mfbrandi

How intimate is the connection between the Red Goddess and the Crimson Bat? “The one rides on the back of the other,” you say, but the Goddess is a moon — how does that work? A hawk from a handsaw, fine, but would you trust a Gloranthan to know a bat from pterosaur? Take a look at Anurognathus. Would you still? Pterosaurs are archosaurs, dino-relatives, … dragons. And as every schoolgirl knows, a dragon invented being torn apart to create the world. Dragons have been mistaken for parts of the landscape till they rise up into the air. What is that you say about the Red Moon? Yes … “So you are telling me that the Red Moon is really a dragon?” No, keep up, the Crimson Bat is a dragon. “You are supposed to be telling me how moons ride around on bats … or dragons … or something.” Sorry. Have you met my friend Tupandactylus? So you see the Bat is a dragon, the dragon is Sedenya, and the Red Moon is merely her crest — as her head turns relative to you, the Moon phases. Did the Great Compromise prohibit waking dragons? Do we need to distinguish between the destruction of the Red Moon and Argrath’s dicing of Wakboth? Is it the same dragon that dies at the end of every age to create the world anew for the next? Is ever-reincarnating Sedenya the Cosmic Dragon? Surely, that cannot be right … Hedges against link rot:

Spoken like a true Puritan — flesh and the devil!

If you want Chaos gods as great stomping kaiju, have them produced by the world — Cosmos, Glorantha, us — “in a wild effort to fill that non-hole” — chaos features on the grand scale. Think sepsis, anaphylaxis, autoimmune disease — the trigger may be innocuous (a peanut), unknown, … or perhaps nothing at all (a non-hole). We cannot fight Nothing — or nothing — so we create something to fight. Scapegoats. Broos have those heads for a reason, right? But they are still us. We all are. Of course, no one has to follow me in this, at all, and why not have some things labelled “Chaos” be quite unconnected (to this notion and each other)? Finally, I don’t say that this is how Stafford meant to be taken, but it is how it struck my perverted brain.

Not annoying. Clearly, there is no ‘place outside of all places’ — if you find a place where the scary monsters are gathering, you are still inside creation. Try as you might, you cannot get on your bike and pedal out of Cosmos. Cosmos can contain spaces — voids — but it cannot contain the Void, neither is Cosmos located in the Void. The Void is nothing and nowhere. It is not a part of the furniture of the world. It is an excuse for wordplay. It is what I have in place of a heart or compassion. Polyphemus cries out: “Nobody has hurt me.” Gloranthans scream: “Chaos has wounded the world.” If they but knew it, they are right: nothing has wounded the world; it is doing just fine. Polyphemus was not so lucky: somebody had blinded him.

I imagine Nysalorean scholars as chaotic little Wittgensteins garrulously rattling on about what cannot be said.

No one said you could punch holes in the Void — “look: here is a void with a hole in it”; not that. If a thing — e.g. Krarsht worshipper — has a Chaos taint, Greg compares that ‘taint’ to a hole in reality, in existence. Think of the hole in reality as a void (surely) or a connection to the Void (which we can quibble about amiably). What do you think Greg was trying to get at if not tying notions of absence, of reality failure — i.e. of some kind of void — to Chaos?

Monk & Mingus for everyone, no?

Now I want you to come to an amicable agreement, but which is it going to be? (I’d have hoped jazzy mathematicians would be more at the Elvin Jones/Tony Oxley end of things. But I probably took one blow too many to the head as a child.)

Orlanth, for sure. Perhaps.

Ah, well, I came to bury Uleria, not to praise her (and without any of that complex Shakespearean irony — I am a simple fellow). 😉

As a measure of how unhip I am, I owe my knowledge of their existence to my high-school maths teacher. The first three albums are all good, but start with Real Life. It was falling apart a bit by the end — the live album and Magic, Murder & the Weather — but then Devoto turned in a decent solo album. (Government health warning: these are just Brandi’s opinions — discount as necessary.) A friend of mine spent time in Manchester in the ’80s and knew a bunch of people on the scene (man). Sadly, he reports that Devoto was too taken with the “look at me, I’m a rock star”-ness of it all. Ho hum! 😉

