Perhaps the only body of religious doctrine and mythology I find harder to invest literal belief in than the orthodox scriptures of the great religions are the heresies that emerge from them; the Gnostics who were sure that they Knew because they could not live with or without the Canon.
Today, among street preachers, every manner of paranoid microcult, and a whole variety of politically correct revisionists, new Gnostics arise--something to do with a tension that arises between Empire and Republic working together in the same society, I think.
I offer the below neither as an antidote or even a polemic against the ancient or modern expression of Gnosticism, but only as whatever better alternative that conscious mythmaking may allow.
My interest in prior or alternative religious and spiritual traditions extends to Paganism too--and yet was there a difference? One thinks of Paganism today as more life affirming, and in seeing all of existance as a live, one could say more existance--affirming. The Pagan believes in the wheel, but believes that the return allows for variety, for a renewal and for the placement of a soul at different missions of need, and even death is seen as a means of maintaining a vital, spinning life for the whole.
Positive as I find this attitude, I think that the self--identification of Gnostics has, over the last two and ahalf millenia, allowed that way of thinking to extract itself from the remainder of Paganism, whereas before I suspect those wild with life and those frantic for escape once worked the same rites and sacred grounds. I hope that some of my poems have served to bring the riders of the wheel to face down the philosophy of nausea that so often challenges whether a given time or cultures collective cynicism will allow another turning.
This gathering of poems I call Notions simply because they are all about notions, though together they are not meant to form any cohesive cycle.
