Diving Into The Unknown Quotes

On September 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I'd later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it's her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I'll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.

I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it’s her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I’ll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.

There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.

Love was truly one of life’s mysteries. That it could fuck you five ways to Sunday and still remain so utterly perplexing and unknown was kind of impressive. I guess it all depends on how you look at it.

Gripped with bitter cold, ice-locked, Petersburg burned in delirium. One knew: out there, invisible behind the curtain of fog, the red and yellow columns, spires, and hoary gates and fences crept on tiptoe, creaking and shuffling. A fevered, impossible, icy sun hung in the fog - to the left, to the right, above, below - a dove over a house on fire. From the delirium-born, misty world, dragon men dived up into the earthly world, belched fog - heard in the misty world as words, but here becoming nothing - round white puffs of smoke. The dragon men dived up and disappeared again into the fog. And trolleys rushed screeching out of the earthly world into the unknown. ("The Dragon")

Nearly a Valediction" You happened to me. I was happened to like an abandoned building by a bull- dozer, like the van that missed my skull happened a two-inch gash across my chin. You were as deep down as I’ve ever been. You were inside me like my pulse. A new- born flailing toward maternal heartbeat through the shock of cold and glare: when you were gone, swaddled in strange air I was that alone again, inventing life left after you. I don’t want to remember you as that four o’clock in the morning eight months long after you happened to me like a wrong number at midnight that blew up the phone bill to an astronomical unknown quantity in a foreign currency. The U.S. dollar dived since you happened to me. You’ve grown into your skin since then; you’ve grown into the space you measure with someone you can love back without a caveat. While I love somebody I learn to live with through the downpulled winter days’ routine wakings and sleepings, half-and-half caffeine- assisted mornings, laundry, stock-pots, dust- balls in the hallway, lists instead of longing, trust that what comes next comes after what came first. She’ll never be a story I make up. You were the one I didn’t know where to stop. If I had blamed you, now I could forgive you, but what made my cold hand, back in prox- imity to your hair, your mouth, your mind, want where it no way ought to be, defined by where it was, and was and was until the whole globed swelling liquefied and spilled through one cheek’s nap, a syllable, a tear, was never blame, whatever I wished it were. You were the weather in my neighborhood. You were the epic in the episode. You were the year poised on the equinox.

I recall those beautiful summer mornings with my parents by the sandy beach of Belek. My father used to teach me how to ride waves. I remember him constantly emphasizing the fact that no wave, no matter how big it is should stir enough fear inside me to keep me glued to the shore. He used to repeat those words while glancing at my mother with a smile that could set the whole sea on fire. My mother, sitting on the beach, too afraid of the deep blue sea, contented herself with building sand castles, ones my father would step on trying to drag her hopelessly into water. Step on your sand castle and dive deep. Dive deep into the unknown. Life is damn too short for building sand castles.

Maybe they had become volcano smoke jumpers, diving into an unknown risk to do a dangerous job because, in part, it was a social good and, in part, because they loved the big show.

Death was not necessarily a portal to the blank bliss of absolute nothingness. It was a deep dive into the unknown.

because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.

Spare’s drawings were always inspired by the New Aesthetic, the New Sexuality. They amount almost to masturbation in line; the line coils and curls upon itself and mounts the steep incline of ecstasy as the amazing sigils are woven into a complex web of dream. To follow closely the line of some of his Sabbatic drawings is to leave earth and dive obliquely between those spaces that Lovecraft celebrated in his nightmare tales. Such drawings are themselves the gateway to the Sabbath; one is drawn into a vortex and whirled down the funnel of consciousness which explodes into unknown worlds. Spare would not reveal the magical graphs that unsealed the cells of these eldritch dimensions…

…one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake-I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I thinks it’s her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I’ll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.

… I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it’s her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I’ll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.

