Explore the edges...

Ran Prieur interview by Tim Boucher:

"...I see the world as a conflict between the grass and the pavement, and I work toward siding with the grass, or being the grass. On the physical level that's about 'dropping out,' finding a way to meet my basic needs and still have plenty of free time. And then my writing is about the mental levels. Part of it is breaking people out of the mental prison of seeing this society on its own terms. Things we take for granted, like the existence of police, or having to pay for water, or not being permitted to sleep in public, or being dependent for survival on wage labor, or having your entire day structured by the clock, would look like a dystopian nightmare from any other time in history, especially prehistory.

Then the prison has metaphysical levels, like the assumption that dead matter is the root of mind, which is a very recent and radical idea, and totally absurd if you can see it from the outside. Almost the entire 'new age' movement is just an attempt to make money from the shift back to seeing mind as the root of matter, but once the shift is done, they can't make money, so they draw it out and put lots of clutter around it. I want to get it done!

Also I'm a big follower of Charles Fort, not just his interest in strange phenomena, but his whole philosophy. Roughly his idea is that only the universe as a whole really exists, and everything else just seems to exist by inventing false boundaries. All our 'truths' come unraveled at the edges, and by exploring the edges we find new 'truths,' and it just keeps going. In Fortean science, there is no closure, and you can have many explanation systems all peacefully co-existing. Some people are only into the political angle of my writing and cringe at the metaphysical stuff, but there are tremendous political implications to a metaphysical system with no firm ground and no guiding principle except always looking beyond."