I think prophecy is an important part of writing, at least as important as technique or form. I think there are magical processes going on in writing. Like this raven thing. I’d been writing using the raven myth, and when I went up to Sitka in Alaska, the ravens disappeared. It was very unusual. Then the day before I left they all returned and flew around the totems. It was a strange experience.
Ishmael Reed, in an interview with Jon Ewing for The Daily Californian, 1977
(from Shrovetide in Old New Orleans, 1978)
Kneeling breast feeding mother – Paula Modersohn-Becker, date unknown
When the breast withers away to a vanishing point, other oral and maternal values are also drying up and atrophying; when the breast spouts forth again, these values are also returning.
By no accident, the most admired poem among American intellectuals in the 1920s was T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; although actually dealing with his adopted country, England, his symbols spoke very eloquently to American sensibilities also. The withdrawal of the breast is suggested in Eliot’s images of wandering in the desert, of thirst, of the failed crops in the land rules by an impotent king, of sterility in general. The most famous of Eliot’s images– e.g., “lilacs out of dead land,” “The Hanged Man,” “the Unreal City,” “the corpse you planted last year in your garden,” “rock and no water and the sandy road”– all revolve around the theme of life struggling to survive without nourishment. The final section, in the mountains (breast symbols, according to Freud), brings the promise of rain and renewal. If all poets seek to summon the mother goddess in her guise as Muse, Eliot in a very real sense is calling for her to appear as wet nurse.
…consider a final parable, which comes from Aleister Crowley’s Magick in Theory and Practice and is said by him to contain the whole secret of practical occultism:
Two passengers are sharing a railway carriage. One notices that the other has a box with holes in it, of the sort used to transport animals, and asks what animal his companion is carrying. “A mongoose,” says the other. The first passenger naturally asks why this eccentric chap want[s] to transport a mongoose around England.
“It’s because of my brother,” says the second man. “You see, he drinks perhaps more than is good for him, and sometimes he sees snakes. The mongoose is [to] kill the snakes.”
“But those are bleeding imaginary snakes,” says the first man.
“That’s as may be,” says the other placidly. “But this is an imaginary mongoose.”
An art dealer once went to Picasso and said, “I have a bunch of ‘Picasso’ canvasses that I was thinking of buying. Would you look them over and tell me which are real and which are forgeries?” Picasso obligingly began sorting the paintings into two piles. Then, as the Great Man added one particular picture to the fake pile, the dealer cried, “Wait a minute, Pablo. That’s no forgery. I was visiting the weekend you painted it.” Picasso replied imperturbably, “No matter. I can fake a Picasso as well as any thief in Europe.”
This book has a lot to say about Ancient Greek perspectives and their meaning but there is one perspective it misses. That is their view of time. They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes.
When you think about it, that’s a more accurate metaphor than our present one. Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I like the word “gumption” because it’s so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn’t likely to reject anyone who comes along. It’s an old Scottish word, once used a lot by pioneers, but which, like “kin,” seems to have all but dropped out of use. I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption.
The Greeks called it enthousiasmos, the root of “enthusiasm,” which means literally “filled with theos,” or God, or Quality. See how that fits?
A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes. That’s gumption…
…The gumption-filling process occurs when one is quiet long enough to see and hear and feel the real universe, not just one’s own stale opinions about it. But it’s nothing exotic. That’s why I like the word.
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Sketch for “Truth Rescued by Time, Witnessed by History” – Francisco Goya, 1797 – 1800
…Einstein had said, “Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest,” and let it go at that. But to Phaedrus that was an incredibly weak answer. The phrase “at any given moment” really shook him. Did Einstein really mean to state that truth was a function of time? To state that would annihilate the most basic presumption of all science!
But there it was, the whole history of science, a clear story of continuously new and changing explanations of old facts. The time spans of permanence seemed completely random, he could see no order in them. Some scientific truths seemed to last for centuries, others for less than a year. Scientific truth was not dogma, good for eternity, but a temporal quantitative entity that could be studied like anything else.
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Like many Writer-Americans who ambled through late adolescence after 1957, I had my Jack Kerouac phase. I’d spend days drinking cheap port wine straight from the bottle, and nights shuffling stoned around the villages of lower Manhattan (though instead of jazz, my soundtrack was early-2000s garage rock revival & disco-punk). My copy of The Dharma Bums is probably more underlined than not-underlined. I considered Big Sur to be, along with Philip K. Dick’s VALIS and Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP, one of the most fascinating portraits of a man’s mind spinning out of control.
