City of Roses

Things to keep in mind:
The secret of a large acquaintance with particulars.

Certainly this must be the most ridiculous appeal to authority that has ever appeared in these pages. Do you only write about these things if you have seen, in pure euphoria, cloves being driven into the apple of the Lord? For one who has experienced fortification spectra and rainbow auras, and seen souls rising from people’s heads, and fixed words begin to stream meaning, the uneasy question is this: what if it is merely neurological? What to make of the mystic loose from any system of thought or framework, who nevertheless has a seizure every time she passes through the same doorway? How easily it may be triggered, or even inherited. I cannot even look at a bevel, my mother has told me hauntedly. Lewis Carroll saw a pack of playing cards, but he might have seen the Supreme Face. What happens when the phenomenon has a name, an explanation? If the state can be entered through the physical: through repetition, the fondling of beads, looking at a bevel, what does that say for the revelations received there? What does that mean for the meaning?

Patricia Lockwood

Posted 1 day ago.

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