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She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.
Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.
To curl fetal there, and briefly marvel, as a final wave crashes over her, at the perfect and now perfectly revealed extent of her present loneliness.
some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.” He smiles, a version of Tom Cruise with too many teeth, and longer, but still very white. “We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.”
Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves, athletic shoes or feature films. That is why I founded Blue Ant: that one simple recognition. In that regard alone, the footage is a work of proven genius.”
It’s as though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was. Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.”
What we think of as ‘mind’ is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things.”
Brian’s been painting his balls every night with clear nail polish, says that it kills them (scabies) but I think it’s really because he’s a queen in the most massive denial and an outback masochist and he likes the way it looks.
Apophenia, Win had declared it, after due consideration and in his careful way: the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things.
August Strindberg’s
Somewhere, deep within her, surfaces a tiny clockwork submarine. There are times when you can only take the next step. And then another.
Well suck me raw with a breast-pump! Thought I was the only one out here obsessing about the peculiar beauties of this particularly spotty stretch of anomalous cinematic prairie. Anybody into cowboy poetry as well? Because, let me assure you, I’m not.
Like someone who’d learned how best to cope with chronic illness, he never allowed himself to think of his paranoia as an aspect of self. It was there, constantly and intimately, and he relied on it professionally, but he wouldn’t allow it to spread, become jungle. He cultivated it on its own special plot, and checked it daily for news it might bring: hunches, lateralisms, frank anomalies.
That had always been Win’s first line of defense, within himself: to recognize that he was only a part of something larger. Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.
She’s never actually seen soil emerge from any incision they might make in the street, here; it’s as though there is nothing beneath the pavement but a clean, uniformly dense substrate of pipes and wiring.
Pull loose and run. “And run” was invariably the footnote to any Bunny lesson.
“It’s more the way it is now than it’s ever been,” Cayce replies, a line of Dwight David Eisenhower’s that she sometimes resorts to when she has nothing whatever to offer.
“But, Hubertus,” Cayce offers, “what if Dorotea is . . .” “Yes?” He leans forward, palms flat on the table. “A vicious lying cunt?”
“But didn’t you say that it had all worked out,” Cayce asks, “in the meantime?” “Yes,” says Ngemi, with quiet pride, “but now I am negotiating to buy Stephen King’s Wang.” Cayce stares at him. “The provenance,” Ngemi assures her, “is immaculate, the price high, but, I believe, reasonable. A huge thing, one of the early dedicated word processors. Shipping alone will require the funds I had earmarked for the scaffolding, and more.”
The closest she can come is that it’s somewhat akin, for her, if only in its enormity, to how the British seem to feel about certain American attitudes to firearms ownership—which they generally find unthinkable, and bafflingly, self-evidently wrong, and so often leading to a terrible and profligate waste of human life. And she knows what they mean, but also knows how deeply it runs, the gun thing, and how unlikely it is to change. Except, perhaps, gradually, and over a very long time. Class in England is like that, for her.
“It’s not a Starbucks. I’m not sure they even have Starbucks.” “They will.” “Parkaboy?” It feels strange, to say his name. His handle, really. Suddenly it feels stranger still to remember that she doesn’t know his name. “Yes?” “I have to tell you something.” A pause, on his end. “You’re carrying our child.”
Parkaboy would get it. But who else would? Not, she’s now certain, Boone. Bigend, probably, but in that way of his, in which he seems to somehow understand emotions without ever having partaken of them.
“Because he pretends to be better at what he does than he is. I prefer people who are better at what they do than they think they are.”
