Alan > Alan's Quotes

“With the industrial proliferation of visual and audiovisual prostheses and unrestrained use of instantaneous-transmission equipment from earliest childhood onwards, we now routinely see the encoding of increasingly elaborate mental images together with a steady decline in retention rates and recall. In other words we are looking at the rapid collapse of mnemonic consolidation. This collapse seems only natural, if one remembers a contrario that seeing, and its spatio-temporal organization, precede gesture and speech and their coordination in knowing, recognizing, making known (as images of our thoughts), our thoughts themselves and cognitive functions, which are never ever passive.”
― Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine

“A First Sign of the Beginning of Understanding is the Wish to Die.”
― Franz Kafka

“Great art is horseshit, buy tacos.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Art altogether is nothing but a survival skill, we should never lose sight of this fact, it is, time and again, just an attempt -- an attempt that seems touching even to our intellect -- to cope with this world and its revolting aspects, which, as we know, is invariably possible only by resorting to lies and falsehoods, to hyprocrisy and self-deception, Reger said. These pictures are full of lies and falsehoods and full of hypocrisy and self-deception, there is nothing else in them if we disregard their often inspired artistry. All these pictures, moreover, are an expression of man's absolute helplessness in coping with himself and with what surrounds him all his life. That is what all these pictures express, this helplessness which, on the one hand, embarasses the intellect and, on the other hand, bewilders the same intellect and moves it to tears, Reger said.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters: A Comedy

“Everyone, he went on, speaks a language he does not understand, but which now and then is understood by others. That is enough to permit one to exist and at least to be misunderstood.”
― Thomas Bernhard, Gargoyles

“I write for the unborn.”
― Hortense Caruthers

“If I have a problem, it is this: there is a store where everything costs a dollar.”
― Gary Lutz

“The job required the luxurious useless indoor fortitude it has always been my fortune to enjoy.”
― Gary Lutz

“There is a moon shaped rictus in the streetlamp's globe where a stone has gone and from this aperture there drifts down through the constant helix of aspiring insects a faint and steady rain of the same forms burnt and lifeless.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Suttree

“You have got to goad yourself toward a becoming that is in accordance with what you are innate. You have got to sometimes become the medicine you want to take.”
― Ariana Reines, The Cow

“It is not easy to be honest because it is impossible to be complete.”
― Ariana Reines

“The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.”
― Georges Bataille

“Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.”
― Theodor W. Adorno

“All writing is rubbish.
People who try to free themselves from what is vague in order to state precisely whatever is going on in their minds are producing rubbish.
The whole literary tribe is a pack of rubbish mongers, especially today.
All those who have landmarks in their minds, I mean in a certain part of their heads, in well-defined sites in their skulls, all those who are masters of language, all those for whom words have meaning, all those for whom the soul has its heights and thought its currents, those who are the spirits of the times, and who have given names to these currents of thought—I am thinking of their specific tasks, and of that mechanical creaking their minds produce at every gust of wind—are rubbish mongers.”
― Antonin Artaud

“In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.”
― Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

“It is the very reason-for-being of language and grammar that I
unhinge.”
― Antonin Artaud

“The aim of literature ... is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.”
― Donald Barthelme, Come Back, Dr. Caligari

“This endured absence is nothing more or less than forgetfulness. I am, intermittently, unfaithful. This is the condition of my survival.”
― Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

“The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility.”
― Georges Bataille

“Poetic Terrorism
WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. ...
Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc.
Go naked for a sign.
Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty.
Graffiti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public monuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, Xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement...
The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive breakthrough, dada-esque angst--no matter whether the PT is aimed at one person or many, no matter whether it is "signed" or anonymous, if it does not change someone's life (aside from the artist) it fails.
PT is an act in a Theater of Cruelty which has no stage, no rows of seats, no tickets & no walls. In order to work at all, PT must categorically be divorced from all conventional structures for art consumption (galleries, publications, media). Even the guerilla Situationist tactics of street theater are perhaps too well known & expected now.
An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life--may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE.
Don't do PT for other artists, do it for people who will not realize (at least for a few moments) that what you have done is art. Avoid recognizable art-categories, avoid politics, don't stick around to argue, don't be sentimental; be ruthless, take risks, vandalize only what must be defaced, do something children will remember all their lives--but don't be spontaneous unless the PT Muse has possessed you.
Dress up. Leave a false name. Be legendary. The best PT is against the law, but don't get caught. Art as crime; crime as art.”
― Hakim Bey, TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone

“If rulers refuse to consider poems as crimes, then someone must commit crimes that serve the function of poetry, or texts that possess the resonance of terrorism. ”
― Hakim Bey, TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone

“I often thought men stank of rage; it is why I preferred women, and homosexuals.”
― Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

“God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle—or instruction.”
― Harold Brodkey, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death

“Prison is like high school with knives.”
― Raegan Butcher

“Id Faciam

What I hate I love. Ask the crucified hand that holds
the nail that now is driven into itself, why.”
― Catullus

“But when you are week the best way to fortify yourself is to strip the people you fear of the last bit of prestige you’re still inclined to give them. Learn to consider them they are, worse than they are in fact and from every point of view. That will release you, set you free, protect you more than you can possibly imagine. It will give you another self. There will be two of you.
That will strip their words and deeds of the obscene mystical fascination that weakens you and makes you waste your time. From then on you’ll find their act no more amusing, no more relevant to your inner progress than that of the lowliest pig.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“Pleased at having proclaimed these useful truths, we sat looking at the ladies in the café.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“They came from the four corners of the earth, driven by hunger, plague, tumors, and the cold, and stopped here. They couldn’t go any futrther because of the ocean. That’s France, that’s the French people.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“Love is the infinite placed within the reach of poodles. I have my dignity!”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night

“In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavor, it’s indispensable.”
― Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night