magical miraculous things

the gate may open "Human beings can't live without the illusion of meaning, the apprehension of confluence, the endless debate concerning the fault in the stars or in ourselves. The writer is just the messenger, the moving target. Inside culture, the writer is the talking self. Through history, the writing that lasts is the whisper of conscience. The guild of writers is essentially a medieval guild existing in a continual Dark Age, shaman, monks, witches, nuns, working in isolation, playing with fire.

When the first illuminated manuscripts were created, few people could read. Now that people are bombarded with image and information and the World Wide Web is an open vein, few people can read. Reading with sustained attention, reading for understanding, reading to cut through random meaninglessness - such reading becomes a subversive act. The writer's first affinity is not to a loyalty, a tradition, a morality, a religion, but to life itself, and to its representation in language. Ego enters in, but writing is far too hard and solitary to be sustained by ego. The writer is compelled to write. The writer writes for love. The writer lives in spiritual debt to language, the gold key in the palm of meaning. Awake, asleep, in every moment of being, the writer stands at the gate.
The gate may open.
The gate may not.
Regardless, the writer can see straight through it."
- Jayne Anne Phillips



"Writing is one of the most easy, pain-free, and happy ways to pass the time in all the arts. For example, right now I am sitting in my rose garden and typing on my new computer. Each rose represents a story, so I'm never at a loss for what to write. I just look deep into the heart of the rose and read its story and write it down through typing, which I enjoy anyway. I could be typing "kjfiu joewmv jiw" and would enjoy it as much as typing words that actually make sense. I simply relish the movement of my fingers on the keys. Sometimes, it is true, agony visits the head of a writer. At these moments, I stop writing and relax with a coffee at my favorite restaurant, knowing that words can be changed, rethought, fiddled with, and, of course, ultimately denied. Painters don't have that luxury. If they go to a coffee shop, their paint dries into a hard mass."
- Steve Martin
Writing Is Easy!



why do I write? ". . . . the inner journey of the imagination itself. There is the ecstasy. The rest is simply good. Some money, a little fame. Not to be rolled over like scuttling claws by the sands of time. Et cetera.

I write out of a greed for lives and language. A need to listen to the orchestra of living. It is often said that a writer is more alive than his peers. But I believe he might also be deader than his peers, a sort of narcoleptic who requires constant waking up by his own imaginative work. He is closer to sleep and dream, and his memory is more haunted, thus more precise.

I write to live, and I write to share. The Original Creator's version seems random and fascistic, but there are enough consistencies, if you wait and watch for them, to give remarkable tales. You must wake up terribly to catch them, even though what you produce may be close to dreams.

My life seems precious, even though often sad, and crammed with mystery. My past seems a fine gray, like good old movie rain. I forget almost nothing. A blessing and a curse. I feel superior to nobody because of the gift, and in other talents I rank very low. I do not rate myself highly in thought, for instance. I find life too vivid for thought, really. Thus I go about preaching, of course, that thought is over-rated.

The Furies turned up the volume of our own inner voices, it is told. Such was their punishment. These voices want both definition and deliverance. So I write to both record them and free myself of them.
Once you are into the life of writing, you are never really rid of the inner voices, and they are certainly not all your own. They will exhaust themselves for a time, but then there will be another siege and you have to sit down and do something about it.

I think of those moments in Faulkner, Beckett, and Holy Scripture when the words seem absolutely final, bodiless, disattached, as out of a cloud of huge necessity. My desire is to come even closer to that team - to be that lucky, to be touched by such grace.

I do believe that as you write more, and age, the arrogance and most of the vanity go. Or it is a vanity met with vast gratitude, that you were hit by something as you stood in the way of it, that anybody is listening.

I'm waiting, however, for the future priest to be kicking around shards of our old cabins.
He finds some pages:
My God, it's paper, ancient paper.
He bends over, holding the cigarette pack-sized computer to his shirt pocket so it won't fall out.

Poor devils, the old scribes, jabber jabber, yadda yadda, he says. But wait, this is pretty good."
- Barry Hannah



why do I write? "To satisfy a basic, fundamental need. I think all people have this need. It's why children like to draw pictures of houses, animals, and Mom; it's an affirmation of their presence in the corporeal world.
You come into life, and life gives you everything your senses can bear: broad currents of animal feeling running alongside the particularity of thought. Sunlight, stars, colors, smells, sounds. Tender things, sweet, temperate things, harsh, freezing, hot, salty things. All the different expressions on people's faces and in their voices.
For years, everything just pours into you, and all you can do is gurgle or scream until finally one day you can sit up and hold your crayon and draw your picture and thus shout back, Yes! I hear! I see! I feel! This is what it's like! It's dynamic creation and pure, delighted receptivity happening on the same field, a great call and response."
- Mary Gaitskill



Writer's block
If I dared write
I would carve my words from a rock;
scrape a line with a flint
sparking off malachite,
or smell the sulfur linger from a struck match
as I flare what I feel to the world.
I would give you cadences Cuillin-sharp
or rolling as the ocean;
line breaks dangerous as a
ravine;
assonance subtle as the dying wind.
I would write of tears and dissolve your page.
I would write of drought
and you would scrape the dust from your hands.
The tinder of my parched heart
would spark forest fires.
I would growl a word
and you would hear the thunder.
- Helen Nicholson



Writer's block
the best way to avoid Writer's Block is simply
to ignore the temptation to write in the first place
A state that may be manifested by a dearth of ideas, self-dissatisfaction or an inability to organize.

One step toward conquering writer's block is to acknowledge the fact that it comes from within the self. Performing work-related tasks, such as reading, tidying one's desk, corresponding with other writers or speaking before a local organization, can help the writer during a period of block. Also, buying a new piece of equipment or a reference book may raise spirits.

Causes of writer's block vary. For many writers, block results from fear that their writing isn't any good, and that once it's in print other people will see it and realize it's no good. In other writers, it results from fear of disapproval. Many professional freelancers claim that the best cure for block is when bills come due.
from the Writer's Encyclopedia



it always starts like this


Zoo
a poem written for writer's block
by Colin Ryono

Please don't tap on the glass,
or throw things through the bars.
They don't appreciate your attention. Really.
Feeding time changes regularly.
So don't ask. And they don't do
tricks and they don't even hear you.
So don't ask. Pay no attention
when, like animals in a cage
(dumb animals),
they pace back and forth,
for what seems like hours.
This is perfectly normal.
They could lash out at any moment.
Or worse, they could lose their
train of thought, they could
forget the word they were trying
to think of, or realize that that
line doesn't really work at all.
And this would be a minor tragedy.
Let's move on now to the next cage
where we have a female who thinks she's a novelist.



"To own yourself is to own your thoughts, at least while they are inside your head. And thus we come to the first insight of IP [ Intellectual Property ] as the "true" property. The relationship between a person and the thoughts they create is the most real relationship in the world. Unlike all the other forms of property, especially real estate, my ownership of the creative thoughts in my own head exists without law, without society, without philosophy.

Of course, if I reveal my thoughts to others, they can have them in their heads too. And, unlike physical objects, in some cases they can come up with very similar thoughts of their own independently of me. So while the relationship is intrinsic, we do need to create philosophy and laws to govern just what control of shared thoughts means."
- Brad Templeton
A Radical Theory of Property




"The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible. Profound, bottomless self-doubt: it has no value, what's the point?
In a way, that takes up as much time as anything else."
- Jonathan Safran Foer




"Like it or not, when you're a writer, there's no escaping the writer's life . . . when it comes to the feelings, obsessions, and just plain worries that accompany any writer's efforts, there's no getting out. Regardless of career experience, advancing age, and sizeable amounts of therapy, there's no 'cure' for the writer's life.
As soon as writers commit to the writing of a thing, they embark on a journey through both an external world of crises and triumphs and an internal world of feelings and belief systems."
- Dennis Palumbo




