were expected to read God’s word for themselves and make their own decision on how to worship Allah from Muhammad’s prophecy in the Quran and his example in the book of his life (the Sunnah). In order to be a good muslim you were expected to read and understand Arabic. With no formal educational infrastructure when Islam started, this was a tall order. The way that this problem was solved was that everywhere that Islam was carried teachers went with it. Mosques doubled as places of worship and schools that taught the newly converted how to read and write in Arabic. This was a serendipitous occurrence because as Islam spread from the Indus river valley to the Atlantic ocean the common language of religion became the common language of government, administration, trade, and education. Literate people could read and write Arabic because they were good Muslims and they could use this literacy coupled with paper to effectively advance education, science, and technology. Mosques doubled as schools that taught the devout the Quran. These schools grew into madrasas that taught non-religious subjects like science, math, and the law. These madrasas became the basis for the University system in the Muslim world which was transferred to the west in the 1000s. So today we are going to honor Islamic madrasas and the granting of degrees written on paper from China. Specifically, we are going to recognize the founder of the first formal madrasa in the world, the University of Karaouine in Morocco. This was the first institution in the world to grant degrees to students upon completion of their studies. Al-Karaouine was founded by Fatima al-Fihri in 859. Here is an exerpt from http://ift.tt/1gEezj8 that explains this extrordinary accomplishment in greater detail.

"Speaking of universities, that is also an invention made possible by the Muslim world. Early on in Islamic history, mosques doubled as schools. The same people who led prayers would teach groups of students about Islamic sciences such as Quran, fiqh (jurisprudence), and hadith. As the Muslim world grew however, there needed to be formal institutions, known as madrasas, dedicated to the education of students.

The first formal madrasa was al-Karaouine, founded in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri in Fes, Morocco. Her school attracted some of the leading scholars of North Africa, as well as the land’s brightest students. At al-Karaouine, students were taught by teachers for a number of years in a variety of subjects ranging from secular to religious sciences. At the end of the program, if the teachers deemed their students qualified, they would grant them a certificate known as an ijaza, which recognizes that the student understood the material and is now qualified to teach it.

These first degree-granting educational institutes quickly spread throughout the Muslim world. Al-Azhar University was founded in Cairo in 970, and in the 1000s, the Seljuks established dozens of madrasas throughout the Middle East. The concept of institutes that grant certificates of completion (degrees) spread into Europe through Muslim Spain, where European students would travel to study. The Universities of Bologna in Italy and Oxford in England were founded in the 11th and 12th centuries and continued the Muslim tradition of granting degrees to students who deserved them, and using it as a judge of a person’s qualifications in a particular subject.”

What makes this accomplishment particularly astonishing is that the University of Karaouine was founded by a woman. There were parts of the muslim world that were pretty progressive in 850 but to have anything this important started by any woman was remarkable. It is because of Fatima al-Fihri that millions of people have received degrees from programs of study. Fatima al-Fihri was a remarkable woman whose invention has helped incubate and create scientific progress for over 1000 years. How do we honor such an amazing accomplishment? Today you should make a commitment to formally study something in the next year. Whatever you study is up to you. If you want to take a class and get a degree, that is awesome. If you want to scour the internet and your local library to learn a certain topic, go for it. If you want to apprentice with someone that is proficient in a subject or skill, more power to you. The only requirements that you need to follow is to enjoy what you are learning and be willing to pass it along to another person. Just another word of advice before you take this journey. It is OK to be ignorant and not know everything. Remember that there is a difference between ignorance and stupidity. Ignorance is not knowing what is inside the book because you haven’t read it, stupidity is reading the book and ignoring good ideas that are inside it. Very simply, it is OK to be ignorant but don’t be stupid. via Blogger http://ift.tt/2CsoLxE

#merrynewtonmas seasonofreason

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erinxsmusings-blog · 7 years

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Lessons from the Total Solar Eclipses

It’s eerily interesting that there are 2 total solar eclipses that will cross over the US both in 2017 and 2024. The paths of these 2 eclipses mark an X right on Carbondale, Illinois which is right between the New Madrid faultline in southeastern Missouri and the Wabash Valley faultline in southeastern Illinois. I’m not necessarily suggesting that these eclipses are harbingers of doom and destruction per se, but I do believe they involve significant and symbolic messages that we should be gleaning from the timing and placement of them.

