Passages

"For the functionary, "to live," means to function within an apparatus that provides him his rights. If the apparatus denies him his rights, it is because it has been badly programmed and is malfunctioning. So it must be fixed. For the functionary, rights are not ethical or political judgements, they are formal judgements. The functionary is formalist according to the dominant ontology. In the post-industrial society it makes no sense to try to distinguish between conservatism and revolution, between right and left: Politics loses all meaning. This seems to indicate that the post-industrial society will be a bureaucracy, a society in which the functionary is dominant. But everything indicates that this is a mistake. Because on the contrary: wherever there is bureaucracy, the post-industrial society is not yet well programmed. So everything indicates that functional programs will dominate the post-industrial society, within which the functionaries will function progressively more like invisible cogwheels inside the black boxes. This will be technocracy. Functionaries are not comparable to the farmers and factory owners of preceding societies, but to the serfs and workers. The apparent dominant class shall be the programmers, although an attentive analysis will also reveal that they too are specialized functionaries. The apparatus will form the real dominant class. It will be an inhuman society."

"“Yes, there are stars," I lie and I give them to him--there are no stars--but there must be some behind the clouds and they must be shining inside-out tonight. I love stars, but I hardly ever notice them. I guess when you're blind, you realize how much you forget to see."

"For what it is worth: Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening team with a peculiar membership goes to work on them. Otherwise, life will go on exactly as before, no matter how painful, unrealistic, unjust, ludicrous, or downright dumb that life may be. The team must consist of three sorts of specialists, he says. Otherwise, the revolution, whether in politics or the arts or the sciences or whatever, is sure to fail. The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius—a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation. “A genius working alone,” he says, “is invariably ignored as a lunatic.” The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. “A person like that working alone,” says Slazinger, “can only yearn out loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be.” The third sort of specialist is a person who can explain anything, no matter how complicated, to the satisfaction of most people, no matter how stupid or pigheaded they may be. “He will say almost anything in order to be interesting and exciting,” says Slazinger. “Working alone, depending solely on his own shallow ideas, he would be regarded as being as full of shit as a Christmas turkey.”"

"“You get to tell the truth,” I said, “when you're schizophrenic.” “Then more people should be schizophrenic.”"

"I got a job checking facts at a science magazine. Fun facts the called them. 'The connected fibers in a human brain, extended, would wrap around the Earth forty times.' Horrible, I wrote in the margin, but they put it through anyway."

"And John says: “I could love you violently, if I let myself.” But he has not let himself. Why? Because I haven’t touched him, I haven’t looked into his eyes with the image he wants to see there. And I could. But I am too tired, too noble, in a perverse way. It sickens me. I wouldn’t want him, even as he became a victim. So I tell him casually that I won’t let it happen, playfully, because it is a stillborn child. I have given birth to so many of these."

"Matsushima is a cheerful laughing beauty, while the charm of Kisagata is in the beauty of its weeping countenance. It is not only lonely but also penitent, as it were, for some unknown evil. Indeed it has a striking resemblance to the expression of a troubled mind."

"Even my grandfather, on the glassed-in verandah, couldn’t woo me from my huge gloom. I refused to hide his pipe in the rubber plant and make it a pipe tree. He stalked off in his sneakers, wounded too, but whistling. I waited till his shape rounded Water Tower Hill and dwindled in the direction of the sea promenade; its ice-cream and hotdog stalls were boarded up still, in spite of the mild pre-season weather. His lyrical whistle beckoned me to adventure and forgetting. But I didn’t want to forget. Hugging my grudge, ugly and prickly, a sad sea urchin, I trudged off on my own, in the opposite direction toward the forbidding prison. As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin: I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over."

"The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine's central premise is that all diseases can be cured. Such a disease is, by definition, mysterious."

"I would not want to make you unhappy by detailing pain, but there is a crucial sort of difference between pain and the narration of pain. I am telling you what happened. If there is vicarious pain in knowing, there is actual peril in not knowing. In aversion lies a colossal risk."

"Quite often I had heard Bunny say this Housman aloud – seriously when drunk, more mockingly when sober – so that the lines for me were set and hardened in the cadence of his voice; perhaps that is why hearing it then, in Henry's academic monotone (he was a terrible reader) there with the guttering candles and the draft shivering in the flowers and people crying all around, enkindled in me such a brief and yet so excruciating pain, like one of those weirdly scientific Japanese tortures calibrated to extract the greatest possible misery in the smallest space of time."

