you go too far, marlowe.
those are harsh words to throw at a man. especially when he's walking out of your bedroom.
just kids.
My treasured objects were mingled with the laundry. My work area was a jumble of manuscript pages, musty classics, broken toys and talismans. I tacked pictures of Rimbaud, Bob Dylan, Lotte Lenya, Piaf, Genet and John Lennon over a makeshift desk, where I arranged my quills, my inkwell, and my notebooks - my monastic mess.
[…]
It had been raining and droplets trickled down from his thick curls. He had on a white shirt, damp and sodden agianst his skin. Like Jean Genet, Robert was a terrible thief. Genet was caught and imprisoned for stealing rare volumes of Proust and rolls of silk from a shirt maker. Aesthetic thieves.
- Patti Smith
deductive.
Experience for the paltry purpose of having had it is to me both trivial and immoral … I have an almost puritanic horror and that includes an objection to the cultivation of [passion] in any of its many disguised forms. I have a sort of notion that to be capable of anything more worth while one must have the power of idealising another and I don’t seem to have any of that…I want things too but only in order to understand them, and I never go and get them… All I want to do is meditate endlessly and to think and talk.
- getrude stein, Q.E.D
the seminal union of carvers.
I’ve saved the best conspiracy theories for my own private genocide.
I’ve saved my own sweat for the trial, and the lingering doubts
for the lingering nights I spend in furious luxury.
I’ve saved my best thought for the last laugh of the century,
and my worst thought for the seconds after.
I’ve examined the bruise on your thigh and it looks nothing like your pet.
Beauty has become a riddle and the answer is grass.
Beauty was always a riddle, but now it’s doused in gasoline.
I was born to break and break to be born again.
In my great novel the protagonist rides through the desert
searching for a lost father or gold.
It’s a story of the death of narrative, the failure of history.
In my great debacle, all stories are starting to sound like Vietnam.
The enemies hide in bushes, the heroes go insane like helicopters.
I wrote the footnotes last night while the world was busy being victims.
It sounded more like a love poem than an explication of archaic usages.
It was the sickest excuse for love I’ve ever felt.
It was the second time I had ever been true.
The first time was when I joined the zealots plundering a home for the elderly.
The first time I was coping with peace by pretending it was war.
Peace has made a farce out of my masculinity.
What will war do to me now that it’s come at last?
What can I do with my devastation now that it has gone astray?
What can I do with my inmates now that the sheets tear every time,
now that the guards have grown jealous?
I’m stuttering into a phone. It doesn’t work. It’s not a phone.
I’ve come this far, almost all the way back to my master plan,
but I can’t take another lie. My name has been written on raw meat.
The old ways were so glorious in all their savagery,
so full of potential that we never took time to abuse.
I’ve watched the river run itself ragged against the rocks
and I’ve told myself, That’s not my army. But it is,
and the logging accidents pale in comparison to
the things that take place in my capital when everybody’s looking.
I believe in military might and the military might believes in
my hocus-pocus. They’ve never seen such illustrious lies.
They’ve never felt such an illustrious hammer on their heads.
They’ve never heard such a laugh.
They think the truth is buried somewhere in
the backyard of my body. They think one shovel will do.
- johannes goransson.
oh, lottie.
To study the way with the body means to study the way with your own body. It is the study of the way using this lump of red flesh. Everything which comes forth from the study of the way is the true human body. The entire world of the ten directions is nothing but the true human body. The coming and going of birth and death is the true human body.
- Dogen
A Study of Simone Weil as Other Than Martyr is on my mind today.
Asceticism is different from martyrdom and different, again, from masochism. But spirituality with physical labour as its core is simultaneously puritanical/political. Contradictions is the word that comes to mind when I think of Weil; mystery not as something unclear and problematic but a reading practice in and of itself, the chiasma between one thing and another, the I and the Other as the site of meeting reality. Existence as independent of our thoughts, but that doesn’t mean it’s located in the body. Her answer is God, the denial of the body, the absorption of sins for the utilitarian good, right? but denial of the body is also intense awareness of it. Perhaps Weil was really thinking about changing our relationship of the body to the world - reject muscle memory, to read with the intellect and the visceral reactions of the gut as one seamless entity, to move outside of temporality (not in terms of the teleological goal of death, rather in terms of being, ontological) but in some kind of transcendent stasis, because now is eternal and continuous, always shifting, but atemporal.
I should be doing my homework instead.
i remember
he said, you know how once you start believing someone can do no wrong, they can do no wrong?
and i said, you have no idea, babe.
things i should do.
“I have been playing around with my computer’s voice recognition software. When I wake up in the morning, I can stay in bed and say “Computer, good morning.” and my computer says, “Good morning, captain. I trust you slept well? The time is now [THE TIME]. There is a man with a gun inside the house.”
- Joey Comeau
i was a good girl and ate all my medicine.
it was vile.
to spend.
What I call “feminine” and “masculine” is the relationship to pleasure, the relationship to spending, because we are born into language, and I cannot do otherwise than to find myself before words: we cannot get rid of them, they are there. We could change them, we could put signs in their place, but they would become just as closed, just as immobile and petrifying as the words “masculine” and “feminine” and would lay down the law to us. So there is nothing to be done, except to shake them like apple trees, all the time.
- Hélène Cixous
