More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
August 25, 2018 - April 29, 2021
Sex neither as habit nor suggestion but simply sex by itself, unplanned and chaotic and concomitant with nothing, beyond all hope of conspiracy, previously indistinguishable and now seen in infinity. Sex as practiced. Sex as it was. At the time, an inconceivable proposition.
But gentle blind man doth not will not shalt not knowing [it was written after that, the lines indented to set them apart from the previous text, the words formed in a particularly proud and elegant script], saith imbecile of imbeciles adding few some several own thoughts first Abraham last Jesus last Isaiah first Mohammed thought of thoughts adding over years of years saith wanting hoping hope of hopes here Matthew Mark Luke John sharing work here Prophet love of loves here Lord never adding much Gabriel doth not will not shalt not adding much adding Utile Ruth little Mary little Fatima here
...more
The monks in the refectory were stupefied. When his shocked superior warned in a quavering voice that merely suggesting such blasphemy constituted a fatal nakedness before God, the former Brother Anthony at once removed not only his cassock but his loincloth, exposing even his genitals, and left the room without an explanation of any kind. Behind him his weeping former brothers stayed on their knees for hours praying beside their bowls of gruel.
capricious,
gamboling
There is nothing a young child values as highly as his own feces, for the simple reason that it is the only product he can produce at such an early age. Therefore builders of empires and others with a concern for money are the perennial children of every era, at flay with their feces, and in yet another guise we find men contriving to clothe their formidable sexual chaos in respectability. For it is axiomatic in the West that it is improper to spend one’s life playing with shit, whereas a thoughtful accumulation of lucre is seen commendable and even noble.
What are these enthusiasts actually up to? Could it be they fear the slippery and slithering and wholly unmarchable rhythms of true sexuality? Is that why they organize themselves into a counter-orgy of numbing rituals and dreary Sunday afternoon concerts? Because they are reduced to expressing pride in the only sensual act of which they are capable? Taking a shit?
aberrant
Yet that part of Strongbow’s work was completely ignored. The beautiful passages devoted to the gentle Persian girl were passed over in their entirety as if they didn’t exist, of no interest at all to his Victorian audience when compared to such possibilities as a Damascus dungeon where Moroccan mercenaries could be hired to administer secret canings for life.
And lastly a political philosopher with heavy unmovable bowels finds the past turgid and ponderous, the future necessarily destined to experience explosive upheavals from the lower regions or classes.
It’s true that life is crumpled and mindless and covered with hairs. But for
the few years we have its good memories we also have to admit it remains as pleasantly soft to the touch as an old well-used wineskin. Or for that matter, as an old man’s well-used balls.
On Easter Monday in 1916 the rising came as predicted and the Irish revolutionaries managed to hold the Dublin post office for several days. One of the few to escape from the post office was young Joe, who then walked two hundred miles south to the mountains of County Cork, thereby reversing the route of his famous ancestor.
In a few seconds it was over and the once powerful body of Catherine Wallenstein lay dead, not struck down by some primitive paroxysm of rage as it appeared, rather felled by the terminal onslaught of a massive and incurable disorder that had been ravaging him for years with a fever resembling paratyphoid, noncommunicable among humans, a condition visited upon him during the onset of puberty when he had first contracted a rare and largely extinct mountain strain of Albanian hoof and mouth disease.
People cut off love for all kinds of reasons but generally it has to do with them, not with somebody else.
She understood now why he had never made love to her, why he had probably never made love to anyone, why the sexual encounters in his life could never have been more than that.
A real writer puts his heart and soul and all his intelligence on the page. Any book can be the last one. Every one of the writers words, every small motive, counts. The editor must attend as though nothing else matters.
Cairo Martyr laughed and cut the pack once. O’Sullivan Beare smiled despite himself and cut the pack a second time. Munk Szondi put aside his bow and arrows and the first cards of their twelve-year game went down on the boards in the Old City, in a smoky Arab coffee shop, where it all began.
For Szondi invariably knew that Persian dinars were due to weaken in the next few days in relation to dried fish, and that a handsome profit would be his if he discounted the Maria Theresa crowns in Damascus, doubled the value of his fish futures by buying dinars on the margin in Beirut, sold a quarter and a third of each in Baghdad as a hedge against customs interference on the Persian border, and then saw to it that his courier with the fish futures arrived in Isfahan on Friday, a market day, when the fish futures would be most in demand.
Since the Mamelukes were pederasts, they couldn’t reproduce. When they were the rulers of Egypt they had purchased boys in southern Russia and fattened them to be their successors, but with that source no longer open to them they were dying out as a Moslem warrior caste. Those who survived were aging bloated men, elderly asthmatics tormented by malignant rectal tumors and virulent skin diseases, which flourished particularly in their groins and armpits.
Yes. Despite the ultimate mystery of the universe there’s still one small truth we can live by. Choice. Never merely to take what we are given or inherit, but to choose. It may not seem like much but it’s the difference between meanings and memories that disappear in the sand, and something that doesn’t. Choice is the arrow. For then, at least, we play a part in making ourselves.
The first task was to come to her castle on the next full moon and deflower eighty virgins from her court, in one night, without ejaculating.
