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she/her. astro enthusiast & witchcraft practioner, wielder of magick & mysticism. lover of aesthetiscism & nature.

[crystalsenergy]

Compability level of a relationship (synastry chart) - part two!

[faffreux]

My sister got a new kitten and it immediately decided to loaf on a watermelon and bless us with this picture.

[petitworld]

Yorkshire, England by Paul Moon

[valtsv]

*approaching the four horsemen of the apocalypse* are you looking for a fifth

[valtsv]

*approaching the seven deadly sins* are you looking for an eighth

[bebs-art-gallery]

Diana Awakening Apollo (1910)

— by Carl Bertling

[roychewtoy]

my watery friend... are you too brushed with the pattern of the dappled light...?

[shisasan]

29 August 1904 James Joyce to Nora Barnacle Joyce Letters of James Joyce [originally published 1966]

[virtuallyinsane]

[lionofchaeronea]

Centaur at the Village Blacksmith, Arnold Böcklin, 1888

[shisasan]

𝙰𝚞𝚐𝚞𝚜𝚝 𝟷𝟸, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟺 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙳𝚒𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚎𝚜 𝙾𝚏 𝙵𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚣 𝙺𝚊𝚏𝚔𝚊, 𝟷𝟿𝟷𝟺-𝟷𝟿𝟸𝟹

[ID: August 12. Didn’t sleep at all. Lay three hours in the afternoon on the sofa, sleepless and apathetic; the same at night. But it mustn’t thwart me. END ID]

[1980vibes]

one of the best feelings is knowing that you’re wanted. knowing that someone wants to talk to you, wants to know how you’re doing, wants to see you.

[wanderlog]

[pyaarisms]

reading isn't enough I need to swallow the book whole

[unichrome]

Beds are so warm and soft when the rest of the world is not

[monstermoviedean]

we should get a government stipend for having to bear the weight of being sad about dean winchester every single day

[evilsupplyco]

Moonlight is so pure and clean that it feels like a gift.

[transgenderer]

i have to carefully avoid thinking too hard about any time period before like the 1900s because i start thinking about all the dead babies and i fucking lose it

like!!!! i trully cannot countenance any argument that the past was better when nearly HALF of all young children died. 

[argumate]

whenever I wonder about why humanity started getting so much nicer in the second half of the 20th century I conclude that it may be related to the fact that we weren’t constantly surrounded by tiny skeletons.

[neriad13]

yeah.

the messed up thing is that I’ve heard literal history teachers (and my own parents) say that the people of the past were used to it and that it didn’t have as big an effect on them as it would have had on us…which is absolutely untrue and so, so freaking dehumanizing - see the 14th century poem ‘Pearl’, in which a father mourns the loss of his infant daughter, with palpable pain

Since in that spot it slipped from me I wait, and wish, and oft complain; Once it would bid my sorrow flee, And my fair fortune turn again; It wounds my heart now ceaselessly, And burns my breast with bitter pain. Yet never so sweet a song may be As, this still hour, steals through my brain, While verity I muse in vain How clay should her bright beauty clot; O Earth! a brave gem thou dost stain, My own pearl, precious, without spot!

I think…that some people have difficulty comprehending the sheer scale of death in the past and so, choose to believe that the ones experiencing it were different from them

[tanadrin]

oh man, Pearl fucked me up so bad when I first read it in university. We know nothing about the Pearl poet (who also wrote Gawain and the Green Knight, plus two other poems, called Patience and Cleanness), though we have four of their poems, and based on the vivid language and the subjects of the poems it’s tempting to infer things about the poet’s life. and I have a really really hard time imagning the Pearl poet was not a parent, bc Pearl is this beautifully wrought poem, with intricate alliteration and repetition and a really thoughtful exploration of the theology that is supposed to comfort us (was supposed to comfort them) when contemplating the death of someone beloved–and at the end of the poem, in this vision where the father is beholding his dead daughter in the paradise of the New Jerusalem in heaven, when she turns to go he can’t help but dive into the stream that separates them, whereupon he suddenly wakes and finds himself alone.

