Category: Non-fiction

Frantic pacing, thinking ahead of time, trying to make the best of it all. The chaotic brain with all it’s voices competing for the attention of all the possibilities and directions abundant in a very limited time span. Inconceivable solutions yet there is constantly all these attempts at mastering it. Life. What the fuck is it? Really?

You may think I’ve gone crazy now. But here goes: I’ve finally become a magician. This weekend I reached the Sun in a magical working with a dear friend. After all these years of studies and exploring I am now confident to call myself a magician. I am Mercury-Hermes-Thoth if you like symbolic language. I am a shaman, I walk a different path, I am one who changes existence through the forces of a magician.

I also think I’ve come to the end of myself in this manifestation, as I came to the end of the one I was before that, and so on. I carry the memories of being an innocent child that is no longer me. I remember being the only girl dancing in a black midsummer dress. Inside there is the joy of an euphoric musician on stage, the shame of once having been an arrogant man, the sorrow of a despairing woman, all the feelings of an inquisitive explorer, a fatigued partner, a loving master, an introvert student, an ambitious writer. I am not them, yet I am the consequence of them all. I am a conglomerate of my previous lives. Now I need to reorient and reorganize all my selves. Solve et coagula!

I have been mostly Ellinor for some years now, and I am so happy that I finally could let her out. She have been with me since the beginning, hiding inside, and to get her dressed and out in the world interacting with people that didn’t judge her have been marvelous. My friends and co-workers didn’t flinch an eye as she slowly emerged. I am very happy to be her, and I still am, always will be.

But I am also M. He’s this curious boy living inside Ellinor, as she lives inside him. Not as a separate person, but as a simultaneous being, like the drawing with the rabbit-duck illusion where both animals are there all the time but you only see one at a time. Ellinor had so much to catch up to that while being her, manifesting and defining her, I pushed M to the back and instead neglected that part of myself. Because I’m not completely one or the other.

When becoming a magician I was dissolved and assembled again. Balancing the wand and the cup, wielding the sword while standing firm on the discs can not be done by neither M nor Ellinor if they are separate. They have to become one. My mercurial genderfluidity takes me in a third direction outside the binaries, much like in the tradition of a shaman. It allows me to move curiously in the borderlands. It is my magical mission to disrespect limits and break the rules that should be broken. That is what makes magic, that is what changes the world.

I am still Ellinor. But now Ellinor + M. I am a writer and a magician. And still a fox (in change).

☿

I was in a play once. I was cast as this character called X, but I’m not quite sure how I actually got the part. The costume was ill fitting from the beginning, but I didn’t realize there was a tailor that could have helped me customize it. So I went on stage trying to ignore the uncomfortable fitting and eventually I got used to it; I found ways to work around it. There was absolutely no direction to the play, I never got a finished script and I had to buy my own props. Also, come to think of it, I’m not sure, I think I’m still in it, improvising the hell out of the stage each performance.

My favorite dress is made of wisdom, understanding and knowledge. The robust fabrics make me feel sexy. Whoever wears it look sexy. Just thinking that it exists feels sexy.

(Added comment: I reckon that only clothes sewn from “severity” is high fashion these days. It’s sad cause it’s a very rough fabric meant to be worn only in harsh weather and not all the fucking time.)

We were a small group of explorers and magicians up in a rocky area where we were going to explore a newly discovered, mysterious cave. Inside I got separated from the others and found a big room in the cave filled with what I first thought was just trash. I thought the cave was connected to a dump. Lots of discarded things. Plastic cups. Toothbrushes.

Then the next room was also full of things, but more ordered, like a flea market. Lots of vintage things. Old toys, some tape recorders, coffee makers and other electrical appliances. And when I saw an old white and orange vacuum cleaner I understood it all. It had sturdy wheels and a handle perfectly placed for a small kid to sit on and ride around on.

I knew this because it was the vacuum cleaner I rode around on when I was a kid. I recognized the scratch marks. It was my family’s old vacuum cleaner. It was my old tape recorders. My old coffee maker. The next room had rows upon rows of clothes hangers with clothes in various sizes. From kids to adult clothes. And there was a rather big section with only black.

I understood that the cave was filled with all the things I had ever owned.

With a smile on my face I started to run. I wanted to find the room with all the books. Because I was hoping there would also be some books that I hadn’t gotten yet.

I fell in love with a girl in a dream last night. She was a young filmmaker I was going to interview. She was happy and enthusiastic and really wanted to get to know me and not just because I’ve been a filmmaker too. We had interesting conversations and I remember some of them. They were so real and she was smart and charming. If it was only in my head, how come I can’t be that interesting when I’m awake? Now I feel a bit sad. I miss her. Though she showed some disturbing footage of decaying but upright walking animal carcasses she claimed was caused by demonic presences. It would have been a cool idea if she hadn’t stolen it from the book I’m writing right now.

If time is a river it has now boiled to steam – that’s the only logical explanation.

The fox is a non-conforming, cunning trickster, often a shapeshifter, and has red fur. It’s somewhere in between on the archetypal scale from dog to cat, it’s Mercury in between Venus and Mars. A girl at a pub once borrowed my black notebook and wrote a poem: “I want to eat the fox” and only later I understood she was hitting on me. I’ve also, several years ago, drawn a magical picture of a fox in a fox-mask and I realized only afterwards it was a symbol of myself. Finally I’ve also, ever since one of my closest friends started working with theater, used a fox-based analogy to point out the wonderful absurdity in magic and art. Now I’m a member of a not so secret society (without name) and my magical epithet is: A fox in change.

Sometimes it feels like the internet is a projection or manifestation of our dark subconscious. Or maybe it’s like an infection – the scab of our wounded minds.

