People don't read the morning newspaper

People don't read the morning newspaper, Marshall McLuhan once said, they slip into it like a warm bath. Too true, Marshall! Imagine being in New York City on the morning of Sunday, April 28, 1974, like I was, slipping into that great public bath, that vat, that spa, that regional physiotherapy tank, that White Sulphur Springs, that Marienbad, that Ganges, that River Jordan for a million souls which is the Sunday New York Times. Soon I was submerged, weightless, suspended in the teprid depths of the thing, in Arts & Leisure, Section 2, page 19, in a state of perfect sensory deprivation, when all at once an extraordinary thing happened:

I noticed something!

Yet another clam-broth-colored current had begun to roll over me, as warm and predictable as the Gulf Stream...a review, it was, by the Times's dean of the arts, Hilton Kramer, of an exhibition at Yale University of "Seven Realists," seven realistic painters...when I was jerked alert by the following:

"Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory. And given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial - the means by which our experiences of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify."

Now, you may say, My God, man! You woke up over that? You forsook your blissful coma over a mere swell in the sea of words?

But I knew what I was looking at. I realized that without making the slightest effort I had come upon one of those utterances in search of which psychoanalysts and State Department monitors of the Moscow and Belgrade press are willing to endure a lifetime of tedium: namely, the seemingly innocuous obiter dicta, the words in passing, that give the game away.

What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of The New York Times saying: In looking at a painting today, "to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial." I read it again. It didn't say "something helpful" or "enriching" or even "extremely valuable." No, the word was crucial.

In short: frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it, I can't see a painting.

Then and there I experienced a flash known as the Aha! phenomenon, and the buried life of contemporary art was revealed to me for the first time. The fogs lifted! The clouds passed! The motes, scales, conjunctival bloodshots, and Murine agonies fell away!

The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe, 1975

I'm currently caught up in re-reading several books that i pulled out merely to hunt for extracts for this blog, hence postings have dried up recently. hope to resume soon...

When I married Edgar Strasser-Mendana

When I married Edgar Strasser-Mendana I received from an aunt in Denver who had been taken as a bride to a United Fruit station in Cuba, twenty-four Haviland dessert plates in the 'Windsor Rose' pattern and a letter of instructions for living in the tropics. I was to allow no nightsoil on my kitchen garden, boil water for douches as well as for drinking, preserve my husband's books with a thin creosote solution, schedule regular hours for sketching or writing, and regard the playing of bridge as an avoidance of reality to be indulged only at biweekly intervals and never with depressive acquaintances. In this regime I could perhaps escape what the letter called the fever and disquiet of the latitudes. That I had been living in those same latitudes unmarried for some years made no difference to my aunt: she appeared to locate the marriage bed as the true tropic of fever and disquiet.

So in many ways did Charlotte.

As it happens I understand this position, having observed it for many years in societies quite distant from San Francisco and Denver, but some women do not. Some women lie easily in whatever beds they make. They marry or do not marry with equanimity. They divorce or do not. They can leave a bed and forget it. They sleep dreamlessly, get up and scramble eggs.

Not Charlotte.
Never Charlotte.

I think I have never known anyone who regarded the sexual connection as quite so unamusing a contract. So dark and febrile and outside the range of the normal did all aspects of this contract seem to Charlotte that she was for example incapable of walking normally across a room in the presence of two men with whom she had slept. Her legs seemed to lock unnaturally into her pelvic bones. Her body went stiff, as if convulsed by the question of who had access to it and who did not. Whenever I saw her with both Victor and Gerardo it struck me that her every movement was freighted with this question. Who had prior claim. Whose call on her was most insistent. To whom did she owe what. If Gerardo's hand brushed hers in front of Victor her face would flush, her eyes drop. If she needed a bottle of wine opened on those dismal valiant occasions when she put on her gray chiffon dress and tried to 'entertain' she could never just hand the corkscrew to Gerardo. Nor could she hand the corkscrew to Victor. Instead she would evade the question by opening the wine herself, usually breaking the cork. I recall once telling Charlotte about a village on the Orinoco where female children were ritually cut on the inner thigh by their first sexual partners, the point being to scar the female with the male's totem. Charlotte saw nothing extraordinary in this. 'I mean that's pretty much what happens everywhere, isn't it,' she said. 'Somebody cuts you? Where it doesn't show?'

"A Book of Common Prayer", Joan Didion, 1977

Let The Power Fall

I
1 One can work within any structure.
2 Once one can work within any structure, some structures are more efficient
than others.
3 There is no structure which is universally appropriate.
4 Commitment to an aim within inappropriate structure will give rise to
the creation of an appropriate structure.
5 Apathy, ie passive commitment, within an appropriate structure will
effect its collapse.
6 Dogmatic attachment to the supposed merits of a particular structure
hinders the search for an appropriate structure.
7 There will be difficulty defining the appropriate structure because it
will be always mobile, ie in process.

II
8 There should be no difficulty in defining aim.
9 The appropriate structure will recognise structures outside itself.
10 The appropriate structure can work within any large structure
11 Once the appropriate structure can work within any large structure,
some larger structure are more efficient than others.
12 There is no larger structure which is universally appropriate.
13 Commitment to an aim by an appropriate structure within a larger,
inappropriate structure will give rise to a large, appropriate structure.
14 The quantitive structure is affected by qualitative action

III
15 Qualitive action is not bound by number
16 Any small unit committed to qualitative action can affect radical
change on a scale outside its quantitative measure.
17 Quantative action works by violence and breeds reaction.
18 Qualitative action works works by example and invites reciprocation.
19 Reciprocation between independent structures is a framework of
interacting units which is itself a structure.
20 Any appropriate structure of interacting units can work within any
other structure of interacting units.
21 Once this is so, some structures of interacting units are more efficient
than others.

Robert Fripp, 1981

Flay began to untie his boots.

Flay began to untie his boots. Behind him his swept cave yawned, a million prawn-coloured motes swaying against the darkness at the entrance. He noticed, as he worked his heel free of the leather, that the crag was biting its way into the sun and had all but reached it's centre. He leant his bony head backwards against the stone, and his face became lit and the stubble of his first beard shone, its every hair a thread of copper wire, as he followed the course of the crag's crest in its seemingly upward and arrow-headed journey, its black barbs eating outwards as it climbed.

Inexorable as was its course, there was, that summer evening, more destiny in the progress of another moving form, so infinitesmal in the capacious mountain dusk, than in the vast sun's ample spellbound cycle.

Through her, in microcosm, the wide earth sobbed. The starglobe sank in her; the colours faded. The death-dew rose and the wild birds in her breast climbed to her throat and gathered songless, hovering, all tumult, wing to wing, so ardent for those climes where all things end.

To Flay, it was as though the silence of his solitude had been broken, the senses invading each other's provinces, for on seeing the movement of something the size of the letter 'i', that moved in silhouette agains the gigantic yellow plate, he had the sensation of waking from a dream which took hold of him. Distant as it was, he could tell it for a human form. That it was Keda it was not in his power to realize. He knew himself for witness. He could not stop himself. he knelt forward on his knees, while the moments melted, one into the next. He grew more rigid. The tiny, infinitely remote figure was moving across the sun towards the crag's black edge. Impotently, he watched, his jaw thrust forwards and a cold sweat broke across his bony brow, for he knew himself to be in the presence of Sorrow - and an interloper upon something more personal and secret than he had the right to watch. And yet impersonal. For in the figurette was the personification of all pain, taking, through sliding time, its final paces.

She moved slowly, for the climb had tired her and it had not been long since she had borne the child of clay, like alabaster, the earthless daughter who had startled all. It was as though Keda was detached from the world, exalted and magnificently alone in the rose-red haze of the upper air. At the edge of the naked drop to the shades below she came to a standstill, and, after a little while, turned her head to Gormenghast and the Dwellings, afloat in the warm haze. The were unreal. They were so far, so remote. No longer of her, they were over. Yet she turned her head for the child's sake.

Her head, turning was dimensionless. A thong about her neck supported the proud carvings of her lovers. They hung across her breasts. At the edge of age, there was a perilous beauty in her face as of the crag's edge that she stood upon. The last of footholds; such a little space. The colour fading on the the seven-foot strip. It lay behind her like a carpet of dark roses. The roses were stones. There was one fern growing. It was beside her feet. How tall?...A thousand feet? The she must have her head among far stars. How far all was! Too far for Flay to see her head had turned - a speck of life against that falling sun.

Upon his knees he knew that he was witness.

About her and below lay the world. All things were ebbing. A moon that climbed suddenly above the eastern skyline, chilling the rose, waned through her as it waxed, and she was ready.

She moved her hair from her eyes and cheekbones. It hung deep and still as the shadow in a well, it hung down her straight back like midnight. Her brown hands pressed the carvings inwards to her breast, and as a smile began to grow, the eyebrows raised a little, she stepped outwards into the dim atmosphere, and falling was most fabulously lit by the moon and the sun.

"Titus Groan", Mervyn Peake, 1946

I shan't risk trying to predict.

