elves.

i heard a bonny cow low, over the lea,

and it was an elf-call calling unto me
and the little elf-king said unto me…

for about twenty years i’ve enjoyed the company of an elf. there are
several beings called elves; this one’s about two inches high, blackish
but with a dusting of indigo in the shadows of his face, which is not at
all a human one, having tiny beetle eyes and stiff, clubbed feelers.

it amazes me that when i confess to consorting with this elf, all sorts
of people respond spontaneously with remarkably consistent accounts
of their own or some acquaintance’s friendship with just such a being,
or something very similar.

this elf comes out of darkness and returns to it when leaving, zapping
off suddenly in mid-sentence to return in an explosion of energy when
you’re least expecting it, full of excitement over some event somewhere
beyond our ken, blasting into my mind a tumult of intelligible
telepathy that can’t be denied.

so when i decided to take this elf at his word and take down from his
dictation an account of his existence, in order to write it up into a
book, having announced it to the astral and ethereal communities at
large, i was dismayed when, instead of enhanced telepathy and
improved focus, i lost touch completely with my elf.

i turned my mind to other things, notably gardening, and looked

instead for the small winged flower faeries i’m used to working with
there. but notwithstanding one dramatic interlude with some plant
spirits, featuring a fight between an unexpectedly savage comfrey
plant and some kikuyu grass threatening to invade its root zone, i
could not retrieve my rapport with those faeries either. instead i fell
into a kind of apathy for almost a year, going through the ordinary
processes of living in a daze. it was sad. i felt betrayed, deserted.

but on one of my lunar sabbaths, having attended to all my faerie,

ghost and god shrines, i felt compelled to lie down and give myself up
to the lethargy, and to the magnetic pull i felt drawing me into a deep
stony meditation.

slowly i became aware that my psychic eyes were open and gazing
comfortably upon a meadowy scene filled with pale sunlight. in the
rocky foreground stood a small man about the size of a man’s fist and
with him were four or five others. short and broad, they had long
beards and wore pointed hoods or caps, short jackets and bulky
trousers tucked into boots. elves of a different sort. the spokesman
fixed me with keen, piercing eyes. he said, “i am angry.”
i was devastated, but feeling that he was not unreasoning but had in
mind issues he wanted resolved, i tried to keep him in focus, but a
younger elf intervened. he began to show me many things about his
people in the kindliest possible way.

he explained that the reality shift between his world and ours is
directly related to a systematic logistical shift that can be
accomplished by pure reasoning from sound, accessible premises –
carried further than our culture normally permits us to carry it. in
some parts of the world, and perhaps he meant iceland from the
scenery he showed me, the local indigenous culture inclines itself to
the kind of logic that once made, and will eventually make again, a
single broad continuum of our two realities.

he gave me an image of two people walking together on one stretch of

meadowland, one forming thoughts around elvish logic and the other
around mainstream western thinking. at a critical point in logical
divergence, each will seem to the other to change shape and size and
after a while to disappear. in effect, he asserted that by a sequence of
logical shifts it is possible to reach “elfland” quite prosaically on foot!
songs that say things like ‘i saw a cheese eat a rat’ prepare us for
shifts like this.

later he introduced me to a little round woman who, by their evident

mutual affection, seemed to be his wife. their bodies are much
foreshortened and their heads very large in proportion – about the
same size as their thoraxes, and about a third of their over-all height.
this geometrical change also reflects the altered logic of their
orientation that makes their stretch of reality different from, but just
as full and rich as our own.

he showed me a guinea pig, perhaps one of mine, as i keep them as

pets. beside him it was about the size of an obese ox. it wore a
harness and bridle and, just as i noticed these, he leapt up onto its
back and, pulling back hard on the reins, made it rear up into the air
and fly.

“pigs might fly!” was the obvious thought to flit though my mind,
along with, “am i supposed to expect anyone to believe this?” that
thought broke the spell and it all vanished.

one of my shrines is a flat altar-stone on which i occasionally place a

small beaker of hot black coffee and a small portion of anything nice i
might be cooking for myself, and sometimes flowers. none of our
animals has ever been ill as a result of eating this food after the
faeries have taken their astral or ethereal portion as happens with
celtic faeries.
at this shrine, dedicated rather vaguely to all the ‘other’ ones i haven’t
honoured specifically, i began to look for these elves, and asked again
about the anger, but instead of an answer i was told to make a
cobblestone path in my vegetable patch, which i began to do.

as i worked i began to see movement among the herbs, and small

colourful forms began to emerge, vague and elusive at first but
becoming firmer and clearer and lasting longer. these elves were
always smiling and their thoughts streamed into my mind, although
their physical voices were still just fleeting impressions of sound,
tiny, frail echoes too slight yet to be heard.

