The quietest knife

I. Even the happiest breath— you don’t forget. It doesn’t leave.

Sleep it off like bad medicine. Maybe tomorrow you’ll vomit light.

II. In you, the architecture of longing: forgetting’s hollow bones, remembering’s teeth.

III. Perhaps.

Another day.

Perhaps not.

This inner fragmentation mirrors our view of the world “outside" which is seen as a multitude of separate objects and events. The natural environment is treated as if it consisted of separate parts to be exploited by different interest groups. The fragmented view is further extended to society which is split into different nations, races, religious and political groups. The belief that all these fragments—in ourselves, in our environment, and in our society—are really separate can be seen as the essential reason for the present series of social, ecological, and cultural crises. It has alienated us from nature and from our fellow human beings. It has brought a grossly unjust distribution of natural resources creating economic and political disorder, an ever rising wave of violence, both spontaneous and institutionalized, and an ugly, polluted environment in which life has often become physically and mentally unhealthy.

Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics

Joscelyn Godwin, Robert Fludd, Hermetic Philosopher and Surveyor of Two Worlds

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, from  “Women who Run with the Wolves,” published in 1992

In magic as in poetry, the effect a word creates is produced by the combination of its sound and its meaning, and the two things cannot really be disentangled from each other. Forceful words, impressively spoken and backed by authority . . . have a powerful effect on those who hear them. Magicians believe that in the same way forceful words, backed by the authority of the magician's will, have a powerful effect in magic. In some magical operations the words of an incantation are expected to be effective by themselves, with little or no other ceremonial.

Richard Cavendish, The Black Arts