Cabbages and turnips

Elend: “Winds devouring men”. Like a funeral march, or the walk to the gallows.

And I open any page from my story and it’s all there. All in detail. All my feelings, my anguish, the number of little deaths throughout the day. The number of times I say your name in vain. Aconite and nightshade upon my lips. All the times I cried out god’s name in vain.

Saturn/Lucifer watches silently with suppressed interest. Hecate walks dressed in darkness and endless possibilities swirl around her. I walk my path alone, knowing that which makes the gods laugh: the degree of human stupidity and frailty. The fact that we consider ourselves immortal and safe from harm. If the gods are nothing but figments of our imagination, the death of human race will mean their death too, or rather the death of archetypes as a whole. Hmph. The divine masks fall to reveal the emptiness behind them. From that emptiness, “both pregnant and empty” like the blank rune, from chaos, unformed and shapeless, came creation. And as creation slowly slips into chaos, I can’t help but wonder if change will be satisfying when it comes. I am certain it will not be, for it is human nature to hate change. But nothing is more certain than change. The whole of human race has been installed wrong software, I am absolutely positive.

It is hard to put into words certainties that make my skin crawl. It is harder still to explain the way little omens appear to show me the way of doing things, or puzzle me sometimes. Chaos magick is the next chapter. I think the Lady is happy with my choice. So let’s see: Tiamat would be one goddess related, Sekhmet too, Hecate another, and funny as it seems, there is Loki. I am not happy about the last, but I bet he’s having a field day. (I mean Loki, especially if we keep in mind my dislike for him). Discordia or Eris… Gah, this is so fucked up and so wrong that it ends up being the right thing to do. Eh. I am sure I’ve missed a turn somewhere along the way.

“Forlorn, I sailed/ and once I saw winds devouring men. /And I became the great deceiver/ to see what fair eyes still cannot see: /a tear in every sea, /a fragment of light exhausted. /Vision is all that matters to a wayward sailor. /

Through centuries of burning/ -we have waited for so long/ clothed in the serpent’s skin/ from the portal I was calling/ you lay me in the dust of the dead./ A swan in agony.

Patience, patience, patience…/ night moths on her wings, /a staggering moon murmurs./

The land blessed the manifold faces of your love. / The Garden lies asleep, the grave unclouded, /and we dance about a fallen sun.” (Elend)

It is all getting clear in a way that makes absolutely no sense. If we are to look behind the masks of existence, behind the masks of gods themselves, then we must claw our way through all the veils and even use a bloody spoon to dig under the bedrock of reality. To realise what? If the masks have been empty from the start then who’s wearing them? “There is no spoon”, I know. It is all a masquerade. The “harlequinade”. The end of worlds. A new dawn with the sun put out. The forms and the sounds are confused with one another. Reality is unraveling like an old rug and we are fleas hiding in that rug. Maybe this is what it takes to remember.

I need to sleep. My madness progresses smoothly. All is well. As Lord Fanny said, “we have the best corn”. In our ears, most likely, this is why we are incapable of making sense of the obvious. The symbols are dancing like the wings of a hummingbird and I want to laugh or run away like hell. Reality is overestimated. That and the joys of sanity. There is no pattern. This is a pattern. We can play just fine without bothering with rules once. We can play and I have missed playing so much. It is all an exercise in absurdity. I will not be angry again. It gives them the benefit of attention. I will not pay any attention to them ever again. I will only pay attention to what is important: the weather, the colour of ribbons, the way some bumblebees look like fuzzy zeppelins and are propelled like rockets. Now that’s worth taking note of.

Okay, my divorce with reality has just begun. Do they give away doughnuts when this happens? I want one with a hole in the center and chocolate. The archetypal doughnut. When I eat it and the god behind the archetype dies, its divine ghost will do what it must: settle comfortably upon my tummy and augment it a wee bit more. I fear no god, I am the avatar of Beligadesh, the tummy goddess. You can kiss my divine bellybutton and eat crow, the lot of you.

God, a doughnut would be nice.

PS: Some of the above might make sense if someone is familiar with the series "the Invisibles" by Grant Morrison and Jung.

Melancholy

I honestly don't feel so well, and anger and tiredness rise in my throat to choke me like bile. It's late at night, Saturday, and I slept at 22:00 hoping to catch up with lost sleep so that I manage to go out later. Yeah, right. I woke up at 01:00 am, too broken to be able to move even my toes. All I managed to do was force myself out of bed to take a bath, and now that I smell better I sit here and write, too pissed off to be able to sleep. I will do that later. There is always time to catch up with lost sleep: when I am dead. Although lack of rest does reduce my mental faculties to that of a dead person, I have to admit that sleeping is not an option now.

