This was a very well written and thought out response to my post, and I appreciate your pointing it out to me in email so that I could read and comment.
First off, I don't think that the poet is "empty" of everything in a pre-imbas state. Open, yes. Empty, no. Essentially, if the poet were "empty" there would be nothing there to transform when the fili and the Otherworlds meet. The three internal cauldrons aren't necessarily always empty either -- otherwise the imagery of brewing and boiling, of filling and emptying, would be meaningless.
I tend to think of spirit as immanent in body, that in many ways they're inseparable, but I'm also speaking as someone who at root identifies as androgynous and has felt a certain gender dysphoria throughout my life that expressed when I was maybe seven as "mom, I really think I was supposed to be a boy." My experience as an androgyne is not going to match exactly with the experience of someone who feels strongly gendered one way or the other, regardless of the sex of the body they were born in.
My point in posting was not so much to say that there are no men's or women's mysteries. It was really to point out that there are mysteries that are other than male or female, mysteries of between-ness and other-ness. It is particularly gender rather than physical sex that I refer to in my post and in my discussion of Celtic spirituality, and in a strict sense, gender has nothing to do with the physical body at all, but rather with the spirit of who we are, if you will.
Certainly my female hormones and female body effect my experience, but it is the non-gendered, androgynous part of me that interprets that experience, that travels within the mists. When I'm in the Otherworlds, my body may or may not be human, may or may not be male, may or may not be female. The spirits I interact with there may be sexed or gendered or not. The mist and imbas are ungendered, and in so many ways it seems that the Celtic worldview is that the center and the edge, both being liminal places, are also ungendered in that sense.
Filidecht isn't the same as ordinary poetry that's rooted in physical experience. It reaches into something magical and Otherworldly and tries to bring it back here into the physical. My mundane poetry is as much rooted in my female body and my bisexual experience as anything else. But when I'm working with poetry that arises from aisling, from the state of dream and vision, it transcends that bodily limitation and moves into other realities. This isn't about modern western feminism, nor is it about transcendentalist spirituality that postulates the body and the material world as bad and the spirit and heaven as good. It's about dealing with something that's within the world but seen from an entirely different angle. It's about what walks in the mists. It's about being in that place that every mystic may inhabit regardless of their physical station in life and the condition of their physical body.
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Date: 2006-10-04 04:24 am (UTC)From:First off, I don't think that the poet is "empty" of everything in a pre-imbas state. Open, yes. Empty, no. Essentially, if the poet were "empty" there would be nothing there to transform when the fili and the Otherworlds meet. The three internal cauldrons aren't necessarily always empty either -- otherwise the imagery of brewing and boiling, of filling and emptying, would be meaningless.
I tend to think of spirit as immanent in body, that in many ways they're inseparable, but I'm also speaking as someone who at root identifies as androgynous and has felt a certain gender dysphoria throughout my life that expressed when I was maybe seven as "mom, I really think I was supposed to be a boy." My experience as an androgyne is not going to match exactly with the experience of someone who feels strongly gendered one way or the other, regardless of the sex of the body they were born in.
My point in posting was not so much to say that there are no men's or women's mysteries. It was really to point out that there are mysteries that are other than male or female, mysteries of between-ness and other-ness. It is particularly gender rather than physical sex that I refer to in my post and in my discussion of Celtic spirituality, and in a strict sense, gender has nothing to do with the physical body at all, but rather with the spirit of who we are, if you will.
Certainly my female hormones and female body effect my experience, but it is the non-gendered, androgynous part of me that interprets that experience, that travels within the mists. When I'm in the Otherworlds, my body may or may not be human, may or may not be male, may or may not be female. The spirits I interact with there may be sexed or gendered or not. The mist and imbas are ungendered, and in so many ways it seems that the Celtic worldview is that the center and the edge, both being liminal places, are also ungendered in that sense.
Filidecht isn't the same as ordinary poetry that's rooted in physical experience. It reaches into something magical and Otherworldly and tries to bring it back here into the physical. My mundane poetry is as much rooted in my female body and my bisexual experience as anything else. But when I'm working with poetry that arises from aisling, from the state of dream and vision, it transcends that bodily limitation and moves into other realities. This isn't about modern western feminism, nor is it about transcendentalist spirituality that postulates the body and the material world as bad and the spirit and heaven as good. It's about dealing with something that's within the world but seen from an entirely different angle. It's about what walks in the mists. It's about being in that place that every mystic may inhabit regardless of their physical station in life and the condition of their physical body.
It's about paradox.