Sonya Blanck writings

Oh hey it’s a Wednesday and I still haven’t posted anything! Gosh. Well, now that the kids are in bed, I’m sure I can think of something.

I was more productive today than I have been for a long time, writing half a poem. Look, this was while helping kids with lockdown homework and arguing with a relative about whether or not I’m actually neurodivergent because former gifted kids can’t possibly excel at masking behaviours, so cut me some slack hey.

Finding my second zine to be particularly difficult to write, because most of the poems concern my upbringing as a white person in the American South, and I’ve recently come to realise how interacting with covert racism as a child with undiagnosed neurodivergence has impacted me. I’ve often thought that part of being a decent ally is sitting with discomfort, but have only just realised that in my case some of that manifests as fixating or ruminating – I do the same thing with climate change, another big intractable problem that I have limited capacity to fix.

Well, I hope the poems are interesting anyways, and don’t just come across as white-woman whingeing. I try, y’all.

Have also just realised that this is the first update since my partner and I launched our podcast! I really enjoyed recording it, despite the name snafu (we accidentally nicked the name of a well-regarded local arts festival, who quite politely requested that we change it when I sheepishly tweeted them), and one astrological error that Oliver keeps fixating on (Venus will trine Mars on Friday, rather than square it, which basically has the same implications without being as confrontational). We’ll go into both in our next podcast on 1 February, where we’ll also review our astrological predictions and take questions! (In case anyone wants to send us a question? Please?)

Anyways I need to sleep now, rather than obsessively follow the American news cycle. You should sleep too. Even if you’re reading this tomorrow morning. Sleep. Now. Look, just get back in bed and stop horsing around. GO TO SLEEP.

Much like before, I have no particular plan for this week’s blog post. And that’s okay.

My partner and I are recording a podcast today, to launch in *checks watch* two days, and my talking-points outline is still enormously fuzzy. I mean, until he talked me out of it, I was planning to just record a video and put it on YouTube, until he informed me that technically that doesn’t count as a podcast. This is probably why I should actually get into podcasts before making one.

See, as a neurodivergent person, I do not actually have the attention span to listen to podcasts. Believe me, I have tried. I have also fallen asleep. So typically, if I want to enjoy a podcast, it’s either in text or video form. I didn’t always used to be like this, but as I get older and less masky I find that I just don’t have the time or mental energy to pay deep attention to people talking about something for three hours.

Hence, I’m planning a short podcast! And it will likely be edited, possibly heavily depending on how much my voice annoys me on the recording. And that is also okay.

Anyways, I’ll post it here when it’s done. Then I can annoy you with my voice, instead of just me and most of my immediate family.

I even have a theme jingle for it! It came to me in a dream. Happens sometimes.

to be a creature of Air
you must, like a bird,
learn to wheel and dive.

the winds you must know
as intimately as your feathers.
in their currents you will gambol
as a tern plays
upon the waves
of the sea.

you must view the Earth
as a series of trees,
rooftops,
mountains,
what intrudes through the clouds
to your realm above.

your vocation is the hunt, and it is
all you know to do.
yours are the creatures below,
slow-moving and ancient of days.

one beady eye must be ever affixed
to the horizon, for the winds
have many moods.

move among them, falcon,
and you may yet know
the taste
of the starlight's zephyr.

From me today, a gentle and well-meaning nudge at my magical homies, particularly if Alexandria figures strongly in your own personal explorations: so nu, how’s your knowledge of Second Temple-era and older Judaism?

I ask because I’m currently reading Gordon White’s excellent Star.Ships, wherein he posits an origin for the Western magical tradition which pre-dates the end of the Ice Age, and while I am L O V I N G this book and agree with its assertions (and now need to figure out how to swing a family scuba holiday to Indonesia), I am also, quite selfishly as a Jew, a little disheartened that most of the references to Judaism therein are either encoded within references to early Christianity, or explicitly looking past the Torah/Pentateuch to the wisdom writings of older Near Eastern cultures, eg Sumeria. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some Sumerian, Ugaritic and Hittite cosmology, but jumping straight from that to early Christianity and glossing over the extensive – like, extensive – wisdom writings of Judaism to me feels like a disservice to undoubtedly one of the strongest influencing vectors on the Alexandrian magical tradition – as well as a vector which does directly encode numerous Laurasian motifs.

Now, here I am obligated to say that I have a lot more reading to do on this topic, and I’m sure that the Jewish influence on the magicians of Classical antiquity has been at least touched on by numerous authors. For example, I’m also in the middle of reading Saturn’s Jews by Moshe Idel, which is THE book you need to read if you’re looking for links between Jewish astrology, Roman/Christian conceptions of the planet Saturn, and the persecution of ‘witches’ in mediaeval Europe. I’ve also come across numerous scholarly articles examining Jewish magic, but this expertise seems to be siloed amongst researchers and laypeople interested in Judaica, without really leaking through to chaotes, which, to be fair, might be due to their overriding focus on Egypt.

