Yesterday morning, while browsing through files of unpublished images in the Geranium Lake Properties archive, I came across these two panels with their depictions of the moon and the sun. How perfect it would have been if I had posted them on Monday, for the eclipse!
The style of the above mask is called uk-wayyalyaryar, “the moon exploded”, or uk-weezeeggut, “moonburst”, in Inultarumek. Penciled on the back of the artwork are the letters T I A V, which is an abbreviation Yost used for “Travesty Is A Verb”, the working title for a story concept that Yost never developed (as far as we know). Beyond the title and a few unpublished comics marked with the abbreviation, there is not much written down about “Travesty Is A Verb” in the Yostian ephemera that now resides in the archive.
Today is the holiday we call Dpajormymy, and here in this unpublished Geranium Lakes Properties comic we have Kordeyn Guhtellop, the Three Nights demalion, wearing a Dpajor mask. Or is it Dpajor wearing a Kordeyn Guhtellop mask?
The answer to this wurncheolf* has to be that I don’t know; I don’t have a firm grip on the concept of the Three Nights. All I know for sure is that the Domain of Kordeyn Guhtellop consists of three holidays: Twelfth Night on January 5th, Dpajormymy on February 6th, and Yifteyzoumaymy on March 7th. Which brings us to this mask…
…of the demalion Yifteyzouma, dated for March 7th, and one has to ask, is this Kordeyn Guhtellop performing the role of Yifteyzouma, or vice versa? Also, why do the Moss Folk and some jackalopes call this March holiday Yiftoum Nahja, which translates as “the reptile house”? Which leads hapless people with wandering minds to the assumption that this holiday is about the Mayan god Itzamna (aka “god D”) because Sir John Eric Sidney Thompson, KBE, mistakenly interpreted the name Itzamna as “lizard house”.
One thing is for certain, jackalopes love a threefold holiday. They observe the anniversary of the Three-Day-Three-Way War on November 16th, 17th and 18th, and on November 29th (except for leap years) they celebrate Threethreethree Day. Sometime in March or April (I have not yet pinned this down) is the Three Georges Festival, although some people call it Two Georges and a Georgia.
*I found this word last week in the Paisley Notebook, where it is defined as a question (or a series of questions) that must be answered with “I don’t know.”
The Entropic holidays are the days when the Inultaru celebrate specific events during the Procession of Entropy, which proceeds from the middle of October through the last day of December. Today is the holiday known as Twelve-Eleven or the Eve of the Last Twenty or Dwarfstone Day. It commemorates in advance that moment when our sun will finally blow out and shrink down into a small blue jewel that jackalopes call a dwarfstone. Or maybe a dwarfgem? There is some confusion in the translation; I prefer dwarfstone, but I know there are people who will insist on dwarfgem.
(We can all agree that you definitely do not want to call it a swartstone or swartgem. That translation can only be found in Bidot’s Field Guide to Inultarumek Grammars and Vocabularies, a book that you should ignore or burn because Louis Randolph Bidot was a xenophobic misogynistic hoonyuffalp*.)
Dwarfstone Day is one of the holidays that I left out of the Official 2022 Geranium Lake Propeties Calendar, which was my second attempt to include Jackalopian holidays in a GLP calendar. I did not attempt to do that for the 2024 calendars, and I think I will probably never try again. I discovered that my casual knowledge of astronomy, astrology and alchemy is not sufficient for sorting out the complexities of a true Inultarumet calendar, and my knowledge of the history of Jackalopian holidays is woefully incomplete. Plus I was not born with a jackalope’s instinctive affinity for the planet Mars; jackalopes always know where to find Mars in the night sky.
