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In 1947, on Capitulation Day,
Here came the hexagram, brought forth by the passive chance workings of the vegetable stalks. Random, and yet rooted in the moment in which he lived, in which his life was bound up with all other lives and particles in the universe. The necessary hexagram picturing in its pattern of broken and unbroken lines the situation.
He had been able to procure, miraculously, an almost mint copy of Volume One, Number One of Tip Top Comics. Dating from the ’thirties, it was a choice piece of Americana;
they had barely managed to win the war, and at once they had gone off to conquer the solar system,
those great glossy magazines printed in Munich and circulated around to all the libraries and newsstands
the flights to Mars had distracted world attention from the difficulty in Africa.
Didn’t Diesel throw himself out the window of his stateroom? Commit suicide by drowning himself on an ocean voyage?
I know you East Americans, she thought. You like the big time. Dreaming your big schemes.
all the smart boys have flocked east to New York, crossed the border legally or illegally. Because, she thought, that’s where the money is, the big industrial money.
It’s idealism that makes him that bitter.
the frontier isn’t here; it’s the other planets.
he should have that cold but somehow enthusiastic look, as if he believed in nothing and yet somehow had absolute faith.
senile paresis. Syphilis of the brain, dating back to his poor days as a bum in Vienna . . . long black coat, dirty underwear, flophouses.
the Nazis themselves had diagnosed it, identified it; that quack herbal medicine man who had treated Hitler, that Dr. Morell who had dosed Hitler with a patent medicine called Dr. Koester’s Antigas Pills—he had originally been a specialist in venereal disease.
What you get for incest: madness, blindness, death.
I like a picture to mean something, not merely to represent the ideal.”
that’s the task of art,” Lotze said. “To advance the spirituality of man, over the sensual. Your abstract art represented a period of spiritual decadence, of spiritual chaos, due to the disintegration of society, the old plutocracy. The Jewish and capitalist millionaires, the international set that supported the decadent art. Those times are over; art has to go on—it can’t stay still.”
A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this?
Their view; it is cosmic. Not of a man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honorable men but of Ehre itself, honor; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Güte, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again.
They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history.
Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.
Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small . . . and you will escape the jealousy of the great.
“Harusame ni nuretsutsu yane no temari kana . . .”
“As the spring rains fall, soaking in them, on the roof, is a child’s rag ball.”
“I know what else they sell,” he said finally. “And so do you.” “Yes,” McCarthy said.
W-M Corporation turned out a constant flow of forgeries of pre-war American artifacts. These forgeries were cautiously but expertly fed into the wholesale art object market, to join the genuine objects collected throughout the continent. As in the stamp and coin business, no one could possibly estimate the percentage of forgeries in circulation. And no one—especially the dealers and the collectors themselves—wanted to.
A Gresham’s Law: the fakes would undermine the value of the real.
I can’t get faith or enthusiasm by willing it. Deciding to.
schlimazl’s
You can’t have good fortune and doom simultaneously. Or . . . can you?
synchronicity theory,
meshuggener.
Is it possible, sir, that you, the owner, dealer, in such items, cannot distinguish the forgeries from the real?
He was sent by United States Historic Objects to destroy me. Or by West Coast Art Exclusives.
Ray Calvin Associates, on Van Ness.
“According to our reference room, sir,” she said in a giggling voice, “the carrier Syokaku is at the bottom of the Philippine Sea. It was sunk by an American submarine in 1945.
Probably no Admiral Harusha.
“What is ‘historicity’?” “When a thing has history in it.
The paper proves its worth, not the object itself!”
the word “fake” meant nothing really, since the word “authentic” meant nothing really.
The past makes people sad,
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.
Hawthorne Abendsen.”
“I don’t have time to read popular fiction.
Roosevelt isn’t assassinated in Miami; he goes on and is reelected in 1936, so he’s President until 1940, until during the war.
Albert Speer.
we’ve got five outfits competing in each field, and at terrific waste.
“‘God speaks to man in the sign of the Arousing.’”
Fleece-seeking cortical response.”
I understand they murder the old.”