"Art is as important to the human psyche and physical body as air is, as oxygen, as water. And alas, because it's not something we can quantify reliably, we tend to think art is a luxury. Art is not a luxury. The artist is so necessary in our lives. The artist explains to us, or at least asks the questions which must be asked."
- Maya Angelou



William Safire's self-violating Rules for Writers Remember to never split an infinitive.
The passive voice should never be used.
Do not put statements in the negative form.
Verbs have to agree with their subjects.
Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.
A writer must not shift your point of view.
And don't start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)
Don't overuse exclamation marks!!
Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
Always pick on the correct idiom.
The adverb always follows the verb.
Last but not least, avoid clichés like the plague; seek viable alternatives.



artistic gardening
the mudmaid
giant head
the magic lantern slide show
from the lost gardens of Heligan



"Writing comes more easily if you have something to say."
- Sholem Asch
Topics du jour
[writing prompts]



"To have something to say is a question of sleepless nights and worry and endless ratiocination of subject - of endless trying to dig out the essential truth, the essential justice. As a first premise you have to develop a conscience and if on top of that you have talent so much the better. But if you have talent without the conscience, you are just one of many thousands of journalists."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald



The Committee to Upgrade Celestial Signs
meets once a year
to re-evaluate old myths
that spangle heaven:
Taurus, Draco,
Perseus,
Boötes. . .
outdated in their Greek shining.
Quickly renamed,
they are reconfigured into modern shapes
- cluster by cluster -
Guitaris Major, Double Arches,
Empire State Building,
Bottle of Coke. . .
Each fall,
the firmament glitters like a new marquee,
a hit parade of celebrities
to correspond
with the season's upcoming shows:
where Cepheus glittered -
the visage of an actress
shines;
Libra morphs into the body
of a reigning hunk;
the Pleiades burn all night -
divas in a female rock group.
Trained over centuries
to forget the past
entire populations suffer
from cultural
amnesia
catalyzed by constant change -
"This is NOW!"
a favorite bumper sticker shouts,
and
"Welcome to the Interactive Cosmos!"
Constellations rise and fall,
brief as ads
that flash across the blank screen
of heaven.
Computers work around the clock
to thread stars
into relevant patterns
while last year's icons
fade
like the memory
Of someone's face
before cosmetic surgery.
At last
the Committee votes on current choices,
having sifted
through a copious Printout
of Possible Skies:
Hands go up around the table
as they nod and smile -
with the stroke of a finger
the Zodiac is realigned
against the infinite blackness behind the stars.
- Kurt Brown
The Virginia Quarterly Review
Volume 77, Number 1



><((((º&gt "We are so in love with our words and ideas that we forget the direct experience from which they arise. We build concept upon concept. In the end we have abstracted our contact with life into the rote regurgitation of thought-bound ideology.
We have fallen victim to the great curse of human existence of the tendency to misconstrue language (words, thoughts, ideas) for actuality. We are entombed in our brains.
We are thinking our lives, not living them.

Think about the problems all this thought is creating. We pick up a self-help book, a book of spiritual advice, a religious book, thinking it might help with our thought-bound world. We read. We think it quite interesting. We think we will read more. We are not sure where all of this is going, but we think we will read more and find out.
It is not going anywhere.

Thought has nowhere to go but its own isolated, endless fragmented repetition.

Without the obsession of thought we are the recognition and the expression of the energy of consciousness and space in which we and others coexist in such profound contact that there is nothing that definitively divides us.
We search for this relationship of profound openness, without guile or armor, vulnerable, trusting, and at the same time, intimate, intertwined, boundaryless - but this transcendental relationship constantly slips from us as we experience it and then try to institutionalize it.
When our minds are absolutely quiet, when thought is still, this relationship is the natural state of our being. Then thought, the ego-center, enters immediately to catalog, analyze, and capture the beauty of the vision.
We seek the rare butterfly. Upon glimpsing its beauty we stalk it, catch it, drive a pin through its head to mount it, and put it on our wall with its Latin name. We trade the moment of beauty for the endless stultification of a dead symbol, an artifact, a word, a concept.

