Quentin S. Crisp Quotes
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I did not understand the differences between Catholic and Protestant until I was an adult.
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I feel that Nagai Kafu was a writer who cold stitch together apparently meaningless moments like these into a lyrical whole, and has enhanced my ability to do the same with my own life.
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I think the seventies caught the last red rays of the dying sun of this innocence, but were already a little cold and drab.
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The quality of that 'who I am', is what I hope comes out in the writing.
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Non-pantheist models for god seem almost completely untenable to me, though not without interest.
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Nonetheless, I'm not sure this entirely accounts for my Buddhist voice, which tells me forever to give up writing, to give up on relationships, simply to give up. Whatever it is, it doesn't seem to me to be the voice of innocence.
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You focus on the here and now in order to escape existence forever and vanish into Nirvana. There is another religious impulse that is the opposite of this. It uses a world elsewhere in order to affirm life and give a reason to "go forth and multiply".
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I'm more a dog person than a cat person.
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I have a sense of them being Easter religions, for some reason. Christianity, of course, is a mystery religion, too, and I believe that Arthur Machen was one of those especially interested in the link between the pagan mysteries and the Christian ones. So, my experience was also a Machenesque experience.
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I think I'm probably too close to the seventies to be able to analyse them (it?) effectively.
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I'm constantly struggling with the futility and even sinfulness, from an antinatalist point of view, of creativity. And that struggle itself seems part of the creativity, though I sometimes suspect that it's nothing but a burden and an obstacle.
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I really think [William] Burroughs was onto something here, when he said, "Dreams are a biologic necessity and your lifeline into space."
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I also remember a line from a song by Smog [Bill Callahan], which seems to describe the experience of a town-dweller moving to the country: "I was raised in a pit of snakes/Blink your eyes - I was raised on cake."
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I suppose I could say that to be interested in innocence already suggests a remove from innocence, perhaps a longing for something that is lost.
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[My muse] feels nostalgic for Japan, and, perhaps strangely, for the pioneer days of America.
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I mean, in 1979 I was seven. I do remember punk, though, as a playground phenomenon, and remember that it was exciting to us. It really was, to a five- or six-year-old, quite a thrilling enticement to revolt. The anarchy sign scratched in desk tops, and so on.
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Zen is influenced by Daoism, which is not so much a nature-religion in the animistic sense as a nature-philosophy in a cosmic sense.
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On the other hand, the seventies were drab. That is, I am utterly fascinated by the fifties and sixties.
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There's a strong aspect of Buddhism which is geared towards ending all fertility.
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I feel almost as if I had been born in a vacuum of innocence, and then had to come to terms with the fact that actually, I was born into the middle of history - the rather grimy normality of the 70s, which did, indeed, retain some traces of human innocence, but were also girded about by the demons of experience.
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I don't know if Britain ever really achieved that much glamour. We had post-war austerity rather than post-war prosperity, and our cultural products of the time include some pretty dour kitchen-sink dramas of the A Kind of Loving variety. (This kind of film seems disillusioned with the sixties before they've even really begun.)
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Some Buddhists, however, never seem to get past the void, and I suppose I view this as a kind of Buddhist 'Old Testament' that I don't especially like.
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I would say that, apart from being a writer, I have also always been very conscious of the idea of a 'world elsewhere'.
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I like the concept of an anti-muse, though I'm not quite sure what that is. If there is such a thing in my life, I suppose it is just this weariness, this sense that it is more fulfilling not to exist, to efface all traces, than to limit oneself to the determined expression of manifestation.