grace

It happened to me, it’s the worst thing that ever happened to me. It’s the only thing that ever happened to me. I own it.

“A prophet may not be honoured by her people, may be forgotten, may, like Cassandra, not be believed; but nonetheless a relationship exists between a prophet and her people. She voices their experience, their past and their future, their despair and their visions. […] Prophecy isn’t polemics. The prophet doesn’t argue. She says, “This is so” And that ‘is’; has a special meaning. Prophecy isn’t history, or sociology, or even meteorology. Questions like, “But don’t the characteristics of a lesbian change from period to period?” or “Is it possible to verify the truth of her prophecies?” or even “What large-scale events is she prophesying exactly?” don’t have much meaning in this mode, because it isn’t based on sequential time or on cause and effect. This mode exists in the present. The past and future are both known and encompassed. They are present in any moment of time. Cassandra said, “Troy will fall.” She may also have said, “It will rise again.” She wasn’t believed. She wasn’t treated like a prophet or even like a person. (She was treated as spoils of war.) If you switch modes and try to take a prophecy literally, you either get nonsense or you get a truism. The prophetic state-ment is eternally true; it does not belong to time in the sense that we ordinarily understand time. The prophet does not deduce events like a meterologist or a racecourse bookie or even a stock-broker with the aid of a computer. I think what happens is that the past and the future are embodied in the present, as are the visionary and the everyday. […] In the prophetic mode, what has been and will be is. It is real. It is also imagined. And the two are one. In other words, the mode includes possibility and redemption as well as the despair arising from the logic of experience.”

Properly written texts are like spiders’ webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm. They draw into themselves all the creatures of the air. Metaphors flitting hastily through them become their nourishing prey. Subject matter comes winging towards them. The soundness of a conception can be judged by whether it causes one quotation to summon another. Where thought has opened up one cell of reality, it should, without violence by the subject, penetrate the next. It proves its relation to the object as soon as other objects crystallize around it. In the light that it casts on its chosen substance, others begin to glow.