From The Ghost Wars- on the concept of the Torah as ancient science fiction. “Take the story of the fall of the tower of Babel. Let’s say this represents not an act of God, nor a metaphor for this planet’s diverse linguistic heritage; but a cat...
[…] once in the quagmire each further action only serves to plunge me deeper. And at least as corrosive is the awareness that I am dealing with . That it is who are dragging me down. There is something deeply shameful about this. In such situations...
Poetry is a will to put things right, an imaginary solution, a way of avoiding a catastrophe that already happened. Poetry is an escape, perhaps intelligent, perhaps idiotic, from a senile situation. It is a dialectical movement, it keeps tearing ope...
When it came to love you had to know when to fight, and you had to know when to let go. I was letting go. I never wanted to look at him and hate him; but if I kept myself in this situation I would. I would hate him for never giving me what I wanted. ...
Isabelle - "She laughed out loud, not able to recognize her own voice. She found her situation suddenly hilarious. She laughed and laughed at the door. Just a simple, silly, stupid door had her trapped. And now the ones that had been closed so long w...
It is too sad . I must speak to him - The do you really ? - Sure . How can you expect things to get better , if we do not speak? - Earlier , you talked to Mr. Omochi . Do you feel that things have thus been arranged? - What is certain is that if we d...
Political conflicts are merely surface manifestations. If conflicts arise you may be sure that certain powers intend to keep this conflict under operation since they hope to profit from the situation. To concern yourself with surface political confli...
One example of an uniquely Sethian approach towards initiation is for the initiate to regard his or her own life with the same urgency and need experienced as in a war zone in which every move and action must be weighed yet determined swiftly, as nec...
We waste so much energy trying to cover up who we are when beneath every attitude is the want to be loved, and beneath every anger is a wound to be healed and beneath every sadness is the fear that there will not be enough time. When we hesitate in b...
A few years ago, when I was hitchhiking through Laramie, Wyoming, I met an old and infertile man named John. I told him, “I think I’d have made a good son, John. But I’d have made an even better Johnson.” He nodded as he took a long drag from...
The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are an...
To be sure I was!' Humpty Dumpty said gaily, as she turned it round for him. 'I thought it looked a little queer. As I was saying, that SEEMS to be done right--though I haven't time to look it over thoroughly just now--and that shows that there are t...
I love bookshelves, and stacks of books, spines, typography, and the feel of pages between my fingertips. I love bookmarks, and old bindings, and stars in margins next to beautiful passages. I love exuberant underlinings that recall to me a swoon of ...
We ought not to READ the scriptures, but listen to them, for our Beloved is present and speaks to us through them. (vs. it being like a love letter sent to us from afar).
God had listened to my little-girl prayers back then and had orchestrated the events of my life, even the painful ones, to produce a present reality beyond my greatest hopes. How great were His ways compared to ours!
Women of color have no call to trust white women until white women take a gander at the world around them, investigate, learn and annihilate ignorance founded in being white in a society where the perspective and voice presented to the general public...
I like to compare my mental stress capacity to a dinner plate. Most people have moderate amounts of stress in their life, like a nice balanced meal. The food represents different stresses that occur in our lives, past and present.
The whole concept of some stranger making his way down our chimney - not that we had one - suggested burglary more readily than generosity. Any Santa who tried it would have gotten a bullet in his holly, jolly keister.
The historical fact is that cinema was constituted as such by becoming narrative, by presenting a story, and by rejecting its other possible directions. The approximation which follows is that, from that point, the sequences of images and even each i...
Past memories strobed before him, flashes of joy blackened by the present. Reality teased, then beckoned, home likewise. Confusion dimmed, the answer clear. This could end. Would end. In one of two ways. Still he refused, not ready for either.
Attempts at description are stupid. Who can all at once describe a human being? Even when he is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of his appearance which must be completed by innumerable impressions under differing circumstances.