A cat--whose only signs of aging are a deep chest cough and balding eyebrows--insists on sitting on top of my arm. Life is quiet, by which I mean I am quiet. The seven of pentacles, three of wands, and the Hermit. I am coming up all waiting cards, dreaming of the return of the perversions of hope.

Diogenes follows me through a prolonged literary ramble, from an anecdote in a self-help book to a slick reference in Neil Gaiman's short stories, and now this. He is carrying the hermit's lantern, always lit in his search for an honest man. This light here has just gone out, a blown fuse I expect, and it's hard to replace.

I made no choice when I wrote down that my purpose is to create masterpieces of time and evolution, and I cannot take credit for this bit of spun silk and dreamstuff, though since the age of twelve, I've been very concerned with the puzzle of my destiny and the scope of a human life. In the Mastery of Love, Don Miguel Ruiz simply states "A dream master creates a masterpiece of life." Making a leap here, the purpose of my life is to live it, and the life of a human is itself a masterpiece of time and evolution. FORTUNE COOKIE: BE THE SYMPHONY. It is hard to loose my grasp on the idea of production, of forcing my life into some vessel of lasting worthiness.

I have reached the point in the Two Towers where I no longer want to rush ahead. This is where Tolkein splits the action into two books, the first accounting for the adventures of Merry and Pippin, Legolas, Aragorn and Gimli, and their dealings with the Ents and the Riders of Rohan and with the affairs of wizards. My favorite of all the books, I think because my motto is "Follow the wizard". And the second half, my least favorite, in which Sam and Frodo take a cold hard slog over marshes and dusty lands into Mordor, with the treacherous Gollum in tow. No magic or gallantry there. The transition from companionship, cheer and daring deeds, to a present and growing horror leaves me shocked every time.

It's been becoming more and more obvious to me that writing, and especially writing science fiction and fantasy, is the best way to open young minds to new ideas, the meaning of life, and to convey the importance of protecting the planet we live on and creating a livable future for all. Speculative fiction, as it's called in the 'biz, gives all people but especially young people, a chance to imagine 'what if' and to explore beyond the boundaries of the known. It is through such exploration that we dream and invent and make something more inspiring of ourselves, and escape beyond the confines of current expression and conventions to realize our own potential. I was thinking about this when I found the following letter, drafted circa 2006. A bit childish, simple, but my sentiments have not changed and neither has the overwhelming message that fiction is what feeds my passion. I have a habit of writing to authors as I finish a book, my mind afire. Maybe only the last sentence is worthwhile, but for context, here is the letter I wrote:

To: Diana Wynne Jones, on the subject of The Merlin Conspiracy, a thoroughly excellent book.
This was fabulous. I must say the cover art had me quite skeptical at first. But I opened the book and immediately was plunged into an intricately, vividly entertaining story, that was both amusing and profound. With each page, a new layer was added, the whole piece weaving itself together into a delicate, delicious and exotic tapestry, like the people in the canyon world.
I enjoyed most of all Nick, Romanov, and Maxwell Hyde, the latter two for having real power and enticing complexity, and the former for not having either quality. Nick seemed so genuinely a teenage kid, with absolutely no clue what was going on, but who wanted to do something important. To have a grand adventure sprung upon such a character rings true for me. I feel sometimes that school, homework and worrying about college and test scores are just fillers, things to take up time until one day I'll just take a step sideways and find myself plunging into my real life, which will of course be full of adventure and excitement. There's got to be more to life than existing and consuming, even soaking in knowledge has begun to seem pointless and anticlimactic.
I enjoyed the very British flavor of your story. British lore can't help but have something of chivalry and King Arthur, of Stonehenge. There is a connectedness with the land, history, something archaic, something greater, that you just don't get in America. Your whole country is steeped in history and myth and magic; everyone just breathes it in I think, and the resulting works are refreshing to those surrounded by raw commercialism daily.
Thank you. I'm sure you get fanmail, but I wonder how much genuine appreciation and admiration actually gets through to fantastic authors. Definitely not enough. Thank you for a moment, a point in time, one page, when the world was still, and time held its breath, and the universe fit inside a book, and a book was a wealth of universes.

