Dry Reference

Relearn astonishment.

What I, in common with his other enthusiastic readers, took from his work was a conviction and a technique. The conviction was that the everyday world might be — as to adolescents it certainly is — full of boredom and triviality, but the wider world of nature, art, and learning is full of inexhaustible interest. But it’s easy to lose sight of the latter, and let ourselves be trapped in the former. The technique, the trick for lifting oneself from the one world to the other, was simple enough: intense concentration followed by relaxation will lead to elation.

The thing is, it does work.

If one is going to engage with the primordial darkness one must expect a certain amount of social awkwardness.

I hear new news every day, and those ordinary rumours of war, plagues, fires, inundations, thefts, murders, massacres, meteors, comets, spectrums, prodigies, apparitions, of towns taken, cities besieged in France, Germany, Turkey, Persia, Poland, &c., daily musters and preparations, and such like, which these tempestuous times afford, battles fought, so many men slain, monomachies, shipwrecks, piracies and sea-fights; peace, leagues, stratagems, and fresh alarms. A vast confusion of vows, wishes, actions, edicts, petitions, lawsuits, pleas, laws, proclamations, complaints, grievances are daily brought to our ears. New books every day, pamphlets, corantoes, stories, whole catalogues of volumes of all sorts, new paradoxes, opinions, schisms, heresies, controversies in philosophy, religion, &c. Now come tidings of weddings, maskings, mummeries, entertainments, jubilees, embassies, tilts and tournaments, trophies, triumphs, revels, sports, plays: then again, as in a new shifted scene, treasons, cheating tricks, robberies, enormous villainies in all kinds, funerals, burials, deaths of princes, new discoveries, expeditions, now comical, then tragical matters.

By the help of bhang ascetics pass days without food or drink. The supporting power of bhang has brought many a Hindu family safe through the miseries of famine. To forbid or even seriously to restrict the use of so holy and gracious a herb as the hemp would cause widespread suffering and annoyance and to the large bands of worshipped ascetics deep-seated anger. It would rob the people of a solace in discomfort, of a cure in sickness, of a guardian whose gracious protection saves them from the attacks of evil influences, and whose mighty power makes the devotee of the Victorious, overcoming the demons of hunger and thirst, of panic, fear, of the glamour of Maya or matter, and of madness, able to rest to brood on the Eternal, till the Eternal, possessing his body and soul, frees him from the haunting self and tee shares to the full. Like his Hindu brother Masulman fakir reveres bhang as the lengthener of life, the freer of the bonds of self. Bhang brings union with the Divine Spirit. ‘We drank bhang and the mystery I am He grew plain. So grand a result, so tiny a sin.’

We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

Panic is the sudden realization that everything around you is alive.

So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You’d better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe.

What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.

Eroticism is first and foremost a thirst for otherness. And the supernatural is the supreme otherness. This is perhaps the most noble aim of poetry, to attach ourselves to the world around us, to turn desire into love, to embrace, finally what always evades us, what is beyond, but what is always there – the unspoken, the spirit, the soul.

Nature is a temple where living pillars
At times allow confused words to come forth:
There man passes through forests of symbols
Which observe him with familiar eyes.

Like long echoes which in a distance are mingled
In a dark and profound unison
Vast as night is and light,
Perfumes, colors and sounds answer one another.

There are perfumes as cool as the flesh of children,
Sweet as oboes, green as parries
-And others, corrupt, rich and triumphant,
Having the expansion of infinite things,
Like amber, musk, myrrh and incense,
Which sing of the transports of the mind and the senses.