I shan't risk trying to predict. All these factors are part of his identity. He was born into a family that was traditionally Muslim; the language he speaks links him to the Southern Slavs, who were once joined together in a single state, but are so no longer; he lives on land which belonged sometimes to the Ottoman and sometimes to the Austrian Empire, and which played a part in the major dramas of European history. In every era one or other of his affiliations swelled up, so to speak, in such a way as to eclipse all the others and to appear to represent his whole identity. In the course of his life he'll have heard all kinds of fables. He'll have been told that he was a proletarian pure and simple. Or a Yugoslavian through and through. Or, more recently, a Muslim. For a few difficult months he'll even have been made to think that he had more in common with the inhabitants of Kabul than with those of Trieste!

In every age there have been people who considered that an individual had one overriding affiliation so much more important in every circumstance to all others that it might legitimately be called his "identity". For some it was the nation, for others religion or class. But one has only to look at the various conflicts being fought out all over the world today to realise that no one allegiance has absolute supremacy. Where people feel their faith is threatened, it is their religious affiliation that seems to reflect their whole identity. But if their mother tongue or their ethnic group is in danger, then they fight ferociously against their own co-religionists. Both the Turks and the Kurds are Muslims though they speak different languages; but does that make the war between them any less bloody? Hutus and Tutsis alike are Catholics, and they speak the same language, but has that stopped them from slaughtering one another? Czechs and Slovaks are all Catholics too, but does that help them live together?

I cite all these examples to underline the fact that while there is always a certain hierarchy among the elements that go to make up individual identities, that hierarchy is not immutable; it changes with time, and in so doing brings about fundamental changes in behaviour.

Moreover, the ties that count in people's lives are not always the allegedly major allegiances arising out of language, complexion, class or religion. Take the case of an Italian homosexual in the days of fascism. I imagine that for the man himself that particular aspect of his personality had up till then been important, but not more so than his professional activity, his political choices or his religious beliefs. But suddenly state repression sweeps down on him and he feels threatened with humiliation, deportation or death. It's the recollection of certain books I've read and films I've seen that leads me to choose this example. This man, who a few years earlier was a patriot, perhaps even a nationalist, was no longer able to exult at the sight of the Italian army marching by; he may even have come to wish for its defeat. Because of the persecution to which he was subjected, his sexual preferences came to outweigh his other affiliations, among them even the nationalism that was at its height. Only after the war, in a more tolerant Italy, would our man have felt entirely Italian once more.

"On Identity", Amin Maalouf, 1996, translation Barbara Bray

At two in the afternoon I set off with the firm intention of seeing Fidèle and cross-examining her.

At two in the afternoon I set off with the firm intention of seeing Fidèle and cross-examining her. I can't stand the smell of cabbage; the shops along the Meshchanskaya just reek of it. What with this, and the infernal stench coming from under the front doors of all the houses, I held my nose and ran for all I was worth.

If that's not bad enough, those beastly tradesmen let so much soot and smoke pour out of their workshops that it's quite impossible for any respectable gentleman to take a stroll these days.

When I reached the sixth floor and rang the bell, a quite pretty-looking girl with tiny freckles came to the door. I recognized her as the same girl I'd seen walking with the old lady. She blushed slightly and straight away I realized that the little dear needed a boyfriend. 'What do you want?' she said. 'I must have a talk with your dog,' I replied. The girl was quite stupid - I could see that at once. While I was standing there the dog came out barking at me. I tried to catch hold of her but the nasty little bitch nearly sank her teeth into my nose. However, I spotted her basket in the corner. That what I was after! I went over to it, rummaged around under the straw and to my great delight pulled out a small bundle of papers. Seeing this, the filthy dog first bit me on the thigh and then, when she's sniffed around and discovered I'd taken the papers, started whining, and pawing me, but I said to her: 'No, my dear, good-bye!' and took to my heels. The girl must have thought I was mad, as she seemed scared out of her wits.

When I arrived home, I intended starting work right away sorting the papers out, because I can't see all that well by candlelight. But Mavra decided the floor needed washing. Those stupid Finns always take it into their heads to have a good clean up at the most inconvenient times. So I decided to go for a walk and have a good think about what had happened earlier. Now at last I would find out every little detail of what had been going on, what was in their minds, who were the main actors in the drama, in fact, nothing would be hidden from me: those letters would tell me everything. 'Dogs are a clever species,' I told myself. 'They're very well versed in diplomacy, and therefore everything will be written down, including a description of the Director and his private life. And there'll be something about her, but never mind that now...Silence!' I returned home towards the evening and spent most of the time lying on my bed.

"Diary of a Madman", Nikolai Gogol, 1834, translation Ronald Wilks

Words of Advice for Young People

(ed. note: can't seem to get enclosure links to work right now, should be an audio file here)

"The Western Lands", William S. Burroughs, 1988

I met Clarisa when I was an adolescent

I met Clarisa when I was an adolescent working as a servant in the house of La Señora, a lady of the night, as Clarisa called women of her occupation. Even then she was distilled almost to pure spirit; I thought at any minute she might rise from the floor and fly out the window. She had the hands of a healer, and people who could not pay a doctor, or were disillusioned with traditional science, waited in line for her to relieve the pain or console them in their bad fortune. My patrona used to call her to come lay her hands on her back. In the process, Clarisa would rummage about in La Señora's soul, with the hope of turning her life around and leading her along the paths of righteousness - paths my employer was in no hurry to travel, since that direction would have unalterably affected her commercial enterprise. Clarisa would apply the curative warmth of the palms of her hands for ten or fifteen minutes, depending on the intensity of the pain, and then accept a glass of fruit juice as payment for her services. Sitting face to face in the kitchen, the two women would have their chat about human and divine topics, my patrona more on the humble side and Clarisa more on the divine, never straining tolerance nor abusing good manners. Later, when I found a different job, I lost sight of Clarisa until we met once again some twenty years later and re-established a friendship that has lasted to this day, overcoming many obstacles that lay in our way, including death, which caused a slight hiccup in the case of our communications.

"The Stories of Eva Luna", Isabelle Allende, 1989, translated Margaret Sayers Peden

Coyote

No regrets Coyote
We just come from such different sets of circumstance
I'm up all night in the studios
And you're up early on your ranch
You'll be brushing out a brood mare's tail
While the sun is ascending
And I'll just be getting home with my reel to reel...
There's no comprehending
Just how close to the bone and the skin and the eyes
And the lips you can get
And still feel so alone
And still feel related
Like stations in some relay
You're not a hit and run driver, no, no
Racing away
You just picked up a hitcher
A prisoner of the white lines on the freeway

   "Coyote", Joni Mitchell, 1976

We have some influence over how long we can delay human extinction.

We have some influence over how long we can delay human extinction. Cosmology dictates the upper limit but leaves a large field of play. At its lower limit, humanity could be extinguished as soon as this century by succumbing to near-term extinction risks: nuclear detonations, asteroid or comet impacts, or volcanic eruptions could generate enough atmospheric debris to terminate food production; a nearby supernova or gamma ray burst could sterilize Earth with deadly radiation; greenhouse gas emissions could trigger a positive feedback loop, causing a radical change in climate; a genetically engineered microbe could be unleashed, causing a global plague; or a high energy physics experiment could go awry, creating a “true vacuum” or strangelets that destroy the planet (Bostrom, 2002; Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2007; Leslie, 1996; Posner, 2004; Rees, 2003).

Farther out in time are risks from technologies that remain theoretical but might be developed in the next century or centuries. For instance, self-replicating nanotechnologies could destroy the ecosystem; and cognitive enhancements or recursively self-improving computers could exceed normal human ingenuity to create uniquely powerful weapons (Bostrom, 2002; Bostrom & Cirkovic, 2007; Ikle, 2006; Joy, 2000; Leslie, 1996; Posner, 2004; Rees, 2003).

Farthest out in time are astronomical risks. In one billion years, the sun will begin its red giant stage, increasing terrestrial temperatures above 1,000 degrees, boiling off our atmosphere, and eventually forming a planetary nebula, making Earth inhospitable to life (Sackmann, Boothroyd, & Kraemer, 1993; Ward & Brownlee, 2002). If we colonize other solar systems, we could survive longer than our sun, perhaps another 100 trillion years, when all stars begin burning out (Adams & Laughlin, 1997). We might survive even longer if we exploit nonstellar energy sources. But it is hard to imagine how humanity will survive beyond the decay of nuclear matter expected in 1032 to 1041 years (Adams & Laughlin, 1997). Physics seems to support Kafka’s remark that “[t]here is infinite hope, but not for us.”

Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction, Jason G. Matheny. 2007

Was every day of my life to be as busy a day as this

Was every day of my life to be as busy a day as this--and to take up-- Truce.

I will not finish that sentence till I have made an observation upon the strange state of affairs between the reader and myself, just as things stand at present--an observation never applicable before to any one biographical writer since the creation of the world, but to myself--and I believe, will never hold good to any other, until its final destruction-- and therefore, for the very novelty of it alone, it must be worth your worships attending to.

