Day #42: More on the Sekhmet-Damien Tag Team with the Summer Solstice and Eurydice Thrown In

Woke up this morning in a thoroughly bad mood.  I so didn't appreciate yesterday's tag-team suggestion that I stop torturing myself ... personally, I think it's my constitutional right to torture myself! ... so much so that I got myself thoroughly soused yesterday on   Bailey's Irish Cream, which I happened to have in the house.  Ergo, part of my problem is a bit of a Bailey's hangover.  And I'm not even Irish.

The other half of the bad mood is self-recrimination for making some sugar-free blueberry crumble yesterday.  I love blueberries.  Absolutely love them.  The crumble was mouth-wateringly delicious; one of those desserts Mom used to make in summer.  Should never have done that, though - I suffer like hell the next morning after eating even one blueberry and I ate a whole bunch of them.  So I started out this day in a thoroughly bad mood.

And yes, I KNOW the right to torture myself is not in the Constitution, leave me alone you anal-retentive OCD'ers preparing to set the record straight!  Geez.  Some people do not recognize creative license ... oh, never mind.

Took a deep breath, preparing to start over.

As a bit of an intro:  a sonnet cycle is defined as a group of sonnets having a single subject or controlling idea.  Elizabeth Barrett Browning composed one to her husband (remember "How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways."?)  That was only one sonnet in her sonnet cycle to her husband, published as "Sonnets from the Portuguese".  Petrarch wrote his to "Laura", Dante, Shakespeare - all composed sonnet cycles.

Not that it is any comparison to those, but mine had as its controlling idea the passage through intense grief via an obsession with passion in general and Piero Barone in particular - the obsession with Piero began with a brush with cancer, the death of a beloved pet, and reached its apogee when Jim died - all of it happening in a month's time.

I use the Italian or Petrarchan format:  14 lines with a volta (turn) at the 9th: abba-abba-cddc-dc, and the Alexandrine - 12 syllables per line.  It's ongoing.  When it ends, it ends.  I'm not there yet.  Thus far, there are 25 Petrarchan sonnets in this sonnet cycle.

The 25th entry in the sonnet cycle was this, and the inspiration easily recognizable if you read yesterday's blog entry:

The Sekhmet-Damien Tag Team

All I want is to crawl into his arms and whine;

whining is such an excellent way to express
a child-like frustration at being blocked access
to something longed-for, ached for, needed, while confined,
It is annoying, but so primal; such a sign
of desire for a basic thumb-sucking solace.
Piero, they’re picking on me!  See my distress;
make them go away; kiss me; hold me, I’ll be fine.

In his place I’m met by Damien and Sekhmet;

standing shoulder to shoulder; I can’t get past them;
I need to object, “I have the right to condemn
myself, I have the right!”  But this solid duet,
implacable, serene, will resolve this problem
in their own way, blocking me, solid as cement.

18 June 2012

©Snake's Trail, 2012, all rights reserved

 I may be still refusing to listen to the "tag team" (mainly because their POV makes no logical sense to me - see previous entry), but he at least has nudged me into getting back to my Daybook.  I still can't quite call it a "Book of Shadows" because I still blow things up and give myself itchy skin rashes with recipes I've tried thus far.  I could call it a "Grimoire", I suppose, but I was reading the Veritable Key of Solomon (Skinner/Rankine) before everything went to hell in a hand basket, and spent most of my time turning the book upside down and sideways and saying, "Huh?", trying unsuccessfully to make sense of the sketches and diagrams.  So apparently, not only am I a poor excuse for a witch (who flies into trees on her broomstick),  I'm in absolutely no danger of turning myself into a skilled alchemist either, as far as being able to make sense of grimoires goes.  Too bad, too:  I could really use the gold.

So, I flip open the Witch's Book of Days, which I haven't looked at in months, to June 18th.  I don't know why I haven't noticed this before:  the book was written with the assumption that witches are all women ... which would be of interest to, say, John Procter or Giles Corey, the former executed by hanging and the latter buried under rocks in Salem for being one.  A witch, I mean.  And that doesn't even touch on the guys who were gruesomely punished in my immediate lifetime, just for the crime of being witches.  Do we want to go into any more detail on that?  No, we do not.

But I digress.  More coincidences.  The entry for June 18th is about Eurydice.  Another "WTF?"
reaction.  She was the subject of Sonnet #13.  I slam the book closed again, beginning to become seriously freaked out by all these coincidences.

 Instead, I search for information on the Summer Solstice, a few days hence:

 " ... the festival celebrated on the Summer solstice in June. They [Polish/Slavic pagans] believe that it was a sacred holy day honoring the two most important elements: Fire and Water. The tradition is to burn fires at the end of the day and bathe in open waters at sunset, singing and dancing around 'pal' till midnight. At midnight, under the pretext of searching for "Fern flower the flower of the Fern," unmarried men and women run into the forest. Ladies with a crown of flowers on their head (Polish: wianek), a symbol of their unmarried state, go first, singing. Next they are followed by single men. If you find the "flower of the Fern" the wishes of life may be fulfilled. However, nobody found it so far, but they lived happily together. The lucky man would return with a flower ring on his head, with the now engaged lady."

 [Long pause]

 Okay, so it's a seriously dangerous holiday for gimps and klutzes:  roaring fires, skinny-dipping in dark, who-knows-what infested waters, and running blind in a forest chased by who knows what lunatic?  What kind of stupid holiday is this?  And am I still naked from the skinny-dipping?  What about tripping over tree roots in the dark?  I could slash the ^&%^$ out of my feet and totally bleed out, because I can't feel my feet and wouldn't know it!!!  (pant, pant, pant).  And another thing ...!  Yes, I know:  someone needs to seriously shut me up.

I'm off to bed.  Here's hoping I'll be in a much better mood in the morning.