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"Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food."

- Austin O'Malley

As quoted in The X-Files Topps comic Issue 3, 'The Return"

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"Trying to make sense of something stupid only can go so far."

- Jaron Lanier

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"The persistence of your faith in sex and machines is evidence of your capacity to hope."

- John Kessel, 'The Pure Product'

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"Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not."

- Francis Bacon, 'Of Studies'

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"Few people ever follow an argument to its logical conclusions, either in public or in private. Their “arguments” therefore, ought to be taken as mere expressions of feeling like “ouch” or “yum yum” rather than as attempts to define or reason. Professional politicians take this for granted and do not make everyone uncomfortable by treating what they say as if they really meant it. “Feelings rule mankind,” Disraeli said. Right."

- Millbrook: The True Story of the Early Years of the Psychedelic Revolution, by Art Kleps

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"In another life, we were arsonists." - boygenius, '$20'

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"It's a scary world, but we don't need to be scared anymore. We need active visionary protest, we need to grab hold and make the transformation, from complaining that there is NO FUTURE to insisting there be a future."

- Al Larsen,

of the band Some Velvet Sidewalk, in an article for the Snipehunt zine which reflected and distinguished K Records (Label)'s approach to "punk" music with an ethos he called "Love Rock."

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“Men are divided by their opinions but unified by their outlooks.”

- Goethe,

as quoted in Millbrook: A Narrative of the Early Years of American Psychedelianism by Art Kleps

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"Neither strength nor weakness is a fixed quality."

- Anaïs Nin, 'In Favor of the Sensitive Man'

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"Freedom is not just something which can be distorted, which can undergo a disease; freedom is at its most basic a disease, which is why—as Kant put it—the human being is an animal which needs a master to discipline/educate it. Which is the dimension upon which discipline and education work? Kant seems to claim that it is our animal nature:

"Discipline or training changes animal nature into human nature. An animal is already all that it can be because of its instinct; a foreign intelligence has already taken care of everything for it. But the human being needs his own intelligence. He has no instinct and must work out the plan of his conduct for himself. However, since the human being is not immediately in a position to do this, because he is in a raw state when he comes into the world, others must do it for him.”

However, the need for discipline is not just grounded negatively, in the lack of an instinctual firm base; discipline is also needed because humans display an “unnatural” savagery (Wildheit) or passion for freedom specific to human nature:

"Savagery or unruliness, Wildheit is independence from laws. Through discipline the human being is submitted to the laws of humanity and is first made to feel their constraint. Thus, for example, children are sent to school initially not already with the intention that they should learn something there, but rather that they may grow accustomed to sitting still and observing punctually what they are told, so that in the future they may not put into practice actually and instantly each notion that strikes them … Now by nature the human being has such a powerful propensity towards freedom that when he has grown accustomed to it for a while, he will sacrifice everything for it."

The predominant form of appearance of this weird “savagery” is passion, an attachment to a particular choice so strong that it suspends rational comparison with other possible choices—when we are in the thrall of a passion, we stick to a certain choice whatever it may cost. And, as the subdivision “On the inclination to freedom as a passion” tells us, “For the natural human being this is the most violent [heftigste] inclination of all.” Passion is as such purely human: animals have no passions, just instincts."

- Freedom: A Disease Without a Cure, by Slavoj Žižek

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"When the human mind is made obsolete by advancing technology, the soul may not be far behind."

- The Outer Limits (New Series) S6E15, 'The Grid'

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"If all this is just a game... I wish to play it forever." - Peter Dickenson, 'The Flight of Dragons' (1982)

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“What, man, you can’t run a mimeograph machine? Don’t you realize that mimeograph machines are absolutely essential to every revolution?” Tim [Leary] laughed.

- Millbrook: A Narrative of the Early Years of American Psychedelianism, by Art Kleps

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This passage from the Nabokov book I just read gets at some of the mystery of how writing a novel is like constructing a melody that can be haunting and elusive. Beyond the subject matter, there is the matter of how the author constructs the telling. There is surface, as well as voice, and harmonies, and the dynamics of volume and density. Is the last note a crescendo or a whisper? What is the effect of these choices, and how does it relate to the subject of the surface narrative?

