a Skip and a Beat

In a piece collected in Close to the Knives David Wojnarowicz writes:

Hell is a place on earth. Heaven is a place in your head.

In case any readers might want to take this aphoristic slice of quotation as a license to mind trip, here is the fuller context:

[...] I play games with the road to shake myself up, at times squeezing my eyelids closed so that I drive quarter-mile stretches without sight and it becomes a fight to open my eyes before the side of the road overtakes me. The body that holds the wheel understands the danger that mounts by the moment and the second body smiles in the dark interior of the first. When the eyes finally open, they reveal nothing new about the world except a slight shift in landscape proving that increased mortality teaches me nothing. There's no enlarged or glittering new view of the nature of things or existence. No god or angels brushing my eyelids with their wings. Hell is a place on earth. Heaven is a place in your head.

Nothing new is revealed. But something is revealed. A touch of vertigo helps rebalance bodies.

And so for day 394
11.01.2008