Sevenfold Silence

There's a guest post about personal experiences in pagan blogging over at the pagan blog The Wild Hunt that tweaked me. Paganism isn't otherkin, and otherkin isn't paganism, but the two are interwoven for a lot of people, so it caught my eye in the context of Sevenfold Silence.

The heart of the post is:

Don't give me your ideas on Pagan life, my sisters and brothers. I have ideas enough of my own. And don't give me answers, because ours is a religious movement with hundreds of answers, thousands of answers.

Give me your experience. Give me the marrow and the meat of your spiritual life. Because, unless you write it down, no one else ever will. Only from you can I receive this gift: your own lived Pagan journey.

And here, I'm thinking, is a key difference between the pagan community and the otherkin community (other than the obvious): where pagans talk about ideas and play their personal experiences close to the vest, otherkin talk about personal experiences and play their ideas close to the vest. There's much more chatter about the symptoms of being otherkin, the everyday reality of it, how different you feel, than there is about where we come from, what we're here for, how we can function.

Each of these has a place but I think, personally, that the personal side of otherkin is overplayed. Sharing personal experience is great! But drawing commonalities between experience, attempting to create (and break) generalizations--that's more fun, I think, and far more productive.

I think we're scared, as a subculture, to talk ideas and make the necessary generalizations to do that. We are all so rabidly individual, and potentially so very different from each other, that it gets hard to talk ideas. But I think that just chatting experience is part of why the otherkin community's gone so silent. There's only so much you can draw from "sometimes I feel like I have a tail and scales" (for instance), and only slightly more from "sometimes I feel this--does anybody else?"

But even something mild like "I think that sometimes I feel like I have a tail and scales, because of x y and z, and it usually happens to me during a b and c--can anyone relate?"--that has room for discussion. It puts the speaker in the crossfire, potentially, and it creates potential for controversy and disagreement. But without taking a stand you can't have a real conversation going.

I make a fair number of posts of a personal nature here on this blog. I try not to, generally, and I space 'em out when I make 'em, because there isn't much room for discussion with that, and honestly if I used this blog as a place to describe my own, very peculiar personal experience with otherkin I think that would border on the masturbatory.

I'm much, much more interested in stripping away the personal experience and, yes, sometimes the poetry from the otherkin experience, and getting to the heart of the matter--big ideas, theories, and experimentation.

The other day I read an article on salon.com (you will probably have to watch an ad to get their free site pass first) riffing off of the idea that we use consumerism as identity. Contemporary Western culture is good at this. Hi, I'm Veamoryn! I like David Bowie, the Decemberists, Doctor Who, Robert Heinlein, Aleister Crowley, and Death Note.

You are what you consume, in other words--not what you produce, or are.

The article, naturally, thinks this is Bad. It recommends, for the sake of experimentation, seeing if you can brand yourself more sincerely. ("I like Nestea, Sobe, Fuze, Excedrin migraine medicine, and St Ives' apricot facial scrub" isn't that cool of a list.) And then--it's implied--eventually dispensing with this consumerist identity entirely.

But then what? A commentator I read remarked that that leaves a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum. Or, rather--consumerism fills the vacuum of other identities, like tribe, religion, heritage, and "volk", and without consumerism they're what people would fall back on. ("I'm Veamoryn. I'm three-quarters Irish and one-quarter German, but I was raised culturally German even though I'm American. My mother spoke German to me when I was a child and we have a dirndl somewhere." Ow. Dangerous territory. I don't want to be proud of my particular flavor of human; people who are proud of heritage like mine join the Aryan Nation, and those people just aren't people I want to hang out with.)

So what happens when consumerism is seriously abandoned (rather than just pushed aside) in a society where the fallbacks of race and tribe are dangerous? I think it makes otherkin an answer. (And as I've written before--"making it an answer" doesn't mean that we're making it up. Instead it means it's an option that gets considered rather than discarded.) It has the trappings of tribe and race, but without the potential dangerous footing of nationalism and racism. It fills up that identity-hole.

It's not the be-all end-all of theories, but I think it's something to consider. It's significant, I think, especially in light of the strong individualism that tends to go along with otherkin, along with the environmentalism we show that's often hand-in-hand with a rejection of consumerism.

We can't go there, so we seek around, and eventually we find ourselves as 'kin.

There's an unspoken sentiment, I think, in the otherkin community that if I don't call you on your bullshit, you won't call me on mine.

I think, on the whole, we tend to be a thoughtful, sensitive bunch. We have to be, after all, to come to the conclusions we have. (They're not 'natural', and they require that we be in-tune with ourselves, at least to a degree.) That fact, combined with the fact that due to being 'different' we've dealt with our share of exclusion and alienation, leads to the fact that we're sensitive to alienation ourselves and don't want to alienate others.

On the good side, this leads to a lot of general politeness, and minimal flaming, at least that I've seen. (Think about all the newbies panicking about astral battles and the veil falling. Instead of being laughed out of the community, they're politely and gently shepherded to take a few breaths and ground.) I think that also this can lead us to put forward claims more boldly--we know we aren't going to be questioned on them or ridiculed.

Toward the grayer end of things, though, it lets a lot of claims go unquestioned and unsubstantiated. Think of all the elven princesses. Think of the reincarnations of anime characters (hell, they're a blog post in and of themselves). Think of the Neptunian fairy space wolves, as I think the Field Guide called them--the weird one-person menageries of creatures. We may be able to put forward our claims better, but we can't discuss them in great depth--that might harm someone's feelings.

Are all their claims bullshit? I'm willing to lay my money on "probably not"--there's at least a kernel of truth in a fair number of them. I doubt, though, that they're all true, or all sincere.

There are definitely a handful of people in the Otherkin community I'd like to grab and shake by the shoulders. But that general principle--live and let live, don't question my bullshit and I won't question yours--abides. It might break my heart to be told I'm not a fey-thing, so I won't tell you you're not a Neptunian fairy space wolf. Not to mention that it doesn't actually hurt me that you're saying you are. Maybe it embarrasses me, a little, but I'll live. Like Thomas Jefferson said, it neither picks my pocket nor blackens my eye.

Is it fair, just, good that I can't question others' claims? I don't know. I think sometimes it impedes intelligent conversation. And personally, I know that I appreciate a polite, civil degree of bullshit-calling--I'm happy to receive the feedback of others regarding what they think I may or may not be. I appreciate the extra perspective.

But ultimately, for the sake of social mores and sensitivity, I'm willing to not call people on their bullshit unless it's supremely irritating and inhibiting discussion. What others say doesn't really affect me in any noticeable way--though it may tweak me at times.

And I don't find discussion of ideas and comparison thereof to be intimidating or upsetting, either. I'm pleased that our openness lets us put forward ideas, but if we can't discuss those ideas we haven't gained anything.