Wizardry 2016: Notes

Reminder:

What I need more of in my life, what I need to remember, is wild magic, not rule bound and law bound magic. Everything you need to learn, you can, from the trees, the wind, the old stones, the lake. No explanations or justifications are necessary. I am far more wild than that. I need to remember and embrace the wild.

•

It feels sometimes like all I know anymore is despair, doubt, suffering. But a wizard's way begins in words. Naming is a powerful thing. Change the words, and you change the story, and maybe the story's ending. Words are a wizard's tool, although there are many things behind words. Use the tools, change yourself, change the world.

•

Another thing about wizardry and wizards: They notice everything. Everything. And they never lose their sense of wonder. Even at ordinary things. Everything is a source of wonder.

•

Half of wizardry, like empathy, is deep listening. Listen to what the world tells you. Most people can't shut up long enough to actually listen to anything. Are you that afraid of silence, that nervous about gaps in social interaction? Try just listening for awhile, without spending all your energies thinking of your next reply.

•

If you want to leave a tribute who an artist who made a difference to you, who changed your life somehow, do what that artist did: don't copy what everyone else is doing, make something transcendent, memorable, and durable. Make it count.

Basho said: “Do not imitate the masters. Seek what they sought.”

Be just as good as your gods. That's the minimum tribute they deserve.

•

Gathered Leaves

Recent journal entries of varying profundity, somewhat at random:

•

One of the most important, yet unnumbered, rules of wizardry:

You are required to leave the world a finer place than it was when you found it. Always work to make the world a finer place.

Your constant adversary is entropy. That long slide into the dark.

As one wizard once said, Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. (Dylan Thomas)

•

Someone, perhaps someone who doesn't even know you, gets it into their head that you're an asshole.
So they start treating you as if you were an asshole.
They act like an asshole towards you.
In self-defense you start responding to them like an asshole, because they're acting like an asshole.
Then they point their finder at you and shout, "Look! I said you were an asshole, and you are!"
Because now they have pushed you into acting just the way they expected you to act.

The name for this process is:

Self-fulfilling prophecy.

And that, dear friends, is the danger of having expectations in the absence of experience or data.

•

At some point I suppose people will figure out that merely stating the obvious does not constitute an actual revelation.

That doesn't mean it's not a personal epiphany to the person who just had it. And when said person takes their epiphany to their spiritual master, who then laughs, "well, duh," then a certain amount of humility is in order.

Because what's really toxic amongst seekers after personal growth and/or enlightenment is spiritual ambition and spiritual hubris. And most of the time we don't even know we're doing it.

As the Zen masters have said, Ambition in seeking enlightenment will prevent you from achieving enlightenment. Just sit there!

•

In India, there is a Hindu tradition that comes out of the belief that the Divine exists in all of us, in everything, in everyone, all the time.

A person who needs to talk to the Divine, who just needs to be heard, for whatever is bothering them, will go up to a stranger, and ask "Will you be God for me?"

Which means, that the one asked will sit and listen, standing in for that person's God, as the person pours out their soul and heart to their Divine. (Its not always out of desperation or something bad, by the way.) This is always meant to be a temporary job, not a permanent one. The person is asking to talk to their God through a channel of another person, since the Divine Immanence is in everything and everyone.

We all sometimes need a Face of God that we can personally connect with. Most people connect better to an image of the Divine (what Joseph Campbell called the Masks of God) that they can relate to, that they feel they can talk to directly, and be heard. Westerners who discover this tradition in Hindu India are often amazed; but if you think about it, this isn't radically different than praying at the foot of a statue of Jesus or the Virgin Mary. The main difference is that in the Abrahamic religions God is thought to be transcendent, while in India God is thought it be immanent and transcendent.

As the stand-in for God, you don't have to do anything but listen, and listen with your heart. The gods behind all of reality, behind us, will hear. When the person who asked you to be God for them are done, you bless them, as God. If they ask God for advice, all you have to do is get yourself out of the way and let the Divine speak through you. Speak from your heart, and it will be true.

