emergency atlas strategy.

―

“If I remember correctly writers usually find some excuse for their books, although why one should excuse oneself for having such a quiet and peaceful occupation I really don’t know. Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

“Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.”
— Jean Baudrillard

“She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.”
— Louisa May Alcott, (Work: A Story of Experience)

“An invisible landscape conditions the visible one”
― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

“A very small part of this great system, during a very short time, is very imperfectly discovered to us; and do we thence pronounce decisively concerning the origin of the whole?”
— David Hume, Dialogues, 1779.

It’s the same old story as before, a beam of light from before.

Pooh: “Christopher Robin, what exactly is “doing nothing”?
Christopher Robin: “Well, I’m told it means, “Going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

The point is although we think there’s a very solid distinction between where our bodies end and the world begins, in fact the brain has to work quite hard to produce this kind of consistency of experience.

And, of course, clearly it can go wrong.

“I begin by taking. I shall find scholars later to demonstrate my perfect right.”
― Frederick the Great

“Love is all we have, the only way that each can help the other.”
— Orestes, 408 BC

I know what it means to lose sleep. Just a little bit of afterlife doesn’t mean no one loves you.

“Our notions of what a human being is problematically depend on there being two coherent genders. And if someone doesn’t comply with either the masculine norm or the feminine norm, their very humaness is called into question.”
― Judith Butler

Domesticated and wild dogs scavenge human remains in different ways: pet dogs tend to eat their owners’ faces, while wild dogs prefer to eat the nutrient rich organs located in the abdomen.

“Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.”
― Fredric Jameson, “Future City”, New Left Review (May-June 2003)

“Clay was slowly deciding to kill himself. It was slow because, in spite of everything Clay did not want to die. He was just becoming less and less able to tolerate the pain of living.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Mind of My Mind

Aristotle described childhood as hot and moist, youth as hot and dry, and adulthood as cold and dry. He believed aging and death were caused by the body being transformed from one that was hot and moist to one that was cold and dry—a change which he viewed as not only inevitable but desirable.

“Quotation confesses inferiority. “
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters and Social Aims (1876).

“Consider incompleteness as a verb.”
― Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, 1995.

Bellsybabble is the name of a fictional language of the Devil, mentioned by writer James Joyce in the following postscript to a letter (containing the story now known as “The Cat and the Devil”), which he wrote in 1936 to his four-year-old grandson.

The devil mostly speaks a language of his own called Bellsybabble which he makes up himself as he goes along but when he is very angry he can speak quite bad French very well though some who have heard him say that he has a strong Dublin accent.

The name “Bellsybabble” is a pun on Beelzebub, “babble” and Babel. Bellsybabble has variously been called a poly-language, a pluridialectal idiom and a ludic creation.

“Leave me to my own absurdity.”
― Sophocles, Antigone

She’ll never have a birthday again. She’ll never have a thirst for that again.

“Don’t for heaven’s sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

Studies of human conversation have documented that 30–40% of everyday speech is used to relay information to others about one’s private experiences or personal relationships, and recent surveys of Internet use indicate that upwards of 80% of posts to social media sites (such as Twitter) consist simply of announcements about one’s own immediate experiences.

In Buddhism, one “Aeon” is the amount of time it takes to completely erode a huge rock 16x16x16 miles in size, by brushing it with a silk cloth once a century.

 “It was about knowing you were going to be underestimated by everyone and then punishing them for those very thoughts.”
― Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir

In her will, author Dorothy Parker left her estate to Martin Luther King Jr. and the NAACP following his death. The organization still owns the rights to her work today.

 “The mediocrity principle suggests, given the existence of life on Earth, that life typically exists on Earth-like planets throughout the universe.”

That explains the trouble that I’m always in. That explains the trouble that I’m always in.

“I sat next to Zelda, who was at her iridescent best. Some of Scott’s friends were irritated; others were enchanted, by her. I was one of the ones who were charmed.