On the back of the artwork for the GLP comic I posted on December 8th, Yost had written a list of dates, arranged in two groups of four:
1 – 4 – 91 7 – 22 – 91 1 – 22 – 92 6 – 16 – 92
11 – 21 – 92 6 – 8 – 93 12 – 8 – 93 * 5 – 4 – 94
By coincidence, I was familiar with the way the dates were arranged, because two years ago I had made my own list:
Spring Equinox – Feb 07 2021 Summer Solstice – Aug 25 2021 Autumn equinox – Feb 24 2022 Winter Solstice – Jul 21 2022
Spring Equinox – Dec 26 2022 Summer Solstice – Jul 12 2023 Autumn equinox – Jan 12 2024 Winter Solstice – Jun 07 2024
These are the Earth dates for the first days of the four seasons on Mars.
With the intention to add a note of irony to today’s post, I lifted the title from Bidot’s dubious translation of this well=known line, Amkeylan tanna ballakveydi annumoorisso dis leydi, from “Sway Towards the Horizon”, a hymn from the Book of Common Procession Prayers. The correct translation is “The white snake bites its own tail fated forever” or “The lindworm bites its own tail destined forever”.
I am including coloring pages for the masks from both parts of “Seasons Beastlings”. Remember to be polite if a wish demon appears after you finish coloring your mask.
*A slang word that is so rude and so ridiculous that it defies translation. If you have conversed with the spalpeens and mudlarks of the To-inen-wa clan, you are probably cognizant of the gist.
As is my wont at this time of year, I have been looking through the Geranium Lake Properties archive for comics that might be suitable for the winter holiday season. When I came across today’s comic, I noticed the date and immediately realized what could be the story behind Yost’s stamp design from my Thanksgiving post. That mask, and the one above, could be portraits of a particular kind of Yalsjee, a demalion called ruhlargheelim by the Inultaru, with some people in tribes of the Second House preferring the term aggakawonnee.
These are pinecone imps who have jobs of critical importance during the Yuletide/Christmas season. Their mission (if you decide to accept their help) is to make sure you will find the most nearly perfect tree for your holiday decorating. Or they might help you find a crazy-branched weed of a tree that will stir your imagination and pity, a tree that will become (through miracles of love and kindness) the Best Christmas Tree Ever.
Apparently there is a faction of ruhlargheelim devoted to the philosophy of “A Charlie Brown Christmas”.
Both of these masks are among the unpublished comics in the GLP archive, so I do not have the option of referring to the narrative authority of Jack Loki’s adventures. The clues to their identities are the dates on the comic panels. These dates can be found at the center of one of the Great Holiday Debates* in Jackalopian culture, a debate that seeks a definitive answer to the question: What day is the best/earliest date for putting up the Christmas tree?
On one side of the debate are the Novemberists, who hold to the argument that any time after eating the Thanksgiving feast, including the afternoon or evening of Thanksgiving Day, is good for hauling the tree into the house. On the other side are the Decemberists, who argue that you can pick/tag your tree on any day after November 12th, but you cannot put it in your living room until Easy As Pie Day, which is December 3rd.
The Decemberists also have a minor debate among themselves, about cutting down your tree the day after Thanksgiving and keeping it outside in a bucket of water until a later date.
*Some jackalopes believe there should be Four Great Holiday Debates, some think there should be Five, while others insist on Seven.
Jackalopes argue about whether to celebrate the holiday of Rakjangrimko (also called Ingrimko Unwa Walks Out or Ingrimko Unwa Walks Alone) on July 13th or July 22nd. Some argue in favor of a Perayu-mun Immissimgalla (a festival five days long), beginning with Rakjangrimko on the 22nd and ending with the Passeggiata of Kalkatura Pumkta on July 26th. Regardless of which date(s) you choose to honor, the story is about a woman who chooses to walk away.
Among the Inultaru, Ingrimko Unwa is a coded name for Creusa, first wife of the Trojan War hero Aeneas. Yep, that Trojan War hero, the star of Virgil’s Aeneid, son of Aphrodite/Venus, progenitor of the Roman Empire and ancestor of Julius Caesar (by way of Creusa’s son, Ascanius). Who is whose antecedent will vary depending on what Greco-Roman myth attributed to which author you read, but today we will concern ourselves with Virgil’s version, to contrast it with the story of Creusa as jackalopes tell it, the story of how Ingrimko Unwa walked out of history.
