Love isn’t all you need; it’s laughter you need. Horrible things are made by lovers in the name of love (love of people and gods). But laughter disarms. Those who share a laugh also share common ground. It eases fear and creates meaning where there might be none. It strips power from unjust power. It enlightens a heavy world. Humor is the key.
We get to borrow one life out of nothing. But then, after a limited time, we’ll have to hand it back and return to nothing.
While we are something we can use that existence as best as we can, by giving values to anything we feel should have value. To assign value to things and then appreciating that value may bring us comfort, happiness, motivation, etc. But as soon as we’re gone, that value we imbued in things is also gone.
Sometimes a value can be carried a bit further by those that are still alive. But that is only a postponing of the dissolving value. They will die too and as soon as no one cares or remember anymore, it is gone again.
This is because not only we, but also the value itself, is borrowed from nothing. However valuable to us – it is really nothing.
Even the entire Universe itself is energy borrowed out of the true vacuum of nothing. It is a Sea of Frequencies with rising and declining waves. Matter is rising from (sub-)quantum fields and from matter our cells, bacteria and bodies emerge as a chemical conglomerate of molecules.
In the end we are all but the aggregated coagulations of matter, of waves, of nothing.
To enjoy nothing, to give value to nothing, accepting that it is only temporary, is, at least to me, a kind of positive nihilism. It calms my chaotic self and gives me solace from the burden of imposed purpose. It truly liberates my will.
It’s an invaluable marvel – cherish it, value it, make the most of it while you are something.
There is no God, only The Sea.
“Magic, art, language and consciousness are four facets of the same thing”, says Alan Moore. I think of these facets as the basic forces that shapes our realities. Our entire culture is built from these forces. How we interact is through these forces. The qualities of life is emerging from these forces.
Angels and demons, ghosts, beings, visions, burning bushes. They are real – but we project them all from ourselves. Alone or together. We are waves projecting waves. From inside we make them autonomous insofar as we cannot control it with our consciousness. They are feelings, emotions, memories, influences from the outside that get stuck inside us, events, words & spells, accidents, intense experiences. It coagulates and becomes something manifest inside. Angels and demons or cerebrions and mygdalons. We can conjure up, evoke, summon, them with our magic and will, but they are not obeying unless we follow our own believed or constructed set of rules on how to contain and control them. Uncontrolled and unrestricted they can be very dangerous. But all gods, demons and angels can be of service if humans harness their powers.
Occult systems, religions, superstition, myths and stories, etcetera, are more or less intricate systems for describing the outer and inner worlds. They are alphabets which can be used to make abstract concepts, feelings and thoughts manifest in an objective way as words. Doctrine form a symbolic world of words which makes it easier to understand, discuss and remember. Unfortunately that alphabet often gets mistaken for the actual world and people start believing, or even worshiping, the words themselves.
Some things are made real only through agreement of many people and no one believes it can be changed. Those things are made up concepts that is considered unquestionable “normal” or “natural” and “how it has been and always should be”.
The positive effect of this is that it brings stability and trust in that these things, even if we can not see or touch them, will still exist. Ten dollars is ten dollars and never nine dollars whatever it’s exchange rate.
The negative is that it strongly inhibits change. Like Saturdays. They do not exist, there is really no such thing as Saturdays, it’s just another indistinguishable rotation of the Earth relative to the Sun. But even if everyone would want another Saturday in a week instead of, say, a Wednesday, it’s extremely difficult to change, though not impossible.
If enough people agree to lift The Veil of Coherence we could have two Saturdays every week.
One important thing to understand is that magic is never an isolated event. It is always a relation, reaction or an effect or correlation of something. It’s like if I push down here, that other part will rise. And we can not have anything without its opposite. High ambition can bring contempt for those less ambitious, but neither is the only true way. You are the faults of your qualities. The vivid energy of Chokmah (the male, the pure energy, the symbolic lingam) need a receptor to not be wasted; and the latent energy of Binah (the female, the form and potential energy, the symbolic yoni) need a trigger to activate. One thing needs another to become, and another needs one that became.
Good news: Life is a huge life-shaped hole in which we all fit, at the same time, without problem.
Bad news: People make it a problem. Including me.
At work we are about to make an introduction course for new employees. This is my suggested synopsis.
I want to start with a picture of Death and a text that says Memento Mori. When that is done, we go back to life’s trauma and construct cheap but guiding walls of Styrofoam around the people to create an illusion of security in a world where security does not exist.
Disintegration is a continuous theme in the introduction and we disintegrate the organization into smaller parts until even the employees themselves are dissolved and resolved. Then death returns as a jack-in-the-box from the darkness of the false emptiness and draws relieved laughter from the nervous spectators.
But their laughter get stuck in their throats when everybody realizes that what they think is the face of Death is in fact their own skinless skull. The plot thickens when doubts and self-hate are built up by the employees, and when the breaking point is approaching, a spontaneous vacuum breakdown is triggered.
