Rubywise Transfigurations

I can’t impress Rev Tim with religious speculation yet

Took my trouble to actually go to post office and grab my money as I should

I have the feeling Amanita Rodriguez won’t put much trust in the Trustees… gotta concoct how exacly…

Denzil opened the cucumber bridge for us

I’m sorry, I just CAN’T help but always think of that bridge as having a funny name. There are cucurbit plants, there’s the cucurbit as part of an alembic, and there’s also this

Hulusi or cucurbit flute

A pity we don’t have a Mazarine Hulusi around.

I don’t have any idea which is the right meaning for the bridge. All of them look significant. I even thought it was some Gaelish word.

this is third day, and it’s still spring

Now the blacksmith’s true work with me starts. Welcome to the 60 minute counters that every room imposes.

as it is the case for everyone, this cottage, the Keeper’s Lodge, is the first room we can unlock

A diverse but reduced assortment of books await inside the Lodge. Mr. Christopher’s books! I had some fun reading this guy before in my old life, I am sure. I can feel his romantic but slightly cynical soul from afar when I skim the pages.

Even if I remember some joke about his work being readily understandable… I feel frustrated, humiliated even. I can’t get what he really wants to say here. I spent some time sitting on my new bed, trying to unlock true meaning. And the second volume is even worse. That makes me think I was in fact reduced to a baby here… should I try to extract some measure of confort from this image? To enact the idea of rebirth more fully? No. I think I took this too far. If I was a child at any moment that was when I woke up on the beach sand, almost drowning yet. Just as Moth and Moon, I need my growth stages… I think I’m young inside but not as young as to be not deserving of a sip of the dandelion wine I found near my bed, though.

Not going to drown my sorrows in flower juice. This is Hush House Key. Not a Key, just a key of course. Let us see in what stage of decay I can find the House proper.

While Denzil works on rehabilitating Hush House I go around inspecting some of the other books left behind on the cotttage. Galmier prose feels excited and exciting. I am almost contaminated by her particular obsessions.

Opera! I’m eager to later examining it better. I have a feverish chill when skimming the volume. Tragedy, when properly felt, enables synthesis. I can feel a veritable flood of insights and conclusions fed by the careful study of this piece.

I don’t feel the familiarity the other works I’ve perused before brought me. Nevertheless the subject is deeply enticing. But I’m very tired, it’s already dark outside and Denzil went home. Finally tomorrow I’ll have a proper desk to work on. Maybe some Baronial secret left behind to explore… thankfully, at least more books. The reader that finds this journal someday probably have no idea of how much I need to read. And possibly no clue of how much I need to understand what I read before my patience runs out with myself and I start doing something I don’t even yet have a clue what will be.

The fourth day brings me the face of the Sun.

I love how peculiar but alluring her manners are. I assisted her, or she assisted me in fixing the observatory problems. We talked in vague terms about the concept of rebirth. Maybe I’ll open up more to her at some point? She seems to know more than she lets go with her words but at the same time I have the impression she is not exactly hiding something. Or maybe I’m naive as a teenager.

I take some time writing a proper reply to the Trust. Then at the end my own trust vanishes in a burst of paranoia and superstition. I don’t know if I should open myself up about how I truly feel to these people, even if they are my patrons, or employers. I’m not ready. To the fire it goes. To the fire it went. It was paranoia and supersticion, now that I think of what I’ve done.

Hm. That’s more like it, they probably are expecting an answer just like this from me. Less paranoia and superstition. In all probability they will also feel less paranoia and superstition and won’t send anyone inquiring about what I’m doing and what I became.

At this point, besides laughing at Hieronymous, Amanita won’t devote much time musing about those books’ contents, waiting for when she actually pores over them and cracks their significance.

This probably won’t work. But she tried nevertheless, just to add more to her frustration…

Now that I think of it, technically, since this is the seat of Hushery in the Watchman’s Tree, shouldn’t Librarians be specially accomplished in that Wisdom?

Heart principle on the bed and the memory

The place of rest is specially important to one’s soul. Almost all access to the Mansus is done when sleeping; each bed is receptive to catching some influences and not others. But let me think particularly about this, let me call it, charged Memory I was dwelling upon today. It was a Memory of carnal appetites, but those appetites roll on thanks to Heart, not Grail; if appetites can be sated, it’s because of Heart, not Grail; we devour the sources of nourishment because of Grail, given it’s the vessel-maw that opens to engorge and welcome those sources, but nourishment can only properly be processed, be understood… by Heart. There is a meditation I can do in this bed before sleeping. Unlike higher mysteries and their extreme holiness I can write about it here… what is above the stomach, and what is below the stomach… as above, so below; as within, so without.

first spring, day 5

it is clouded now and if it was sunny as yesterday I could take this challenge on

A(man)ita of lettters

the inevitable result? epiphany goes Nowhere

FIRST RECIPE DETECTED EVER, in fact i should be fumbling around with those already

some wiki links about what we’ll be Considering from now on… https://book-of-hours.fandom.com/wiki/An_Impertinent_Vitulation https://book-of-hours.fandom.com/wiki/Leaves_%26_Thorns https://book-of-hours.fandom.com/wiki/Ernestine_Peterhans https://book-of-hours.fandom.com/wiki/Thomas_Dewulf https://book-of-hours.fandom.com/wiki/Rubywise_Ruin

I can’t get no Satisfaction…

Note that Amanita uses the Satisfaction memory to crack open this book, and this was of course facilitated by her meditations on the bed the night before.

