,said the Shotgun to the head

Introduction

Have you ever been kissed by God? Passionately (tongue, lips, etc.)? Or are you one who simply condemns God to the realm of the invisible? When do you feel most comfortable? When do you feel most loved? Perhaps it is in the warm embrace of your lover or in the assuring touch of you mother. Perhaps, like me, you have likened this person to God in your life and realized that God was loving you through them. Or maybe you don't believe in God. Cool. Here's a simpler question: Have you ever lost yourself in a kiss? I mean pure psychedelic inebriation. Not just lustful petting but transcendental metamorphosis when you became aware that the greatness of this being was breathing into you. Licking the sides and corners of your mouth like sealing a thousand fleshy envelops filled with the essence of your passionate being and then opened by the same mouth and delivered back to you, over and over again - the first kiss of the rest of your life. A kiss that confirms that the universe is aligned, that the world's greatest resource is love, and maybe even that God is a woman. With or without a belief in God, all kisses are metaphors decipherable by allocations of time, circumstance, and understanding.

This book is the result of a kiss. A kiss that brings symbols to life and fear-based shortcomings to their symbolic death. To be kissed by a deity is nothing short of a miracle. The mind altering/altaring effect can last more than a lifetime. Here is the accoutn of a man so ravished by a kiss that it distorts his highest and lowest frequencies of understanding into an incongruent mean of babble and brilliance. He wanders the streets disheveled and tormented by all that he sees that does not reflect her love. He is a wandering man, sort of like a modern day John the Baptist, telling of the coming of a female messiah that he has known intimately. He is the babbling man you cross the street to avoid. He is the unavoidable end before the new beginning. He is a lover in search of greater love. SHE is One and many: Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and creation; Oya, the Yoruba orisha of death and rebirth; the Holy Ghost, which is to say, the woman restored to her rightful place in the Holy Trinity. No longer ghost, no longer virgin, She is mother of us all.

saul williams
los angelas, 2004