Virgil makes short work of Creusa’s life. A daughter of Priam, the last king of Troy, she marries Aeneas and bears him a son, Ascanius. She is a detail in the legends of these men, with not much of a life of her own, and the story of her death remains untold. She dies in the sack of Troy so that her ghost can appear to Aeneas and provide him the motivation to fulfill the destiny of his epic and become the forefather of the founders of Rome. In Virgil’s story, she comes perilously close to becoming a plot device we can now call “fridging”.
According to the Greek tales, Creusa was one of nineteen children born alive from Hecuba’s pregnancies, but jackalopes are highly skeptical of ancient storytellers who brag about the effortless fecundity of human mothers. The Inultaru never forgot that childbirth, persistently throughout history, was the second (and sometimes the first) leading cause of death for humans until the twentieth century, or that half of all children died in childhood, or that a woman had a one in four chance of dying from a pregnancy. In the so-called “modern age”, despite the eventual acceptance of germ theory, doctors (who were male and not at risk of dying from childbirth) were slow to change their obstetric practices, and women continued to die when they should have survived.
Creusa as Ingrimko Unwa in the stories of the Inultaru was the daughter of Priam but not Hecuba. Priam fathered many children with slaves, and one of these children of rape was Ingrimko Unwa, whose mother was one of the Inultaru, a woman named Dinyanna (although she is also called Imikku Sa or Ullissantarra). Dinyanna was a servant, confidant and friend to Queen Hecuba. Some people like to say she was some kind of royalty captured as a war prize, a queen or a princess, and that is why she was allowed to interact with Hecuba as a peer. But most jackalopes regard that as silly snobbery, and will tell you that Hecuba was wise enough to recognize that she was the property of a man as much as any slave, despite her being a queen.
Hecuba and Dinyanna became friends as most women will do when they are thrown together in a situation ruled by men. They raised their children together in the female realm of Priam’s household, in rooms and gardens filled with women and their children. According to unspoken rules (unspoken in the sense that they were discussed by women but never spoken to men yet men obeyed them, out of indifference or caution) this was a realm where no adult man was allowed to enter, not even a eunuch. A realm where the intelligence and energy of women worked their mysteries and their magicks.
When Dinyanna died in her second childbirth, her son survived her by only a few minutes. Hecuba took Ingrimko Unwa (who was less than three years old) as her own child and Priam accepted this daughter as his child by Hecuba without knowing or caring about the identity of the actual biological mother. This moved Ingrimko Unwa’s status from the child of a slave to the daughter of a king. A thing that happened so often that it was not unusual at all.
Powerful magicks of destiny were cooked up in the female realms, unseen by men, unrecorded by history.
Ingrimko Unwa became Creusa, a daughter of Priam, a child of royalty, eligible for marriage to an aristocratic hero, which was something that had to happen, whether she wanted it or not. She was a valuable piece of royal property, and when she was old enough (somewhere between sixteen and eighteen years of age) she was awarded to Aeneas according to a contract arranged by her father with the gods. Aeneas was a real hero, we know this because Virgil told us he was a real hero, and also a son of Aphrodite/Venus. This real hero promptly fucked his wife, got her pregnant, and Ingrimko Unwa was lucky enough to survive the birth of her son. She did not survive the sack of Troy according to Virgil, but we have already realized that Virgil did not know much (or did not care) about the lives of women. As far as Virgil was concerned, the women of Troy were there to wail with grief when their sons and husbands were torn to pieces by heroes on the battlefield, or to beg for mercy for their babies, then watch in horror as their babies were hurled by heroes off the battlements. They were there to be raped by heroes, to be sold as slaves to heroes, and to have their throats slit with swords by heroes.
