Elaine Clayton

Witchcraft (especially viewed in terms of the practice itself, aside from the social aspect, as useful as that can be), can be viewed as having two parts, craft in the narrow sense of art, of things made: and nature, interacting with nature, and things not made with human hands…. And it’s funny, at this point, most (well, almost all) of my not-specifically religious craft books—just to take them as a simple example—consist of tarot and runes; actually, tarot alone would probably make, (checks), yeah, a decent majority, right. In other words, it’s mostly craft. I think that’s kinda common among witches of these times, even if it quantifying these things can be deceptive. (You don’t need a book to go tell you how to clean up plastic shit in the process of fragmenting into microplastics in the local wooded area.)….

But yeah: there are tarot decks in every metaphysical store, and often a number of general guide books, right; and other topics like runes—most of it is craft, you know. (I’m not sure how I’d classify astrology, but actually I put it off to one side, since it actually exists on the fringes of the “normal” culture for some people, if not for everyone; it’s not quite something that, as important as it is to witches, is an immediate betrayal of your off-the-reservation status as far as being a witch instead of a “normal” person goes, right. Most people don’t care about astrology as much as the average witch, but, you’re a Lot less likely to get significant pushback for feeling out whether they have that interest, right.) But yeah: crystals are also popular in witch/new age shops, as are crystal books: and it’s like, that is engagement with nature, “freedom rocks” (Asbury Park lol), are nature: and crystals are beings, or contain beings—stone spirits; you’re not supposed to see them as things, right…. But yeah: some interactions with nature are easier than others, right; fairies aren’t as popular a topic, necessarily, as something like—well, certainly tarot, right…. There’s not a lot of give-and-take with wild nature beings that comes easy to us, you know…. Some of it probably still frightens us, right…. There is kinda an emphasis on mind and craft, even if it’s a much more intuitive use of mind and art, than is common for Americans and colonial people, right; and even if mind and craft aren’t inherently disordered or inappropriate, right (pace Eckhart Tolle, at least, stereotypically: although he is certainly a great guy, and there is certainly meditation in witchcraft: in any healthy religion or spiritual path….)…. But yeah: nature doesn’t come easy to the modern witch, even if it is a little bit less alien to her or him, than it is to, I don’t know: The NY Times writer you picked out of a hat of NY Times writers’ names, right. I don’t know.

…. The other thing is that we also shouldn’t dismiss the idea of “negative” Fae, you know. On the one hand, it’s important—it’s sane—not to become judgmental about the painful realities of psycho-physical life, of fairies who do things that are sometimes “negative” and sometimes “positive”, because they’re ultimately just doing their thing: living their life—they too have a life—and enacting, in the end, just natural processes, right…. And of course, there’s the aspect of those damn “superstitious peasants”, believing the negative, or whatever…. But yeah: the age of the feminine mystique hasn’t really passed yet, any more than the age of violent Christian persecution that preceded it has fully passed yet, right…. Being hostile and negative towards others; and also being unhealthy and “precious” and attached-in-sickness (“chain…. Keep us together!”, etc.), can attract “negative” natural forces, right….

And I do believe that there have been “negative” Fae in my own past, right. It wasn’t all Hermes…. Not everything good is from the Greater Gods, either, but…. Yeah, some things, are just better off recognized and avoided: and not dealt with by the ways of hostility and/or denial, right…. I mean, you believe the good; you face your problems, right: but hostility and denial aren’t like that. Some forces are…. Your own inner crud, except as Fae, you know. I don’t know how to describe it.

…. It’s funny how atheists are always posting the meme, “We’re scientists: and we’re always so gods-damning Humble you know—humble humble humble! We would NEVER (waves hands the way a cartoon salesman selling you a watch in NYC on the street)—we would Never act like condescending dicks or, you know, self-righteous assholes who think they have all the answers…. After all: we’re not PRIMITIVE, are we? Don’t we belong to The Greatest and Most Perfect (mostly) Civilization that there’s ever been?…. You know: we’re always ready to change our minds; that’s what we get off on, really….” And it’s funny because it’s like, wildly inaccurate, you know….