We can use language to approach that which is beyond language. We can use language to amuse ourselves. We can use language as poetry, as music. But we forget that these words, any words, bring us nowhere in actuality, only somewhere in the mind, in thought. We are in a bubble. We are staring in the pond admiring the reflection of our own thoughts."
- Steven Harrison



"Even if the truth comes out or if, as you say, magical, miraculous things occur, when words come out, they are still nothing but words."
- ajja




Helen, dearest,
I know that you will read this.
I am going and cannot take you with me.
I have an appointment.
If all goes well, we will start anew.
If not, I wish you good luck and beg you to forgive me for the many manias
with which I have tormented you these last wonderful years.
Above all, I want to tell you that I loved you more than everything else in my life.
I hope that we will soon see each other again.
Your Peter.

Secret Fauna
Pere Formiguera / Joan Fontcuberta
illustrations
sketches
threschelonia and winged frogs
aerophants
horned monkeys
sketches
specimens



Essay on Clairvoyance and Traveling in the Spirit Vision
by Sub.Spe - Zelator Adeptus Minor "The best theory of the phenomenon of clairvoyance seems to be founded on the relation between Man as the Microcosm and the Universe as the Macrocosm; regarding the former as a reflection in miniature of the latter, as in a grass field full of dewdrops each drop might present a perfect tiny image of trees and mountains, the sky, clouds, the sun and the stars.

If, then, everything in the Cosmos is somehow reflected or pictured on each man's own sphere of sensation, it follows that if he could but be conscious of the pictures so reflected or imprinted he would at once be possessed of all actual or potential knowledge of everything in the Cosmos, and further assuming that time itself is merely an illusion, and that the reality of things is, as it were, one vast picture along which we travel seeing point after point in succession and producing the idea of lapse of time, then it further follows that the full and complete knowledge of all that is reflected in our sphere of sensation includes all knowledge past, present and future."




A subject for Contemplation
By G.H. Frater N.O.M. "To obtain magical power, one must strengthen the will. Let there be no confusion between will and desire. You cannot will too strongly, so do not attempt to will two things at once, and while willing one thing do not desire others."

Example

"You may at times have passed a person in the street, and as soon as passed may have felt some attraction, and the will to see him again; turning around (you) may have found that he also turned to you.
The will, although untrained, may have also done this. But if you, untrained, walk out again, and decide to make the experiment of Willing that he who passes you shall turn around, and try it, you will fail. Because the desire of gratifying your curiosity has weakened the force of your will."
- Francis King
Astral Projection, Ritual Magic, and Alchemy



scape : a scene; a view. Often used in combination: seascape; mindscape; landscape;
letterscapes


><((((º>



Eight and a half independent intelligences and their concomitant real-world applications: 1. Linguistic Intelligence (that of poets, journalists, advertising copywriters, and lawyers)

2. Musical Intelligence (that of composers, conductors, and instrumentalists, as well as acousticians and audio engineers)

3. Logical-Mathematical Intelligence (that of mathematicians and computer scientists)

4. Spatial Intelligence (that of architects, geographers, surgeons, and navigators)

5. Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence (that of dancers and rock climbers, athletes and jugglers)

6. Interpersonal Intelligence (that of therapists, parents, and teachers)

7. Intrapersonal Intelligence (that of people with keen introspective skills; this intelligence may act as a 'central intelligence agency', enabling individuals to know their own abilities and perceive how best to use them)

8. Naturalist Intelligence (that of biologists, ecologists, and taxonomists)

8 ½. Existential Intelligence (concern with cosmological and ultimate questions of life and death)
- Howard Gardner
Intelligence Reframed