"And he tells me all those strange things and always talks about his wife and what times we have nowadays. Everything is being torn up and destroyed and if you want to be honest, you have to admit that you can't figure things out anymore. And particularly an educated man can't build anything for himself anymore, and everything is uncertain. The whole world is uncertain and life and the future and what we used to believe in and what we believe now, and work isn't fun anymore, because you always have a bad conscience because there are so many people who don't have any. And so a man has nothing but his wife and he's very dependent on her because he wants to be able to believe in something, and that's the love for his wife-- and then she doesn't want all that love and that you're not worth anything at all anymore. And because you're nothing but a burden on humanity these days-- that's why you need that special someone so badly to whom you can be a joy. And then all of a sudden you're no joy anymore. And true elegance is disappearing in this day and age and in times like that, women are the first ones to slide, and men are held by the law and they hold women too-- and once all the laws of humanity have disappeared, man has nothing more to hold onto, but you can't tell, because he never did in a moral sense-- and what falls first in a way to be noticed by everyone, that's always the woman."

"The wife wants to go to the hospital. But she does not want to have gone to the hospital. If she goes, she might not come back. If she goes, he might use it against her. But when she is alone, the objects around her bristle with intent. This is fascinating to her but it must remain a secret."

"I look at the blanked-out faces of the other passengers--hoisting their briefcases, their backpacks, shuffling to disembark--and I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful. Only what is that thing? Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet--for me, anyway--all that's worth living for lies in that charm? A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are. Because--isn't it drilled into us constantly, from childhood on, an unquestioned platitude in the culture--? From William Blake to Lady Gaga, from Rousseau to Rumi to Tosca to Mister Rogers, it's a curiously uniform message, accepted from high to low: when in doubt, what to do? How do we know what's right for us? Every shrink, every career counselor, every Disney princess knows the answer: "Be yourself." "Follow your heart." Only here's what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can't be trusted--? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight toward a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster?...If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or...is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name."

"If the gravity of this moment outweighs your knowledge of where you are, that is pathetic. That is what makes the space above the ocean so attractive, but you still know enough to travel in a straight line through a patch of fog, and continue to walk when you emerge, with some fog clinging to you, up to your waist."

""It has been said here that reason is the devil's tool. That's not true! But it is true that the devil can dwell only in the mind and never in the heart of man. I would not be able to answer the question of whether or not Jan is guilty! His heresy lies mostly in his lack of trust, for all his fine efforts. He constantly yields to strange promptings. They might come from the devil, or his submission may just be out of weakness. We should be concerned with the salvation of this soul, not its damnation. I think Jan should be removed from the council so as to have time for meditation and prayer. Then we shall see. . .""

"Gentlemen, that was a town neither good nor wise, because of what it had suffered. A grievous fate was sent down upon it, and that was why Arras had sinned. Wisdom never goes hand in hand with affliction."

"“I can’t help it,” I said. “My soul knows my meat is doing bad things, and is embarrassed. But my meat just keeps right on doing bad, dumb things.” “Your what and your what?” he said. “My soul and my meat,” I said. “They’re separate?” he said. “I sure hope they are,” I said. I laughed. “I would hate to be responsible for what my meat does.” I told him, only half joking, about how I imagined the soul of each person, myself included, as being a sort of flexible neon tube inside. All the tube could do was receive news about what was happening with the meat, over which it had no control. “So when people I like do something terrible,” I said, “I just flense them and forgive them.” “Flense?” he said. “What’s flense?” “It’s what whalers used to do to whale carcasses when they got them on board,” I said. “They would strip off the skin and blubber and meat right down to the skeleton. I do that in my head to people—get rid of all the meat so I can see nothing but their souls. Then I forgive them.”"

"Mingled with tiny shells I saw scattered petals Of bush-clovers Rolling with the waves."

"The Six Grandfathers have placed in this world many things, all of which should be happy. Every little thing is sent for something, and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World."

"And as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic. And—I would argue as well—all love. Or, perhaps more accurately, this middle zone illustrates the fundamental discrepancy of love. Viewed close: a freckled hand against a black coat, an origami frog tipped over on its side. Step away, and the illusion snaps in again: life-more-than-life, never-dying. Pippa herself is the play between those things, both love and not-love, there and not-there. Photographs on the wall, a balled-up sock under the sofa. The moment where I reached to brush a piece of fluff from her hair and she laughed and ducked at my touch. And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime."

