E. M. FORSTER

I do not want my voice to go out into the air while my heart is sinking. 

e. e. cummings - “unlove’s the heavenless hell and homeless home”

unlove’s the heavenless hell and homeless home
of knowledgeable shadows (quick to seize
each nothing which all soulless wraiths proclaim
substance, all heartless spectres, happiness)
lovers alone wear sunlight. The whole truth
not hid by matter; not by mind revealed
(more than all dying life, all living death)
and never which has been or will be told
sings only — and all lovers are the song.
Here (only here) is freedom: always here
no then of winter equals now of spring;
but april’s day trancends november’s year
(eternity being so sans until
twice i have lived forever in a smile)

BJÖRK – “Possibly Maybe”

your flirt finds me out
teases the crack in me
smittens me with hope

possibly maybe probably love

as much as i definitely enjoy solitude
i wouldn’t mind perhaps
spending little time with you
sometimes
sometimes

possibly maybe probably love

uncertainly excites me
baby
who knows what’s going to happen?
lottery or car crash
or you’ll join a cult

possibly maybe probably love

mon petit vulcan
you’re eruptions and disasters
i keep calm
admiring your lava
i keep calm

possibly maybe probably love

since we broke up
i’m using lipstick again
i’ll suck my tongue
as a remembrance of you

SIGMUND FREUD from “Screen Memories” (1899)

I was the child of people who were originally well-to-do and who, I fancy, lived comfortably enough in that little corner of the provinces. When I was about three, the branch of industry in which my father was concerned met with a catastrophe. He lost all his means and we were forced to leave the place and move to a large town.

Long and difficult years followed, of which, as it seems to me, nothing was worth remembering. I never felt really comfortable in the town. I believe now that I was never free from a longing for the beautiful woods near our home, in which - as one of my memories from those days tells me - I used to run off from my father, almost before I had learnt to walk.

WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA - "Negative"

In the dun-colored sky
A cloud even more dun-colored
With the black outline of the sun.

To the left, that is, to the right
A white cherry branch with black flowers.

On your dark face, light shadows.
You have sat down at a small table
And laid your grayed hands on it.

You give the impression of a ghost
Who attempts to summon the living.

(Because I'm still counted among them,
I should appear and knock:
Good night, that is, good morning,
Farewell, that is, hello.
Not being stingy with questions to any answer
If they concern life,
That is, the storm before the calm.)

Translated by Joanna Trzeciak

RYŌKAN

I watch people in the world
Throw away their lives lusting after things,
Never able to satisfy their desires,
Falling into deeper despair
And torturing themselves.
Even if they get what they want
How long will they be able to enjoy it?
For one heavenly pleasure
They suffer ten torments of hell,
Binding themselves more firmly to the grindstone.
Such people are like monkeys
Frantically grasping for the moon in the water
And then falling into a whirlpool.
How endlessly those caught up in the floating world suffer.
Despite myself, I fret over them all night
And cannot staunch my flow of tears.  

Jette Stoltz (1923-2010).

CORMAC McCARTHY from Blood Meridian

The judge like a great ponderous djinn stepped through the fire and the flames delivered him up as if he were in some way native to their element.

KELLY LUCE from the opening lines of “Three Scenarios in which Hana Sakaski Grows a Tail”

It is her thirteenth birthday. She wakes alone. Her right hand reaches around to feel a soft length of hair that wasn’t there when she took her bath the night before. She shuffles to the mirror, cranes her neck. The tail is three inches long and gleams silver with a lavender tinge, one end thin and flyaway, the other as thick as rope. It sprouts from the asymmetrical dark button at the base of her spine - what her mother used to call her Hydrangea Mole.

FANNIE LOU HAMER

Sometimes it seem like to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I’ll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom. I’m not backing off.

ALBERT CAMUS from The Plague

The evil that is in the world almost always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence if they lack understanding.

ANTONIN ARTAUD from The Theatre and Its Double

All true feeling is in reality untranslatable. To express it is to betray it. But to translate it is to dissimulate it. True expression hides what it makes manifest. It sets the mind in opposition to the real void of nature by creating in reaction a kind of fullness in thought. Or, in other terms, in relation to the manifestation-illusion of nature it creates a void in thought.

All powerful feeling produces in us the idea of the void. And the lucid language which obstructs the appearance of this void also obstructs the appearance of poetry in thought. That is why an image, an allegory, a figure that masks what it would reveal have more significance for the spirit than the lucidities of speech and its analytics.

This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose.

