mythology

Some things can be recovered. Some things can be restored. But some lost things, we seek forever.

The moment was all we truly had: a succession of moments, a triumphal march of them, to create a life beyond compare.

The picture of the bacchante who stands motionless and stares into space must have been well known. Catullus is thinking of her when he tells of the abandoned Ariadne, who follows her faithless lover with sorrowing eyes as she stands on the reedy shore __ike the picture of a maenad._ Indeed, melancholy silence becomes the sign of women who are possessed by Dionysus. [_]Madness dwells in the surge of clanging, shrieking, and pealing sounds, it dwells also in silence. The women who follow Dionysus get their name, maenads, from this madness. Possessed by it, they rush off, whirl madly in circles, or stand still, as if turned to stone.

Count me amongst the enemies to demons. Except for one.

You know your life is completely screwed up when you have to look up the mythological figures who talk to you in the bathroom mirror.

There were formerly horizons within which people lived and thought and mythologized. There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together. And so we are right now in an extremely perilous age of thunder, lightning, and hurricanes all around. I think it is improper to become hysterical about it, projecting hatred and blame. It is an inevitable, altogether natural thing that when energies that have never met before come into collision__ach bearing its own pride__here should be turbulence. That is just what we are experiencing; and we are riding it: riding it to a new age, a new birth, a totally new condition of mankind__o which no one anywhere alive today can say that he has the key, the answer, the prophecy, to its dawn. Nor is there anyone to condemn here (__udge not, that you may not be judged!_). What is occurring is completely natural, as are its pains, confusions, and mistakes.

There are no endings, only beginnings that have been reborn.

How do you give something away with the knowledge that you will get it back in three days, and then claim it to be the 'Ultimate Sacrifice'?

We fell in love with that little peep-show projection on the inside of an iris, pictures that amount to nothing more than the thirsty moon over a spot of bloody ground. Those weren__ the nothings we restless sleepwalkers knew, no place no home no song. So we heard her and we followed until she went where we couldn't follow.She went down beyond the mountains and disappeared between the crease of sky and land, like a great eyelid folding shut. No one knows what happened out in the Black Hills, but I imagine she lies buried in a rusty coffin under the stars. And on nights when the desert crickets sing her tune, they say one day she will rise again. On that day, there is no telling the kind of vengeance she'll demand of us. Fair is fair.They say when she fell from Heaven she wore a crown of jagged stars that slit the skies throat. They say she loved them all, in the secret corners of their shallow sleep. Strangers, at the last. They say a lot of things. They__e all lies. Everything is already written.

Time slipped and slid around him, unanchored by any fact that could be verified. Perhaps it did not matter. 'Where does our story take place, and when?' asked Cocteau at the start of Orphée. 'It's the privilege of legends to be ageless. Comme il vous plaira. As you please.

In the make-up of human beings, intelligence counts for more than our hands, and that is our true strength.

I asked "What do you even do with a chimera?""What wouldn't you do with a chimera?" Jeff asked. "They're like the Swiss Army knife of animals.

And when suddenlythe god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry,uttered the words: __e has turned round_ __he comprehended nothing and said softly: __ho?

And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter. For you know how many sons your esteemed writers ascribed to Jupiter: Mercury, the interpreting word and teacher of all; Aesculapius, who, though he was a great physician, was struck by a thunderbolt, and so ascended to heaven; and Bacchus too, after he had been torn limb from limb; and Hercules, when he had committed himself to the flames to escape his toils; and the sons of Leda, and Dioscuri; and Perseus, son of Danae; and Bellerophon, who, though sprung from mortals, rose to heaven on the horse Pegasus. For what shall I say of Ariadne, and those who, like her, have been declared to be set among the stars? And what of the emperors who die among yourselves, whom you deem worthy of deification, and in whose behalf you produce some one who swears he has seen the burning Caesar rise to heaven from the funeral pyre? And what kind of deeds are recorded of each of these reputed sons of Jupiter, it is needless to tell to those who already know. This only shall be said, that they are written for the advantage and encouragement of youthful scholars; for all reckon it an honourable thing to imitate the gods. But far be such a thought concerning the gods from every well-conditioned soul, as to believe that Jupiter himself, the governor and creator of all things, was both a parricide and the son of a parricide, and that being overcome by the love of base and shameful pleasures, he came in to Ganymede and those many women whom he had violated and that his sons did like actions. But, as we said above, wicked devils perpetrated these things. And we have learned that those only are deified who have lived near to God in holiness and virtue; and we believe that those who live wickedly and do not repent are punished in everlasting fire.

Take the first A out of Abraham and put it at the end. You get Brahama. There__ the ancient connection right there.

Rest in Peace?_ Why that phrase? That__ the most ridiculous phrase I__e ever heard! You die, and they say __est in Peace!_ _Why would one need to __est_ when they__e dead?! I spent thousands of years of world history resting. While Agamemnon was leading his ships to Troy, I was resting. While Ovid was seducing women at the chariot races, I was resting. While Jeanne d__rc was hallucinating, I was resting. I wait until airplanes are scuttling across the sky to burst out onto the scene, and I__ only going to be here for a short while, so when I die, I certainly won__ need to rest again! Not while more adventures of the same kind are going on.

Many more have died of attempting love than victory, and countless numbers hate love more than war. Honor has often been the dear prize awarded to the killers of lovers. The epics of war have always and still outnumber the epics of love. For those who love deeply and greatly gain a clairvoyant, excruciating awareness of the fear and suffering of the world along with their joy, which few warriors could endure. Who is not more truly afraid of a love story than of a tale of war?

We can never stop searching for Heaven, since there is always more of it than we can see. There, as in those tales that evolve endlessly into other tales, stories have no end. They are hardly ever the stories you know, the official ones, in which wishes are made formal, then legislated and enforced as matters of life or death. They are more often the stories we didn__ hear, or wouldn__ believe, told by the person we ignored, the house that was razed, the choir of dry bones. The scholars of Heaven read and study the vast collection of ashes, books from the torched libraries.