#Degrees of Wisdom

[judahmaccabees]

loosey goosey

[aprilblossomgirl]

What do you do to make humans confess?

23.5 องศาที่โลกเอียง (2024) Ep.06

[seilon]

my only complaint about 2005 dw is that we didn’t get more episodes with gung-ho mortal baby jack harkness. absolutely smitten by that fucker

[themoonplantwrites]

No, I’m not done talking about Epic the Wisdom Saga yet.

So anyway, I just realized how hard Aphrodite’s section of God Games hits, and the thing is, it wouldn’t hit so hard if Love in Paradise didn’t end the way it does.

So Aphrodite says that Odysseus should stay trapped with Calypso because he “let [his mother] die of a broken heart.” Which accurate to The Odyssey, by the way. In The Odyssey, Anticlea states that she died of grief, that she thought Odysseus would never come home. But it’s more than that.

In God Games, Aphrodite states that Odysseus’s punishment for his mother’s death is that he should “feel the pain that his mother felt and rot.” According to tradition, Anticlea didn’t just die of grief, she hung herself. (I’m not totally sure which primary source this specific detail is from because it’s not in The Odyssey, but I am trying to track it down.)

Anyway, if we take Aphrodite at her word, then we know that she wants to put Odysseus through what Anticlea went through. Anticlea hung herself out of grief. And at the end of Love in Paradise, we see Odysseus about to jump to his death because he can’t live with his grief.

That’s what makes Aphrodite’s section hit the hardest for me. Because it’s already happening.

[jasper-book-stash]

You know what's worse than reading a book recommended to you and hating it? Reading a book recommended to you and feeling overally pretty damn neutral about it.

[inkyquince]

It's so important to me to write a thing where the pc breaks up with someone and immediately fucks the person they hated most thank you

[defiledtomb]

Don't get your tongue pierced unless the freak dividends yield more than the eventual cost. Then absolutely go for it

[sparklywaistcoat]

Thanks to @celluloidbroomcloset for the tag! Below are some books I want to read in 2025.

I've already started Braiding Sweetgrass. I'm reading this because I want to learn more about different ways of being connected to the world.

Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom is research for the tarot decks that I'm designing.

I really liked The Haunting of Hill House, so this one is next on my list.

I first read a version of The Odyssey when I was a child. I've heard good things about this translation and want to read it for myself.

What are you all reading this year?

[marsixm]

i love it when im like whyyyy am i so anxious and sad… am i just a loser…. whats wrong with me… and then i have to sit and think for a minute like hm have you perhaps considered the like 4-5 ongoing extremely stressful situations youve been experiencing lately. like oh shit dude good point

[clochanamarch]

i just made an account on lin.kedin, adulthood is an awful pool of job placements and "entry-level but we need u to have 6+ years experience" but damnit if i don't have my swimming bands and goggles on to wade through the shitstorm--

[kkoct-ik]

i reflect on my kidhood sometimes and i do just think "wow. guilty traumatised kids get upset by the maddest things"

[woodentrain]

Observe: this is the face of a man who does not want to spend his day selling/changing/collecting money for water filters

For the love of god woman just give me my money and stop with the water filter crap

[always-a-slut-4-ghouls]

I gotta stop saying "left eye" first whenever someone proposes a saw trap where they remove parts of your body. I could be getting free wisdom tooth surgery

[themoonplantwrites]

So I have many things I love about Epic the Musical, one of which is how it is in conversation with the text that it is adapting, The Odyssey.

Now, if you were a high school student in America (and maybe other places, but I can’t speak for them), you were probably taught that The Odyssey starts in medias res, or in the middle. When The Odyssey starts, most of the adventuring and monsters and stuff that most people remember from The Odyssey has already happened, and Odysseus recounts it in books 8-11. The rest of The Odyssey is mostly what is Telemachus doing, what does Odysseus do once he returns to Ithaca, and books 5-7 are just Odysseus among the Phaeacians.

My point in all of this being, the first four books of The Odyssey, how this text starts, those are the events that the Wisdom Saga in Epic the Musical adapts. And it’s such a good adaptation that personally, I believe that you could listen to the Wisdom Saga first, and then go back to the beginning of Epic and listen to the rest of the Sagas in order, and it would still work as a story. Just structurally, it would work in a similar way to how The Odyssey works.

But Epic, unlike The Odyssey, does not start in medias res. The Wisdom Saga is the seventh saga in the musical. And yet, Epic does pay a kind of homage to The Odyssey’s story structure through the song Love in Paradise. Here, in this song, we have Athena looking back on the last time she saw Odysseus, and at everything that has happened to him since then. This is similar to Odysseus recounting his story to the Phaeacians in books 8-11 of The Odyssey.

But, personally, what I find to be a much more interesting part of this adaptation is that the part of Love in Paradise where Odysseus is being haunted by his past feels a lot like the part of The Odyssey where Odysseus breaks down crying at the stories the Phaeacian rhapsode sings of the heroes of the Trojan War. Jorge did not have to include Odysseus grieving the people he’s lost since leaving Ithaca; most adaptations of The Odyssey don’t. But he did, and I think that makes Epic all the better, not just as a story, but specifically as an adaptation of The Odyssey.

[principleofplenitude]

Many people experience feelings of being powerful so infrequently that they try to hold on to them. By doing nothing they hope to preserve their magic moments. But we can really hold on to power in our lives only by constantly discharging it. By releasing creative power we open ourselves up to receive a further flow. However, by trying to hold onto it, we block the channels and the sense of power, which is really life itself, withers within us...The craftsman or scientist or teacher—or, for that matter, the tarot reader—will find the power increase over the years the more they discharge it into physical reality.

Rachel Pollack, from Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (1980)

[moistcl1tikal-ao3]

btw

if any ppl r interested in potentially collabing on fics or just generally being strange and weird and awful together vis a vis writing nasty jman rpf or other ickypostings, pls feel free to message me! i am always up to beta stuff or just generally blather on about my grotesque musings.

aka lets b moots