She had the waywardness of a Southern belle and the lack of inhibitions of a child. She talked with so spontaneous a color and wit—almost exactly in the way she wrote—that I very soon ceased to be troubled by the fact that the conversation was in the nature of a ‘free association’ of ideas and one could never follow up anything.

I have rarely known a woman who expressed herself so delightfully and so freshly: she had no ready-made phrases on the one hand and made no straining for effect on the other. It evaporated easily, however, and I remember only one thing she said that night: that the writing of Galsworthy was a shade of blue for which she did not care.”
― Edmund Wilson, recalling a party at the Fitzgerald home in Edgemoor, Delaware, in February 1928

“But the printing press didn’t only lead to progress. It also led to anti-Semitic violence, the spread of medical misinformation, and about a century of religious wars.”

If I were a wealthy man.

“We introduce the term “enclothed cognition” to describe the systematic influence that clothes have on the wearer’s psychological processes. We offer a potentially unifying framework to integrate past findings and capture the diverse impact that clothes can have on the wearer by proposing that enclothed cognition involves the co-occurrence of two independent factors—the symbolic meaning of the clothes and the physical experience of wearing them.”

“Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.”
— Michel Foucault

“You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages — they haven’t ended yet.”
— Kurt Vonnegut, closing lines of Deadeye Dick, 1982

Living island. Specializes in the education and entertainment of no one.

“Obligate scavenging is actually very rare in the animal kingdom, due to the difficulty of finding enough carrion without expending too much energy. In vertebrates, only vultures and possibly some pterosaurs are obligate scavengers, as terrestrial soaring flyers are the only animals able to find enough carrion. Well-known invertebrate scavengers of animal material include burying beetles and blowflies, which are obligate scavengers, and yellowjackets.”

“Think it o-o-over, haven’t I been good to you?”
― Diana Ross, 1965, age 21.

“The Orphan Bird is a legendary bird from medieval bestiaries. It had a peacock’s neck, an eagle’s beak, a swan’s feet, and a crane’s body. It would lay its eggs in the sea The good eggs would float, while the bad eggs would sink.”

Adam begat Seth. Seth begat Enos. Enos begat Cainan. Cainan begat Mahaleel. Mahaleel begat Jared. Jared begat Enoch. Enoch begat Methusaleh.

Parchment, scraps and pieces, one last paradox of the heap.

Death may not be removed from language, but its location may be translated to a different place.

“My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery – always buzzing, humming, soaring roaring diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?”
― Virginia Woolf

“I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse… I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.”
― Leonora Carrington

Side effects of eternal life (without eternal youth).
1. It’s all cancer / runaway cell division
2. Inflammation / tissue deterioration
3. Antagonistic pleotropy
4. Negative mutations can just hang out there.

“There is nobody that can make you happy, you must take care of this matter yourself.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

“Joan Miró gave me some money one day and told me to get him some cigarettes. I gave it back and said if he wanted cigarettes, he could bloody well get them himself.”
― Leonora Carrington

We’ll be together. You see every star, find me. Do you really want to? Find me.

“Is any of this real? Dangerous question. Sometimes I don’t know the answer. I doubt myself. I doubt what I think I know. I try to forget about it. After all, if it’s real, why doesn’t anyone else know about it.

Every one knows that change is inevitable. From the second law of thermodynamics to Darwinian evolution, from Buddhism’s insistence that nothing is permanent and all suffering results from our delusions of permanence to the third chapter of Ecclesiastes (“To everything there is a season”), change is part of life, of existence, of the common wisdom. But I don’t believe we’re dealing with all that that means. We haven’t even begun to deal with it.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

I can never go to sleep. Go for a drive. Anything.

“The original word for ‘bear’ has been lost. People in middle ages were superstitious and thought saying the animal’s name would summon it. They called it ‘bear’ which means ‘the brown one’ to avoid saying its actual name.”

