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I reflected that without language, or before language, the mind cannot comfort itself. And yet it is the language of our thoughts that tortures us more than any excess or deprivation of nature.
London is perpetual; a constant streaming present hurrying towards a receding future.
What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
Byron is a poet but he likes to be clean.
We are haunted by ourselves, he says, and that is enough for any man.
Where is consciousness in the womb?
I loved him for bringing her back to me. He was neither ghoulish nor sentimental. Last resting place. He is my resting place.
The deadness of the dead, said Polidori, is not what we fear. Rather we fear that they are not dead when we lay them in that last chamber. That they awake to darkness, and suffocation, and so die in agony. I have seen such agony in the faces of some new-buried and brought in for dissection.
She’s right. I am liminal, cusping, in between, emerging, undecided, transitional, experimental, a start-up (or is it an upstart?) in my own life.
This is fantasy, not nature, so you can have what you want.
All the girls have an extra-wide splayed-leg position. It’s popular with our clients, especially the fat ones.
I have thought about doing a supermodel size, but it’s not practical. The only point of a supermodel in real life is to show her off to your mates – I mean, she’s too anorexic for anything else.
Deluxe has a big vocabulary. About 200 words. Deluxe will listen to what you want to talk about – football, politics or whatever. She waits till you’re finished, of course, no interrupting, even if you waffle a bit, and then she’ll say something interesting.
Basically a boy-bot is a vibrator with a body attached. He’s like a shop-window mannequin with a dick that doesn’t work. No thrust.
I believe it is each man’s task to awaken his own soul. His soul is that part of him not subject to death and decay; that part of him made alive to truth and beauty. If he has no soul he is a brute.
The great wealth of the manufactories is not for the workers but for the owners. Humans must live in misery to be the mind of the machines.
Yet, if automata had intelligence … would that be sufficient to call it alive?
Yet he suffers. Suffering, I do believe, is something of the mark of the soul.
WHAT IS SO SMART ABOUT THE END OF THE HUMAN?
If you believe, as I do, that religious texts – like myths – are texts we create to mirror the deeper structures of the human psyche, then yes, naming is still our primary task. Poets and philosophers know this – perhaps science has confused naming with taxonomy.
Naming is power.
Is manhood dickhood? I ask Ron.
I am what I am, but what I am is not one thing, not one gender. I live with doubleness.
Nationalism is on the rise, I say. He nods. That is a throwback. A fear. A refusal of the future. But the future cannot be refused.
It is easy to be controlled by someone who is controlling and charming. And, outside of my job, I dislike decisions.
I get the sense, deep down, that Victor Stein is a high-functioning madman.
I am a woman. And I am a man. That’s how it is for me. I am in the body that I prefer.
Perhaps, I said, it is women who bring knowledge into the world quite as much as men do. Eve ate the apple. Pandora opened the box. Had they not done so humankind is what? Automata. Bovine. Contented pig.
Are not these new inventions the disrupting force? I said. Is there not violence in forcing men to work for lower wages in order to compete with a machine?
Where is free will? he said. A luxury for a few, I replied. We are fortunate, said Shelley, that we can and do enjoy free will. Our life is the life of the mind. No machine can mimic a mind.
She said, Machines that mimic a mind! Oh! Suppose such a thing should happen one day! Yes! Yes! Imagine, gentlemen, how you will feel when someone invents a LOOM that writes poetry!
I glanced at Shelley, my Ariel, this free spirit, imagining himself imprisoned in a loom of words.
It’s not survival of the fittest – it’s survival of the smartest.
The One. Let’s hope there is no such thing as The One because using numbers, rather than magical thinking, your special One is probably dead. Cut off from you by time you can’t travel.
I am saying this, only this: love is not limit. Love is not this far and no further. What the future is bringing will also be the future of love.
The room had the look of a bad set from an early episode of Doctor Who.
I gave him wine. What is your story, sir? I said. That is the dilemma, he replied. I do not know if I am the teller or the tale.
Only in the living of it does life seem ordinary. In the telling of it we find ourselves strangers among the strange.
The English are serial racists – one group gets accepted, another group becomes the scapegoat.
Ryan, you just said that 55 million people die every year? Yes … We wouldn’t want them all back though, would we? Author’s note: THIS IS THE MOST PROFOUND THING RON HAS EVER SAID.
Is Donald Trump getting his brain frozen? asks Ron. Max explains that the brain has to be fully functioning at clinical death.
Cry at night for what you can’t understand in yourself or others. Cry at night. Don’t you? The tears make my knees wet as I sit with my face on
What is the point of progress if it benefits the few while the many suffer? I said this to Shelley
My life in numbers has been as wild as any life lived among words.
I discover that grief means living with someone who is no longer there.
He would enjoy that; to be read back to life. Imagine it; his poems in my pocket, and him too. I feed the punch-card into the machine and what comes out is Shelley.