Which, by the way, doesn’t actually make sense, because dismissing a literal interpretation of Exodus without examining the mutual influence between Egyptian and Mesopotamian culture which gave rise to it leaves a large, Sinai-shaped hole in the historical narrative which I would presume chaotes and other modern magicians would want shaded in somehow. But hey.

Is this a good place for me to lay out my pet theory about Exodus? I guess I could briefly go over my pet theory about Exodus. (Don’t worry, Akhenaten isn’t involved.)

So first of all, my theory is predicated on cultural links between the Phoenicians and the Canaanites – remember, ‘Phoenicia’ is a Greek exonym, with the actual people described referring to themselves as Kena’ani (which may have been a catch-all designation but there was undoubtedly a high degree of cross-cultural pollination within the Levant at the time). And as we know, the Phoenicians were the premier maritime power around the time of the Middle and New Kingdoms, bringing them into contact with numerous Mediterranean cultures (eg Egypt).

Leaving aside female Levantine deities eg Asherah, most people know that the Jewish deity (let’s say HaShem, it’s a good name) stems from a syncretisation between the Ugaritic god El and the Canaanite god Yahweh, which is attested from around 1000 BCE. However, these gods also had syncretisms with Egyptian gods. El was syncretised with Ptah at least 500 years earlier – bear in mind that Ptah’s cultic centre was Memphis, which happens to be right in the middle of Goshen, mentioned as an area of Hebrew settlement in Genesis.

Memphis also boasted a strong cult of Thoth, who by the New Kingdom was syncretised with the lunar god Yah. Given that Yahweh does not have a firm etymological origin, this raises the possibility that Yahweh and Yah are directly related. Yahweh as lunar god also makes a lot of sense, given the Hebrew lunar calendar and the fact that Hebrew and Aramaic are written from right to left, resembling the waxing and waning of the moon. A syncretised Yahweh-Thoth (or Iah-Djehuty, as he is attested in the New Kingdom) is also just personally exciting as someone who enjoys Hermeticism generally. Anyways.

To my mind, a non-literal interpretation of Exodus must include something less hand-wavey than ‘Well I mean the Hebrews were nomads and I guess there was a lot of cultural contact between the Egyptians and stuff’. Which is often where it’s left. BUT. My pet theory solves this by saying that Exodus encodes the syncretism and emergent priesthood of Ptah-Thoth, which then travels back to Canaan and becomes HaShem. That took way too long to explain, but there you have it.

ANYWAYS, my point here, particularly with regards to my pet theory, is that Judaism as a link between Egyptian and Mesopotamian mythemes, and its subsequent influence on the emergent magical traditions of Alexandria, has been under-explored, with preference given to examining Christian influence. Guys, Judaism isn’t Christianity’s afterthought, nor is it just a summation of earlier Near East mythologies. Judaism is a wisdom tradition – with both ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’ manifestations – which extends back thousands of years, with a written corpus to prove it and an oral tradition which likely pre-dates the written. There’s gold in them there hills, but you can’t dig it out with either an ankh or a cross.

And yes, Judaism isn’t an island. It’s drawn from a number of other Near Eastern wisdom traditions, including Sumerian and older. I’m not saying that Noah’s flood is the be-all and end-all of flood mythemes here. But what I am saying is that a closer reading of the Torah can certainly contribute a lot to not just the examination of Alexandrian magic, but also to the reconstruction of ancient history and the broader Laurasian narrative.

Speaking of Laurasian narratives, what’s up with the Saturnine deity? Its characteristics pop up everywhere, including in Hinduism and – yes – Judaism. But that’s a post for another time, as I have a lot more reading to do.

an accounting of sins, O God of pardon,
for which You must pardon us:
     for the sin of sugar, and for the sin of tea;
     for the sin of cotton, and for the sin of spice;
     for the sin of poppy heads, and for the sin of leather;
     for the sin of gold, and for the sin of silver.
for the sin of the spinning jenny.
for the sin of armadas.
for the sin of exotic plants.
for the sin of the atlantic’s sunken cargo.
and for the sin, the original sin, of blood:
     for all the blood spilt in foreign lands, both by our hand
and because we did not restrain
the hand of another.
  
our statues of Nike Victoria Imperatrix,
her gaze fixed on the harbour’s horizon,
we shall tear down
and throw in the sea.
may her name be forgotten
on our shores.

As I sit in front of my computer writing this blog post, my chair faces the window with the best sea view in my house. Since moving to Hastings, I’ve been able to look out at the sea every day, and every day it’s different. Some days you can see the white crests of choppy waves; some days the sky is cloudy and the see a deep, churning green; some days the sun is so bright on the water that it sparkles. Today it’s pale, calm, shrouded at the horizon where it meets the pale blue sky.