"Any disease that is treated as a mystery and acutely enough feared will be felt to be morally, if not literally, contagious."

"The industrialist dropped me already. And it's all because of politics. Politics poisons human relationships. I spit on it. The emcee was a Jew, the one on the bike was a Jew, the one who was dancing was a Jew.… So he asks me if I'm Jewish too. My God, I'm not — but I'm thinking: if that's what he likes, I'll do him the favor — and I say: “Of course — my father just sprained his ankle at the synagogue last week.” So he says, he should have known, with my curly hair. Of course it's permed, and naturally straight like a match. So he gets all icy; turns out he's nationalist with a race, and race is an issue — and he got all hostile — it's all very difficult. So I did exactly the wrong thing. But I didn't feel like taking it all back. After all, a man should know in advance whether he likes a woman or not. So stupid! At first they pay you all sorts of compliments and are drooling all over you — and then you tell them: I'm a chestnut! — and their chin drops: oh, you're a chestnut — yuk, I had no idea. And you are exactly the way you were before, but just one word has supposedly changed you."

"The earliest literal definition of cancer is a growth, lump, or protuberance, and the disease's name—from the Greek karkinos and the Latin cancer, both meaning crab—was inspired, according to Galen, by the resemblance of an external tumor's swollen veins to a crab's legs; not, as many people think, because a metastatic disease crawls or creeps like a crab. But etymology indicates that tuberculosis was also once considered a type of abnormal extrusion: the word tuberculosis—from the Latin tuberculum, the diminutive of tuber, bump, swelling—means a morbid swelling, protuberance, projection, or growth."

"Father thou art in heaven, please make my inside so good and so fine that he can love me. I'm going to buy him a tie, because that's something I can do. Someone once told me that I have an almost masculine understanding of it. i guess there are situations where having a past is to your advantage. Heavenly Father, perform a miracle and give me an education--I can do the rest myself with make-up."

""Being a romantic means you always see what's beautiful. What's good. You don't want to see the gritty truth of things. You believe everything will turn out right.""

"in the distance, an allusive expanse of expanded, indifferent purity. Because your eye clings to this margin, it appears to speed up."

"Up until the seventeenth century, it was widely believed that magnets had souls. How else could an object attract or repel?"

"The map said that if you drove X miles you would arrive at place Y, whereupon he would start up the car and drive X miles knowing that Y would be there; it said so on the map. The man who doubted every article of Christian doctrine believed everything he saw written down. "

"It didn't occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I'd roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I'd missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines."

"Only those who have had visions of the thunder beings of the west can act as heyokas. They have sacred power and they share some of this with all the people, but they do it through funny actions. When a vision comes from the thunder beings of the west, it comes with terror like a thunder storm; but when the storm of vision has passed, the world is greener and happier; for wherever the truth of vision comes upon the world, it is like a rain. The world, you see, is happier after the terror of the storm. But in the heyoka ceremony, everything is backwards, and it is planned that the people shall be made to feel jolly and happy first, so that it may be easier for the power to come to them. You have noticed that the truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping. When people are already in despair, maybe the laughing face is better for them; and when they feel too good and are too sure of being safe, maybe the weeping face is better for them to see. And so I think that is what the heyoka ceremony is for."

"The dark secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks. This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?"

"Move, if you can hear, Silent mound of my friend, My wails and the answering Roar of autumn wind."

"And—maybe it's ridiculous to go on in this vein, although it doesn't matter since no one's ever going to see this—but does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end—and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy? To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I've been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it's there. And I've written these pages, on some level, to try to understand. But—on another level I don't want to understand, or try to understand, for by doing so I'll be false to the fact."

"Throughout his life each of us had submitted to those above him, but when hunger and plague suddenly toppled the ladder of hierarchy into the dung of universal powerlessness, each of us, without exception, discovered that he was separate from the world. We were orphaned and condemned to death, but we were no longer subject to anything except ourselves. A terrible solitude had overtaken us, but there was something sublime about it as well. Hitherto, in living and in dying, all of us, without exception, had been in a state of subjection; and I do not doubt that this state can be full of sweetness and may give us a sense of security. Yet in that state, we make efforts to please others, those above us and those below. Submission is the beauty of our existence. And, in exchange, we receive protection and peace; in a word, it allows us to enjoy life. Without it, fate leaves each of us prey to himself. And so it was that in the hour of agony, a mixture of terrible anguish, despair, and lasciviousness, the citizens of Arras whispered to themselves, "I am the son of man. I am the son of man and nothing more!" This unbearable burden lay heavily upon us, most likely causing our descent to the lowest depths."