Anyway, this tradition always seems to work, and the person gets what they need. After the speaking to God is done, both people get up, feeling blessed, and depart, probably never to see each other again.

•

Any attempts to ascribe simplistic explanations of cause and effect to events in dreamtime are doomed to equivocacy.

First, because in dreamtime, time itself is neither linear nor narrative. Second, because in dreamtime, spacerime is malleable and non-relativistic. Third, because simplistic explanations of anything are usually just wrong, anyway.

Anentropic

I don't believe in apocalypse, which says that everything must finally grind down to its final end.

I do believe in apokatastasis, which says that there is nothing that cannot be redeemed.

When's the last time you went and sat next to a bed of flowers. Not to touch them, brush your hand through them, though that is good to do. Not to look at them, at their beauty, though that is also good.

Just to be with them. Just to be a companion to what lives.

I resist entropy. I refuse to succumb to that downward slide into black hole abyss without putting up enough of a fight to at least slow down that last end. Every time we do something that brings more light, more love, into the universe, we slow down entropy, we slow down the eventual heat-death of the universe, if only by a little bit. Every time we act to serve life, to be in the service of life's health and joy, we slow down death. It adds up. Every little thing helps.

There is nothing that cannot be redeemed.

That Box of Rocks

A Spiral Dance essay

This morning it's all I can do to wake up after a heavy sleep. A sleep induced by chemical agency I'd rather avoid, but at least it was a refreshing sleep. And a hard process waking up. I'm never a quick awakener anymore, and even slower now. At some point, maybe a cup of tea and a good book later, maybe after a half-hour of hands-on meditation and healing, there's a switch that gets thrown in the back on the mind and suddenly I'm alert, aware, able to parse the day's needs. Till then, I am a slow evolving, a fish who just climbed out onto land for the first time, gasping, trying to learn to breathe. Till the spark inhabits the mind, I am a slow ember, a dark waving of treebranches in shadow, pointing towards the river hidden beyond. A walk to the river is no walk at all. It barely stirs the rushes. I am inarticulate. The neighbors wave and want to chat, and it's all I can do to wave back, smile, and keep strolling. Conversation this early in my day is a calamity. I never want to be social till I'm fully awake, fully aware. Even then, some days being social is a drain. As lonely and isolated as I feel some days, morning silence is never unfriendly. Ask me again in an hour, and I'm sure I'll be a cheerful companion. Till then, ignore my silence. Or better yet, leave it alone, and take your need for chatter with the waitress off to the diner, and leave me in peace.

I am immersed right now in writing words and music. It keeps me alive. Its demands keep me going. All else is not much fun, and if I let myself think about requirements and obligations demanded of me by the outside world, I get cranky and irritable. The disordered illogic of bureaucratic systems is enraging. It's not even a matter of putting up with necessity. It's that you're aware of how fragile and arbitrary it all is. It could all fall apart at any moment. Life itself is irrepressible. Those who decry the end of life are usually referring to their own way of life, not yours.

People, even people who should know better, try to sell you on the idea that if you had a better tool for making art, your art would improve. (Of course they're happy to sell you a better tool, to their profit.) It's not about the tools. Good tools do help make great art, it's true. But a great musician would make great music no matter which tools were available. A great musician could sit down, and be handed a box of rocks, and make music out of that. What makes a great musician, or artist, is the attitude of working with whatever is at hand: Let's see what we can make from this. Great artists I've known have an open-ended sense of wonder and exploration, very child-like in many ways, that allows them to see what's actually there, rather than what most people think is there. They do not pre-judge, they observe; and they have an experimental approach to both work and life. Life is a work of art, making art is a way of life; they're not separate, and both are experiments, trial and error till something good happens. Meanwhile, you learn as much as you can about what you're doing, about how you're living. Making art is an ecological practice: art, environment, life, all are intertwined.

Most people never can see past their own projections: what they think is there. They catalog and dismiss. They move on quickly to the next row, to catalog and dismiss that, too. They believe that a sense of accomplishment lies in how much, how quickly, one is able to catalog and dismiss. But wizards, and bards, and artists, see what's really there. They know that there's no end to learning, and many thing are so vast that in the end they will remain mysterious and unknown, even given a lifetime of study. They see what others do not see mostly because others are not looking. I've said this all before. The only people who listened were those who already understood the truth of it. My fellow wizards, bards, and artists.