Ingrimko Unwa did none of those things. Troy had been defeated, the enemy was within the walls and death was near. Ingrimko Unwa’s husband was arming himself and getting ready to die gloriously in a lost battle. His father, the guy who had been seduced by the goddess Aphrodite/Venus and lived to brag about it, was laying on his bed, lame, bewailing the fate that had prevented him from dying honorably in battle. Ingrimko Unwa had been busy taking care of their household, making sure the people who depended upon them, their servants and their families, had provisions and knew how to escape the city. She tried to reason with Aeneas, reminding him of his duty to protect his son and his followers, all the people who did not want to die. He would not listen to her; even Virgil admits his hero would not hear her entreaties.
So she left. She picked up her own pack of necessities and walked out. She had already sent her son to safety in the care of trusted servants who were desperate to save their own children. She had made sure that Aeneas and her cranky father-in-law knew the avenues of escape. She walked away from the great hero without looking back, in haste, eager to leave behind the mighty epic of her husband’s life. If she had known, she would have been delighted that her actions would inconvenience future poets like Virgil, who would have to make up stuff about her fate, and invent a different son for Aeneas.
In the stories jackalopes tell, the name of Ingrimko Unwa’s son was Askeltan. He founded no empires, created no dynasties, fought in no wars, and never became a hero. He had a long life, no children, many friends, enough wealth, and was as happy as he needed to be.
Ingrimko Unwa continued to walk out and drifted into the life of a wanderer. She walked across the entire known world and back, then did the same across the unknown world. She wrote many books about her travels, and all her books were lost. She walked herself out of one kind of existence into another, and then did it again. She gained a different perspective with a new pair of eyes, and after several lifetimes, she became the demmalyun* of the long and winding road.
Yost preferred the July 13th date for Rakjangrimko.
*I have been informed that this is the proper spelling for the word “demalion”. I suppose I will go through my posts and make corrections. Eventually. Maybe.
If I tried to write a short essay about how the pandemic changed my life, and my views on life, I might begin it like this:
“The pandemic, and the goddess Fortuna, compelled me into unemployment and then into early retirement.”
I edited out the word “forced” from that statement and replaced it with “compelled” but either statement would be no less true than the other. I think “forced” indicates a situation in which I had no choice, while “compelled” implies that there were other choices I could have made. And indeed there were other choices, but they were…
oppressive.
That really is the best word for it.
According to Google Translate, the word arinnirleya (which I think is a lovely word, it sounds like a name you would give to your daughter) is an Inultaru word that means “oppressor” or “nuisance”. Which might cause you to think that jackalopes would never, or rarely, give that name to their daughters. Yet it is the name of a magnificent fairy creature in a book: Queen Arinnirleya of the Wild Weird Clime by Chanthlyn Solutorris (Chatterton & Peck, 1907).
In the context of that story, arinnileyra might be better translated as “obstinate” or “stubborn”. The Inultaru have many stories about obstinate or stubborn females. Alice Aroumbeyski, Jack Loki’s orfensirrin, his girlfriend, fiancée, significant other, would fit that description.
Stubborn women are much admired by jackalopes.
The above image is half of the mandala form for this mask of Queen Arrinirleya. The whole mandala could not fit on the coloring book page, so you will need to print out two halves.
Masks of Queen Arrinirleya do not always feature her fabulous third eye, but Alice prefers to include it in her designs, as an eye or a peacock feather, or as a shape where the eye, as an option, can be painted or attached.
The Inultaru phrase idu j’valna is seen by most people as equivalent to the French phrase c’est la vie, and thus it is often given the same English translation, “that’s life” or “such is life”. Which is not quite right, even though jackalopes use their words in the same way as the French phrase, as an observation or an exclamation. To the French, c’est la vie is a insouciant declaration of knowing: life is this. To the Inultaru, idu j’valna is an implication that life is a question, a mystery: what is this?
Enjam. Device, or bread.
When used as an exclamation, the word enjam means just that, an exclamation. Much like when you exclaim “shit” when there is no poop in sight. Otherwise, in calmer settings, enjam can mean device, trick, tool, and more recently, because of the movie Moonstruck, bread.
