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AUTHOR’S NOTE

Does life resemble Art?
Nietzsche said that Art exists so that Reality won’t destroy us.
But what is Reality, If not an outpicturing of one’s own inner
psychic landscape, reflected from that Secret Place of ancient Mystics?
It has been suggested by The Great Minds through history that
the seemingly prosaic, often uncannily synchronistic procession of
people, places, things and events we experience and fervently cling to
as our reality is in fact nothing more than an amazing mental Matrix,
an infinitely complex and perplexing collective Hallucination. A
fabrication of our own innermost psychic patterns and those of the
Race mind that created and continues perpetuating them at the level of
Thought.
To quote Einstein, “Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistent one.”
If God is Love, how then does that healing state of Grace
manifest itself to us poor sinners? Does this God of Miracles only
enter our limited five-sense reality through our consciousness? Or, as
Carl Jung has suggested through our visions and dreams?
Or through our wounds?
Take your pick…
Can ancient traumas of harms and hurts ever be completely healed?
Can the Wounded rise like Lazarus from graves of pitiful,
incomprehensible moral degradation?
Can a Ghost be reborn to walk happily and usefully whole among
the living?
And what is Alchemy then, if not the process by which base
matter is converted into something of great value, something precious?
Treasure.
How do you relate to the World Unknown?
Questions. Many fucking questions…
For my money, Dylan came closest when he wrote, “The answer
is blowing in the wind.”
And I do believe in Miracles, the suspension of belief.
This book stormed into my life one day like an angry child.
Demanding to be written.
It’s protagonist, Narcisa, is not a person so much as a Principal.
An Experience. A Truth. A state of Mind.
A Demand.
A Trial. A Purification by Fire.
An Exterminating Angel.
A Holy, bloody, screaming Exorcism.
I didn’t write the book so much as submit to it.
Like a sort of spiritual surgery.
Documenting and recreating each demented, warped ‘experience’
from a maddening Web of shared hallucinations.
Like a soot-faced miner going back down, again and again into
the heart of a festering inflamed Wound.
That, I believe, is the magical key to Surviving one’s
‘reality’, as it unfolds again and
again in an endless recurring nightmare loop of Love and Terror. Hell
and Redemption.
Salvation.
NARCISA - OUR LADY OF ASHES, then, is completely a work of Fiction.
Seeded from the innermost depths of a tiny fragment of
eternal mind’s experience.
The characters in this book are not ‘real’ people.
Never were.
Not in the popular sense of the word.
Illusions. Albeit persistent ones.
I prefer to see them today simply as “Lessons”.

Jonathan Shaw
Rio de Janeiro