Places don’t stay where you left them. You go back there, anywhere, and even if it looks exactly how it did before, it’s somewhere else.
Orwell was almost exactly wrong in a strange way. He thought the world would end with Big Brother watching us, but it ended with us watching Big Brother.
Trust in the fictive process, in the occult interweaving of text and event must be unwavering and absolute. This is the magic place, the mad place at the spark gap between word and world.
Three things, then. Escape, and finding work, and then explaining himself adequately. It was just those areas he had trouble with. Everything else, he was all right about.
The things that are most popular are usually rubbish, stand up for what’s important, not popular.
Finally, faced with horrors both intolerable and unavoidable, I chose madness.
Of course you can. I’m not questioning your powers of observation. I’m merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is.
The relentless onslaught of this stupefying imagery that pounds our inner landscapes flat, a carpet-bombing of the mind. The language of the world, that overwhelms us.
Give me a platform of ideas and harmonies on which to gesture and unfurl my wings. Give me a place to stand.
The child had woken before she could ask whether this meant that pigeons were all human ghosts, forms that dead people had gone into and become, or whether they somehow existed simultaneously in Heaven, where dead people go, and up amongst the rafters of the derelict barn in the neighbour’s yard at the same time.
History, unendingly revised and reinterpreted, is seen upon examination as merely a different class of fiction; becomes hazardous if viewed as having any innate truth beyond this. Still, it is a function that we must inhabit. Lacking any territory that is not subjective, we can only live upon the map. All that remains in question is whose map we choose, whether we live within the world’s insistent texts or else replace them with a stronger language of our own.
Children starve while boots costing many thousands of dollars leave their mark upon the surface of the moon. We have labored long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.
Nothing meant anything that couldn’t be turned instantly into its opposite by any competent spin-doctor or spoon-bender. History and language had become so flexible, wrenched back and forth to suit each new agenda, that it seemed as if they might just simply snap in half and leave us floundering in a sea of mad Creationist revisions and greengrocers’ punctuation.
Do not weep. Being is enough. There, that is all. I am done...
And it’s only symbolism puts magic and meaning into anything. You of all people should know that. We can make love amongst the gods, or we can screw on a dirty mattress. It’s our choice.
It doesn’t matter how “successful” each of us is in life. We’re all doomed to die. Why can’t anyone else see that?
Professor Einstein says that time differs from place to place. Can you imagine? If time is not true, what purpose have watchmakers, hein?
Rome sees some bloke from the London School of Economics on the telly while he’s flicking through the channels. This chap makes the point that governments don’t actually do anything for us. The only thing that makes them boss is that they control all the currency. Historically, anyone proposing an alternative to cash is brutally suppressed, but then historically they haven’t got the Internet, which makes such things much easier to set up; much harder to crack down on.
That’s how far the world is from where I am. Just one bad day.
I’ve been dog rough, half blind and barking mad for years but you don’t catch me going on about it.