"Man's higher intelligence may come in from the stars, winding as a filmy snake inwards, circling through the Milky Way, or Dragon's Path, entering Earth from the direction of the Pole Star, as some of our ancestors imagined. It may come from a series of age-long visits from other and more developed planets, in flaming chariots, wheels, groups of spacemen called angels. It may be called up by the higher or inner sun radiating from a sphere 'behind' the physical. It may be from any of these things, or it may not.
From God's breath man became a living soul, in the old story. God's breath might come in many forms, with the Mercury-snake not the least worthy concept."
-Ross Nichols
The Book of Druidry



your thoughts "We presume that our thoughts are ours because no one has ever challenged the idea. Modern technology can scan the brain and watch it working, but it can't scan thoughts. You can stimulate the brain and ask the patient what they are feeling, or what reaction that stimulation caused, but you can't know exactly what a mind is thinking. Nor can you be certain that the electrical impulses you are observing are a result of that person' s particular consciousness or some incoming thought from elsewhere.

I know this idea sounds bizarre and most neurologists would say it's crazy. I'm not saying the neurologists are wrong. It's just that they are looking at consciousness and the brain in an external, logical way rather than from a multidimensional view of mind and consciousness beyond the 3-D rotation, where thoughts flow back and forth instantly and automatically.

Now, this question would need 50 pages to really explain it properly, but here is the gist of it.

There is no space in consciousness, no distance. There are levels of perception layered by oscillation like strata of a cake, but it's all the same cake. Every bit of the global mind is technically able to be aware of every other bit, and how much you are aware of is limited by individual development. But it's all there. The consciousness we are normally aware of, the thing we call our "mind", is trained by, and a product of, its social situation — its location in the 3-D state. So ideas coming in from others don't seem strange because they are coming in from minds that are likewise programmed. So it's hard for an individual to realize that there are thoughts coming into their mind that are not their own.

If an incoming thought is totally out in left field, like it expresses a totally unknown idea or technology, then you might be able to say that it's not your own thought, for you would know that you didn't know those facts or that you weren't familiar with those ideas. But ideas that flood in are from ordinary people with the same ideas and motivations as yourself. So it's very hard sometimes to figure out what your ideas and impulses are, and what comes from other individuals or even from the collective mind of humankind.

It is natural to presume that the thoughts that come into your mind are automatically your thoughts. However, I believe we're all interconnected and that a fairly substantial percentage of your ideas - especially those that relate to people, places, and social situations outside your immediate life, or ideas of an inspirational nature - come into your mind from somewhere else.

Rupert Sheldrake talks a lot about morphic resonance. He maintains that we are all interconnected, so that when one person learns a task, it automatically becomes easier for other people to learn the same task. Evidence of this occurred after Roger Bannister managed to run a four-minute mile. For thousands of years, people tried to accomplish this feat, but as soon as Roger Bannister did it, a barrier was torn down and a dozen did exactly the same as Bannister shortly thereafter. Sheldrake says, for example, that through morphic resonance, people doing the crossword puzzle in the evening find it easier to do than the people who did it in the morning when the paper first came out, because there had already been an impact on that particular morphic field — the answers had been deduced by others.

What I've said in my books is, because one can project thoughts into people's minds and because one can move one's subtle body into the force field or physical body of another person, we cannot categorically say that all the thoughts we have are ours. In the extreme case of mass hysteria or collective hallucinations, for example, you can see how ideas jump so rapidly that instantaneously a group of people can act completely irrationally. Fear can also jump from one person to the next. If the person next to you is scared, it makes you feel uncomfortable and insecure. You can test this for yourself by getting on any airline flight that has a lot of first-time flyers, or vacationers who are not used to flying often. The fear you feel as you walk through the plane is intense, and it jumps back and forth between the passengers, affecting all of them. Yet in the coach section, it's more intense than, say, in first class, where there's usually a sense of tranquility. This is because there are fewer seats and they're spaced farther apart. The ease you feel in first class has nothing to do with the fact that they're going to serve you caviar and champagne once the aircraft takes off - it's all to do with the fact that there is less psychic pollution in first class."
- Stuart Wilde