And then one afternoon as I confided my woes to her likeness, an unknown face interposed itself between us. Reflected in the glass I saw the head of a man who seemed to have emerged from a vat of formaldehyde. His mouth was twisted, his nose damaged, his hair tousled, his gaze full of fear. One eye was sewn shut, the other goggled like the doomed eye of Cain. For a moment I stared at that dilated pupil, before I realized it was only mine.

When you ask “Is it true?” for example, you may not really want to know. It could be that you’d rather stay with your statement than dive into the unknown. Blocking means rushing the process and answering with your conscious mind before the gentler polarity of mind (I call it “the heart”) can answer.

She didn’t note the time of moonrise or when a great horned owl took a diurnal dive at a blue jay. From bed, she heard the marsh beyond in the lifting of blackbird wings, but didn’t go to it. She hurt from the crying songs of the gulls above the beach, calling to her. But for the first time in her life, did not go to them. She hoped the pain from ignoring them would displace the tear in her heart. It did not. Listless, she wondered what she had done to send everyone away. Her own ma. Her sisters. Her whole family. Jodie. And now Tate. Her most poignant memories were unknown dates of family members disappearing down the lane. The last of a white scarf trailing through the leaves. A pile of socks left on a floor mattress. Tate and life and love had been the same thing. Now there was no Tate. “Why, Tate, why?” She mumbled into the sheets, “You were supposed to be different. To stay. You said you loved me, but there is no such thing. There is no one on Earth you can count on.” From somewhere very deep, she made herself a promise never to trust or love anyone again. She’d always found the muscle and heart to pull herself from the mire, to take the next step, no matter how shaky. But where had all that grit brought her? She drifted in and out of thin sleep.

What is it to become enamored by the process of deep diving into the unknown oceans of vast unchartered waters within the psyche? There is a universe out there, science can prove it. Now we become private investigators to the universe within, researching the inner stars, planets, and galaxies for the clues to the profound mysteries.

Willingly taking a dive headfirst into the unknown takes some serious courage.

Doubt is more intelligent than poetry, insofar as it tells malicious tales about the world, things we’ve long known but struggled to hide from ourselves. But poetry surpasses doubt, pointing to what we cannot know. Doubt is narcissistic; we look at everything critically, including ourselves, and perhaps that comforts us. Poetry, on the other hand, trusts the world, and rips us from the deep-sea diving suits of our “I”; it believes in the possibility of beauty and its tragedy. Poetry’s argument with doubt has nothing in common with the facile quarrel of optimism and pessimism. The twentieth century’s great drama means that we now deal with two kinds of intellect: the resigned and the seeking, the questing. Doubt is poetry for the resigned. Whereas poetry is searching, endless wandering. Doubt is a tunnel, poetry is a spiral. Doubt prefers to shut, while poetry opens. Poetry laughs and cries, doubt ironizes. Doubt is death’s plenipotentiary, its longest and wittiest shadow; poetry runs toward an unknown goal. Why does one choose poetry while another chooses doubt? We don’t know and we’ll never find out. We don’t know why one is Cioran and the other is Milosz.

There is in me an insatiable thirst for a quest. For discovering things greater than ourselves. Beyond that is a murky darkness which beckons me to its call. I seek movement for movement's sake. There is no destination except the verb of motion...I seek to dive into the unknown and allow its wisdom to take me away. And when it is finished with me, it will bring me back and things will never be the same again.

The Frog was the only one who could retrieve the golden ball because he was the only one who could descend into the well. He was the only one who could descend into the well because the art of diving was still unknown in Europe at this time. The art of diving was still unknown in Europe because it had not yet been imported from India. Therefore the Frog was the only one who could retrieve the golden ball. Q.E.D.

Like growth, change in general can be hard and painful. Though oftentimes it only looks as such on the surface. Being part of the unknown, people tend to be afraid of change. So they fight it, resist it, and try to control it. This resistance is what usually causes suffering; for it creates sorrow and disappointments. Change, however, only becomes hard and painful when resisted. To flow through life one must dive into it head first.

ON SEPTEMBER 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I’d later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the Seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it’s her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I’ll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.