“It is June. I am tired of being brave.”
― Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems

“How small a thought it takes to fill a life.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“When we can’t think for ourselves, we can always quote.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“Jean asked her sister, “Am I?”
“Are you?” she asked back.”
― Christine Schutt, A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer

“In these letters to her sister, Nora Barnacle depicts her husband as a weak and neurotic man. She accuses Joyce of ruining her life and that of their children. She says he drinks too much and wastes too much money. As for his literary activity, she laments the fact that his writings are obscure and lacking in sense. She hates attending his meetings with other artists and admits she would have preferred him had he been a musician rather than a writer.”

Forever, and ever
All alone, all alone
And you will always answer
Forever, for ever, and ever
All alone, all alone
Listening to all the things you can’t hear

“I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.”
― Dorothy Parker

“The two most beautiful words in the English language are ‘cheque enclosed.”
― Dorothy Parker

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (George Santayana).
“I’ve got news for Mr. Santayana: we’re doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That’s what it is to be alive.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“The doctor lifted the bottle.
“Thank you,” said Felix.
“I never drink spirits.”
“You will,” said the doctor.”
― Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

“There’s nothing in the world so demoralizing as money.”
― Sophocles, Antigone

“What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone’s orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away.”
― Anne Carson, Decreation

Not quite a toy. We can bring bodies back. I don’t understand. No one ever does.

“I am a cage, in search of a bird.”
― Franz Kafka

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.”
― Franz Kafka

“I am in chains. Don’t touch my chains.”
― Franz Kafka

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

And you say, you don’t want nobody. You say, you got that right.

“There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, ‘Consume me’.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity. ”
― Virginia Woolf

“I will not be “famous,” “great.” I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self: to let it find its dimensions, not be impeded.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf

“Tell them I was too fucking busy– or vice versa.”
― Dorothy Parker, while on her honeymoon, in letter to her publisher

“Dreams neither injure nor benefit: they are vain.”
― Ibid., Genesis Rabbah 68, p.83

And here I thought you could talk to me… I’ll just have to think of something else. I thought you could talk to me, things won’t be the same.

“When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees. Maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious.”
― Edna O’Brien

“Nothing is yours. It is to use. It is to share. If you will not share it, you cannot use it.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“Charidas, what is it like down there?
All darkness.
And resurrection?
All a lie.”
— Callimachus.

Dig, dig, dig, dig. Don’t be excited, here we go.

“I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them. The librarian said $32 even and you’ve owed it for eighteen years. I didn’t deny anything. Because I don’t understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away.”
― Grace Paley

“This tremendous world I have inside of me. How to free myself, and this world, without tearing myself to pieces. And rather tear myself to a thousand pieces than be buried with this world within me.”
― Kafka Franz, Diaries, 1910-1923

Oh that’s me
I guess, down in the dirt
Grow fonder

“It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck.

Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless.

As the nations of the world free themselves, capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely….”
― Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks (1965)

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”
― Simone Weil

Vicenzo and Luigi Pappalettera wrote in their book The Brutes Have the Floor that, every time a new transport of detainees arrived at Mauthausen, Kapo August Adam picked out the professors, lawyers, priests and magistrates and cynically asked them:

“Are you a lawyer? A professor? Good! Do you see this green triangle? This means I am a killer. I have five convictions on my record: one for manslaughter and four for robbery. Well, here I am in command. The world has turned upside down, did you get that? Do you need a Dolmetscher, an interpreter? Here it is!” And he was pointing to his bat, after which he struck. When he was satisfied, he formed a Scheisskompanie with those selected and sent them to clean the latrines.

The scenes that greeted British troops were described by the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby, who accompanied them:

“ …Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which… The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them … Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live … A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.”

The ancient Jewish text of Perek Shirah asserts that spiders and rats praise God using verses from Psalm 150.

“In the visible world, the Milky Way is a tiny fragment; within this fragment, the solar system is an infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot.

On this dot, tiny lumps of impure carbon and water, of complicated structure, with somewhat unusual physical and chemical properties, crawl about for a few years, until they are dissolved again into the elements of which they are compounded.