From the Farthest Shore

Ursula K. LeGuin's third novel in the classic Earthsea trilogy holds these pearls, which I gather to me now.
"It is time to be done with power. To drop the old toys and go on. It is time that I went home. I crave to walk on the mountain, the mountains of Gont, in the forests, in the autumn when the leaves are bright. There is no kingdom like the forests. It is time I went there, went in silence, went alone. And maybe there I would learn at last what no act or art or power can teach me, what I have never learned."

"A kind of weariness of dread, of waiting for the worst, grew in Arren all day long. Impatience and a dull anger rose in him. He said, after hours of silence, "This land is as dead as the land of death itself!"
"Do not say that," the mage said sharply. He strode on a while and then went on, in a changed voice, "Look at this land; look about you. This is your kingdom, the kingdom of life. This is your immortality. Look at the hills, the mortal hills. They do not endure forever. The hills with the living grass on them, and the streams of water running... In all the world, in all the worlds, in all the immensity of time, there is no other like each of those streams, rising cold out of the earth where no eye sees it, running through the sunlight and the darkness to the sea. Deep are the springs of being, deeper than life, than death..."
He stopped, but in his eyes as he looked at Arren and at the sunlit hills there was a great, wordless, grieving love. And Arren saw that, and seeing it saw him, saw him for the first time whole, as he was.
"I cannot say what I mean," Ged said unhappily.
But Arren thought of that first hour in the Fountain Court, of the man who had knelt by the running water of the fountain; and joy, as clear as that remembered water, welled up in him. He looked at his companion and said, "I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom and the unperishing spring?"
"Aye, lad," said Ged, gently and with pain.
They went on together in silence. But Arren saw the world now with his companion's eyes and saw the living splendor that was revealed about them in the silent, desolate land, as if by a power of enchantment surpassing any other, in every blade of the wind-bowed grass, every shadow, every stone. So when one stands in a cherished place for the last time before a voyage without return, he sees it all whole, and real, and dear, as he has never seen it before and never will see it again."

As if I had lost

Tonight the words are addressed to my sadness, coming from everywhere and enveloping me fully in my memories. In autumn, I remember other autumns, other years past, as if they were coils of wire touching each other at the rim, separated by whole years but located in the same space, other wraps of the scarf around my neck. (I wear layered garments of memory, each one brightly insulative against the tugging, scattering winds.) So I've found that in sadness, I remember past sadnesses standing out sharp and clear, tingling along the length of my arm like bangles sliding neatly together. Or it may be that my memories of grief stand out strong as the most vibrant experiences of my life, when a hurricane rocked through my body, more strongly still when I felt the tidal pull of strange waves. I know that I love doing this, that it keeps me alive, and that without this rocking motion another feeling I love would end, which is why I am sitting with tears streaming down my face, as if I had lost a child. Not merely finished a book, where I was witness to another's grief, and the laying down of burdens, fictional and twenty years in the past. Not merely held someone else's child in my arms, astonishment melting me under the light of the infant's gaze. I had not just heard it as a story, seen it in the face of a friend, listened while the parentheses closed. Are these the echoes of some future grief ricocheting off a rupture in the fabric of my life? I honor this feeling and any who can call it forth with as much grace and tenderness as Barbara Kingsolver in her book Animal Dreams.

I knew there was a reason. That vague unsettling feeling that led me three months ago, the dissatisfaction, the burn of things not lining up, of too many things jostling for attention, coincidence upon haphazard colliding with force, simultaneity and synchronicity impacting, and the collisions were too forceful within my warring selves. I wrote apocali (?), not one, multiple apocalypses, saw the wrongness of that word, the lack of it, the very wrongness an unease I couldn't pinpoint. How could it not encompass the multiplicity of endings being drawn together? That noticing made me afraid. The bling-sightedness of all those prophets. Mass hysteria and conspiracy, all singular and selfish. And here, just on page 84, something I didn't know was true, yet, has just been confirmed by China Mieville. A bit dramatically, but all the same. The right chord is struck. The brush takes the next stroke. Is it any wonder then that I feel... vindicated? relieved? Someone else noticed and wrote to my fears. Made them sane. Made them fictive and poetic, spelled them out in myth. Which has its roots in the collective unconscious and without reason, beyond reason, draws us in from the night of logic. Here you're not alone, he whispers, here the world is raving mad. Some comfort.

