Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation.
On Curiosity
I’ve been enamored with the writings and films of Alejendro Jodorowsky lately. This also rekindled my interest in Surrealism and Andre Bretón.
The intellectual improvisation of mind, following it’s natural curiosity, has led me to some of my greatest discoveries of music, film and culture. Any time I encounter an artistic form that speaks to me, I listen intently and let myself meander and traverse whatever path the Daemon wants me to take. I am always astonished where I end up.
Years ago Trane led to Miles. Miles led to Bird. Bop led to Sonny Rollins and back to Trane which led to Mingus, Monk, Rouse, Blakey, Clifford Brown, Dolphy, Ornette Coleman and scores of other jazz giants. The same has been true in literature and philosophy, even spirituality which went through paths of Buddhism, Zen, Tao, Gnostic, Alchemical, Western Esoteric, Vedic, and on and on and—
To never limit the possibilities of what might be just around the next curve is infinite in its potential for growth and self-discovery. That curiosity is the greatest gift. The illuminative. Even the most shattering and paradigm shifting. But, that’s the idea, right?
The Holy Mountain
This mindF$#@K of a film was impossible to turn away from. Kind of like the journey it depicts wherein horror (dark night) and ecstasy (unitive state) dance and struggle endlessly.
How to Be a Poet
This from Arthur Rimbaud:
I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, and keeps only their quintessences. This is an unspeakable torture during which he needs all his faith and superhuman strength, and during which he becomes the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed – and the great learned one! – among men. – For he arrives at the unknown! Because he has cultivated his own soul – which was rich to begin with – more than any other man! He reaches the unknown; and even if, crazed, he ends up by losing the understanding of his visions, at least he has seen them! Let him die charging through those unutterable, unnameable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where he has succumbed!
Not many today would sacrifice so much for their art!
Alejandro Jodorowsky is a fascinating human.
It’s to fiction that we regularly and gratefully turn for the truest picture of life.
– Julian Barnes, from The Art of Fiction #165, an interview in the Paris Review.
Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of a book, is sleep in the same room with it. Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to it.
Joan Didion said this and I adore it. Besides, books are sexy.
The new Warehouse 13 season is off to a delightfully literary start.
On Reading Like A Writer
An interview from the Atlantic with Francine Prose on reading like a writer.