Most people see only what they want to see, believe what they want to believe. There is a vast distance separating them from what is really there, and they cling to that gap with all their might. Most people believe that if they recite a cant a hundred times, it becomes true. They believe that about political policy, and they believe that about healing affirmations: if you say it's true, enough times, with enough force, it becomes true.

But the world is resistant. It has its own momentum. You can't turn a turnip into a forest by sheer force of will. Your will imposed on the world is your first, childish mistake. Unlike the musician who, presented with a box of rocks, makes some music from them, your stance is refuse to use the rocks, because they're impractical and unsuitable. The basic definition of ego is fear of change, because all change begins in the self. The ego clings to its own image of its changeless self, and is a master of denial. Don't pay attention to the facts, here's what's really true, says the ego. Political display is ego-display; that's not a new insight. National identity is bound up with ego and its fears of change. Confrontation with the Other is terrifying to most, because on some level they know it will require change. They reject the box of rocks because they're not homeland rocks, and they're not the right flag-borne color anyway.

Politics without artists, without naturalists with thirty years of field experience sitting by the river and observing its ecosystem, is hollow politics. It's incestuous and self-serving. More than forty years ago Rachel Carson disturbed the universe by writing her book Silent Spring, and taking to task what we were doing to the environment. She was roundly attacked by the vested political and chemical-company interests, but she was proved right. Her book led directly to the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Look who is trying to dismantle that agency now, forty years after it was founded: the vested chemical-company interests, and the politicians they bought. For the sake of expediency and profit they want to go back to poisoning the natural world. The natural world, they want us to forget or ignore, is also the world we live in. For our own self-interest, we can't afford to shit where we sleep. We will pollute ourselves in our own wastes, unto death. This is not news. This is not a new insight. Why then must it be repeated as if it were news?

Because politics without a sense of the sacred is hollow and self-serving. Without a sense of social justice, in which social justice is part of the fabric of the ecosystem, there is no real justice. Without a sense of human equality with all other creatures we share the planet with, we get a sense of entitled superiority that sees nothing wrong with destroying the very systems that keep it alive, all in name of short-term goals. Politics with no long view is murderous and suicidal.

The world resists being controlled. If you think you're the master of the world, you're deluded. If you think you're even the master of your own small corner of the world, you've never understood true mastery. True mastery is husbandry. It's cajoling the world to be more like what it aspires to be, to evolve, to be better than it is, to find efficient solutions to its patterns. Wizards are ecologists at root, because all you're really doing is helping the world be what it most wants to be. Life is irrepressible, and wants to grow. Nobody wants to die, as inevitable as that might be. Everything wants to reach its full flowering, reaches its fulfillment, finds its purpose and meaning. Nothing makes the box of rocks happier than for a great musician to make music with it, or for a child to fantasize a castle wall and moat made from it. That wall wants to hold together, not fall. When you help it stay upright, and fulfill its purpose, you've made the world into its better self. All you do is help. Life is meant to be about service.

Life is meant to be about service, not about self-fulfillment. Actually, those are not contradictory, because few things are more fulfilling than a life of dedicated service. What you are in service to, well, that's where you have to figure out your own purpose in life. For myself, it's finally clear, after decades of distraction and being waylaid by people telling me what I should be doing, that my own life is meant to be in service of the art, music, and poetry that I make. Decades were spent trying to fit into the ideas and patterns and plans that others told me my life should be about. Now I now they were all wrong. Burn those old maps, they'll just lead you astray.

