hometowns

this is assuming its on art you normally wouldn't jump to reblog. i myself only rb stuff i really really like so .

The 'rude/demanding' tone would be stuff along the lines of "if you like but don't reblog I'll [threat]" which i see surprisingly often, both serious and more silly

I’m going to unlearn shame *bursts into tears and beats my head against a brick wall*

Cone minions

And she would say, idly, more as prayer than demand: “Have you worked out who I am?”

prints

you really havent considered how "hide and seek" by imogen heap plays into this have you

get your power then reblog and tell everyone in the tags!

Note: Powers only work with enthusiastic consent!

(The first poll here was very obviously way too easy for too many of you, this time the landslide option's out, have fun ^^)

I miss working with charcoal but charcoal is expensive so today I have been trying to figure out how to create the same effect digitally.

3 portraits of people with pigeons as I worked out the technique, roughly 45 minutes each

catgirl hrt.. meowstrogen redux

Indeed, the spiritual profundity revealed in any number of exegetical constructions, as well as the prolific variety of myths that appear on every page, suggest a still-fresh spirit of creativity, although the mystics themselves believed that they were in touch with a fixed structure of wisdom. Perhaps it was the very diversity of scriptural language that kept the teachers alive and seeking; for each sentence of Scripture is different, and this meant that the truths of Divinity could not be summarized or reduced to any one pattern. One may further suppose that it was this very linguistic vitality that prevented mythmaking from becoming idolatrous. The exegete’s sense of touching the mysteries of God with words was outrun at every step by each new verse or pattern of verses, and by the mystic’s perception that no myth was the ultimate or final formulation of truth.

—The Exegetical Imagination : On Jewish Thought and Theology by Michael Fishbane

this book was somewhat disappointingly Standard to me, so extra insane of it to casually drop a passage that slaps this hard in the middle of a chapter?????

Peacocks are hilarious, really. They really are just like

I love art about the city. I love it because I love the city; I think neon light reflected in wet asphalt is one of the prettiest things in the world. But I also love it because the city is a built environment. We create these utterly surreal landscapes and then wonder at them like we would any natural vista. When we make art about how the city makes us feel, we’re making art about how we’ve made ourselves feel.

Of course, we make art about ourselves all the time, about human nature or human acts. But while cities in reality are human acts, the city in our art is not. The city in our art is made of the same stuff as gods.

But really, is that wrong? The emergent structure of modern human civilization is, for all intents and purposes, as impersonal as the weather or the motions of stars, and the city embodies that. It represents everything about the human-made world that is too large for humans to comprehend, a testament to how much greater 8 billion is than 1.

That’s why I love art about the city.

A poet is what he is in himself. Gertrude Stein used to distinguish between a person who is an 'entity' and one who has an 'identity.' A significant man is an entity. Identity is what they give you socially. Your little dog recognizes you and therefore you have an identity. An entity, by contrast, an impersonal power, can be a frightening thing. It's as T. S. Eliot said of William Blake. A man like Tennyson was merged into his environment or encrusted with parasitic opinion, but Blake was naked and saw man naked, and from the center of his own crystal. There was nothing of the 'superior person' about him, and this made him terrifying. That is an entity. An identity is easier on itself. An identity pours a drink, lights a cigarette, seeks its human pleasures, and shuns rigorous conditions. The temptation to lie down is very great.

— Saul Bellow, from Humboldt’s Gift

pg., 311

Height gap romance except the shorter one is frequently depicted in situations where they are contextually taller. The taller one sitting while the shorter one looms over them. Both of them lying in bed with the taller one’s head pressed to the shorter one’s chest. The shorter one straddling the taller one’s lap and leaning down for a kiss. The taller one on their knees as the shorter one tilts their head up. Please, it makes me go feral

rain photo study

cagey friend replied to this in dm’s and said i could quote:

although i wouldn't be surprised if writing out a true name of g-d would also like. holify you.

a really interesting thing i think in the series is that an understanding of the god isn't just what happens after holification, it's something which is prior to holification too. i think tesena is a good example here, focusing on g-d: it's not that g-d sees tesena's pillar of light and that causes Them to be holified, it's more that…. g-d is already quite close w tesena at that point, they already have a sense for what tesena is, they've been discussing tesena's Difficulties for a while!

and right before tesena manifests;

