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.
With your depth of field and curious soul, allowing something to evolve or to see meaning in playful accidents can make the difference between creating the same old thing, or something that is unique, valuable, lasting, beautiful.
Design is based upon resolving how someone is going to use something. Great design is describing the very best experience for them, then moving towards that ideal.
Faith is for sissies who daren’t go and look for themselves.
Listening to her spooling out impractical and transcendental picture-concepts like a hyperventilating tickertape he felt the weight lift from him, floating in a sweet and putrid lager fart to dissipate beneath the starry, vast obsidian pudding bowl of closing time, inverted and set down upon the Burroughs as though keeping flies away.
Ideas of self, ideas of world and family and nation, articles of scientific or religious faith, your creeds and currencies: one by one, the beloved structures falling.
Things have their shape in time, not space alone. Some marble blocks have statues within them, embedded in their future.
Academic stress-related pre-birth suicides.
Aleister Crowley once stated that the most important grimoire, or book of magical instruction, that anyone could ever conceivably own would be an etymological dictionary, and in my opinion he was exactly right. I keep it right here by my desk, and just 10 minutes ago it confirmed for me that I had the spelling of “proprioception” right all along, even though my spell-checker had raised a crinkly red eyebrow.
Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains...