Never mistake the preferred

Never mistake the preferred for the necessary.

Lies are confusion

Lies are confusion; truth is chaos.

Such a pity (Dawkins)

Yes. Your president is told by God to invade Iraq. It's a pity, by the way, that God didn't tell him there were no weapons of mass destruction.

Richard Dawkins

Everything is a negotiation

Everything is a negotiation, but not everything is negotiable.

Love is

Love is obsessive, possessive affection.

We are born into this condition (Barker)

We are born into this condition, slapped into this condition of the flesh, and it is a very dominant, dominating, domineering condition. It demands attention from us at the time. We get hungry, we have to pass wind, we need to make love, we get headaches and we bruise easily. There are so many facts of the flesh. So many things that the flesh demands of us, demands of our spirits. And, every now and then we are liberated.

Now, we can seek that liberation artificially. I have never been a great advocate of liberation through drugs, feeling perhaps in my own case as though my head was already a balloon on a thin thread and it would be dangerous to set fire to the thread. But I feel there are clearly other ways. Art is one such way. Sex, actually—which begins in the body but ends up in the spirit—can be another way in which we are outside of ourselves. Sleep, under certain conditions, can liberate us into another condition as well. And in those conditions flesh becomes less the fascist that it is. We're not thinking about hunger, and passing wind and the like, we're into a state in which ideas and images and maybe the spiritual presence of others, dead, alive, journeying, are also possibilities, presences.

Clive Barker, Writers Dreaming

A tree can grow branches

Only a reactionary identifies too closely with gender, race, culture, habit, age. A tree can grow branches in any direction and doesn't confuse itself with the moss on its bark or the transient shadows it casts upon the ground.

New Look

I've reformatted the blog today. I'll continue to tweak it a bit, but this will essentially be the new look for the foreseeable future, I think.