Transforming Medusa

“to look at the Medusa straight on to see her. And she’s not deadly. She’s beautiful and she’s laughing.”

Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself.

Now women return from afar, from always: from "without," from the heath where witches are kept alive; from below, from beyond "cul-ture"; from their childhood which men have been trying desperately to make them forget, condemning it to "eternal rest." The little girls and their "ill-mannered" bodies immured, well-preserved, intact unto themselves, in the mirror.

Frigidified.

But are they ever seething underneath! What an effort it takes-there's no end to it-for the sex cops to bar their threatening return. Such a display of forces on both sides that the struggle has for centuries been immobilized in the trembling equilibrium of a deadlock. Here they are, returning, arriving over and again, because the un-conscious is impregnable.
~ Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa, 1975

Medusa, Audrey Flack, 1991

Medusa's transformations from beautiful maiden to monster and from monster to emblem, are thus both forced on her by males, each of whom is assisted by the masculine goddess [Athene] whose temple Medusa defiles and on whose aegis she will be placed. ~ Charlotte Currie


Elizabeth A. Sackler Centre for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum
Healing and Medusa: Shedding the Stigma of the Gorgon Myth - Owlmirror

She Loosened Her Hair and He Kissed its Waves in the Moonlight

textile art "Blonde, lifted" by Inge Stahl

It is written that Loki Laufeyarson, out of sheer malice, once cut off all of Sif's hair, and when Thor heard of it, he grabbed Loki and was about to break every bone in his body until he promised to have the black elves make a head of hair for Sif from gold, one that would grow like real hair.

The emotionally charged triangle of Sif, Loki and Thor is all the more evident in the eddic poem Lokasenna, when Sif tries to placate Loki in the midst of his malicious wrangling: "Then Sif approached, offered Loki mead from a crystal cup and said: 'Hail now, Loki, accept this crystal cup, full of antique mead. Better find one woman, among the AEsir's sons, who is without fault.'

He accepted the horn and drank it down: 'You'd be the one, if only you were wary and cautious with men; but I know someone, it seems to me, who made you unfaithful to Thor, and that one was crafty-wise Loki."
Sif signifies summer Fertility and corn, hence Loki's cutting of her hair is interpreted as a fire destroying a corn field. Sifs name is cognate with the German sippe, meaning "kith and kin." From this we may assume that, like Frigga, Sif is a goddess associated with peace and friendship in a happy family, and with conjugal fidelity.

Don't believe everything you read.

Text sourced from Valkyrie Tower

Runes compatible with sif are Berkana and Inguz.

 

 

Rune of isolation or separation in order to create a space or place where the process of transformation into higher states of being can occur. Rune of gestation and internal growth.  Inguz represents the Great Mother.  She is the sacred power of female sexuality. When she appears in your spread, the counsel is to honour your own sexuality and recognise it as a source of magic.

 

“One is not born, but becomes, a woman.” — Simone de Beauvoir

 

Voices of Sophia

The Journey is Home

textile sculpture "Mute Servant" by Inge Stahl

 

Be an empowered woman, a citizen of planet Earth in a pervasively patriarchal time/space, whose power is emerging full force through the aegis of other women as She moves into and beyond........  Nelle Morton 1905-1987
 

Biography of Nelle Katherine Morton

 

 

A Mythic Life : Gene Tierney

Gene Tierney

On 6 June 1943, a conjunction of Sun with Saturn in Gemini squared Gene Tierney's natal Jupiter in Virgo opposing natal Moon conjunct Uranus in Pisces.

At some stage in June 1943, brushing aside advice to not attend, Gene would make her only appearance at the Hollywood Canteen.  There she would shake hands with a woman serving in the military, who brushing aside the rules of her medical quarantine, would infect her 'favourite actress' with rubella virus.

Gene Tierney was in the first-to-second trimester of pregnancy with her child Antoinette Daria Cassini, who would be born premature on 15 October 1943, weighing less than 4lbs and needing a total blood transfusion. Daria was born partially blind, entirely deaf, severely retarded and spent the majority of her life within institutionalized care. Daria's father, Oleg Cassini, "King of Bridal" would pick up the tab for the most part.  Howard Hughes would prove himself a kind, generous and loyal friend to Gene.

Daria Cassini died just before her 67th birthday on September 11 2010.  She is survived by her youngest sister, Tina; two nieces and two nephews, and six grandnieces and nephews.

The argument continues between the anti-vaccination league of mothers, who fear their children may develop autism, and the Department for Public Health & Safety who are advised by expert microbiologists and immunologists.

Gene Tierney wrote of her anguish over Daria's fate in her autobiography 'Self-Portrait' and her own eventual decline into mental illness, delusions and emotional collapse and the popular treatments of the 1950s.  Treatments that my own mother endured in 1950s Australia.

I recall how as a child I had a prominent vaccination scar on my upper arm that I was self-conscious about because the children at primary school would tease me about it: like it was a witches mark.  I don't know if I had an adverse reaction to my baby/early childhood vaccinations.  I have no idea what medications my mother, who had manic depression, was taking whilst pregnant with me. 