EUNICE TIETJENS - “To Jake”

You are turned wraith. Your supple, flitting hands,
As formless as the night wind’s moan,
Beckon across the years, and your heart’s pain
Fades surely as a stainèd stone.
And yet you will not let me rest, crying
And calling down the night to me
A thing that when your body moved and glowed,
Living, you could not make me see.
Lean down your homely, mist-encircled head
Close, close above my human ear,
And tell me what of pain among the dead—
Tell me, and I will try to hear.

For God so loved the world ...

Artist unknown.

CARL SAGAN from The Demon-Haunted World (1995)

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues.

When the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites - now down to 10 seconds or less - lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

NORMAN MAILER

I don’t know if I need seclusion, but I do like to be alone in a room.

DŌGEN

The moon reflected
In a mind clear
As still water:
Even the waves, breaking,
Are reflecting its light.

JULIAN RANDALL - “The King Is Dead, Long Live the King”

Heaven is the certainty that you will be avenged
           I know            I know             the kingdom is not fair
but it’s what I have  a montage of red and a mitosis
           of knuckles    I’m not sure how you could expect me
to love anything       Ain’t no question
                                                sadness is regal like that
                           golden and replaceable  once I wanted
a lineage of identical men             once a mouth soft and hot
as the quickest way that gold can hurt you     You see
           a pattern yet?            I practice the want of nothing       and fail
                                           I’ve been shown how ugly I can be
when I am invisible
                                           I don’t believe in yesterdays
The throat of loneliness?              Straddled with my knife
            I press my hands to my face         and the lament is a valley
the light sags through          What do you do when you have
                      lost Everything?         Rewrite the history of Everything
I don’t like my smile             because someone told me I didn’t like it
            Now I am gorgeous in all the languages I mothered
                        Flex the antonym of Missing             I avenge myself
Stretch my hands      I orphan my grief for the living and it is beauty
                                                            ain’t no question          I monarch
the lonely       I my own everything now I miss my love and
           it is an American grief          I strike the smell from nostalgia
cut my memory to spite my country        What is the odor of nothing
           but my dominion in want of excess             I grin and pillars of                       bone flower
into sawed-off crowns           say I flex the light and the light flexes
            heat shimmer             unfurling like a bicep           my lust a                              mirage
where the body is merely a congealing of the river           I can feel it
  slowly drifting away from me     The world I knew is gone
and getting more gone           and my anthem populating my nose
           with an abundance of salt  I slip the shroud over the life I named
and forget I belonged to someone once         My sovereign’s face is a riot
of diamonds whining        This will be a beautiful death      and I am             free
and gorgeous and desperate to never have to miss anyone again
I rock the jeweled shroud           become the bride of my own sad light

SHARA McCALLUM - “No Ruined Stone”

When the dead return
they will come to you in dream
and in waking, will be the bird
knocking, knocking against glass, seeking
a way in, will masquerade
as the wind, its voice made audible
by the tongues of leaves, greedily
lapping, as the waves’ self-made fugue
is a turning and returning, the dead
will not then nor ever again
desert you, their unrest
will be the coat cloaking you,
the farther you journey
from them the more
that distance will maw in you,
time and place gulching
when the dead return to demand
accounting, wanting
and wanting and wanting
everything you have to give and nothing
will quench or unhunger them
as they take all you make as offering.
Then tell you to begin again.

GRAHAM HANCOCK

In our society, if we want to insult somebody, we call them “a dreamer.” In ancient societies, that was praise.

FLORENCE RIPLEY MASTIN - “Dust”

My words are dust.
I who would build a star,
I who would touch the heel of the white sun;
Staggering up the inaccessible sky,
I look upon the dust.
The stainless clouds go mounting
In shining spires;
And a little heap of dust
Are my desires.
Yet, dwelling long upon these peaks
Unchained upon the flickering western sky,
I have beheld them at the breath of darkness
Fade slowly out and die.
What of my lineage?
Arrogant and swift,
I bend above the dust,
Untouched of all my grief,
Untarnished of the hour,
And lo! the leaf—
The passionate climbing flower!

SAMUEL R. DELANY from Dhalgren

Babes, I am so bored here that I don’t think, since I’ve come, I’ve ever been more than three minutes away from some really astonishing act of violence.

RYAN ADAMS - "Oh My Sweet Carolina"

I went down to Houston
And I stopped in San Antone
I passed up the station for the bus
I was trying to find me something
But I wasn't sure just what
Man I ended up with pockets full of dust

So I went on to Cleveland and I ended up insane
I bought a borrowed suit and learned to dance
I was spending money like the way it likes to rain
Man I ended up with pockets full of 'caine

Oh my sweet Carolina
What compels me to go
Oh my sweet disposition
May you one day carry me home

I ain't never been to Vegas
But I gamble all my life
Building newsprint boats I race to sewer mains
Was trying to find me something
But I wasn't sure just what
Funny how they say that some things never change

Oh my sweet Carolina
What compels me to go
Oh my sweet disposition
May you one day carry me home

Up here in the city feels like things are closing in
The sunsets just my light bulb burning out
I miss Kentucky and I miss my family
All the sweetest winds they blow across the south

Oh my sweet Carolina
What compels me to go
Oh my sweet disposition
May you one day carry me home

May you one day carry me home

FRIDA KAHLO

You deserve a lover who takes away the lies and who brings you hope, coffee, and poetry.