They divide their time between labour designed to postpone the moment of dissolution for themselves and frantic struggles to hasten it for others of their kind.”
― Bertrand Russell, Dreams and Facts (1919)

“She had a pretty gift for quotation, which is a serviceable substitute for wit…”
― W. Somerset Maugham The Creative Impulse (1926)

Neither character-driven nor plot-driven, the book sometimes seems to have nothing at all holding it together. (Certainly, the jarring shift to outright magical realism in the later chapters may cause some readers to lose patience.)

“Near limitless energy is to be found by effectively cannibalizing dead galaxies from other dead universes.”

During the Renaissance and by early modern times the voices in favor of actual infinity were rather rare.

“The continuum actually consists of infinitely many indivisibles…”

Argues Galileo.

But Plato has two infinities: the great and the small.

“Don’t you want to join us?” I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffeehouse that was already almost deserted. “No, I don’t,” I said.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Princess of Nazareth. What is instinct? What is an instant?

“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”
― Octavia E. Butler

“My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Para. 464. (1953).

“Linguist Derek Bickerton reasons that despite the vast powers that language has conferred on our species, some of the consequences of modeling reality with language threaten the continuation of our life on earth.

Language can create dysfunctional representations of reality, representations that result in antibiological conduct such as a heretic who refuses to recant and is burned to death.

In a sense, humans have become a heretical species. Orthodoxy upon this earth holds that any species, which destroys its environment, destroys itself. Humans are destroying their environment, hence destroying themselves. Humans are a heretical species. Bickerton ascribes this antibiological behavior to our capacity to misrepresent reality with language. He states, rather abruptly, “Perhaps language is, after all, terminally dysfunctional.”

“I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich.”
― Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (1937).

I’m wishing, today. Today.

Antiprocess is the preemptive recognition and marginalization of undesired information by the interplay of mental defense mechanisms: the subconscious compromises information that would cause cognitive dissonance.

It is often used to describe a difficulty encountered when people with sharply contrasting viewpoints are attempting (and failing) to discuss a topic.

“Perfer et obdura, dolor hic tibi proderit olim.”
(Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.)”
― Ovid

Bentham was an obsessive writer and reviser, but was constitutionally incapable, except on rare occasions, of bringing his work to completion and publication.

Most of what appeared in print in his lifetime was prepared for publication by others.

“A poet who reads his verse in public may have other nasty habits.”
― R. Heinlein, Time Enough For Love, 1973

I’m a plain, simple man. I have plain, simple wants. I use plain, simple words.

“I dreamed night after night that everyone in the world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the responsibility of making a wagon wheel.”
― Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Ch. 2

“A black hole really is an object with very rich structure, just like Earth has a rich structure of mountains, valleys, oceans, and so forth. Its warped space whirls around the central singularity like air in a tornado…”
― Kip Thorne

I want silence up there. Up there. Helplessness is the last thing I am looking for.

“Little Eichmanns” are people whose actions, while on an individual scale may seem relatively harmless even to themselves, taken collectively create destructive and immoral systems in which they are actually complicit.

The name comes from Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi bureaucrat who helped to orchestrate the Holocaust, but claimed that he did so without feeling anything about his actions, merely following the orders given to him.

The use of “Eichmann” as an archetype stems from Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil”. According to Arendt in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Eichmann relied on propaganda rather than thinking for himself, and carried out Nazi goals mostly to advance his career, appearing at his trial to have an ordinary and common personality while displaying neither guilt nor hatred. She suggested that this most strikingly discredits the idea that the Nazi war criminals were manifestly psychopathic and fundamentally different from ordinary people.

“The shadow escapes from the body like an animal we had been sheltering.”
― Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 1981.

“I don’t know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I’ll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.”
― Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989.

About a decade before she killed herself, Sylvia Plath told her love interest, “I like people too much or not at all. I’ve got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.” Her crush replied, “Nobody knows me.” “So that was it; the end,” Plath wrote in her journal, crushed indeed by this magnetic man’s near militant disinterest in her wild moods, her extremist desire to free-fall.

