You might call this innocence. I had a sense of another world that had not been spoken of to me.
I do not think that my spiritual apprehensions are as dogmatically cultural as those of many people who have been brought up strictly in a particular tradition.
I'm not an expert here. I'm talking about an experience I had rather than something I intellectually worked out. From what I can gather, the original mystery religions are still, largely, as the name suggests, mysterious. But they are associated with intoxication, fertility and resurrection.
I have a sense of them being Easter religions, for some reason. Christianity, of course, is a mystery religion, too, and I believe that Arthur Machen was one of those especially interested in the link between the pagan mysteries and the Christian ones. So, my experience was also a Machenesque experience.
I went for a walk in the rain. Recently, whenever it rains, I feel like I want to go for a walk.
I'm constantly struggling with the futility and even sinfulness, from an antinatalist point of view, of creativity. And that struggle itself seems part of the creativity, though I sometimes suspect that it's nothing but a burden and an obstacle.
In terms of what is expressed, antinatalism is a strong presence, not always explicit, in what I write.
It would be hard to say that exactly, but antinatalism is a reality in my life, not just an interesting idea. I can feel it in the chilled and weary marrow of my bones.
Western progress (from one damned thing to another) seems to be essentially the MO of nowhere fast. But, on the other hand, the don't-set-foot-outside-your-own-village/cave ideal or injunction that you find in Buddhism and even in the Daoism of which I'm fonder, seems . . . defeatist. And more than that, it is in contradiction to what nature actually does. Somewhere, somehow, I feel as if these two opposing principles have to be reconciled.
[william] Burroughs, incidentally, took up the slogan that we are "Here to go", which contradicts the tendency in Eastern mysticism to advocate staying where you are because there's nowhere to go anyway. I feel conflicted on this one.
I really think [William] Burroughs was onto something here, when he said, "Dreams are a biologic necessity and your lifeline into space."
Anyway, to cut off one's biological dreams seems to me the most fundamental form of psychic castration that you could imagine.
This is part of the fundamental character of Buddhism that I find problematic - that it is not interested in anything. Hence the 'Fascination' in the title of the essay, the fascination of art and creativity, stands in opposition to what is called 'Liberation'.
The research reading I did for Fascination and Liberation included some Jung, and I noticed that he had a similar impression of Buddhism to myself, that, if it weren't for certain qualifying clauses, the philosophy would be downright suicidal.
[My muse] likes to inhabit tea leaves, sunlight filtered through bamboo, melancholy clouds over the Devon coastline, a weedy railroad crossing in the Southern States, bubblegum pop from the sixties, torch songs from the forties, undersea caves where B-movie octopi grapple with men in loincloths, sacred groves of pink anime dryads, Victorian fairy paintings executed by gentlemen in lunatic asylums and so on.
My muse can take the form of a landscape, an era, a style of writing, a piece of music, and, perhaps that which I find strangest of all for a muse, a human female. Of course, she's also adept at taking the form of toothless old Japanese men or young English lads with tattoos.
She [me muse] feels most at home in autumn, nonetheless, she is glad of the other seasons and loves them all. Without the others she would be unable to feel most at home in autumn, besides which, she almost feels most at home in all of them.
[My muse] feels nostalgic for Japan, and, perhaps strangely, for the pioneer days of America.
I do have a muse. I am not sure how to describe her. She can be very elusive. She was born in England but has Mediterranean ancestry.
I feel that Nagai Kafu was a writer who cold stitch together apparently meaningless moments like these into a lyrical whole, and has enhanced my ability to do the same with my own life.
I never went to church as a child. I did not .
I'm not claiming anything like sainthood - merely a native perception.
It's interesting, the sense of pastoral utopia that exists in so much fantasy - in [Edward ] Dunsany, [John R.R.] Tolkien and so on.
I associate my childhood with two things, mainly: the North Devon countryside and a sense of connection to another world.
I also remember a line from a song by Smog [Bill Callahan], which seems to describe the experience of a town-dweller moving to the country: "I was raised in a pit of snakes/Blink your eyes - I was raised on cake."