Yost adapted this comic for a Christmas card, and most of the people on his mailing list received it in 1988 instead of this card. I have been looking through the archives for this particular Geranium Lake Properties comic since the start of December, but I did not find it until the day before yesterday. For me, January 6th is the last day of the Christmas season, so I do not feel I am terribly late posting this today.
I have thought of a couple of ways to begin this post, to try to explain Iljom Irreysee, the Ghost of Closed Doors, the Story Told, and . . . plant fertilizer? Specifically, compost and manure. Rot and shit. It is an interesting challenge to interpret her ibbattan (a word from the Second House, which can mean realm, relatedness, essence, aura) in a Christmassy mode.
To make my task easy, I will first reach for something Dickensian, because ghosts + Christmas = Dickens. Also, it is easy to tell you what Iljom Irreysee is not: the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come (which I will call Christmas Future because it is more pithy and pithy is the brevity of wit). Jackalopes really do not get Christmas Future. They love everything about the character, they love the boney hands and the dark empty hood, they love Christmas Future’s terse, no-nonsense attitude that moves right past straightforward into cruelty. They do get the ghost part, Christmas Future is the classically scary Angel of Death. Jackalopes get Dickens, because he knew you had to put the dark in a story so you could better see the light.*
What jackalopes do not get is the future part.
The reason jackalopes have a problem with the Ghost of Christmas Future is the problem jackalopes have with the Arrow of Time. They feel the Arrow of Time is not a real thing. Their sensitivity to Entropy, the only god of the universe the Inultaru would consider worshipping if they bothered to worship gods, makes it difficult for them to think of time as something that moves into the future. Entropy is in the Here Now, in a place the Inultaru call the Oj-Oomirran, and changes that happen to the Here Now (because of the force of Entropy) happen in the present moment. There is no future. There is only worry, anxiety, anticipation, desire, all happening in the present moment, generated by a fantasy of the future.
Wow. That went off on a tangent, but it is getting too late to edit it, and now I will have to finish this undoubtedly fascinating account of Iljom Irreysee in another post. Meanwhile, enjoy this picture of one of my weeds. Entropy has added some red to this small plant rooted between bricks, making my front walkway look a lot like Christmas.
*Also the dark is interesting and fun. That is why great actors like to play Scrooge.
Today let us consider the problem of angels in the beliefs of the Inultaru. The problem might be that jackalopes do not believe in angels as existential entities, i.e. persons. Or the problem might be a matter of grammar.
The problem might be the word demalion.
English speakers are familiar with the word demalion when it is stuck on the back end of the word tatter, which means, as a noun, a person dressed in ragged (or tattered) clothing. The tatter part of tatterdemalion is fairly self-evident. It is the demalion part that stumps people. The best guess is that it might come from the French word maillot, for a kind of lightweight shirt or undershirt, like a jersey.
In the language of jackalopes, the word demalion can be translated as “like an angel” or “like a tortoise”. The literal translation of malion is “tortoise”, but malion cannot be translated as “angel”, although an angel can be called a demalion.
A demalion can be any one of the various spirits, ghosts, demons, demigods, household gods, creators and demiurges that make up the pantheon of Jackalopian animism. You might try to imagine Jackalopian animism as a creative writing exercise for atheists. You need characters with substantial personalities to make a good story, but the story has only the realness of literature, like a prose poem version of the universe. Like fishermen spinning a yarn, Jackalopes give personhood to various aspects of the universe for the sake of a better narrative.
(I have seen people defining a demalion as a supernatural being, but that is a crappy definition because jackalopes are not enthralled with the term supernatural. To them, there is no feasible reason why anything in the universe should be more than natural.)