"It's the ends of the world."
"End of the world?"
"Ends."--- Kraken, by China Mieville

I love the Literary Book of Answers, compiled advice from great works of literature. I always consult it when I visit a certain friend.

Question: What do I do now?
Answer: Thou must gather thine own sunshine.
Question: How do I find my own way?
Answer: Be still.
Question: How will I communicate what I find to other people?
Answer: You shall not fail.-- Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

I forgot to cite the first two answers.

the nature of subjectivity

A fascinating examination of the cultural lens of science with which we view Nature, as described in Steven Buhner's book The Secret Teachings of Plants:

"Any measurement of Nature that smooths out its irregularities in order to allow measurement is not objective. It is, in fact, highly subjective.
The observer, by determining the degree of measurement (or magnification) that will be used, and thus how the lines will be smoothed out, interferes with what is being measured. The observer intervenes in any resultant description of Nature by subtly altering its description, a description that depends on a preference for one level of magnificaiton over another. It is an error that is not rectifiable--not correctable--because the error comes from the way of thinking itself. It comes from applying a linear, static mode of cognition to a nonlinear, always changing and flowing reality. That this resultant description is then taken as an accurate portrayal of Nature injects an unreality into our collective consciousness. We are slightly moved away from Nature, and everything we do begins to take perturbations that grow greater the farther away in time we go from, and the more decisions we make based upon, that original error in description.
The truth is that in the real world, in Nature, quantification is a projection of arbitrary human decisions. It is always subjective. Nature contains no fixed, measurable quantities." and if you would care to find out how he justifies it, the book is quite interesting.

More Earthsea

As I said, Ursula K. LeGuin is good if you have trouble with your shadow.

"Ged stood up, and took his staff, and lightly stepped over the side of the boat. Vetch thought to see him fall and sink down in the sea, the sea that surely was there behind this dry, dim veil that hid away water, sky, and light. But there was no sea any more. Ged walked away from the boat. The dark sand showed his footprints where he went, and whispered a little under his step...
He strode forward, away form the boat, but in no direction. There were no directions here, no north or south or east or west, only towards and away...

At that Ged lifted up the staff high, and the radiance of it brightened intolerably, burning with so white and great a light that it compelled and harrowed even that ancient darkness. In that light all form of man sloughed off the thing that came towards Ged. It drew together and shrank and blackened, crawling on four short taloned legs upon the sand. But still it came forward, lifting up to him a blind unformed snout without lips or ears or eyes. As they came right together it became utterly black in the white mage-radiance that burned about it, and it heaved itself upright. In silence, man and shadow met face to face, and stopped.
Aloud and clearly, breaking that old silence, Ged spoke the shadow's name and in the same moment the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same word: "Ged." And the two voices were one voice.
Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff, and took hold of his shadow, of the black self that reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one."

Earthsea

I have reread Ursula K. LeGuin's fantasy masterpiece A Wizard of Earthsea. Always a good decision. Especially if you have trouble with your shadow. Predictably, I find nature sorcery riveting.
"Ogion let the rain fall where it would. He found a thick fir-tree and lay down beneath it. Ged crouched among the dripping bushes wet and sullen, and wondered what was the good of having power if you were too wise to use it, and wished he had gone as prentice to that old weatherworker of the Vale, where at least he would have slept dry. He did not speak any of his thoughts aloud. He said not a word. His master smiled, and fell asleep in the rain."

"He stood in the innermost room of the House of the Wise, and it was open to the sky. Then suddenly he was aware of a man clothed in white who watched him through the falling water of the fountain.
As their eyes met, a bird sang aloud in the branches of the tree. In that moment Ged understood the singing of the bird, and the language of the water falling in the basin of the fountain, and the shape of the clouds, and the beginning and end of the wind that stirred the leaves: it seemed to him that he himself was a word spoken by the sunlight."

