fairy portals & ritualmaxxing (instead of building my writing career)

first forays into my literary mysticism PhD

John Anster Fitzgerald, Fairies in a Bird’s Nest (ca. 1860). Collection of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco

good morning you!

all lowercase lilting lyrics & lore today

not because of a trend or whatever…but because sometimes writing in all lowercase makes you feel like you’re somehow inexplicably stepping back into your childhood wardrobe & it fits in a way that’s not weird but is safe, hugging, soothing.¹

anyhow, i’m told i should be focusing on my WRITING CAREER.

i am told i have TRACTION on my substack & thousands of subscribers & I should thus be focusing on my WRITING CAREER.

i am told it would be very strange & stupid to just keep going as i am, with no real plan for anything, & indeed being so random & oddball that even the randomsters & oddballers are kinda like, hey you’re not random & oddball in a consistent enough way byii

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there is no unsubscribe button option on substack but if there was, it’d go here

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i am thinking of fairy portals.

earlier this year i dropped out of my mfa & decided to become the presiding faculty dean of my own institution that is very much not-regulated & extremely exclusive.

i’m teaching myself literary mysticism.

so i’m doing this thing where i’m following the thread of my thoughts & trying to cultivate physical rituals to aid my literary practice.²

so, where was i? ah yes, not thinking about my WRITING CAREER but rather about fairy portals. if you’ve seen one, you know what it is, if you haven’t, it can look like this though not always:

Sentiero del Sarvanot in Piedmont, Italy (a hiking trail)

indeed, sometimes it looks nothing like that. sometimes it’s just a scattering of mushrooms or a particularly enchanting pile of dog shit or a collection of pebbles or a gathering of leaves or an amalgamation of bird bones or a firefly lit pathway or or or

why am i thinking of fairy portal when i should be thinking about GROWING MY WRITING CAREER.³

the reason, the reason, the reason is that fairy portals are at once a thing of utter sublime natural fantastical beauty & at once a thing to be feared, even loathed, but certainly stayed the fuck away from.

how is it, why is it, that so much of what is alluring is also that which can ruin or lead to ruin? is it the way of the world, if i may speak grandly? are we put on earth to walk away from the paths that beckon us or to see the true path beyond the paths that lay out before us, enchanting & glaring & blindingly beautiful, but altogether illusory?⁴

but fairy portals are not the only kind of portal there is in the world of lore & wonder that sits just outside of your screen, & outside of the other screen (the one we impose upon ourselves).

there are portals to the world below & the world beyond. there are portals into ourselves, & portals outside of us. there are portals that will lead us to all our heart’s desires, & yet again portals that will take us to what we desire but do not yet know we desire. there are portals to places we want to be in, places we’d never want to visit even in our dreams, & places we need to be in, but do not yet want to.

how do we find the right portal? the true path? which map book will tell us? who is our guide? where must we go? how long shall we seek?

another kind of portal is the tower. the tower which is present in many a folktale & fairytale & folklore. the tower which is the most doomsday-ist scariest oh-shit-iest card in the tarot deck. the tower that leads often to a lonely, locked up princess with no recourse but perhaps sometimes her hair. the tower with no way in & no way out but one connived & contemplated & created with brute force & determination.

but there is another tower. there is a tower of song. there is MR. LEONARD COHEN’S TOWER OF SONG. stop reading this, go listen to this, then come back:

on every listen of the song or this recitation, i have a different favorite part, but today it is:

I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice
And twenty-seven angels from the Great Beyond
They tied me to this table right here in the Tower of Song

what is the tower of song? is the tower of song a place of bliss or a place of bondage? could it be both? indeed, perhaps that is our secret to discover, our code to crack, our adventure to chart, & so on & so forth.

so how do we enter a the tower, the portal? is it as simple as walking right in? yes, oh yes so much is that simple, dear sillies. you knock, then you walk, & then you fall or you rise up. so a good question is not how to enter a portal, perhaps, but how to attract the correct one(s).

for this, i am finding handy the very ancient reality of ritual. ritualmaxxing if you will. all practices whether writing or the dreaded GROW YOUR WRITING CAREER are rooted in ritual in some way. even killing is a kind of ritual. birthing, certainly is. ritual can be a repetitive task performed again & again without understanding⁵ or it is a purely performative action or series of actions one takes outright to attract a certain kind of attention or it is a private thing, a practice in & of itself one does without too much fanfare & yet with deep intention whether for or without a desire for some grand thing.

i wonder, in these first forays into my self-adjudicated, self-proclaimed, self-governed journey towards a PhD IN LITERARY MYSTICISM, what is my grand thing?

why am i writing this, or this, or this next thing? why am i on substack talking to you? why am i posting on notes? why am i having conversations with people & recording them? why am i why’ing everything? are these small rituals? outside of the other small rituals that make up my life that is certainly not a systematic attempt at GROWING & MAXIMIZING MY WRITING CAREER?

they must be, indeed they are. & in some sense the desire is there to find a portal of my own, though not a fairy portal, not one that is enchanting in externality but ruinous internally, certainly not. not the flim-flam & glam-glam & shiny silver egg hollow inside kinda portal. not the weeping princess in the tower kind. what kind, then?

i don’t know is the answer. or rather, i do. the rituals are in service in some way to this:

I was born like this, I had no choice
I was born with the gift of a golden voice

& indeed these are all our burdens to bear, for each of us has been given a “golden voice” or a golden whatever a GIFT of some special unique sort & in many ways we have no choice but to create rituals around it, or else they will be created for us & if the latter happens, then there’s no telling which portals are attracted or opened & which we fall into & or what we find on the other side.

Les Origines — Plate 3 (The misshapen polyp floated on the shores, a sort of smiling and hideous Cyclops) by Odilon Redon (1883)

oh, we won’t know even if we do it all with the best of intentions, but at least this way, we’re placing ourselves in a position of power. in many ways, literary mysticism is simply mysticism informed by the literary arts. & the literary arts are in many ways the most mystical arts of all. good stories, music, art, outlasts us all. good art is better than cockroaches.

so yes as of now i do not have a solid plan, that is a ritual of sorts, to BUILD MY WRITING CAREER but i do have a series of rituals that i am shaping & creating & growing to help me seek whatever must now be found by one that is me.

i will leave you with this thought from URSULA K. LE GUIN whose seminal work A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA i’ll soon be exploring in a slow read right here on Beautiful Losers hopefully with you & you & yes you too.

I pray it’ll open all the right portals for us.

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“It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

Source: Ritual Dust

1. as a child, though, my wardrobe was, most of it, dictated by my mother & i hated it so much, but in my head, the child i truly was, wore strange robes made of clouds & weeping willows so that’s what i’m referring above.

2. you must understand that all of this is happening alongside my being told from many sources that i must, i seriously must, think about my WRITING CAREER.

3. though one could also ask, why should I be thinking about GROWING MY WRITING CAREER when i could be thinking of fairy portals?

4. are they illusory? are you or i even real?

5. albeit one hopes the understanding deepens & grows with repetition