'Then when he brought the lying untrue word into his mind, Khvarenah was seen to depart from him in the shape of a bird.' --Yasht 19

In every deep relationship there comes a point when suddenly i seem to hear the familiar songs on a warped record--as if my acuity were suddenly increased past a certain threshold, beyond the manufacturers' standards of flatness, till any seems far too imperfect to tolerate--and why is this? Because i had been able, at last, to imagine what their personality would be like without the self-destructiveness (an imagining, of course, i can never perform on myself). And from that moment, there seems to be a cruel complicity between the unavoidable deformations of their childhood, and their conscious attempts to maintain the intactness of an embattled, flawed self. The mistake is mine, in thinking of creative beings as if they were merely artist's material. If i do not understand form genesis in my own creative process, why do i tend to extrapolate someone else's?

"People don't want to be healed. They want a nice juicy wound that will show well when they put neon lights around it." --The Journal of Albion Moonlight

The way we want to base our cultural renewal on places (nightclubs, healthfood stores, radio stations)--it's drawing magic circles on the ground for protection against nonsymbolic dangers--but my every experience proves to me that we are not yet such persons as know what to do with a place--we are not yet persons. Those winged reptiles who came before the archaeopteryx, did they spend their whole lives jumping up and falling down again, refusing any longer to go by feet? And how did they ever evolve into birds at that rate? Perhaps only the ones who were ashamed of their wings did.
  --for wings, substitute: personhood.

"...in 1949, the year Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, the United States Department of War suddenly became the Department of Defense." --Richard Lederer