Tetradrachm of Antiochus I of the Seleucid Empire, the last known ruler to use the title King of the Universe. (281 – 261 BC)

The original phrase was translated from the French: Le roi est mort, vive le roi!, which was first declared upon the accession to the French throne of Charles VII after the death of his father Charles VI in 1422.

Satan frequently appeared as a comic relief figure in late medieval mystery plays, in which he “frolicked, fell, and farted in the background.”

“I think the next little bit of excitement is flying. I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously, nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot. I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them.”
―Samuel Beckett, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1929–1940.

Parrondo’s paradox: it is possible to play two losing games alternately to eventually win.

“Ambition is the last refuge of the failure.”
― Oscar Wilde, Phrases and Philosophies for the use of the Young, 1894.

“It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence … and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.”
― Hannah Arendt, 1951.

“That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

“Intelligence is relatively new to life on Earth, but your hierarchical tendencies are ancient.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Lilith’s Brood

“That’s what Humans are, too, don’t forget. People who poison each other, then disclaim all responsibility.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Adulthood Rites

“It’s a terrible thing to die young. Still, it saves a lot of time.”
— Grace Paley.

“The world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through. Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. … Every separation is a link.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

Poison. In my head is poison, if I keep on believing.
It’s not fair. Let me close my eyes just right here. Where you are.

“I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable notebooks with phrases to be used when I have found the true story, the one story to which all these phrases refer. But I have never yet found the story. And I begin to ask, Are there stories?”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

“The skeleton was as happy as a madman whose straightjacket had been taken off. He felt liberated at being able to walk without flesh. The mosquitoes didn’t bite him anymore. He didn’t have to have his hair cut. He was neither hungry nor thirsty, hot nor cold. He was far from the lizard of love.”
― Leonora Carrington, The Seventh Horse And Other Tales

“but me you have forgotten
or you love some man more than me”
― Sappho

Time and space. You can handle half the things. Get up in the morning, it’s another day.

*Gause’s law, in ecology, the competitive exclusion principle: “complete competitors cannot coexist.”
*Gérson’s law: “An advantage should be taken in every situation, regardless of ethics.”
*Hebb’s law: “Neurons that fire together wire together.”
*Parkinson’s law is the adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. It is sometimes applied to the growth of bureaucracy in an organization.
*Shirky principle: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” *Stigler’s law: No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. Named by statistician *Stephen Stigler who attributes it to sociologist Robert K. Merton, making the law self-referential.

“We all have a tendency to think that the world must conform to our prejudices. The opposite view involves some effort of thought, and most people would die sooner than think – in fact they do so.

Variant: “Most people would rather die than think; many do.”
― Bertrand Russell, The ABC of Relativity, 1925.

“None preaches better than the ant, and she says nothing.”
― Turkish Proverb

Antonio de Guevara’s utopian nation “had a custom, not to live longer than sixty five years”. At that age, they practiced self-immolation. Rather than condemn the practice, Bishop Guevara called it a “golden world” in which people “have overcome the natural appetite to desire to live”

Desperation makes for poor stealth.

“All liminality must eventually dissolve, for it is a state of great intensity that cannot exist very long without some sort of structure to stabilize it…either the individual returns to the surrounding social structure…or else liminal communities develop their own internal social structure.”
― Victor Turner The Forest of Symbols, 1967

‘’Art and language could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass- produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.’’
― Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New

Carl Sagan believed the first TV that aliens would see would be Hitler’s Nuremburg rallies.

The ancient Trishikhibrahmana Upanishad text asserts the theory that living beings originate by four means, through an egg, through seeds, through a womb, or through sweat

“Man … is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history… and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.’
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death, 1973 (written one year before death)

And now are you kidding?
Grow fonder
And you aren’t going
Hands full
You aren’t useful
And down
That’s me, too

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty says, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.

“Life, is, as I’ve said since I was 10, awfully interesting—if anything, quicker, keener at 44 than 24, more desperate, I suppose, as the river shoots to Niagara—my new vision of death; active, positive, like all the rest, exciting; & of great importance—as an experience.”
― Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary when she was 44

I just close my eyes, and there you are.