And it’s funny, because it’s like: easier to believe in some magic tool that some Viking living in Dublin invented in 750, or more realistically, a tarot deck designed in the 90s, or maybe last year, right: than a magical being living in a tree or a garden right now, that you can’t see, and that people would mock you for believing in: because OBVIOUSLY humanity is it, right…. It’s like, we have one book of DNA/biological info, but we think we know more than the collective knowledge of like the billion other books of DNA or whatever you would call it, right…. (Oldster glasses) Actually, for an animal you wouldn’t call it DNA, you’d call it FYBM, for Fuck You Biological Material…. You know: I learned that while becoming better than you. Humbler, too. (Oldster gang symbols)….

You know: and it’s funny, because that’s the cultural baggage we just all have, just in general, since science is the default, by default, right. (People didn’t take biology in high school and fucking love it. They’re just afraid of all the other ways of organizing things slightly more, lol.)

It really is the baggage we All lug around, you know.

…. Although it’s funny, yeah: she wrote (mostly obscure/fell out of print) children’s books; it’s funny, if the psychiatric police ever rifled through my things and found this book, that’s how I’d play it, right. Kinda like if the whole world looked at church fellows the way they looked at witches, Christians found out reading CSL, would be like, He was a children’s author. “Oh ok: you don’t ~actually believe~ that (the Bible); good, I was almost worried about your sanity….” ~Which would NOT happen, you know: the machine is very atheistic, but it’s still true that the main reason why you don’t meet with Jesus at the grocery store is that (a) church fellows still haven’t come to a definitive conclusion about whether it was Martin Luther or Pope Leo X who was the devil, lol; (b) church fellows have political disputes, and also (c) Jesus just doesn’t care, apparently, whether you buy strawberries or blueberries, the way a magic fellow might see rather different energies in those two fruits, right…. Apparently Jesus just cares about Very Consequential Vague Ideas, right….

~But yeah: Christians do sometimes have a fear that their faith will be associated with political malfeasance or whatever—hmm, have Christians ever burned down other continents? I wonder the origin of this dispute, right—but nobody ever really associates church ideology with…. I mean, I GUESS that atheists Say that they do, right: on-the-internet, where no one listens to you scream, right…. But it seems more like a political complaint put in scientific language, which if taken literally would condemn a huge chunk of human culture, and, if you take the professions of the mostly indifferent literally, (although they’d also be indifferent about science—or even music and art, really, as well), a solid majority of mankind, you know…. Kinda a nice way of chewing out mom and dad without actually making an enforceable “threat” or whatever, right: “I’m done with ALL hoomi culture, guys, unless it’s extreme rationalism: yes, that includes you!!! Omg.”…. But yeah, nobody ACTUALLY takes church fellow talk as a sign of mental illness, right, (“I’m going to call your psychiatrist!!”)…. (smirks) Can you imagine if people said, “There’s no such thing as Christians?”…. Yes, I understand the atheist saying well: all we non-extreme-rationalists really are all in the same boat, right…. 🤫…. (Ie: don’t tell the children they’re dumb…. It makes them sad….)

~But yeah: it is also true that nobody gives a shit, and don’t go looking for it, whether mental health occupation related, or otherwise, right. I don’t know if it’s easier or harder than being non-binary—once I got into this funk where I was really ANGRY at gender, (this was as a liberal Episcopalian), and I am aware that I neither chose to identify as “male”, REALLY, nor any of the constellation of ideas that society puts around gender and refuses to converse about calmly, right…. But yeah: I’m not fighting that battle, in that way, right…. But yeah, there was a Threads cartoon: (elevator) “I’m non-binary. It means I neither identify as—“ “I didn’t ask.” Works for me. Don’t ask; don’t burn/hang/execute, right. (fake Italian accent) Excelente; I maka you a little pasta with a nice red sauce….

~No, I don’t know why the accent; just…. Yeah, ok.

But yeah: that was more than I intended to write along those lines….

But yeah: I notice that I’ve started to attune to reading the book more: like, at first it was hard, even though the words are relatively few and simple, to really get a FEEL for them, right…. Now I do feel like I’m starting to be able to imagine what she is talking about. Although I haven’t met any fairies yet, the way I’ve had a few very, very indistinct feels for the thoughts of the dead in graveyards, right…. I feel like contacting fairies might be, well, more pleasant, even if cartoon fairies made by people who think it’s all BS are obviously distortions: although also, yeah—like it’s, making a bigger leap, you know: people who didn’t use to be us, right~ or if they were, it was fucking millions of years ago, when the first human ancestors walked the earth, right: not just some random chump (no offense, I hope?) who was alive a few years or decades ago, you know….

