One is always wrong, he thought now, always, always wrong about every single thing; if some young cousin was ever stupid enough to ask him for advice about life, that was all he would be able to tell them. The truth ran back and forth over your head at night but you never saw so much as the colour of its fur.
If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work, cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing...
My moods are inversely related to the clarity of the sky...
I detest audiences - not in their individual components, but en masse I detest audiences. I think they're a force of evil. It seems to me rule of mob law.
I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.
T
He asked to have the change - in which there was not even one bill – put in an envelope and shoved the coins back under the partition. The official, in the same way he had lined up the piles earlier, stuffed the coins into an envelope and pushed the envelope back to Bloch.Bloch thought that if everybody asked to have their money put into envelopes, the savings bank would eventually go broke. They could do the same thing with everything they bought: maybe the heavy demand for packaging would slowly but surely drive businesses bankrupt? Anyway, it was fun to think about...
His ears were so sensitive that at times the cards didn’t fall but were slammed on the next table; and at the bar the sponge didn’t fall but slapped into the sink; and the landlady’s daughter, with clogs on her bare feet, didn’t walk through the barroom but clattered through the barroom; the wine didn’t flow but gurgled into the glasses; and the music didn’t play but boomed from the jukebox.
Felicia had never seen such beads before, neither of glass nor of metal, not of jade either, she thought; of stone or baked clay, rather, opaque, in mysteriously tender and quenched colors: orange ocher, golden brown, some touched with black; so subdued of hue - melancholy almost, as if there was something of autumn in that little box woven from leaves, something of passing and dying.
The nineties, ecstatic decade!
Sometimes, one wants to have the illusion that one is making ones own life, out of ones own resources...
The window logs Kilburn’s skyline. Ungentrified, ungentrifiable. Boom and bust never come here. Here bust is permanent. Empty State Empire, empty Odeon, graffiti-streaked sidings rising and falling like a rickety roller-coaster. Higgledy-piggledy rooftops and chimneys, some high, some low, packed tightly, shaken fags in a box...
It filled her with panic and rage to see her spoilt children sat upon the floor, flicking through past images, moving images, of themselves, on their father’s phone, an experience of self-awareness literally unknown in the history of human existence – outside dream and miracle – until very recently. Until just before now.
It was neither a sign nor a coincidence that we were going to have mussels that evening. Yes, it was slightly unusual, and afterwards we sometimes spoke of the mussels as a sign, but they definitely weren’t; we also said they were a bad omen – that’s nonsense too. Nor were the mussels a coincidence. This evening of all evenings, we’d say, we decided to eat mussels. But it really wasn't like that; you couldn’t call it a coincidence. after the event, of course, we tried to interpret our decision as a sign or coincidence, because what came in the wake of our abortive feast was so monumental that none of us have got over it yet...
Everything in our lives revolved around us having to behave as if we were a proper family, as my father pictured a family to be because he hadn't had one himself and so didn't know what a proper family was, although he'd developed the most detailed notions of what one was like...they may have been incredibly precise, but were impossible to fathom as none of us understood the logic behind them...
Ever since their escape to the West my mother's violin had lain in their bedroom wardrobe, and only occasionally, when she was sad, would she sit at the piano, playing and singing Schubert songs, the whole of the Wintereisse, back and forth, crying all the while...
I didn't get to know modern music at these concerts, in short bursts, but from listening to it secretly on the radio, and from the radio I gained the impression that music and mathematics were not so dissimilar, but closely related, they went hand in hand, I told my mother. My mother didn't like twelve tone music, she said; she preferred harmonious music, but not when it went dum-dee-dum-dee-dum like Verdi, who she didn't rate as a serious composer.
“You think it's all rather too "New Age" to be taken seriously, eh?'
'Not at all.'
'But it's an ancient discipline...'
'New Age disciplines invariably are,' Beede said, disparagingly, 'but in the modern world they lack context - we just pick them up and then toss them back down again, we consume them. They have no moral claim on us. No moral value. And without that they're rendered meaningless, fatuous, even.”
It’s quite shameful the way reality imposes no limits on itself...
