The Gospel According to Judas - A Handbook on Life

> From this, and this.

I have seen snakes in the fire. No, this is not a portent of doom. It was in a commercial on TV, the view from the top of a fire a few feet wide. I think it was actually a commercial for charcoal; now I don’t remember. There was a grill and it was the charcoal that was in flames — nothing weird, but interesting to display a screenful of fire as the central image for your product. But it happened to be the case that I was coming back into the real world from a little stint in a mental institution. So, a little tweaked, would we? (Ahem. Kidding around.) The licking of the flames looked like snakes writhing. Snakes made of the flickering plasma-like sliptwisting of fire in curving fluctuation. Nothing much really came of that vision, just a really cool thing to witness.

Also, while we’re on the subject, I saw once when I looked at one of van Gogh’s self-portraits, the yellows and oranges: it looked like that paint was on fire. There are other things I have seen, too, but these two stand out as the more or less hallucinatory side of this experience (which I call life). And people may think of madness as being dark, but I found that the opposite was much rather the case: things being supernaturally bright was more of the indicator of insanity. So anyway, there were other things which may not have been so flashy as these two in aspects of fire, but some of the more subdued ones — those may have portended things of quite the deeper scope.

(In which I have sometimes found myself walking through a dream, day through day. I do not know if you would call it all madness, though I know that there were things I have been through that would most definitely qualify. Sometimes to feel like that song:

i am superman, and i know what’s happening
i am superman, and i can do anything…

I’ve had that feeling, I don’t know whether it is so very good or so very bad, that I am a hero upon the world, who does great things in the service of humanity. I know it is not just a dream, these visions of mine; I know it is not just a passing madness, that flows into the backwaters of time, never to be questioned or rationalized. I think madness has not the poetry that I have witnessed, the verse of musical meanings that have sewn in me such hope, that I will never wear a mind without the fabric so intimate with love, intrinsic in the thread. There is a light. Try to walk in it. That is what my visions say.)