Vision

We all landed on this planet, not making the rules, feeling, for a time, at least, subject to them. For the first years of my writing career (which I would stay started at eighteen) I was exploring the place I was in, the world I'd been handed, trying to understand other people, always uncertain of my own interpretation of the world, gullible enough to take people at face value.

And I think I was a person of struggle. Though I would never have classified myself as deferential, I suppose I was deferential to Rome, to the Church being the final say. How could I know when I was writing Jamnia, that this little book marked the beginning of that end. Not a year would pass before I was heavily jaded by the religion of my youth, and only a little more time could pass before I had gone back to the mystery traditions that, in deference to Rome, I had forsaken. Only a little more time would pass before I traded in being a loyal Roman for a skeptical Anglican who was religious on his own terms.

And this matters how?

I thought I was writing about my writing, not my religion. But I see the two are the same. Especially as I enter now into the actual paper publication of Jamnia. The person who wrote that was a devout Roman who felt it his task as a Catholic to disagree with his Church, to maintain a tension between himself and the Powers That Be. The author who remains is a Anglican Pagan, a bit of a gnostic, a liberal heretic. He is not struggling against any power or any doctrine. He is not chafing under any dogma because he does not believe in one. He knows God is good and God is everywhere. Very different from dogmatic faith.

And this effects my writing?

Well, yes. Because it effects my imagination. It is the difference between having an imagination that is (however grudgingly) subject to someone else's imagination. In my case the imagination of a Church was what I subjected my own to, but sometimes it is the imagination of a nation or a race. This collective imagining which demands that the individual give way to It is more like a dream than it is a vision and more like an opiate haze than a dream.

So, if in the beginning I wrote because I wanted to know, I wrote myself into a sort of knowing and it appears that now I writeto clear away the opiate haze. I don't want to impose my vision on anyone else because I don't really have a vision. Pity, isn't it. I hope, though, when I write, to prick, to slap, to sting a little bit not so that the reader may have my vision, but-- in a sharp moment of clarity-- have her own.