We mourn our father, for example, but we are left with a legacy, his house, his money and his worldly goods, which we would have to give back to him were he to return, which would put us in a very awkward position and cause us great distress. We might mourn a wife or a husband, but sometimes we discover, although this may take a while, that we live more happily and more comfortably without them or, if we are not too advanced in years, that we can begin anew, with the whole of humanity at our disposal, as it was when we were young; the possibility of choosing without making the old mistakes; the relief of not having to put up with certain annoying habits, because there is always something that annoys us about the person who is always there, at our side or in front or behind or ahead, because marriage surrounds and encircles. We mourn a great writer or a great artist when he or she dies, but there is a certain joy to be had from knowing that the world has become a little more vulgar and a little poorer, and that our own vulgarity and poverty will thus be better hidden or disguised; that he or she is no longer there to underline our own relative mediocrity; that talent in general has taken another step towards disappearing from the face of the earth or slipping further back into the past, from which it should never emerge, where it should remain imprisoned so as not to affront us except perhaps retrospectively, which is less wounding and more bearable. I am speaking of the majority, of course, not everyone...
The worst thing that can happen to anyone, worse than death itself, and the worst thing one can make others dois to return from the place from which no one returns, to come back to life at the wrong time, when you are no longer expected, when it is too late and inappropriate, when the living have assumed you are over and done with and have continued or taken up their lives again, leaving no room for you at all...
Everything becomes a story and ends up drifting about in the same sphere, and then it’s hard to differentiate between what really happened and what is pure invention. Everything becomes a narrative and sounds fictitious even if it’s true...
What happened is the least of it. It's a novel, and once you've finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel's imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events do and to which we pay far more attention...
El enamoramiento - the state of falling or being in love, or perhaps infatuation. I'm referring to the noun, the concept; the adjective, the condition, are admittedly more familiar, at least in French, though not in English, but there are words that approximate that meaning.
But one might have just as much right to say that nobody ought to go to concerts, or visit the theatre, or enjoy any other kind of amusement as long as there are places of punishment in the world with unhappy prisoners in them. This is of course asking too much; for if anyone were to postpone contentment until he were to find no more poverty or misery anywhere, then he would be waiting until the impenetrable end of all time, and until the gray, ice-cold empty end of the world, and by then all joie de vivre would in all probability be utterly gone from him.
"At the end of the tunnel, more tunnel."
"In the darkness of the storm, a ray of darkness."
...
“One day your employees start complaining about insomnia. Many of them call in sick. Those who do show up wear gloves in the office and never remove them. Why? You ask. They don’t respond. Show me your hands, you say. They refuse to show you. You physically force your secretary to remove her gloves. The gloves are filled with blood. You run her hands under the faucet. When the blood drains away, you can see identical cuts on both her palms. The cuts are in the shape of a cross... She has received the stigmata.”
“The stigmata?”
“The stigmata. You see, your secretary is one of the chosen ones.”
“Chosen? For what?”
“You wake up next morning to the sound of a trumpet call. The sun is turning black, like a rotten lemon. At the northern end of Broadway, seven horses appear in the middle of the avenue. They are as white as ivory. Astride the beasts are horsemen cloaked up to their eyes in dark garments. The horses begin to march downtown.
“The East River has turned to blood. The Harlem into blood. The Hudson – also blood. Blood spurts out of the tap. There is a red ring around the shower drain. Blood comes out of there too... The Blood is thick and dark, almost black. It clots the pipes. Plants and crops start to wither. People raid supermarkets for bottled water. When that runs out, they start drinking the blood. The blood is nothing like normal blood. It tastes awful.”
“Zukor? Are you alright? Alec, is he alright?”
“This taste,” said Mitchell, “this is the taste of the future.”
Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not villains of our own stories.
... But a book suggests conversation: one person is speaking to another, and audible sound is, or should be, natural to that exchange. So I read aloud with myself as the audience, and gave voice to another's words.
... It is dangerous to live in a secure world.
... I deeply respect American sentimentality, the way one respects a wounded hippo. You must keep an eye on it, for you know it is deadly.
... Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic. Who, in the age of television, hasn’t stood in front of a mirror and imagined his life as a show that is already perhaps being watched by multitudes? Who has not, with this consideration in mind, brought something performative into his everyday life? We have the ability to do both good and evil, and more often than not, we choose the good. When we don’t, neither we nor our imagined audience is troubled, because we are able to articulate ourselves to ourselves, and because we have through our other decisions, merited their sympathy. They are ready to believe the best about us, and not without good reason.