"Somewhere Plato says that if you are going to shoot at a king you must be sure you kill him. The conservative bishops, in failing to destroy Tim, left him as a result even stronger than ever, which is the way with defeat; we say about such a turn of events that it has backfired."

"The stolen horses, the fornications Circle a womb of marble. Where are you going That you suck breath like mileage?"

"I wish to mention here, that through these rites a three-fold peace was established. The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all of its Powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real Peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which, as I have often said, is within the souls of men."

"He pondered and then said, half to himself, “She was going to ram an ongoing car on the Bay Bridge. So I saved him, too; the other car. It might have been like a station wagon full of kids.” “My God,” I said faintly. “It was a decision I had to make in a hurry.” Bill said.” “Once I knew she had that key, I had to do something. It was a big Merc. Silver-colored. Almost new. She had a lot of money. In a situation like that if you don't act, it's the same as helping them.” I said, “It might have been better to tell the doctor.” “No.” He shook his head. “Then she would have-well, it's hard to explain. She knew that I did it to save her life, not to get her in trouble. If I had told the staff-especially if I had told Dr. Gutman-she would have interpreted that as me just trying to get her kept there another couple of months. But this way they never knew, so they didn't hold her any longer than they originally intended to. When I got out-she got out before I did-one time she came by my apartment.""

"The fixed idea kind of madness is fascinating, if you are inclined toward viewing with interest something that is palpably impossible and yet nonetheless exists. Over-valence is a notion about possibilities in the human mind, possibilities of something going wrong, that did it not exist it could not be supposed. I mean by this simply that you have to see an over-valent idea at work fully to appreciate it. The older term is idee fire. Over-valent idea expresses it better, because this is a term derived from mechanics and chemistry and biology; it is a graphic term and it involves the notion of power. The essence of valence is power and that is what I am talking about; I speak of an idea that once it comes into the human mind, the mind, I mean, of a given human being, it not only never goes away, it also consumes everything else in the mind so that, finally, the person is gone, the mind as such is gone, and only the over-valent idea remains."

"If one is resting at A, he explains, and desires to rest in a distant place B, one can only do so by resting for infinitely brief intervals in innumerable intermediate places. Thus there is no difference essentially between what happens when one is resting at A before the start of the 'journey' and what happens when one is 'en route', i.e., resting in one or other of the intermediate places. He treats of these 'intermediate places' in a lengthy footnote. They are not, he warns us, to be taken as arbitrarily-determined points on the A-B axis so many inches or feet apart. They are rather to be regarded as points infinitely near each other yet sufficiently far apart to admit of the insertion between them of a series of other 'inter-intermediate' places, between each of which must be imagined a chain of other resting-places - not, of course, strictly adjacent but arranged so as to admit of the application of this principle indefinitely. The illusion of progression he attributes to the inability of the human brain - 'as at present developed' - to appreciate the reality of these separate 'rests', preferring to group many millions of them together and calling the result motion, an entirely indefensible and impossible procedure since even two separate positions cannot obtain simultaneously of the same body. Thus motion is also an illusion. He mentions that almost any photograph is conclusive proof of his teachings."

"And as far as Robert? Oh, God bless Robert! There was a man. He would have no problem whatsoever with this Family Mission. She loved the way he had of saying "Ho HO!" whenever she brought home something new and unexpected. "Ho HO!" Robert had said, coming home to find the iguana. "Ho HO!" he had said, coming home to find the ferret trying to get into the iguana cage. "We appear to be the happy operators of a menagerie!" "

"In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. The world is hopelessly constructed. Imagine the existence of an ox. "

"Humanity is an ever-widening spiral and life is the beam that plays briefly on each succeeding ring."

"He must have chosen this particular spot for his smithy probably because he knew of a certain mysterious power latent in the water"

"So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down. "

"How could she do it to him? I asked myself. What malice. What abysmal cruelty, toward us all. She really hated us. This is our punishment. I'll always think I'm responsible; Tim will always think he's responsible; Bill likewise. And of course none of us is, and yet in a sense all of us are, but anyhow it is beside the point, after the fact, null and moot and void, totally void, as in “the infinite void,” the sublime non-Being of God."

