Category: Journal

“Writer, demi-fictional pseudonym, non-binary queer boy≈girl, maybesexual, anarchist, liminal explorer, positive nihilist, syncretic polymath.”

The quote above is my current Twitter bio. For the benefit of the curious I thought I’d expand a bit upon what I mean with those somewhat cryptic words.

Writer – I write fiction and ramblings, philosophy and poetry. I just got an English language short-story published in print in the anthology Vast. Also several Swedish language novels under another name. Lots of reading on this and my Swedish alter ego-website.

Demi-fictional pseudonym – Ellinor Kall is not my legal name. But this is still me, with fictional parts, imagined into reality. I’m conjured, created from fiction, made part real. I’m a mind without body. Or maybe the alternative behavior of an existing body.

Non-binary queer boy≈girl – I personally reject the concept of gender identity – to me it’s just physical ins and outs, that’s all. I treat it more as just a personality trait and makes no difference in interaction or attraction. I’m neither Venus nor Mars – I’m Mercury.

Maybesexual – I’m not attracted to people on the usual premise. It’s more of a gray/ace/demisexual thing where friends and lovers are not two separate things but different levels of connection on the same scale. The sexual bit only happens very intermittently, so maybe.

Anarchist – Politics are like the remote control to your TV. You have no choice but to watch whatever the one who holds it wants to watch. Anarchists puts the control on the table for everyone to use.

Liminal explorer – I’m curious about the in betweens as you might have noticed. The gradients outside the beaten path. The shadows, the light. Where no girl has gone before. I don’t understand mainstream, I try to do my thing. In life and in fiction.

Positive nihilist – Nothing has inherent value or meaning. We can however give subjective value or meaning to what we want. But that has to be an active choice, we can’t passively wait for the meaning of life to appear to us. I’m a bringer of meaning.

Syncretic polymath – I work the arts like magic. Words, music, drawing, painting, photo, film, animation, etc. from any style, school or genre I like. I learn the rules so that I can break them in the best possible way. Diversity makes fiction stronger.

The scent of her presence always upbeated my heart. The cogs in her mind ignited the ones in mine – it’s called cognition. I long, but memory is short – her sharp tongue could sting and hurt me like nothing else.

I remember our time together. It was like the tale of the fox and the scorpion. I was swimming with her on my back, trying to get us both to shore, but you couldn’t help stinging me, cause that’s your nature.

Maybe I’m ready to move on now.

Yesterday I was logs of tar wood burning from all the things that were wrong and beyond my control. Today I am the transcending flakes of ashes with their Brownian motion in the gusts among the oblivious living trees. Tomorrow – maybe I can be a seed in the newly fertilized soil?

2019 in review
I expanded a short-story that got accepted into an anthology (due out 2020). I also recorded some music and kinda finished the novel I’d been writing since forever. I continued up the tree, visited Geburah and did some writing on magic.

I made a peace treaty with my body. I declared that I’m a binary star. While I fought my old foes fatigue and depression I got stuck in boy-mode. I didn’t have energy to get close to anyone so I kept mostly to myself, reading, recuperating.

2020 in preview
I wanna quickly edit and publish two almost done novels. Then move on to writing more short stories that won’t take ten years to finish. Gonna record more new music, solo and with two different bands. Get dirty with some visual arts, both ink+paper and digitally.

I wanna find energy enough to get close to someone for snuggling, giggles and stuff. Assert myself and grow as non-binary. Probably get a tattoo. Definitely care more for my body. Maybe move on from just having a peace treaty with it to actually liking it again.

On a rotating speck of dust, leaning away from the local fusion reactor on an arbitrary amount of orbits, an interconnected accumulation of deoxyribonucleic acid ignite chemical reactions in the lower troposphere that via electromagnetic waves triggers a release of monoamine neurotransmitters.

Visiting the past is always a revelation. This year I found out there is nothing of me left in that shallow world where time stands still. Nothing – but an empty shell mistaken for a person I’m not. I can’t create my present reality here, the past is petrified.

The voices in the past repeat the same sentences for what seems like an eternity of a single moment. They’re at a shore, attempting to chew the rocks in their mouths instead of trying to talk to the ocean of time that is raging and frothing in front of them.

“What’s the point of talking to water”, they’d say if they could. Not seeing beyond. The past is not a place, it’s the inside of people.

Soon I’ll swim back out to my boat where time moves again.

I just woke up from a nightmare where I was forced to put my left hand into a wall-mounted medical device designed to perform emergency amputations. My heart was racing from the panic as I braced for the cut.

This could also be my 2019 in review.