The technique of removing redundant data in a file is called compression. The technique of using a model of a listener to remove additional data is a special kind of “lossy” compression called perceptual coding. Because it uses both kinds of compression, the MP3 carries within it practical and philosophical understandings of what it means to communicate, what it means to listen or speak, how the mind’s ear works, and what it means to make music. Encoded in every MP3 are whole worlds of possible and impossible sound and whole histories of sonic practices... But MP3 encoders build their files by calculating a moment- to- moment relationship between the changing contents of a recording and the gaps and absences of an imagined listener at the other end. The MP3 encoder works so well because it guesses that its imagined auditor is an imperfect listener, in less-than-ideal conditions. It often guesses right.
"It’s not a good cast of human being here,” he said. “The people are relatively short. The infants are given ‘brandy rags’ to suck, to keep them from screaming… Alcohol has displaced milk. They all have high squeaky voices. Most of them are crippled in one form or another. All of them are conceived in drunkenness. For the most part criminal characters… Child abuse, killings, are Sunday afternoon stuff… The animals are better off: after all, what people would really like is a pig, not a kid"
"One man thinks pretty much what the man next to him thinks: the human porridge of the traffic accident, weeks ago, or years..."
... A year ago, he took over from a man who died of septicemia. “He scratched himself with a fawn’s bone."
"My notion of infinity is the same as the one I had when I was three years old. Less than that. It begins where your eyes end. Where everything ends. And it never begins."
"The world isn't the world, it's a zero."
"You know," the painter said, "that art froth, that artist fornication, that general art-and-artist loathsomeness, I always found that repelling; those cloud formations of basest self-preservation topped with envy... Envy is what holds artists together, envy, pure envy, everyone envies everyone else for everything... I talked about it once before, I want to say: artists are sons and daughters of loathsomeness, of paradisiac shamelessness, the original sons and daughters of lewdness; artists, painters, writers, and musicians are the compulsive masturbators on the planet, its disgusting cramps, its peripheral puffings and swellings, its pustular secretions... I want to say: artists are the great emetic agents of the time, they were always the great, the very great, the very greatest emetics... Artists, are they not a devastating army of absurdity, of scum?"
"What goes on in a brain that conceives itself to be the centre of the world. Millions of lights going on and off in millions of centres! That's the world. That's all it is."
"You are molested wherever you go”, said the painter. “It’s as if everyone had conspired to bother you. An instinct that rages through them all like wildfire. Against you. You wake up, and you feel molested. In fact: the hideous thing. You open your chest of drawers: a further molestation. Washing and dressing are molestations. Having to get dressed! Having to eat breakfast!"
"Worth is worthlessness, the calamity of worthlessness is the worthlessness of one’s own world and of the world unconnected to one’s own."
As he drove away, I began to think that what kept us together was perhaps not even our romance with an imaginary France. That was just a veneer, an illusion. Rather, it was our desperate inability to lead ordinary lives with ordinary people anywhere--ordinary loves, ordinary homes, ordinary careers, watching ordinary television, eating ordinary meals, with ordinary friends--even ordinary friends we didn't have, or couldn't keep.
... No one starts as a self-hater. But rack up all of your mistakes and take a large enough number of wrong turns in life and soon you stop trying to forgive yourself. Everywhere you look you find shame or failure staring back.
...in my world, a man who darns his own socks is not a man.
... I liked forgetting my cares. Thanks to wine, you didn't forget them, they just stopped scaring you for a while.
For some time now Wandernburg had been visible in the distance, to the south. And yet, thought Hans, as often happens at the end of an exhausting day, the small city seemed to be moving in step with them,and getting no nearer.
... Love and translation look alike in their grammar. To love someone implies transforming their words into ours. Making an effort to understand the other person and, inevitably, to misinterpret them. To construct a precarious language together.
... Packing a bag doesn't make you aware of changes, rather it compels you to postpone the past, and the present is taken up with concerns about the immediate. Time slides over the travelers' skin.
What was I avoiding, via this freestyle investigation, this crisis in which I found myself? I amn’t, dear reader, going to say. Let’s say that I just cherished this idea of writing something that would keep unfolding out of itself, a story that would take in as many other stories as possible.
The girl dreams she's surrounded by invisible aliens that talk to her incessantly. One of them talks about the planet and its destruction. It's hard to accept that something which took so much time and effort to build up could disappear in an instant. One supreme instant, the voice says, in which the world blows up and vanishes from sight...
