I feel as though I should state that I am one of those people, who do corruption to it. We all are, to different degrees.
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Do not believe those who would tell you the Church is backward, or “against science,” by which they mean against the use of reason. It isn’t true. The Church is corrupt, or rather is peopled by those who, through sins venial and mortal, do corruption to it. But even corruption cannot destroy the Church. It is a mystical body, not an institution. And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.
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Of course, to belong to the world one doesn’t need to be aware of it as such. I belong to the world whenever I follow blindly my own will.
Augustine of Hippo would describe this condition as belonging to the City of Man, rather than the City of God.
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In other words, there is a thing outside of time that is responsible for the existence of time, along with everything that persists in time. That thing is what one might call God.
The world wants no part of this.
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Here is one way of understanding what is meant by ‘the world’: any instance of human society, or civilization, that operates under the premise that visible reality is contingent upon nothing, for its existence, but past manifestations of its very self.
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Remember: that humankind is special, despite the fact that it is also part of creation, and not distinct from creation, is one of the first notions the world would like you to be rid of.
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To hate the world, in a religious sense, is not to hate creation, but to hate the values by which the world measures or regards creation. The world, of course, would not use the word ‘creation,’ because that would imply a creator, in whom it does not believe, or about whom it wishes to forget.
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An artist is concerned with beauty, above all things. But not beauty as in appearance alone, although appearance can take part in beauty, and is not unimportant. The highest beauty can be found when a thing in existence, of its own volition, conforms itself to truth, which is not to say conducts itself as the world expects it to.
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But that’s different than having a character who needs to find, for example, a bomb before the timer goes off. My characters tend to just be walking down the street, looking at something, or at nothing in particular.
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Of course, the way I structure a sentence could itself be the plot. You don’t know what’s going to happen until you reach the end.
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They lack drama, is what I’m saying. Or the drama of which they seem to consist comes not from any suspense that is inherent to the action of their plots (they do not have plots, I don’t think), but from an impression that I create in the reader not unlike curiosity, and whose origin can be traced to the way I structure a sentence.
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The reason for this, I think, is that I often write about the ordinary, or mundane, even when working in the genre of fiction, so that my stories have the semblance of real life.
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If I write a story about a man who happens to be a writer, though the story has little to do with the fact that he is a writer, though of course it must have something to do with that fact, must be shaped by it in some way (or else why include the detail?), readers often assume the story is autobiographical, even factual, as opposed to invented, or imagined.
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Lily Brisoce came to me in a dream again, and spoke to me, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying, for we were standing near the ocean on a windy day, she was yelling, as if in frustration, I could feel on my cheek the surf as the waves crashed and sprayed.
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The mad are no closer to God than are the sane. For God wants heaven for all of us, and thus is available to all of us, by way of our very being.
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I killed a man in a duel, and myself was wounded so badly that I thought I too was then going to die, though while I was on the ground where I’d fallen, beside the pistol that I’d dropped when the slug that had been discharged from the other man’s weapon had slammed into my chest, the doctor who’d been summoned, by one of our party, to this clearing in the forest, that he might witness the encounter and aid one of us or both of us, once our purpose had been accomplished, said, as he knelt above me with an instrument he’d taken from his bag, and that he’d already used on my rival, though to no avail, “He might yet live, the round has missed his heart.”
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A poet who sits in a bar, on a barstool, during the best hours of the afternoon, is not necessarily a worse poet than the one who wanders through a field, or through a forest, smiling and singing to herself, though the opposite is also true.
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I often imagine that Andy Warhol is standing behind the desk where I draw and write, and that he nods now and then, when he sees how my work is progressing, which gives me confidence in what I am doing, although his nodding is, of course, only my estimation, and whether such an estimation would be accurate isn’t clear, though I believe it would be, for I also sometimes imagine that he doesn’t nod, but rather shakes his head, or continues to look on, over my shoulder, while making a dissatisfied noise at the sight of my work, so that I must start again whatever I am doing, and try to fix it.
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My first book was a book of poems, and it is my favorite, among the books that I have written, although in it are a couple poems that I now don’t think are very good, and that I wouldn’t have included were the book to be published today, though I cannot bring myself to say that I wish I’d never written them, for that seems harsh, and puts me at odds with my younger self, who might’ve needed to write the not good poems in order to write the better poems, assuming that the better poems came afterward, which surely some of them did, though probably not all.
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I want to write a book called Essays on Art, in which each of the essays included in the book takes for its subject a different genre, and is titled by the name of that genre, so that the table of contents would look something like this: Film, Sculpture, Music, Painting, Photography, Dance, Literature, Acting, and Architecture, although everything I would say in these essays, despite their definitive titles, would be limited to what I could articulate.