You never see your own faults the same way those close to you do. And they never tell you. On the other hand, they never see the flaws you hide from them. The darkness of absent light, the sharp broken shards of your heart, the empty container where your happiness should be.

You are like
a beautiful sunrise
and you’ve got
three apples.

You give one to me,
and eat one yourself.

How many apples
remain when sunset
separates us
with darkness?

We only use second person narration in poetry and math problems. Is there some kind of hidden connection?

“Learn from the past and deal with any bad things rather than avoid it. Then move on. Stop returning and dwelling, because it keeps you from moving on. To me the past feels more and more like distant backstory that mostly isn’t relevant anymore. I have become someone else now.”

This name, Ellinor Kall, started as an escape, the revealing of an inner secret, as an exploration of myself. Along the years it grew and took on it’s own life. It made me write and act more spontaneous. I didn’t have to care about what those who knew the previous me would think. It made me free.

I connected with people that didn’t care who I had been, they became friends with who I was now. I realized that this name was as true as the other one I have. My alias became me. I let my sides do different things, even preferred different languages depending on who was up front.

For a couple of years I’ve tried to physically manifest my new self in actual reality. Changing my appearance bit by bit, mostly by clothing, nails and some makeup. It alternately brought me comfort and despair, ultimately draining my energy. I’ve been in a civil war with my body.

My inner selves and my body are different. I have come to accept that now. I’ve made a peace treaty with my body. I’ll stop disliking my body, treat it with respect, exercise it and use it to do things we both enjoy instead of retreating into my mind and only using it for transport.

I can be who I am without changing the body I live in. The clothes I wear doesn’t validate me. I can wear high heels or heavy hiking boots. I can be both me and me at the same time, just as easily as I can be both a writer and a reader. I can change appearance based on mood and feelings. I can be fluid on both inside and outside.

I’m Ellinor and I’m […]. I’m a writer, musician and magician. I’m liminal, demi-fictional, a positive nihilist, queer, non-binary, genderfluid, an extranousician and a secret oracle. I travel through and explore both fiction and reality. And by my will – I do what I darn well please!

On the troubles of being a binary star…

I separated Ellinor from M when online as a way to explore her as an aspect of myself without the burden of the connotations M brought with him. Now I feel that I want to consolidate. I’m not two separate entities, it’s just two non-binary aspects of one core.

I was born with the body of M. But I’ve always had Ellinor within me. Sometimes she is stronger and takes over the stage and sometimes she stays at home under a blanket with a book while M goes to work. Poor M, he doesn’t want to leave her, none of them likes a job where they have to follow orders and rules.

Ellinor is not just a persona of M. She has her own will, her own mood, her own way of expressing, her own way of writing and interacting with people. She is both stronger and more vulnerable. She has impetus, she is restless and sometimes hypomanic.

M is not the real Ellinor. He is just an aspect of her. Often conditioned by society into a role. He often feels he’s playing a character, putting up a fascade, and he often gets genuinely surprised when he sees himself in a mirror. Sometimes he feels like nothing. Like his task is just to carry a body from A to B.

Sometimes E hates that she looks like M. Sometimes M hates that he feels like E. Sometimes they get along and work marvels. Their wills wax and wane, their interests overlap, and both like writing. Maybe M would like to let go of the selfcontrol, which also makes him prone to judge himself and other, while E is more dominant with a greater kindness who sees mercy beyond the obstacles.

And still – it’s all me.

It was Midsummers Eve, the great heathen celebration of the fallic shape of Scandinavia, and Ellinor was invited by a friend to a small backyard party in a somewhat shady suburb for beer and some kind of grilled, or rather charred, meat referred to only as “fleisch”.

She wasn’t used to socializing with humans and got off on the wrong foot already when she before leaving home realized she hated almost all of her clothes and couldn’t get into the ones she still liked because she had gained too much weight during her recent months under the surface in a low mood cycle of her undiagnosed bipolar-like syndrome.

The people at the party were very nice. But she found herself thinking mostly about her writing, how she was losing so many hours of writing time, how this extra day off from work could have yielded at least a thousand words.

The music was good, mostly metal, but she thought about the poor neighbours having to live with the hosts speakers and hifi-system. The speakers were so tall that she could stand straight next to one and rest her nose on the top of it.

The beer made her tired and the boys in charge of food had only bought the fleisch and some candy to eat. Only. A smörgåsbord of meat, candy and beer. And vodka of course, this was taking place in Sweden, on Midsummer’s Eve, what do you expect?

