#averno theories

[gsirvitor]

https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech

And as for misinformation, you lie. You simply make statments that are nor true.

Yes yes, I know that Hate speech exists as a legal precept in certain nations, I however rebuke its validity and use.

The origin of hate speech laws has been largely forgotten. The divergence between the United States and European countries is of comparatively recent origin. In fact, the United States and the vast majority of European (and Western) states were originally opposed to the internationalization of hate speech laws.

European states and the U.S. shared the view that human rights should protect rather than limit freedom of speech and expression.

The introduction of hate speech prohibitions into international law was championed in its heyday by the Soviet Union and allies. Their motive was readily apparent.  The communist countries sought to exploit such laws to limit free speech.

As such, I reject hate speech and the prohibitions its proponents wish to impose on free people, for it is not only Communist, it is the same tactic every totalitarian ideology has adopted since time immemorial.

Punishing ideas and speech, whatever they may be, is to aid and abet tyranny, and leads to the abuse of power. As far as I am concerned, ideas should be fought with ideas and reasoning; theories must be refuted by arguments and not by threat of violence, imprisonment, exile, or fine.

Clearly, many proponents of hate speech laws do not share the same ideologies and methods as those who originally proposed them, and many may have the best of intentions, yet I hold to the saying, facilis descensus Averno, the descent to hell is easy, or its modern rendition, the best intentions pave the way to Hell.

As for misinformation and lies, I'd need you to prove your claims rather than merely asserting them, lest you yourself be called a liar dear anon.

[catilinas]

hihi is necronarrative an extablished theory i could read about or look into more? 👀 do you have any recs or should i start fishing?

i am so sorry to have to inform you that it is a word i made up like last week :/ and i'm not entirely sure what i mean by it yet, but definitely Something. it is vaguely adjacent to the stuff in this tag (which is a line from lucan in averno by sonya taaffe) but like. my tongue between his teeth will speak is more about authors (re)animating or repurposing the dead via writing (and imo includes Translation As Necromancy my beloved) while necronarratology is more. what if an inset narrative was a dead person. narratives around and about a dead person. not necessarily reanimated in any way. or even specifically not reanimated in any way. like how else is the death written around or what is it written into. there is definitely overlap between the two ideas! they are both ways of thinking about what's going on behind the amount of ''''''agency'''''' a work gives to dead people, and what for in which direction etc. idk im still figuring it out. i recommend lucan's pharsalia probably! or like anything about narratology and then put ghosts in it. it's just narratology with dead people. hauntology adjacent?????? probably. but with more narratology :-)

#i am a metronome swinging between i am so big brained forever and i have no idea what i'm talking about. hope this helps #but at least the answer is not: When Leg #necronarratology #<- tag is so tiny rn! it's in progress! #beeps

[lucy-ghoul]

Tbr list that I will hopefully complete before the end of summer:

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

The Orphan's Tales: In The Night Garden by Catherynne M. Valente

Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt

Maurice by E. M. Forster

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

Journey at the End of the Millennium by Abraham Yehoshua

The City of Brass by S. A. Chakraborty

and last but not least: Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin (the fourth book of the Earthsea Cycle - which I'm loving btw)

(In theory Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter, The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, Stardust by Neil Gaiman, and Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno by Italo Calvino are included in this list but let's be honest here, I will never manage to read those ones too before the end of August lmao)

Now, my favorite books from 2022 (at least so far):

Grendel by Josh Gardner (!!! i wasn't expecting it to be that great but omg. it really was. gorgeous prose + existential philosophy + tragic antivillain/antihero maneater monster as protagonist? i mean.)

Averno by Louise Glück

The Plague by Albert Camus

Hygiène de l'Assassin and Journal d'Hirondelle by Amélie Nothomb (batshit insane stuff. 100% recommended)

Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen (unhinged fictional women my beloveds <3)

Salomé by Oscar Wilde (unhinged fictional women my beloveds <3 part 2)

Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (ditto part 3)

The Hours by Micheal Cunningham

An Oresteia by Aeschylus, Sophokles, and Euripides (translated by Anne Carson) (and yes, that's where the famous "it's rotten work" "not to me. not if it's you" comes from lmao. also family drama and greek tragedies <3)

technically L'amica geniale/My Brilliant Friend saga by Elena Ferrante (my beloved!!) although that was a reread. but this time I appreciated it even more so I'm including it in the list

