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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Excerpts From Seuphor And Natalie And The Word Accomplished
Above all: If you feel the need to create you must put it before all the rest. Not abandon the rest, this would be a serious mistake. But make all the rest serve the essential.
March 1983Stealing Souls
Thoughts On Photography
I never took quite the same kind of photograph again. From that moment on I regarded the taking of a photograph as a personal act, as personal as the writing of a poem — deep and perilous, intellectual and beautiful.
March 1983The Over-Soul
We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are the shining parts, is the soul.
February 1983Cholestiatoma
Cholestiatoma is a loving beast; as with other cancers, he comes like a string around the finger, a chain around the throat, to insure that we do not idly forget why we are here. Cholestiatoma (Chole when masculine, Choleste when feminine) lives in my skull between the meninges and the right orbit.
February 1983The Choice Of Emptiness
I am more and more convinced that only emptiness is creative. On all levels this is true. To be full of tradition is to have no room for the new. To be full of responsibility is to have no room for play. To be full of activity is to have no room for reflection. To be full of self is to have no room to receive another.
January 1983Pocket Physics And The Metaphysics Of Pocket Physics
If we wish to help humanity, we must first revise our assumptions about others with the understanding that ALL functional agreements are pleasurable. Having done that, the best any of us can do is communicate — whatever the form in which we do so — the information that the contracted entity is free to expand, and that the energy entity is free to cease being energy if it so desires. Merely making others more energetic, or organizing the submissively stupid, is not a solution to the human condition.
December 1982The Main Thing
If you have opened yourself up to more of the unknown than you have developed the trust and resources to handle, you can upset the balance and this is how people blow it. Either way you look at it, trusting in the future doesn’t mean ignoring it.
December 1982Legally Piggly
The main objective of the Wall Street lawyers was for the corporations to get out from under the tax control of the American government. In 1933 the American people had saved the corporations by subsidizing them; then, twenty years later, the Wall Street lawyers moved them out of America, getting the American people to pay for the move.
December 1982Sparrow In New York
“We’re asking people not to go to work today,” one of us said. “We’re asking people to protest nuclear weapons. Sit down with us.”
November 1982Making The Muse Real
Poetry And Spirituality
How can we continue to have poetry without a sense of spirit? Here we live in a time of the breakdown of traditional values and the questioning of traditional religions, yet where are the poets writing of the ecstatic and seeking new visions, or reanimating, from new perspectives, old ones?
November 1982Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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