I tend to think — and I must stress that I do not know this to be true; I can live without the hate mail — that the “porno chic” Uleria appeals to people (dare I say boys?) who have a cop-in-the-head Puritan to throw off. Those of us who never had a bad case of that (or so we tell ourselves) may be seen as sneering at other people’s sex-worker fantasies — so “anti-sex”, “uptight”, or “no fun”. Sounds like the ’70s redux. And you know, I have been called worse. So I was maybe poking a little fun at an imagined Gloranthaphile who railed against anything Chaos “tainted” but — what shall we say? — trouser-tented over the sex/love/life three-for-one bundle of heteronormativity we could label “Uleria”. Me? I’m with .

On a flipper tip, Gbaji karaoke!

Although even dipping into the Well of Daliath might lead one to think her an impostor or a pathetic remnant. (And I am sure we can cook up something more heterodox than the WoD version.) And Uleria does seem to tie into some whoppers — no one is going to buy any of this nonsense (without some prince of lies as (m)ad man): A cult whose devotees are taught a skill whose “tools and media are human bodies” has to sound a bit creepy, right? And presumably erotocomatose lucidity comes to us via ‘the wickedest man in the world’, ‘the great beast’, who — “even if unlike most braggarts had actually done some of the things he boasted of” (I forget who said that) — is best described as what, the Christian fundamentalist id let off the leash? The return of the repressed? Don’t you just want the Uleria cult to be a hiding-in-plain-sight mask of capital ‘D’ Devil worshippers? I mean, subbing for the true “energy which can fill and permeate anything” — — as it slouches toward Bethlehem to be born: MGF! And if you want a Mallia connection (I don’t, really): The feminists might do well to shun all of this feminine mystique. I hear that Shulamith has done a deal with the Mostali to free women from childbearing — “Feminists have to question, not just all of [Gloranthan] culture, but the organization of culture itself, and further, even the organization of nature.”

I think you are getting into the spirit of Chaos wordplay: treating ‘a hole in existence’ as ‘a hole which exists’ or ‘a hole which is located in existence/cosmos’? And I am proposing play with all of these notions of Chaos: the void state preceding creation the gap or abyss created by the separation of heaven and earth space the expanse of air the nether abyss infinite darkness /dev/null nothing not anything How can one fail to see Umath–Orlanth in there? The rebels against Yelm are legion but they are also one: the separation of heaven and earth. We can put this in the mouth of a Sky pantheon theologian: “Chaos separates Heaven and Earth, mortals from God.” An unusually reflective Storm priest might say: “We raise our eyes to the Void but we see only the dome of the Sky, and thus we mistake Heaven for God. But the divine surrounds us, unseen. This is one meaning of ‘Invisible Orlanth’.” (This is helpfully ambiguous between the Void before and the Void beyond the dome of the Sky — but perhaps Orlanth’s blow struck against Yelm renders this a distinction without a difference.) And we can ‘answer’ the riddle of why some Nysalorean illuminates are enlightened and others are corrupt: “Nothing can make them see the error of their ways.” (Echoing Homer’s Polyphemus: “Nobody has hurt me.”) Now I have no beef with real-life Buddhists — who have written screed upon screed over thousands of years, so much that it is doubtless inconsistent; how could it not be? — but for the purposes of rehabilitating our fantasy Buddhists, the Nysaloreans, why not take seriously the meaning of ‘nirvana’ as being blown out? If a flame is blown out, it ceases to be. And IRL people love to talk of the death of the ego, the self. And what is the source of the universe? If it has one, it must be nothing, because as soon as you have something, you have the universe (even if it is nothing like present reality) — and yes, we can play on “it came from nothing”/“it did not come from anything”. The hardcore mystics take the nothingness of Chaos to the limit, beyond merely darkness, a gap, an expanse of air: “What is Chaos? It is not anything. Where is Chaos? Nowhere.” Surely, I cannot be the only one for whom this reeks of MGF. (Although, that is exactly the sort of thing I would be wrong about.)

Where’s the fun in that? 😉 But I was trying to get at Jörg’s attitude (the theorist, floating above the thing), rather than the attitude of — say — a PC of Jörg’s. But maybe he was in character.