Would a mind that creates itself and everything else still have need of success and recognition? It would require a superhuman effort at self-deception...
He's usually accompanied on his travels by the female student's music, which is transmitted from speakers located around the city - her recordings of twelve-tone piano music performed so slowly, with the pauses between notes so long, that the waiting becomes a kind of torment - now a note, then silence, now another - the only interruption occurs on the hour, every hour, when a voice can be heard announcing the time and date...
The universe as a great explosion of thought expanding outward. An instant before, there was nothing, and then, bang! - suddenly , thought began expandingits domain, invading everywhere, conquering its territories, bestowing sense and reason on what had no trouble imagining nothingness, the void.
I remember my favorite nights were just getting drunk and walking around outside the East Village kicking over garbage cans. Just the night. Just that it would be night again. And you could go out, you know? It just seemed glorious.
- Legs McNeill
The old sound was alcoholic. The tradition was finally broken. The music is sex and drugs and happy. And happy is the joke the music understands best. Ultra sonic sounds on records to cause frontal lobotomies. Hey, don't be afraid. You'd better take drugs and learn to love PLASTIC. All diffrent kinds of plastic- pliable, rigid, colored, colorful, nonattached plastic.
- Lou Reed
I always thought the ONLY way to really conquer evil is to make love to it. My favourite dream is always the one where I face the devil. I'm in the nude and the devil appears, and he is a beautiful blue. He looks like a mannequin, he looks like a robot. He doesn't have any clothes on, of course, and he's blue and shiny. I keep hearing voices that say, "It's him! It's him!" And I go, "Okay."
So he comes and faces me and I look at him and he's a little taller than me, not much taller, but a little taller, and I say, "I like you." And he says, "I like you too." But he starts beating me up, RA RA RA RA, and I'm down on the floor - and then all of the sudden, he turns into a little baby, like a baby, just a few months old, and then I fuck him, ha ha ha ha. And while I'm fucking him, he's moving his hands, he's moving them like a helpless baby.
So I always thought that to conquer evil, you have to make love to it. You have to understand it.
- Arturo Vega
The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I feel it's not beautiful? And very shortly you discover there is no reason...
Every something is an echo of nothing...
Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression "free as a bird," Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, "You know? They're not free: they're fighting over bits of food...
It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else...
Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of it's own accord...
What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot...
If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience...
If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all...
Every day you amass knowledge in a frantic race against death that death must win. You want to find out everything in the time you have; yet in the end you wonder why you bothered, it'll all be lost. I keep trying to explain this to anyone who will listen.
I could hear noises in the apartment over us, and thought about the people who lived here, the human hordes who filled the subways in the morning and sat in front of the TV at night, who sooner or later fell ill from their labor and the hopelessness of their efforts. A camp of the living and the dead, as Aldo Rossi had once described the city, where only a few symbols manage to survive.
... If you give in, you don't have to struggle.
The Road! It's an amazing thing. It runs from Guangzhou across China, then winds its way across Kazakhstan, enters through the gates in our Southern Wall, and then traverses the breadth of Mother Russia to Brest. From there – straight to Paris. The Guangzhou-Paris Road. Since the manufacturing of all necessary goods flowed over to China bit by bit, they built this Road to connect China to Europe. It’s got ten lanes, and four tracks underneath for high speed trains. Heavy trailers crawl along the road with their goods 24/7, and the silvery trains whistle. It’s a real feast for the eyes.
... “Haaaaiiiilll!”
Lord, don’t let us die...
I'd become one of those mistakes you sometimes find in an office, a not unpleasant but mostly unproductive presence bobbing along on the energy tides of others, a walking reminder of somebody's error in judgement.
... I bought an energy bar, and as I ate it a great weariness came over me.
Once Sanyi had "finally" finished, he looked to see what effect he had had on his sister's "dumb mug"; she was practically in tears with this unexpected burst of happiness, though she knew from bitter experience that crying was not an advisable course with her brother.