I have lost all my maps, again. I've had significant practice in losing my maps before. I've been through the dark night of the senses, then the dark night of the soul, when all the maps, and all contact with God, are taken away from you. In that outer darkness, echoing back, all you can hear are your own fearful limits. I have lost my mental maps more than once, this lifetime. Now, after the surgery, after the recovery, still recovering, beginning to prepare about moving forward towards the completion of the medical narrative of recovery, with new maps imposed on me about where I am expected to arrive so that the restoration of my life through another surgery and recovery can be made complete, I find myself angrily rejecting those maps again. I am exhausted with other peoples' ideas of where I'm supposed to be, what I'm supposed to do, who I'm supposed to become. I am being presented with constantly-changing narratives of expectations, told that I have to arrive on that shore by my own will and and under my power, told when I ask for help and a crew to man my boat that it isn't available. That I'm on my own, again, with no one to either count on or to help me arrive without blame.

If I've learned anything, it's that every time you survive something life-threatening, you have to redraw the maps. Or make new ones. I've learned, several times, so that it seems like it was all practice for what I'm dealing with right now, right here, that I have to constantly remake my own maps. And just as constantly be willing to let older maps blow off the bowsprit, into the wind. Parchment leaves in the wind, falling into the sea. I find myself once again mapless and uncertain of the territory. Everything is made new, and I don't know the lay of the land anymore. You bet that strikes a nerve. It also strikes a chord, ringing out of the very air: a celestial music, a ring of voices of angels, which, after all, sound a lot like the music you can make out of a box of rocks.

Angel, speak to me. You forbidding and blaring foghorn, you long night of nothing in the wind but cedar chatter, you long road of suffering and rebirth, you constant immolation and dying, you desert silence, speak to me. Speak to me of the ghats in Varanasi where the bodies of holy ancestors are burned, given to the wind. Speak to me of the dessicated ribs of Joshua Trees in the desert, which slipstream the wind around themselves. Speak to me of the quiet brown river curving under overhanging trees, wind riffling its surface under unsteady light and uncertain clouds. Speak to me, angel, of my own death and rebirth: not for the first time, either, but just the latest in a long series of unmapped reincarnations. I've died and come to life again, angel. This morning, my mind finally clear enough to be able to face the day, is just one more evolution of consciousness, reborn out of sleep into waking life. I find some kind of quiet exultation in the wind in the cedars, the annoyed bluejay shrieking from the pear tree's summit. Life will go on. Life will find a way.

Even when I die and am reborn again, which is inevitable, unavoidable, and neither to be feared nor unwelcomed, I see, with the bard's eye behind my own everyday gaze, that this is just part of the spiral pattern that is my greatest work of art so far, my life. Angel, I've finally learned that I'd settle for starvation and homelessness as long as I can make music, make art, make photographs. Nothing else matters as much, I don[t need much else. I've finally learned that it's more important than anything else I've ever done, to just give in and make art. It doesn't even matter how it gets received, or used. My life of service is to be in service to that which prompts me to make art. My life of service is to be in service to art. I'm a slow learner, it only took me my entire life, and this latest death and rebirth, to at last sort out my priorities and stop giving a damn what anyone else thinks about it. That was a tough one, angel. I've always had a hard time ignoring the outer shell of advice. Well-meant or not, it was useless all along. I see that now. I am at last seeing what's really there: that the most wonderful thing I can do with my life is burn myself up in the actinic blue fire of Creation, to spend all my life on living art and making life, and bring as much of the Creation into view as I can, which is the purpose of making art: to praise and reveal the Creation. All a poet can do is praise. That's all the purpose there is.

Since I died, and was reborn, I've started another new way of art, one that I've been meaning to investigate for a long time. But now, there's no time like the present, nearly dying has re-sorted my priorities, and there's point in waiting to do something you've always wanted to do, and are in fact meant to do. After my parents died, I took up teaching myself to draw with colored pencils: a very conscious choice of learning a completely new art medium, for the first time free of any need for, or possibility of, parental approval or rejection. For the first time, I was doing art that nobody could catalog and dismiss, that those family-born voices could no longer say was unworthy. It didn't even matter if I ever got good at drawing with colored pencils; that wasn't the point. Nor was it necessary to be like every other colored-pencil artist, and create photo-realistic drawings such as they teach you in the how-to books. I have no interest in being like everyone else; I'll skip the perfectionism this time around, thank you. And so, now, I've done it again: started another new artistic process that is brand new to me, that reveals a world never seen before, and reveals it in ways both imaginative and spiritual. Namely, I finally allowed myself to get into infrared photography. Now, with digital cameras, it's technically more approachable and easier than back in the film camera days; I was stopped back then by the difficulties of technical mastery. Now, in the past few weeks, with a new infrared photography system for my existing camera, I've found myself looking at the world anew, all over again with new eyes, as if for the first time, revealed in the first light of the first day of Creation.