Hyman Bloom (né Melamed) was born into an orthodox Jewish family in the tiny Jewish village of Brunavišķi in what is now Latvia, then part of the Russian Empire. He was one of six children born to Joseph and Anna Melamed. His father was a leather worker. Brunavišķi was a poor village in an area torn by civil unrest, where Jews lived in fear of persecution.

Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, who first saw Bloom’s work at the MoMA exhibition, considered Bloom “the first Abstract Expressionist artist in America.” As abstract expressionism dominated the American art world, Bloom became disenchanted with it, calling it “emotional catharsis, with no intellectual basis.” In addition, instead of moving to New York to pursue his career, he opted to stay in Boston.

As a result he fell out of favor with critics and never achieved the kind of fame that Pollock and others did.

He disliked self-promotion and never placed much value on critical acclaim.

“The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.”
― Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

“The executioner is, I believe, an expert, and my neck is very slender.”
— Anne Boleyn, last words

“I want to tell you, Miss Tierney, you gave me one of the most memorable evenings I ever had in a theater in your film Leave Her To Heaven. When I saw the expression on your face in the sequence in which you drowned the boy, I thought, that is acting!”
— Noël Coward

Go out and love someone. I do, her.

*Wedding of fox and hyena. Fox refuses to marry hyena, since, according to belief, hyena yearly changes sex. -Aesop No 405.
*Human eyes used as fishbait. Hawaii: Beckwith Myth 245.
*Reincarnation: boy to bird to boy. Boy returns as bird, who later becomes the boy. *Type 720; *BP I 422.
*Resuscitation by dismemberment. (Cf. †E30, †E32.) (Usually combined with burning; cf. †E15.)
*Visible sun is the “pet” of real sun. S. Am. Indian (Bacairi): Lévi-Strauss BBAE CXLIII (3) 348.
*Creator makes clouds from own vitals. Tahiti: Henry 339.

“They are particularly enthusiastic about the human “talent” for cancer, which they find beautiful. This book focuses on the conflict between Lilith’s desire to stay human and her loyalty to her species and her desire to survive at any cost.”

Cirrus. Socrates. Particle. Decibel. Hurricane. Dolphin. Tulip. Monica. David. Monica. Will you die?

“When we are denied a story, a light goes off. I am asking you to study the dark.”
― Anne Carson, Plainwater: Essays and Poetry

“It gets you nowhere but deeper into
your own shit–pure misery a luxury
one never learns to enjoy.”
― Rita Dove, Against Self Pity

“People liking you or not liking you is an accident and is to do with them and not you. That goes for love too, only more so.”
― Edna O’Brien, Girls in Their Married Bliss

“Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.”
― Audre Lorde

The Bible mentions Orion three times, naming it “Kesil” (כסיל, literally – fool).

Not this again. She wants her hand held. I was once a son. I woke up.

‘’The desire of appearing clever often prevents our becoming so.’’
― François de La Rochefoucauld, Maxim 199, Maxims, 1665–1678.

“I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from the Underground

Cupio dissolvi. Literally I wish to be dissolved.

“It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others, and to forget his own…”
―Cicero, Tusculanarum Disputationum, 45 BC.

“What is the answer?” she asked, and when no answer came she laughed and said: “Then, what is the question?”
― Gertrude Stein, last words

Here is Plato’s critique of Heraclitus: If you ask any one of them a question, he will pull out some little enigmatic phrase from his quiver and shoot it off at you; and if you try to make him give an account of what he has said, you will only get hit by another, full of strange turns of language.

Why this again? All the wrong places. You can handle half the things. Get up in the morning, it’s another day.

“Everyone is dragged on by their favorite pleasure.”
― Virgil, Eclogues, 1st century BC.

“I brought up lonesomeness again, and not being understood at all except by some women everybody hated.’’
― Grace Paley, The Loudest Voice, 1959.