... He gazed sadly at the threatening sky, at the burned-out remnants of a locust-plagued summer, and suddenly saw on the twig of an acacia, as in a vision, the progress of spring, summer, fall and winter, as if the whole of time were a frivolous interlude in the much greater spaces of eternity, a brilliant conjuring trick to produce something apparently orderly out of chaos, to establish a vantage point from which chance might begin to look like necessity ... and he saw himself nailed to the cross of his own cradle and coffin, painfully trying to tear his body away, only, eventually, to deliver himself--utterly naked, without identifying mark, stripped down to essentials--into the care of the people whose duty it was to wash the corpses, people obeying an order snapped out in the dry air against a background loud with torturers and flayers of skin, where he was obliged to regard the human condition without a trace of pity, without a single possibility of any way back to life, because by then he would know for certain that all his life he had been playing with cheaters who had marked the cards and who would, in the end, strip him even of his last means of defense, of that hope of someday finding his way back home
... Green mildew covered the cracked and peeling walls, but the clothes in the cupboard, a cupboard that was regularly cleaned, were also mildewed, as were the towels and all the bedding, and a couple of weeks was all it took for the cutlery saved in the drawer for special occasions to develop a coating of rust, and what with the legs of the big lace-covered table having worked loose, the curtains having yellowed and the lightbulb having gone out, they decided one day to move into the kitchen and stay there, and since there was nothing they could do to stop it happening anyway, they left the room to be colonized by spiders and mice.
... Quietly, continually, the rain fell and the inconsolable wind that died then was forever resurrected ruffled the still surfaces of puddles so lightly it failed to disturb the delicate dead skin that had covered them during the night so that instead of recovering the previous day's tired glitter they increasingly and remorselessly absorbed the light that swam slowly out of the east.
... Outside the water rushed, unobstructed, from the tiles, in a hard, straight line and beat at the earth by the walls of the Horgos farm, forming an ever-deeper moat, as if every individual drop of rain were the product of some hidden intent, first to isolate the house and maroon its occupants, then slowly, millimeter by millimeter, to soak through the mud to the foundation stones beneath and so wash away the whole thing; so that, in the unremittingly brief time allowed for the purpose, the walls might crack, the windows shift and the doors be forced from their frames; so that the chimney might lean and collapse, the nails might fall from the crumbling walls, and the mirrors hanging from them might darken; so that the whole shambles of a house with its cheap patchwork might vanish under water like a ship that had sprung a leak sadly proclaiming the pointlessness of the miserable war between rain, earth, and man's fragile best intentions, a roof being no defense
... In the tense silence the continual buzzing of the horseflies was the only audible sound, that and the constant rain beating down in the distance, and, uniting the two, the ever more frequent scritch-scratch of the bent acacia trees outside, and the strange nightshift work of the bugs in the table legs and in various parts of the counter whose irregular pulse measured out the small parcels of time, apportioning the narrow space into which a word, a sentence or a movement might perfectly fit. The entire end-of-October night was beating with a single pulse, its own strange rhythm sounding through trees and rain and mud in a manner beyond words or vision: a vision present in the low light, in the slow passage of darkness, in the blurred shadows, in the working of tired muscles; in the silence, in its human subjects, in the undulating surface of the metaled road; in the hair moving to a different beat than do the dissolving fibers of the body; growth and decay on their divergent paths; all these thousands of echoing rhythms, this confusing clatter of night noises, all parts of an apparently common stream, that is the attempt to forget despair; though behind things other things appear as if by mischief, and once beyond the power of the eye they don't hang together. So with the door left open as if forever, with the lock that will never open. There is a chasm, a crevice.
... But as soon as the clerks got to the part relating to Mrs. Schmidt, they immediately found themselves in the deepest difficulty, because they didn't know how to formulate such vulgar expressions as stupid, big-mouth, and cow--how to retain the import of these crude concepts so that the document should be true to itself while at the same time retaining the language of their profession. After some discussion they settled on 'intellectually weak female person primarily concerned with her sexuality' but they hardly had time to draw breath because next they came across the expression cheap whore in all its awful attendant crudity. For lack of precision they had to abandon the idea of 'a female person of dubious reputation,' of 'a woman of the demimonde' and 'a painted woman' and a mass of other euphemisms that seemed alluringly attractive at first glance; they drummed impatient fingers on the writing desk across which they faced each other, painfully avoiding each other's eyes, finally settling on the formula 'a woman who offers her body freely,' which was not perfect but would have to do.
I didn’t want to be anywhere at all. I shut my eyes, but it takes more than that; I was still there, it’s automatic when you’re alive... Monsieur Hamil is right when he says that nobody has understood anything for centuries and one can only stand amazed..