See

I remember climbing up into the maple tree and sitting there in its arms and feeling held by the green bowers' embrace an expansive love enfolding me hidden, invisible, green fairy of the air I was, a small thing that could climb with skinny legs dangling, an apple and a book. What else the summerhood child of pleasures? My green libraries the sundappled pages that shifted all around me with the whisper of a thousand voices, each a character and each a friend, their names and patterns known to me within the wide world of my myopic inspection
daydream self that stumbled stopped dead at every dewdrop, pebble alive in millions, little worlds in every corner framed by my own fascinated mind.

What I could learn of, eagerly I climbed, remembering not the day I marveled first, saw the leaves on the trees, unlooked-for mystery revealed, two small windows--each one eye--and worlds were opened, trees, books, everything that I could fit within the frame and always and intently press the bridged glass-rim further up my nose, if the windows were only closer I could see more, know more, peer into the very corners of the universe, tease out test answers, life answers, read what's written on the board, read what's written in the wind, stay a little longer before the great show, spend another moment, breath forgotten, lost in delicate intricacy. Be quiet enough and read far enough long enough read the spaces in between the books upon the shelves, the curves between what is now and what is storied, stored. Futures, sometimes, maybes, more windows seeing past to untold worlds. Around the next corner, or the next, inside the next cover, beneath the trunk, the shafted sunlight, if I hunch my shoulders and direct the torrent, hold my head still with both hands, I might yet find the biggest frame.

of things which are small and quiet

Another review, I haven't read anything since the last one, I must confess that I've been renewing the same volume since May, disgusting but true. I just received this in the mail,
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
and as the title promised, it speaks to childhood memories of confusion and wordless reverie, I've only read the first chapter but it's telling me about emptiness and silence and the reasons for them, darkest patches of a child's soul buried underneath years of reflective habit.
Other than that, the writing style is startling, flooded with imgaes of nature, bright, lurid memories. And it is set in India, country of my dreams, maybe all dreams. She sees the biggest thing in the small things. And she understands why I start all my stories with "There was never anything that could be said to describe..." or "No one could tell..." or "Nothing ever happened to change..."

here are excerpts. They are long because they were so full. THIS IS NOT MY WRITING. It is Arundhati Roy's. And if it makes you read her book, then that's good, but if it gives you just a taste of what touched me at the bottom of the well, then that's something too, and you are closer to thinking you understand me.

"Estha had always been a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly when (the year, if not the month or the day) he had stopped talking. Stopped talking altogether, that is. The fact is that there wasn't an "exactly when." It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable quietening. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing left to say. Yet Estha's silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn't an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of estivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through the dry season, except that in Estha's case the dry season looked as though it would last forever.

Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was--into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets--to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye. It usually took strangers awhile to notice him even when they were in the same room with him. It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all.
Estha occupied very little space in the world.
Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it. ...

Rahel drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts towards an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge. ...
But when they made love [Larry] was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in a hat.

He was exasperated because he didn't know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn't know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.

So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully....
What Larry McCaslin saw in Rachel's eyes was not despair at all, but a sort of enforced optimism. And a hollow where Estha's words had been. He couldn't be expected to understand that. That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lovers' bodies. ...
In a purely practical sense it would probably be correct to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem. Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes.... Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago... in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.
And how much."

And I finished the chapter, and then I cried, and then I slept. And I'm still working on how this is true, and why it's been hidden so beautifully.

Even affirmations can be frustrating

My paradigms are not shifting. It is as if someone else is confirming a paradigm that I didn't know how to express. But I was aware of it, without words, and because I couldn't name it it was full of hoarse sorrow. As I am reading the Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram, I am feeling grief for the loss of a larger sense of connection to the community of life. I can feel the nerve endings that were severed when I or my predecessors were cut off from the nonhuman world. My ancestors robbed me of my heritage, this valuable sense, with a vicious and painful separation that is today manifesting everywhere as pollution, degradation, physiological disease and psychological disorder.