There just wasn't the awareness then of the hazards and risks with pharmaceuticals.  Those were the days when medical science was still figuring things out.  The doctors told Gene Tierney that there was no risk to her child-in-utero from the bout of rubella she had contracted.  Maybe the doctors didn't want to dash Gene's hopes. 

The fact is, if they had told her the truth, had told her there was an 85% chance her child would be born severely disabled, then Gene and Oleg could have considered their options.  Terminating the pregnancy on medical grounds being one of them.

Oleg Cassini called his first wife the "unluckiest lucky woman in the world". 

Gene Tierney filmed 'The Ghost and Mrs Muir" not long after being  encouraged to place her first-born daughter, Daria, into care.  That movie is a perennial favourite of mine.  How hard, and Hollywood-cruel, must it have been for Gene to play the mother of young daughter (Natalie Wood) in a chocolate-box perfect story of female independance in the late 19th century.

Back then it was felt that the best practice in the event of personal crisis was to "keep busy to take your mind off things".  Gene Tierney was kept so busy in the early 50s that she lost her mind completely.

We can only hope that 'best practice' has gotten a whole lot better in the 21st Century.  Now, more than at any other time, is it essential for people and families experiencing extreme personal crises to shield themselves against the inevitable pathologizing of emotional responses that are appropriate to the life circumstances which have altered.

Being touted as one of the most beautiful women of her time and then giving birth to an 'imperfect' child was a solid shattering of any notions Gene had of living the fairy-tale life with Count Cassini.

When the gods come calling, nothing prepares you for the form in which they'll arrive. 

 

Sapphire Blue: a sterile hybrid

Thirsty bees and wasps drinking from fountain pond - Norton Conyers, Yorkshire

 

 

 

Norton Conyers is believed to have been the inspiration for Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The author came here in 1839 and describes the secret staircase used by Mr Rochester as a short cut to the attic where Mrs Rochester was incarcerated so, when, a blocked staircase was discovered in 2004, it created much excitement. The author is also believed to have based her idea for the mad Mrs Rochester on one of the family's aunts who was ill and confined to a garret.

 

 

 

 

How Stean Gorge, Yorkshire

 

 

One cold winter day a fisherman had gone out to sea. It began to grow stormy when he was about to return and he had trouble enough to clear himself. He then saw, near his boat, and old man with a long gray beard, riding on a wave. The fisherman knew well that it was the merman he saw before him, and he knew also what it meant. 

 

“Uh, then, how cold it is!” said the merman as he sat and shivered, for he had lost one of his hose.

 

The fisherman pulled off one of his, and threw it out to him. The merman disappeared with it, and the fisherman came safe to land. Some time after this, the fisherman was again out at sea, far from land. All at once the merman stuck his head over the gunwale, and shouted out to the man in the boat,

“Hear, you man that gave the hose,

Take your boat and make for shore,

It thunders under Norway.”

The fisherman made all the haste he could to get to land, and there came a storm the like of which has never been known, in which many were drowned at sea.

 

The Fisher and the Merman
From Scandinavian Folklore, ed William Craigie, 1896

 

 

 

Bees working the Sea-Holly

 

 

'Sapphire Blue' is a garden cultivar with the largest flowers of any sea holly. It is not invasive. The wild form of E. planum is capable of being too aggressive in the Northwest, but 'Sapphire Blue' is a sterile hybrid.

 

Latter image and text swiped from Beautiful North Yorkshire

Folklore migrated from Seven Miles of Steel Thistles

 

 

 

The Feminine Mystique: my mother, Betty.

Loving Woman
Edvard Munch 1894

all that I am, I will not deny.....it's the core of me

I was one month shy of turning two when The Feminine Mystique first came out. I have never read Betty Friedan's classic call to arms and growing up in the tyranny of distant Australia, it was Melbourne's own Germaine Greer who I was most familiar with.  Although I didn't come to an interest in reading any of her books until I was in my late 40s and, even now, I have yet to read one of her books all the way through.

I have lived for over 50 years.  I was there.  I don't need to really read about what I experienced although it helps to see myself a part of a greater cycle.  It soothes the ancient hurts to know that it wasn't personal after all.  There was no particular dislike of me, only my femininity.  It still astonishes me though that in 20th Century Australia, I was met by attitudes that I had no idea were the subtext of my life.  I, and my generation, were a little too young; born to be kept dumb.

Pluto in Virgo: the Bridge generation.  Trolls beneath, scapegoats crossing.  Aye, I can live with that imagery.....a beautiful bridge over an old old stream.

It was the 1970s glossy woman's magazine, Cleo, which provided bite-size morsels from the front-lines of the Women's Liberation Movement for my generation to puzzle over.  Born in 1961, I was only 16 when feminism reached fever-pitch in Melbourne and I was too adolescent to know what the core issues were, yet I was the right age to absorb the ideas, that zeitgest which was being generated by those fierce women, who themselves had been surged forth by the fierce women before them.  Those unknown and nameless pioneers, the women who blazed a path for their grand-daughters and great-grand-daughters to follow.