I entered this webpage with a summoning. With my name I manifest, with my words I create. It was the beginning of a meandering spell that still continues to shape me and my world. Recent experiences have further advanced my exploration and I’ve been opening mental places (or sephiroth if you like) that has been sealed for me until now. I move in new territory and as usual it is both scary and exciting. You who have eyes, read between the lines!

What if we really are dead and lives in purgatory? What if we’re all just talking nonsense gibberish that we somehow interpret meaning into on the fly? What if hidden somewhere there is a big mechanical elevator, filled with different kinds of people, that goes a long way down into the back entrance to the maintenance rooms of this purgatory, and that there are shortcuts into the long lines to the secret auditions for people that have understood all this, down there? What if my dream, which I just awoke from, about all this was real and I just got re-cast?

Added this comment later:

What if we are already living in a What if world?

• What if WWII ended in 1945 instead of this eternal nightmare?
• What if there was some kind of medicine against all these extinctionbrinking bacterial infections?
• What if vikings discovered north america first but then they just abandoned it?

I know – reality is shifting a lot by itself nowadays. All conspiracy theorists believing crazy stuff have really eroded reality in a tangible way. If even nazis can come back in style I wouldn’t be surprised if purgatory would manifest in strange warehouses in industrial areas where the veil of coherence, or the hold of the collective psyche, is particularly thin. And what happened a thousand years ago on Greenland, in those devastating years when everyone suddenly left like in a hurry? Who were that small tribe of pale, blue eyed, supposedly native Americans called Mandans really?

I was laying in my bed reading when I got home from work yesterday. Suddenly my book was just gone! Like it vanished out of thin air and I didn’t see it anywhere. Then I realized that I had just, very smoothly, woken up from dreaming that I was laying in that same bed reading.

Some words are like soap bubbles. Perfectly shaped with a shimmering beauty – but as soon as you try to examine them they burst.

Words are like butterflies – when you pin them down they crumble to letters and die.

Words can be so much: difficult, trivial, offensive, evocative, out of fashion and so on. But they are never meaningless – if they were they wouldn’t be words.

I like both the made up words and those that existed before us humans started fiddling around with them.

Words! Oh, they trigger a tingle in me, releases a wave of new alignments, they multiply in my brain and splooosh out into reality from my mouth and fingers!

Yesterday I bought a crescent moon. A silver pendant around the neck. I’ve been The Magus since forever, juggling words and directing stories, influencing the world. Now I embrace the High Priestess – the mystery of the moon. I’m beyond words, reflecting, patiently observing, gathering inner wisdom and power, preparing for creation, rising like the new moon, on a camel across The Abyss. See five footprints!

After visiting a wonderful bookstore, called Antikvariat Verklighetsflykt, the not so secret society (without name) would recruit a new member. A ritual was performed, resulting in a sort of tangible reality shift, perhaps always abundant in the air, if you are there to catch it.

The noisy city street full of people turned into a road through the forest. We touched a magic field and filled it with sunlight. We created an alternitiy¹ and I shred my skin with a great sense of freedom.

An already magical coin was imbued with the power of three and it was given to me as a gift which made me feel very honored and touched. The magic spells spilled out of my heart all the way from the beginning of the ritual and made me lighter than ever before, exploring and peeling, getting centered and re-purposed.

We continued into the architecture of music and built internal cathedrals and expanded further enlightenment way beyond nightfall. Oh, and there were a bit of dancing also. I felt that it is not the magic that creates the magic. The magic unlocks what is already inside us. We all have that potential and it can be reached in many ways if we just try.

Then the assembly of fools, magicians and tricksters contently disbanded for the evening and that concluded a fantastic weekend of friendship and magic.

¹ Will be explained in another post.

“It’s a beautiful day – let’s not start any wars!”
or:
“Living on the edge – except when it comes to toilet paper.”

My answer to a comment from the old journal: Combine the first first half with the second second half? That sums up life in a way.

Eye-of-the-storm-advice | Sound advice in the midst of insanity. Had to invent this today in recent discussion.

It’s time for the april 2018 CampElloWriMo Cabin. Consider me that girl that shows up to the camp with nothing but a bag containing ten lengths of jute rope, a small wooden box, a steel reservoir pen and a black notebook. Oh, and some naughty underwear just in case.

First day she is very tired and if she is not sleeping she wanders aimlessly in her pyjamas or stares into the fridge. Second day she is doing performances with rope suspensions, first with herself then with a “volunteer”, from the branches of an old oak outside to the music of some old norse shamanka drumming. Third day she speaks only about Alan Moore and gets upset when Grant Morrison is frequently mentioned – only to realize that it is she herself that keep bringing him up.

Fourth day she asks what the other kids are doing in the cabin and apparently gets happily surprised when she realizes everyone is there to write. She finds an acoustic guitar and although encouraged to play some happy camp fire tunes she only plays her own experimental compositions and then tries to seduce that one writer who kind of thought her music was “ehm, fascinating”, with unclear success.

Fifth day afternoon she eats all the dried mushrooms out of the wooden box and wanders off into the woods to “explore”. Giggling is heard in the distance. When she returns in the evening she is calm and happy. Bringing words of wisdom and eternal love to everyone. Sixth day she is writing her ass off, completing her entire word count in a single day. Then on the seventh day she gets restless and leaves early with a note on the kitchen table: “Hugs and kisses to all fellow mutants! You were wonderful, see you again next year! //Ellinor Kall”

“Life is a frequency wave – it goes up and down and to get the high you need the low, all depending on amplitude.”

I wrote this to cheer up a dear friend. May your wave rise again soon!