Saturday, August 14, 2010
A light has dawned for me: I need companions, living ones, not dead companions and corpses which I carry with me wherever I wish.
But I need living companions who follow me because they want to follow themselves – and who want to go where I want to go.
A light has dawned for me: Zarathustra shall not speak to the people but to companions! Zarathustra shall not be herdsman and dog to the herd!
To lure men away from the herd – that is why I have come. The people and the herd shall be angry with me: the herdsman shall call Zarathustra a robber.
- Thus spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
But the love between a man and a woman, when it is whole, is dual. It is the melting into pure communion, and it is the friction of sheer sensuality, both. In pure communion I become whole in love. And in pure, fierce passion of sensuality I am burned into essentiality. I am driven from the matrix into sheer separate distinction. I become my single self, inviolable and unique, as the gems were perhaps once driven into themselves out of the confusion of earths. Then in the fire of their extreme sensual love, in the friction of intense, destructive flames, I am destroyed and reduced to her essential otherness. It is a destructive fire, the profane love. but it is the only fire that will purify us into singleness, fuse us from the chaos into our own unique gem-like seperateness of being.
- David Herbert Lawrence
So ignorant are most landsmen of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching the plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick
Then there is the other secret. There isn’t any symbolysm (mis-spelled). The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The sharks are all sharks no better and no worse. All the symbolism that people say is shit. What goes beyond is what you see beyond when you know.
- Ernest Hemingway to Bernard Berenson, Selected Letters, p.780
A rather dishonest person one day, in a note contained in an anthology, made a list of some of the images presented to us in the work of one of our greatest living poets. It read:
‘The next day of the caterpillar dressed for the ball’… meaning ‘butterfly’
‘Breast of crystal’… meaning ‘carafe’
Etc.
No, indeed, sir. It means nothing of the kind. Put your butterfly back in your carafe. You may be sure Saint-Pol-Roux said exactly what he meant.
- Andre Breton, Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality
The ‘Other Half’ is the word. The ‘Other Half’ is an organism. Word is an organism. The presence of the ‘Other Half’ is a separate organism attached to your nervous system on an air line of words can now be demonstrated experimentally. One of the most common ‘hallucinations’ of subject during sense withdrawal is the feeling of another body sprawled through the subject’s body at an angle…yes quite an angle it is the ‘Other Half’ worked quite some years on a symbiotic basis. From symbiosis to parasitism is a short step. The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.
- William S. Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded
Here comes the time, when people will behave like madmen, and if they see anybody who does not behave like that, they will rebel against him and say: “You are mad”, – because he is not like them.
- Anthony the Great
Monday, February 22, 2010
One of the grimmest monuments to altruism is man’s culturally induced selflessness: his willingness to live with himself as with the unknown, to ignore, evade, repress the personal (the non-social) needs of his soul, to know least about the things that matter most, and thus to consign his deepest values to the impotent underground of subjectivity and his life to the dreary wasteland of chronic guilt.
- Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
The young stastician is devoted to number and to method, not table-rapping or wishful thinking. But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in between. Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, he imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements. Some are always in bright excitation, others darkly inhibited. The contours, bright and dark, keep changing. But each point is allowed only the two states: waking or sleep. One or zero. “Summation,” “transition,” “irradiation, “concentration,” “reciprocal induction” – all Pavlovian brain-mechanics – assumes the presence of these bi-stable points. But to Mexico belongs the domain between zero and one – the probabilities.
-Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
