'Shall all wights in the world
   Wander from home--'
--Voluspa (Hollander tr)

Sometimes it seems to me that the world is divided into those who makes their lives a story and those who don't. That is, whether you believe in order or randomness as the fundamental reality. The habit of explaining precedes particular explanations. Or maybe it's: accepting somebody else's story vs. making up your own. But--'everyone reads their own meaning into the old tales anyway'. Well, then: thinking types come up with explanations. Sensation types orient by habits. Feeling types set up families. Intuitive types tell stories. Of course, even if i soften this point of view with all of Jung's concessions, there still remains defining Story. Certainly metaphors are used for different purposes. (Thus it's not so much that everyone lies, as that we are confusing several ways of using metaphors, and all call ours Telling the Truth.) Just consider the stories people read in the same time and place (i thought of this, waiting to check out). I don't consider 90% (99%) of this big library Literature. (Even, bad Literature...)
   Those who know they're telling themselves a story and the rest. (Then a poet making poetry is temporarily normal?)
   (Of course i have heard fundamentalists say that everyone worships some god. Clearly it is possible to turn your own metaphors into a classification system, if one is so inclined.)
   But i hope my journals are, at least in part, my trying to deconstruct the stories i have told myself--.

'...I failed to realize that everything is mysterious, that we live only in mystery, that if chance existed, chance would be yet more mysterious than Providence.' --J K Huysmans, 1903 preface to A Rebours, 1884

"Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked." --Philip K Dick, Valis (1981)

"Ectothermy is a kind of Zen state." --Robert T Bakker, in 12/83 OMNI