Yesterday we went out foraging for alexanders in the country park. After my brush with hemlock this weekend, I wrote to an expert forager asking whether anything idiot-proof could be foraged in Hastings in winter. He patiently pointed me towards alexanders, something I’ve been meaning to forage for awhile – an intruder on England’s coast, imported as a pot herb from imperial Rome and replaced by celery after the 18th century. It also happens to look a tiny bit like hemlock water dropwort BUT don’t worry guys I sent the forager pictures and he said I definitely got a haul of alexanders! They made an amazing winter soup, with a bright, grapefruit-like flavour, and neither my partner nor I are dead yet.

I’ve been trying to forage more lately, both as a way to make Universal Credit lyfe work for me and to get me out of my house, away from my screen. Here I could discuss at length the ways in which the screen has intruded and colonised increasing swathes of our lives this year, but it’s all a bit boring, isn’t it? This particular archon very much enjoys being the centre of your attention, interposing itself between colleagues, friends, even lovers; it feeds on your slack, screen-dazed eyes. Best to reorient towards the real, the tangible – the sea, and not its image.

I’m working on a zine about screens, but I’m trying to do as much work as possible on it downstairs at the coffee table, away from my screen. Drawing in pen – I wish I could draw as well as my partner, who is more confident in such things – and layering images together around the static crackle of a cut-out screen. And yet. Does a zine like this feed the archon? Does it even matter, if it does?

This weekend I’ll take my kids back to the country park to forage for alexanders. We’ll walk to East Hill, and look at the sea – Beachy Head in one direction, and Dungeness in the other, and between an expanse of miles and miles of waves. Whenever we go to East Hill the water seems to be brighter and bluer than normal, perhaps because there’s so much more of it than what I can see from my window.

I’m having trouble figuring out what to write about today. Not particularly ‘on-brand’ for a writer, despite its commonness. But, like erectile dysfunction, it does happen, and more often than one would wish to admit.

I haven’t touched my smutty vampire novel for about a week for this reason. I tend to write my novels linearly – I suppose one could jump from scene to scene and weave them together, but I prefer for the first draft to be sequential. And my problem at the moment is that I’m stuck in the middle of this sex scene that’s running well over 1,000 words. (Bear in mind that my word count is, at the moment, less than 10k, and that prooobably a third of that is purple prose.)

I mean, can you write a sex scene when you’re just not in the mood? You could, I suppose, but I just find that if writing smut feels like a chore and isn’t getting you, as an author, horny, then how on earth are you supposed to make the scores of horny housewives that you want reading your book horny, and therein lies my dilemma.

ANYWAYS.

Yesterday, my partner and I discussed the possibility of starting a podcast, which seems to be the trendy thing for writers hoping to build their brand to do. I’m not opposed – I, in fact, suggested the possibility – but upon reflection, how much of my day/week/month do I want to spend ‘branding’ myself? For example, the ‘Zoom coat’ is becoming a thing – people are literally putting on some bullshit dress coat to sit in front of their computer in their pyjamas and talk via video to their colleagues. Just like, A) turn your fucking camera off. Who cares. And B) if I can’t do a podcast in my bathrobe, I’m not interested. Also C) is it necessary for me to inflict my bathrobe and my woke white opinions on the world once a month? Is it?

Granted, there’s a lot to talk about. I just don’t know how much of it is objectively funny or interesting, and how much of it is just me and my family giggling about snakes or whatever. (Though perhaps a script/general talking points for the conversation would be in order? Maybe?)

ANYWAYS.

The other thing I was considering writing about today was Perkwunos. Would you like to hear about Perkwunos, the reconstructed Indo-European thunder god that has finally gotten me to read my partner’s copy of Star.Ships? WELL TOO BAD MAN THE MUSE IS GONE.

Also I simplified my Patreon tiers, because ain’t nobody gonna pay £25/month for quality, quality content like this. But if you’ve got a fiver…

My partner and I had an interesting conversation yesterday which has got me thinking about representations of non-white/non-hetero/disabled people in mainstream media. This topic interests me as a white writer who, while striving to be anti-racist, has encountered difficulty when attempting to portray a minority, non-white culture in my work.

I chose to write a science-fiction book which specifically centred around protagonists of colour, and writing that story was and still is important to me. But I didn’t want to just write any old story, such as the space-capitalist narratives which proliferate in sci-fi, and then make one or all lead characters people of colour. I specifically wanted to explore some of the challenging differences which characterise the lives of my novel’s minority culture – things like whether and how much to assimilate into a dominant culture; schisms of culture and faith that can be found in just about every minority group; and, yes, prejudice encountered from the outside.

