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“Give me the inland or give me the open rails,” say both the railsailor & the landlubber, “only spare me the littoral-minded.”
Fights are much taxonomised. They have been subject over centuries to a complex, exhaustive categoric imperative. Humans like nothing more than to pigeonhole the events & phenomena that punctuate their lives. Some bemoan this fact: “Why does everything have to be put into boxes?” they say. & fair enough, up to a point. But this vigorous drive to divide, subdivide & label has been rather maligned. Such conceptual shuffling is inevitable, & a reasonable defence against what would otherwise face us as thoroughgoing chaos. The germane issue is not whether, but how, to divide.
What stories d’you know about, y’know, the edge of the whole world?” Robalson blinked. “Stories?” he said. “You mean, like, Heaven? Same as you, probably. Why?” “Wouldn’t you like to know if they was true?” Sham said, with sudden fervour, an intensity that took him quite by surprise. “Not really,” said Robalson. “For a start, they ain’t, they’re just stories. For a second, if they are true, some of them you don’t want to be. What if it’s true that you should shun it? What is it they say’s there? A universe of sobbing, is it? Or, a crying treasure?” He shook his head. “It don’t have to make
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Like all Streggeye youth, Sham had been to the Museum of Completion, seen the famous flatographs of women & men standing on the mountainous carcases of philosophies: Haberstam on his beetle; ap Mograve on her mole; Ptarmeen on the sinuous mutant badger Brock the Nihil, beaming like a schoolchild with his dead nothing-symbol under his foot.
John Cleese, narration
earth churned by ferocious little mammals.
What fell from it was not even salvage, but true useless rubbish, rejectamenta beyond reclamation, hauled up out of the innards of the world.
Rejectamenta!
Don’t think about burrowers. Don’t think about seeing a bulge in that garbage wall, as you walk hunched to get under the beams of the supports, past the trolleys & wagons & discarded tools; don’t think about that bulge roaring into a split into the shadows under the world & onto a snuffling, blind, toothed face. Just look at this passage. Between layers of pressure-hardened earth & shaley rock, an archaeology of discards, centuries layered. Extruded edges of junk, shards, glass, bits & pieces, faint stretching fronds of ripped-up plastic bags.
So J.G. Ballard, so amazing
gallimaufryan coagulum of mixed-up oddness.
Have fun and eat copious quantities
Maybe you don’t have to cast about to find out what it is you want instead. It’s enough, maybe, to know you don’t want what you thought you did. That’s enough to be getting on with.
What if ridiculous questions are an indispensable philosophical tool?
a sandwich, sung.
In North Pittman is a particularly striking theology. There, one church memorably teaches that if all the trains were to be still, together, for one moment, if there were no wheels percussing the iron road, all human life would wink instantly out.
The 9 billion names of god
is the rails that dream us. We do not dream the rails.
Technically, our name, to those who speak science, is Homo sapiens—wise person. But we have been described in many other ways. Homo narrans, juridicus, ludens, diaspora: we are storytelling, legal, game-playing, scattered people, too. True but incomplete. That old phrase has the secret. We are all, have always been, will always be, Homo vorago aperientis: person before whom opens a vast & awesome hole.