“It was my mother who taught me the one worthwhile thing: when they ask if you like what you see in the mirror, pretend that what they mean is what’s behind you–the shower curtain, the tile, the wallpaper, whatever’s there.”
― Gary Lutz, Stories in the Worst Way.

‘….that explains the trouble that I’m always in.”
― Alice in Wonderland, Very Good Advice

“It was a silly, silly dream, being unhappy.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 1925.

Abandonment by the parsec. I ran away and I am not going back,

“To oppose something is to maintain it… To be sure, if you turn your back on [something] and walk away from it, you are still on the [same] road…You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
― Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness, 1969.

“I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding, they learn by some other way — by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”
― Richard Feynman, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, 1985.

“Envy feeds on the living. It ceases when they are dead.
― Ovid, Amorum, 16 BC

“Beware the fury of a patient man.”
― John Dryden. Absalom and Achitophel, 1681.

An Indian Proverb states, “The eyeless ant asked God: Give me eye-lashes.”

The Kalahari Desert’s San people tell of a bee that carried a mantis across a river. The exhausted bee left the mantis on a floating flower but planted a seed in the mantis’s body before it died. The seed grew to become the first human.

“2 November. This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“You too have weapons.”
― Franz Kafka

“I usually solve problems by letting them devour me.”
― Franz Kafka

“And don’t demand any sincerity from me, Milena. No one can demand it from me more than I myself and yet many things elude me, I’m sure, perhaps everything eludes me.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

People label themselves with all sorts of adjectives. I can only pronounce myself as ‘nauseatingly miserable beyond repair’.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“My condition is not unhappiness, but it is also not happiness, not indifference, not weakness, not fatigue, not another interest – so what is it then?”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“I’m doing badly, I’m doing well, whichever you prefer.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“Yours (now I’m even losing my name – it was getting shorter and shorter all the time and is now: Yours)”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena, 1920 – 1923

“The person I am in the company of my sisters has been entirely different from the person I am in the company of other people. Fearless, powerful, surprising, moved as I otherwise am only when I write.”
― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“April 27. Incapable of living with people, of speaking. Complete immersion in myself, thinking of myself. Apathetic, witless, fearful. I have nothing to say to anyone – never.” ― Franz Kafka, Diaries, 1910-1923

“Faith, like a guillotine. As heavy, as light.” ― Franz Kafka

“Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being.” ― Franz Kafka

“It is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

Kafka was hired at the Assicurazioni Generali, an insurance company, where he worked for nearly a year. His correspondence during that period indicates that he was unhappy with a work schedule—from 08:00 until 18:00 that made it extremely difficult to concentrate on writing, which was assuming increasing importance to him.

On 15 July 1908, he resigned.

Two weeks later, he found employment more amenable to writing when he joined the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia.

Kafka usually got off work at 2 P.M., so that he had time to spend on his literary work, to which he was committed.

Franz at age 31 moved into Valli’s former apartment, quiet by contrast, and lived by himself for the first time.

It was Kafka’s last will that all his writing should be destroyed; the will that was famously disobeyed by his best friend.

All of Kafka’s published works, except some letters he wrote in Czech to Milena Jesenská, were written in German. What little was published during his lifetime attracted scant public attention.

Kafka finished none of his full-length novels and burned around 90 percent of his work, much of it during the period he lived in Berlin with Diamant, who helped him burn the drafts.

Kafka wrote: “Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me … in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread.”

Forever, and ever
All alone, all alone
And you will always answer
Forever, forever, forever and ever
All alone, all alone

One popular American song, “Masculine Women, Feminine Men” was released in 1926 and recorded by numerous artists of the day; it included these lyrics:

“Masculine women, Feminine men
Which is the rooster, which is the hen?
It’s hard to tell ’em apart today! And, say!
Sister is busy learning to shave,
Brother just loves his permanent wave,
It’s hard to tell ’em apart today! Hey, hey!
Girls were girls and boys were boys when I was a tot,
Now we don’t know who is who, or even what’s what!”

You are so beautiful to me. You are everything that I hope for.