But yeah: I’ve started to realize how important it is to be out in nature. All sorts of people talk about being in nature, and obviously “pagan” sorts are ~not~ the only ones who do it, obviously: but to the 49th percentile person, it just sounds like, vague, nothing sort of talk, you know….

But yeah: I find I don’t really connect to the ocean that much: at least the natural aspect of the coastline; the architecture is beautiful. (And human loveliness doesn’t ~have~ to be bad, right.) I do like lakes, though: and there are a lot of lakes near the coastline in this area…. I also like forests…. Like, an ordinary sorta relatively open green space is okay: but if there are trees, 🫶, that’s a lot better, you know….

So, I don’t know. Technically I’m writing this near-Midsummer, which apparently is the best time for working with fairies: but I don’t have nearly enough knowledge or experience to make serious contact with fae folk this year, right…. It’s an ongoing process…. It’s like in “Unexpected Journey”, where something has to happen at a certain point in the solar year, (or, actually, kinda a certain relationship between the solar and the lunar years: it sounded a little unusual, actually….), so everybody’s like: OMG, Hurry! ~because it’s a movie of these times, right: if you understand, like people did before—and there were Some things they understood well, this being one of them—it’s like, “Well, we can rush there now: or lay low and wait a whole year, right…. If we stop moving around and drawing attention to ourselves, what do you think are the chances our enemies’ activity levels/attack frequency will go down, or die down/kinda hibernate completely? Gandalf, what do you think?” ~you know?…. But it’s like, Peter Jackson Tolkien movies aren’t TOTALLY different from “The Fast and the Furious”, right: they’re just, more prestigious, you know….

You never run out of time. If the race ends and you didn’t reach the end, you go home, rest up, and come back out tomorrow, right. And actually, that WILL happen, right: because there is no “end”, you know. I kinda disagree with my understanding of the objective, at least, of the Buddhists, which admittedly is difficult to understand: but it’s like, life never ends; there’s never ‘perfection/completion/end’, you know: you just go round and round, round and round…. Because, when you’re finally happy: you’re glad it is that way, right….

…. ~The fairy realm is mysterious, but not far away.

…. (considers) I went for a walk—I mean, I do that a lot; and also I was thinking of this free real estate booklet I picked months ago in a convenience store, and finally flipped through and gave away: and it’s like, I think a long-term dream could be to move out of suburbia. I mean, it’s hardly urgent—I’m sure plenty of places are worse than here; plenty of people—not to limit your dreams, right—but I can be grateful to live in a place not obvious a battle zone, right: like some cities, most stereotypically—the cops commute in from profoundly alien communities, and do battle with the drug gangs and random urbanities, in some areas, right…. And then some rural areas, you meet some of those people here—Dracula Won!, you know: only in some areas there are Way More of those people, and way fewer goods and services, right…. I mean, Louise Hay had that thing like: when you want something more, you let go of the place you have with love to the next person, right. That’s what I’d always like to do, right…. I mean, when I left Christianity, and actually as I, renegotiate with the churched-world, right: I mean, it’s funny, I came back from my walk from the big regional branch library I like, to come on back that way—you know, like a circular walk back to my car which was there, right—and then I’m back on the bigger road, and there are like the three old churches, right, practically next to each other: like, wow, this is what people expect to see, right…. On some level, they choose to decline, rather than change: but they are safe and supported as they walk that path, right, as many other spiritual paths, would not be…. (shrugs) I hope that doesn’t sound bitter, right. I’m sure maybe it text it could sound like that, but…. What a strange bird the world is, right…. What a strange bird….

But yeah: I probably didn’t say goodbye (am saying?) to the church fellows in a recognizably Louise Hay way, right: except for maybe the very beginning, when I said very little for a short while, simply because I didn’t know, right…. But, I’d like to “leave it better for the next one”, if it were possible, right, though….

