Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

I disliked him. To say I disliked him might be putting it too mildly. Instead I should say that I found him repulsive, horrible. In fact I didn’t even regard him as a human Being.

Anger always leaves a void behind it, into which a flood of sorrow pours instantly, and keeps on flowing like a great river, without beginning or end. My tears came; once again their sources were replenished.

It occurred to me if there really was a Good God, he should appear now in his true shape, as a Sheep, Cow, or Stag, and thunder in a mighty tone, he should roar, and if he could not appear in person, he should send his vicars, his fiery archangels, to put an end to this terrible hypocrisy for once and for all. But of course no one intervened. He never intervenes.

“I thought that you, as a Writer, had an imagination and a capacity for conjecture, and were not closed to ideas that at first glance seem improbable. You should know that everything possible to be believed is an image of the truth.”

“I’d never have written a single line if I didn’t have my feet firmly on the ground, Mrs Duszejko”

For a time I slept with a Protestant (…) and he told me, probably quoting Luther, that he who suffers sees the back of God. I wondered if this meant the shoulders, or the buttocks perhaps, and what this divine back looked like, since we’re incapable of imagining the front. Maybe it meant he who suffers has a special access to God, by a side door, he is blessed, he embraces some sort of truth which without suffering would be hard to comprehend. So in a way the only Person who’s healthy is the one who suffers, however strange it might sound. I think that would be in harmony with the rest.

That’s what I dislike most of all in people — cold irony. It’s a very cowardly attitude to mock or belittle everything, never be committed to anything, not feel tied to anything. Like an impotent man who can’t experience pleasure himself, but will do all he can to ruin it for others. Cold irony is Urizen’s basic weapon. The armaments of impotence. At the same time the ironists always have a world outlook that they proclaim triumphantly, though if one starts badgering and questioning them about the details, it turns out to consist of nothing but trivia and banalities.

“I am simply informing the Police that the man is committing evil. Where am I to go, if not to the Police?”

He laughed throatily.

“Evil, you say? Maybe you should go to the priest!”

“How can God be listening to all the prayers in the entire world simultaneously? And what if they contradict each other? Does he have to listen to the prayers of all these bastards, devils and bad people? Do they pray? Are there places where this God is absent?”

So for people like me the only thing possible is here and now, for every future is doubtful, everything yet to come is barely sketched and uncertain, like a mirage that can be destroyed by the slightest twitch of the air.

For people my age, the places that they truly loved and to which they once belindes are no longer there. The places od their childhood and youth have ceasws to exist, the villages where they went on holidays, the parks with uncomfortable benches where their first loves blossomed, the cities, cafes and houses of their past. And if their outer form has been preserved, it’s all the more painful, like a shell with nothing inside of it anymore. I have nowhere to return to.

From nature’s point of view, no creatures are useful or not useful. That’s just a foolish distinction applied by people.

In any case, I know the date of my own death, and that lets me feel free.

As I gazed at the black-and-white landscape of the Plateau I realised that sorrow is an important word for defining the world. It lies at the foundations of everything, it is the fifth element, the quintessence.

I stopped in the sloping market square, and gradually I felt flooded by a powerful sense of communion with the people passing by. Each man was my brother and each woman my sister. We were so very much alike. So fragile, impermanent, and easily destroyed.

It made me feel sad, horrified, for even someone as foul as he was did not deserve death. Who on Earth does? The same fate awaits me too, and Oddball, and the Deer outside; one day we shall all be nothing more than corpses.

I am a phantom built out of pain. Whenever I find it hard to know what to do with myself, I imagine I have a zip fastener in my belly, from my neck to my groin, and that I'm slowly undoing it, from top to bottom. And then I pull my arms out of my arms, my legs out of my legs, and take my head off my head. As I extract myself from my own body, it falls off me like old clothes. Underneath them I'm finer, soft, almost transparent. I have a body like a Jellyfish, white, milky, phosphorescent. Oh yes, then I am free.

A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us.

The prison is not outside, but inside each of us. Perhaps we simply don't know how to live without it.

But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have had the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.

Everything will pass. The wise man knows this from the start, and has no regrets.

Reality has grown old and gone senile; after all it is definitely subject to the same laws as every living organism — it ages.

I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by an ambulance in the Night.

Everything will pass. The wise Man knows this from the start, and has no regrets.

I think we all feel great ambivalence at the sight ofour own Horoscope. On the one hand we're proud to see that the sky is imprinted on our individual life, like a postmark with a date stamped on a letter-this makes it distinct, one of a kind. But at the same time it's a form of imprisonment in space, like a tattooed prison number. There's no escaping it. I cannot be someone other than I am. How awful. We'd prefer to think were free, able to reinvent ourselves whenever we choose. This connection with something as great and monumental as the sky makes us feel uncomfortable. We'd rather be small, and then our petty little sins would be forgivable. Therefore I'm convinced that we should get to know our prison very well.