According to the man, who identified himself as Morton Thornton, the night got real long and by midnight, he was darn well wed to one of the lovelier inhabitants of the dish, a comely middle-aged amoeba of unknown parentage named Rita. When he was rescued on the morning of the following day, Morton plumb forgot about his single-celled nuptials and went back to his daytime job tasting the contents of open pop bottles for backwash and cigarette butts. Only sixteen years later, when a brilliant Sacajawea Junior High roving reporter—who shall remain nameless—discovered the product of this union lurking among us right here at Sac Junior High, was Morton’s long-held secret discovered. “This intrepid reporter was present three weeks into Dale Thornton’s third try at seventh grade, when the young Einstein bet this reporter and several other members of the class that he could keep a wad of chewing tobacco in his mouth from the beginning of fifth period Social Studies until the bell. The dumb jerk only lasted twenty minutes, after which he sprinted from the room, not to be seen for the rest of the day. When he returned on the following morning, he told Mr. Getz he had suddenly become ill and had to go home, but without a written excuse (he probably didn’t have a rock big enough for his dad to chisel it on) he was sent to the office. The principal, whose intellectual capacities lie only fractions of an IQ point above Dale’s, believed his lame story, and Dale was readmitted to class. Our dauntless reporter, however, smelled a larger story, recognizing that for a person to attempt this in the first place, even his genes would have to be dumber than dirt. With a zeal rivaled only by Alex Haley’s relentless search for Kunta Kinte, he dived into Dale’s seamy background, where he discovered the above story to be absolutely true and correct. Further developments will appear in this newspaper as they unfold.

For what is life, but a plunge from the high diving board into the fantastical and the unknown?

She trusted Finn completely. If he said a pool was safe to swim in, she dived in without a second thought, and the dreaded piranha fish did not tear at her flesh, nor did a caiman come at her with snapping jaws. If he told her a mushroom was safe to eat, she ate it. “My father had this thing he used to say to me,” she told Finn. “It was in Latin. Carpe diem. ‘Seize the day.’ Get the best out of it, take hold of it and live in it as hard as you can.” She pushed back her hair. “After he died, and my mother, I couldn’t do it too well. There never seemed to be a day I wanted to seize all that much. But here…” “Yes, some places are right for you. Your mother was a singer, wasn’t she?” “Yes. But she never made a fuss about it. I never remember her saving her voice for the performance or gargling with eggs and all that stuff. She’d just sing--in the house, in the garden, anywhere.” “Everyone says you ought to get your voice trained,” he said, and frowned because if she had a future as a singer, perhaps she shouldn’t be taking off into the unknown. She shook her head. “I’m all right like this.” “But won’t you miss music?” “There’s always music. You just have to open your mouth.

To understand this new frontier, I will have to try to master one of the most difficult and counterintuitive theories ever recorded in the annals of science: quantum physics. Listen to those who have spent their lives immersed in this world and you will have a sense of the challenge we face. After making his groundbreaking discoveries in quantum physics, Werner Heisenberg recalled, "I repeated to myself again and again the question: Can nature possibly be so absurd as it seemed to us in these atomic experiments?" Einstein declared after one discovery, "If it is correct it signifies the end of science." Schrödinger was so shocked by the implications of what he'd cooked up that he admitted, "I do not like it and I am sorry I had anything to do with it." Nevertheless, quantum physics is now one of the most powerful and well-tested pieces of science on the books. Nothing has come close to pushing it off its pedestal as one of the great scientific achievements of the last century. So there is nothing to do but to dive headfirst into this uncertain world. Feynman has some good advice for me as I embark on my quest: "I am going to tell you what nature behaves like. If you will simply admit that maybe she does behave like this, you will find her a delightful, entrancing thing. Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, 'But how can it be like that?' because you will get 'down the drain,' into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

Down by the stream, Rose gathered many unknown little flowers and twigs. Nearby haystacks at the centre of the barn, nothing stirred: nt even a piece of straw fell out of place. Emma dived deep into the pond. The water of the pond imparted a greenish tinge on her floating body,

Once you decide to dive into that ocean of unknown which uplifts your spirit, inspite of the fears, you start producing your own limitlessness.