a young one told me one morning how the elves recruited our people
to become elves. people we might consider normal, but with amiable
eccentricities of a certain kind – a love of puns or fantastic or funny
metaphors for example, or with certain abstruse habits of thought,
may take several simultaneous paths from their bodies at death. i
was referred to a delightful old man i’d lived next-door as a child. he
had died one christmas eve, and his soul had yielded up to the elf
kingdom that of itself which was spiritually elvish; and that had
entered a transitional state between human and elf - a kind of larval -
form, while the rest of his soul went to its similarly predestined after-
lives.

he didn’t enter an elf’s womb, and i don’t know whether any souls ever
do or not. the elf indicated that such souls wait like tadpoles at the
‘rim’ of elvish experience, and are nurtured and educated by many
elves as they slowly change their attributes from human to elvish. it
takes many years for them to learn to stand without tumbling, and
many decades more before they have full adult autonomy.

their clothing is what we’d call old-fashioned. the first elves i saw
wore caps, jackets and leather boots, and trousers woven of soft
woollen cloth, while the elf-wife’s dress was of a lightweight cotton-like
fabric which she’d made of plant-fibres. here, nettles make a coarse
but serviceable, hardwearing, linen-like cloth, but when you’re only
six inches or so tall, you can work it much more minutely to a soft
fine flax for spinning. they use other plant fibres too, too fiddly for
our use.

they have other handcrafts but no commerce and only simple

technology. but they have evolved as philosophers and
metaphysicians, learning the magical arts of gaia our planet mother
via plant spirits and devas and other beings including humans, that
gaia might send their way - or their logical perambulations might take
them to. they can charm and enchant and cast spells to heal, control,
delude, reveal or repel with great power and with responsibility in
proportion, being playful, even mischievous, in the small things and
reverent and circumspect in the great.
the elf-wife once showed me a rather awkward-looking dance with a
complex, rollicking rhythm such as you might dance best with clogs
on – perhaps she was wearing some. laughing, she clattered out a
rapid rhythm like little hammers on boot-lasts, or on anvils – weavers’
rhythms too. it reminded me of certain folksongs, for example “i know
my love (by his way of walking)”, which are hard to sing until you get
the hang of them.

during these conversations, sometimes with one elf, sometimes with

two or three, we were frequently inconvenienced by sudden upsurges
of energy resutling from the emotional and mental impacts we were
having on each other as we emerged into, faded from and re-emerged
into each other’s view through swirling mists of foggy thought.

this turbulence only sent my thoughts into a whirl, but the elves were
picked up bodily, as if by a flurry of air, and tumbled head over heels,
doing at the worst times several quick, helpless somersaults
backwards or forwards in mid-air, gradually slowing to a gentle
rocking and bobbing, until they could get a foot to the ground and
steady themselves again. this they said was only inconvenient, not
painful, and they were content to find it funny.

tumbling is a measure of their attunement to their reality, which they

compromise in order to reach us. new elves, still partly under the
enchantment of realities they’ve come from, tumble constantly before
they achieve a sense of their new piece of reality sufficient to attune
themselves to it.

they like to stress that they don’t inhabit a separate reality, another
dimension, or a parallel universe, as many beings in contact with our
reality might be said to do, but a reality continuous with ours,
bridgeable by the solid fabric of interreferentiality of which they claim
all realities are made. the logistics of this interreferentiality are what
determine which reality you will be attuned to.

hearing them talk of these things led me logically to where, while still
in our normal reality, i was also in another, seeing a rocky hollow
where on an outdoor throne carved from the rock sat a little king,
complete with a crown on his head and a cape over his shoulders. he
was slender, proportioned like a normal person, not like us, but with
very delicate features, like the king in a pack of cards. he had a
beautiful smile and was very excited to see me, his face lit up with
pleasure. the crowd of elves evidently adored him, smiling with great
pride and delight from him to me.

delightful as it was, it was a shock, and to compose myself i went in

and made coffee. i dedicated some on the shrine and on my way back
i found myself walking beside the younger spokes-elf, who appeared to
be shrinking and growing between about waist- and shoulder-high to
me. for several moments he smiled a smile of sweet, happy radiance
into my face, and then suddenly seemed to shrink back down to his
tiny size again.

but suddenly i saw that i was the one changing size, and my shape
too was wavering grotesquely, and it wasn’t his shrinking but my
return to normal that had made him seem to shrink, and then
suddenly i was back home. but then, i’d never left it – just been
interreferentiating with it differently.

when i got back inside, there was the tiny dark cosmic elf i was accustomed to,
swaggering about on my desk just as of old.

that path has taken on a life of its own. lately when deeply absorbed
in the work, i glimpse miniature ethereal buildings either side of it.
one day i believe i will fill out these airy forms by building them. that’s
a lifelong dream of mine i’d all but dismissed as too trivial.

and the anger? the answer finally came, months later, these elves
having become established members of the wyeuro faerie community.
there was no anger! the elves had ‘hacked into’ my awareness via
game-playing ploys designed to penetrate my defences. the entry-
winning ‘gambit’ was to ‘become’ what i’d be too scared to ignore, i.e.,
angry. all part of the fun!

first published in touchstone.