I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got, as you perceive, almost into the middle of my third volume (According to the preceding Editions.)--and no farther than to my first day's life--'tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write just now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work with what I have been doing at it--on the contrary, I am just thrown so many volumes back--was every day of my life to be as busy a day as this--And why not?--and the transactions and opinions of it to take up as much description--And for what reason should they be cut short? as at this rate I should just live 364 times faster than I should write--It must follow, an' please your worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to write--and consequently, the more your worships read, the more your worships will have to read.

Will this be good for your worships eyes?

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne, 1760

The Great Valerio

High up above the crowd
The great Valerio is walking
The rope seems hung from cloud to cloud
And time stands still while he is walking
His eye is steady on the target
His foot is sure upon the rope
Alone and peaceful as a mountain
And certain as the mountain slope

We falter at the sight
We stumble in the mire
Fools who think they see the light
Prepare to balance on the wire
But we learn to watch together,
And feed on what we see above
‘Till our hearts turn like the seasons
And we are acrobats of love

How we wonder, how we wonder
Watching far below
We would all be that great hero
The great Valerio

Come all you upstart jugglers
Are you really ready yet?
Who will help the tightrope walker
When he tumbles to the net
So come with me to see Valerio
As he dances through the air
I’m your friend until you use me
And then be sure I won’t be there

How we wonder, how we wonder
Watching far below
We would all be that great hero
The great Valerio

The Great Valerio, Richard Thompson, 1974

What should we make of all this?

What should we make of all this? The probability that there is a secret mental trick that at one stroke will enable the human mind to solve complex problems better is practically zero. It is equally unlikely that our brains have some great cache of unused potential. It such things existed, we would be using them. Nowhere in nature does a creature run around on three legs and drag along a fourth, perfectly functional but unused leg. Out brains function the way that they function and not otherwise. We must make the best of that; there is no magic wand or hidden treasure that will instantly make us deep and powerful thinkers.

Real improvement can be achieved, however, if we understand the demands that problem solving places on us and the errors that we are prone to make when we attempt to meet them. Our brains are not fundamentally flawed; we have simply developed bad habits. When we fail to solve a problem, we fail because we tend to make a small mistake here, a small mistake there, and these mistakes add up. Here we have forgotten to make our goal specific enough. There we have over-generalized. Here we have planned too elaborately, there too sketchily.

The subject of this book is the nature of our thinking when we deal with complex problems. I describe the kinds of mistakes human beings make, the blind alleys they follow down and the detours they take in attempting to cope with such problems. But I am not concerned with thinking alone, for thinking is always rooted in the total process of psychic activity. There is no thinking without emotion. We get angry, for example, when we can't solve a problem, and our anger influences our thinking. Thought is embedded in a context of feeling and affect, thought influences, and is in turn influenced by, that context.

Thought is also always rooted in values and motivations. We ordinarily think not for the sake of thinking but to achieve certain goals based on our system of values. Here possibilities for confusion arise: the conflict between treasured values and measures that are regarded as necessary can produce some curious contortions of thought - "Bombs for Peace!" The original value is twisted into its opposite. Motivations provide equally ambiguous guidelines. There are those who would say that what counts are the intentions behind our thinking, that thought plays only a serving role, helping us achieve our goals but failing to go to the root of the evils in our world. In our political environment, it would seem, we are surrounded on all sides with good intentions. But the nurturing of those good intentions is an utterly undemanding mental exercise, while drafting plans to realize those worthy goals is another matter. Moreover, it is far from clear whether "good intentions plus stupidity" or "evil intentions plus intelligence" have wrought more harm in the world. People with good intentions usually have few qualms about pursuing their goals. As a result, incompetence that would otherwise have remained harmless often becomes dangerous, especially as incompetent people with good intentions rarely suffer the qualms of conscience that sometimes inhibit the doings of competent people with bad intentions. The conviction that our intentions are unquestionably good may sanctify the most questionable means.

The Logic of Failure, Dieter Dörner, 1989, translation Rita and Rob Kimber

Monks, the All is aflame.

"Monks, the All is aflame. What All is aflame? The eye is aflame. Forms are aflame. Consciousness at the eye is aflame. Contact at the eye is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye — experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain — that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I tell you, with birth, aging & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs.

"The ear is aflame. Sounds are aflame...

"The nose is aflame. Aromas are aflame...

"The tongue is aflame. Flavors are aflame...

"The body is aflame. Tactile sensations are aflame...

"The intellect is aflame. Ideas are aflame. Consciousness at the intellect is aflame. Contact at the intellect is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the intellect — experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain — that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I say, with birth, aging & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs.

"Seeing thus, the well-instructed disciple of the noble ones grows disenchanted with the eye, disenchanted with forms, disenchanted with consciousness at the eye, disenchanted with contact at the eye. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye, experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain: With that, too, he grows disenchanted.

"He grows disenchanted with the ear...

"He grows disenchanted with the nose...

"He grows disenchanted with the tongue...

"He grows disenchanted with the body...

"He grows disenchanted with the intellect, disenchanted with ideas, disenchanted with consciousness at the intellect, disenchanted with contact at the intellect. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the intellect, experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain: He grows disenchanted with that too. Disenchanted, he becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, he is fully released. With full release, there is the knowledge, 'Fully released.' He discerns that 'Birth is ended, the holy life fulfilled, the task done. There is nothing further for this world.'"

The Fire Sermon / Adittapariyaya Sutta, Gotama Buddha, c. 550-450 BCE, translation Thanissaro Bhikkhu

To lie in bed, to give way to the counterforce of an immense fatigue

To lie in bed, to give way to the counterforce of an immense fatigue, to float between dream and waking, to remember the past, to have nothing in your mind, to have everything in your mind, to see the faces bent over you, looking worried, there's my wife, there's her mother. Someone puts a wet cloth to his lips. What's that strange raspy sound? Someone in this room is having trouble breathing.

There are endless passages through which he must walk, until he realizes he no longer has the use of his legs. There are things he has left undone. It is spring and the window is open, there are voices. They ask him many questions. How are you, how do you feel, do you feel better? Surely they don't expect him to answer. He hadn't been able to say, though he meant to say, that he had to piss. He won't tell them the sheet is wet. They might be angry. He wants them to stay as they are now, with their smiling intent faces - her face, his face. They are holding his hands. How warm their hands are. They have taken him in their arms. He hears the crinkling of cloth. That is his wife on his left side. He can feel her bosom. And that is his friend on the other side. He is in his friend's left arm. He hopes he is not too heavy for them. There is a big hollow space inside his chest where the pain used to be.

He has escaped the dungeon of thought. He feels elated. He is climbing. It is a laborious ascent. But now the mountain no longer has to be climbed. He has climbed. By a kind of levitation. He was looking up for so long, and now he can look down from this high place. It is a big panorama. So this is dying, thought the Cavaliere.

The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag, 1992

Consider what happened in Borneo in the 1950's

Consider what happened in Borneo in the 1950's. Many Dayak villagers had malaria, and the World Health Organization had a solution that was simple and direct. Spraying DDT seemed to work: Mosquitos died, and malaria declined. But then an expanding web of side effects ("consquences you didn't think of," quips biologist Garret Hardin, "the existence of which you will deny as long as possible") started to appear. The roofs of people's houses began to collapse, because the DDT had also killed tiny parasitic wasps that had previously controlled thatch-eating caterpillars. The colonial government issued sheet-metal replacement roofs, but people couldn't sleep when tropical rains turned the tin roofs into drums. Meanwhile, the DDT-poisoned bugs were being eaten by geckoes, which were eaten by cats. The DDT invisibly built up in the food chain and began to kill the cats. Without the cats, the rats multiplied. The World Health Organization, threatened by potential outbreaks of typhus and sylvatic plague, which it had itself created, was obliged to parachute fourteen thousand live cats into Borneo. Thus occurred Operation Cat Drop, one of the odder missions of the British Royal Air Force.

Natural Capitalism, Paul Hawkin, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins, 2000

The Dilemma of the Discarded Weapons

Author of the Civil War Collector's Encyclopedia F. A. Lord tells us that after the Battle of Gettysburg, 27,574 muskets were recovered from the battlefield. Of these, nearly 90 percent (twenty four thousand) were loaded. Twelve thousand of these loaded muskets were found to be loaded more than once, and six thousand of the multiply loaded weapons had from three to ten rounds loaded in the barrel. One weapons had been loaded twenty-three times. Why, then, were there so many loaded weapons available on the battlefield, and why did at least twelve thousand soldiers misload their weapons in combat?

A loaded weapon was a precious commodity on the black-powder battlefield. During the stand-up, face-to-face, short-range battles of the era a weapon should have been loaded for only a fraction of the time in battle. More than 95 percent of the time was spent in loading the weapon, and less than 5 percent in firing it. If most soldiers were desperately attempting to kill as quickly and efficiently as they could, then 95 percent should have been shot with an empty weapon in their hand and any loaded, cocked, and primed weapon available dropped on the battlefield would have been snatched up from wounded and dead comrades and fired.

