is not the entirety of life one absurd story, one unbelievable and foolish tale? Am I not writing my own fable and tale? A story is nothing more than a way of escaping unfulfilled dreams,—dreams that have not been reached, dreams that each storyteller has imagined according to their own inherited and constrained state of mind.
Sadegh Hedayat and Naveed Noori, The Blind Owl [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
Saint, hero, and poet are all inspired; the difference is that saint and hero work in their “… own flesh and blood and not in paper or parchment…” (PASL, 333). Their very lives are works of art, because they have permanently found the anti-self, and so, live in an inspired ecstasy. The poet lives in the tension between inspiration and the workaday world. According to this theory, the ecstatic state of mind, immersion in the anti-self, allows the daimon to inspire the artist.
Susan Johnston Graf, W B Yeats Twentieth Century Magus: An In-Depth Study of Yeat’s Esoteric Practices and Beliefs, Including Excerpts from His Magical Diaries [Bookshop, Amazon]