-------------
They told me the whole thing could be run off in reverse from the end to the beginning, “right back to the earthly paradise,” but added: “unfortunately when it starts up again it’s always the same
This sense of something nebulous, forever on the point of taking form verbally, but never quite doing so, is one that comes back to me even now from time to time, allowing me to taste again the pleasant sensation I often had back then of drifting aimlessly yet enjoyably through the days.
I felt no shame in these activities, because I understood what almost no one else seemed to grasp: that there was only an infinitesimal difference, a difference so small that it barely existed except as a figment of the human imagination, between working in a tall green glass building on Park Avenue and collecting litter in a park. In fact, there may have been no difference at all.
... Structural dissatisfaction: Returning to circumstances that once pleased you, after having experienced a more thrilling or opulent way of life, and finding that you can no longer tolerate them.
... Rebecca was an academic star. Her new book was on the phenomenon of word casings, a term she'd invented for words that no longer had meaning outside quotation marks. English was full of these empty words--"friend" and "real" and "story" and "change"--words that had been shucked of their meanings and reduced to husks. Some, like "identity" and "search" and "cloud," had clearly been drained of life by their Web usage. With others, the reasons were more complex; how had "American" become an ironic term? How had "democracy" come to be used in an arch, mocking way?
"We are the fucked generation," said Sam.
Looking back on it later it could only have happened because Budai had gone through the wrong door in the confusion at the transit lounge and, having mistaken an exit sign, found himself on a plane bound elsewhere without the airport staff having noticed the change. After that it was impossible to say how far or for how long he had flown, for as soon as the engine purred into life he reclined his seat and fell asleep. He was quite exhausted, hardly having rested the last few days, working himself to a standstill, and apart from anything else there was the speech for the linguistic conference in Helsinki for which he had just now been preparing. He was woken only once during the flight when they brought him his meal, then he promptly fell asleep again, it might have been for ten minutes or for ten hours. He didn’t even have his wristwatch with him since he intended buying one out there and didn’t want to have to present two watches at customs back home, so he didn’t have the least clue how far he was from home. It was only later, once he was in town, that he discovered it wasn’t Helsinki and was shocked that he didn’t know where he actually was.
... Budai liked children and was generally touched by them but he had never seen so many all together and the sight confused and terrified him. He looked to escape, seeking an exit from the clinic. He was losing patience, wanting to see no more babies, worrying what would happen when the present batch grew up and joined the already teeming hordes in the streets.
... Then he gazed at the photograph of the author on the flap (...) and he still looked familiar. He wondered where he might have seen him, who he reminded him of, why he was drawn to him. (...) One evening he returned tired from his work at the market and caught sight of himself in the bathroom mirror just as he was
suppressing a yawn and it suddenly became obvious: the man in the photographs reminded him of himself.
... Filth and mess everywhere - had it been like this from the beginning or had he simply not noticed? When the wind blew, as it was doing now, it lifted and carried discraded wrappers and other rubbish with it.: a newsstand caught in the gust, a thousand newspapers were swirling about his feet. He noticed how many old people there seemed to be in town: lame, crippled, halt and half paralysed, they stumbled, lurched and staggered on sticks though the crowd that pressed against them and separated them. Waves of alien humanity regularly washed over them. Frail old grannies, sickly frightened little sparrows, struggled against the overwhelming crowd, dragging their helpless bodies along, trying to cross at traffic lights, trying to board and squeeze themselves onto buses, constantly being shoved aside, squashed and trodden on in the melee. What power maintained them? What strength enabled them to go on living here?
... It added up to little more than nothing: it was an equation without known quantities.
... The lights started coming on in blocks, each estate or major road in one go, all the tiny pieces slowly fitting together as an entire lit area rose out of the grey-blue. There was no end of it as far as the eye could see. In the far distance the rows and clusters of illumination melted into a single mass, its edges lost in glimmering fogs and milky galaxies like the stars in the Milky Way whose light comes to us from thousands or millions of light years... Budai had been a city dweller all his life, the city, for him, being the only possible place of work, routine and entertainment. He was constantly drawn to the great cities of the world: the metropolis! And while the proportions of this one horrified and imprisoned him, he could not deny its sheer enormous urban beauty. Looking down on it from such a height, he was almost in love with it.
The person doing the worrying experiences it as a form of love; the person being worried about experiences it as a form of control...
London was so rich, and also so green, and somehow so detailed: full of stuff that had been made, and bought, and placed, and groomed, and shaped, and washed clean, and put on display as if the whole city was for sale...