There were many who were shot while charging the enemy or were casualties of artillery outside of musket range, and these individuals would never have had an opportunity to fire their weapons, but they hardly represent 95 of all casualties. if there is a desperate need in all soldiers to fire their weapon in combat, then many of these men should have died with an empty weapon. And as the ebb and flow of battle passed over these weapons, many of them should have been picked up and fired at the enemy.

The obvious conclusion is that most soldiers were not trying to kill the enemy. Most of them appear to have not even wanted to fire in the enemy's general direction. As Marshall observed, most soldiers seem to have an inner resistance to firing their weapons in combat. The point here is that the resistance appears to have existed long before Marshall discovered it, and this resistance is the reason for many (if not most) of these multiply loaded weapons.

On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

Diodorus, a native of central Sicily

Diodorus, a native of central Sicily, had come to Egypt to compile a historical magnum opus. Historians, he knew had been divided by Polybius into two categories: those who immerse themselves in the actuality of events, drawing the material for their works from their own concrete experiences (these alone, said Polybius, being worthy of esteem), and those who take an easier course, seeking out some 'city well supplied with libraries' where they can sit at their desks, consult an atlas, and travel, as Ariosto would have put it, 'with Ptolemy the geographer'. Diodorus was of the latter school. But as Polybius's ideas were much in vogue among the Greek and Roman public, it was as well to display some first-hand experience, and Diodorus accordingly fabricated a series of voyages he had never made. The philosophical proem to his work tells us that the author

has travelled through much of Asia and Europe, undergoing all manner of hardships and dangers, in order to behold in person everything, or as nearly as possible everything, of which this history treats. We are well aware that the majority of historians, including some of the best known, have made numerous geographical errors.

These words of severe reproof were in fact taken verbatim from Polybius. His journey to Egypt was the sole voyage Diodorus had ever made.

The Vanished Library, Luciano Canfora, 1989, translation Martin Ryle

The details of my life are quite inconsequential

Dr. Evil: The details of my life are quite inconsequential.
Therapist: Oh no, please, please, let's hear about your childhood.
Dr Evil: Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Some times he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical, summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds, pretty standard really. At the age of 12 I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen, a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum, it's breathtaking, I suggest you try it.
Therapist: You know, we have to stop.

Austin Powers, Mike Myers, 1997

Black Maps

Not the attendance of stones,
nor the applauding wind,
shall let you know
you have arrived,

nor the sea that celebrates
only departures,
nor the mountains,
nor the dying cities.

Nothing will tell you
where you are.
Each moment is a place
you’ve never been.

You can walk
believing you cast
a light around you.
But how will you know?

The present is always dark.
Its maps are black,
rising from nothing,
describing,

in their slow ascent
into themselves,
their own voyage,
its emptiness,

the bleak temperate
necessity of its completion.
As they rise into being
they are like breath.

And if they are studied at all
it is only to find,
too late, what you thought
were concerns of yours

do not exist.
Your house is not marked
on any of them,
nor are your friends,

waiting for you to appear,
nor are your enemies,
listing your faults.
Only you are there,

saying hello
to what you will be,
and the black grass
is holding up the black stars.

Black Maps, Mark Strand, 1968

In the chapters that follow, I will attempt to explain consciousness.

In the chapters that follow, I will attempt to explain consciousness. More precisely, I will explain the various phenomena that compose what we call consciousness, showing how they are all physical effects of the brain's activities, how these activities evolved, and how they give rise to illusions about their own powers and properties. It is very hard to imagine how your mind could be your brain - but not impossible. In order to imagine this, you really have to know quite a lot of what science has discovered about how brains work, but much more important, you have to learn new ways of thinking. Adding facts helps you imagine new possibilities, but the discoveries and theories of neuroscience are not enough - even neuroscientists are often baffled by consciousness. In order to stretch your imagination, I will provide, along with the relevant scientific facts, a series of stories, analogies, thought experiments, and other devices designed to give you new perspectives, break old habits of thought, and help you organize the facts into a single, coherent vision strikingly different from the traditional view of consciousness we tend to trust. The thought experiment about the brain in the vat and the game of psychoanalysis are warm-up exercises for the main task, which is to sketch a theory of the biological mechanisms and a way of thinking about these mechanisms that will let you see how the traditional paradoxes and mysteries of consciousness can be resolved.

Consciousness Explained, Daniel C. Dennett, 1991

It was almost always the foreman who kept them advised of the tiger's movements

It was almost always the foreman who kept them advised of the tiger's movements; Luis had the greatest confidence in him, and since he passed almost the whole day working in his study, he neither emerged nor let those who came down from the next floor move about until don Roberto sent in his report. But they had to rely on one another also. Busy with the household chores inside, Rema knew exactly what was happening upstairs and down. At other times, it was the children who brought the news to the Kid or Luis. Not that they'd seen anything, just that don Roberto had run into them outside, indicated the tiger's whereabouts to them, and they came back in to pass it on. The believed Nino without question, Isabel less, she was new and might make a mistake. Later, though, since she always went about with Nino stuck to her skirt, they finally believed both of them equally. That was in the morning and afternoon; at night it was the Kid who went out to check and see that the dogs were tied up or that no live coals had been left close to the houses. Isabel noticed that he carried the revolver and sometimes a stick with a silver handle.

She hadn't wanted to ask Rema about it because Rema clearly found it something so obvious and necessary; to pester her would have meant looking stupid, and she treasured her pride before another woman. Nino was easy, he talked straight. Everything clear and obvious when he explained it. Only at night, if she wanted to reconstruct that clarity and obviousness, Isabel noticed that the important reasons were still missing. She learned quickly what was really important: if you wanted to leave the house, or go down to the dining room, to Luis' study, or to the library, find out first. "You have to trust don Roberto," Rema had said. Her and Nino as well. She hardly ever asked Luis, because he hardly ever knew. The Kid, who always knew, she never asked. And so it was always easy, the life organized itself for Isabel with a few more obligations as far as her movements went, and a few less when it came to clothes, meals, the time to go to bed. A real summer, the way it should be all year round.

Bestiary, Julio Cortazar, 1951, translation Paul Blackburn

Light years are interchangeable with years of living in darkness.

Light years are interchangeable with years of living in darkness.
The role of darkness is not to be seen as, or equated with, ignorance, but with the unknown, and the mysteries of the unseen.

Thus, in the name of:
ROBESON, GOD'S SON, HURSTON, AKHENATON, HATSHEPSUT, BLACKFOOT, HELEN, LENNON, KAHLO, KALI, THE THREE MARIAS, TARA, LILITH, LORDE, WHITMAN, BALDWIN, GINSBERG, KAUFMAN, LUMUMBA, GANDHI, GIBRAN, SHABAZZ, SHABAZZ, SIDDHARTHA, MEDUSA, GUEVARA, GURDJIEFF, RAND, WRIGHT, BANNEKER, TUBMAN, HAMER, HOLIDAY, DAVIS, COLTRANE, MORRISON, JOPLIN, DUBOIS, CLARKE, SHAKESPEARE, RACHMANINOV, ELLINGTON, CARTER, GAYE, HATHAWAY, HENDRIX, KUTI, DICKERSON,
RIPERTON, MARY, ISIS, TERESA, HANSBERRY, TESLA, PLATH, RUMI, FELLINI,MICHAUX, NOSTRADAMUS, NEFERTITI, LA ROCK, SHIVA, GANESHA, YEMAJA, OSHUN, OBATALA, OGUN, KENNEDY, KING, FOUR LITTLE GIRLS, HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI, KELLER, BIKO, PERON, MARLEY, MAGDALENE, COSBY, SHAKUR, THOSE WHO BURNED, THOSE STILL AFLAME, AND THE COUNTLESS UNNAMED.

We claim the present as the pre-sent, as the hereafter.
We are unraveling our navels so that we may ingest the sun.
We are not afraid of the darkness, we trust that the moon shall guide us.
We are determining the future at this very moment.
We know that the heart is the philosophers' stone.
Our music is our alchemy.
We stand as the manifested equivalent of 3 buckets of water and a handful of minerals, thus realizing that those very buckets turned upside down supply the percussive factor of forever.
If you must count to keep the beat then count.
Find your mantra and awaken your subconscious.
Walk your circles counterclockwise.
Use your cipher to decipher coded language, manmade laws.
Climb waterfalls and trees; commune with nature, snakes and bees.
Let your children name themselves and claim themselves
as the new day for today
We are determined to be the channelers of these changing frequencies into songs, paintings, writings, dance, drama, photography, carpentry, crafts, love, and love.
We enlist every instrument: acoustic, electronic.
Every so-called gender, race, sexual preference.
Every per-son as beings of sound
to acknowledge their responsibility to uplift the consciousness
of the entire fucking world.
Any utterance unaimed, will be disclaimed, will be maimed - true rappers slain.
Any utterance unaimed, will be disclaimed, will be maimed - true rappers slain.

