A painting card on my table

This comes from Plato, from the Phaedo. Socrates says that precisely. Within the realm of myth, you wander into this danger zone, and that is the zone of the unknown. What you can do there is, first of all, utter or sing a carmen, a word that is usually translated as “poem” but primarily means “enchantment.” That is the best weapon at our disposal.

We are already there. As Sallustius the Neoplatonist wrote, the world itself is a myth. So no matter what we are doing, we are in the midst of a fable. And fables are by definition what enchant us. The only question is whether we perceive it or not.

Myths are not invented, they are there. You cannot say a myth starts at a certain moment.

And myth is never a single story. It is always a tree with many branches. Unless you take into account all possible variants, you don’t truly understand it.

excerpts from Calasso interview

[1]

The gods come afterward. In India the gods are latecomers. First there is Prajapati, and we just don’t know who he is—and he doesn’t know either, which is the disquieting point. Then come the rishis, the seers. Then finally come the gods—and they are not taken so seriously. Indra, who is the king of the gods, is made a fool of very often in Indian myths. This happens far more often in Indian lore than for his equivalent in Greek myth. At the end of all are animals and men.

Well, you find that notion already in Genesis. But that has its own consequence—guilt. Guilt lies at the root of sacrifice. Sacrifice is not a way to avoid guilt or to excuse guilt, it is a repetition of guilt. In a sense, it’s a reinforcement of guilt. The first guilt is the very fact of making things disappear. Killing is only one of the ways of achieving that. Eating is another.

These actions are all very closely connected and they reach very far back into prehistory. They have gone on for hundreds of thousands of years and have thus left their traces in our minds. You can take them into account or ignore them. Our world attempts to ignore them, it considers all of these things as very remote. In my books, I try to unearth them.

[2]

M, you cannot write. N. gather your cards then, they should be 10, and gather your notes. if this is your material for the day- transform it- enter it, rewrite it, stitch into it, work into it. writing about it as a way of transforming

the woman who lies in her marble bed in marble fur, because that is what that paint does, bridges the distance between marble and fur.. and the hoories come, wearing qawali caps, in orange and just a bit of bum pink and make a margin around the simple page of the marble boudoir. marble and fur boudoir as the lined page, the hoorees as the margin, that is not difficult.