From 'The Real Life of Sebastian Knight' by Vladimir Nabokov:

"In those last and saddest years of his life Sebastian wrote The Doubtful Asphodel, which is unquestionably his masterpiece. Where and how did he write it? In the reading-room of the British Museum (far from Mr. Goodman’s vigilant eye). At a humble table deep in the corner of a Parisian “bistro” (not of the kind that his mistress might patronise). In a deck-chair under an orange parasol somewhere in Cannes or Juan, when she and her gang had deserted him for a spree elsewhere. In the waiting-room of an anonymous station, between two heart-attacks. In a hotel, to the clatter of plates being washed in the yard. In many other places which I can but vaguely conjecture. The theme of the book is simple: a man is dying: you feel him sinking throughout the book; his thought and his memories pervade the whole with greater or lesser distinction (like the swell and fall of uneven breathing), now rolling up this image, now that, letting it ride in the wind, or even tossing it out on the shore, where it seems to move and live for a minute on its own and presently is drawn back again by grey seas where it sinks or is strangely transfigured. A man is dying, and he is the hero of the tale; but whereas the lives of other people in the book seem perfectly realistic (or at least realistic in a Knightian sense), the reader is kept ignorant as to who the dying man is, and where his deathbed stands or floats, or whether it is a bed at all. The man is the book; the book itself is heaving and dying, and drawing up a ghostly knee. One thought-image, then another breaks upon the shore of consciousness, and we follow the thing or the being that has been evoked: stray remnants of a wrecked life; sluggish fancies which crawl and then unfurl eyed wings. They are, these lives, but commentaries to the main subject. We follow the gentle old chess player Schwarz, who sits down on a chair in a room in a house, to teach an orphan boy the moves of the knight; we meet the fat Bohemian woman with that grey streak showing in the fast colour of her cheaply dyed hair; we listen to a pale wretch noisily denouncing the policy of oppression to an attentive plainclothes man in an ill-famed public-house. The lovely tall primadonna steps in her haste into a puddle, and her silver shoes are ruined. An old man sobs and is soothed by a soft-lipped girl in mourning. Professor Nussbaum, a Swiss scientist, shoots his young mistress and himself dead in a hotel-room at half past three in the morning. They come and go, these and other people, opening and shutting doors, living as long as the way they follow is lit, and are engulfed in turn by the waves of the dominant theme: a man is dying. He seems to move an arm or turn his head on what might be a pillow, and as he moves, this or that life we have just been watching, fades or changes. At moments, his personality grows conscious of itself, and then we feel that we are passing down some main artery of the book. “Now, when it was too late, and Life’s shops were closed, he regretted not having bought a certain book he had always wanted; never having gone through an earthquake, a fire, a train-accident; never having seen Tatsienlu in Tibet, or heard blue magpies chattering in Chinese willows; not having spoken to that errant schoolgirl with shameless eyes, met one day in a lonely glade; not having laughed at the poor little joke of a shy ugly woman, when no one had laughed in the room; having missed trains, allusions and opportunities; not having handed the penny he had in his pocket to that old street-violinist playing to himself tremulously on a certain bleak day in a certain forgotten town.” 

Sebastian Knight had always liked juggling with themes, making them clash or blending them cunningly, making them express that hidden meaning, which could only be expressed in a succession of waves, as the music of a Chinese buoy can be made to sound only by undulation. In The Doubtful Asphodel, his method has attained perfection. It is not the parts that matter, it is their combinations. 

There seems to be a method, too, in the author’s way of expressing the physical process of dying: the steps leading into darkness; action being taken in turns by the brain, the flesh, the lungs. First the brain follows up a certain hierarchy of ideas—ideas about death: sham-clever thoughts scribbled in the margin of a borrowed book (the episode of the philosopher): “Attraction of death: physical growth considered upside down as the lengthening of a suspended drop; at last falling into nothing.” Thoughts, poetical, religious: “…  the swamp of rank materialism and the golden paradises of those whom Dean Park calls the optimystics …” “But the dying man knew that these were not real ideas; that only one half of the notion of death can be said really to exist: this side of the question—the wrench, the parting, the quay of life gently moving away aflutter with handkerchiefs: ah! he was already on the other side, if he could see the beach receding; no, not quite—if he was still thinking.” (Thus, one who has come to see a friend away, may stay on deck too late, but still not become a traveller.) 

