infinite
October 2011
“To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name, and then to know it with your eyes closed so that when something is gone, it can be recognized by the shape of its absence. So that you can continue to possess the lost, because absence is the only constant thing. Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been.”
—Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room
“All your educational systems and all your cultural beliefs, force you to be ambitious, to be somebody. But to be somebody means creating anxieties in a silent pool, ripples and waves. The greater the ambition, the more tidal is the wave of anxiety. You can become almost insane desiring. Trying to be somebody, you are trying the impossible, because basically you are nobody. Zen has an absolutely unique perception into the nothingness of everyone. It does not teach you any ambition, it does not teach you to be someone else. It simply wants you to know that in the deepest part of your being you are still nothing, you are still carrying the original purity which is not even contaminated by an idea of “I.”
—Osho
“I am not a machine. For what can a machine know of the smell of wet grass in the morning, or the sound of a crying baby? I am the feeling of the warm sun against my skin; I am the sensation of a cool wave breaking over me. I am the places I have never seen, yet imagine when my eyes are closed. I am the taste of another’s breath, the color of her hair. You mock me for the shortness of my lifespan, but it is this very fear of dying that breathes life into me. I am the thinker who thinks of thoughts. I am curiosity, I am reason, I am love, and I am hatred. I am indifference. I am the son of a father, who in turn was a father’s son. I am the reason my mother laughed and the reason my mother cried. I am wonder and I am wondrous. Yes, the world may push your buttons as it passes through your circuitry. But the world does not pass through me. It lingers. I am in it and it is me. I am the means by which the universe has come to know itself. I am the thing no machine can ever make. I am meaning.”
—Bernard Beckett
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wicked game // james vincent mcmorrow [chris isaak cover]
James Vincent McMorrow
wicked game // james vincent mcmorrow [chris isaak cover]
Exile →
hewn.tumblr.com
Mathematicians still don’t understand
the ball our hands made, or how
your electrocuted grandparents made it possible
for you to light my cigarettes with your eyes.
It isn’t as simple as me climbing into the window
to leave six ounces of orange juice
and a doughnut by the bed, or me becoming
the sand you dug your toes in,
on the beach, when you wished
to hide them from the sun and the fixed eyes
of strangers, and your breath broke in waves
over my earlobe, splashing through my head, spilling out
over the opposite lobe, and my first poems
under your door in the unshaven light of dawn:
Your eyes remind me of a brick wall
about to be hammered by a drunk
driver. I’m that driver. All night
I’ve swallowed you in the bar.
Once I kissed the scar, stretching its sealed
eyelid along your inner arm, dried
raining strands of hair, full of pheromones, discovered
all your idiosyncratic passageways, so I’d know
where to run when the cops came.
Your body is the country I’ll never return to.
The man in charge of what crosses my mind
will lose fingernails, for not turning you
away at the border. But at this moment
when sweat tingles from me, and
blame is as meaningless as shooting up a cow with milk,
I realise my kisses filled the halls of your body
with smoke, and the lies came
like a season. Most drunks don’t die in accidents
they orchestrate, and I swallowed
a hand grenade that never stops exploding.
- Jeffrey McDaniel
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“ 820 (1885)
In the main, I agree more with the artists than with any philosopher hitherto: they have not lost the scent of life, they have loved the things of “this world”—they have loved their senses. To strive for “desensualization”: that seems to me a misunderstanding or an illness or a cure, where it is not merely hypocrisy or self-deception. I desire for myself and for all who live, may live, without being tormented by a puritanical conscience, an ever-greater spiritualization and multiplication of the senses; indeed, we should be grateful to the senses for their subtlety, plenitude, and power and offer them in return the best we have in the way of the spirit. What are priestly and metaphysical calumnies against the senses to us! We no longer need these calumnies: it is a sign that one has turned out well when, like Goethe, one clings with ever-greater pleasure and warmth to the “things of this world”:—for in this way he holds firmly to the great conception of man, that man becomes the transfigurer of existence when he learns to transfigure himself.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power.
In the main, I agree more with the artists than with any philosopher hitherto: they have not lost the scent of life, they have loved the things of “this world”—they have loved their senses. To strive for “desensualization”: that seems to me a misunderstanding or an illness or a cure, where it is not merely hypocrisy or self-deception. I desire for myself and for all who live, may live, without being tormented by a puritanical conscience, an ever-greater spiritualization and multiplication of the senses; indeed, we should be grateful to the senses for their subtlety, plenitude, and power and offer them in return the best we have in the way of the spirit. What are priestly and metaphysical calumnies against the senses to us! We no longer need these calumnies: it is a sign that one has turned out well when, like Goethe, one clings with ever-greater pleasure and warmth to the “things of this world”:—for in this way he holds firmly to the great conception of man, that man becomes the transfigurer of existence when he learns to transfigure himself.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power.
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