There are 7 years between both eclipses, and in numerology, the number 7 represents the seeking of truth, critical thinking, and hidden truths coming out and being exposed. What I find fascinating about this is that is also the symbolism of an eclipse….the idea that truth and light are being obfuscated by darkness, falsehoods, and deception….that nothing is actually as it seems. Given the tense and divisive political arena of the past many months, where accusations of lies, fraud, and other forms of disinformation have been argued about and debated ad nauseum (myself included), it’s possible that these eclipses will uncover some hard truths, and the placement of an X right on the center of the continental USA is symbolic of that. Or maybe there’s even deeper symbolism in the actual location of the X. I, personally, believe that we (humans) are very connected to Mother Earth and that our emotions, thoughts, fears, and feelings can actually manifest natural occurrences. We are more psychically powerful that we all realize, and if there is enough collective anger, hostility, and friction, this negative energy can seep down into the earth and trigger a reaction. So, maybe it is possible that the X is a warning of a major earthquake...caused by none other than yours (you plural or all y’all) truly. However, because the number 7 calls for the seeking of truth and higher order thinking, I would argue that the X is symbolic of something far more figurative... the idea that we are so divided right now, that if an earthquake would happen, it would literally split the country in 2 right there in Carbondale, Illinois. It’s a suggestion from God or the Source or the universe that we need to do a better job of trying to heal the divide….that we are letting disinformation take over our emotions and prevent us from seeing the common humanity in each other. People on both sides of the political spectrum have been lashing out at each other taking cues from their shadow sides….the X over Carbondale is the bulls eye center of the moon’s shadow both in 2017 and 2024. Therefore, I believe that this intersection or X is a call for us to alleviate our bitter feelings and resentments toward each other, to minimize the friction, to stop letting our shadow sides take over, to smooth over emotional fissures.

All that being said, I don’t always think that “darkness” is meant to represent deceit or negativity, and given that the moon symbolizes the divine feminine, I am not trying to give her a bad rap. In fact, I wonder if there aren’t also Christian-related spiritual messages being delivered by this eclipse. Many scholars of ancient mystic Christian Gnosticism believe that Mary Magdalene was not only NOT a prostitute, but rather the 13th apostle and Jesus’ female counterpart. Gnostic Christians believe that she also carried within her a light similar to Jesus’ and was instrumental in helping spread the word of God. However, unlike dogmatic organized religions would have you believe, Gnostics believe that Jesus and Mary’s message was much more “Buddhist” in nature. In a nutshell, they believed that God’s light lies within each of us, and that through prayer and meditation, we can hear God speaking to us. Gnosticism also asserts that God has been anthropomorphized as a fearsome, omnipotent, omniscient authority, when in actuality our souls each contain a piece of God, and that our human souls are the collective composition of God, including the good, the bad, and the ugly. One can certainly see how this translates into Jesus’ compassion for all, however, Gnostics believe that Jesus’ messages were much more mystical in nature. Much of this was considered heretical by leaders of organized religion, and thus began the spreading of “fake news.” In fact, many of the Gnostic gospels were buried by monks to avoid their being destroyed in the name of blasphemy. There even exists a Gospel of Mary (Magdalene), which was discovered in Egypt in the late 1800s but it wasn’t given much legitimacy (shocking!) until more Gnostic gospels were found by some farmers in Egypt in 1945. With the discovery of these other gospels, more credence was given to the Gospel of Mary, and since that time, Gnostic scholars have been hoping to increase awareness of their existence. Additionally, I don’t believe that it was a coincidence that these texts were discovered in 1945, the year in which World War 2 ended, and the US military industrial complex was developed in response to the Cold War. This leads me to my next conjecture, and that is the symbolism of Mary Magdalene as a moon goddess. Some alternative theological scholars believe that Mary Magdalene is/was the ancient Egyptian goddess, Isis, reincarnated or embodied, and that Jesus was the embodiment of Isis’ husband, Osiris, the god of the sun. There are certainly many parallels between Jesus/Mary and Osiris/Isis. In fact, many say that this is how we derived the word “sun” in English because Jesus was the “son” of God. So, if we take the metaphor of Jesus as the sun and Mary Magdalene as the moon and apply it to the 2017 and 2024 total eclipses, we again have the suggestion that we all need to start putting the truth at the forefront of both our political and personal issues. Like Tanya Donelly suggests in her song tribute, “Mary Magdalene in the Great Sky,” humans are like moths who irresponsibly flock to porchlights, thereby ignoring the bright and mighty moon (Mary M.) shining above “Moths burn on the porch light tonight and every night. We hear them fall like cottonballs. Meanwhile there’s a bright, berry moon above. But they go for the nearer, easier glow.” Later in the song, Donelly asserts that the best way to connect to Mary’s divine energy is through meditation, but that it might require commitment and faith “If you can make it past your own guards tonight. Close your eyes, be still fall in, just trust me on this.” Regular prayer and meditation give us the keys we need to seek our own truths, which will in turn help us see greater truths including those on a global scale. By going for the moon instead of the porchlight, we can more easily see through the skewed stories and false narratives being delivered to us by people in positions of power….the same folks who enjoy keeping us divided so that they can more effectively fund their candidacies through donations from major weapons’ contractors. Now consider that Carbondale lies in an area of Illinois called Little Egypt. And that Carbondale, Illinois is near St. Louis, Missouri. And that the symbol of both St. Louis and Mary Magdalene is the fleur de lis. Of course, all of this could be unrelated, and I could be connecting dots that aren’t even meant to be connected. But even the most skeptical among us would have to agree that all of this divisiveness and hostility isn’t good for our collective culture, and we all need some way to overcome the divide and lies that are being propagated by those who lead us. So, would it really hurt any of us to start going for the moon instead of the porchlight? Can we afford not to?

#tanyadonelly #solar eclipse #mary magdalene #gnostism #moon #divine feminine

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