Then, little by little, the demons of physical sickness smother with mountains of pain all kinds of thought, philosophy, surmise, memories, hope, regret. We stumble and crawl through hideous landscapes, nor do we mind where we go—because it is all anguish and nothing but anguish. The method is now reversed. Instead of those thought-images which radiated fainter and fainter, as we followed them down blind alleys, it is now the slow assault of horrible uncouth visions drawing upon us and hemming us in: the story of a tortured child; an exile’s account of life in the cruel country whence he fled; a meek lunatic with a black eye; a farmer kicking his dog—lustily, wickedly. Then the pain fades too. “Now he was left so exhausted that he failed to be interested in death.” Thus “sweaty men snore in a crowded third-class carriage; thus a schoolboy falls asleep over his unfinished sum.” “I am tired, tired … a tyre rolling and rolling by itself, now wobbling, now slowing down, now …” 

This is the moment when a wave of light suddenly floods the book: “…  as if somebody had flung open the door and people in the room have started up, blinking, feverishly picking up parcels.” We feel that we are on the brink of some absolute truth, dazzling in its splendour and at the same time almost homely in its perfect simplicity. By an incredible feat of suggestive wording, the author makes us believe that he knows the truth about death and that he is going to tell it. In a moment or two, at the end of this sentence, in the middle of the next, or perhaps a little further still, we shall learn something that will change all our concepts, as if we discovered that by moving our arms in some simple, but never yet attempted manner, we could fly. “The hardest knot is but a meandering string; tough to the finger nails, but really a matter of lazy and graceful loopings. The eye undoes it, while clumsy fingers bleed. He (the dying man) was that knot, and he would be untied at once, if he could manage to see and follow the thread. And not only himself, everything would be unravelled,—everything that he might imagine in our childish terms of space and time, both being riddles invented by man as riddles, and thus coming back at us: the boomerangs of nonsense … Now he had caught something real, which had nothing to do with any of the thoughts or feelings, or experiences he might have had in the kindergarten of life …” 

The answer to all questions of life and death, “the absolute solution” was written all over the world he had known: it was like a traveller realising that the wild country he surveys is not an accidental assembly of natural phenomena, but the page in a book where these mountains and forests, and fields, and rivers are disposed in such a way as to form a coherent sentence; the vowel of a lake fusing with the consonant of a sibilant slope; the windings of a road writing its message in a round hand, as clear as that of one’s father; trees conversing in dumb-show, making sense to one who has learnt the gestures of their language … Thus the traveller spells the landscape and its sense is disclosed, and likewise, the intricate pattern of human life turns out to be monogrammatic, now quite clear to the inner eye disentangling the interwoven letters. And the word, the meaning which appears is astounding in its simplicity: the greatest surprise being perhaps that in the course of one’s earthly existence, with one’s brain encompassed by an iron ring, by the close-fitting dream of one’s own personality—one had not made by chance that simple mental jerk, which would have set free imprisoned thought and granted it the great understanding. Now the puzzle was solved. “And as the meaning of all things shone through their shapes, many ideas and events which had seemed of the utmost importance dwindled not to insignificance, for nothing could be insignificant now, but to the same size which other ideas and events, once denied any importance, now attained.” Thus, such shining giants of our brain as science, art or religion fell out of the familiar scheme of their classification, and joining hands, were mixed and joyfully levelled. Thus, a cherry stone and its tiny shadow which lay on the painted wood of a tired bench, or a bit of torn paper, or any other such trifle out of millions and millions of trifles grew to a wonderful size. Remodelled and re-combined, the world yielded its sense to the soul as naturally as both breathed. 

And now we shall know what exactly it is; the word will be uttered—and you, and I, and everyone in the world will slap himself on the forehead: What fools we have been! At this last bend of his book the author seems to pause for a minute, as if he were pondering whether it were wise to let the truth out. He seems to lift his head and to leave the dying man, whose thoughts he was following, and to turn away and to think: Shall we follow him to the end? Shall we whisper the word which will shatter the snug silence of our brains?We shall. We have gone too far as it is, and the word is being already formed, and will come out. And we turn and bend again over a hazy bed, over a grey, floating form,—lower and lower … But that minute of doubt was fatal: the man is dead. 