HANNAH ARENDT from The Origins of Totalitarianism

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Scenes from "Little Red Riding Hood"

by Edward Gorey

ORSON WELLES

Gluttony is not a secret vice.

FANNIE LOU HAMER

Black people know what white people mean when they say “law and order.”

NĀGĀRJUNA - “Space”

No trace of space
Is there before
The absence of obstruction
Which describes it.

With no obstruction,
How can there be
Absence of obstruction?
Who distinguishes between them?

Space is not obstruction
Or an absence of it,
Nor is it a description
Or something to describe.

Fluidity and heat,
Energy and gravity
Are just like space.

In seeing things
To be or not to be
Fools fail to see
A world at ease.

THOMAS MERTON from No Man is an Island

It is useless to try to make peace with ourselves by being pleased with everything we have done. In order to settle down in the quiet of our own being we must learn to be detached from the results of our own activity. We must withdraw ourselves, to some extent, from effects that are beyond our control and be content with the good will and the work that are the quiet expression of our inner life. We must be content to live without watching ourselves live, to work without expecting an immediate reward, to love without an instantaneous satisfaction, and to exist without any special recognition.

CAROLYN FORCHÉ - “Elegy”

The page opens to snow on a field: boot-holed month, black hour
the bottle in your coat half voda half winter light.
To what and to whom does one say yes?
If God were the uncertain, would you cling to him?
Beneath a tattoo of stars the gate open, so silent so like a tomb.
This is the city you most loved, an empty stairwell
where the next rain lifts invisibly from the Seine.
With solitude, your coat open, you walk
steadily as if the railings were there and your hands weren’t passing
through them.
“When things were ready, they poured on fuel and touched off the fire.
They waited for a high wind. It was very fine, that powdered bone.
It was put into sacks, and when there was enough we went to a bridge
on the Narew River.”
And even less explicit phrases survived:
“To make charcoal.
For laundry irons.”
And so we revolt against silence with a bit of speaking.
The page is a charred field where the dead would have written
We went on. And it was like living through something again one
could not live through again.
The soul behind you no longer inhabits your life: the unlit house
with its breathless windows and a chimney of ruined wings
where wind becomes an aria, your name, voices from a field,
And you, smoke, dissonance, a psalm, a stairwell.

CHRIS WILLIAMS from Ecology and Socialism

A world economic system predicated on relentless growth, devouring increasing amounts of raw materials and energy and spewing out ever-larger amounts of toxic waste products, has produced a whole series of environmental threats: species extinction, air and water pollution, genetically modified organisms, desertification, deforestation, soil depletion, and the ever-present possibility of nuclear warfare, to name only a few.

However, as it intersects with all other threats, and furthermore has a tendency to aggravate them, the most urgent and all-encompassing of these is global climate change. 

DŌGEN

Like tangled hair,
The circular delusion
Of beginning and end,
When straightened out,
A dream no longer.

SAMUEL BECKETT from The End

I tried to groan, Help! Help! But the tone that came out was that of polite conversation. 

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER - “Track”

2 A.M. moonlight. The train has stopped
out in a field. Far off sparks of light from a town,
flickering coldly on the horizon
As when a man goes so deep into his dream
he will never remember he was there
when he returns again to his view
Or when a person goes so deep into a sickness
that his days all become some flickering sparks, a swarm
feeble and cold on the horizon
The train is entirely motionless
2 o’clock: strong moonlight, few stars

MARLENE DIETRICH as Frenchy in Destry Rides Again

And when I die, don’t pay the preacher, for speaking of my glory and my fame; just see what the boys in the back room will have, and tell them I sigh, tell them I cry, and tell them I died of the same.

James Merrill - “A Silence”

No coffin without nails.
This one you drive into mine
At least is golden.

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

I despise the kind of book that tells you how to make yourself happy. The first duty of philosophy is making you understand what deep shit you are in.