"The "lamenter" should also notice if one of the little birds should come, or even perhaps a squirrel. At first the animals or winged peoples may be wild, but soon they become tame, and the birds will sit on poles, or even little ants or worms may crawl on the pipe. All these people are important, for in their own way they are wise and they can teach us two-leggeds much if we make ourselves humble before them. The most important of all the creatures are the wingeds, for they are nearest to the heavens, and are not bound to the earth as are the four-leggeds, or the little crawling people."

"I think it would be good to explain to you here why we consider the cottonwood tree to be so very sacred. I might mention first, that long ago it was the cottonwood who taight us how to make our tipis, for the leaf of the tree is an exact pattern of the tipi, and this we learned when some of our old men were watching little children making play houses from the leaves. This too is a good example of how much grown men may learn from very little children, for the hearts of little children are pure, and, therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss. "

"Of course there was very much in the vision that even I can not tell when I try hard, because very much of it was not for words. But I have told what can be told."

"So the discs of the brain revolve, like the muzzles of cannon."

"'Are you always up this early?' I asked him. 'Almost always,' he said without looking up. 'It's beautiful here, but morning light can make the most vulgar things tolerable.'"

"Hiring a boat at the port of Yoshizaki on the border of the province of Echizen, I went to see the famous pine of Shiogoshi. The entire beauty of this place, I thought, was best expressed in the following poem by Saigyo. Inviting the wind to carry Salt waves of the sea, The pine tree of Shiogoshi Trickles all night long Shiny drops of moonlight. Should anyone dare to write another poem on this pine tree, it would be like trying to add a sixth finger to his hand."

"This certainly is an epistemological and aesthetic challenge, but it is above all as a political challenge that the concept of a programmatic reality is difficult to digest. Here, it is about the question of freedom, of the emancipation of man from the intentions of other men. In politics, therefore, finalistic thought is the only appropriate thought. The challenge that a programmatic reality represents is the need to learn to think apolitically, if we want to preserve the concept of human freedom. This is a paradox. If we continue to think politically, finalistically, if we continue to seek for purposes behind the programs that govern us, we will fall fatal victims to this absurd programming, which precisely predicts just such attempts at “demythologizing” among its virtualities. We can always better observe how different apparatus progressively program individual and social behavior. And we can observe, on top of this, the behavior of “intelligent instruments,” whose program we know and in which we recognize our own behavior. That is: we can always better observe how much the programmatic reality becomes progressively less “theoretical” and is increasingly applied within praxis. Certainly it is a case of deliberate application. There are programmers. However, despite this: if we persist with finalistic thought, if we continue to try to discover the programmers behind the programs, in order to demystify their intentions, we will lose sight of what is essential in the scene. Within the current scene all “Kulturkritik” is an anachronism. Because what is essential in the scene is the fact that programs, despite being projected by programmers, become autonomous. Apparatus always function increasingly independently from their programmer’s intentions. And apparatus that are programmed by other apparatus emerge with increasing frequency. Their initial purpose always recedes farther beyond the horizon, and becomes less interesting. Human programming is itself increasingly programmed by apparatus. Certainly: some specific programmers judge themselves, subjectively, to be “owners” of the decisions taken by apparatus. When, in reality, they are nothing but functionaries who are programmed to think of themselves in this way. “Kulturkritik” naively accepts the programmer’s naive and programmed view, and in so doing, itself becomes a function within programs. Apparatus incorporate both programmers and critics progressively. Freedom will die if we continue to think politically and to act according to such thinking. We must neither anthropomorphize nor objectify apparatus. We must grasp them in their cretinous concreteness, in their programmed and absurd functionality, in order to be able to comprehend them and thus insert them into meta-programs. The paradox is that such meta-programs are equally absurd games. In sum: what we must learn is to accept the absurd, if we wish to emancipate ourselves from functionalism. Freedom is conceivable only as an absurd game with apparatus, as a game with programs. It is conceivable only after we have accepted politics and human existence in general to be an absurd game. Whether we continue to be “men” or become robots depends on how fast we learn to play: we can become players of the game or pieces in it."