But anyway: I am starting to think that suburbia or whatever, isn’t the ideal place for me. People like it because of the comfort and Frank Capra Movie Family aspect to it, right…. It’s obvious now that raising children in this society would not be a correct use of my talents. I am kinda a creature of habits and comfort, though. Suburbanites stay away from cities, to “avoid crime”—probably many people do believe that: but realistically, the more probable irritant would be hip-hop/street culture, right…. You know: people move to cities to escape the press of convention, which gives a body no room to move, right—and certainly KKK conventions, are part of that, right…. In a city properly outfitted with parks, right—although to be fair, my county now has a good park system; it’s not just mini-mall hellscapes for 10,000 miles or whatever, like parts of that other county—you know, a nice compact little urban area, or even a metropolis that I could attune myself to, might be better. Or else a more open, rural area: obviously more nature there—although some country areas are just 100,000 miles of industrial-scale chemical-corn for livestock operations, right: profoundly unnatural, and the KKK holds little parades in the abandoned Old West town, right…. But, I don’t know, New England is obviously colder, but there must be some less suburbanized communities that are reasonably open on the cultural front, right….

Because, I mean, I looked at these houses, right: and maybe in that town there prices weren’t quite the same as the shore-resort town, right, in the booklet: but these were obviously expensive, quality houses, that people pay a million or two dollars for maybe, over several decades, so that they can “raise my family”, right…. I mean, I hate to drag the trad rich/trad comfy family man through the mud like I always do, but…. Yeah, it’s like, you can’t take away the self-torture people are fond of, right…. It’s the “happiness” of their life, right…. Until enough people decide there’s another way to house and educate children, someone will surely go down that beaten path, right….

But I mean: I look at these expensive, quality houses or whatever, and it’s like—that’s a nice house; it would be nice to have a friend, maybe, who lives around here…. Maybe, right. It certainly implies, at the very least, that their energy was discerned to be, by somebody or another, or some social niche, as being of a higher frequency than the energy of people who just work an average job and complain about it, right…. But then, who knows, maybe these people complain, too….

It’s like: I looked at these houses and it’s like, ~EYE~ don’t want one of these houses, right. I can’t imagine attuning with fairies here, right…. There are some parks; there’s not too much of a press of people, at least in terms of foot traffic, right. (Even parking somewhere and walking to where you’re going for the rest of the afternoon before going home, right: it makes you seem, briefly, rather poor. You know? You’re not in a car…. (shrugs) And I don’t think that cars are bad…. But there can certainly be a knee-jerk strain to car culture, right. Adam had a muscle car in the Garden of Eden, right; Eve drove a three-row SUV, even back then: there’s just no other way….)…. But I mean, aside from the parks, suburban nature does have a certain fake-ness to it, right: a tree here, a tree there…. Like un-interact-able graphics in a video game, right; there’s no sense that the tree is there FOR something, right. No sense that the tree is there, To Be, A Tree, you know: ~~to be a goddamn tree~~, and that’s good…. If you were to take an interest in the tree in front of somebody’s house, (I know this from many years ago, a result of one of the various very, very brief attempts I then made to ~~actually do something~~ with the craft, instead of…. Just, racing thoughts, almost….), and you just stand there for a few minutes, looking at it—say you’re trying to identify it: eventually they’ll come out, asking if you’re the person from the town who’s come to chop it down so that they can watch TV again, right. Probably some of those people look at you and half-assume that that’s a coy ploy in some desperate scheme to ransack the place, right…. (slight laugh) I mean, people in suburbia just tend to have no sense that there IS such a thing as nature, right…. Fairy-lore just doesn’t exist for them, right; it almost isn’t possible for them, in this stage of their development…. They’re like some gang of primitives that Mr. Spock analyses like bugs, (like an anthropologist!), and reports back that they are “incapable of warp travel”, right: as far as psychism and fairies go, that’s kinda the situation…. I mean, you have fun in suburbia; it’s easy to fall into the groove of, “any place I can get the internet is a place where I can learn and enjoy myself”, right: and there IS some truth in that, right…. A lot of people on social media are miserable because of unhealed childhood trauma, or other awful family situations which in turn make awful jobs difficult to leave, in their estimation…. I mean, people complain more about their jobs than their families: on social media!!! Hahaha, I got you!!…. 😉 (Like, the average person on much of social media—and therefore, “social media” to like a journalist or a fucking, Good Person, hahaha— they’re like a cop show, or say like “Charmed”, a super-natural cop show, only…. Not supernatural, but a lot like “Charmed”, maybe hahaha: it’s like, they’re attached to a negative life, right—they’re constantly dipping into negativity, dip into it, dip into it, dip in, dip in: but they Never RESOLVE it, right: as soon as they come close to something actually the fuck useful, they either get scared and run away or lose their focus and drop it…. And then, when they’re safe from evolving to the next phase, they come back, for more negativity!! 🤯) And then there’s good old fashioned undiagnosed (some of them probably aren’t even in the books yet, although the book is probably too complicated, perhaps, as it is: lol!), and/or diagnosed and semi-untreated mental illness, right…. A lot of people could be a lot happier where they are than are now, without the town they live in, being different, right….