I already knew you thought this, but I would like to draw you out a bit more. I will repeat the case for the prosecution; it goes something like this: The Godlearner perspective seems to be that of the putative origins of the universe, the Void takes priority with the Plasma being at the opposite — reality — end of the umbilical cord, whether or not the cord represents a temporal development. (I know: coals to Newcastle.) Then Greg says: A natural way to take this — according to me, anyway — is to equate Chaos with the Void. Chaotic features are of the world — they are horror vacui made flesh — but Chaos itself is not. And so Chaos terrifies some, is a solace to others, and leaves others wondering what all the fuss was about: “don’t the concepts of presence and absence come as a job lot?” This is why Nysalor — love him or loathe him — is ineluctably a Chaos deity, because his gift is ‘nirvana’, being ‘blown out’, the big zero. And it lends irony to the Darkness and Air forces claiming to be opponents of Chaos when they are themselves — according to some, anyway — manifestations of absence, which is Chaos. The ‘chaos monster’ is one who reacts badly to touching or contemplating the Void: they feel the horror, it is written on their bodies, they are the tormented. So Chaos-as-Void seems to fit the pre-Gloranthan, IRL understanding and (IMO) key bits of exposition of Glorantha. It also allows people to take varying attitudes toward Chaos: we can feel differently about it without having to argue about what it is. So what is wrong with this picture? You surely think something is, so help me see the other viewpoint. Pretty please!

Although, to be charitable to Greg, we can say that he wouldn’t expect a single rune ever to provide a solution: won’t really fix your medical problem without or . But in the context of trying to distinguish the domains of two runes, one wouldn’t emphasize that. A rune’s power is only a virtue in the right context. Ompalam had until retconned.

Yeah, but I say it so often I figure (a) people are sick of it & (b) it goes without saying. 😉

There is being a doctor and there is healing. Sometimes when a patient has cancer, accommodating it is the right course of action: the cancer is progressing slowly and something else will kill the patient first, so leave it be. I agree, of course, that this is not healing the patient of their cancer. Consider the case where someone has an immune system which would overreact to a stimulus if exposed to it: is there harmony before they are exposed to the stimulus? If we say that there is and that exposure to the stimulus would cause disruption — because it would cause inflammation — what would we conclude about healing as restoring harmony? Remove the stimulus? Put a barrier between the stimulus and the patient? Alternatively, treat the patient with immunosuppressants to enable them to live with the stimulus. Now this is a return to the prior state in the (thin?) sense that previously there was no inflammation, but the new situation has features that the prior ‘harmonious’ state lacked: the presence of the stimulus and a less hair-trigger immune system. ‘Restore harmony’ is not really a theory of medicine, it is a vague picture. Perhaps sometimes it will suggest helpful courses of action, but if it is the only thing one thinks of, it might perhaps mislead. Taking the more general case of restoring harmony, suppose a refugee population (the newbies) arrives in an area where the existing population (the grogs) had previously enjoyed a ‘harmonious’ existence — this might be disruptive and produce ‘dissonance’, but what is the best way to think about the problem? The grogs might think that harmony should be restored by sending the newbies ‘back where they came from’. Well, that might fix the grogs’ problem — ‘heal’ them (yes, I know) — but what about the newbies? Maybe the newbies old home is now radioactive slag or a vampire nest and those problems are not going away any time soon. They cannot achieve ‘harmony’ by winding things back, they need something new. Sure, to be acceptable their new situation will need to have some features of their life before the bombs or the bloodsuckers arrived, but it will need to have new features, too, notably location. And the grogs may have to change to accommodate the newbies. Now maybe we can still file finding an acceptable synthesis under ‘harmony’, but that is not harmony conceived as restoration of a prior state in all its concrete details. Of course, one can always say ‘the old state was acceptable, the new accommodation is acceptable — you see: healing = harmony = restoration!’ — you can push toward generality till you find something in common between the old and new states, but how helpful is that in finding the new accommodation? The grogs new life may be as good as their pre-newbie life, but it may be very different, perhaps in profound ways, no? If you have a picture that is not a testable theory, it may be hard to disprove(!), but that doesn’t mean that it is right or helpful. That is not to say we should all be little Karl Poppers in every aspect of our lives, nor that ‘pictures’ that are sometimes unhelpful are not also sometimes suggestive of solutions.