Coded Language, Saul Williams, 1999

But though a shot had killed the rabbit

But though a shot had killed the rabbit, though the bored rifles of General Cialdini were now dismaying the Bourbon troops at Gaeta, though the midday heat was making men doze off, nothing could stop the ants. Attracted by a few chewed grape skins spat out by Don Ciccio, along they rushed in close order, morale high at the chance of annexing this bit of garbage soaked with an organist's saliva. Up they came full of confidence, disordered but resolute; groups of three or four would stop now and again for a chat, exalting, perhaps, the ancient glories and future prosperity of ant hill Number Two under cork-tree Number Four on the top of Mount Morco; then once again they would take up their march with the others towards a buoyant future; the gleaming backs of those imperialists seemed to quiver with enthusiasm, while from their ranks no doubt rose the notes of an anthem.

By some association of ideas which it would be inopportune to pursue, the activity of these insects reminded him of the days of the Plebiscite about Unification through which he had lived shortly before at Donnafugata itself. Apart from a sense of amazement those days had left him many an enigma to solve; now, in sight of nature which, except for ants, obviously had no such bothers, he might perhaps find a solution for one of them. The dogs were sleeping stretched and crouched like figures in relief, the little rabbit hanging head down from a branch was swinging out diagonally under the constant surge of wind, but Tumeo, with the help of his pipe, still managed to keep his eyes open.

"And you, Don Ciccio, how did you vote on the twenty-first?"

The poor man started; taken by surprise at a moment when he was outside the stockade of precautions in which like each of his fellow townsmen he normally moved, he hesitated, not knowing what to reply.

The Prince mistook for alarm what was really only surprise, and felt irritated. "Well, what are you afraid of? There's no one here but us, the wind and the dogs."

The list of reassuring witnesses was not really happily chosen; wind is a gossip by definition, the Prince was half-Sicilian. Only the dogs were absolutely trustworthy and that only because they lacked articulate speech. But Don Ciccio had now recovered; his peasant astuteness had suggested the right reply - nothing at all. "Excuse me, Excellency, but there's no point in your question. You know that everyone in Donnafugata voted 'yes'."

The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, 1958, translated Archibald Colquhoun

The paranoid spokesman

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”)

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated—if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional).

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. The Ku Klux Klan imitated Catholicism to the point of donning priestly vestments, developing an elaborate ritual and an equally elaborate hierarchy. The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy. Spokesmen of the various fundamentalist anti-Communist “crusades” openly express their admiration for the dedication and discipline the Communist cause calls forth.

On the other hand, the sexual freedom often attributed to the enemy, his lack of moral inhibition, his possession of especially effective techniques for fulfilling his desires, give exponents of the paranoid style an opportunity to project and express unacknowledgeable aspects of their own psychological concerns. Catholics and Mormons—later, Negroes and Jews—have lent themselves to a preoccupation with illicit sex. Very often the fantasies of true believers reveal strong sadomasochistic outlets, vividly expressed, for example, in the delight of anti-Masons with the cruelty of Masonic punishments.

The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter, Harper's Magazine November 1964

Shortly after dawn on 10 April

Shortly after dawn on 10 April Zapata and his escort were up and riding. This was Zapata's home ground. Chinameca hacienda lay along the Cuautla River barely thirty-five miles below Villa de Ayala. It was one of the first places he had seized after joining Madero in 1911. And as he recalled later in the day he had almost been trapped and killed here in that summer's crisis. Many times he had ridden these same country trails - as a young man, headed for markets or stock auctions, then for the last eight years as a rebel, revolutionary, and outlaw, hiding and hunting. He knew every path, creek and fence. The countryside was cool and fresh in the early April morning. The rains and planting had already begun. In August he would be forty. Of his children he knew only the eldest, Nicolás, now thirteen; and he had hardly reared him. There was no omen about the day, a plain Thursday; dealing with Guajardo heightened the tension, but the basic strain of trust, fear, and hope was old and familiar. At about 8:30 in the morning he and his men came down out of the hills to Chinameca.

Outside the hacienda and back against its front walls stood various shops, and in one Zapata and Guajardo conferred. Inside the walls, Zapata's escort rested. But the talk of ammunition and attacks was soon interrupted by reports that nationals were in the area. Zapata quickly directed Guajardo to guard the hacienda, and then organized patrols from his own men and sent them out on reconnaissance. He himself led one patrol. Although there was no sign of the enemy, Zapata posted sentries and returned to the hacienda environs. It was 1:30 in the afternoon. Only Guajardo's troops were inside the walls now, except for the aide Palacios, who was in conference with Guajardo about collecting twelve thousand rounds from his cache of ammunition. Zapata waited. Invited in to join Guajardo for dinner and close the deal, Zapata chose to keep waiting. But as Guajardo's officers went on repeating the invitation, tacos and beer sounded better. The day had started early, and there had been a lot of rough riding. By two o'clock Zapata was growing impatient; finally at 2:10 he accept. Mounting the sorrel Guajardo had given him the day before, he ordered ten men to come with him inside the hacienda gate.

'Ten of us followed him just as he ordered,' a young aide at the scene reported to Magaña that evening. 'The rest of the people stayed [outside the walls] under the trees, confidently resting in the shade with their carbines stacked. Having formed ranks, [Guajardo's] guard looked ready to do him the honours. Three times the bugle sounded the honour call; and as the last note died away, as the General in Chief reached the threshold of the door...at point blank, without giving him time even to draw his pistols, the soldiers who were presenting arms fired two volleys, and our unforgettable General Zapata fell never to rise again.'

Zapata and the Mexican Revolution, John Womack, Jr. 1968

How Fortunate The Man With None

You saw sagacious Solomon
You know what came of him,
To him complexities seemed plain.
He cursed the hour that gave birth to him
And saw that everything was vain.
How great and wise was Solomon.
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It's wisdom that had brought him to this state.
How fortunate the man with none.

You saw courageous Caesar next
You know what he became.
They deified him in his life
Then had him murdered just the same.
And as they raised the fatal knife
How loud he cried: you too my son!
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It's courage that had brought him to that state.
How fortunate the man with none.

You heard of honest Socrates
The man who never lied:
They weren't so grateful as you'd think
Instead the rulers fixed to have him tried
And handed him the poisoned drink.
How honest was the people's noble son.
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It's honesty that brought him to that state.
How fortunate the man with none.

Here you can see respectable folk
Keeping to God's own laws.
So far he hasn't taken heed.
You who sit safe and warm indoors
Help to relieve our bitter need.
How virtuously we had begun.
The world however did not wait
But soon observed what followed on.
It's fear of god that brought us to that state.
How fortunate the man with none.

How Fortunate The Man With None, Bertolt Brecht, 1928, translation by John Willett

Finally the monkey might

Finally the monkey might try to ignore that he is imprisoned or that there is something seductive in his environment. He plays deaf and dumb and so is indifferent and slothful in relation to what is happening around him. This is stupidity.

To go back a bit, you might say that the monkey is born into his house as he awakens from the blackout. He does not know how he arrived in this prison, so he assumes he has always been there, forgetting that he himself solidified the space into walls. Then he feels the texture of the walls, which is the Second Skandha, Feeling. After that, he relates to the house in terms of desire, hatred, and stupidity, the Third Skandha, Perception-Impulse. Then having developed these three ways of relating to his house, the monkey begins to label and categorize it: "This is a window. This corner is pleasant. That wall frightens me and is bad." He develops a conceptual framework with which to label and categorize and evaluate his house, his world, according to whether he desires, hates or feels indifferent to it. This is the Fourth Skandha, Concept.

The monkey's development through the Fourth Skandha has been fairly logical and predictable. But the pattern of development begins to break down as he enters the Fifth Skandha, Consciousness. The thought pattern becomes irregular and unpredictable and the monkey begins to hallucinate, to dream.

When we speak of "hallucination" or "dream," it means that we attach values to things and events which they do not necessarily have. We have definite opinions about the way things are and should be. This is projection: we project our version of things onto what is there. Thus we become completely immersed in a world of our own creation, a world of conflicting values and opinions. Hallucination, in this sense, is a misinterpretation of things and events, reading into the phenomenal world meanings which it does not have.

...

Q: What does the monkey perceive when he looks out of the five windows of the house?
A: Well, he perceives the east, west, south and north.

Q: How do they look to him?
A: A square world.

Q: What about outside the house?
A: Well, a square world, because he sees through windows.

Q: He doesn't see anything in the distance?
A: He could, but it is also a square picture, because it is is like hanging a picture on the wall, isn't it?

Q: What happens to the monkey when he takes a little LSD or peyote?
A: He has already taken it.

Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, Chögyam Trungpa, 1973

Suppose that we agree to stay away from sincerity

Suppose that we agree to stay away from sincerity, the details of a person's private life, and interpretive diagraming. What then?

To begin with, we ought to decide whether any public discussion of a particular work is appropriate. There are legitimate reasons for being hesitant to speak. Silence is after all the context for the deepest appreciation of art; the only important evaluations are finally personal, interior ones. And, even assuming that public discussion might be helpful, there are many ways to make it unhelpful; because photographs tend to be less inflected than paintings, there is, for example, the question of whether one has seen enough (Cartier-Bresson was right - anybody can take one or two good pictures, or, by extension, a lot of bad ones). To guide public taste fairly requires a great deal of preparation.

