lizardgoats

[lizardgoats]

I cannot conjure spirits, but I can tell you that callign things by their right names is more than giving them an identity bracelet or a label, or a serial number. We summon a vision. Naming is power.

Frankissstein, by Jeanette Winterson

[lizardgoats]

History is what you make it. Tonight we are the history we are making.

Frankissstein, by Jeanette Winterson

[lizardgoats]

Why should she not remake herself? What is identity but what we name it?

Frankissstein, by Jeanette Winterson

[lizardgoats]

And where does this soul go, at death? said Byron. That is unknown, answered Shelley; the becoming of the soul, not its going, should be our concern. The mystery of life is on earth, not elsewhere.

Frankissstein, by Jeanette Winterson

[lizardgoats]

She's right. I am liminal, cusping, in between, emerging, undecided, transitional, experimental, a start-up (or is it an upstart?) in my own life.

Frankissstein, by Jeanette Winterson

[lizardgoats]

why is it that we wish to leave some mark behind? said Byron. Is it only vanity? No, I said, it is hope. Hope that one day there will be a human society that is just.

Frankissstein, by Jeanette Winterson

[lizardgoats]

But what is the right time? I asked him, and he wondered if time itself depends on those who are in time. If time uses us as channels for the past—yes, that must be so, he said, as some people can speak to the dead.

Frankissstein, by Jeanette Winterson

[lizardgoats]

Shelley is fascinated by moonlit nights and the sudden sight of ruins. He believes that every building carries and imprint of the past, like a memory, or memories, and that these can be released if the time is right.

Frankissstein, by Jeanette Winterson

[lizardgoats]

The world is at the start of something new. We are the shaping spirits of our destiny. And though I am not an inventor of machines I am the inventor of dreams.

Frankissstein, by Jeanette Winterson

[lizardgoats]

In dreams, nothing is lost. Childhood homes, the dead, lost toys all appear with a viidness your waking mind could not achieve. Nothing is lost but you yourself, wanderer in a terrain where even the most familiar places aren't quite themselves and open onto the impossible.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, by Rebecca Solnit

[lizardgoats]

Or maybe, there's one thing to say, about the capitalism of the heart, the belief that the essences of life too can be seized and hoarded, that you can corner the market on confidence, stage a hostile takeover of happiness. It's based on scarcity economics, the notion or perhaps the feeling that there's not enough to go around, and the belief that these intangible phenomena exist in a fixed quantity to be scrambled for, rather than that you can only increase them by giving them away.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, by Rebecca Solnit

[lizardgoats]

That is what the city offered, a sharp antidote, the possibility of being fully awake, surrounded by all possibilities, some of which we'd learn the hard way were terrible.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, by Rebecca Solnit

[lizardgoats]

What they wanted to erase, we unearthed and made into our underground culture, our refuge, our identity.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, by Rebecca Solnit

[lizardgoats]

I think now that the suburbs were a kind of tranquilizer for the generation before us, if topography can be a drug. The blandness of ranch houses, the soothing lines of streets curving into cul-de-sacs, the homogenity, the repetition, the pretty, vacant names were designed to erase the desperation of poverty and strife.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, by Rebecca Solnit

[lizardgoats]

Ruin was everywhere, for cities had been abandoned by the rich, by politics, by a vision for the future. Urban ruins were the emblematic places for this era, the places that gave punk part of its aesthetic, a worldview with a mandate on how to act, how to live.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, by Rebecca Solnit

[lizardgoats]

Coming of age in the heyday of punk, it was clear we were living at the end of something—of modernism, of the American Dream, of the industrial economy, of a certain kind of urbanism. The evidence was all around us in the ruins of the cities.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, by Rebecca Solnit

[lizardgoats]

But the changes in a butterfly's life are not always so dramatic. The strange resonant word instar describes the stage between two successive molts, for as it grows, a caterpillar, like a snake...splits its skin again and again, each stage an instar. It remains a caterpillar as it grows through these molts, but no longer one in the same skin. There are rituals marking such splits, graduations, indoctrinations, ceremonies of change, though most changes proceed without such clear and encouraging recognition. Instar implies something both celestial and ingrown, something heavenly and disastrous, and perhaps change is commonly like that, a buried star, oscillating between near and far.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, by Rebecca Solnit