Section Quotes from Christopher Moore's "Practical Demonkeeping"

Like one that on that lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread,
And having once turned round walks on,
And no more turns his head;
Because he knows a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

All mystical experience is coincidence;
and vice versa, of course.

Tom Stoppard, Jumpers

Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth.
Unseen, both when we wake and when we sleep.

John Milton

Listening - David Mura

Listening – David mura

And from that village, steaming with mist, riddled with rain,
from the fisherman in the bay hauling up nets of silver flecks;
from the droning of the Buddhist priest in the morning,

incense thickening his voice, a bit other-worldly, almost sickly;
from the oysters ripped from the sea bottom by half-naked women,
their skin darker than the bark in the woods, their lungs

as endless as some cave where a demon dwells
(soon their harvest will be split open by a blade, moist
meaty flesh, drenched in the smell of sea bracken, the tidal winds);

from the torrii[1] halfway up the mountain
and the steps to the temple where the gong shimmers
with echoes of bright metallic sound;

from the waterfall streaming, hovering in the eye, and in illusion, rising;
from the cedars that have nothing to do with time;
from the small mud-cramped streets of rice shops and fish mongers;

from the pebbles on the riverbed, the aquamarine stream
floating pine-trunks, felled upstream
by men with hachimaki2 tied round their forehead

and grunts of o-sha3 I remember from my father in childhood;
from this mythical land of the empty sign and a thousand-thousand
manners,
on the tip of this peninsula, far from Kyoto, the Shogun’s palace,

in a house of shoji4 and clean cut pine, crawling onto a straw futon,
one of my ancestors lay his head as I do now on a woman’s belly
and felt an imperceptible bump like the bow of a boat hitting a swell

and wondered how anything could cause such rocking unbroken
joy.


[1] Gate of a Shinto shrine.
2 Headband.
3 Ruler or monarch.
4 Paper screen.

Haroun and the Sea of Stories

…the Water Genie told Haroun about the Ocean of the Streams of Story, and even though he was full of a sense of hopelessness and failure the magic of the Ocean began to have an effect on Haroun. He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one different currents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity: and [the Water Genie] explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each colored strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all the stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories…

Salman Rushdie, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (London, 1990), 71-72.