Some time after midnight, still dressed in clothes she hated, she excused herself and caught a late bus home. No fertility rituals or sexual celebrations for her this year. No dancing around the midsummer pole. The closest thing was a faint hint of fetish feeling for the black rain jacket she wore to not freeze to death while waiting for the bus.

When she finally got home she quickly fell asleep without flowers under her pillow as tradition usually edicts. And so another year passes without carnality. It’s all good. Her vow to be a writer-nun still valid. Well, except that one time just before Christmas. Oh, and the thing this spring. Damn. Neither of them counts!

I just realized that I have navigated off the charts now. That’s why the old maps don’t appeal to me anymore. I have to draw my own henceforth.

I wore boy-shirts for the first time in a couple of years this winter. Something fluid shifted late autumn after reaching the Sun. The Mercurial sign became dominant. I went in between. I had some unfinished creative business to take care of. I revisited myself as I was to wrap it up and felt that I still knew that person.

I’ve been trying how far from the original schematics I feel comfortable to go and had to pull back a bit and assess my findings. Even the eager explorer sometimes needs to regroup at basecamp. The more common path is not mine to thread, it never was.

After some healthy doubt I now feel invigorated. I’m doing maintenance on my gear and have started drawing possible routes on my maps. I’ve set my eyes on a new mountain top.

I almost said goodbye to creativity this Sunday. I wanted to quit writing, sign off from being Ellinor, stop philosophizing about magic/art. I was overwhelmed by all the overlapping realities I carried in my head and got another almost-panic-attack while taking a walk. About to faint I sat on a bench down by the river where I live and imagined that I was a gardener tending a garden.

But the thing is: I am a writer, I am Ellinor and I always think about creating things. Why did I feel so strongly against it? I didn’t doubt myself. I doubted the sanity of getting too deep into all these created realities. I doubted the sanity in feeling that negative forces were leaking out of my writing into reality. I doubted the sanity in who I have become. It was too much chaos and not enough control.

What is real, what is pretend? When trying to take a break from it all I realized how much of our human lives take place in realities outside the actual reality. Our society, culture, books, tv-series, social media, etc – all layers of reality that is very difficult to detox from. I got to work on Monday and went straight into the reality of animating a motion graphics video. No escape. But do I really need an escape?

I got home the same Monday. Opened the manuscript I was working on when my brain went into chaos mode. And continued writing. I logged into Twitter to write about my intended break. On Tuesday I did an audio recording of an insane 3.5 minute sermon based on a text about magic I had written previously. And today it’s Wednesday and I’m back here to write about it all. And I love it. This is who I am.

Imagination, writing, art – the consciousness can do powerful stuff. There is no white or black magic/art, but magic/art can definitely be positive or negative so we better know what we’re doing. As writers or magicians, call it what you will, we must direct and ride the currents without getting caught up in them. Take a step back and assess the situation once in a while. Remember not to dive head first into too deep water without checking for sharks first.

And when chaos hits your mind – just imagine being a gardener.

I’m not sure I should be writing about fucking when in fact I am the fucking. Oups, did I say fucking? I meant magic of course. I am the fucking magic.

// Ellinor Kali (sic), The Oracle with the Sharpened Teeth, heading for Geburah, which is too Marsy for me as I am, I need to swim the fluid, maybe I could try to close a loop in the process, while writing incomprehensible gibberish about a grain of sand that is itching and needs to be isolated, layer by layer until it is no longer… well, it’s a pearl, so much for the high initiation of the mystery of the Goddess of Digressions…

I recently finished reading two odd books that had taken an unusually long time to get through. As I wrote a review for one of them (Cyclonopedia) I realized that the review could as well have been written for the other one (Jerusalem). So, without further ado, two very different books, but exactly the same review.

Cyclonopedia (Reza Negarestani) and/or Jerusalem (Alan Moore)
Intriguing and exhausting, a mouthful and hollow, an artifact of art disguised as logic and reason, an extreme twist of thought with its own purpose, consciously bombarding the unconscious not with a message but with a state of mind. Sometimes you skip a few words, or paragraphs, bored or saturated, as there is no end in sight. It’s compelling content is not genius of thought, but an equilibrism of complex construction. As pretentious as every single work of art. The words mean nothing unless you want them to; the experience is all. And I really enjoyed the experience of nearly going insane. Highly recommended – with caution!

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Addendum: Jerusalem, which is very different from Cyclonopeida, took me over two years to finish. It’s both good and boring. The endless descriptions of Northampton was making me angry. But still it was intriguing. The most experimental thing Moore could do now is to write an ordinary 250-page straight story. Please.