""The people on the council made a grievous error, but I will not be their judge. I'm feeling too weary to prosecute others for their sins. They've made their beds; let them lie in them. And it wasn't I who led them astray. If I seek the freedom most appropriate for me, I will not deprive them of choice either. Let each man go his own way. The way of the foolish is not for me; but neither shall I attempt to correct them, for it will only come to naught. Let the sober stay with their sobriety, and the madmen with their madness.""

"Albert of course won the argument because the result was truly important to him, while everything was an amusement to de Saxe. He was too rich and bored to attach importance to anything. Once when I came upon him in church by the confessional, he told me that he sinned out of boredom and confessed out of boredom as well. He really was the only great lord in the town of Arras! May he rest in peace."

"In real life the looking away is the apology, despite the fact that when I look away I almost always feel guilty; I do not feel as if I have apologized. Instead I feel as if I have created a reason to apologize, I feel the guilt of having ignored that thing—the encounter."

"Though not nearly so spectacular, this manifestation of grief for Bunny was in many ways a similar phenomenon – an affirmation of community, a formulaic expression of homage and dread. Learn by Doing is the motto of Hampden. People experienced a sense of invulnerability and well-being by attending rap sessions, outdoor flute concerts; enjoyed having an official excuse to compare nightmares or break down in public. In a certain sense it was simply play-acting but at Hampden, where creative expression was valued above all else, play-acting was itself a kind of work, and people went about their grief as seriously as small children will sometimes play quite grimly and without pleasure in make-believe offices and stores."

"Also the Wasichus had made a treaty with Red Cloud (1868) that said it would be ours as long as grass should grow and water flow. Later I learned too that Pahuska had found there much of the yellow metal that makes the Wasichus crazy;5 and that is what made the bad trouble, just as it did before, when the hundred were rubbed out. Our people knew there was yellow metal in little chunks up there; but they did not bother with it, because it was not good for anything.”"

"In the morning, he polishes his shoes in the kitchen. He would always polish mine as well. Did he love his wife that much? I guess you always experience the man's previous woman in a man."

"And the strange thing was: I knew that most people didn't see her as I did—if anything, found her a bit odd-looking with her off-kilter walk and her spooky redhead pallor. For whatever dumb reason I had always flattered myself that I was the only person in the world who really appreciated her—that she would be shocked and touched and maybe even come to view herself in a whole new light if she knew just how beautiful I found her. But this had never happened. Angrily, I concentrated on her flaws, willfully studying the photographs that caught her at awkward ages and less flattering angles—long nose, thin cheeks, her eyes (despite their heartbreaking color) naked-looking with their pale lashes—Huck-Finn plain. Yet all these aspects were—to me—so tender and particular they moved me to despair. With a beautiful girl I could have consoled myself that she was out of my league; that I was so haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested—ominously—a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years."

"I felt deeply in my heart both the sorrow of one that goes and the grief of one that remains, just as a solitary bird separated from his flock in dark clouds, and wrote in answer: From this day forth, alas, The dew-drops shall wash away The letters on my hat Saying ‘A party of two’."

"The cobwebs departed Bishop Archer's mind when Kirsten killed herself, so, it would seem, her death had served a useful purpose, although a purpose unequal to our loss. It amazes me: the sobering power of human death. It outweighs all words, all arguments; it is the ultimate force. It coerces your attention and your time. And it leaves you changed."

"Once we were happy in our own country and we were seldom hungry, for then the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds lived together like relatives, and there was plenty for them and for us. But the Wasichus came, and they have made little islands for us and other little islands for the four-leggeds, and always these islands are becoming smaller, for around them surges the gnawing flood of the Wasichu; and it is dirty with lies and greed. A long time ago my father told me what his father told him, that there was once a Lakota holy man, called Drinks Water, who dreamed what was to be; and this was long before the coming of the Wasichus. He dreamed that the four-leggeds were going back into the earth and that a strange race had woven a spider's web all around the Lakotas. And he said: "When this happens you shall live in square grey houses, in a barren land, and beside those square grey houses you shall starve." They say he went back to Mother Earth soon after he saw this vision, and it was sorrow that killed him. You can look about you now and see that he meant these dirt-roofed houses we are living in, and that all the rest was true. Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking. "

"The Zen master Ikkyu was once asked to write a distillation of the highest wisdom. He wrote only one word: Attention."

"This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible."

"Long-standing scientific questions were now trivially easy to answer. Scientists who had once spent billions of dollars setting up intricate experiments now spent their time thinking of the right questions to ask Prime Intellect."