It is characteristic of the person who is emotionally in health that he can ‘make do’ with fewer guarantees than can the emotionally disturbed person. . . . He does not need, therefore, what amounts to a guarantee that his truth is the truth or is all truth, or that his actions will inevitably be crowned with success. Since he experiences, by and large, an inner state of happiness and freedom, he can take it more or less for granted that he has somehow got hold of enough truth to go on for the time being — and that more is likely to come when he has gone far enough to need and find it.” —The Mind Alive One of the places that mature courage is most needed is in exercising the capacity to move forward on faith. The Overstreets argue that the mature mind is one that is comfortable acting on a “faith in life,” which they describe as the psychological “permission” that allows the emotionally healthy man “to go on from where he is,” “to go further into experience than he has ever yet gone,” “to go beyond the known into the not yet known, beyond the tried into the not yet tried.” Part of the kind of black and white thinking that marks the adolescent mind is the desire to possess absolute knowledge before committing to an idea or path. To have all the answers before moving forward or throwing one’s hat in the ring. The mature person has a higher tolerance for mystery and uncertainty; he doesn’t have to have everything figured out in order to take a step into the darkness. This ability to grapple with the unknown, the Overstreets argue, grows out of the mature individual’s substantial, varied experiences with diving deep into life.

of course i am scared i am terrified by the depths of diving down into the unknown to find myself lost in the darkest corners of my soul confused and all alone and i am unnerved by the truths i might find for once it’s done there is no coming back to a place of innocence

For almost forty years now, I have lived on the ocean. I have dedicated myself to the sea, and wholly consecrated myself to it. I have explored depths that, until then, were unknown. I have had good days and bad days. I have dived in the waters of incredible transparency, and I have experienced the violence of waves like those at Europa, which tore the Calypso from its anchorage and battered its aging carcass with elemental fury. But, despite all the dangers, all the fatigue, all the sacrifices, I have never regretted the choice I made. The sea, in the final account, always brought me more joy than pain. And that was true in this case also; for I had the pleasure of seeing us all together again - our entire team, gathered under a blue sky, on a blue sea. Once more, the sea had refused to exact a price for our audacity and our curiosity; and once more I was grateful to her for her generosity. -P219

Life is like the ocean. It dips and dives. You can have a general course of navigation but you can't stop the tide from where it takes you.

Your eyes speak myriad new words unknown languages they talk to the world they say unknown things which can only be felt deeply and soulfully Your eyes are like windows to your soul they mesmerise the looker to dive deep into them If I look longer into your eyes I feel lost in them I feel I discover a new world inside them Your eyes are the ocean and the depth of your eyes and the stories that they tell me is an aching mystery !

Bring me the stars She wanted me to bring her those stars, I looked at the sky and wondered how far they could be, They had witnessed moments of triumph, romance and many wars, And from where I was they appeared too distant to me, But then a feeling greeted me suddenly, “To know how far , far can be; you must go, Bring her the stars she loves so passionately, And how much she loves you, you shall know!” I could dare the dark even the unknown, But being unable to see her would be like witnessing the sky without stars, And in my thoughts in these distant skies I have often flown, Knowing that she is beside me, kissing me, touching me, unlike these far away stars, Yet her wish, her desire, is like this night sky to me, Where the stars indeed exist, But somehow this sky of mine where she is everything, she fails to see, Perhaps this is why from seeking these new and unknown stars I resist, But tonight she kissed me with her eyes and she spread over my soul, And said, “I want those stars and the sky too.” I wondered how I could steal the empire of Gods whole, But for her love, her smile, her warm and wet kisses, I can anything do, So I held her in my embrace and felt her everywhere, Then I let her drown into my eyes, And from there, when she returned she had retrieved the sky, the stars from somewhere, Then her smile and the passion in her eyes, Poured over me like the million kisses of love, And from this night onwards, whenever she loves me in the darkness of the night, I hold her warm body in my arms and kiss her with the feeling of love, And then she dives into my eyes of passion to retrieve her objects of delight, It has been so, since that night, that starry night, When I realised how far, far can be, And with the feeling of love one can even steal the starlight, At least this is how I feel Irma, whenever you confess you love me!

