love will keep us safe from death

An evening in an orange room. Outside is all fading sunlight; inside is similar, artificially made but no less sweet. Three friends sit near me: two new, one much older. We hold microphones, instruments. A kalimba, a violin. My fear swells. I will it to disperse.

The three of them are making music, sharing words. It seems so easy to do, as if they were one being, one body, one brain controlling each individual limb, directing it to move. I want to be part of it, to open my mouth, to scream, but I press my lips to the microphone and can only manage a hum.

The notes vibrate in my mouth, through the speaker, onto the walls. The same note over and over, like a meditation. Trying to find synchronicity, to find my place, to feel at home between the other sounds, to not copy but follow then diverge, to find a space that feels less like a grave and more like a burrow. Something I can live in.

There are moments where it happens. Where four bodies and minds inhabit what they need to, and it is somehow complimentary, even when it’s grating. And when that next moment comes, I dare myself to make the hum a wider sound, something that doesn’t only vibrate in my mouth but my chest, that travels through the roof of my mouth and exits through the crown. A hidden opening. It is possible. To open something previously thought closed, even if for a moment.  

It’s not up to you, well, it never really was

I am trying to write more intuitively, to make less sense. To trust the connection between words and sound and myself and other people. Allow the creation of something confused and twisted. A rejection of mastery and an openness to what is. To experimentation and the danger it presents. Lean into the crack and it will tremble ever so nicely. 

I keep gesturing towards opacity but in the most transparent ways. Essays felt like growing up, moving away from the juvenile poetry that led me into this writing world and proving that I actually had. something. to. say. I know things, I can write more than fragments, I can convince you (really me) not only of my intelligence but also that my sense of the world could be something like common sense. Rather than self-excavation I have been pursuing self-explanation. Trying to use the master’s tools, like a hammer and chisel, always working to make the surface more defined. (I cannot help myself. I have to reference.)

I want to write so clearly and perfectly that all parts of me can be understood. So clearly and perfectly that my arguments make sense, that they can hold water, be taken seriously, can be held up to the light.

Losing the romance of writing is a heartbreaking thing. To try instead to force it into being, compel its birth, rip it out from the internal dark and into the bright light with much force, hands covered in latex and blood.

Should I lean into coincidence and fate rather than logic? It is what it is, it happens for a reason. I roll my eyes when my dad says these things, because they feel like an appeal to a God, a higher power that I’m not sure exists. Like fatalism, a rejection of my autonomy and power.

But Björk wills me to understand that there is only so much I can control. And creativity, when it feels the best, connects with this ephemeral ocean, what some might call the source, the centre, God, expanse, energy. What Björk calls fine tuning my soul to the universal wavelength. This thing that makes us human. 

Surrender
give yourself in
you’re trying too hard

Unfold
in a generous way
surrender, surrender

It’s a sign of maturity to be stuck in complexity

Around the time of the new year I promised to stop treating myself like something to be worked on. A project. A thing to be improved, refined, made more efficient. It is hard to break a habit, one lived in for years, but it is also surprising how quickly the unusual can feel like home. 

The playlist I made on new year’s eve - I do this every year - is based on the six of swords. Transition, a journey, heading into the unknown. I carry my baggage with me as I sail away on the seas of change.

When I am broken I am whole
and when I’m whole
I am broken

In ‘The Gate’, the wound is a world is an opening - an opportunity to love more deeply and intensely than might otherwise seem possible. It is prismatic and ever-morphing, an exchanging of light back and forth between healed chest wounds, a reunion of many parts, of solar beams. All resistance can be dropped. Only metallic movement remains. The light moves like sound moves like breath moves like hands, shining rivers surrounding us as we merge, “not one and not two”, from the places where we hurt.

I do not have to deny my wounding nor do I have to dwell in it. Instead, find some other unknown thing. An ellipsis to live in. 

No one is a lover alone; most hearts fear their own home

One time I was at a bar in Chicago, somewhere near the lake. Its steps led down into a dive, empty and already dim despite only being 5pm. I had met the friend I was with only an hour earlier, in another bar, where sunlight came through the windows and he greeted the staff fondly. But we had come to the dive to eat and drink, and it was there that we talked about the cities we lived in, the paths that had brought us there. He welcomed strangers into his home. Gave them a place to sleep, and if he couldn’t, he’d show them around the city he’d lived in for several years, told them how the lake is a swimming hole in summer and freezes in the depths of winter when yes, it really can get colder than this. He was older than me. Maybe ten years. I was skeptical as to why he wanted to meet me, used to ulterior motives that usually involved my body, but I was trying to remain open. Willing. Able to believe that two strangers could meet as a result of the hospitality of one and the coincidence of their location and could find a way to connect. That maybe life is that simple, and your drink didn’t need to be watched, and the offer of a ride home could be happily accepted. We talked about Björk in that bar. He’d discovered her in college; me when I was a child. We compared our favourite albums: I think his was Post; mine will always be Medúlla, for nostalgic reasons. We had been polite and distantly curious up to that point, but from our musical ties a new energy was birthed - something that came from a place of feeling generally misunderstood, maybe, in our love for this artist. By that point I was aware that Björk was an internationally famous musician, but when I was a teenager in a small town it felt like nobody else knew her, or if they did, then they existed elsewhere. She was a portal to a world, not outside or parallel mine, but deeper within, a permissive conduit to a more pronounced self-connection. To share this with another, someone who, despite distance and age and all our other differences, felt the same, ignited a bond between us.