Now of course, as a Jew, these are all issues which I regularly encounter within my community. However, as a white gal, I know I have big, dumb blind spots, which is why I commissioned an editor to give my draft a sensitivity reading. And hey! Now I get to rewrite the thing, because even while trying to explore difference I ended up doing that thing that white authors sometimes do and condensing down what I had hoped to portray as a vibrant and varied community into a monolith.

Do some white authors get it right the first time? Yes. But for me, it feels important to talk about where I fell down as a white author, because I know for a fact that my mistakes have been replicated by countless white authors with the best of intentions. And that comes down to not just the inclusion of non-white (or otherwise non-‘normative’) characters, but also the larger story in which they feature.

Representation has become a mandatory must for many mainstream writers and content creators. Marvel Comics springs to mind – over the past decade they have made many white male nerds cry delicious tears with their inclusiveness. And yet. To what extent is mainstream inclusiveness simply taking a story written for a white, hetero, and/or able-bodied character, and swapping them out for a POC, queer, and/or disabled character? I’m thinking specifically about characters like America Chavez, who inherited the moniker of Miss America from a blond-haired, blue-eyed predecessor.

And so, the central thrust of the conversation with my partner yesterday: To what extent does mainstream representation of minority groups rely on the cultural assimilation of those minority groups? And can the lived experiences of minority characters and cultures really be depicted by white, mainstream authors?

I have a very easy example of this as someone who previously identified as queer and has been queer-adjacent for most of my life. A large percentage of queer people identify as non-monogamous – that is, they are casually or romantically involved with multiple people at the same time. However, how often do you see non-monogamy and its implications depicted in relation to a queer character, or at all in mainstream media? (Okay, there’s John Constantine, maybe. Anyone else?) Very often, when I see a queer person in mainstream work, the line tends to be ‘They’re just like you and me! Except they are A Gay(TM)!!’

And I see that line recycled with other minority representation too. A disabled character who just shows up in a wheelchair and no further mention is made about how that affects their life, their ability to participate in the plot action, etc. A POC character who perhaps faces some discrimination, but is otherwise culturally indistinguishable from their white colleagues, with no examination of their life path or the particular sociocultural milieu that shaped them. It’s not necessarily check-box tokenism, but I find that mainstream stories which feature minority characters tend towards assimilation more often than not.

However, there’s also a fine line that you tread as a white author trying to unpack the cultural differences between mainstream and minority characters. It’s certainly easier to rewrite Star Trek, with one dominant ‘space culture’ being populated by minority characters. But when trying to write something more challenging, you do run the risk of misrepresenting the subcultures you’re trying to subtly unpack, and then feeling like a big ol’ white dumbass when this is pointed out to you.

I have no easy answers here, no prescription for how to properly represent minorities in mainstream work or content otherwise written by white, straight, able-bodied authors. I do find myself thinking about this topic though, particularly as I’m now writing a new book which is incredibly easy and fun for me to write but doesn’t address these challenging questions of difference. One day I’ll return to my sci-fi draft, when I’ve had the chance to breathe, process what I did wrong and how to change it so that I can do my characters justice and give them the story they so richly deserve.

Work continues apace, and I’ve actually gotten quite a bit done already this month, though I tend to berate myself for falling short of arbitrary goalposts instead of step back and appreciate how far I’ve come.

Saturn’s Cove is being sent to the printers this week for an initial run of 100 numbered and signed copies, 72 of which will also be sigilised. My partner’s gotten in on it too and will be helping me with sigils, which is how I know I chose right hehe. Amazingly for a relatively-unknown chaote-poet, I’ve already gotten some preorders! (If youuu also want a copy, please see previous post. And you know you want one. You totally do.)

Meantime, I’ve had an idea for my second poetry zine, and am in the midst of writing for that as well. It will be a bit more personal, as the poems thus far are about growing up within a Southern American family, and the conflicting feelings I have about that particular line of my ancestry and its occupation of place within the Deep South. I hope I can do justice to the topic and my perspective – well, that’s what I hope for all my work anyway.

I’m also nearly 5,000 words into a novel of a genre that I honestly never thought I’d write – sexy vampires. I got the idea during the same walk which produced most of the poetry in Saturn’s Cove, so there must have been something in the air and landscape on that day! I originally intended it to be a more serious vampire book, but then I decided, fuck it, the world needs another sexy vampire book. (And you know you would read it, don’t even lie to me.)

And it has, thus far, been enormously fun to write! Especially compared with the science-fiction novel I’ve just finished, which I deeply cared about, agonised over, and am now going to have to completely rewrite (ugh). Something about writing a novel that you know is going to be an illicitly fun read for most of its readership has been very satisfying. But, ask me again in a couple of months when I’m agonising over like the fifth vampire orgy scene and frantically googling synonyms for ‘throbbing’.

Yknow, I think that’s probably a good place to leave off…