I could avoid the thought that what life was really demanding from me might involve surrendering the craving for mastery and diving into the unknown instead.

I commenced writing this scroll in a frenzied attempt to find myself. I wished to ascertain how the concertina wire that cinches the plasma pool of my biological capsule together stitches a person into the vacillating web of eternity. Instead of my wild ravings spooling out answers, the act of writing nonstop in the midst of my darkest hours triggered a torrent of questions to examine. Each adamant question posed led to a baffling string of insistent conundrums. I orchestrated an urgent caucus, and tenaciously conducted a fact-finding mission. I held a self-questioning klatch attempting to pierce a spool of secular inquiries, a series of pious and profane questions that compressed upon my confused mind. The resultant positive displacement and negative displacement of febrile energy generated from this disorientating and mind-numbing process of rigorous self-scrutiny spun me akin to a crazed top. Unsure of my destiny, I lunged into the unknown, diving headfirst into the indecipherable parts of my reeling existence. I asked questions and sought answers, examined a sundry of personal experiences, and listened to my inner vibrations. How does a person square their mystical self to the undulating camber of life? How does anyone face the deflating specter of the impending death of his or her beloved? I seek to develop a desirable quotient of self-confidence and gain the needed degree of brio to tackle life. I wish to learn how to savor every moment, come to terms with impairing personal fears, blighting uncertainty, and caustic self-doubt. I aspire to overcome the disfiguring emotional liabilities harvested during my troubled past, develop healthful new habits, and brace myself against the irreducible fact of human mortality.

There’s a sweet kind of abyss in the unknown. In diving headfirst into whatever the universe sends one’s way.

The heist of feelings Everything appeared older than it was, Time seemed to end sooner than it should have ended, A moment that was here just now, I wondered, now where it was, It felt like a desire, that before a wish could find it, always ended, A feeling of strangeness where every sense failed to feel anything, Because time ended sooner than before, And you only felt a feeling that was made of everything but you could not feel anything, Because it led to incomplete sensations that felt, only partially, like before, They bore no true shades of complete feelings, Because before the heart could feel them time ended their reign, And being caught in this ever flowing stream of incomplete feelings, Made you a victim of this strange reign, Where time no more ruled, but something that controlled it now manifested itself, Time rushed with an unknown pace, witnessing the premature death of its every moment, It was as if time was fleeing from its own interlooping moments, and confounding itself, And a sensation that visited the heart, left before it could be felt in that climactic moment, And in this trench of strangeness everything vanished, finally to be lost forever, Every incomplete feeling struggled to witness its completion, Before it was destroyed and lost forever, And moments of time too appeared desperate to realise their own completion, But every moment of time was dissected into two halves, One that felt a feeling and the other that carried its unfelt parts, And thus every feeling, every sensation was cut into halves, One that belonged to the mind and the one that only bore heart’s parts, For a feeling that enters the heart through the mind is incomplete unless it reaches the heart, And this force somehow stole the moments of time that entered the mind, Ending them before they could meet their waiting part in the heart, And as the moment left alone in the heart ended without feeling the sensation of the mind, The trench was filled with moments of heart and moments of mind, never together, And finally time realised it could undo this continuous heist of feelings and sensations, And keep its separated moments together, It dived into this trench with infinity and retrieved all feelings and sensations, While this strange force is now riding ripples of infinity, Time has rearranged sensations and feelings and paired them with their respective moments, While the evil force is caught in the loops of infinity, Time now flows as it always used to, in the form of complete moments, Where a feeling beginning in the mind grows as a sensation in the heart, And my love Irma, that is what time should be doing forever now, Letting the thoughts of mind sink into the sensations of my heart, To be our infinity of known feelings and sensations, always as fresh as now, always like now!