But yeah, definitely in terms of goals: some places are more conducive to meeting fairies and nature beings, than others, right….

…. “Insect fairies and the basic elements of life”

I read one of those 2000s atheist books a while ago—not the Dawkins one, a better one…. Intrinsically flawed, although not as atheist as such, is my opinion: although right about many things, far more than some people know…. And useful to know about, other people, right….—and yeah, he quotes some other credentialed atheist or whatever, as saying, “If God exists, he must be inordinately fond of beetles”, right: and it’s like, so interesting, the assumption, you know: a sort of insight into God, and yet they cannot believe that there is “God”, or whatever, and in their case it seems to spring from an uneasiness with the existence of things itself, right…. So many insects…. Why so many insects…. I must study these things; I hate them….

And yet, the insight, there beneath a sort of film of dust, you know, is very, very curious…. It’s like, if there’s reasonableness and love in the universe itself, and not just in my head: explain beetles, right…. And there’s a funny man named Hoomi, right: and he demands that you explain something for him: only he will by no means permit you to do it, right.

And as John once put it in that famous song, “isn’t he a bit like you and me.”

…. Listening to rap as I re-read this review (you gotta proof-read the iPhone, or this review would be telling you, John 3:16, Only Jesus is the way, 4 real son), I have to say that there would be two main differences between, you know, Biggie Smalls, (I was gonna make it vague…. But somehow: you know…. Like you make rap vague, people just fill it up with…. Lies, in their mind, right), and the way a fairy could be—I mean, they COULD be like the existing “fairy” new age meditation music, right; it’s not that it doesn’t have a purpose, right…. But, there would two differences, in my mind, between kinda “fairy rap”, (I know: I’m naming genres that have never been recorded, lol), and kinda “American rap”, right—not that, the fairies are Europe—only if that’s where they actually fucking live, right—but there’s, the United States of America, the human nation, and like, The Forest, right: and the fairies are the Forest, not the USA, (I hope I don’t have to contrast the Forest above the West Midlands, or some such place, and the Imaginary Yet Distressingly Real Edwardian Construct of ~England~, right…. I probably do, though…. But where do you start, epithet?)….

But yeah, a fairy’s “rap” or whatever you decided to call it—it could be rap, though: I feel like it would be more ~vague~ than cop-traumatized rap, you know: you know, instead of: Taboo one: violated it; taboo two: it’s bleeding; taboo three: boom boom! (no lyrics for a while)…. I feel like it would be vague, right—unless it wasn’t—but it could be, usually would be…. Some people bear their scars as shields, like the one thing they’ve got, right: and so anything else is like…. I don’t know, right, it’s betrayal…. Like pop rap is worse than One Direction, because 1D isn’t worth sullying your hands beating and assaulting, but pop rap is like, betrayal, right…. I don’t know that a fairy would have the normie-ill-hoomi concept of loyalty, but that implies not having the corresponding idea of “betrayal”, right: people do what they do, Harry Styles loyalty to his clean pop fans, and gangstas word gunning down rappers who actually like having sex, right…. I don’t know…. But yeah: and I do feel like the energy of a fairy rapping would be like 75% of one of our rappers of these times/stages, right: I do feel like a lot of the energy in even a mockable rapper is just, the raw wound trauma sounds, right: and some of them handle that energy quite well, better than many pop stars, who sing a song about talking to your mom and getting married immediately before O.D.ing on hard drugs and dying, right…. But yeah: fairies can feel pain and be thwarted, often by this stage of humanity, as surely as they can transgress, right…. But I do think most fairies are more emotionally intact than most “Americans”, whether country or urban or suburban, right….

