Terrible things happen all the time, he thinks, but not today. Terrible things, beautiful things, things of such power, of such bewilderment, lucent and dark as tar. But right now the universe, restless beyond imagining, a universe of rock and flame, whose nature is incandescence – a universe that flickers, its impatient forms blinking like fireflies in the night – astounds and delights him.

A fan is like the thighs of a woman: It opens and closes. A good fan opens with a flick of the wrist. It produces its own weather – a breeze not so strong as to muss the hair.

The world is brimming with plaster replicas, and the point is to smash them to bits, to create an upheaval so acute it cannot be anticipated or resisted.

I am a wheel. As I rise, Sweetheart, I carry you along with me, a heady, dizzying spin toward the sweet oceans of eternity. On wings of flames we sink into the sea of love. May be burn forever like bees in honey. Who does not wish for that delirium to last forever?

And I cannot help but wonder as we navigate the realms of our own manufacture, will we remember how to cherish one another, or will these realms turn out to be far too self-referential, a kind of beautifully furnished tomb, a mind loop, a mirror reflecting a mirror-offering a vista that can only induce dizziness, longing, and loneliness?

Truth is a leper banished from the hearts of men and rotting away in exile. All that is left is corruption, a bad smell, some unnameable pieces of what was once a thing lucent and good.

The world is a translation of the divine, and its manifestation. To write a text is to propose a reading of the world and reveal its potencies.

My pen is the key to a fantastic bordello, and once the gate is opened, it ejaculates a bloody ink. The virgin paper set to shriek evokes worlds heretofore unknown: eruptive, incorruptible, suffocating.

I like to imagine that Adam’s tongue, his palate and his lips were always on fire, that the air he breathed was kindled to incandescence each time he cried out in sorrow or delight. If fiction can be said to have a function, it is to release that primary fury of which language, even now, is miraculously capable – from the dry mud of daily use. So that furred, spotted and striped, it may – as it did in Eden – scrawl under every tree as revelation.

The purpose of myth, therefore, is to both reveal and conceal. To tell what we have seen and disguise it, to mask God’s forked tongue.