And that's essential. With the loss of the old maps, I have to make new maps. Finally, I know that my new maps always have to be crayon drawings, finger-paintings, child-like renderings of the terrain as a bard, an artists, or a musician using sonar echo-location, would see it. My new maps, angel, must always be seen from the ground, not from the air. And they have to be paintings, not technical drawings. Great painters have always taught us to see the world in a new way, in new light. Great photographers have revealed the world as never seen by the unaided eye. Great musicians have opened our ears. Charles Ives once demanded of an audience for one of his difficult, dissonant new compositions: "Stand up and use your ears like a man!" That's great advice, angel with the voice of a foghorn or a bluejay. As long as there is surprise and discovery in this new life, this life whose purpose is at last known to be about nothing but making art, and like a wizard-poet, a wizard-artist, revealing the world the way it wants to be revealed, for its own purpose and joy, as long as there is joy and making, then I will have lived well. Any new maps I must remake will be good ones, even if as usual only temporary. I can always make more.

This morning, after a sunny dawn, thin gray clouds have covered the sky. But it's not an oncoming storm. It's the edge of possibility. Map it out, get it down. Finish your tea. Go make some art, sufficient to the day.

Notes to Overcome

Notes:

As much of my poetic juice as I'm pouring into writing song lyrics for the new music commission, I'm also writing these other poems as they come to me. Which they have increasingly been doing, again.

Remember, one of the rules of creativity is: The more you do, the more you do. The more you do, the more you are able to do. It's anti-entropic: it feeds itself, it starts to run under its own power, like the ancient dream of perpetual motion. One of the reasons you know that the creative process is divine is precisely because it's anti-entropic. Doing work over there feeds work over here. Being in the flow means that everything is flowing, the river of creative force is available to feed all the various media that you might work in. Activity here increases activity over there, because the floodwaters are non-specific. Everything feeds everything else.

Also, these other poems serve for me a different purpose than the lyrics written for the music commission. The song lyrics are specific stories, specific narratives about one part of my life and the lives of others like me. These other poems, especially the Letters series poems, help me cope with my own very personal narrative of recovery, grief, suffering, PTSD, and the daily need to find a meaning in life, a reason to keep enduring what is occasionally unendurable. They too are anentropic, if not overtly anti-entropic, in that they help me be able to not slide down the gravity well into acedia or despair. They become part of my self-healing process, a necessary response to what has ben going on in my life, medically and psychologically. I began writing the Letters poems, after all, as a response to encounters with personal mortality, as a response to almost dying, as a way of pulling my head out of a morass of confusion and despair. You need to vent, to get it out of your system,, to get past it. As I've said before, Making art is the best revenge. Revenge not on people for supposed harm done to oneself, but against the entire systems that try to destroy us, and fail. I never expected to write so many of these Letters poems; I never expected to have the need to. What I try to do is turn raw feeling into art: so that these are not raw screaming into the journal, are not merely venting and shouting and yelling at the walls of life's limits, but that something artful, more permanent, more transcendent might be made. They are fueled by painful circumstances, and sometimes reflect that more than not; but I don't want them to be merely a cry of pain. I want them to map the way out of pain, not merely recite its effects.

There is a scene near the end of Shakespeare's The Tempest, where Prospero realizes that revenge, that inflicting suffering on those who caused his own suffering and exile, will do no good: he must either forgive and let go of his righteous rage, or he will destroy those things he most loves, beginning with his daughter Miranda, and ending with his own honor, his own sense of self. It's a scene where suddenly the tone of Prospero's speech changes from verbal fireworks to calm self-knowledge, rooted acceptance, and powerful self-confidence that needs no more artifice to be self-sustaining. It is a moment of anti-entropy, when Prospero chooses a path of perpetual service that needs no more rough magic. First he releases his anger and desire for revenge. At the last, he releases the spirits he has mastered—however lovingly, they were kept as slaves to his unrealized passions—and drowns his books of magic in the sea. He remains an extraordinary person, an exceptional man, who has been tempered by exile and suffering into a man who make a fair and just ruler, a king whose reign shall be praised overall.