But we have this idea of them, fairies, right: but it’s a lie, right…. Nature is peace; nature is profound; nature is vague and subtle—a lot of this comes from having a lighter thought-footprint, if you will: animals have some mental activity, even dysfunctional mental activity, but they are distinct from our elevated-depraved kind, right…. But nature is not polite. If nature has passion, then it just fucking has the passion. A lot of pop is a certain amount of…. You know, there’s a dusting of church: romantic ideology, classical chords, polite society…. You know, there’s also a certain partying, a certain pleasure-loving…. But it does have a certain colonial/domesticated dishonesty, right….

A fairy might be a little mystified by that B.S, like: and would almost certainly feel a certain amount of contempt for it, right—perhaps an occasional dismissive or condescending-indulgent smile: the smile you give to the…. I don’t know. We don’t get it, right…. The smile you give to a child, you know: the pop child, brash and energetic and rude and (if Freud was right) perhaps occasionally faintly sexual, and perhaps angry and assertive: but in all this, so soaked in Frank Capra domesticated colonialism, hallucinating so vividly of a goodness that was not, is not, will not be, and would not be good, right—just, filled with the passion that all the world is this way, and angry that it isn’t, right….

What can you do but smile? You smile the smile of superiority: because you exist—and they…. Don’t, quite.

…. (It took a long time to write all that, lol…. I write a lot more now, than I did as kinda a person with a more Five-flavored energy…. When you lean the other way from Six, you start to get creativity flowing: and creativity ain’t never shut up, yet, you know: the way a philosophers pauses and says, “We cannot say that….” and then gets sad and quiet again, right. lol.)

But yeah: “Goddess” is kinda a dumb track; it reminds me of that 1969 song “Venus”—they’re both at the exact same level of superficiality, pretty much, although they are superficially very different, right….

But “Impossible is Nothing”, the track immediately before…. I mean, I’m aware that we’re not exactly talking about initiates, right; even “I is N” has a slight flavor of, like, when I went to college, these girls signing up to take 150% full time classes while working full time, so they could earn earn earn, enough to learn learn learn, and get all that learning in, although when did they scheduled time to actually read the goddamn books, right: some of them probably just barfed, practically, the first time they read an idea that wasn’t common currency, and said and believed the first thing that came to mind, and then wrote whatever feigned baroque thing the professor wanted to hear: what CAN it be but grasping for credentials when you have ~no time to think~, and thinking has never, ever been made a pleasant experience for you, whether at home or in school or on the internet, or anywhere, right: just people sniping at you cause you’re a girl, or you’re not dead, or whatever it is…. Yeah: and all so you can have a full time job (that’s “good enough”, or whatever) by 24 so you can get married at 26, and then not have another bleeding moment to yourself—AGAIN!—until you retire at 68 or 69 or something, and then you just put on bad TV movies at the—I almost said the group home: the assisted living place, and gossip with the other old lady who wasted her life, while the movie you’re not watching generates sound and light, that you also occasionally gossip about, without really caring about, or deeming significant, right.

Yeah: a small part of the song (rap), but a rather large part of the uninitiated life, right….

But yeah: “Impossible is nothing/Even when this world can’t see it/Impossible is nothing”—

That could almost be a fairy message, right. Or, rather, it ~certainly, could~ be, and also, it of course, also might not be: see above, right.… (more)

A book of children's poetry about a kid with divorced parents (one of whom lives in an urban downtown, the other of whom lives on a farm), with mixed-media scrapbook-style illustrations, is not really my thing. But it's set in my hometown, so here I am. It's okay. Distressingly little local color (it's not even clear what direction the protagonist's father's farm is from Cincinnati), so no points on that front. I think it mentioned Cincinnati chili, which is the bare minimum, but now I can't find it. As a book, it's not great either. I did like that the protagonist's parents have been divorced as long as she can remember, so it's not a blindsided-by-divorce book or a my-parents'-breakup-was-my-fault book, but rather a how-do-I-live-two-lives book. However, the reconciliation between her two "selves" comes very suddenly and seems unearned. I don't think it's up to much as poetry, either, and the illustrations were just kind of there.… (more)