"In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. By then, gentlemen, I knew what I was doing. At some time everyone feels the need to make a great revolt, but one must choose the right hour. Had I left Arras during the madness, I would have saved only my reason, something I never lacked anyway. By leaving after everything was over, however,I saved a scrap of my faith. Not a lot, but enough to live a while longer in this best of worlds."

"Like the camera, memory is a device and feeling is a device, or a souvenir. The interior of the courtyard lights up. Its doorway becomes a luminous square in the dark, and I can regulate the rate at which a blue wooden bench passes across it, like a car, or returns, when I back up. An apple tree in blossom in the courtyard travels across the screen."

"Your concentration is interrupted by a shadow on the periphery of your memory of her. Your concentration is a large array, where debris in the mind appears as an intense shower of heat radiation, like a cluster of instincts to the body."

"So ironic: I pick up poetic identities of characters who commit suicide, adultery, or get murdered, and I believe completely in them for a while. What they say is True."

"To the extent that she can reconstruct a context or pornography in her body suitable for a hanged woman, a contingency is being beaten back, critically. In the sense that events happening at the same time are meaningful, though not connected, there are events which mean nothing, though there is something to mean. This is an easy way to expect with desire from moment to moment, while the woman was hanging herself, as if consistency and the quest for certainty were not emotional, as when a person begins telling a story, leaves move. He believed that when a life is valuable, there is further value when it is responded to as valuable, but this could occur through evaluative judgment, without his attendant emotion. The product is in one case consistent manners, in the other, beautiful manners."

"Alison had, in plain view, given Millicent a sudden, rough shove, tumbling her to the ground. There was a second of silence, expectant as the brief interval between the flash of lightning and the thunder crack, and then Millicent howled from the grass."

"Of all the many striking statements made by de Selby, I do not think that any of them can rival his assertion that 'a journey is an hallucination'. "

"He said, "And thus, the progress of your mind seems to result from a constant struggle—Heaven's grace grapples with the promptings of Hell. Where do you find confirmation that your halting mind, shackled by a thousand conditions, influences, tastes, lustful fantasies, fears, and caprices could be clearer and more able in its knowledge of God's intentions than the teachings of the Church? We live in cruel times, my dear Jan. People no longer desire to be honorable Christians. They follow the example of licentious princes and foolish bishops, and yield to bizarre heresies. They seek the presence of God in daily life and try to detect God's designs so as to meet them halfway, but God does not want people to strive so zealously for salvation. It is obvious that everyone desires eternal happiness, but they must surrender their fate into the hands of our Lord Jesus Christ and not try to take His place. . . . Jan, trust me! I have spent my life among books and the treatises of the wisest authors. It's laughable! I despise all those usurpers who would save the Holy Church with their belief in reason. The Church's greatest power lies in the sacraments, for they are the narrow footbridge thrown over life's abysses and along which God draws near to us. By remaining faithful to the sacraments, you remain faithful to God. He is with you then, and you with Him. If God gave you a mind, it was not to be used to strive for Heaven but to move about this earth."

"Twice on Sundays, morning and evening, the town bell-ringers sent their carillons pounding out over the surrounding countryside. There was no escape from the probing notes. They bit into the air and shook it with a doggy zeal. The bells made Esther feel left out, as if from some fine local feast."

""I love autumn," she says. "Look at the beautiful autumn leaves. It feels like autumn today. Is autumn your favorite time of year?" She stops walking and tugs on my sleeve. "Mommy! You are not noticing. I am using a new word. I say autumn now instead of fall.""

"I too want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same. Far off, I go to my coat with Win; he brings me my scarf as I wait on the stair, and Chris is being red-cheeked and dramatic and breathless and penitent. He wants to be scolded, and punished. That is too easy. That is what we all want."

"'Death is the mother of beauty,' said Henry. 'And what is beauty?' 'Terror,' 'Well said,' said Julian. 'Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.' I looked at Camilla, her face bright in the sun, and thought of that line from the Iliad I love so much, about Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining. 'And if beauty is terror,' said Julian, 'then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?' 'To live,' said Camilla. 'To live forever,' said Bunny, chin cupped in palm. The teakettle began to whistle."

"This is the sea, then, this great abeyance."