Let us suppose though that one has carefully determined that a body of work is bad, unambiguously bad. If so, is it not the critic's duty to speak up? Isn't there an obligation actively to clear away the second rate and the imitative? A critic's job is to support work of merit; how can good work thrive unless the other is conscientiously separated out?

Such questions are not answered quickly. John Rewald, in talking about Seurat and his imitators, identified the center of the problem: "While it is true that those who tried to cash in on the researches of Seurat and his group were so weak that they only underlined the strength and originality of the others, it is also true that public success when it came at last, temporarily went to them, as it always goes to the vulgarizers before reaching the initial inventors." The history of art is filled with people who did not live long enough to enjoy a sympathetic public, and their misery argues that criticism should try to speed justice.

On the other hand, there is the amply documented possibility that a critic's judgement may be wrong. One contemporary defender of the Impressionists asserted that no newspaper had ever discovered a new figure of talent; that is a hard thesis to refute even now. There is also a tactical consideration: in cases in which there is a defensible need for making, in public, a negative judgement, usually the most damaging negation is silence. It is a truism among publishers that a bad review is better than no review at all. True, their attitude is grounded in economics, but even looked at more seriously, a negative review usually implies at least that the issues raised by the work are important. No review implies the worst - boredom.

Beauty in Photography, Robert Adams, 1981

Perceptions of power during the crisis

Perceptions of power during the crisis were particularly revealing. During the early phases, leaders notoriously tended to exaggerate their own power and to perceive their enemies as weaker than they really were. Wilhelm's pledge to Austria, for example, betrayed a fundamental contempt for Russia's military power and an exaggerated confidence in the impact of his own appearance on the Russian leadership. Similarly, the Austrians had contempt for Russia's military machine, which they perceived as more cumbersome and weaker than it actually was. As stress mounted, however, these perceptions gradually changed, and were soon replaced by acute fears of inferiority. These fears, interestingly enough, did not deter any of the participants from actually going to war. At the boiling point, all leaders tended to perceive their own alternatives as more restricted than those of their adversaries. They saw their options as limited by necessity or "fate," whereas those of the adversary were characterized by open choices. This may help explain the curiously mechanistic quality that pervaded the attitudes of statesmen everywhere on the eve of the outbreak: the "we cannot go back now" of Francis Joseph; the "iron dice" of Bethmann-Hollweg; and the unrelenting determinism and enslavement to their timetables of the military leaders who perceived the slightest advantage of the enemy as a catastrophe.

Everywhere, there was a total absence of empathy. No one realized how the situation looked from another point of view. Berchtold did not see that, to a Serbian patriot, Austria's action would look like naked aggression. He did not see that, to the Russian leadership, war might seem to be the only alternative to intolerable humiliation, nor did he see the fateful swing of the pendulum in the mood of his ally, the German Kaiser, from careless overconfidence to frenzied paranoia. Wilhelm's growing panic and total loss of balance made any empathy impossible. And the Russian's contempt for Austria and fear of Germany did likewise.

Finally, one is struck with the overwhelming mediocrity of the personalities involved. Each of the leaders, diplomats, or generals was badly flawed by arrogance, stupidity, carelessness, or weakness. There was a pervasive tendency to place the preservation of one's ego before the preservation of the peace. There was little insight and no vision whatsoever. And there was an almost total absence of excellence and generosity of spirit. It was not fate or Providence that made these men fail so miserably. It was their own evasion of responsibility. As a result of their weakness, the flower of Europe's manhood was destroyed. The sins of the fathers were truly visited upon the sons who forfeited their lives. Of all the cruelties that men have inflicted upon one another, the most terrible has been that of the weak against the weak.

Why Nations Go To War, 2nd ed, John G. Stoessinger, 1978

I have the impression that this isn't the first time

I have the impression that this isn't the first time I've found myself in this situation: with my bow just slackened in my outstretched left hand, my right hand drawn back, the arrow A suspended in midair at about a third of its trajectory, and, a bit farther on, also suspended in midair, and also at about a third of his trajectory, the lion L in the act of leaping upon me, jaws agape and claws extended. In a second I'll know if the arrow's trajectory and the lion's will or will not coincide at a point X crossed by both L and by A at the same second tx, that is, if the lion will slump in the air with a roar stifled by the spurt of blood that will flood his dark throat pierced by the arrow, or whether he will fall unhurt upon me knocking me to the ground with both forepaws which will lacerate the muscular tissue of my shoulders and chest, while his mouth, closing with a simple snap of the jaws, will rip my head from my neck at the level of the first vertebra.

So many and so complex are the factors that condition the parabolic movement both of the arrow and of felines that I am unable for the moment to judge which of the eventualities is the more probable. I am therefore in one of those situations of uncertainty and expectation where one really doesn't know what to think. And the thought that immediately occurs to me is this: it doesn't seem the first time to me.

t zero, Italo Calvino, 1967, translated William Weaver

Until one night that voice rose threateningly

Until one night that voice rose threateningly and irresistibly, demanding that he should bear witness to it with his mouth and with his entrails. And we heard the spirit enter into him as he rose from his bed, tall and growing in prophetic anger, choking with brash words that he emitted like a machine gun. We heard the din of battle and Father's groans, the groans of a titan with a broken hip, but still capable of wrath.

I have never seen an Old Testament prophet, but at the sight of this man stricken by God's fire, sitting clumsily on an enormous china chamberpot behind a windmill of arms, a screen of desperate wrigglings over which there towered his voice, grown unfamiliar and hard, I understood the divine anger of saintly men.

It was a dialogue as grim as the language of thunder. The jerkings of his arms cut the sky into pieces, and in the cracks there appeared the face of Jehovah swollen with anger and spitting out curses. Without looking, I saw him, the terrible Demiurge, as, resting on darkness as on Sinai, propping his powerful palms on the pelmet of the curtains, he press his enormous face against the upper panes of the window which flattened horribly his large fleshy nose.

The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz 1934, translation Celina Wieniewska

In Pakistan I discovered the full force of religious faith.

In Pakistan I discovered the full force of religious faith. I covered my first war, the struggle which was to lead to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. After several days' fighting in the Saidpur region, in the north of what was East-Pakistan, but only for a few more days, I asked the Pakistani army to escort me back to Dacca, so that I could send my films to Paris - I had a scoop. They took me, by night, to a makeshift landing zone. Just like in a film, the moonlight picked out the silhouette of the General and his escort scanning the sky, anxiously awaiting the helicopter which would ferry us over the Indian lines surrounding us. Again, just like in a film, the chopper did not appear. The General then decided to cross the enemy lines by road - he had to be at his HQ by morning - and invited me to go with him. Were my films worth such a risk? I told myself that a General did not take as many risks as a lieutenant and agreed to go with him. What I did not know, and one look at his face the next morning revealed this, was that I was dealing with one of those firebrand Generals, a 'mad General', the sort who leads his troops into battle himself. Since then I have never accepted an invitation from anyone whose face I could not see in the dark.

While the General busied himself rustling up a bigger escort, I asked his aide-de-camp, a captain, what the chances were. He answered: 'It's suicide!' It was too late to turn back and from time to time I had to test my luck. Two trucks bristling with machine guns surrounded the general's jeep, and that idiot put me in the first vehicle. We would be the first in the firing line, that was certain. Wedged between the driver and the aide-de-camp, I would not be able to jump out quickly, and I wouldn't even get any shots of the night attack: using a flash was out of the question. The convoy stopped every half-hour, so that the general could consult his map by the light of a dim torch. When at the fourth halt the aide-de-camp muttered 'to be honest, I think we're lost,' fear, which I had felt only vaguely at first, crept up on me.

At dawn, 'when a white thread can be distinguished from a black one', as in the Muslim tradition, we stopped for longer. Increasinly anxious, I got out to see what the hell this general was up to, holding us up when we no longer had the cover of darkness, right in the middle of enemy lines. I found him by the roadside, behind the last truck, quietly absorbed in dawn prayer. My fear evaporated at once. With men of this calibre, nothing could happen to us. Nothing did happen to us.

Allah O Akbar: a journey though militant Islam, Abbas, 1994

You can live longer if you avoid death

You can live longer if you avoid death, get better if you avoid bankruptcy, and become prosperous if you avoid blowups in the fourth quadrant.

Now you would think that people would buy my arguments about lack of knowledge and accept unpredictability. But many kept asking me "now that you say that our measures are wrong, do you have anything better?"

I used to give the same mathematical finance lectures for both graduate students and practitioners, before giving up on academic students and grade-seekers. Students cannot understand the value of "this is what we don't know"—they think it is not information, that they are learning nothing.

