Saturday 5 November 2022

The Hand of Xoannon









“On my Fortieth Birthday, rather than merely bore my friends by having anything as mundane as a midlife crisis, I decided it might be more interesting to terrify them, by going •completely• mad, and declaring myself as A Magician. 

This had been something that had been coming for a •while•….

It seemed to be a logical end step in my career as A Writer, and the problem is that with magic, being in many respects a Science of Language, you have to be •very• careful of What You SAY. 

Because if you suddenly declare yourself to be A Magician, without •any• knowledge of what that ENTAILS, then one day you are likely to wake up and to discover that is exactly What You ARE.





Now I read something a long time ago 
and I don't remember who wrote it, 
but it was written about Jewish commentary on 
The Torah -- God is omniscient, 
omnipotent and omnipresent :
What Does He Lack? 

And The Answers' "Limitation." 
and that's that's a... 
That's a Riddle and an Answer 
of unparalleled brilliance 
as far as I'm concerned 
because I think it speaks deeply 
to something about 
The Central Nature of Existence-Itself 
and that is that, without Limitation
there's no Being. 

Now, that's a hard thing to understand 
but I think you can understand it 
in a number of different ways -- 
The first thing you mightwant to understand 
is that I play this game with my students 
sometimes in my class --

I'll come up to 
a student, pick 
poor victim at random 
and come up to them, say 
"Okay, We're to Play a Game.", say, and they say, 
"Okay --and I say 
"Well, You Move First --"

Well, they don't know What to Do and 
The Reason for that is because 
The limiting parameters 
of The Game 
have not been defined 
and as a consequence of that 
they're stunned by their infinite freedom into complete immobility 
and what that means in a sense 
is that the --

In The Absence of Serious Constraint 
There can be 
no choice 
no freedom 
no existence 
and I believe this to be 
fundamentally True 
just as the fact that 
Human being is vulnerable is 
fundamentally True. 

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