And Their eyes, all focusing on one point, and that point is Teśena’s want. Burning bright, so bright, the same as God’s—

is when things slide into place (for them both) and all these scraps of informations are now an entire coherent whole that points and adds up to something else:

“And that pillar is God’s response. An agreement, if you can call it that.”

in a sense w a god, a price is what you pay for knowing one too "closely" (? it's not like, an intimacy, but like… [gestures]. experiential knowing of a certain kind.), but w [name one] you gotta kinda. know them first in some sense.…g-d being quite fae with their names, their names as an "expression" of them basically, like speaking a name of theirs summons their full force unto you because it's like… their name is them, you've manifested them…. but this interplays w the whole thing of having to actually figure out g-ds name, you have to. puzzle it out. so it's smthing knowable in that sense, it's smthing that can be found and presumably not sheerly through dumb luck, hence my headcanon that g-d doesn't have a fixed amnt of names/every holy says a different name…

anyway this is all to say; i think someone who writes down a name of g-d is beyond the point of no return and the act they take which proves that they Know G-d's Name is one they will pay the price for

again thinking about this and again too meandered off to feel like adding it to a reblog addition, about a specific casual ableism overlooking i did here with the line:

(though hm. within holy-circles, tongue-price holies (eg the option that can be explicitly nonconsensually done) specifically perhaps? but that's a subset)

the idea of tongue-prices, from verbally speaking a name of g-d with the tongue, being the ONLY way to force g-d to holify someone isn’t actually canon! what’s canon is that finding out one of g-d’s names is the only way to force it. from birds:

“Although, you can find out one of Their names, of course. Then They can’t reject you. That’s how Lilith did it.  So, if you’re really serious about it, why not try that?”

i know intellectually perfectly well that sign language is — linguistically and neurologically and etc — the same as speech (unlike writing, which isn’t btw! it’s a different skill), but clearly my brain casually conflated language with speech in remembering it, instead of remembering the exact wording.

so — there are probably many hand/arm-price holies who signed a name of g-d, consensually or not.

in fact! if it was done with realism/verisimilitude/research accuracy on the part of the in-universe author, it’s probably the method the fictional protagonist of the in-universe novel in chapter 5 of stars used to lose both of her hands followed by intense regret and dislike, as in Birds g-d is suspicious of and insulted by holification requests that are motivated by misunderstandings and projection about the request’s relevance or lack thereof to the actual underlying desire. i mean afaict it sounds like the unnamed novel might be an uncharitable depiction, and therefore might not have much accuracy, but otoh we never find out how the book ends, we don’t know if the depiction is negative as in bigoted/meanspirited or simply negative as in focused on the potential negative outcome of an incredibly high-risk action. and lucifer’s projection and wishful thinking in summarizing it is pretty thick. and i know i definitely prefer the reading that the situation the novel depicts is a possible one rather than impossible.

and even if it is a meanspirited fearmongering depiction, that might ironically be even more fitting: the very next two epistolary texts in Stars that appear after that novel — in chapter 6 — have a theme of the emotional valence of a text and the factual implications of it being at odds, even more specifically than the general recurrence throughout Stars of texts that explain concepts in an intensely alienating and misleading, even if not actually factually inaccurate, way. the epigraph of ch 6 is the fallen angel asriel railing against the devil-like seductive corruption of g-dfire in a way where the most interesting interpretation imo is that nothing they say is actually untrue, just a very funny ‘wow you’re talking about this like it’s a bad thing.’ and, in the book yenatru’s reading, by the angel israfil, whose treatise mentions g-d-manifestation in neatly logical and reassuringly positive terms, but terms that appear to at the very least have basically no experiential truthfulness/salience, especially by the end of the series.

thinking about how when you experience a lot of shame in your formative years (indirectly, directly, as abuse or just as an extant part of your environment) it becomes really difficult to be perceived by other people in general. the mere concept of someone watching me do anything, whether it's a totally normal activity or something unfamiliar of embarrassing, whether I'm working in an excel spreadsheet or being horny on main, it just makes my skin crawl and my brain turn to static because I cannot convince myself that it's okay to be seen and experienced. because to exist is to be ashamed and embarrassed of myself, whether I'm failing at something or not, because my instinctive reaction to anyone commenting on ANYTHING I'm doing is to crawl into a hole and die. it's such a bizarre and dehumanizing feeling to just not be able to exist without constantly thinking about how you are being Perceived. ceaseless watcher give me a god damn break.