#writing it all down on tumblr just as a journal kind of thing #though i already have goodreads for that #and an office word document with my complete and long ass tbr list (which idt i could ever successfully complete in one lifetime) #val speaks #txt

[coswintercabin]

Headmaster Theory

Okay so the last post I rbed made me think of something- So everyone knows that, as far as we know, no one has actually seen or even know who the headmaster is right? What if the headmaster is someone we see everyday? What if the headmaster is a student? Or at least someone who looks like a student- What if the headmaster pretends to be apart of DCD or DHS or maybe the rumored seventh department everyday, even sitting in our classes just to make sure no one knows that they're the headmaster- I have no real evidence for this but it would make sense why not even the teachers would know the true identity of the headmaster- I mean how would you expect your teachers to not single you out or act strangely around you if they know who you are???

Well that's my latest theory for ANS, stay tuned for more of Claude's theories! @avernotown

#ans headmaster #the headmaster #a new school #claude's theories #who knows i could be completely wrong #averno

[thatonecrowperson]

Okay so I found this new musical called Willow and it's set in this town called Averno where there are going to be more musicals set in and it's like a gigantic story over many musicals (you guys should check it out it's very nice) and basically the story is about lgbtq+, mental health and witches.

(Edit) LINKS

https://instagram.com/avernotown?igshid=2m3z6bkb8d4x

https://link.tospotify.com/kKmsUJk0cab

⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️

Spoiler warning (I guess)

⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️

So I have this theory that Grace is already dead and like a spirit and since Cassie is a witch(I'm assuming) she can like see her and in the song "I'm here" Cassie is committing suicide and Grace is like welcoming her to the afterlife/ spirit world

#Averno #Willow #musical #fan theory #theory

[martyncrucefix]

Louise Gluck's Poetry: Whole But Not Final

Louise Gluck’s Poetry: Whole But Not Final

Lots of hits in the last 24 hours on my earlier blog post about Louise Gluck. Being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature tends to have that effect… She’s a fascinating writer, always experimenting, but Anne Carson or Claudia Rankine would have come before her on my list. But given the obvious interest in her work, I’m posting here the text of the review I wrote for Poetry London in 2014 of…

View On WordPress

#A Village Life #Anne Carson #Ararat #Averno #Cape Poetry #Carcanet Press #Claudia Rankine #George Oppen #Jacques Brel #Michael Longley #Nobel Prize in Literature #Proofs and Theories #Samuel Beckett #St Francis #T H White #The Sword in the Stoone #Thomas Mann

[loveriddenpilled]

my favorite part about working on averno but also being a fan account in my core is that even though i know the secrets, i feel the same hype as everyone else trying to theorize.

like!! y’all??? are??? so??? cool????? and the theories are so exciting to watch unfold and give some of the best happy vibes that make our community what it is

#averno #avernotown

[ejsplace]

Who is the Headmaster?

//

No one quite knows what they look like. Their face is always in a shadow and they never appear for more than a few seconds and always out of focus. Sometimes they wear a long dark dress, other days they wear a crisp black suit and tie. Personally? I think the Headmaster used to be a Wild One. After they grew up, they decided to leave the forest and start a life elsewhere. However, they did not find that life satisfactory. So, they returned to Averno with the hope of educating today’s Wild Ones so that if they chose to leave the forest, they have a better shot at life.

Then again, what do I know? It’s all just theories anyway...

@avernotown

#averno #avernotown #a new school #department of higher powers #department of dead languages #averno freshman

[catilinas]

need to read bartsch’s aeneid i am SURE it is deeply haunted by lucan

#scholarly Beef over whether reception can work backwards and whether it makes sense to talk abt e.g. lucan in vergil #rather than vergil in lucan. the answer obviously is that time is fake do what you want #but a cool and fun way to Get to this answer is just think of reception as haunting (it is) and then remember that time in death is FUCKED #like across SO many different depictions of the underworld. Time In Death Is Weird. and that includes backwards #lucan's ghost is literally chilling in the underworld in aeneid 6 writing the pharsalia before vergil has even finished the aeneid #vergil just didn't mention him bcs he wasnt relevant to aeneas' journey #this is so obviously referencing a poem sonya taafe play lucan in averno #like hindsight as foresight DOES make sense actually! if you are dead #when i get to actually study theories of life after death next term i am going to become so even more insufferable #beeps

[whispersthroughtheplywood]

Hello and Welcome to WhispersThroughThePlywood!