Err, really? So world-negating and world-affirming mythologies both regard life as a disease but differ as to the prognosis. JC sounds as depressed as Tiptree: is the Plan the Plan is (and a bunch of others). As for “the natural conclusion of the joining of a man and woman in love is the birth of a child” — at least now we know what made the Spider throw up. “Healing, however. Healing falls in the realm of Harmony, of returning something to the state it was in before it was disrupted.” Now this may be a narrow way to look at medicine, but if I read it right, it is worse than that implying harmony [is] returning something to the state it was in before it was disrupted. (Good luck running the sand back up the hourglass to a point where everybody is happy. The unspoken assumption is that we wind back to the point where we are happy and screw them?) I don’t think I would include that in a training package for diplomats. Definitely no thesis (prior state) + antithesis (disrupting stimulus) = synthesis (new normal), here. Let’s say Greg was trying to think like a Gloranthan: “Who moved my cheese? I must destroy them utterly and anyone who knew them even slightly. Then I can move my cheese 2 mm north, restoring it to its cosmically ordained position.” But yeah, this does all sound very CA and Uleria.

May as well have its own “info graphic”:

Cannot fault the Sun–Spider on orientation or appetite. You won’t catch her fretting about Chaos and purity. The less charming version of the hourglass model of the cosmic cycle is that the Spider — head down — vomits forth Cosmos, flips 180° and sucks it/us all back in again, flips 180°, rinse and repeat. But I am lazy and repeat myself. Bring me new heresies to digest!

But remember poor old Huntun who started out with none and had extra drilled out of ‘gratitude’ — although Gloranthans might shrug and say, “Probably Utuma.”

I think of as an hourglass: as the sand (matter–energy) flows through from one half to the other, one Void is polluted/one Cosmos born … and the universe next door reverts to nothing; flip and repeat; time in a bottle. (See also Orlanth’s self-trepanning.) I cannot help but see as a bow tie and the undead as clowns. But taking your lead, the ‘stake’ is a barrier between the chambers of the hourglass overdetermining the no-flow condition — the thing is horizontal, anyway. The vampire as cut off from Life, the interplay of Chaos and Cosmos. I didn’t know that, but it figures. I don’t go for as linked to communication — nothing touches — but that is old Issarian ground. where art thou? Try something like this … We could say that unlike Mallia, she can only see ‘half’ of life. If she succeeded in wiping out the children of Mallia, she would wipe out the children of Uleria, too: eukaryotes need prokaryotes. But maybe even this undersells it: she sees what is going on, but she refuses the ‘taint’ of Chaos Mallia brings to all Life. Does this make her a Death goddess in disguise? Maybe better an Unlife goddess: when the scribes wrote perhaps lighting conditions were poor or wishful thinking strong; perhaps this was there to be seen: Undeath is not made by toppling Life and staking it — why would a vampire in its undead condition already be staked? — but from a simple twist of Fate combined with ownership of Harmony. Fate as fatalism. Harmony as parallel lines that never touch, as communication and contact refused. Zombiedom as the ultimate asceticism — supreme purity — cutting oneself off from Life but denying Death. The bug broom is not to save the children of Gorakiki and Aranea but to emphasize and ensure the ascetic’s purity. Life requires Death, Communication, and Chaos, else nothing flows. Chalana Arroy refuses this, so she is a deity of Unlife, not sister to Uleria or Mallia. Like Clark Kent and Superman, did you ever see Chalana Arroy and Gark the Calm together? There is no ‘Resurrection’ spell and at least the more honest ‘Create Zombie’ is cheaper. When Humakti and Death Lords put aside their differences and get blind drunk together — without fail — they will begin plotting to torch the nearest ‘nest’ of White Ladies. The sober Humakti know that the project is politically impossible. The hungover Humakti reflect on their own asceticism and possible zombie status. If a Zorak Zorani is close to their god, they know that we are all zombies but that at least some of us have a fire inside. Or you know, something like that …