Valus

Stella Adler, the famous acting coach, wanted more from a pupil, who was determined to play the role of Hamlet. She kept telling him, "Bigger! More! Hamlet is not a guy like you." He said, "Oh, you want larger than life?" She said, "Darling, there is nothing larger than life!" 🎭

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“A totally nondenominational prayer: Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that I be forgiven for anything I may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which I may be eligible after the destruction of my body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your elected intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony. Amen.” ― Zelazny, Creatures of Light and Darkness

The world is so polluted, if you think of sacredness and expect a holy influence, immediately you discover yourself under the protection of grace; leaving room for the sacred, she makes herself felt. Whatever strife or estrangement has lately held between the worlds, it seems instantly dissolved, as the veil begins to thin, as spaces begin opening, allowing higher-dimensional communications to pass through, signaling a reconciliation. But the present influence is only an improvement on the utter godlessness, preceding it. One step back, in the right direction, is rewarded, but Zion is not yet beneath our feet. To court real magick takes more than that. To recapture the richer, more ancient spirit of reverence, friendship with the animal kingdoms, welcomed and well-remembered in every fairy realm, enjoying the intimate confidence of gods, and the favor of The LORD, Most High, is almost unattainable, to the clipped imaginations of this age. One knows that something divine has gone missing, and one knows nothing else, so well as this.

"It came from Pelagius... It was the idea that each solitary individual man had the power, from the very start of his concious life, not so much by his will, for that was coerced by other wills, but by his free imagination, by the stories he told himself, to create his future... Well! the Mithras Bull might bellow and bleed till it broke the adamantine chains of every tradition in the world! The important thing was the human imagination that defied it: the human imagination that defied not only the Bull and the Slayer of the Bull, but the Crucified and the slayer of the Crucified, yea! and all the God-bearers and all the God-slayers from the beginning of the world unto this hour! The human imagination must never be robbed of its power to tell itself other stories, and thus to create a different future." ~ John Cowper Powys, PORIUS

He whose own home was an alien world, a foreign, enemy-occupied territory, can feel no more displaced beyond her walls. But if everywhere is home, home is nowhere. A sage settles down over his head: His rest is only a witnessing of restlessness: Who is home, to identify as home?

I was never a people-pleaser, who wanted to be liked, but I resembled one, in that I genuinely empathized and saw others' values and perspectives. Or perhaps I was simply absorbed in myself, in a different way than most were, and willing to trust others with "the wheel". On account of my guileless nature, I believed everything they told me, and weighed their wills as if they were my own, long before I understood what mine should be. Swept up in seemingly wholesome waves of fellow feeling, to which I was more than willing to yield, and naively giving away the benefit of every doubt, I must have expected the average idiot to treat me with civility (its substance, not a threadbare semblance), and to act with circumspect discretion, in all things; to be approximately as honest, ponderous, and fair-dealing as I naturally endeavored (and felt myself inclined) to be. In fact, I overestimated everyone, including myself. But, most of all, I overestimated the affinity I shared with others. They made it plain to me, over time, that I was different and my differences were not welcome. They shattered my innocent projections, for they were never as broadminded I imagined, in my instinctual broadmindedness. But I disappointed myself, as well, in that I was not so discriminating as I supposed. My very goodness, it seemed, made me trusting of the devil, and an accomplice in evils I could not have conceived. So much depended on subterfuge, and due to my (autistic?) authenticity, I took too long to see it. Blame it on Neptune in my 12th, maybe. That so much of life, as it is customarily lived among foolish peoples, concerns appearance, affectation, and deception, was an alien reality to my mind, for the longest time; and one I did not pick up on - or the ramifications of which I was unprepared to fully appreciate - until much later in life. I learned late the difference between vanity and pride: The proud are aggrieved, as I believe, by a feeling of lacking those virtues which they sincerely admire, and wish to possess for their own merit; while the vain, seeing less deeply into the the value of things, are equally aggrieved by a feeling of lacking the mere semblance of anything (virtues and vices) which is fashionable, or celebrated by their peers. When it came to adapting, in social situations, I was practically a ghost. These days, it is no wonder to me, though I could not even see it then: that they presumed my character was simply weak. They must have thought that I, like them, had a will to get my way, where all sorts of material pursuits were concerned. That my share of the world was largely internal was not something they were prepared to recognize, or certainly not respect. Spending more energy in my head, questioning everything, it was only natural, or only by default, that I happened to be easy going or flexible around activities. I genuinely, hardly cared for external recreations. Drugs became the exception to that rule, but only because the experience was so internalized; and could be carried over, along with my contemplations, into any number of activities. While they were doing what they wanted to do, I was thinking about what I wanted to think about. I went through the motions with them or sat in a corner, content to observe - mostly, the contents of my own mind; for which everything was, indifferently, fodder. Maybe I was more of a spirit guide (only incidentally embodied), than I ever realized. Or is that just what it has always meant, to be a philosopher? Being with people would be pleasant enough, - without having to get all busy, and fussy, and loud, over where there is to go, and what there is to do, and eat and spend our money on, - or even talk about, - but too many of them want to control you; rather than chill, and consider the world with you, for a little while called "life". My stress was of another order: Anxiety and angst came from not having answers to the epic questions, from never understanding the place of anything in The Big Picture, or from understanding too much that could never be reconciled and harmoniously related. Action never seemed to be the answer. Lunch -even at a fancy, $30, Japanese, seafood buffet, - never seemed to settle a matter in my mind, for more than a fleeting moment. "Why aren't you happy? We just did thing." Sorry, I was thinking. "Why are you happy? We didn't do thing." Well, I was thinking. "You think too much!" Don't think. Don't ask. Just do. Do. And do as they tell you to do. Day in and day out. In school and after. The show much go on. They want to cast you, see, in an artificial production. It's your big break, Kid. They're gonna drill you in how to be a performative clown, according to some, ill-envisioned, unexamined, hand-me-down script; dogeared as if it had been studiously read, when it hadn't, but with the multicolored pen-scratchings of a dozen or more writers, editors, and revisors, crowding the margins on every page. (Not that any one of them ever cared what came out the other end. Why should they? It was all "content" then, and it's all "content" now. Crap it out! Stand for applause. Those few who really care, who wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole, will call it crap and be considered cruel.) Too many persons are personas; water-soluble masks, concealing warts and pale infirmities of soul. Too many turn into The Wicked Witch of The West, - just as soon as you ask any relevant question; like you'd brandished a sloshing bucket of crystal-clear truth, and threatened to extinguish her tyrannous reign; you radical, erratic, insurrectionary, mad, eccentric, water-bearer, you! Too many are fat, Nerf basketballs, - the kind that toddlers try to stuff into 2ft, blue-plastic nets, - just bouncing and rolling through life, conforming to every obstacle, redirected in any-which-way, until they get stuck under a Buick. Speaking not entirely without experience here: Everybody's a champion, quiz-kid hero, until they get their head wedged underneath a Buick, figuratively speaking. Sometimes that needs to happen. What makes the world a Hell on Earth is only that such incidents do not suffice, to knock some common sense into a guy. He comes out with his head even softer; Nerfier. He goes spoiling for a fight in the middle of traffic on a Thursday afternoon. Bounces off a bumper. His brain is already too scrambled to be phased; same with most of the others. It's the rare ones you need to worry about. And that's you. Well, me, anyway. And maybe you, if you read this far. Anyway... Sometimes you don't find your people. Sometimes you walk alone for long time, only to realize — you were always alone; even for a much longer time before that.

'Love is a rebellious bird that nobody can tame, and it's all in vain to call it if it chooses to refuse.' ~ Georges Bizet