That is an example of how to make a good life out of suffering. It's a template for overcoming pain, obstacles, and the personality-ego's desire for revenge, for lashing out to create suffering in response to its own suffering. It is a template for how to break the cycle of hate, revenge, judgment, and guilt. It leads to a greater wholeness in the person who makes such anti-entropic choices as serve the highest good. The genuine essence of wizardry lies not in the personal power over matter and energy that one has gained, but in choosing to expend one's power in the service of life itself. Prospero leaves the island at last to go serve life, and no longer requires the external trappings of magic, or wizardry, because he has at the last learned to master himself.

I do not compare myself to Prospero, although I do aspire to attain something like that service of wizardry. I make art in part as an act of self-mastery. These poems in the Letters series, as diverse in content as they have been, as similar in tone and style as they might be, all serve my own need for self-mastery. They give channel and direction to energies that would otherwise flail in every direction, and splash over their bounds with perhaps destructive force.

Remember, another rule of creativity is: Use the power, lest it use you. Use your creative process as well as you can, live within it as consciously as you can, or it will use you instead. Serving its own need to be used, to be released, it will exit through whatever channel is provided—which might be your own darkest Shadow, if you give it no other channel. Creative force will out, no matter what. You have a choice about how that happens. With self-mastery comes self-knowledge, and a greater awareness of your own energetic anatomy—including this truth that creative force will out, no matter what else you might hold true. So far better to choose where and when.

Remember, one rule of psychological repression is that whatever you suppress over here will pop back up over there, often inappropriately. The energetic force of the psyche will out. It's up to you where and when it comes out. Sometimes you can measure how self-repressed a person is merely by observing how much is inappropriately leaking out over there, in ways seemingly beyond that person's awareness, or control. Judgmental, self-righteous rage is often a clue towards denial of one's own shadow: and when someone responds with righteous rage to being told the truth, what is happening is that they are fighting hard to remain ignorant, to retain their subconscious denial, their not-knowing. I have encountered artists whose paintings are blatantly, toxically pathological (in one case I recall, psychosexually dysfunctional), and who go through their lives suffering one toxic relationship after another. Yes, art can be a tool for personal therapy: but it can also be a barometer of personally willful, self-ignorant denial. It can be a tool of suffering or of redemption; it can drag you into a shared hell, or it can transcend.

Sometimes both, as another rule of art as life is: Sometimes the only way out is through. Sometimes when you find yourself in deep water, you have to become a diver, and go deeper into those waters, to come out the other side. First you go through the agony in the garden, then the crucifixion experience, whatever narrative form that takes for you, and only then can you see again the light of heaven.

And, sometimes your art is more personally powerful, and more universally meaningful, for having gone through hell to get there. What you make is tempered by what you have lived through. So it is with these other poems, whose writing has helped me cope with overwhelming emotions, with a life-threatening medical situation and its aftermath. They help me get through one more day. They help my recover my life. I still don't know who these Letters are written to; I may never know. Writing them is more important than sending them out. I don't even know if they are artful, or good art, or decent poems—although I do feel that at least some of them are. I don't know if they will ever have an audience—although some of them are probably worthy of being shared. In some ways, writing this other series of poems, these Letters poems—which has been going on in continuous, sporadic parallel to everything else I've done creatively over the past year and more—is an act similar to Prospero writing his books. Releasing these poems into the world is like drowning them: I give them to the sea, and see what changes. No other act of self-mastery will suffice, to keep my own head above water. The more you do, the more you do.

