Quentin S. Crisp Quotes
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Zen, on the other hand, is not so dogmatically sterile, though there are certainly traces and more than traces of this austerity. However, with Zen we have not only the void, but the fertile void. The ink lines in a sumi-e painting show this fertility of the void ever ready to brim over into existence.
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Speaking of [Philip] Larkin, in his poem about the First World War he wrote something like, "Never such innocence, before or since, that turned itself to past without a word".
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The quality of that 'who I am', is what I hope comes out in the writing.
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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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Non-pantheist models for god seem almost completely untenable to me, though not without interest.
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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 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 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'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'm more a dog person than a cat person.
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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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I think I'm probably too close to the seventies to be able to analyse them (it?) effectively.
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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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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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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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There's a strong aspect of Buddhism which is geared towards ending all fertility.
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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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[My muse] feels nostalgic for Japan, and, perhaps strangely, for the pioneer days of America.
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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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On the other hand, the seventies were drab. That is, I am utterly fascinated by the fifties and sixties.
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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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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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The urban, on the other hand, is often seen as more real and mundane, even though it is obviously far more recent in terms of planetary development. I think this might be because nature corresponds to the unconscious and the artificial world of the city and human culture to the conscious mind.