The man is dead and we do not know. The asphodel on the other shore is as doubtful as ever. We hold a dead book in our hands. Or are we mistaken? I sometimes feel when I turn the pages of Sebastian’s masterpiece that the “absolute solution” is there, somewhere, concealed in some passage I have read too hastily, or that it is intertwined with other words whose familiar guise deceived me. I don’t know any other book that gives one this special sensation, and perhaps this was the author’s special intention. 

I recall vividly the day when I saw The Doubtful Asphodel announced in an English paper. I had come across a copy of that paper in the lobby of a hotel in Paris, where I was waiting for a man whom my firm wanted wheedled into settling a certain deal. I am not good at wheedling, and generally the business seemed to me less promising than it seemed to my employers. And as I sat there alone in the lugubriously comfortable hall, and read the publisher’s advertisement and Sebastian’s handsome black name in block letters, I envied his lot more acutely than I had ever envied it before. I did not know where he was at the time, I had not seen him for at least six years, nor did I know of his being so ill and so miserable. On the contrary, that announcement of his book seemed to me a token of happiness—and I imagined him standing in a warm cheerful room at some club, with his hands in his pockets, his ears glowing, his eyes moist and bright, a smile fluttering on his lips,—and all the other people in the room standing round him, holding glasses of port, and laughing at his jokes. It was a silly picture, but it kept shining in its trembling pattern of white shirtfronts and black dinner jackets and mellow-coloured wine, and clear-cut faces, as one of those coloured photographs you see on the back of magazines. I decided to get that book as soon as it was published, I always used to get his books at once, but somehow I was particularly impatient to get this one. Presently the person I was waiting for came down. He was an Englishman, and fairly well-read. As we talked for a few moments about ordinary things before broaching the business in hand, I pointed casually to the advertisement in the paper and asked whether he had read any of Sebastian Knight’s books. He said he had read one or two—The Prismatic Something and Lost Property. I asked him whether he had liked them. He said he had in a way, but the author seemed to him a terrible snob, intellectually, at least. Asked to explain, he added that Knight seemed to him to be constantly playing some game of his own invention, without telling his partners its rules. He said he preferred books that made one think, and Knight’s books didn’t,—they left you puzzled and cross. Then he talked of another living author, whom he thought so much better than Knight. I took advantage of a pause to enter on our business conversation. It did not prove as successful as my firm had expected. 

The Doubtful Asphodel obtained many reviews, and most of them were long and quite flattering. But here and there the hint kept recurring that the author was a tired author, which seemed another way of saying that he was just an old bore. I even caught a faint suggestion of commiseration, as if they knew certain sad dreary things about the author which were not really in the book, but which permeated their attitude towards it. One critic even went as far as to say that he read it “with mingled feelings, because it was a rather unpleasant experience for the reader, to sit beside a deathbed and never be quite sure whether the author was the doctor or the patient.” Nearly all the reviews gave to understand that the book was a little too long, and that many passages were obscure and obscurely aggravating. All praised Sebastian Knight’s “sincerity”—whatever that was. I wondered what Sebastian thought of those reviews. 

I lent my copy to a friend who kept it several weeks without reading it, and then lost it in a train. I got another and never lent it to anybody. Yes, I think that of all his books this is my favourite one. I don’t know whether it makes one “think,” and I don’t much care if it does not. I like it for its own sake. I like its manners. And sometimes I tell myself that it would not be inordinately hard to translate it into Russian."

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"There's safety in thinking in a diner. You can have your coffee or your milk shake, and you can go off into strange dark areas, and always come back to the safety of the diner."

- David Lynch, 'Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity', chapter: 'Bob's Big Boy'

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(Operating on a man with some kind of burning chest wound)

Treves: "We'll be seeing a lot more of these machine accidents, Mr. Hodges.” Hodges: “Yes, sir.” Treves: “Abominable things, these machines, but you can’t reason with them.” Fox: “What a mess.”

- The Elephant Man, Directed by David Lynch (1980)

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"Why argue? It’s much easier, and more fun, to demonstrate that you are a “hopeless case” instead."

- Millbrook: A Narrative of the Early Years of American Psychedelianism, by Art Kleps