The ultimate blasphemy is to name the gods, to try to contain the essence of such unique things that are spiritual experience, to trap them in words, not as poetry or the like but as names, to pretend they are shared, to fool ourselves into thinking they are like the rest of our world. My friend was telling a story about how yesterday he was in a house trying to sleep on a couch and he felt a presence, it raised the hair on his arms, it prevented him from breathing and he attributed it to a ghost or ghosts and I totally believe his tale though you mustn't because spirit stories are only true in the first person, can be appreciated in the second and are lies in the third.... But I could not accept his naming of the source, the distillation or perversion of his beautiful, terrifying experience into a name that reduced it to being only a ghost story... 7/8/00 - 5 AM 
© Huw Powell
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