Thoughts on the mind, magic, writing, language, art, philosophy, psychology, culture and just about everything I suppose. Or, who am I kidding, this is probably some kind of fiction too. Some longer and more coherent thoughts, some short random ideas.
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!
Our minds are occupied. Invaded and colonized by media, advertising and brands like an enemy force. Our culture invaded by uniforming – same shops, same restaurants everywhere – and the real-estate in our minds forcibly rented out for the prize of small conveniences. We are marketplaces where battles are fought between giants that doesn’t even notice which head they are in or what mess they are creating. They leave the depleted resources behind without further considerations for our future when they eventually discard us and move on. Resist occupation – get occupied by yourself!
People are never alone with their thoughts anymore. No wonder the world is what it is. I try to avoid having railway-thoughts as much as I can. All kinds of media hijacked our thoughts and that’s where most of our stress comes from. There is no time to understand or develop yourself, let alone comprehend your surroundings. And it’s impossible to see the big picture if you’re only staring at a few pixels. Your subconsciousness ends up running the show when your consciousness is not present. The monkeys are in charge while we are away inside screens. This is not a new insight but worth repeating, if only to myself. Turn everything off and be bored once in a while! Reclaim your thoughts!
The physical reality is not the only reality. There is another, less thought of, reality that is equally real. It is created by our culture, our social paradigms and it is as real as our physical existence. We all live in multiple realities. This non-physical reality exists in our collective minds, in our culture and makes manifest in action, words, writing and so on. Ideas are intangible but very much real things and they affect the physical world constantly.
The same way thoughts shape who we are. We are not merely biological lumps of flesh – we are the sum of both the physical and the extra physical realities that makes up our world. That is how we in our psyche can be another person than we are physically. And it is no less real just because the difference is not visible to the eye. You have to look deeper to see that dimension of someone. You have to gain insight into that person to see who they really are. And by who I mean that in plural.
Because no one is just one person. I am a conglomerate of several personalities, impulses, hidden feelings and hardwired responses. I got several creative strains, curious and bold bits and pieces as well as the bad sides, as doubt and spleen (in the sense poets used to use the word). Sometimes rambling, sometimes taciturn. Sometimes the wise man, sometimes the trickster.
And I’m fluctuating – both internally and in contact with others externally. For instance, I can’t easily explain who I am. My identity is diverse but singular at every moment. Mind you, this is no weakness, it gives me strength. But as I said, it’s fluctuating. It all depends on who I am with. This range of identities doesn’t show to people, they meet the same one, and I keep a solid facade, can’t break conventions, society wants labels, clear cut and unambiguous people that are easily understood. Gradients are effectively repressed so that there is only two official colors. Who’d want a complicated society where everyone is different?
So I act very differently towards different people. I also act different when alone depending on mood and I don’t know what – I’m fluid and unpredictable. The thing that is supposed to be me, my self, I, is in fact only a control center trying to make sense of all the parts conflicting and warring. I am not one person – I am many. As we all are.
Or are we all? I’ve met so many people that never seem to change. They are very solid and unmutable. One-dimensional. They oppose change, they get upset by non-binary possibilities. I have heard a person actually say that he had done what he wanted and now only wanted every day to be the same. Someone really said that. Yes, really. So maybe we are different. Maybe some people are just one person while others are an entire menagerie. Nothing wrong with that. Celebrate diversity! Life would be simpler but rather boring if my inner crowd dispersed.
Added later: Career-wise I am constantly moving through different expressions, albeit of the same core profession. I have successfully worked as film director, director of photography, editor, photographer, graphic designer, author and lately as copywriter. I’ve won awards for both writing and directing. And people have payed me good money to work with these different expressions. I enjoy it all but tend to drift between them which makes it difficult to convince people that I am rather good at all those things. Because you can apparently be good at only one thing, just look at mr DaVinci. Irony intended. In the end it all comes down to different aspects of storytelling for me. That is my core profession. I’ve thought about calling myself a pan-medial storyteller. But no one will understand what I mean by that so maybe multidisciplinary storyteller would be better. Except for the discipline part. I defy discipline but rather enjoy to enforce it in others. But that is another story.
This morning I was trying to get into my sweater through the arm before I realized that it was not the right way in.
You know, I’ve never liked the expression Kill your darlings. The thought of cutting out something you really like because it doesn’t fit in is entirely backwards to me. Now I’ve encountered this situation again while working on an old treatment for my next novel. And I’ve decided to cut everything else out and Save my darlings!
Last week a friend helped me to mend my old pentagram pendant. It has been broken since I was young and deep into studies of the occult mysteries. It broke late one night while I did an enthusiastic, and probably intoxicated, dance routine at a local metal/synth/goth club. I recently found it again and thought I’d revive it and wear it under my shirt. But somehow it snuck out at work and a co-worker happened to see it.
Co-worker: “I see you have a pentagon necklace. Do you know it’s a Jewish figure that in yoga-practice symbolizes union and inner balance…”
Me (saying): “Oh, is that so? Too bad I’m in a hurry and have to go now.”
Me (thinking): “GET THE FACTS RIGHT YOU CULTURELESS UNEDUCATED NEW AGE MUMBO-JUMBO HIPSTER HIPPIE!”
No offense to real hippies. Middleclass hipster hippies on the other hand… Next time she’ll probably say: “I listened to the singer Maradonna, who sang Like a Virgo some years ago, and she taught me, so now I am kabbalah. Which is a native North American religion that symbolizes our bond with dolphins.”
Relaxing with a glass of wine, the fantastic album Prey by Tiamat on my turntable and my cozy home-after-work-clothes. Suddenly I feel a horrible lump on my left boob. Fuuuck! How could I have missed this aggressive growth!? The horror! Death! Angst! Then I realize it’s just a popcorn that snuck in under my shirt.
“The pictures lie about my age. But doesn’t pictures do that all the time?” I wrote in a comment recently, striking quote-worthy gold.
My neurons are in a favorable alignment at the moment, according to my own neurological zodiac.
While I agree with the modern definition of magic as “to intentionally cause an effect” I would like to add my own statements about what magic is to me.
So, just to be clear, there is nothing magical about magic – it’s all in our heads. However, it’s no less real, and things in our heads have a tendency to move out into reality. And when they do it is magic – manifest of thought, in action or artifact, or as another state of mind.
I’m actually thinking about breaking canon within the novel I’m writing right now. Different chapters will state things that don’t match, on purpose of course. Subtle at first, then more and more. It’s crazy, I know, it shouldn’t be done, but my brain works this way… for some reason. What do you think, is it crazy, should I stop this idea right now? Or did someone say genius?
Exercise your mind. Let it wander, let it wonder. Make it afraid, make it reel. Force it to work, make it relax. Excite it, please it, direct it, restrict it and rest it. Dissolve all borders. Focus and collapse, again and again!