H. L. HIX - "Blur"

Turns out lots of lines prove blurry I once thought sharp.
Some blur from further away, some from closer in.
Plant/animal, for instance. On which side, and why,
the sessile polyps, corals and sea anemones?
Same problem saying why my self must be internal.
Where do I see those finches glinting at the feeder?
To experience the is-ness of what is,
I’d need to locate the here-ness of what’s here.
Or be located by it. Or share location with it.
There’s a line I want to blur: between my senses
and my self. And another: between my senses
and the world. That anemone looks more like a lily
than an appaloosa. Looks, and acts. I feel that fizz
of finches sparkle on my tongue, the back of my throat.
I don’t say these words until I hear them. My voice
visits. Is visitation. I would choose the role
of visitor over visited, if I got to choose.
Those finches trill and warble in sequences of phrases.
I can tell there’s pattern, but not what the pattern is.
I can say I hear them (I do hear them) in my sleep,
but I can’t say what that means. Their twitters and chirps
start early, before I wake. I can say they chatter all day
(they do), when I’m hearing them and when I’m not,
but I can’t say how I know that. The back of my hand
always feels as if it’s just been lightly touched.

Greta Garbo by Edward Steichen, 1928

ORSON WELLES

We now sit through Shakespeare in order to recognize the quotations.

NĀGĀRJUNA - “Dedicatory Verse”

I prostrate to the Perfect Buddha,
The best of teachers, who taught that
Whatever is depedently arisen is
Unceasing, unborn,
Unannihilated, not permanent,
Not coming, not going,
Without distinction, without identity,
And free from conceptual construction.

TARJEI VESAAS - “Sun-Corner”

At home there’s a sun-corner
where spring quietly stirs.
Dripping all day long.

Clear drops from the snow-rim,
they reflect both good and bad
in their brief fall, and are shattered.
The sun is a hot cataract.

In that sun-corner,
where you were born -
it’s those drops that should
mirror you, and wet your lips,
pure from the snow-rim and
right into your heart.

It’s in that faint smell of
spring moisture you should fall asleep.
That call you should heed.
There, everything would feel right.

It’s all moving downhill.
Everything’s oozing toward a distant
goal,
on its way to the sea.
An unknown sea inside a dream.
All of spring’s sorrow is heading there.
All thoughts spiral there
and then disappear.

Your childhood sun-corner is where
you are when the call sounds.

GILLES DELUZE from Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly, and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered:

Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?

RYŌKAN

in this dream world
we doze
and talk of dreams –
dream, dream on,
as much as you wish 

ABUL ʿALA AL-MAʿARRI

The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains.

UMBERTO ECO

Invention can produce reality.

HANNAH ARENDT

The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.

ELIAS CANETTI

The Agony of Flies
____________________

It isn’t being alone that I need to know, for that comes easy to me. I like being alone; what I need to learn is how to keep silent around people … It doesn’t matter to whom my words are addressed or whether or not they are understood; the words in themselves have a horrifying and devastating effect on me. They are too strong; I need to muffle them by writing them down … I myself cannot evade my words; I am at their mercy; I take them in whole; I understand them fully and they shake me the way a storm shakes up the sea.

YUAN MEI - "Nearing Hao-pa"

(I saw in the mist a little village of a few tiled roofs and joyfully admired it.)

There’s a stream, and there’s bamboo,
there’s mulberry and hemp.
Mist-hid, clouded hamlet,
a mild, tranquil place.
Just a few tilled acres.
Just a few tiled roofs.
How many lives would I
have to live, to get
that simple.

HAROLD PINTER
Party Time

You don’t have to believe anything. You just have to shut up and mind your own business, how many times do I have to tell you? You come to a lovely party like this, all you have to do is shut up and enjoy the hospitality and mind your own fucking business. How many more times do I have to tell you? You keep hearing all these things. You keep hearing all these things spread by pricks about pricks. What’s it got to do with you?

FANNIE LOU HAMER

I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been a little scared to [register to vote] - but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it kinda seemed like they’d been trying to do that a little bit at a time since I could remember.

DAVID HUME

The worst speculative skeptic I ever knew was a much better man than the best superstitious devotee and bigot.

Ft Tilden bunker ruins and graffiti.

LEAD BELLY - “There’s a Man Going ‘Round Taking Names”

There’s a man going ‘round taking names
There’s a man going ‘round taking names
He’s been taking my father’s name
And he left my heart in vain
There’s a man going 'round taking names.

There’s a man going 'round taking names
There’s a man going 'round taking names
He’s been taking my mother’s name
And he left my heart in vain
There’s a man going 'round taking names.

There’s a man going 'round taking names
There’s a man going 'round taking names
He’s been taking my sister’s name
And he left my heart in vain
There’s a man going 'round taking names.

There’s a man going 'round taking names
There’s a man going 'round taking names
He’s been taking my brother’s name
And he left my heart in vain
There’s a man going 'round taking names.

There’s a man going 'round taking names
There’s a man going 'round taking names
He’s been taking my father’s name
And he left my heart in vain
There’s a man going 'round taking names

Colin Kaepernick, American hero.