Wisdom is nothing more than the marriage of intelligence and compassion. And, as with all good unions, it takes much experience and time to reach its widest potential. Have you introduced your intellect to your compassion yet? Be careful; lately, intellect has taken to eating in front of the TV and compassion has taken in too many cats.
I've always been creative verbally, had a flair, my teachers said - wrote great expository essays in elementary school, scribbled little poems, embraced all writing assignments. And all along I read voraciously - first in Russian and then, after we left the USSR, in English, and even Spanish.
I was forgetting that an artist also just stares at a piece of paper or canvas all day. It somehow never occurred to me to connect these two diverse creative modes.
Even for the people who are color-blind to any degree, I believe their experience would also be affected [ in Lords of Rainbow ] if everyone else too only perceived the world in colorless monochrome.
Our world is so bursting-full of natural wonder that we are all experiencing a sensory overload. We are no longer perceiving all of Ú the details, just the ones that immediately interest us.
Seems to me that there is no better way to experience the depth of loss than after the fact. No more powerful instrument of imbuing value in an object than parting with it.
I must admit that I do have a particular soft spot for the character of the chameleon-trickster goddess Ris in Dreams of the Compass Rose. Ris has gone through the whole spectrum of personal change and has had the longest road of all. And in the end she chooses to come back to the world, to guide, and to help, and to open the eyes of those who are suffering. In that is her true strength and humorous wisdom. I really do like her a whole lot.
The satisfaction of short fiction does not come close to the rich pleasure I get as a writer in the long deep immersion in the same long work and its growing complexity. I suppose you might say I love to wallow in my characters and imaginary worlds. I love to play with the whole necklace, not just one glittering stone.
I am a novelist at heart.
However I will never forget what Marion [Zimmer Bradley] did for me by accepting that first story from a stupid enthusiastic kid.
At some point, sitting in the school library, during reading period, I looked up from my leopard print hardcover composition notebook where I was scribbling a derivative [John Ronald Reuel ] Tolkien epic full of purple prose in tiny handwriting and thought to myself, "Damn! I am a writer! How did that happen?".
I started to write. And I wrote and wrote all through high school.
I technically live in the desert - Los Angeles being an artificial oasis - but my interest stems even farther to my own ethnic roots and to my love of antiquity, of the Old World and of the east.
We don't need fantasy to mess with our minds to the point of rendering us insane - real life horrors do that already.
Thus, true long-term change is brought about not by destructive passion of the moment but by well-reasoned constructive action. Violent shock of Armageddon that leaves nothing in its wake but a blank slate is not a solution, only a postponement of progress.
I also find the desert a wonderful metaphor for desolation and yet the exact counterpart of the ocean with its hidden depths. Both are vast, harsh, implacable, homogenous to the untrained eye, and beautiful. Bothallow the wind to roam on the surface. And both serve as wonderful vehicles for human survival stories.
Fantasy is not the literature of subversion of the status quo but of 'awakening to' the status quo.
Fantasy plunders the well of our deepest selves for existent truth instead of creating new truths out of the illusory fabric of recent events or the flow of society.
I see no profound progress taking place when there is no hope, no inspiration, only drastic overthrow and rebellion. Before having a revolution of thought there must be real ideals to aspire to, and they are only to be found within.
Some writers whom I respect very much, like China Miéville and some others of the New Weird, consider the true role of fantasy to be not Tolkienesque consolation but subversion - a kind of rebe Ûllion from complacency. Yes, I can see what is meant here. And I also see the need to change, to fix, to drastically improve the human lot.
A made-up proverb from Dreams of the Compass Rose says, "In the desert, the only god is a well." I love exploring the intensity of such juxtaposition, the dangerous edge.
I was nurtured on Greek Mythology and the classical epics. I lived and breathed Homer. Other mythologies - the Russian, the Norse, the Persian, the Indian, Egyptian, etc. - all came later. First and foremost were the Greeks, and they were all living in my head as though I were Zeus and they were a clamoring Chorus of Athenas.
It is right here, all of it, here for the taking, right before our eyes - happiness, fulfillment, hope, peace, justice. And most of all, there is truth, ordinary and simple, just sitting there to be plucked, if only we get our lazy rear ends off the pillow of complacency. But first, we need to open our eyes to this banal fact. And for that we need a periodic bit of shakeup in the form of an infusion of wonder - fantastic literature.