We all feel those pioneers. Their stories hum in our genes, their legacies of flesh and blood gaze back at us from every mirror, the contours of their lives dwell in the Void of ours.....waiting. 

Anticipating joyfully our visitations; for our thoughts to alight on them like feathers from our dreams.  Their eyes the eyes behind ours wondering at hemlines, clucking over 1001 tales of what we think their lives were really like. 

How little we know. 
How much they love us. 
The notion of us...

We owe it to our ancestors to put right that which they did in-advisedly.  We owe it to our ancestors to look back with kindness and compassion and say:  Do not be afraid.  I know you that you were not aware of that which you were doing.  It is enough that I know what to do and that I remember you well,  and in the remembering, all shall be well.  All is well.

I am one of Betty Friedan's spiritual daughters. 
We are all the children of Ceres,
Siblings to Persephone


Further Reading:
The Feminine Mystique’: ‘All that I am I will not deny’
Looking Back at a Domestic Cri de Coeur

For Kaspar: the ninth wave

 In The Handmaiden’s Tale, Margaret Attwood wrote of such people:

“We were the people who were not in the papers.

We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print…

We lived in gaps between the stories.”

I rose and rose through the skies and reached the outer reaches of the earth. Nothing could bring me down.....

The thing with Schizophrenia is that sometimes you will get these sort of manic phases where everything seems to revolve around you. My delusions feed into this since today it seems like everything has happened for a reason. Every little thing on my way today was put there by the gods, or the suits behind the scenery, and I know it seems weird but that's what I feel like. I know it's not true and I dont believe in fate but today it certainly seems like the entire world revolves around me and only me.

When I get like this I go so high that I loose touch with earth. I go farther than my life support can handle and that's when the fall kicks in.

 

A seemingly endless fall triggered by the fact that your brain is so full of signals to interpret that it just shuts down. The entire overjoyed state of mind shifts and turns into depression and sends you falling faster than anyone can catch you. I know because I've been here before. I've gone through this countless times already. Being so manic and happy thinking that everything is put in your way for a reason. Spending tons of cash on pointless things because you get a wicked impulse in your brain that tells you that you have to have this now and that it won't be there next month when you can actually afford it.

 

People with schizophrenia often act on impulse a lot and I am very guilty of that. It makes me fun to be around as I'll get weird ideas in the middle of the night and act on them, but it's dangerous for me as it's not just like an idea that pops up into my mind. It's a need or a craving for something that I can't ignore.

 

For instance. When I've gone to bed and cant sleep all of a sudden I will get this idea that I need food. I'm not really hungry or anything I just want to eat. So instead of ignoring that and getting a good nights sleep I get out of bed and cook not because I want to but because I have to.

 

Otherwise bad stuff will happen.

I've been to many record stores and bought a ton of vinyls that I couldnt afford simply because my brain was telling me that I need to get theese things otherwise something will happen.

Sourced from theendlessfall: a story


The author of this blog has not written since July 2012.  In his last post, Kaspar wrote: the mortality rate for people with schizophrenia is frightening...up to 13% successfully kill themselves while a staggering 60% of all males suffering have attempted suicide one time or more.

I think in total I've had about 10 suicide attempts.....1 or 2 of which were more serious than just attempting.


I feel in my heart that this articulate young man has......... left the building.


 

The Orthopedic Position

 

 

 

In a novel I read long ago, an intern said he had put an obnoxious patient’s bed in “the orthopedic position.” When asked what that meant, he said:

.... "you put the bed as high as it will go and hope the patient will fall out and break something so you can transfer them to the orthopedic service and be rid of them".


That was fiction, but the reality is that every doctor has difficult patients he dreads seeing on his appointment list, sometimes because they are obnoxious but often because their symptoms are stubbornly resistant to treatment and he knows he has nothing more to offer them. Referring them to an acupuncturist would be an easy way out, a way to reduce stress and to avoid guilt feelings for being unable to help those people.

Surely that is a natural temptation.

“Integrative” medicine is another tempting way out. When science-based medicine has little or nothing to offer, the “integrative medicine” concept is seductive. It allows you to step outside the constraints of the scientific arena. In CAM there are no rules because there’s no solid evidence to base rules on; you can pretty much try anything that occurs to you, and just make things up as you go.

~ Harriet Hall, MD
Science-Based Medicine





Lilith on Luke 13:11-13

Abraham took Isaac's hand
And led him to the lonesome hill
While his daughter hid and watched
She dare not breathe; she was so still

Just as an angel cried for the slaughter
Abraham’s daughter raised her voice

Then the angel asked her what her name was
She said, "I have none."
Then he asked, "How can this be?"
"My father never gave me one."

And with his sword up raised for the slaughter
Abraham’s daughter raised her bow
"How darest you, child, defy your father?"
"You better let young Isaac go."

 

~ lyrics Arcade Fire,

 

 

¹¹ And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself.

¹² And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity.

¹³ And he laid his hands on her: and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God.

Jaysus Christ on a piece of toast,

Thank God for that!!

Now I can get my legs up over my head again

and go back to work as a

Whore!