You heard people say forty was the new thirty and fifty was the new forty and sixty was the new forty-five, but you never heard anybody say eighty was the new anything. Eighty was just eighty...
The idea of luxury, even the word "luxury," was important to Arabella. Luxury meant something that was by definition overpriced, but was so nice, so lovely, in itself that you did not mind, in fact was so lovely that the expensiveness became part of the point. Arabella knew that there were thoughtlessly rich people who could afford everything, but she didn't see herself as one of them. She loved expensive things because she knew what their expensiveness meant. She had a complete understanding of the signifiers...
It seemed too as if many of the people were on display, behaving as if they expected to be looked at, as if they were on show: so many of them seemed to be wearing costumes, not just policemen and firemen and waiters and shop assistants, but people in their going-to-work costumes, their I'm-a-mother-pushing-a-pram costumes, babies and children in outfits that were like costumes; workers digging holes in their costume-bright orange vests; joggers in jogging costume; even the drinkers in the streets and parks, even the beggars, seemed to be wearing costumes, uniforms.
That I was a fraud had never been in question - who wasn't? Who wasn't squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said "I"; who wasn't a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life?
... Eventually I stopped heaving, left the stall, and again splashed water on my face. The attendant asked me if I was all right. I blinked at him, breathed deeply, mumbled something about my family, and deposited a handful of coins in the bowl beside him, which might have been for mints.
The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in who Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from buring windows. The terror of falling from a great height is still as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and "Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
... You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.
... almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of 'psst' that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.
It takes a long time to see it, but, like Laura Palmer later in Fire Walk With Me, who feels herself going down faster and faster, or her prostitute mother who chain smokes even before her daughter's death, or with the abandoned woman in Industrial Symphony No. 1, or with Marietta Pace in Wild At Heart, covering her face with lipstick in the bathroom and cracking up, or with Mary X in Eraserhead, in Blue Velvet Dorothy is prey to a sense of terminal depression. Once we have understood this, one can find ample evidence for it. She even says as much...
When you realise that the script's extravagant logic in fact revolves around the notion of forestalling Dorothy's suicide, by means of electro-shocks and strong sensations, through blackmail, Blue Velvet acquires a more interesting and beautiful meaning more in tune with the disturbance it provokes in us. Dorothy's hushed plea as she leans over the basin after Jeffrey leaves, her touching 'Help Me' is thus not a woman's request to help her recover her son and husband. She requests nothing of the sort from Jeffrey. Nor is it a 'Help me with my sexual frustration.' It is about a woman collapsing, slipping into the void of a terminal depression.
Yes, it's a fifties thing. Banal in a way. But it's kind of removed from that also. Misplaced, almost. A fifties/nineties combo was what Twin Peaks was all about. We weren't making a period thing.
Ravel waves nothing, contenting himself with one last wry smile and an uplifted hand before closing the window and returning to his paper.
He is leaving for the harbour station at Le Havre to sail to North America. It is his first trip there; it will e his last. He now has ten years, on the nose, left to live.
"It always used to be nothing but sea, and that's how it's going to be again. It's the end of the world. Somebody told me once that even Prague was seabed once. I think it must have been the newts that did it then as well. I should never have let that sea captain in to see Mr. Bondy. There was something that kept telling me, don't do it, and then I thought to myself, perhaps I'll get a tip from this sea captain. And then, he never did. That's how you destroy the whole world you see, all for nothing . . . " The old man gulped back something like a tear. "I know, I know full well, we've all had it. It's the end of the world, and it's all my fault . . . "
Now I realize M. Proust's whole object, his whole great sacrifice for his work, was to set himself outside time in order to rediscover it. When there is no more time, there is silence. He needed that silence in order to hear only the voices he wanted to hear, the voices that are in his books. I didn't think about that at the time. But now when I'm alone at night and can't sleep, I seem to see him as he surely must have been in his room after I had left him -- alone too, but in his own night, working at his notebooks when, outside, the sun had long been up.
La Monte Young was the best drug connection in New York. He had the best drugs - the best! Great big acid pills, and opium, and grass, too. When you went over to la Monte and Marian's place you were there for a minimum of seven hours - probably end up to be two or three days. It was a pad with everything on the floor and beads and great hashish and street people coming and scoring, and this droning music going on.- Billy Name
