ON WHICH WE FEAST

The truth is, if you read more Aleister Crowley, you might be a happier soul. I don't want to be him, but much of my sorrow and despair has been from living on a path that was very much unlike his. I have lived divorced from lust, desire and imagination feasting on smallness and fear. I have feasted to long on someone else's fear and madness. I need to sit at the altar of my inner temple and wait for the gods to reveal themselves to me.  This is all new to me and I am as fragile as I am strong. It seems many times in this upcoming spring I have fllen into deep despairs and wanted to weep, horrible depressions. We ought to be more careful of that on which we feast, but there is so much poisonous food lying everywhere.

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.



Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.

Part of the public horror of sexual irregularity so-called is due to the fact that everyone knows himself essentially guilty.

Indubitably, magic is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgment and practice than in any other branch of physics.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/aleister_crowley.html

Comicbookgirl 19 us always fun and usually insightful, but the last ten minutes of this are so heartbreaking and important and everything I feel about the struggle to live prophetically and creatively.

Logan Review

EXCURSUS

I stopped journaling and started drinking last night, which was the beginning of my birthday. A birthday weekend, in some ways, has to be the whole weekend, especially when ones fortierth birthday comes. I couldn't sleep anymore, but then I couldn't really quite wake up. I hd to journal. When I star the journal it calls things to attention like, I have to light a cgarette. I have to take some ibuborfen. i have to just sit here and smoke Part of me wants to change this dull as radio station. I have Ramblings on for backbground noise. It may be too much noise, or the wrong noise. I want to get somewhere. I want to keep this good feeling. I want ot learn. I worry about coming down from this day and this night back into the world where I make only so much money and the days are filled with only so much pleasure and much struggle and where i have to find a lawyer because, though i've always worried about creditors suung me, its the most unlikely one who's popped up. I sent an email to Bree to remind her to write and she wrote back and I was glad that she got it and that it encouraged here.  I feel like there is so much I want to talk about or need to face and it can only hppen in this writing.

I feel uneasy. That is what the writing or sometimes the praying does. It opens me up to my dis-ease and to my need. It takes me to a place I would rather stay away from. But that place, like a bad tooth, is always hanging around, always throbbing through all the other shit. I want to know that something is going to happen on my fortieth birthday weekend.

You have to make yourself write. It's like reaking the dirt. You have to almsot drag yourself to prayer. It is ike icing away the stones. It is no easy thing. I think I will write on blogs, write on the old dirty blog, not only on this one. I do not know if I will use the journal tonight. Tonight i need to tak to people. I need my thoughts to be public. At this moment, I'm not even proofreading All of this writing is full of typos..

Today, on my fortieth birthday I get a copy of the galley of the Boook of the Blessed. It's a deeply sexual book and I feel that deeply sexual things are important, that our sexual fantasies matter, that all of our fantasies matter.

I FOUND IT ALONE AND BEING FORSAKEN

How do we live in the world, the world being what it is? The prme message of The Kingdom of the Wicked is that question concerning the Cross and those who first saw the Resurrection and wondered what exactly they were supposed to do with it. A world where a son of God rises from the dead is still the world where  hundreds of Christians are burned in the Circus and where life if common with injustice where people are more right than wrong and goodness more defeated than triumphant. Th prime question of Christianity has been mistated, how can evil happen in a world controlled by an all powerful all loving God. The question is , how does one live in such a world? How does one respond to it?  

There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. It sees to the end of all temptations. As it bears no evil in itself, so it conceives none in thought to any other. If it be betrayed, it bears it, for its ground and spring is the mercies and forgiveness of God. Its crown is meekness, its life is everlasting love unfeigned; it takes its kingdom with entreaty and not with contention, and keeps it by lowliness of mind. In God alone it can rejoice, though none else regard it, or can own its life. It is conceived in sorrow, and brought forth without any to pity it; nor doth it murmur at grief and oppression. It never rejoiceth but through sufferings; for with the world's joy it is murdered. I found it alone, being forsaken. I have fellowship therein with them who lived in dens and desolate places of the earth, who through death obtained this resurrection and eternal holy life.

-James Naylor 1660

This is not a spirit of weariness, despair or indifference, the three things which, along with blindness, keep people who would be good from being good.

VAGUELY HELLISH THE NEXT DAY

The good thing about reviving the blog is I get to revisit myself, look at my life, reassess things. We tell ourselves an often tragic tale where we are the stars, remember how mistreated we were, how we were not loved enough, how nothing was enough, how no one appreciated our particular brand of genius. We forget the free and amazing love so often given. I think of what a good friend I was, how I was always there for those who needed me, never of how shabby I could be, short of temper, tired, distant, unseeing. I think of what a especially good lover I was, dedicated, untiring, and forget how tiring and mad I could be.

This last twenty-four hours, any twenty four hour cycle where I break my natural rhythm and go into work at a school, but especially a school I don't particularly like, has been tiresome, but not as tiresome as the end of it where, to my surprise--all the shit that hits you is shit you never quite predicted--I find a lawsuit from a credit card company and then that two of my futures sub appointments have been cancelled. I go to the message board and quickly pick up something new, something much more desired, for tomorrow than the one that cancelled me, but though the news of the lawsuit leaves me stoical, this thing almost undoes me.

As soon as I have picked up the new assignment, poof! It vanishes as well. What the hell. I get the phone call telling me what is going on and that I will be in this other position tomorrow and then, because I am so tired, I fall asleep. This whole early part off the night has been an uneasy resting, firstly because I was waiting for the new assignment to be posted, and then because I was waiting to talk about this new misfortune. Sometimes the only cure is talking.

Today I worked with a woman who cried the whole day. She said she just wanted to be happy again. I didn't feel smug at all because I somehow suspected misfortune was in my future, and now I wish I was the type of creature who cried more. It feels good to feel something besides this constipated sadness touched by fury, anger, worry perhaps. I do not know. I haven't unpacked my feelings. Feelings are in me like a rar file. They take a long time to come out. It may take the whole night. We may have to work the whole night and not feel alright until morning, and then get up and feel vaguely hellish the next day.