Which brings us back to the problem of Jackalopian disbelief in angels. Angels are not entities to jackalopes because angels do not appear as persons in the Abrahamic religions. (Jackalopes do not even recognize the word angel as a valid noun.) Like the rest of us, jackalopes will sometimes identify themselves according to what they do. I will say, “I am an artist.” Jack Loki will say, “I am a bryologist*.” Alice Aroumbeyski’s business card will identify her as “Alice Cordelia Morisk-Rorifer Aroumbeyski, Vizardwright” (Alice’s legal name refers to ancestors of both her mother and her father, but she dislikes the name Zlessim because of her personal history with an uncle, a story we will not be telling here). However, my occupation as an artist, and Alice’s occupation as a vizardwright, are not who we are. Being is not doing. Angels have no being, they are only doing, and they only do God’s will. These messengers of God are regarded by jackalopes as verbs, or maybe an action clause. Or at most, they might be considered the more vigorous appendages of God. There is a popular, and rather rude, tradition among jackalopes that God sent the angel Gabriel and the Holy Ghost to impregnate the mother of his son, because He was lacking that one essential appendage a male needs for procreation.
*A Slightly Later Edit: Jack Loki identifies himself as a bryologist during the course of Geranium Lake Properties, and yes, I am aware that he also identifies as a lichenologist. Plus several other identities and/or occupations.
The Inultaru call it togsanegua dortama. The To-inen-wa call it togsam anequadortif.
The list of ninety-four.
Gralie Bohe refers to the concept in her novel The Boy in the Yellow Leatherette Portmanteau: “The two men had left Ethan’s godmother at the Bookscape bookstore, caught up in an intense discussion with Ashtabula Littlehales about the Inultarumet doctrine of togsanegua dortama kleit dakuyuzem utalvinnin.”
The list of ninety-four things to put in bottles.
It does not have to be things in bottles, it can be a different set of ninety-four. Things in bottles (specifically wide-mouth apothecary jars, small, might hold four to six liquid ounces, clear glass, not brown) is a well-established tradition taught by the followers of Ava Lantiko and the SPC1 School. She describes the technique as a meditation for melancholy.
Not a meditation to cure melancholy, togsanegua dortama is a method to enhance melancholy. To enchant it, to entice it into your heart, to bring it into a state of fi-dan-illoju2 with charms and talismans.
Salvia Corkhill, the finicky mastermind of the folk/jazz fusion band Crow Vee Sucre Ya, practices a fungurra agashandulku3 technique. Which involves ninety-four scraps of paper, each folded twice and secured with a paperclip. Each scrap of paper is blank, representing a forgotten memory, a path not taken, or an unattainable possibility. These scraps are placed in an empty paper box with the letters H, O, P, E written in the four corners of the box bottom, one letter per corner. Then the box is burned and the ninety-four paperclips are sifted from the ashes and kept in a small container. Corkhill keeps hers in a toothpick holder carved from soapstone.
(This is the second installment of two posts about Yost’s designs for Crow Vee Sucre Ya’s sixth album. I also wanted to practice marking footnotes with superscript numbers. I went a bit overboard with that.)
1Silentium Post Clamores
2This is a weird one to translate. It can mean “a solid certainty”, a tetrahedron, and “let me know”.
There is no mask for today. We are halfway through our Month of Masks, and I have several more masks to show you, but today we are taking a bit of time to appreciate the tradition of Artim-nageem. Tomorrow is the start of the big holiday season for jackalopes: the first day of the Procession of Entropy. If there was such a thing as the Eve of Entropy, today would be that day, but there is no such thing. Instead, today might be called Uncursing Day, or maybe the Day of the Uncursed, but this small holiday does not actually have a name. It is just the best day of the year for undoing a curse, according to the To-inen-wa clan.
It is a remarkably simple ritual. If you wish to lift a curse on someone, perhaps a family member or a friend (or even an enemy, even if you cursed them yourself and now regret it), wait for October 14th, then do this: 1. Center yourself, in whatever way you customarily center yourself. 2. Picture the person you wish to decursify in your mind’s eye. 3. Fill yourself with committed intent. The To-inen-wa have a name for committed intent (of course they do) it is suwadjek-eetmeht. 4. Speak the words, “Azim azim mazim” plus the name of your person.
And that’s it! That’s all it takes for the usual garden-variety curses. Not an effective method, I think, for giant portentous dooms dropped on legendary heroes by demiurges and other kinds of supreme beings.
