reality cracking

I think that while the case is very strongly made by Neal Stephenson that the goddess Metis is the patron of hackers, crackers, and sreenigne, I think Bruno might very well have been the premier martyr - and it's thanks to John Crowley that I'm even aware of Bruno's achievements.

W. W. Atkinson

Mental Concentration, in practice, consists of focusing the mind upon a given subject, or object, firmly and fixedly, and then holding it there for a certain time, fully intent upon its object, and not allowing itself to be diverted or attracted from its object. It likewise consists in the correlative power of then detaching the mind from that subject, or object, and either allowing it to rest, or else focusing it upon another object. In other words, it either gives undivided attention or else inhibits (or "shuts off") attention from the given subject or object.

William Blake
The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by names & adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, & whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; Til a system was formed, which some took advantage of, & enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood; Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.
And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast.

*grrr* I wish I could afford all the John Crowley books. Aegypt, Love & Sleep, are out of my reach (plus I don't have a credit card) and I read a good 2/3rd of Daemonomania before deciding that I wanted to read the series in order (ha! fatchance) and using a rare encounter with online financial interactions actually purchased & downloaded Aegypt, only to have the file wiped from the computer due to inebriated blanket restructuring of the entire harddrive by my girlfriend at the time.. tottally turning me off the entire digital purchasing of data entirely.

Why is it so hard for a publishing company to put a couple of paperback editions of previous novels in a series when the latest comes out in hardback? Whiskey tango foxtrot indeed.. where this is leading is the incredible correlation between Bruno & the art of memory, ancient alchemy, and the art of reality cracking.

more coming (links & shit)