And if one feels closed, how does one stay open?

In experimentation, things occur that are labelled madness in other contexts: screams and laughter that come out of nowhere; answers that don’t quite make sense. Unintelligible actions which refuse to enter intelligibility. Things I suppress if I can and fear when I can’t.

Experimentation is the opposite of stand still and be silent, the opposite of disembodied and disassociated. The opposite of hyper-vigilantly monitoring your every move so as not to disturb another. Instead it is doing something with purpose, even if it’s not clear what it is. It is being in it, connecting with

This kind of obscurity, this opacity, feels risky.

A vulnerability is required to open yourself up to the ocean, to admit that your control is limited or perhaps even nonexistent, that no amount of words or gesturing or connecting point A to point B will give you what surrender will. This time / I’m gonna keep it to myself / I’m gonna keep me all to myself / but he makes me want to hand myself over. I always thought that last line was he makes me want to hurt myself, and maybe that’s what vulnerability represents to me, at least most of the time - an opening to potential harm, to embarrassment, rejection, to falling flat on my face or plummeting off a cliff, the ground giving way, the roof caving in, the facade crumbling around me.

Sometimes all this openness just feels too big, too loud. Almost grotesque. She’s screaming and fantastical, romantic and relational. It’s too much. Sewing pearls through skin, beauty and harm entwined, this soft and delicate thing being pierced and threaded, made all shiny and bright.

Love will keep us safe from death 

Björk growls this refrain, over and over, coming from a place that isn’t pretty or delicate or sweet. Timothy Morton describes Björk’s voice as “threatening vulnerability”, and I agree. She is a triple Scorpio, after all - taking us to the underworld, to the depths of our selves, our relationships with each other, to discover what actually exists in the dark, if anything. A face is down there, perhaps it’s mine, maybe it’s yours, a warped mirror, a distortion, like walking at night or catching a train and seeing your reflection in the dark windows of an empty house or a train passing through a tunnel. You see yourself and you aren’t sure who you are, whether that’s really you. Can you trust it? Can you trust your senses, your eyes, the feelings that arise? Who is this other self that exists in the dark, that looks like you and moves like you but also fails to resemble the way you appear in your own imagination? 

Darkness seems simple, but it’s not. The layers of shadows, the depth of the gradient, the gradual adjustment of eyes to what is contained within the black - a corner, an edge, an open space. If darkness, blackness, was so simple, what would there be to fear?

I am a Scorpio rising; my Aquarius sun and moon and mercury are conjunct in the 4th house. I was born at midnight, birthed into an abyss, an opening, the crown of the day and the chart opposite so many of my natal planets, the vessel holding water under the cover of darkness, birthed under a new moon, no light in the sky. I slept with a nightlight for many years, or had to find the company of another body to feel safe in the shadows; now I wear an eye mask, trying to keep hold of the dark for as long as I can.

Shake us out of the heavy deep sleep. Do it now. 

Her music is an awakening, not a sign that morning is here but that the 3am world is safe too, that in the depths of our hearts, our souls, is a comfort, a place we can reside, like a snail under dead leaves or a groundhog in its hole. I think of anne boyer’s ‘what resembles the grave but isn’t’, another ode to metamorphosis, to visiting the underworld and returning again. Or Emily Dickinson, acknowledging the inevitable abyss, which is actually life. Other obvious images: caterpillar and butterfly and cocoon, phoenix and fire and ash. Maggie Nelson writes that Björk has transformational skills, an alchemical ability, and Björk says this power comes from constantly attempting and constantly failing, from accepting that the abyss must be entered in order to appear out the other side, that one cannot transform if they don’t want to approach the dark.

Transformation is not easy. Jarring, friction-filled, a bright explosion in the dark, a body emerging from the shadows, compelled by an unseen force. Reacting, responding, folding, unfurling. Knees buckling and chest swelling, everything breaking, blurring, changing and screaming. The body becomes multiple, tiny versions of itself emerging out of it, and you only see flashes of what that might mean, what might be possible, and you wonder what the fuck is going on, and you are moved.

Until next time, take care.

Ellen