I am trying to find the little invisible thread of humor here, otherwise I'll just start screaming and wake the rest of the people in my block too, to share the "joy".… It just becomes too much after a point of time, being so trapped, so unable to do anything I want, so shackled and desperate that I go mad. I go mad with all my strength, coming to knock myself against my invisible walls and howl my pain and disappointment. I howl and howl and nothing comes out of it save maybe for a sore throat. Kari Rueslatten fills my room with her mellifluous voice and all I can think of is my ire and hurt and the need to break free at all costs.

A friend unknowingly initiated this, by bringing me a 2006 diary called The Women of the Camarilla. Upon opening it, I find out that the 'Camarilla' in this case is a role playing fan club for players of Vampire: the Masquerade and other White Wolf related role playing games. I also find out that they are organized in a club that includes six continents and thousands of people, from UK, US, Canada etc, and members can participate in more or less any local, national and international event in any continent, taking their characters with them. For example, if my character is a man called Serge, I can take the airplane, go from London to Seattle, Washington, and introduce myself to the players there as Serge, and be recognised as such. I can take part in the local game as Serge, affecting the local story line, and then return to London and players there will treat me accordingly. If my character screwed up or did something truly spectacular, they will behave to me accordingly when their characters find out. Just like it would happen in real life with me and other people. What they actually do is create an alternative space within reality much like a sorcerer would do, force themselves upon it by using the most potent weapon: creativity. They bend reality and force it to recognise them no matter where they are and how they travel, the same way a shaman would put on a mask and 'become' the animal the mask represents. And reality obliges, if only for a few hours. And I hurt like mad because I am stuck here, in Greece, and I cannot even manage to go out for a single Saturday night after months, let alone participate. I cannot even meet people that if not friends, I would at least call them like-minded. I cannot do shit. Reality spits me in the face, reminding me that the last word belongs to it, and I feel weak and enraged and constantly brood. And bite people's heads off the next day at work.

I looked myself in the mirror before I got into the bathtub and saw that my body is falling apart for lack of care and enough exercise. My hair grows longer, but that's about the only good news that I have. Other than that, my eyes are haunted and dark underneath and my lips grow thinner and sour and twisted, my hair fills with white and I am still here, trapped, gagged, maddened. Who would believe that this 28-year-old would harbor so many people within her head and so much pain within her heart? Only those close enough to hear her stories and pained enough to understand. Who would see Serge, my protagonist, sharing my frail body with me and knowing of my mental pain cause he goes through the same and much worse in his case? Who would see the infuriating little beam of Etielle in me, which he uses to hide his tiredness and searing anguish? Who would ever see Nuare in me, who knows that if he lets himself relax and get attached again, the person he gets attached to will sooner or later die?

Nothing lasts forever, they say, and yet this situation has lasted nearly forever. And still what I want to write about isn't on the page yet. I want to write about my worries and gnawing fear that I will never finish the story I am writing now, or even worse, that it will be the single shittiest, most soppy and inappropriate piece of work that any unfortunate man has ever laid eyes upon, a fucking gay vampire soap opera. I tremble at the thought that I might never manage to escape this existence and be trapped in the gray little nothingness I abhor so much, growing old and biased and insignificant and bitter. I do not want this happening to me. I do not want to end up like that. Yet I don't seem to be getting a single chance to run away, not even a crack in the walls of my cell. Nothing yet. What else is there to be done? What have I missed? What am I doing wrong? What must I do? Is my mind playing tricks on me, refusing to show me what the real situation is? Am I living in self-enforced misery?

I remember seeing this dream a few months ago, where I was in the service of Lucifer/ Saturn, a very stern and impeccably dressed man in his fifties, dark wavy hair and mainly blue-grayish hues on his clothes. I handed him over the list with the things I had to do for him, and there were only three or four tasks left (out of something like fifteen or twenty) and asked if I could be dismissed. He shook his head and showed me the last tasks, pointing out that I had not done them. (If only I could remember what these were, I would throw a party). I protested that they were not so important after all, and even if I did not do them they would be done on their own in some sense, with the passing of time alone. No, he had said, these must be done. And off he had sent me. And here I am still.

If hardship is some form of initiation, I am sure I have failed mine spectacularly, or I am destined to become the next savior of the world. Or something. Or my ass has to grow bigger and very hairy, in order for me to invoke it more effectively to dismiss situations and people.

Thankfully I am not looking for a boyfriend.… Now that would have been verrry funny.