The Fourth Quadrant Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2008

It smells of sweat, chili and onions

It smells of sweat, chili and onions, urine and accumulated garbage and the music from the jukebox mingles with the collective voice, the growl of motors and horns, and it comes to one's ears deformed and thick. Singed faces, prominent cheekbones, eyes made drowsy by routine or indolence wander among the tables, form clusters at the bar, block the entrance. Ambrosio accepts the cigarette that Santiago offers him, smokes, throws the butt on the floor and buries it under his foot. He slurps the soup noisily, nibbles on the pieces of fish, picks up the bones and sucks them, leaves them all shiny, listening or answering or asking a question, and he swallows pieces of bread, takes long swigs of beer and wipes the sweat off with his hand: time swallows a person up before he realizes it, child. He thinks, why don't I leave? He thinks: I have to go and he orders more beer. He fills the glasses, clutches his and while he talks, remembers, dreams, or thinks he watches the circle of foam sprinkled with craters, mouths that silently open up, vomiting golden bubbles and disappearing into the yellow liquid that his hand warms. He drinks without closing his eyes, belches, takes out cigarettes and lights them, leans over to pet Rowdy: the things that have happened, Jesus. He talks and Ambrosio talks, the pouches on his eyelids are bluish, the openings in his nose vibrate as if he'd been running, as if he were drowning, and after each sip he spits, looks nostalgically at the flies, listens, smiles, or grows sad or confused, and his eyes seem to grow furious sometimes or frightened or go away, on top of his overalls he wears a jacket that must have been blue once too and had buttons, and a shirt with a high collar that is wrapped around his neck like a rope. Santiago looks at his enormous shoes: muddy, twisted, fucked up by the weather. His voice comes to him in a stammer, fearful, is lost, cautious, imploring, returns, respectful or anxious or constrained, always defeated: not thirty, forty, a hundred, more. Not only had he fallen apart, grown old, become brutalized; he probably was tubercular as well. A thousand times more fucked up than Carlitos or you, Zavalita. He was leaving, he had to go and he orders more beer. You're drunk, Zavalita, you were about to cry. Life doesn't treat people well in this country, son, since he'd left their house he'd gone through a thousand movie adventures. Life hadn't treated him well either, Ambrosio, and he orders more beer. Was he going to throw up? The smell of frying, feet and armpits swirls about, biting and enveloping, over the straight-haired or bushy heads, over the gummy crests and the flat necks with mange and brillantine, the music on the jukebox grows quiet and revives, grows quiet and revives, and now, more intense and irrevocable than the sated faces and square mouths and dark beardless cheeks, the abject images of memory are also there: more beer. Wasn't this country a can of worms, boy, wasn't Peru a brain-twister?

Conversation in the Cathedral, Mario Vargas Llosa, 1975, translation Gregory Rabassa

Awareness is a process

Awareness is a process of deepening self-acceptance. It is neither a cold, surgical examination of life nor a means of becoming perfect. Whatever it observes, it embraces. There is nothing unworthy of acceptance. The light of awareness will doubtless illuminate things we would prefer not to see. And this may entail a descent into what is forbidden, repressed, denied. We might uncover disquieting memories, irrational childhood terrors. We might have to accept not only a potential sage hidden within but also a potential murderer, rapist or thief.

Despite the sense I might have of myself as a caring person, I observe that I want to punch S in the face. What usually happens to this hatred? I restrain myself from expressing it, not out of any great love for S but because of how it would affect other people's view of me. The attachment to self-image likewise inclines me to shy away from and forget this viciousness. In one way or another I deny it. I do not allow it into the field of awareness. I do not embrace it.

...

But to embrace hatred does not mean to indulge it. To embrace hatred is to accept it for what it is: a disruptive but transient state of mind. Awareness observes it jolt into being, coloring consciousness and gripping the body. The heart accelerates, the breath becomes shallow and jagged, and an almost physical urge to react dominates the mind. At the same time, this frenzy is set against a dark, quiet gulf of hurt, humiliation, and shame. Awareness notices all this without condoning or condemning, repressing or expressing. It recognizes that just as hatred arises, so will it pass away.

Buddhism Without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor, 1997

He said that journeys involving the company of the dead were notorious for their difficulty but that in truth every journey was so accompanied. He said that in his opinion it was imprudent to suppose that the dead have no power to act in the world, for their power is great and their influence often most weighty with just those who suspect it least. He said that what men do not understand is that what the dead have quit is itself no world but is also only the picture of the world in men's hearts. He said that the world cannot be quit for it is eternal in whatever form as are all things within it. In those faces that shall now be forever nameless among their outworn chattels there is writ a message that can never be spoken because time would always slay the messenger before he could ever arrive.

The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy 1994

The fact that I, a chemist

The fact that I, a chemist, engaged here in writing my stories about chemistry, have lived a different season, has been narrated elsewhere.

At a distance of thirty years I find it difficult to reconstruct the sort of human being that corresponded, in November 1944, to my name or, better, to my numbre: 174517. I must have by then have been overcome the most terrible crisis, the crisis of having become part of Lager system, and I must have developed a strange callousness if I then managed not only to survive but also to think, to register the world around me, and even to perform rather delicate work, in an environment infected by the daily presence of death and at the same time brought to a frenzy by the approach of the Russian liberators, who by now were only eighty kilometers away. Desperation and hope alternated at a rate that would have destroyed almost any normal person in an hour.

We were not normal because we were hungry. Our hunger at that time had nothing in common with the well-known (and not completely disagreeable) sensation of someone who has missed a meal and is certain that the next meal will not be missed: it was a need, a lack, a yearning that had accompanied us now for a year, had struck deep, permanent roots in us, lived in our cells, and conditioned our behaviour. To eat, to get something to eat, was our prime stimulus, behind which, at a great distance, followed all the other problems of survival, and even still farther away the memories of home and the very fear of death.

The Periodic Table, Primo Levi 1975, translated Raymond Rosenthal

This town is filled with echoes

"This town is filled with echoes. It's like they were trapped behind the walls, or beneath the cobblestones. When you walk you feel like someone's behind you, stepping in your footsteps. You hear rustlings. And people laughing. Laughter that sounds used up. And voices worn away by the years. Sound like that. But I think the day will come when those sounds fade away."

That was what Damiana Cisneros was telling me as we walked through the town.

"There was a time when night after night I could hear the sounds of a fiesta. I could hear the noise clear out at the Media Luna. I would walk into town to see what the uproar was about, and this is what i would see: just what we're seeing now. Nothing. No one. The streets as empty as they are now.

"Then I didn't hear anything anymore. You know, you can get worn out celebrating. That's why I wasn't surprised when it ended.

"Yes," Damian Cisneros repeated "This town is filled with echoes. I'm not afraid anymore. I hear the dogs howling, and I let them howl. And on windy days I see the wind blowing leaves from the trees, when anyone can see that there aren't any trees here. There must have been once. Otherwise, where do the leaves come from?

"And the worst of all is when you hear people talking and the voices seem to be coming through a crack, and yet so clear you can recognize who's speaking. In fact, just now as I was coming here I happened upon a wake. I stopped to recite the Lord's Prayer. And while I was praying, one woman stepped away from the others and came toward me and said, 'Damiana! Pray for me, Damiana!'

"Her rebozo fell away from her face and I recognized my sister, Sixtina.

"'What are you doing here?' I asked her.

"The she ran back and hid among the older women.

"In case you didn't know, my sister Sixtina died when I was twelve years old. She was the oldest. There were sixteen of us, so you can figure out how long she's been dead. And look at her now, still wandering through this world. So don't be afraid if you hear newer echoes, Juan Preciado."

"Was it my mother who told you I was coming?" I asked.

"No. And by the way, whatever happened to your mother?"

"She died," I replied.

"Died? What of?"

"I don't really know. Sadness, maybe. She sighed a lot."

"That's bad. Every sigh is like a drop of your life being swallowed up. Well, so she's dead."

"Yes. I thought maybe you knew."

"Why would I know? I haven't heard a thing from her in years."

"The how did you know about me?"

Damiana did not answer.

Pedro Paramo, Juan Rulfo, 1955 translation Margaret Sayers Peden

The Partisan

When they poured across the border
I was cautioned to surrender
This I could not do
I took my gun and vanished.

I have changed my name so often
I've lost my wife and children
But I have many friends
And some of them are with me

An old woman gave us shelter
Kept us hidden in the garret
Then the soldiers came
She died without a whisper.

There were three of us this morning
I'm the only one this evening
But I must go on
The frontiers are my prison.

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing
Through the graves the wind is blowing
Freedom soon will come
Then we'll come from the shadows.

Les Allemands étaient chez moi
Ils me dirent "résigne toi"
Mais je n'ai pas pu
J'ai repris mon arme.

J'ai changé cent fois de nom
J'ai perdu femme et enfants
Mais j'ai tant d'amis
J'ai la France entiere.

Un vieil homme dans un grenier
Pour la nuit nous a cachés
Les Allemands l'ont pris
Il est mort sans surprise.

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing
Through the graves the wind is blowing
Freedom soon will come
Then we'll come from the shadows.

Paroles : Hy Zaret, adapté d'Emmanuel d'Astier de la Vigerie (a.k.a. "Bernard").