Instead, try breathing into the change. Dive into the unknown.

it is labor, and labor only, which makes civilization possible. ’Tis labor that toils, and spins, and weaves, and builds, that another, not it, may enjoy. ’Tis the laborers who dive into the unknown caverns of the sea and compel her to yield up her hidden treasures, which they know not even the value thereof.

I was very close to the age where I would have been sent to train, but was saved from that fate when we were forced out of Pinyudo, all forty thousand of us, by the Ethiopian forces that overthrew President Mengistu. ... The area near the river was marshy and the group was soaked, wading through the heavy water. The river, when we arrived, was high and moving quickly. Trees and debris flew with the current. The first shots seemed small and distant. I turned to follow the sound. I saw nothing, but the gunfire continued and grew louder. The attackers were nearby. The sounds multiplied, and I heard the first screams. A woman up the river spat a stream of blood from her mouth before falling, lifeless, into the water. She had been shot by an unseen assailant, and the current soon took “her toward my group. Now the panic began. Tens of thousands of us splashed through the shallows of the river, too many unable to swim. To stay on the bank meant certain death, but to jump into that river, swollen and rushing, was madness. “The Ethiopians were attacking, their Eritrean cohorts with them, the Anyuak doing their part. They wanted us out of their country, they were avenging a thousand crimes and slights. I paddled and kicked. I looked again for the spot on the riverbank where I had last seen the crocodiles. They were gone. —The crocodiles! —Yes. We must swim fast. Come. There are so many of us. We’re at a mathematical advantage. Swim, Achak, just keep paddling. A scream came from very close. I turned to see a boy in the jaws of a crocodile. The river bloomed red and the boy’s face disappeared. —Keep going. Now he’s too busy to eat you. We were halfway across the river now, and my ears heard the hiss under the water and the bullets and mortars cracking the air. Each time my ears fell below the surface, a hiss overtook my head, and it felt like the sound of the crocodiles coming for me. I tried to keep my ears above the surface, but when my head was too high, I pictured a bullet entering the back of my skull. ... I pushed my face into the dirt, but secretly I watched the slaughter below. Thousands of boys and men and women and babies were crossing the river, and soldiers were killing them randomly and sometimes with great care. There were a few SPLA troops fighting from our side of the river, but for the most part they had already escaped, leaving the Sudanese civilians alone and unprotected. The Ethiopians, then, had their choice of targets, most of them unarmed. “they chased the Sudanese from their land with machetes and the few rifles they possessed. They hacked and shot those running to the river, and they shot those flailing across the water. Shells exploded, sending plumes of white twenty feet into the air. Women dropped babies in the river. Boys who could not swim simply drowned... Some of the dead were then eaten by crocodiles. The river ran in many colors that day, green and white, black and brown and red. “—Come here!" a woman said. I looked to find the source of the voice, and turned to see an Ethiopian woman in a soldier’s uniform. —Come here and I will help you find Pochalla! she said. The other boys began walking toward her. —No! I said. —See how she’s dressed! —Don’t fear me, she said. I am just a woman! I am a mother trying to help you boys. Come to me, children! I am your mother! Come to me! The unknown boys ran toward her. Achor stayed with me. When they were twenty feet from her, the woman turned, lifted a gun from the grass, and with her eyes full of white, she shot the taller boy through the heart. I could see the bullet leaving his back. His body kneeled and then fell on its side, his head landing before his shoulder. “Run! he said, grabbing my shirt from behind. We ran from her, diving into the grass and then crawling and hurtling away fom the woman, who was still shouting at us. "Come back!" she said. "I am your mother, come back, my children!