Sometimes the values of the past are a bit strange to us and we have trouble imagining ourselves caring about the things they care about, and sometimes the common bond of humanity shines through in medieval or ancient literature so bright that it astounds you. Pearl definitely belongs in the latter category for me.

[crazy-pages]

By the way, if you’re ever wondering why subsistence farmers of the past tended to be conservative and resist revolutions even though they were getting the worst possible end of the stick, it’s related to this.

Because a bad harvest or a famine didn’t typically look like people starving. That happened when things were apocalyptic, but it was much more common to simply have bad years where there was enough for everyone to survive, but not quite enough to be healthy about it. And do you want to know what that looked like, for subsistence farmers who had to do hard farm labor to grow their food?

It looked like the adults in their prime having to eat their fill while they watched their children and elderly parents not get enough. It meant watching your parents nobly turn away half of their portion, and eating a full hearty meal while you watched your three year old kid beg for more food. Because if you were an adult in your prime and you didn’t eat your fill, you would not have the strength to work the fields, come planting and next harvest and grain preparation. And your entire family would surely die the next year.

But eating that much less typically would not kill your parents or your kids. Typically. It didn’t cause them to keel over and die of starvation directly. What it did was make them more vulnerable to disease. So every year your town had a bad harvest, every year war meant you lost food to the army, whether your own or a hostile one? You were rolling dice. Was this the year your youngest kid would get a winter cold and not have the strength to fight it off? Was this the year your mother finally caught a fever and didn’t wake up in the morning? Maybe, who knew.

So when some revolutionary came around asking you to risk disruption and chaos and possibly war to improve things … what’s going through your head? Trauma. You’re thinking of the two kids you already lost, the bad winter where your father passed, and this fucker is asking you to roll those dice again.

And tradition was so important for the same reason. These subsistence farmers relied heavily on horizontal social ties to get them through individual bad harvests. If you had a good year, you contributed to festival feasts and feted your neighbors, so they would do the same for you if you had a bad year. You did everything you could to ensure that a bad harvest had to occur to the entire town to make you roll the dice. And that meant participating in all of the local traditions, and being on good social terms with your neighbors, and it often meant being in good standing with the local religious organization. Tradition wasn’t just a set of obscure actions, it was a necessary component of not rolling the dice on withholding food from your suffering kid while you rolled dice in your head about whether or not they would die.

[elfwreck]

There’s a line in the Two Towers movie that wasn’t in the original: Theoden saying “No parent should have to bury their child.”

It wasn’t in the book. It couldn’t be. Because Tolkien wrote the books between 1937 and 1949. And while parents grieved horribly for their lost children… everyone just knew that parents buried their children. A lot. That women bore three or six or eleven children, from when they were 16 or 18 or 20, until they were about 40, and buried almost half of them.

The line wouldn’t have been in the book, not because parents didn’t grieve, not because 1/3 of all people’s children died (of course, wealthy families were much less prone to infant mortality), but because at the time, nobody could imagine a world where it was unnatural for parents to see their children die.

By the time LotR was written, infant mortality had improved greatly. But that’s not the world he grew up in, and he wrote LotR after serving in WWI. As far as he could tell, “more children are living through their first few years” could just mean “there’s been a war so fewer children are being born.”

It’s not that Tolkien couldn’t write about a deeply grieving parent. It’s not that Middle Earth is so directly based on European middle ages that he designed that same level of child mortality into the background of his worldbuilding. It’s just that, he wouldn’t have that parent even imply, “it’s against the natural order of things,” because such a concept was outside of his experience. (It’s not against nature. The natural order of things, for a couple million years, has been that about 1/3 to ½ of all human children will not live through puberty.)

Grief was constant.

So was callousness developed to stave off grief.

So was mourning so deep it was almost catatonia; people got lost in their thoughts and just… stopped interacting with the world around them.

Part of the industry and productivity changes in latter half of the 20th century was due to communities not spending so much time either grieving or panicking about who would be gone tomorrow.

[internerdionality]

Fathers mourning their sons is, in fact, a big part of Tolkien’s work.

But not in shock; In despair

[the-haiku-bot]

Fathers mourning their

sons is, in fact, a big part

of Tolkien’s work.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[headspace-hotel]

Vaccines work.