Weaveworld

by Clive Barker

Perhaps it doesn’t really matter how accurate my memories are; all that matters is how powerfully they move me.

Tales of Paradise Lost are central to our culture, of course; we are all exiles from some place of bliss.

Yes, fantastic fiction can be intricately woven into the texture of our daily lives, addressing important issues in fabulist form. But it also serves to release us for a time from the definitions that confine our daily selves; to unplug us from a world that wounds and disappoints us, allowing us to venture into places of magic and transformation.

To dream in isolation can be properly splendid to be sure; but to dream in company seems to me infinitely preferable.

Furnaces, after all, grew cold if left unstoked. Even stars went out after a millennium. But the lust of Cuckoos, like so much else about that species, defied all the rules. The less it was fed, the hotter it became.

Then, with his lover out of sight, he went in search of his heart’s desire.

The question she would ask, viewing the most exquisite jug on earth, would be: does it pour? And it was in a sense a quality she sought in every facet of her life.

It was less born than shat, dropping from between its parent’s legs like a vast mewling turd.

Hate remembered though; hate remembered long after love had forgotten.

Das, was man sick vorstellt, braucht man nie zu verlieren. She struggled with this, suspecting that her rusty German might be missing the felicities. The closest approximation she could make was: That which is imagined need never be lost.

“Believe nothing,” Apolline advised. “This woman wouldn’t know the truth if it fucked her.”

She’d taken the harlot century she’d been born into for granted, knowing no other, but now — seeing it with his eyes, hearing it with his ears — she understood it afresh; saw just how desperate it was to please, yet how dispossessed of pleasure; how crude, even as it claimed sophistication; and, despite its zeal to spellbind, how utterly unenchanting.

The room they’d put Suzanna in was cold and charmless enough, but it could have taken lessons from the man who sat opposite her.

True joy is a profound remembering; and true grief the same.

It would be, he idly thought, a fine time to die. And a finer time still to live, with so much laid out before him.

poetry was heard differently from ear to ear. Poetry was like that. The same, he began to see, was also true of geography.

“Fact is,” said the monkey, “neither of us is quite sure who does what any longer. But then love’s like that, don’t you find?”

a thing that grows too certain of itself becomes a kind of lie.

What better? he thought: an upstanding, fine-principled, Law-loving despot.

The affection he felt for Geraldine was painless, which was surely the most certain sign of how slight it was.

They exchanged the bones of their stories as quickly as they could, leaving the meat for less urgent times.

If he’d been a man who believed in ghosts, he’d have said the house was haunted. He wasn’t, so he kept his fears to himself, where they multiplied.

In the final confrontation of any great tale, dialogue was redundant. With nothing left to say, only action remained: a murder or a marriage.

Magic might be bestowed upon the physical, but it didn’t reside there. It resided in the word, which was mind spoken, and in motion, which was mind made manifest; in the system of the Weave and the evocations of the melody: all mind.

So let it do its worst, if that at the last was inevitable. Let the void come, and bring an end to the tyranny of hope.

It was vaster than he’d imagined: and darker; and emptier.

What Cal saw in that geometry was all paradox. It was bleached, yet black; a void, yet brimming; perfect in its beauty, yet more profoundly rotten than any living tissue could be.

There was such sanity in his voice; a politician’s sanity, as he sold his flock the wisdom of the bomb.

They meant nothing in the cosmic context. But it was a necessary comfort, to see the stars and call them by name, as if you knew them as friends. Without that courtesy the sight might break a man’s heart.