My name is Cherry Phoenix, and I go by They/Them and Xe/Xem pronouns (also other neopronouns).

Submissions and asks are open!

Averno related posts are mostly in the same fashion as @avernoconfessions , but anything else is a chaotic fucking mess.

Submissions Rules

Submissions are for Overheard at ANS quotes, Averno memes, or anything else Averno related that you want me to post

Asks Rules

Asks are for questions, tea spilling, finding your lost items and pets (please include how and when you'd like them to be returned), scheduling appointments, or strange messages, and theories about our school.

Also it appears poems!!! You can now (for free) commission a poem from me!

Template 1

2-5 words: (can be Names, Items, Places, anything)

Tone: (happy, sad, angry, romantic, etc)

Long/Short

Am I allowed to show the poem to the public: (i.e. on my writing accounts/to use in a portfolio)

Template 2

Theme: About something specific/someone specific

Long/Short

Am I allowed to show the poem to the public: (i.e. on my writing accounts/to use in a portfolio)

I do not judge. If you want something extremely depressing, I will write it. I will also check up on you 💖.

I hope you enjoy your stay!!!

#welcome to averno #a new school #averno #poems #commisions #free art

[luthienne]

How does one let go? Of another, of one's self, of the life you thought you were living. Do you know any fitting poems or quotes describing the phenomenon of moving forward?

I’m not sure that I’ve ever let go of anything in my entire life. This Anne Carson quote always seems to sum up my thoughts in four succinct lines:

I find the phenomenon of letting go so inextricably tied with the idea of healing or recovery, perhaps because that’s what the desire to “let go” and move forward looks like for me. How do you let go of something that happened to you or within you, something that has altered your conception of the world from one day to the next, that has altered your own perception of yourself, of who you thought you were or could be, of what you thought your life would be? How to come to terms with the reality that there is no return to who you were before? 

For me it’s less a deliberate choice to brush my hands together and “let go”, but more simply putting one foot in front of the other every day until I find myself in a (perhaps even just slightly) different place than before. It’s allowing myself to grieve what I thought my life would be, and also allowing space to hold gratitude for what my life contains. It’s waiting for everything inside of me and around me to shatter, and meanwhile still moving forward. It’s allowing myself to realize that I’m still here and I’m still a whole person, even if the pieces of me have shattered and rearranged themselves into something I don’t necessarily always recognize. It’s sitting alone with myself, with the silence that sometimes makes a home of my throat, with the restlessness beneath my skin, with the fear that who I am becoming won’t be enough, and moving anyway in any direction but back. It’s sitting with grief and shame and bitterness and groundlessness, and understanding that these feelings are temporary, and not things be used to validate my fears or distortions.

I think the deliberate choice involved for me is the one to allow space for growth, to not cling so tightly to past hopes or ideas that there is no longer any room for anything else, anything new, anything different. It’s allowing myself the belief and compassionate understanding that I can be something other than I thought or hoped I would be, and it’s ok. I think sometimes we deny ourselves chances to grow or change because of the shame we feel that we have failed, and to deny ourselves those opportunities for growth would be the real shame. What others believe does not matter—that we have invested ourselves utterly in a relationship that failed is no shame on us, that we have invested ourselves utterly in a dream or a hope that just didn’t work out is no shame on us. I think the worst thing is to remain in a place that is no longer serving us for fear of appearing the failure to others. There is so much opportunity to be had in letting go of one thing, anything, to make room for something else.

I don’t know that this compilation of poetry, essays, literature, and letters will offer any insight, or comfort, or guidance. Letting go must surely be an intensely personal process, an intensely personal thing, a different kind of animal for everyone—but still there seem to be some universal experiences. So these are some of the words that came to mind for me—whether they touch on grappling with the impossibility of letting go and moving forward, the hope of it, the desire for it, the loneliness of it, or the frustration with it (bc of course it’s something that cannot be forced, only something that can be allowed):

“What could I have grown up to be? What kind of human woman, what kind of simple, happy thing? If I had never been broken on a bird’s wing. If I had never seen the world naked. I want to be myself again…I want to stop knowing everything I know.”

