Tag: today

We all have forests on our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each one of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.

Only in silence the word, only in dark the light, only in dying life: bright the hawk’s flight on the empty sky.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.

We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and
sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather
stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the
treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the
terrible boredom of pain.

As for my writing voice in general, well, you get old and your language gets like your shoes or your kitchen gear—you don’t need fancy stuff any more. You’ve learned how to just say it.

Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingertips be your maps
And the ways you go be the lines of your palms.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.

To be oneself is a rare thing, and a great one.

For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.