And then the next morning the princess presented me with my second task. I was to spend one full month standing naked in her court with a full erection, and the ladies of the court were to come and go as they pleased in any state of undress, fondling me as they might as frequently as they might, while I was neither to ejaculate nor go limp in all that time.
In the princess’s court, it seemed, was a very large woman who was round and thick in every part, with a measureless treasure and an inexhaustible appetite to have it filled.
And my third and last task was to do this woman’s business unrelentingly for forty days and nights and thereby bring off success.
It was the fact that as a result of those sexual experiences, I was incoherent for the next hundred years. I was totally preoccupied with visions of sex, which severely limited my vocabulary. When I opened my mouth the only words that came out were things like cunt and lick and fuck and suck.
Paracelsus
Prodigiously learned, vitriolic in debate and psychotically self-confident, believer in the four Greek elements of earth and air and fire and water, and the three Arab principles, mercury and salt and sulphur.
the result is that a Hungarian Jew is converted to Zionism in the Sinai by an aristocratic landowner from northern Japan who was raised as a Buddhist in matters of death, and as a Shintoist in matters of birth.
The Japanese are a unique people who arrived in their islands more or less as an entity, with a culture of their own, just before and after the time of Christ.
I am damned forever, she said simply. And then all at once she was a small naked woman huddled on his narrow iron cot, cowering and terrified and whispering naked words, terrible naked words.
So here beneath the rooftop home where Joe had learned to dream his Jerusalem dreams, right here in a basement hole below, lay buried the original manuscript Wallenstein had brought back from the Sinai after completing his forgery of it, that fabulous creation that had been sought by so many, a document that was unchronicled and circular and calmly contradictory, suggesting infinity, the real Sinai Bible.
An explosion. A vast explosion of continuing duration as long as he’s inside her. That change of direction, you see, simply strikes everywhere. Apparently it feels as if something about the size of a baby’s head is in there, humming and singing and shouting for joy.
And especially in view of the view from down here on the shores of what has been referred to, in an important piece of literature, as the dried cunt of the world.
♂,
No wonder Dead Sea Control had seen fit to evaluate him as POTENTIAL URINE.
From the top of the safe, he said, I see that the man holding the watch with three levels is the winner.
Peace is the treasure, peace to seek, Melchizedek’s gentle dream on the mountain.
Living alone is easier by far in this world, or even living with someone but keeping yourself alone all the same. There aren’t any risks then, but you’re always the poorer for it. The riches are in the risks and that’s the truth, you’ll find them nowhere else.
Love, the forgiving hand to victory.
ankh.
But now that I know better, I can see what a truly brilliant innovation it was on the part of the Indians to connect hum-jobs with the civilizing impulse…. Fakirs indeed. Fiendish really…. The stranger tossed his head and snorted, a kind of depraved mysticism creeping across his face. But admit it, he suddenly roared in excitement. Didn’t you always think Om was the important sound out of India?
That the Indian sages, in their wisdom, may long ago have discovered this astounding way to sound the bells of the soul and the flesh simultaneously? That the soul and the body, therefore, contrary to Western thought, are not only on secret speaking terms with one another, but are actually one and the same thing beneath it all?
On the mesa in Arizona there had been an old woman with a badly deformed face, born that way, so severely deformed she had been hidden away since she was a baby. Throughout her entire life she had never been known to leave the little room where she had come into the world. Many nights Joe had sat up with her in her little room, listening to her sing in the most beautiful voice he had ever heard, a startling voice filled with wonder for all the things she had never seen or known. She sang for hours and when she ended they would sit together in silence for a time, then the old woman would turn
...more
Have you ever been in a crowd when it’s transforming itself into a mob? There’s a Genghis Khan on every side of you. Give any one of them a horde of men on horseback and you’d see the thirteenth century in flames again.
People are comfortable with the way things were done yesterday, but uneasy about whatever may be done tomorrow. Which is why vision never pays off, and why poetry never brings in any money. If you want to make money, the best thing to do is to repeat after others.
Because in his heart, every true Levantine knows that if the rest of the world is half as devious as he is, then the rest of the world bears very careful watching. In other words, we have much in common with the great leaders of the world, both those of the West and of the East. Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan…. Ahmad sank out of sight, chuckling as he descended.
What do we get from the art that obsesses us? he shouted. I firmly believe, he shouted again, that most abstractions are simply our pseudonyms, and that we are therefore time. For surely it is in our fancy, not in reality, that the basis of our lives is to be found …
Quite simply, I’m a poet who can’t write poetry. I was given the soul and sensitivity for it, but not the talent. So when all’s said and done my profession remains that solitary one known through the ages as the failed poet. And there must be many people like me who live alone in their little corners, knowing they’ve never been anything but ordinary, and it’s not that we can’t contribute to the world in some minor way, for of course we can. The sadness comes from the fact that we can’t contribute as we’d like to and create even one little moment of beauty that might live on in someone’s
...more
In other words, heaven save us from people who dream, especially failed artists, the worst of the lot. All tyrants seem to be failed artists of one kind or another…. But then, so are most of us in our souls.
