I Wonder About All These Words Bumping Around

I

“ We are so close to the ditch that we are on the bounce and the width of the jump start not sufficient and therefore able to easily jump short if the lack of a sufficiently solid basis to convey a bounce allowed. "--Martin Heidegger, 1946 (translated by the Google German to English program). I drank with the crazy portion a sickly translation sometimes offers ownly used newness.

http://www.schloss-berlin-live.de/
press for view of Berlin live

II

When I meet a monk, I never fail to greet him;

When I see a Buddha I do not bow down.

If one bows to a Buddha, the Buddha does not know;

If one greets a monk, one is greeting what is actually there.

--Quatrain by Yuan Mei, from the biography Yuan Mei, 18th Century Chinese Poet by Arthur Waley

III

"Reduce Bloom by cross multiplication of reverses of fortune, from which these supports protected him, and by elimination of all positive values to a negligible negative irrational unreal quantity

Successively, in descending helotic order: Poverty: that of the outdoor hawker of imitation jewellery, the dun for the recovery of bad and doubtful debts, the poor rate and deputy cess collector. Mendicancy: that of the fraudulent bankrupt with negligible assets paying 1s. 4d. in the pound, sandwichman, distributor of throwaways, nocturnal vagrant, insinuating sycophant, maimed sailor, blind stripling, superannuated bailiff's man, marfest, lickplate, spoilsport, pickthank, eccentric public laughingstock seated on bench of public park under discarded perforated umbrella. Destitution: the inmate of Old Man's House (Royal Hospital) Kilmainham, the inmate of Simpson's Hospital for reduced but respectable men permanently disabled by gout or want of sight. Nadir of misery: the aged impotent disfranchised ratesupported moribund lunatic pauper."--Ulysses, James Joyce

IV

"God who, in his simple substance, is all everywhere equally, nevertheless, in efficacy, is in rational creatures in another way than in irrational, and in good rational creatures in another way than in the bad. He is in irrational creatures in such a way as not to be comprehended by them; by all rational ones, however, he can be comprehended through knowledge; but only by the good is he to be comprehended also through love."--St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), excerpted from The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley. (The curious translator from the French is unknown to me)

V

"Since every practical law represents a possible action as good, and on this account, for a subject who is practically determinable by reason, necessary, all imperatives are formulae determining an action which is necessary according to the principle of a will good in some respects. If now the action is good only as a means to something else, then the imperative is hypothetical; if it is conceived as good in itself and consequently as being necessarily the principle of a will which of itself conforms to reason, then it is categorical."

--Metaphysics of Ethics, Immanuel Kant (translated by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, B.D., Litt.D., Hon. D.D. (Glasg.), fellow of Trinity College, Dublin)

VI

"My brother in the wisdom of his conceit

is not willing to admit that my ingenuity

is mathematically, inevitably, equivalent to his own;

since we are not separate entities by one.

And therefore our two accomplishments are one.

He believes I cannot solve the acrostic of his fortress;

but yet it is self-evident that I must,

because we both have drawn the plan.

He believes the perimeter of my argument has

wrinkled like the wattle of a beaten cock,

not realizing this must be his also. . . "

--Notes from a Bottle found on the Beach at Carmel, Evan S. Connell

VII

"According to the Archpoet Homer, Cerberus was simply a dog. Dante calls him a worm. Hesiod mentions Cerberus twice in the Theogony, but is unable to decide if he has one head or fifty. Pindar doubles this number, while Horace endows Cerberus with a mane of snakes. The tragedians are more restrained, content with three heads. Sculptors and painters represent Cerberus with three heads at most. Here an observation comes to mind--language is inclined to hyperbole and exaggeration if not lying, while a statement in marble or paint imposes a matter-of-fact simplicity.
Because of the dim illumination at the place of action, the outcome of the struggle between Heracles and Cerberus--guardian of the kingdom of the dead--was unclear. It was the twelfth, the last and the most difficult, labor of the hero. Hence the sacred semi-obscurity that befits other worlds."
--"The Infernal Dog," from The King of the Ants by Zbigniew Herbert (translated from the Polish by John and Bogdana Carpenter)

VIII

"Behind the liberal identification of totalitarianism with authoritarianism, and the concomitant inclination to see "totalitarian" trends in every authoritarian limitation of freedom, lies an older confusion of authority with tyranny, and of legitimate power with violence. The difference between tyranny and authoritarian government has always been that the tyrant rules in accordance with his own will and interest, whereas even the most draconic authoritarian government is bound by laws. Its acts are tested by a code which was made either not by man at all, as in the case of the law of nature or God's Commandments or the Platonic ideas, or at least not by those actually in power. The source of authority in authoritarian government is always a force external and superior to its own power; political realm, from which the authorities derive their "authority," that is, their legitimacy, and against which their power can be checked."

--Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt

IX

"It is one of man's passions to disentangle apparent chaos. He has to harmonize the universe to his own mental structure, and he does so by choosing from nature what fits into the working of his mind. One of the resultants of this activity is called Science. Concordances are but re-echoed questions and answers. All human activity, whether technical or artistic, tends to create structures which conform with those of our constants, and free perceptible affinities from the magma of the real and possible. The geometrising [sic] spirit is one of the consequences of the tendency to least resistance. It is innate."

--Foundations of Modern Art, Ozenfant (translation by John Rodker)

X

"Overpowered by consular guards and turned over to the police the assassin admitted to being a member of the dreaded "Fly Tox Movement" an extremist sect who hold hashish in horror getting their kicks largely from vitamin deficiency a preparation like that you can get on his line sweet and clear 'Can you hear me Homer?' Of course you can. I'm telling you what you have to do Homer. We will protect you Homer. Flying saucers will be waiting after you have done our bidding.'

Now it sometimes happens you lose a screwball can't get on his line well then you put everybody with cop in him out on the streets to trace down the lost screwball before he talks too sensible about what we are doing here in this department which is unthinkable because we got here first heavy and cold as a cop's blackjack on a winter night we was looking for a lost screwball last contacted in an orgone accumulator screen went dead case like that usually turns out to be interdepartmental sabotage or illegal recruitment the whole department is rotten with it maybe the Ethnology Department used him in a ritual murder we are men of the world these things happen . . . "

Q: "Do you think we will arrive, or have already arrived at the point of creating artificial beings without recourse to normal reproductive processes? Does that seem desirable to you?"

A: "I think it's quite within the range of modern technology, and it seems very desirable to me, indeed, because it would bring about elimination of the family. . . Now, if you could produce artificial beings, you could produce them at a reasonable age, and you wouldn't have all this infancy. Yes, it seems to me very desirable."

--The Job, interviews of William S. Burroughs by Daniel Odier (1973)

XI

"The notion of force is far from simple, and yet it is the first that has to be elucidated in order to formulate the problems of society. Force and oppression--that makes two; but what needs to be understood above all is that it is not the manner in which use is made of some particular force, but its very nature, which determines whether it is oppressive or not. Marx clearly perceived this in connection with the State; he understood that this machine for grinding men down, cannot stop grinding as long as it goes on functioning, no matter in whose hands it may be. But this insight has a far more general application. Oppression proceeds exclusively from objective conditions. The first of these is the existence of privileges; and it is not men's laws or decrees which determine privileges, nor yet titles to property; it is the very nature of things. Certain circumstances, which correspond to stages, no doubt inevitable, in human development, give rise to forces which come between the ordinary man and his own conditions of existence, between the effort and the fruit of the effort, and which are, inherently, the monopoly of a few, owing to the fact that they cannot be shared among all; thenceforward these privileges behold in their hands the fate of the very people on whom they depend, and equality is destroyed. This is what happens to begin with when the religious rites by which man thinks to win nature over to his side, having become too numerous and complicated to be known by all, finally become the secret and consequently the monopoly of a few priests; the priest then disposes, albeit only through a fiction, of all of nature's powers, and it is in their name that he exercises authority. Nothing essential is changed when this monopoly is no longer made up of rites but of scientific processes, and when those in possession of it are called scientists and technicians instead of priests."

--"Analysis of Oppression", Simone Weil (translated by Arthur Wills and John Petrie), from The Simone Weil Reader

XII

fou / mad

It frequently occurs to the amorous subject that he is, or is going, mad.

1. "I am mad to be in love, I am not mad to be able to say so, I double my image: insane in my own eyes (I know my delirium), simply unreasonable in the eyes of someone else, to whom I quite sanely describe my madness: conscious of this madness, sustaining a discourse upon it.

Werther meets a madman in the mountains: in midwinter, he wants to pick flowers for Charlotte, whom he has loved. This man, during the time he was in a padded cell, was happy: he no longer knew anything about himself. Werther half recognizes himself in the madman seeking flowers: mad with passion, like himself, but deprived of any access to the (supposed) happiness of unconsciousness: he suffers from having failed his own madness.

3. For a hundred years, (literary) madness has been thought to consist in Rimbaud's 'Je est un autre': madness is an experience of depersonalization. For me as an amorous subject, it is quite the contrary: it is becoming a subject, being unable to keep myself from doing so, which drives me mad. I am not someone else: that is what I realize with horror.