(this transcription from this website)

This truth destroys the veracity of my story

This truth destroys the veracity of my story, the one I have been telling. But we should not be too fixed on this outward appearance, because both are the same one, except instead of advancing along its horizontal axis I have suddenly moved upward across it, vertically, and this is what I have found. Believe me. This le Nègre Pierre turning the wheel is also true. When his own people and the French discovered his gifts, they bound him to the wheel to keep him from getting away, and this is where le Nègre Pierre spends his days, tied like a mule so the wild beast he is cannot escape.

Vertical, and not horizontal, as if Madame in the brothel of The House were not going through her room in the natural way, horizontally, but had found how to go through it in upward fashion. She would see, then, instead of the habitual air of elegance and sumptuousness, nothing by abandon and negligence: above the frame holding up the drapes, dead flies and little moths, dust dereliction, and gloom are what one sees from up there. ... If she were to describe the room in this way, the room she is writing about would be something else....

And why should I share with the reader the filth that I must clean up all by myself, that must be thrown out because, although it belongs to the room, it is not part of the room? Because, without your closeness, reader, without the warmth and company of your body, I would not have been able to draw the story upward, in a vertical direction, because when your body moves close to mine, I succumb, I let myself go, and in that mode I remain in order to go through the story in a different direction, vertically.... That's the way it is when two bodies draw close to each other. The flesh reveal what neither the eye nor the intelligence is able to see. ... But despite your eroticism, so strong and vigorous, into which I have allowed myself to fall, as into a woman's lap, moving back and forth as I feel you have asked me to do, I do know that the truthfulness of this tale is on the verge of tumbling over the cliff, I know I am capable of collapsing, coming apart, going head over heels -- and with me everything that I have written here, that I swear, reader, is true, just as you are or I am when I hold back this pen with my hand before again setting down in ink this true story which we should not allow to be destroyed , or be turned into its own end. Therefore, I promise myself that throughout this book I will not move through the story in any other fashion and that I will direct myself along the horizontal axis so you will believe me, will trust me, will know that it is true, really true. ... Because this story is the only thing I have for believing myself real.

They're Cows, We're Pigs, Carmen Boullosa, 1991, translation Leland H. Chambers

On the other hand, young men of my acquaintance

On the other hand, young men of my acquaintance who were in the habit of voluntarily placing themselves under the influence of alcohol had often surprised me with a recital of their strange adventures. The mind may be impaired by alcohol, I mused, but withal it may be pleasantly impaired. Personal experience appeared to me to be the only satisfactory means to the resolution of my doubts. Knowing it was my first one, I quietly fingered the butt of my glass before I raised it. Lightly I subjected myself to an inward interrogation.

Nature of interrogation: Who are my future cronies, where our mad carousals? What neat repast shall feast us light and choice of Attic taste with wine whence we may rise to hear the lute well touched or artful voice warble immortal notes or Tuscan air? What mad pursuit? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Here's to your health, said Kelly.
Good luck, I said.
The porter was sour to the palate, but viscid, potent. Kelly made a long noise as if releasing air from his interior.
I looked at him from the corner of my eye and said:
You can't beat a good pint.
He leaned over and put his face close to me in an earnest manner.
Do you know what I am going to tell you, he said with his wry mouth, a pint of plain is your only man.
Notwithstanding this eulogy, I soon found that the mass of plain porter bears an unsatisfactory relation to its toxic content and I became subsequently addicted to brown stout in a bottle, a drink which still remains the one that I prefer the most despite the painful and blinding fits of vomiting which a plurality of bottles has often induced in me.

I proceeded home one evening in October after leaving a gallon of half-digested porter on the floor of a public-house in Parnell Street and put myself with considerable difficulty into bed, where I remained for three days on the pretence of a chill. I was compelled to secrete my suit beneath the mattress because it was offensive to at least two of the senses and bore an explanation of my illness contrary to that already advanced.

The two senses referred to: Vision, smell.

At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien, 1939

The genuflection toward "fairness" is a familiar newsroom piety

The genuflection toward "fairness" is a familiar newsroom piety, in practice the excuse for a good deal of autopilot reporting and lazy thinking but in theory a benign ideal. In Washington, however a community in which the management of news has become the single overriding preoccupation of the core industry, what "fairness" has often come to mean is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured. Such institutionalized events as a congressional hearing or a presidential trip will be covered with due diligence, but the story will vanish the moment the gavel falls, the hour Air Force One returns to Andrews. "Iran-contra" referred exclusively, for many Washington reporters, to the hearings.

Political Pornography, from Political Fictions, Joan Didion, 2001

In temple architecture

In temple architecture the main room stands at a considerable distance from the garden; so dilute is the light there that no matter what the season, on fair days or cloudy, morning midday, or evening, the pale, white glow scarcely varies. And the shadows at the interstices of the ribs seem strangely immobile, as if dust collected in the corners had become a part of the paper itself. I blink in uncertainty at this dreamlike luminescence, feeling as though some misty film were blunting my vision. The light from the pale white paper, powerless to dispel the heavy darkness of the alcove is instead repelled by the darkness, creating a world of confusion where dark and light are indistinguishable. Have not you yourselves sensed a difference in the light that suffuses such a room, a rare tranquility not found in ordinary light? Have you never felt a sort of fear in the face of the ageless, a fear that in that room you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time, that untold years might pass and upon emerging you had grown old and gray?

In Praise of Shadows, Jun'ichiro Tanizaki, 1933 translated by Thomas J. Harper & Edward G. Seidensticker

Pugg sat down

Pugg sat down next to the barrel, lifeted the paper tape to his hundred eyes and read what the Demon had, with its informational net, managed to dredge up out of the eternal prancing and dancing of the atoms; those insignificant bits of knowledge so absorbed him, that he didn't even notice how the two constructors left the cellar in great haste, how they grabbed hold of the helm of their ship, pulled once, twice, and on the third time freed it from the mire in which the pirate had stuck them, then climbed aboard and blasted off as fast as they possibly could, for they knew that, though their Demon would work, it would work too well, producing a far greater wealth of information than Pugg anticipated. Pugg meanwhile sat propped up against the barrel and read, as that diamond pen which the Demon employed to record everything it learned from the oscillating atoms squeaked on and on, and he read about how exactly Harlebardonian wrigglers wriggle, and that the daughter of King Petrolius of Labondia is named Humpinella, and what Frederick the Second, one of the paleface kings, had for lunch before he declared war against the Gwendoliths, and how many electron shells an atom of thermionolium would have, if such an element extisted, and what is the cloacal diameter of a small bird called the tufted twit, which is painted by the Wabian Marchpanes on their sacrificial urns, and also of the tripartite taste of the oceanic ooze on Polypelagid Diaphana, and of the flower Dybbulyk, that beats the lower Malfundican hunters black and blue whenever they waken it at dawn, and how to obtain the angle of the base of an irregular icosahedron, and who was the jeweler of Gufus, the left-handed butcher of the Bovants, and the number of volumes on philately to be published in the year seventy thousand on Marinautica, and where to find the tomb of Cybrinda the Red-toed, who was nailed to her bed by a certain Clamonder in a drunken fit, and how to tell the difference between a bindlesnurk and an ordinary trundlespiff, and also who has the smallest lateral wumpet in the Universe, and why fan-tailed fleas won't eat moss, and how to play the fame of Fratcher-My-Pliss and win, and how many snapdragon seed there were in the turd into which Abroquian Phylminides stepped, when he stumbled on the Great Albongean Road eight miles outside the Valley of Symphic Sighs -- and little by little his hundred eyes began to swim, and it dawned on him that all this information, entirely true and meaninful in every particular, was absolutely useless, producing such an ungodly confusion that his head ached terribly and his legs trembled. But the Demon of the Second King continued to operate at a speed of three hundred million facts per second, and mile after mile of tape coiled out and gradually buried the Ph. D. pirate beneath its windings, wrapping him, as it were, in a paper web, while the tiny diamond-tipped pen shivered and twitched like one insane, and it seemed to Pugg that any minute now he would learn the most fabulous, unheard-of things, things that would open up to him the Ultimate Mystery of Being, so he greedily read everything that flew out from under the diamond nib, the drinking songs of the Quaidacabondish and the sizes of bedroom slippers available on the the continent of Cob, with pompons and without, and the number of hairs growing on each brass knuckle of the skew-beezered flummox, and the average width of the fontanel in indigenous stepinfants, and the litanies of the M'hot-t'ma-hon'h conjurers to rouse the reverend Blotto Ben-Blear, and the inaugaural catcalls of the Duke of Zilch, and six ways to cook cream of wheat, and a good poison for uncles with goatees, and twelve types of forensic tickling, and the names of the citizens of Foofaraw Junction beginning with the letter M, and the results of a poll of opinions on the taste of beer mixed wth mushroom soup...

The Cyberiad, Stanislaw Lem, 1975 translated Michael Kandel

Her voice is filled with distant sonorities

Her voice is filled with distant sonorities, like reverberations in a cave: now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. And she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit. 'Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?' She draws her long, sharp fingernail across the bars of the cage in which her pet lark sings, striking a plangent twang like that of the plucked heartstrings of a woman of metal. Her hair falls down like tears.

The Lady of the House of Love, Angela Carter