Catherynne M. Valente, Deathless

“On the surface, I was poised, cool, indifferent. […] The discrepancy between what I would show the world and the chaos I felt grew steadily more intense.”

Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry

“There were glimpses, moments, breathing spaces of calm, but all the rest of the time it was like living in a house that couldn’t be cured of the habit of catching on fire, on a ship that got wrecked every day.” 

Katherine Mansfield, “At the Bay”

“Words can’t describe the wound. / Perhaps more importantly / words alone / can’t heal the wound.”

Emily Pettit, “Hands Like Lighters”

“But sometimes words are the only hands / we have to touch a bruised memory / or cleanse a wound that never healed / or lift a body we carried for years / at last to the pyre of shared grief.”

Fred Dings, Eulogy for a Private Man

“I sat on a gray stone bench / and placed my grief / in the mouth of language, / the only thing that would grieve with me.” 

Lisel Mueller, Alive Together: Poems

“I am not myself, and cannot ever be / again. I am my own emptiness, trying to fill my emptiness / with words.”

Robert Kroetsch, “Letters to Salonika”

“Now that I’m free to be myself, who am I? / Can’t fly, can’t run, and see how slowly I walk.”

Mary Oliver, from Blue Iris

“Can I never escape this interminable mourning for myself?”

Susan Sontag, from Reborn

“The light of the moon poured down; its beauty, / its radiance. / And I grieved and grieved. I grieved for so long.”

from Phoebus was gone, all gone, his journey over (tr. Eavan Boland)

“When will, when will, when will it be enough, / the saying and lamenting?” 

Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected Poems

“…she was only trying to smooth out something she had been given years ago folded up;”

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“It seemed increasingly impossible to remember a time when I had been fully alive, impossible to imagine a future in which I would live that way again.” 

Louise Glück, Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry

“Everything is so fragile. I feel so lost. I live off secret, radiating, luminous rays that would smother me if I didn’t cover them with a heavy cloak of false certainties. God help me: I have no one to guide me and it’s dark again.”

Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life

“Make a place for yourself in the darkness and wait there. Be there.”

Denise Levertov, To Stay Alive

“Losing is also ours; and even forgetting has its shape in the permanent realm of change. Things we’ve let go of circle; and though we’re rarely at the center of these circles: they trace around us the unbroken figure.” 

Rainer Maria Rilke, “For Hans Corossa” (tr. Edward Snow)

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. / It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.”

Mary Oliver, “The Uses of Sorrow”

“Things take us hard, no question. / How do you make it, all the way from here to morning?”

Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck

“Following a fearful night I do not quite / remember came a kind / of dawn, not light, / But something we could see by.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Dream of Saba”

“Afterward, you go back to the old place—all that remains is char: blackness and emptiness. You think: how could I live here? But it was different then, even last summer. The earth behaved as though nothing could go wrong with it. One match was all it took. But at the right time—it had to be the right time. The field parched, dry—the deadness in place already so to speak.” 

Louise Glück, Averno

“…the longing, not for something distant or remote, but for what is lost forever, something that can never return.”

Henia Karmel, A Wall of Two

“When a thing’s gone, it’s gone. It’s over and done with. Let it go then! Ignore it, and comfort yourself, if you do want comforting, with the thought that you never do recover the same thing that you lose. It’s always a new thing. The moment it leaves you, it’s changed.”

Katherine Mansfield, “Je ne parle pas français”

“I cannot go back now. […] For me to go back is impossible, now or later.”

Marina Tsvetaeva, from a letter to Boris Pasternak

“There comes a day when the trees / refuse to let you pass / until you name them.”

Lisel Mueller, Second Language: Poems

“Anyway, it’s in grappling with things at the source that you can tell best whether a thing is worth continuing or not… In other words, everything is worth investigating, wasting time over, if it interests you. There is always a deep, unconcealed reason why it interests you.”

Henry Miller, from a letter to Anaïs Nin 

“We only live by somehow absorbing the past—changing it. I mean really examining it and dividing what is important from what is not (for there is waste) and transforming it so that it becomes a part of the life of the spirit and we are free of it. It’s no longer our personal past, it’s just in the highest possible sense, our servant. I mean that it is no longer our master.”