I'm beginning even to question keeping houseplants, as it separates a single organism from coexistence and interaction with all others (gee, kind of like us! I don't need ants or bird, wait, do I?). It is cruel to put a fish in a bowl, not because it hurts him, but because it denies and cuts him off from all elements and forms of knowledge, experience of life and life forms, and with this codependence removed, his life is now meaningless, without context, and he is gasping just as surely as if he was taken from the water.

No wonder I am ill. Not like in Madagascar, violently, but this is more a malaise, my head blocked up with a sinus migrain of the spirit. I lost 11 pounds due to dysentery, but I gained 15 back due to anxiety at being again rootless from the material world upon my return to my own culture. Even when I was there, I could feel the way missionaries and colonizers and aid workers had wrenched from the land some meaning, forcibly, with language and science as primary weapons.

I am frustrated by the huge barriers to sensitivity and sensation that exist in our civilized, high-tech culture. And also that people who are in need of life-saving solutions embrace these imperialist, colonialist and violent technologies which will unwittingly sever their ties to any life-source, imprisoning them in the tomb of the individual existence.
I want something so badly, but I can't articulate it.

The Book

The Book: on the taboo against knowing who you are, or The Book: that is changing my life a little right now. I don't usually like books about philosophy, because how can you express something so close to your center self? But in between the words there is something falling, and when he forgets to be a philosopher it approaches poetry. Alan Watts doesn't actually say the important things, but he also doesn't try to. He indicates.
I welcome any comments or thoughts on the passages I found most interesting.
quotes!:
"Is it conceivable, then, that I am basically an eternal existence momentarily and perhaps needlessly terrified by one half of itself because it has identified all of itself with the other half?"

"... as my sensation of "I-ness," of being alive, once came into being without conscious memory or intent, so it will arise again and again, as the "central" Self-the IT- appears as the self/other situation in its myriads of pulsating forms-- always the same and always new, a here in the midst of a there, a now in the midst of then, and a one in the midst of many. And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born."

"In unconsciousness all times are the same brief instant."

"... [those] who honestly believe themselves to be lonely, individual spirits in a desperate and agonizing struggle for life. For all such there must be deep and unpatronizing compassion, even a special kind of reverence and respect, because after all, in them the Self is playing its most far-out and daring game--the game of having lost Itself completely and of being in danger of some total and irremediable disaster."

"It is simultaneously the purest nonsense and the utmost artistry."

Three is a magic number

Or, to quote one of my favorite authors "Three is the number of those who do holy work." Which brings me to my three favorite authors: Clive Barker (quote and image), Neil Gaiman, and China Mieville. Concepts dreamed up by these men have changed my life and more importantly my dreams.

Clive Barker is a fantasy/horror/erotica writer, and also paints some of my favorite work (on the left is tree full of sky). The real reason he is on my list is because of Abarat. Barker took a break from his usual and started a series of intensely personal, vivid oil paintings, which grew into the hundreds, and then became a storyline, and then became a series of the most beautifully illustrated, weirdest, wildest fiction I've had the good fortune to come across, with here and there a glimmer of live, imaginative power, higher purpose and philosophical commentary that makes Disney squirm in their mainstream capitalist pants. And it's about to get even better. The next book is called Absolute Midnight. More information here: http://www.clivebarker.info/yaabaratunpub.html

Neil Gaiman should need no introduction. All of his fiction is enjoyable, and the past year I dove into Sandman, opening floodgates that I did not know existed. I'm still traveling headlong, through dreams, through darkness and all unspeakable, and I have no regrets (except that it's over, but it's never really).

China Mieville is the other side of the moon, an Author, someone to draw down the portals. His writing makes me want to drink coffee and cackle insanely, sit on a roof and burn deep into the night (not that i don't want to do any of these normally, well, everything but the coffee). London, or London as it could be, is alive and brooding, breathing, stinking, fucking, dreaming, behind everything he writes. The only author in a long while to send me searching through my thickest dictionary regularly. Even though there are no illustrations (I allow begrudgingly) there are thousands of composite images evolving organically from the smog and diction. Steampunk, socialism, magic and even stranger perversions of the natural world. Perdido Street Station or the short story the Tain are the best introductions to his work.