Words & Wizardry

The past few weeks, late at night, if I've been feeling sleepless, rather than poison my dreams with inane bursts of noise from the television, I've taken to curling up on the blue couch under a single reading lamp, and delving back into beloved works of high fantasy literature. Sometimes I've had the row of lava lamps turned on across the room; one lamp in particular casts light onto the blank white wall above it as though it were the sky filled with the aurora borealis. Or perhaps the gaseous shifting fringes of the sentient planet Solaris, from Stanislaw Lem's SF novel of that name. You take your solace where you can find it.

I've been re-reading, mostly by dipping in and out, and re-reading favorite scenes, sections, and segments of each book, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings in a handy if huge single-volume paperback edition; Patricia McKillip's trilogy of The Riddle-Master (in a similar single-volume paperback), and Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea series, all six books.

Of the latter series, I have the original trilogy in a boxed set, with unified illustrations in every volume; I have the more recent books in their hardcover first editions, glittering with light and air and the coppery fire of the breath and scales of dragons. Dragons everywhere, changing back and forth in shape between human and dragon, never quite knowing which you'll meet today, always wild, fierce, and loving.

So my head is full these days of words and wizardry.

One of the tenets that all wizardry, and riddlery, appears to share is that, to name something truly is to know it, and to have power over it. To love something is to know its true name, yet let it be free and not seek to control it. Over and over again the lesson rings through that to try to control something utterly is to destroy it. Even the attempt to master death, to be immortal, causes more grief than solace. It's unnatural in the original sense of the word: to be natural in this creation is to be mortal. Even stars eventually die; some quietly, some violently and with spectacle.

But death isn't the end. R. Buckminster Fuller once said, to give solace to a friend whose beloved near-son had just died tragically, There is no death. There is only a change of state. It's a chemical, or alchemical, sort of comment to make, and it does bring comfort. It's the sort of wisdom a wizard might give at such a moment. I'm not the first to think of Bucky Fuller as a sort of modern wizard.

So death isn't the end. The story goes on, and stories do. We can make stories even for things we don't know about, which are important but which we can't understand. Some of these stories we call myth, which mythologist and scholar Joseph Campbell once defined as The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Other such stories we call fiction, especially that sub-category of fiction with fantasy, or magical realism, or science fiction, or make-believe.

These stories are lies that tell more truth than so-called truthful stories. (Let's be blunt: there's no such thing as genre fiction, because in fact even non-genre fiction, so-called mainstream literary fiction, is just another kind of genre; so it's all one or it's nothing.) In each of them truth is revealed through narrative and dialogue, which are orderly lies we use to shape time into thought, to give comprehensible structure to an otherwise lumpy flow of chaotic memory.

Yet within the tenets of wizardry, words matter a great deal. Wizards are identified, in one sense, by the care and precision they take with how they use words. There is no casual or ordinary speech. That's a truth about life that we could all learn to live by, even as the lesson arises from fiction. Some days it's hard to separate what happens in fictional worlds from the so-called real world: which is, after all, a lie bound up in Indra's Net, what the Buddhists call maya, illusion. Ask a quantum physicist how real you are: you might discover you're not really here. Are the tenets of riddlery, or wizardry, then, so foreign, so fictional, after all? Perhaps they're more real than we think. Since, after all, words do have power to change the world; if not by magic, then by persuasion, by the magic of charisma and being in the right place at the right time, holding a long lever made out of great words that express great thoughts. Martin Luther King, Jr., stood on the steps of a monumental edifice in our nation's capitol, and said, I have a dream! And the world changed. If the world is but a dream, maya, then we dream a world into being each time we think we wake to start our day in the real world, awakening from the world of dreams. Chuang Tze woke one day and said, I had a marvelous dream! In my dream, I was a butterfly flitting from place to place. Am I am man who dreamt he was a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly dreaming he is a man> Such are the tenets of riddlery: Answer the unanswered question, and the unanswerable questions. Who was Chuang Tze, and was he a butterfly indeed?

In no way is wizardry—or poetry, for that matter, that other art of words—about having all the answers. But it is very much about asking the right questions.

There are cardinals nesting in the thick pines beyond my window. Robins everywhere, more than you see in most years, building nests in the budding trees, scratching like chickens for seeds in the grass. Spring brings back to life what once had died.