Words

"Once words lose anchor in the sensual world, they drift inevitably toward the world of lies. It's not the fault of words; it's how they come between us and things. The word abstract means "to draw away"; our abstractions draw us away from the world. Then we forget their sensual origins. For every word once grew out of the five senses and everyday life. If you brush off the ignorant dirt that covers it, a word is a potato -- with deep roots in the soil, and even eyes that grow underground."
-Rodger Kamenetz , A History of Last Night's Dream

Wonderment

The last half decade has been a time of questioning, probing, growing, loss, grief, and further growth built upon these things; much as it is for many others. The complexity of it all continues to amaze me; the flow of life, the pattern of thought, how one thing leads on to another, epiphanies giving rise to further insights which are paradoxically simplistic yet complex and refined, often leading to further questions and even deeper understandings. It is much like the visual representation of pi above. It loops in upon itself infinitely, refining itself to a seemingly invisible end, at least invisible to the naked eye, after that one can close their eyes and imagine refinement to the molecular and subatomic scales. (Pi, the movie also makes reference to this concept.)

This fascination may also explain why I enjoy allegory, symbolism, analogy, and metaphor so much. They use a simplistic representation to make a seemingly complex set of parameters more accessible, and human curiosity leads us to explore them deeper. If we are brave enough to indulge this tendency in a wise fashion, it is one of the qualities which refines our person and keeps us active and living, leading to purer, higher forms of thought and a greater closeness with The Divine. The term "work in progress" may seem over-used but are we truly allowing ourselves the curiosity and fortitude to be precisely that?

Hmmm... speaking of which, I just finished reading Till We Have Faces, another work by C.S. Lewis. If you have read any of his work in the spirit that it was written, maybe you understand why my thought processes dwell in their current form. Lewis' work is a breath of fresh air in the middle of a seemingly dark political and religious landscape. At the very least it gives a lot of food for thought on what it means to be human and exist with all the troubles and hard questions which are thrown our way. My thanks goes out yet again to my sister and several friends who turned me on to his writings.

Booxez

I finally finished reading The Five People You Meet In Heaven , it was beautiful and very nourishing for the mind and spirit. I just finished watching the movie based on this book too. Well-directed and it did not leave out anything pertinent from the book.

Currently slogging through the rest of The Saint, Surfer, and CEO, it feels dry and I am experiencing a bit of guilt for not liking it as much as the other people I've known who thought it was profound.

In the spirit of wanting to revisit some of the classics, I just started slogging through Sense and Sensibility and there are now recurring memories of why I did not enjoy even the condensed version of it in high school. Maybe I am just not intellectual enough to connect with it or perhaps it is the fact that I need to crack a dictionary several times on each page to research disused English vocabulary words. Regardless, I doubt I will be finishing it.

Feeding The Addiction

My tastes have always leaned toward a fondness for things which are a bit dark, humorous, and abstract or absurd. I recently purchased a used copy of Amphigorey Again by the late, great author Edward Gorey. This is the most recent (ostensibly last?) compilation of his short stories and drawings including projects completed shortly before his death. I was first introduced to his work just over half a decade ago when my good friend Pasha allowed me to peruse his copy of Amphigorey, the first major anthology of Mr. Gorey's best work. I was later furnished with a copy of my own when Pasha saw how much I loved it.


Over the next few years I obtained Amphigorey Too and Amphigorey Also as well as a few pamphlet-size stories that friends had found for me at flea markets. With all of these in my collection, I have almost all of his works, save for a few rare stories which were not widely circulated and are most likely sitting in the possession of ultra hardcore collectors. This is significant because of all authors, musicians and artists out there, very few human beings actually fascinate me enough to have me authoritatively delving into their works. For those who are not familiar with the stories of Edward Gorey, this comic that I found via google: [ (first page) and (second page) ] accurately mirrors my fascination while neatly summing up many common Goreyan themes. He could aptly be described as a fusion of Dr. Seuss, William Shakespeare, Monty Python, Jane Austen, and The Addams Family.


I think I enjoy his style because he never ceases to play mind games... inserting obsessive and seemingly pertinent details into his stories; the details will appear to be driving you in a specific direction, toward some sort of conclusion or a connection with part of the story... in fact your brain is working overtime to make that connection, then nothing happens. The details open the door of the car you are in, kick you out into an empty space, then drive away madly laughing and shouting "You'll never catch meeeee....!!!" It is as if the author is thumbing his nose at you and laughing like a good-natured trickster. He is also fond of deep, flowery literary prose, yet he injects it with random nonsense words which sound like they should be real, or he uses really fancy words and foreign languages to describe something completely ridiculous or mundane. His illustrations are often dark, yet finely detailed, heavily laden with a bleak Dickensian/Edwardian style and they share many seemingly related objects, in what is yet another example of the author's abstract sense of humor... tricking you yet again into assigning significance where there is none. Despite all this, his work does occasionally carry a very well-articulated point, but he really makes you work for it.

He also seems to delight in making fun of lofty, pretentious literary themes, brutally flouting conventional story structure and ruffling the feathers of anyone who takes themselves or the world of literature too seriously. There is also the appearance of occasional, thinly veiled crass undertones, phallic references, and perverse subject matter passed off as being innocently unintended.


If you are some sort of neo-dadaist, a fan of madcap British comedy, or just plain have an appreciation for excessive nonsense then I would heavily encourage you to read any or all of the works of Edward Gorey.

Edward Gorey

...and speaking of Edward Gorey, Nicholas Gurewitch, creator of one of my favorite web comics: Perry Bible Fellowship (don't let the name fool you, it is not a religious comic), penned a strip that could be an Edward Gorey tribute. He hit the drawing style spot-on... when I first saw it, I thought that it was something he had scanned out of one Gorey's published books.