I am a traveller in the realm of the information grids, in the matrix of the magnetically defined. None of the things I touch exists, in the sense that what I touch can be said to be merely imaginary forms, a dream of the machines. I travel through pathways of electrons, arranged specifically, signals coursing through the matter, to change the configuration of their destination. But I know that I must alight back down into the lands of the breathing, to leave the phosphorescent skyworks; I am not born for the realms of scattered lightning. I will return when I have gained some strength in the solidities. But my home is yet in the dust.

The mystery of forgetting is like sand that slips through the fingers, except take away the sand.

Happy Easter!

My Lord is a shelter in the fiercest storms,
safe harbor from the most turbulent seas.
My Lord is guidance in the darkest night,
who leads me down the paths I need to go.
Blind, deaf, and dumb though I may be,
He makes me a champion of life, my life.
Naked and helpless I washed up on shore,
and He took me in as part of His family.
I may have nothing, but if I have His light,
no treasure in the world is worth so much.
Exiled from the world, if I have His love,
I have all the meaning that life can offer.

I have dreamed of Heaven, and I have dreamed of Hell. I have dreamed of open skies and mountains whose peaks are beyond a lifetime’s climb, and darkness so deep that it swallowed the entirety of ground. I have dreamed of love that came from nowhere, and of the incalculable machine that consumes souls as it progresses. Good and evil I have seen in my imagining, and in my imagining I have seen some of the truth behind the knowing of them, what remains of the fruit that Adam and Eve ate in the Garden. And I wondered if there could be grown the opposite, of a Tree of Forgetting of Good and Evil, that would return us to the idylls of before…. But perhaps there are too many things in the world that once seen, cannot be forgotten.

On the dry and dusty road
The nights we spend apart alone
I need to get back home to cool cool rain

– The Who

Max Ernst: The Mysterious Garden

Click on the pic for a larger version.

If you believe, then you must believe this: that whatever evil, it will inevitably play into the purpose of God. This, I think, is the most difficult point to reconcile. This, I think, is the reason for many who simply cannot reconcile it, who fall away from faith entirely. For it is a deep point of faith in the greatness of God, and in His wisdom: that no matter how horrible, how horrific, that He can make it right in the end. There are too many things in the world that test this hypothesis. There are too many things that can shake this heart of belief. The true believer must be able not to turn away from the worst of the evil in the world, and still in his soul believe that God is good. Supremely good. If making us believe that the Devil does not exist is Satan’s greatest trick, surely it is his secondmost to make of the world a playground of horrors. For anyone who feels, it makes faith need to explain itself. And God seems so silent on such things.

Each of these foregoing states has its time, its variety of workings, its trials, temptations, and purifications, which can only be known by experience in the passage through them. The one only and infallible way to go safely through all the difficulties, trials, temptations, dryness, or opposition, of our own evil tempers, is this: It is to expect nothing from ourselves, to trust to nothing in ourselves, but in every thing expect, and depend upon God for relief. Keep fast hold of this thread, and then let your way be what it will, darkness, temptation, or the rebellion of nature, you will be led through all, to an union with God: for nothing hurts us in any state but an expectation of something in it, and from it, which we should only expect from God.

time sometimes slows to ticks that last for an eternity
a whole life lived while waiting for the second hand to move just once
wondering how it is that the years seem so, so much shorter

The simplest patterns are hardest to find, if no one’s seen them.

I have come to believe in that page God has written in Heaven, where all the best poetry is written, where is scrawled the True Physics. In desiring to delve deep into my own field of study, I have at times glanced where touches the sublime with the tangible, and have seen the possibility of the world of ideals. For sometimes one may breach a vein of truth, and may feel the rush of the coursing of pure idea. It is to understand that the mind of God is as far above us as our own thought is to a stone. To see that there is beyond us, farther than we will ever reach, the direction higher into the music of the spheres. And so thankful that such an ambrosia of imagination can be tasted by mortals such as we, who wonder at the light most high, who dream of walking the upper roads.

Few people can see genius in someone who has offended them.
                – Robertson Davies

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.
                – Martin Luther King Jr.

The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us.
                – Paul Valery

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
                – Thomas A. Edison

Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?
                – Abraham Lincoln

I’m singing this note ’cause it fits in well
With the chords I’m playing
I can’t pretend there’s any meaning
Hidden in the things I’m saying

– The Who

Max Ernst: The Equivocal Woman

Click on the pic for a larger version.

do angels regret?
surely, none of them who have turned foul
not the most infinitesimal of wisps
or can it be that never can all light be snuffed?
surely, not any of those in the Presence
for they do the will of love itself
or to turn a city into salt affect the wingèd?

Why believe? Why not believe?

We can none of us go down all the paths that are before us. The most we can do is go down one, go back to the beginning, and down another; but even that is not advised or possible for many things that transpire in our lives. There will always be chances missed, and I think very little that comes our way is not by course of luck. There is only the thinnest veneer of control that we all possess in how and why we go, if we think on it. Thus it must be that if one is truly rational, we must put ourselves in the hands of a higher power if we are to call ourselves wise. If one believes that there is truly an order to the universe — and by what I can tell of how things do work, it seems to me to be so.

[Book. Chapter 4.]

This is the part of the movie where the hand held camera depicts the mad coagulation of chaos in the streets. People trying to run — from what? to what? — unable to get enough footing to stand straight… glass breaking overhead, and at eye level, elsewhere, unable to pinpoint exactly where, because of the great rumble from below throwing low sound in every direction… I expected more screaming, but everyone is just trying in shock to absorb what is suddenly happening to their world at large… the ground shouldn’t feel this unstable, as if it were made all of ions breaking apart all at once… and what do I do, thrown to my knees? My first impulse is to clasp my hands together… and pray. Because this is not something I can do anything about, something this large, except to call on that which is larger. I pray that everything still, and that everyone could be safe.