Muad’Dib… and I remember my favorite line: “Fear is the mind-killer.”

I love the Dickinson quote which you chose all those years ago, among the others :)

I love these photos of you two. I’m so sorry for the sadness of her absence. 💚🩶

Oh no!! That’s a scary moment you captured.
Sending you strength and love 💚
(also sent you an email)

I also loved her metaphor of the “Shining Tribe” and read several of her blog posts.

I’ve never read any of her novels, but I was enriched by her influential book on tarot - “78 Degrees of Wisdom” - and wrote her an email expressing my appreciation a few years before she passed. I was thinking about her this past week, and your post makes me want to now seek out “Godmother Night”. 😊

Nicholas, your poem reminds me of another favorite which I don't believe was ever published —

"The Sublime Wants To Reach You" by Mira Fong

(with references to desert, mountains, "inside your chest" and something of its general mood…)

Happy was she who could believe without seeing, who was at one with the duration and continuity of life… who had the freedom of the city in everything that she touched or came in contact with, a fish swimming downstream, a leaf on a tree, a cloud in the sky, an image in a poem.

… making an accomplice of the reader, a traveling companion. Simultaneanize him, provided that the reading will abolish reader's time and substitute author's time. Thus the reader would be able to become a coparticipant and cosufferer of the experience through which the novelist is passing…

a narrative that will act as a coagulant of experiences, as a catalyst of confused and badly understood notions, which first off will cut into the one who is writing it …

a narrative that will not be a pretext for the transmission of a 'message' (there is no message, only messengers, and that is the message, just as love is the one who loves) …

To provoke, assume a text that is out of line, untied, incongruous… to take from literature that part which is a living bridge from man to man…

The world was still something petrified and established, swinging on its hinges, a skein of streets and trees and names and months.

We invent our conflagration, we burn outwardly from within, maybe that is the choice, maybe words envelop it the way a napkin does a loaf of bread and maybe the fragrance is inside, the flour puffing up, the yes without the no, or the no without the yes, the day without manes… [spirits of the dead]

To burn like this without surcease, to bear the inner burning coming on like fruit's quick ripening, to be the pulse of a bonfire in this thicket of endless stone, walking through the nights of our life, obedient as our blood in its blind circuit.

Like a tarot figure, something that has to resolve itself, a polyhedron in which every edge and every facet keeps its immediate sense, the false one, until the mediating sense is integrated, revelation.

Enough of hedonistic and prechewed novels, with psychologies. One must aim at the maximum, be a 𝘷𝘰𝘺𝘢𝘯𝘵 as Rimbaud wanted to be.

I know that "coherence" in a mainstream sense wasn't Cortázar’s aim. In my opinion though, non-linear and experimental forms can be done better. Perhaps the more recent House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski (published March 2020) is seen as less "literary" than Rayuela, but I enjoyed it more.

I once belonged to a book club that tried reading Hopscotch, and we collectively chose to abandon it.

I saved some excerpts from the novel that I found beautiful and thought provoking. For me, they were isolated gems of language craftsmanship, and the book didn't have enough narrative coherence.