I never got around to criss-crossing the country, but I still hope to, someday.
While I’m not quite as enamored with Kerouac as I was back then, I don’t think he deserves all the bile his haters often spit upon him. Those haters like to toss up that famous Capote quote, how On the Road “isn’t writing, it’s typing,” as if that’s all the proof they need to dismiss Jack’s work. Sure, the guy could’ve used a stronger editor in some spots, to better shape his spontaneous riffage, but that’s more his editor’s fault. And anyway when Jack was on, he wasn’t just hacking shit. He was painting new shades of America’s soul in music and poetry, chill and exuberant and tragic and subversive.
Dr. Korchek’s glorious love letter from Steven Soderbergh’s Schizopolis. Happy Valentines.
Dear Attractive Woman Number Two,
Only once in my life have I responded to another person the way I’ve responded to you. But I’ve forgotten when it was or, even if it was in fact me that responded.
I may not know much, but I know that the wind sings your name endlessly, although with a slight lisp that makes it difficult to understand if I’m standing near an air conditioner.
I know that your hair sits atop your head as though it could sit nowhere else.
I know that your figure would make a sculptor cast aside his tools, injuring his assistant who was looking out the window instead of paying attention.
I know that your lips are as full as that sexy French model’s that I desperately want to fuck.
I know that if I could, for an instant, have you lie next to me, or, on top of me, or sit on me, or stand over me and shake, then I would be the happiest man in my pants.
I know all of this and yet, you do not know me. Change your life. Accept my love. Or, at least let me pay you to accept it.
For almost as long as we’ve been together, my wife has asked me to read to her before she goes to sleep. I believe we started with anthologies of Bill Watterson’s Calvin & Hobbes, and after many months, maybe more than a year, we got through every single strip. Since then we’ve also read Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, some Edward Goreys, a little Shel Silverstein, Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman, a couple Roald Dahls, to name but a few. But the author we’ve read most is probably Neil Gaiman: Coraline, Mirrormask, almost all of Sandman. So this past June when m’lady gifted me with Gaiman’s latest, The Ocean At The End Of The Lane, I knew it was also a gift for her, a new bedtime story. Which was totally cool with me, because I enjoy reading her bedtime stories as much as she loves being read to.
While part of me wished I could scarf the book down as fast as I could, I think I preferred reading it out loud, in small pieces, late at night, over the course of several months. After all, most of Gaiman’s non-comic stories seem to’ve been written with out-loud reading in mind.
And like most Gaiman books, Ocean is essentially a fairy tale in a literary fiction dust jacket, a novel-length illustration of when GK Chesterton said:
The timidity of the child or the savage is entirely reasonable; they are alarmed at this world, because this world is a very alarming place. They dislike being alone because it is verily and indeed an awful idea to be alone. Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it—because it is a fact. Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
The “dragon” in The Ocean takes many forms, one of which sounds an awful lot like the crippling doubt of depression:
It was not one voice, not any longer. It was two people talking in unison. Or a hundred people. I could not tell. So many voices.
‘How can you be happy in this world? You have a hole in your heart. You have a gateway inside you to lands beyond the world you know. They will call you as you grow. There can never be a time when you forget them, when you are not, in your heart, questing after something you cannot have, something you cannot even properly imagine, the lack of which will spoil your sleep and your day and your life, until you close your eyes for the final time, until your loved ones give you poison and sell you to anatomy, and even then you will die with a hole inside you, and you will wail and curse at a life ill-lived. But you won’t grow. You can come out, and we will end it, cleanly, or you can die in there, of hunger and fear…’
Reading that passage aloud shook me pretty hard. I knew those voices, and I was truly, deeply frightened for Ocean‘s little hero. But then in the next paragraph, Gaiman’s little hero finally slays that dragon, and elegantly so, with just a few simple words:
[Spoilers, maybe?]
‘P’raps it will be like that,’ I said, to the darkness and the shadows, ‘and p’raps it won’t.’
I don’t know if my wife heard it in my voice, but reading that next part aloud was like hearing the answer to a prayer, and suddenly I was awash in glorious relief.
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