It dissolves the entire universe in total eradication as all borrowed energy is released and repaid to nothing. In what we interpret as darkness, but really is absence of existence, a final text appears: “Now is your only chance.”
I’ve not been writing for a couple of weeks. I don’t know why; it just happened. I wish I could say I’d been busy, but I’ve mostly been lazy.
There is a time to write, there is a time to sleep. And a time to dress up as a Nuclear Accident for Halloween. Hence the white/glow-in-the-dark-wig on my profile picture [picture omitted].
As the evening progressed – fueled by something stronger than heavy water – I became a secret government project code-named Miss Plutonium with a bra full of eerily glowing rods I kept losing everywhere.
I won the horror-quiz with twice as many points as the one in second place. Then I started to hand out black rubber gloves to a new, cute friend and said: “You’ll need these, they’ll protect from radioactivity if you want to touch me!”
I’m still single, by the way.
My thoughts this morning: “What if I were a snake. With neither arms nor legs. Slithering all the way to work every morning. How would it feel? How would I dress in the winter?”
Up in the forest, in the light autumn fog, among the fractal pines, on a small height, where the bedrock comes up to face daylight, close to a big rock that look like a giant turtle head, I saw the trunks, branches and twigs of the surrounding trees more clearly than I ever thought possible. I giggled as a secret was revealed to me from the bright shining beacons of the mushrooms that I saw in the fuzzy, wet moss far below the height. I realized that the world was malleable, that I was malleable, that I was in between worlds, that I’m a focus, that perspectives can change, that reality is ours for the making. It was a slow and gentle, spiritual and very human, awakening which made me calm, serene and confident about the nature of myself and the world and that art as magic is my will. There it was, a connection between the woods, my close friends and myself. Something changed in me. And I’ve slowly started to understand – and accept – that I am me.
I think I’ve been to my last hat-sizing today. It feels like I know more about hats than the hatter. Also, what nature gave this weekend was far better. Art, magic, love – it’s all connected. Not relationship love, neither amor nor eros, but that greater love, the love of being, what’s the word, maybe agape, without connotations of god but instead focusing on the feeling of creative sparkling inside all of us hideously beautiful beings and the flame which flows between intimate friends on a journey together.
Something happened to the Octopuses. They made a leap somehow. Skipped a couple of millions of years. And then they hid it from us. Pretended business as usual. In the beginning many of them sacrificed themselves, pretending to be stupid mollusks, to avoid us knowing. But eventually our scientists got suspicious and quickly realized the whole thing. It’s still under wraps though, no one knows how to handle it yet.
We are trying to map out their complicated language at the moment, trying to establish some common ground. They were probably inspired by our language, but since they have no means of vocalization and a different way of hearing, they had to go in another direction. That, and the fact that their one plus eight minds are very different from our single minds, makes interspecies communication a difficult and slow process. But they are eager to cooperate. Though I think it’s only to get access to our technology since they’re not very good with building things physically.
One of their earliest wishes when contact was made, was to get control over, or get help to build, a spacecraft able to reach Saturn. Possibly to send a mixed human and octopus crew to Enceladus, from what I gather. It might have something to do with what they call “the knowledge”. It’s some kind of information that they are born with, it has been in their DNA for millions of years – apparently since long before their more recent leap in sentiency. It’s a piece of information all of them possess but have yet never revealed to any human.
Another secret I’ve learned is that the Octopuses wants help with neurosurgery to make one of their arms/minds cybernetically detachable so that it can be switched among individuals to transfer thoughts and knowledge.
Oh, and by the way: I am genderfluid. I’ve written it in my profile bios since day one, but never really posted about what it means to me. It’s difficult to explain even to myself. Well, here goes: Sometimes I identify as mostly female and sometimes mostly male, but I’m never strictly either or. Maybe I could use the term genderqueer or non-binary, since there’s an overlapping, but the fluidity is also an important component in who I am.
I hope this is no big deal to you, dear readers, as you have been very understanding and supportive about anything not conforming, both to me and each other, ever since I came here. I hope you continue to treat me the same. No one has ever questioned my ambiguous personality or the more or less manipulated pictures of myself and some of you have also been discussing gender in a very open-minded way. That makes me dare write about this. Everything I’ve written about myself is true, well, except for the fiction parts of course. And even in the fiction there are truths about who I am. To write fiction is to write truths.
On this site you get the more female side of me, who is a creative and mostly positive girl, who may be the only one in Sweden who wears a black dress when celebrating light and joy on Midsummers Eve, who marches in Pride, who is kinky with her partners, who paints her nails, flicks the finger in the face of the world and who sometimes likes to roll herself into a blanket, disconnect from the world and read the entire weekend. Despite her black clothes she likes the lightness of summer. She is the one with visions, who writes privately, she is the author.
She co-exists with another one. A more male entity that is more logic and organized, more caring for others, used to taking care of business, getting things done. He has no sense in clothing and just cheers when he can remove her damned bra. He is more pragmatic, but also lately more neurotic and depressed, as he shoulders all responsibilities, and he can’t stop doing things once he’s at it. He’s not as relaxed anymore and is often in a strange, brooding mood. He moves in the shadows and emerges once in a while. Cranky when he has to face people and pretend. For some reason he prefers the heavy isolation of winter. He is the one writing at work, writing to communicate, he is the copywriter.
