We must not force our poets to limit the world any further. That is a crime against life itself. If the poet begins to speak only of narrow things, of things that we can effortlessly digest

and recognise, of things that do not disturb, frighten, stir, or annoy us, or make us restless for more, make us cry for greater justice, make us want to set sail and explore inklings murdered in our youths, if the poet sings only of our restricted angles and in restricted terms and in restricted language, then what hope is there for any of us in this world?

Those of us who want this are cowards, in flesh and in spirit. We fear heroic heights. We dread the recombining of the world, dread a greater harvest of being. We sit lazily and demand that our poets draw the horizon closer. We therefore become separated from our true selves. Then even beauty can seem repugnant. Then, we no longer recognise who we are, and we forget what we used to be, what states we sometimes inhabited, what extended moments of awareness.

These old storytellers were the true magicians. They were humanity’s truest friends and most reliable guides. Their role was both simple and demanding. They had to go down deep into the seeds of time, into the dreams of their people, into the unconscious, into the uncharted fears, and bring shapes and moods back up into the light. They had to battle with monsters before they told us about them. They had to see clearly. They had to see even what they hadn’t seen, and make it more real to us than our most ordinary or most frightening experiences. They lived lives of intense sacrifice, placing their psyches, dreams, hungers, and their lives on the altar of listening, seeing, sensing, confronting. And then

they had to render all they had witnessed into comprehendable stories from the other side of the fire, in the deepest of nights.

They risked their sanity and consciousness in the service of dreaming better futures. They risked madness, or being unmoored in the wild realms of unknown interspaces, or being devoured by the unexpected demons of the communal imagination. When great storytellers die, a thousand years of unconfronted journeys, unguided journeys towards the deceptive lights of future civilisations also perish in their silence.

The joy of transgressing beautifully, of taking readers to places they wouldn’t willingly go, this joy of seducing or dragging readers in spite of themselves to places deep in them where wonders lurk beside terrors, this delicate art of planting delayed repeat explosions and revelations in the reader’s mind, and doing this while enchanting them — this is one of the most mysterious joys of all. It suggests that, at bottom, and never wanting to admit it, we really want to face the hidden Minotaur within, we want the drains unblocked within, we want the frozen river of our blood and compassion to flow again, we want the pain so that we can be free. It is just that we want this unpleasant job of facing the dead and rotting thoughts, habits, desires, notions, and traditions to be done with our collusion, with our secret consent. And we would much prefer to be enchanted or to laugh or to be taken out of ourselves while the horrors are being faced, while the ghosts are being exorcised. And we hope afterwards that we will be lighter for it all, and that the gods of harmony will again, for a while, reside in us. With great books we are sometimes granted this grace.

The ages have been inundated with vast oceans of words. We have been virtually drowned in them. Words pour at us from every angle or corner. They have not brought understanding, or peace, or healing, or a sense of self-mastery, nor has the ocean of words given us the feeling that, at least in terms of tranquillity, the human spirit is getting better.

At best our cry for meaning, for serenity, is answered by a greater silence, the silence that makes us seek higher reconciliation.

I think we need more of the wordless in our lives. We need more stillness, more of a sense of wonder, a feeling for the mystery of life. We need more love, more silence, more deep listening, more deep giving.

It is a bewildering fact that while we launch out to distant planets, while we approach the wonder and dread of a new millennium (one that could see the human race bring about its own extinction, or enter the greatest stage of its development), as human beings we have not yet begun to see one another as people who are forced to be together must. Human history is hundreds of thousands of years old and still we look at one another with superficial eyes — as if we haven’t learnt in all these millennia of interacting that we are all merely human, that beneath our skins there are continents of similar desires and eruptive dreams, swirling universes of thoughts, pre-historic urges, lightning flashes, and an eternal bloom of flowers. It is bewildering because it seems that beneath the strife of our age, internecine warfare, tribal antagonisms, religious intolerance, racial violence, the disharmony of the sexes, beneath all these lurks the most ordinary discovery that we are human, and that life is

Holy.