To lift a curse on yourself, the words are “Azim artim nageem azim”, no need to add your name.
In the above panel, Mother Jackal is manifesting as a daughter of Neraka Ikuzimu, the Mother of All Furies. A frowny face or a down-turned mouth denotes fierceness in ancient masks of the Inultaru. You can see the same characteristics in another classically-styled mask by Alice Aroumbeyski, representing three gorgons who are members of the Hilkahilleevinn, the Seven Sisters of Indifference (although some tribes of the Second House call them the Disowned Sisters of the Blue-Eyed Son):
On the front of the mask (February 27th) are the twins: Elmaht, vengeful against those who master skills (or teach them to others) of beguilement, seduction, enchantment and entrapment, and Oseilu, vengeful against people who overindulge in izurunee alkagga*. Which are prayers for salvation and love made by adults who are old enough to generate these things for themselves.
On the back (February 28th) of this reversible mask is Allivaeyem, who can be invoked as a general all-purpose avenger, but she is particularly effective for achieving vengeance for raped women.
*Not the same as praying for comfort. Asking for comfort in times of trouble and hardship is always sensible.
The Cephalopod Jamboree is going on right now. I hope you are getting some quality hang time with your favorite octopuses, squids, cuttlefishes and nautiluses.
This gorgeous mask began as part of a commission from a member of the Killikunda Mahun (five Bostonian families who trace their ancestry back to jackalopes living on the island of Saaremaa in the eighth century). The woman who hired Alice Aroumbeyski was Haleya Matagati, an atijo-noyta* with a patrician pedigree, who asked Alice to design her regalia for the Erityisen Erikoista Biennial Ball. Which was a ridiculously extravagant fancy-dress party held every other year, the premier event at the center of high society for the Killikunda Mahun.
Haleya Matagati was pleased with the finished costume, except for the mask, which she hated, and she had no qualms about telling Alice how much she disliked it. She also told Alice she would gladly pay for the costume without the mask, with a thirty percent discount off the agreed-upon price. Alice contemplated the women in silence for a few moments, but before the matriarch could say another word, Alice carefully set the rejected mask on a chair and whisked the ball gown onto her sewing table. With a few deft twitches of fabrics and furbelows, she arranged the costume into a beautiful display of all its delightful details. Then she picked up a large pair of scissors.
“Let me show you what you will purchase with your thirty percent discount,” she said to Matron Matagati. Then Alice quickly, efficiently, without hesitation, cut out a third of the gown, from collar to hem, tossing the hacked-off piece, with a flourish of expensive embellishments, into the nearest scrap bin.
*atijo-noyta literally translates as house-mother, but matriarch, matron,grande dame or old witch are all suitable interpretations.
This is one of the many masks designed by Jack Loki’s girlfriend, Alice Aroumbeyski. Lately, when digging through the archives of Geranium Lake Properties, I have come across several of Alice’s designs (as evoked by Yost) and I wonder why I have not yet shared them with the wider world. I begin to feel like I may have been neglecting Alice, a bit.
The mask in today’s post represents Neraka Ikuzimu, the Mother of All Furies, in her Mother Nature disguise. The name of Mother Nature in Jackalopian culture is either Iya Iseda or Luyona Aita, depending on which stories you might be telling. Iya Iseda belongs to the classic Inultaru pantheon, while Luyona Aita is favored by storytellers trained in the Second House traditions and for those born in the Killikunda Mahun. Which are five Jackalopian families who trace their ancestry back to the eighth century, to Saaremaa, the largest island in Estonia. All their descendants currently live in Boston.
Whatever the name, whatever the tradition, everyone knows it is the Mother of All Furies behind the smiling mask of Mother Nature.