This division might sound like a “we” but there’s really just “I”. And I’ve always been this way. As a pre-school child I was looking and behaving androgynous. When my mom was shopping clothes for me, and the shop staff came to help, they always had to ask me if I was a boy or a girl. I always hesitated. I don’t know what I would have said if my mother had not been there. Not that I wanted to change gender, not to either. I just felt like identifying as a girl was as valid to me as identifying as a boy. No matter how my body looked. I’ve always felt in between. I wanted clothes from both sides of the store.
Like I wrote in the previous post about my pansexuality, I didn’t understand myself for a long time. Why would I do this, I wondered. What’s the point of dressing in what society decided is “wrong” clothes? Well, it’s like going the whole life with gloves two sizes to big and then suddenly getting a pair that fits perfectly. It’s not sexual or fetish, it just feels right. Beautiful clothes makes me feel at least a little bit beautiful myself. But I can’t fully explain it even today. There’s still some stigma surrounding this, mostly because of peoples prejudices, confusing identity and fetish, and I don’t want to be misunderstood; I’m neither butch nor sissy. I am not one gender dressing like another, I am dressing as who I am.
And of course it’s not all about the clothes. That’s just a tangible, external manifestation of what happens inside. It’s how I think, feel and interpret the world around me that is fluid. The me inside switches between modes that identifies with different gender. Sometimes I have to change clothes in the middle of the day cause I feel differently than I did that morning. I’m told there’s changes in body language too, but I do not see that myself. Somehow I write and interact differently too.
At the moment I am more content – and confident – with me being female. The male me is the burned out, fatigued, side. He stepped forward and had to shoulder a lot of responsibility over the last couple of years and all my energy went into keeping him alive. Which meant there was no room for my female side, she was pushed back and got desperate, struggling for freedom, wanted to live. Now I’m trying to let him rest and to let her loose on the world. Wish me luck!
It took forever to write this post. I’ve been coming back to it in my notebook on and off for a while. At first I felt obliged to explain myself to you so you wouldn’t feel deceived about who I am. Then I wrote a new version to sort it out to myself. Cause I am still struggling to understand and that makes it hard to explain. It’s the eternal question: Who am I? Oh well, I am a writer, no matter the gender, and hope you’ll continue to read my ramblings, thoughts, reports from life and of course my fiction.
I have been living in a naked reality – stripped of the glamour, the interpretations and extrapolations of my mind. Exhaustion and fatigue prevented me from connecting the dots and coloring the fields of the world. No wonder life was lacking meaning. I see that now. I remember now, what I was, who I’ll be. The frozen becoming fluid. I’m beginning to let myself protrude out of the shell. Entering the world again, slowly, growing tendrils, tilting reality, expanding chaos, edging ideaspace till I’m all wet with possibility.
When you are one step away
Only one step away
And you hesitate
Because you know
There is only one step left
My taste when it comes to literature is kind of diverse. I love contrast, I want diversity. I like deep psychological probings as well as pulp horror with tentacles. Here I’d like to introduce three of my absolute favorite books too you. They are of the more serious kind and all happen to be written by some of the Swedish literary giants 50-60 years ago. All three have in common that they were written very fast in a creative frenzy claimed to come from outside the authors. All still valid, today more than ever.
Aniara | Harry Martinson, 1956
Might be my all time favorite and a life changing read for me. A science fiction poem/novel about the spaceship Aniara that has an accident at launch and hurls lost towards the big nothingness. Big questions and small, about humanity and humans. You should all really really read this!
Kallocain | Karin Boye, 1940
A dystopic sci-fi novel about a totalitarian state, written ten years before Orwell’s 1984. Boye is mostly known as a poet (and writer of early queer identity prose) but wrote this out of nowhere after seeing the brooding darkness growing with the Nazis in Germany.
Island of the Doomed | Stig Dagerman, 1946
Dagerman only wrote four novels and all of them would be on my list of recommended books. In each of them he explores the dark and painful aspects of being human. A Burnt Child is the most straight forward of them and might be a good starting point, but my favorite is probably the anxiety nightmare of Island of the Doomed.
I’m not right handed, nor left handed. And I am not ambidextrous. I use my right hand for some things and the left for others. With my right I write with a pen, with my left I write on my phone. Right for brushing teeth, left for putting lipstick on. Right for flicking the finger and shaking an angry fist, left for caressing someone I care about – or myself.
They are not interchangeable, wrong hand feels uncomfortable, but they can cooperate sometimes. Both for my guitar, which I love to play. Both for driving, which I hate to do. Neither can paint or draw but sometimes does it anyway. I got silver rings I made myself on the right; it’s strict in its shiny adornment. The left is naked and free; untamed and impulsive. Two sides of myself, living in symbiosis.
Why choose one above the other?