(A Zen story: An old monk busies himself in the hottest weather drying mushrooms. 'Why don't you let others do that?' 'Another man is not myself, and I am not another. Another cannot experience my action. I must create my experience of drying mushrooms.')

I am indefectibly myself, and it is in this that I am mad: I am bad because I consist."

--A Lover's Discourse, Fragments, by Roland Barthes (translated by Richard Howard)

XIII

"This way of looking at the old was itself something new. Past realities are transformed by present reflection. Te translation of tradition into conscious principles gives rise to a new philosophy which identifies itself with the old. The philosopher does not advance his ideas as his own. The Jewish Prophets proclaimed God's revelation, Confucius the voice of antiquity. He who submits to the old is saved from the presumption of basing great demands on his own infinitesimal self. He improves his chances of being believed and followed by those who still live in the substance of their origins. Independent thought, springing from the nothingness of mere reason, is futile: 'I have gone without food and sleep in order to think; to no avail: it is better to learn.' But learning and thinking go hand in hand. One demands the other. 'To learn without thinking is vain.' "

--"Confucius' Basic Idea: The Renewal of Antiquity," Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, Karl Jaspers (translated by Ralph Manheim)

XIV

"In this Chapter Ani identifies himself with Tem-Khepera, who composed the words of power that Thoth pronounced, which resulted in the creation of the heavens and the earth. In the character of this god Ani could pronounce words, the effect of which would be to give him everything that he desired. Now the Egyptians thought that words were concrete things, and that it was possible to steal from a man his words of power, or the spells wherewith he had been provided; and whereas we should say that we had forgotten a formula, the Egyptian would say that it had been stolen from him. The object of this Chapter was to give a man in Khert-Neter the ability to make his words of power, supposing they had gone away, or been carried away from him, to return to him, no matter how far away they had been carried. When the Chapter was recited by Ani, his spells would return to him more swiftly than greyhounds can run, and quicker than the light. Its recital, too, would obtain for him the help of 'him that brought the ferry-boat of Ra, of the god Herfhaf who ferried the souls of the righteous over to the Island of Fire, wherein Osiris reigned. The word of power which Ani wanted to possess was that the utterance of which would enable him to recreate himself."

--The Book of The Dead, a hieroglyphic transcription of the papyrus of Ani by E.A. Wallis Budge

XV

"A Cambridge don, John Mitchell, wrote a paper in 1783 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London in which he pointed out that a star that was sufficiently massive and compact would have such a strong gravitational field that light could not escape: any light emitted from the surface of the star would be dragged back by the star's gravitational attraction before it could get very far. Mitchell suggested that there might be a large number of stars like this. Although we could not be able to see them because the light from them would not reach us, we would still feel their gravitational attraction. Such objects are what we now call black holes, because that is what they are: black voids in space."

--A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking

XVI

When God made the first clay model of a human being He painted in the eyes ... the lips ... and the sex.

And then He painted in each person's name lest the person should ever forget it.

If God approves of His creation, He breathed the painted clay model into life by signing His own name.

XVII

HM: "Rewriting is so extraordinary, it's where writing, not always, but very often, takes place. That's when the writer becomes the first reader. Becomes a creator. If the reader is the only creator, the writer gets to share and in fact participates in that act of creation in the stage of rewriting. That's when the writer can play creator too. The old idea is hard to get rid of, that the writers have something to say and the readers are there to get it. I don't think things work that way at all.
LT: In that sense, the author has always been dead.
HM: That's right. There have never been any authors. There have only been readers. The authors are first readers.
LT: Your most recent novel, Cigarettes, seems formally very different from, let's say, your first novel, The Conversions, although it seemed to me that Cigarettes reworks some of The Conversions' themes.
HM: The earlier works were misread by a great many readers because they always thought I must be doing something else than what was actually there. And so they kept looking past what was right in front of them . . . The narrator makes only two or three remarks in the course of The Conversions--about his wife divorcing him, for instance--but they're enough to suggest all the things that he's not saying that he should be saying. You can't help being aware, even if you don't know why, that the narrator has been reduced to a point of total fearfulness.
LT: His pursuit of the inheritance, which sets him chasing fragments of an esoteric puzzle that, in fact, doesn't exist, has all sorts of meanings. He's on a quest, a journey. Is he worthy, is he smart enough? A lot of anxiety there."
--"Harry Mathews by Lynne Tillman," from BOMB magazine interviews 1992

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