Back in Portland, in monastic solitude, away from tender temptation and savage predation, this weary writer’s eye revisits the bookshelf of Yeti Waters, my friend and colleague, who hold the nearly thousand-page tome that was one brilliant man’s unravelling madness.

Also on the cynically considered bookshelf are the following works, from each a quote, which I am minded to take as guideposts on this investigation into what I have feared might become of my mind if I looked to long into the abyss of reality. For the man who selected the below quotes of others has made his business what I, here continue as a flirtation and the flirtatious would be wise to head the serious.

“One cannot coerce the Spiritual: if one attempts to enter into the Light without preparation, one always faces the trials and dangers of darkness. At the very least, and enforced entry into initiation will drive the illegal entrant insane.”

-David Ovason, The Zelator, quoted in the in Sinister forces: A Grimoire of American Political Witchcraft: Boke One: The Nine by Peter Levenda “History,

…

“Stephan said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

-James Joyce, Ulysses

From Book Two: A Warm Gun

…

“The sinister is always the unintelligible, the impressive, the numinous. Wherever something divine appears, we begin to experience fear.”

-Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig

Forward, as I return to the west coast to finish numerous works of fiction with spiritual conviction, this mind’s eye turns again to the one novelist who wrote himself into insanity with a most curious postscript to his dystopian musings, The Exegesis of Phillip K. Dick, a tormented soul in a damaged brain who managed to glimpse the future with more accuracy than the rest, and also to encroach into the past from a vantage of profound and sometimes gibbering unrest.