The GLP story here involves a nature loving cult of humans, the Skousies, who occasionally interfere with Jack Loki’s schemes. When Yost was a boy, he used to confuse the John Birch Society with the John Muir Society, but when he finally sorted out the differences, he found much to dislike in both groups. When he created the Skousies (named after Willard Cleon Skousen), he made them into a bunch of anti-communist, tree-hugging tourists who combined odious characteristics from both Societies. They are paranoid believers in elaborate conspiracy theories, whose holy mission is to preserve the glorious natural beauties of the wilderness for generations of Americans to use as amusement parks and cathedrals. The Skousies are quite unable to see that their idea of love is really about ownership.
They are also quite unable to see the wholeness of nature. When the Mother of All Furies takes off her pretty green mask, they still cannot perceive the lethality of the predator, the poisons, the venoms, the violence, the fetid rot, and behind it all, the yawning chasm of the void.
Entropy waiting patiently to swallow everything.
The title of today’s GLP comic comes from a translation of the famous introductory line to a classic Inultaru extinction story: Iya Iseda jee punnaynen erinyileva eranko, jokakynsik aiken luomansa verris iksurrepsien, aipassa vedenzes summusta. Which 90% of the time is translated to English as Mother Nature is the red smiling beast who will claw everything she creates into bloody tatters, while weeping a deluge. I have been told, more than several times, that the start of the line should be translated as Mother Nature is the beast with a red grin. Except both are wrong; the color should be translated as pink. I think I’ve told you twice, at least, that pink is the color of terror for jackalopes. Unfortunately, pink just will not carry the load of horror it needs for English speakers, so red is used instead.
Things on the internet happen like mushrooms popping out of mouldering leaf litter. Over on Ello, I encountered this writing prompt: tvs nanofic #25
“…there’s something in the woods. you can’t quite make it out from where you are. in your own post, using 55 words exactly, tell the story of what you do, what it is, or anything you want.”
That actually happened to me last year, that something in the woods. An elusive presence walked through the wild oaks in my backyard, shuffling through the dry leaves. (These are coast live oaks, they are evergreen but they drop their small prickly leaves all the time, along with lichen-encrusted twigs and branches.) T Van Santāna‘s writing prompt seemed to arrive as a bit of synchronicity, a fleeting revelation, an inkling, a glimmering. I started to write: “You were the glimpse of a moment. Not a bird, not a possum, not a raccoon, not a dog. An entity made intangible when perceived. A god, then.”
I wrote more, 55 words in total, except that the words did not feel quite right, they felt… yosorical, which is a handy word the Inultaru borrowed from the Second House, the Otilem Kejik. It is a word that has no English equivalent, meant for something out of place, a mistake, a dodgy occurrence, to the point of being (but not quite) unlawful.
After I wrote what I wrote, it seemed to me that the entity who visited my garden was disinclined to become a god. They were apparently content to remain an unsolved puzzle, a lappalleppi. So I left that story where it was, where it could not become much of anything, and went on to other things. The weeds in the garden grew large and bloomed with health, the roses and the irises flaunted their flowers valiantly, the cactus and succulents were as staunchly ornamental as they always were, the oaks flung their leaves to the wind with fierce abandon (spring is a blustery season here), and all this happened with little help from me.
I am not sure if this is the iris my mother named “Arnold P. Barker”, but if not, it is probably a sister or a brother, starting as a seed from the same pod.
The big flamboyant aeonium was a succulent I salvaged in pieces last year, from a friend’s rubbish heap. In the image below is a handful of chicks from Sempervivum arachnoideum:
Lappalleppi is another word stolen by the Inultaru from the Second House; it can mean both an unsolved puzzle and a solved one, implying that solutions can be doubted. A reminder that maybe you should re-think your answers, double-check your grand totals, reconsider your stories. Remind yourself that myths are metaphors for truth, and truth transforms itself into fiction the moment you put it into a narrative.
I imagine that Yost wrote the words “monkey puzzle dragon spider” on the back of the art for today’s GLP comic. There is a story the Otilem Kejik tell about the monkey puzzle dragon spider, the story of the aneepa lappaleppilofste tindruspin. I am not sure it is a story I can write down in a language that is not asemic.
Vraicking 