In order to rebuild, destruction is indispensable. To clean the air we breathe daily, we must previously have polluted it. To sell ecological products, we must first infect the world with new species of virus and bacteria.
He convinced himself he was Satie, overcome by a clearly grotesque rush of emotion to his head. He foresaw that he too would scorn traditional forms and that the trash he'd pen would adopt the rough shape of an acorn or a fig.
The level of the seas is rising, ethnic shantytowns are burning, and terrorism is spreading and istrivialised in the name of divine, inflammatory curses and grotesque emotions all prompted by identity crises. Everything is bought and sold as in clearance sales organised by gambling addicts.
The truth of the story is held in the words. All that would remain of him would be the dream of a derisory existence. Of a tailless shooting star, sentenced by the world's sound and fury to sudden, silent extinction.
"If physics proposes: 'You have a brother and he likes cheese,' then metaphysics replies: 'If you have a brother, he likes cheese.' But 'Pataphysics says: 'You don't have a brother and he likes cheese.'"
- Georges Perec
"Obviously 'Pataphysics does not even need to exist in order to exist."
"The apostrophe resembles a hiccup before the loud belch that is the word."
"To understand pataphysics is to fail to understand pataphysics."
The spiral is the primary symbol of pataphysics and has become a badge of the Collège, with a complicated hierarchy of colors and sizes designating rank within the organization.
'Pataphysics is a system in which there are no rules, only exceptions (or, more properly, where each exception creates its own rule), and where everything is equivalent—nothing is more important than anything else.
What distinguishes pataphysics from other artistic/philosophical movements that developed in the period from the 1890s through to the mid-twentieth century…is that it is not so much a movement as a collection of ideas. Since these ideas stand in counterpoint to science, rather than art, pataphysics has managed to sustain itself most effectively, finding fertile ground in any mind that thinks the objective truths of empiricism at least demand a little playful tweaking, if not wholesale reevaluation. Which is not to say that pataphysics is simply antiscientific, or even antirational. As always, the relationship between the parodistic aspects of pataphysics and the thing it parodies is complex: ironic, or even, as Marcel Duchamp would have said, meta-ironic. But we can say that pataphysics is subjective, privileging the particular above the general, the imaginary above the real, the exceptional above the ordinary, the contradictory above the axiomatic. Not that there is any choice in these matters: in pataphysics this is just the way things are.
"Contemporary science is founded upon the principle of induction: most people have seen a certain phenomenon precede or follow some other phenomenon most often, and conclude therefrom that it will ever be thus. Apart from other considerations, this is true only in the majority of cases, depends on the point of view, and is codified only for convenience—if that!"
- Alfred Jarry (Doctor Faustroll)
"'Pataphysics, then, is an inner attitude, a discipline, a science, and an art, which allows each person to live his life as an exception, proving no law but his own."
- Roger Shattuck
We find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates.
The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty's ends.
I wonder if my readers know the color of that "darkness seen by candlelight". It was different in quality from darkness on the road at night. It was a repletion, a pregnancy of tiny particles like fine ashes, each particle luminous as a rainbow. I blinked in spite of myself, as though to keep it out of my eyes.
Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into its forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway.
With lacquerware there is an extra beauty in that moment between removing the lid and lifting the bowl to the mouth, when one gazes at the still, silent liquid in the dark depths of the bowl, its colour hardly differing from that of the bowl itself. What lies within the darkness one cannot distinguish, but the palm senses the gentle movements of the liquid, vapour rises from within, forming droplets on the rim, and the fragrance carried upon the vapour brings a delicate anticipation ... a moment of mystery, it might almost be called, a moment of trance.
There are those who say that when civilization progresses a bit further transportation facilities will move into the skies and under the ground, and that our streets will again be quiet, but I know perfectly well that when that day comes some new device for torturing the old will be invented.
Thus the "brainy" economy designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse - providing constant titillation of the ears, eyes and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect "subject" for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all places. His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-without-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity - shock treatments - as "human interest" shots of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings. The literature or discourse that goes along with this is similarly manufactured to tease without satisfaction, to replace every partial gratification with a new desire.
Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner were particularly guilty of working up to colossal climaxes and conclusiojns, and then blasting away at the same chord over and over again, ruining the moment by being reluctant to leave it.
"What would you think if I shaved off my mustache?"
Caught in the net of madness, she was struggling, trying to make him comprehend. For the last two days she'd made up this whole farce, this absurd business about his mustache, like someone who was screaming and making faces behind a soundproof opaque window, to get his attention, to call for help.
"I'm going to try and get some sleep. Please call that psychiatrist."