There’s a sweet kind of abyss in the unknown. In diving headfirst into whatever the universe sends one’s way. "Whether we confront that unknown or evade it, it remains there, a silent test, one that we ultimately must pass or fail. Whether it be at that moment or in thirty years’ time, the test will never fade for we are that test. We are the sum of many tests that we sit through without even knowing. They forge us in fire, strengthening us like we were steel, and that is why we must embrace change. "Today is the first change as we pass from adolescence into adulthood, and as we sit here today, or in my case, stand, we face the unknown of the future and rather than fear it, we’re excited for it. Today, we’re passing our first test as an adult.

Unknowns? About diving a tiny one-man ship into a star? Imagine that.

Before diving in, consult QuantitativeMedicine.net for the latest list (and pricing). Enter “Blood Test Panels” in the search box. The availability and usefulness of the various tests are moving targets. Several important tests are no longer available. The reasons for this are unknown, but almost surely financial. We hope they return, along with some useful new ones. Good

In my opinion, heroes exist in different degrees, like great men and women: some are even greater than others. But in essence, I believe that a hero is a person who risks his or her own life—maybe even losing it—in a selfless, successful effort to save the life of another. For example, if a mother dives into a river to save her struggling child, she isn’t really a hero; but if she dives into a river to save a struggling child unknown to her, she is clearly a hero if she is successful and if not, she certainly behaved heroically. Likewise, acts of self-defense, even when the lives of others also are at stake, do not quite rise to the level of heroism, although they may be courageous. In addition, the degree of individual heroism grows with various factors, such as nobility of purpose, the degree of risk, and so on. So wartime itself does not produce heroes; instead, it awakens the giants among us.

There is no requirement for those affected by an idea to be aware of any of this, of course. When the writer and media critic Philip Sandifer writes that "David Whitaker, at once the most important figure in Doctor Who's development and the least understood, created a show that is genuinely magical and this influence cannot be erased from within the show," he does not mean that any of the hundreds of actors and writers who went on to work on the programme saw it in those terms. Or as Sandifer so clearly puts it, "I don't actually believe that the writers of Doctor Who were consciously designing a sentient metafiction to continually disrupt the social order through a systematic process of détournement. Except maybe David Whitaker." From Drummond and Cauty's perspective, the story of Doctor Who is irrelevant. All that was happening was that they were exploring their mental landscape, and they were fulfilling their duty as artists by doing so more deeply than normal people. This is a landscape with many unseen, unknown areas where who-knows-what might be found. The KLF explored further than most and, if we were to accept Moore's model, it would perhaps not be surprising that a fiction as complex as Doctor Who could encounter them in Ideaspace and, being at its lowest point and in dire need of help, use them for its own ends. For Moore, and other artists such as David Lynch who use similar models, the role of the artist is like that of a fisherman. It is their job to fish in the collective unconscious and use all their skill to best present their catch to an audience. Drummond and Cauty, on the other hand, appear to have been caught by the fish. Lacking any clear sense of what they were doing, they dived in as deeply as Moore and Lynch. They did not have a specific purpose for doing so. They just needed to make something happen - anything really, such is the path of chaos. "It was supposed to be a proper dance record, but we couldn't fit the four-four beat to it, so we ended up with the glitter beat, which was never really our intention but we had to go with it," Cauty has said. "It was like an out of control lorry, you know, you're just trying to steer it, and that track took itself over really, and did what it wanted to do. We were just watching." This lack of intention is significant, from a magical point of view. One of the most important aspects of magical practice is the will. Aleister Crowley defined magic as being changes in the world brought about by the exercise of the will, hence his maxim 'Do what thou Will shall be the whole of the Law.' The will or intention of a magical act is important because the magician opens himself up to all sorts of strange powers and influences and he must avoid being controlled by them. Drummond and Cauty were not exerting any control on the process, and so they made themselves vulnerable to the who-knows-whats that live out of sight in the depths of Ideaspace. For this reason, you could understand why Moore would think that Bill Drummond was “totally mad." All this only applies if you're prepared to accept the notion of magic, of course.

There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.

Each time I see the woman leap off the Seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower- one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake- I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it's her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I'll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.