Trial and Terror

My country is the world and my religion is to do good.

The days grow and the stars cross over
And my wild bed turns slowly among the stars.

It’s just a ride. But we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok. But it doesn’t matter because: it’s just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings, and money. Just a choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourselves off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one. Here’s what you can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride. Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defence each year, and instead spend it feeding, clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, for ever, in peace.

Chesterton and Tolkien and Lewis were, as I’ve said, not the only writers I read between the ages of six and thirteen, but they were the authors I read over and over again; each of them played a part in building me. Without them, I cannot imagine that I would have become a writer, and certainly not a writer of fantastic fiction. I would not have understood that the best way to show people true things is from a direction that they had not imagined the truth coming, nor that the majesty and the magic of belief and dreams could be a vital part of life and of writing.

Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange. It is only by alienating the desired that language masters it. The frenzy of desire in the medium of words yields the mania of the catalogue. I struggle with the proverbs of hell

I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love for the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness will be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

Psychedelics are not illegal because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out the first story window; psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve phonic structures and culturally laid down novels of behavior and information processing, they open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.

Global warming: Humanity parks the car in a shut garage, leaves it running and invites the rest of the world over for beer pong and a kegger.

When we were only several hundred-thousand years old, we built stone circles, water clocks. Later, someone forged an iron spring. Set clockwork running. Imagined grid-lines on a globe. Cathedrals are like machines to finding the soul; bells of clock towers stitch the sleeper’s dreams together. You see; so we’ve always been on our way to this new place — that is no place, really — but it is real. It’s our nature to represent: we’re the animal that represents, the sole and only maker of maps. And if our weakness has been to confuse the bright and bloody colors of our calendars with the true weather of days, and the parchment’s territory of our maps with the land spread out before us — never mind. We have always been on our way to this new place — that is no place, really — but it is real.