Katherine Mansfield, from a letter to J.M. Murry

“…only one thing is urgently needed: to attach oneself with unconditional purpose somewhere to nature, to what is strong, striving and bright, and to move forward without guile, even if ithat means in the least important, daily matters. Each time we tackle something with joy, each time we open our eyes toward a yet untouched distance we transform not only this and the next moment, but we also rearrange and gradually assimilate the past inside of us.”

Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Adelheid von der Marwitz

“Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.”

May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

“One must let life run its course. The human being destroys so many things on his own, and it is not in his power to restore anything. Nature, by contrast, has all the power to heal as long as one does not eavesdrop or interrupt it.” 

Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter to Anita Forrer

“Do not try to be saved, but let redemption find you, as it certainly will. Love is its own rescue; for we, at our supremest, are but its trembling emblems.”

Emily Dickinson, from a letter to T.W. Higginson

“To take things easy, not to fight against the ebb and flow of life, but to give way to it—that was what was needed. It was the tension that was all wrong.”

Katherine Mansfield, “At the Bay”

“If you find yourself disappointing—drop self-expectations. What you are turning into you cannot expect to know, but you can trust it, and believe that if it is other than you planned, it will also be better than you planned—however different.”

Kahlil Gibran, from a letter to Mary Haskell

“To live in this world / you must be able / to do three things: / to love what is mortal; / to hold it / against your bones knowing / your own life depends on it; / and when the time comes to let it go, / to let it go.”

Mary Oliver, “At Blackwater Pond”

#this response is abominably late i know #i frankly could not bear to grapple with putting to words the concept of letting go this past year #i was in the midst of it (though tbh i think i always am) #ask #letting go #words #poetry #lit #letters #compilation

[foreverything-averno]

Heres my DHP assignment, this was so much fun to make!

This theory is comforting to me in a way.... I feel like it fits averno well

@avernotown

#a new school #averno

[coswintercabin]

Averno Hcs

I’ve been gone from this blog for a whopping four months so I figured what better way to apologize for my absence then by talking about some of my headcanons for all of Averno!

There are no DHP classes on any of the main pagan holidays (Litha, Imbolc, etc)

The most popular theory about the Averno gossip girl is in that they are one of the students in DCM

It’s said that you can hear the DHS raves going on even during the day

It is a DLH tradition to have the freshmen memorize the locations of the different sections of the library 

DCD students put up at least one new art installation every school year, recently as a prank they put a giant bee sculpture on the quad???

There’s a white board in the DUE common room where they keep track of the cryptids they have documented and which ones are (sadly) fake

Similarly, DCM students have a corkboard for popular theories about the headmaster

DDL students are fluent in at least three languages by the time they finish their freshman year

DCM has a club-turned-podcast where they discuss, and occasionally solve, cases 

While the garden is mainly maintained by DCD students, if you help in the garden from time to time you’re allowed to take some of plants for your own uses

If Dolores likes you enough, she’ll give you a slice of your favorite pie for free on your birthday

All of the professors understand Dreamspeak but every year some student finds that out the hard way

Freshman in DHS only receive help through the maze their first week and after that they are supposed to have the way through memorized.

The cats in the library were all named by DLH students so they all have cute nicknames like Al or Cas that come from names like Aloysius and Cassiopeia 

The medical students of DHP somehow are the most unhealthy people at  campus between constantly eating at the Skyline diner and never getting enough sleep, they are Suffering

Not a single school year goes by without the Destruction students of DCD almost causing SERIOUS harm to the garden yet, besides the Great Ruin of 86, the garden has not actually been hurt. 

#averno #welcome to averno #dcm #dlh #dhs #dhp #due #dcd #ddl #ans #a new school #department of cults and mysteries #department of lost histories #department of hidden sequences #department of unconfirmed existence #department of dead languages #department of creation and destruction #department of higher powers #dolores' pie shop #skyline diner #avernotown

[nyxavernoans1]

Headmaster Theories

- It’s Morgan ( duh)

- It’s Jamie. My legit reasoning for this is because Jamie seems like more the headmaster type and he seems like he has connections

- It’s Aster reincarnate. While we’re unsure if reincarnation exists in Averno, but someone created A New School, had the spirit of Aster deep within them and they created a new school to be the place that Aster intended of them.

#averno #avernofreshman #anewschool