Peterhans’ book is the first book we crack open besides the Journal itself. The game definitions of An Impertinent Vitulation say that we need to accumulate a Grail intensity of 6 to learn anything from it; reading it, now or later, brings us Memory: Satisfaction; and the Lesson itself is Leaves & Thorns. On our own end, our Artist character exhausts some of her Ereb here (but not all for the day, since she has more than one Ereb card), drawing on her previous knowledge of Desires & Dissolutions and as mentioned before, burning away Memory: Satisfaction. The workstation used was Eva’s Desk. It’s important to keep in mind that we may or may not take into consideration what was used by the Librarian to understand the book when we make sense of it. We also may or may not use any hermeneutic concept when operating our thinking here. Taking a look at our previous post https://medium.com/@malenadeoliveira/surrealism-and-exegesis-ddb66b89dfc4 may be useful. The actual text of the book you’ve reading, and also its author, are very important as well. And you can run some sort of a Venn diagram in your mind to see what fits what. In this case, for example, the author Ernestine Peterhans informs us that our predecessor Baron Thomas (DeWulf) was a fan of Rubywise Ruin, which can be crafted as a Scholar-level Grail recipe, using Flowers as the game text hints. That could seem like the start of some cheap gossip about a deceased man but… I imagine Baron Silence as a Winter + Sky man. Why a typical Grail beverage would be his fave? Rubywise Ruin doesn’t include any of those (hypothesized) aspects among the five it gives the one that imbibes it. The Ruin is even the main ingredient for Sacrament Calicite, which is a major Grail beverage. I see Grail as something very far from both Winter and Sky. So maybe this was a way the second baron, in a way the patron of Hush House, balanced his humours? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism We know that humoral theory was disproved but we can imagine Principles and Powers acting in our bodies to provoke balance and imbalance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Fludd Fludd was a Paracelsan physician, an astrologer, a mathematician and maybe the author of some books in the SH setting (Orchid Transfigurations, a Grail-focused series), if those are not actually some Pseudo-Fludd work. Astrology and math can be seen as Sky interests, while Paracelsan medicine critcized humoral theory. And this was a matter of competing cosmologies. Paracelsan physicians replaced the four humours focus with the alchemical tria prima (sulphur, mercury and salt), but Fludd in particular had his own vision of Chaos, Light and Spirit. Fludd and Thomas Dewulf were contemporaries as far as I know. Maybe they influenced each other? Thomas was an ouranoscopist, his astronomical notes could have interested Fludd. And way after Librarian Thomas Blake named one of Hush’s House rooms Fludd Gallery. https://book-of-hours.fandom.com/wiki/Fludd_Gallery Now notice that this room requires Grail or Winter to unlock. Hermeneutic philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey defined historicity as a series of world views. We have then crudely used Baron Silence and Robert Fludd worldviews to start composing a theory of cosmology.

From the sketches of Amanita Rodriguez:

Chaos, the waters of chaos: Grail-matter Light, from Glory to everywhere but Nowhere: Lantern-formation Spirit is not a subtle intermediary substance: it is a subtle order assuring proper endings for each thing everywhere. Winter.

At this point I can’t commit Leaves & Thorns to The Bosk, unless I left it for later. But in the beginning of the game (a strategic decison now) I prefer to gather as much Soul cards as I can and I have the basics on all or almost all of the Wisdoms. So I can only commit this Skill to Birdsong, providing me Chor, which, incidentally gives me MORE GRAIL along with Heart, exactly the Principle Amanita was focused when studying the Skill from An Impertinent Vitulation. If The Bosk was available it would give me more Health, no Grail there. And also this ‘explains’ retroactively me ‘ignoring’ any Nectar mentions from the book (so far I just thought it would be too much to involve Nectar).

My Ereb is silent for now but my Chor rises and sings about the vibrations in all things.

lots of Permanent Memories rolling there, man

Amanita’s epiphanies about primal workings of the world and how they reflect in Leaves & Thorns as Birdsong probably deserve a more detailed post in the future as she develops her ideas.

But next post we’ll have either the continuation of what she is doing in Hush House or the second part of our surrealism and exegesis rants.