(161) Gulbrúnur

End of an elusion: an elusion is when a thing pretends that it is not a thing while it pretends to be a thing; for example, there is a mental illness that replicates this three-fold structure—a person’s mental illness is that they pretend to have a mental illness (i.e. normal, pseudo-illness, actual illness). As a base, you have your normal self which has been lost to mental illness, then you have the assumed mental illness, then you have the actual mental illness (which is to pretend to have a mental illness). The process is circular, it loops back on itself—and you could even say there are two “lost selves” in the loop, the actual insane person and the “ghost” sane correlate for the invented mental illness.

This process is related to shamanism, to the play of masks—albeit in a perverted way; it’s about how you lost yourself; and it’s very similar to the themes in Hitchcock films—the “blonde double” in Vertigo where Jimmy Stewart loses his love then finds a woman just like her and remakes her to resemble his lost love (blonde, Hitchcock liked blondes) and then loses her in exactly the same way (the twist being that it was the same woman; she’d just remade her appearance as part of a criminal conspiracy Stewart didn’t know about—when he “remade” her all he did was undo her illusion).

Is this about love? Elusian Mysteries. It recalls Shakespeare’s sonnets, which are really about the way lovers deceive each other and are complicit in the deceit. It’s an allusion to illusion that turns into an elusion. The idea that we could be lost in a circle of our own making, that we pretend to be ill but our illness is that we pretend to be ill, might even stand for life itself. In life, people are all bearing their claws and puffing themselves up to be more than they are (or pretending to be harmless); perhaps the sick are well.