"My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land—the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own. I pick it up, exile that I am, like the purple “lucky stones” I used to collect with a white ring all the way round, or the shell of a blue mussel with its rainbowy angel’s fingernail interior; and in one wash of memory the colors deepen and gleam, the early world draws breath."

"Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. That life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn't mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we're not always so glad to be here, it's our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time—so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next."

"'Your talk,' I said, 'is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand.'"

"But let's forget me for the moment, and focus on the works of Gregory. They were truthful about material things, but they lied about time. He celebrated moments, anything from a child's first meeting with a department store Santa Claus to the victory of a gladiator at the Circus Maximus, from the driving of the golden spike which completed a transcontinental railroad to a man's going on his knees to ask a woman to marry him. But he lacked the guts or the wisdom, or maybe just the talent, to indicate somehow that time was liquid, that one moment was no more important than any other, and that all moments quickly run away. Let me put it another way: Dan Gregory was a taxidermist. He stuffed and mounted and varnished and mothproofed supposedly great moments, all of which turn out to be depressing dust-catchers, like a moosehead bought at a country auction or a sailfish on the wall of a dentist's waiting room."

"The River Mogami has drowned Far and deep Beneath its surging waves The flaming sun of summer."

"From my years at Cal in the English Department, I had learned to make up metaphors, play around with them, mix them, serve them up; I am a metaphor junkie, overeducated and smart. I think too much, read too much, worry about those I love too much. Those I loved had begun to die. Not many remained here; most had gone."

"She used to make fun of those people. With their happiness maps and their gratitude journals and their bags made out of recycled tire threads. But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be."

"A smile fell in the grass. Irretrievable! And how will your night dances Lose themselves. In mathematics?"

"After the heyoka ceremony, I came to live here where I am now between Wounded Knee Creek and Grass Creek. Others came too, and we made these little gray houses of logs that you see, and they are square. It is a bad way to live, for there can be no power in a square."

"By an extraordinary act of either ignorance or ill will, this rite for the "keeping of the soul" was prohibited by the government in 1890, and it was even required that on a certain day, established by law, all souls kept by the Sioux must be released."

""That may be," he replied softly. "But if I remain alive, a great deal will change. People will conclude that they had been right, and their image of sin will be drawn tight as a bowstring. But the human mind is not a bowstring and should not be drawn taut. When it breaks, Arras will descend into madness. It is a good town, Jan, and it deserved a better fate. I do not wish to be the executioner of this town. Better the town be mine.""

"Smilingly, blue lightning Assumes, like a meathook, the burden of his parts."

"Crazy Horse dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that world. He was on his horse in that world, and the horse and himself on it and the trees and the grass and the stones and everything were made of spirit, and nothing was hard, and everything seemed to float. His horse was standing still there, and yet it danced around like a horse made only of shadow, and that is how he got his name, which does not mean that his horse was crazy or wild, but that in his vision it danced around in that queer way."

"To whom it may concern: Every now and then there comes a time when the neutral and impersonal forces of the world turn and come together in a thundercrack of judgment. "

"It was a rather cruel liberation. All people, no matter what their station, had always been part of an all-powerful hierarchy. It cannot be denied that hierarchy is a blessing, but it also cannot be denied that it is a leash and collar. Oh, I do not think that someone born a peasant suffers because of what he is or desires to be something else. Only a very narrow mind could conceive such an illusion. It seems obvious—a peasant is a peasant, and thus everything about him is peasantish, every particle of his body. He would have to stand outside himself and his way of life in order to perceive his own peasantness as I perceive it."

"Resolutely I stared at the television. I hadn't been at school since the day before my mother died and as long as I stayed away her death seemed unofficial somehow. But once I went back it would be a public fact. Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone. Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away."

"Nowhere has the number zero been more of philosophical value than in the United States. “Here goes nothing,” says the American as he goes off the high diving board."

"All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world."

"There is a line somewhere in Wozzeck that translates out to, roughly, “The world is awful.” Yes, I said to myself as I shot across the Bay Bridge not giving a fuck how fast I drove, that sums it up. That is high art: “The world is awful.” That says it all. This is what we pay composers and painters and the great writers to do: tell us this; from figuring this out, they earn a living. What masterful, incisive insight. What penetrating intelligence. A rat in a drain ditch could tell you the same thing, were it able to talk. If rats could talk, I'd do anything they said."

"A poem for a pair of faithful osprey nesting on a rock: What divine instinct Has taught these birds No waves swell so high As to swamp their home?"