cycads and ferns > Recent Status Updates

…Babbage and his Analytical Engine with its punched cards Babbage the grandfather of the modern computer…but he got his idea from Jacquard's loom so that's all you ever hear…Jacquard's loom....the frenzy of invention and mechanization and democracy and how to have art without the artist and automation, cybernetics you can see....

"Twas not too many years before the War, - what we were doing out in that Country together was brave, scientifick beyond my understanding...we were putting a line straight through the heart of the Wilderness...in order to separate two Proprietorships, granted when the World was yet feudal and but eight years later to be nullified by the War for Independence."

To go from the beginning and not enter till the end. To go today now and not enter into today forever….you remain in your place like a cornered convict and wherever you move the center moves with you…. Red summer bombyx remaining in the cocoon you made of yourself you stay in yourself you die in yourself winter spring and autumn one after another.

"You never liked me"
Picking up his clothes like the immigrants from Timor picking up debris left by the tide, his shirt like a crumpled newspaper, his trousers like a frazzled basket...the Minister walking slowly behind his navel like someone behind a baby carriage…strangling himself in his shirt collar as if resigned to suicide
"The woman you remind me of never loved me either"

And what do I do? I stumble to my desk and try....when I write about myself, is it truly the truth I want? What do I want? to find out who I am? What is the good of that? I want to feel a little less uneasy.
We drag our acts behind us like a string of monsters.

…she was aware only of an emerging sense of agonizing bitterness: for while she felt it was deeply unfair that she should be cast as an innocent victim…she was forced to concede that this was of little consequence: there was no authority to which she could appeal…and she could hardly hope that the forces of anarchy having once been loosed could afterwards be restrained.

How could I communicate to the Detective that the poem's task is not to communicate but quite the opposite: to protect the secret place that resists all communication, all transmission, every effort of translation…. that the tongue will never be an organ of resurrection, that words, as Pizarnik says…in a declaration no less gloomy for its accuracy,
"do not make love / they make absence"?

Billy Pilgrim, there in the creekbed, thought he, Billy Pilgrim, was turning to steam painlessly. If everybody would leave him alone for just a little while,he thought, he wouldn't cause anybody any more trouble. He would turn to steam and float up among the treetops.

When I open the curtains in the morning, I sometimes see the caravels anchored in the sea right outside our apartment….
"Look at the caravels, Mom"
…"What caravels, Romeu?"
without believing me…looking…I pointing at the beach on the right, where a canopy was being raised to protect the king from the sun….
"Take this medicine for me, Romeu"
…a medicine to keep others from taking advantage of you….

Dust thou art....And to dust thou shalt return....
"Since coming here l've found myself concentrating on small things, then smaller. My mind is unwinding, unspooling. I think of details buried for years....It's a sense of closing down, coming to an end."

“Science is possible only where situations repeat….A cube would not be a cube if it were not just as rectangular at nine o'clock as at seven….the reason God is such an embarrassment to science is that he was seen only once, at the Creation….”

Though I trip myself up, what skins when I fall? Nice….How many were engaged in that dispute? How many of me were there in those days? in the streets of my youth? in the slow soft life....When young I multiplied (x]. Now I divide [÷]. I am a two [2], a twelve [12], a twenty [201, hung beneath that skimpy horizontal rod I-] with its skinny upright line [I], and there I sway like a rack of out-of-season clothes.

"There was light and now there is darkness. I was here and now I'm going...Where?" A chill came over him, his breathing ceased, and he felt only the throbbing of his heart.
"When I am not, what will there be? There will be nothing. Then where shall I be when I am no more? Can this be dying?"

We aren't people after all, we are art products, the piano player is an art product, a disgusting one, he said in conclusion... Basically we want to be the piano, he said, not human beings....Sometimes we get close to this ideal, he said, very close.... All his life Glenn had wanted to be the Steinway itself....

A 100 years of Mrs Dalloway.

“For she was a child…at the same time a grown woman…holding her life in her arms which…grew larger and larger…until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down…and said, "This is what I have made of it it! This!" And what had she made of it?:

...she wore at times a smile he tried to remember...her lovely face would soon exist nowhere save in his memories...after that nowhere at all.She came...trailing sarsenet…push back the cowl of her robe and her blonde hair would fall about her face as she bent to him where he lay in the damp and clammy sheets and whisper to him l'd have been your shadowlane,the keeper of that house alone wherein your soul is safe.

So I wonder why I've lived so much of my life in a chair…because loneliness is unendurable elsewhere…that loneliness may be shaped the way the first dumb lump of clay was slapped to speech in the divine grip. We were late among the living…by the time God got to us…Haven't I always maintained that our several ribs were the incriminating print of a bedeviled and embittered fist?

When she spoke of beauty, he spoke of the fatty tissue supporting the epidermis…she mentioned love, he responded with…the automatic rise and fall in the annual birthrate…Somehow it always began with Diotima talking as if on the sixth day of Creation God had placed man as a pearl in the shell of the world, whereupon Ulrich reminded her that mankind was a tiny pile of dots on the outermost crust of a dwarf globe.

…I cry the way the pine trees cry into resin pots,without anyone ever noticing,it takes years to fill a pot,and the tears are never seen, when I was little I spent day after day among the pine needles in the forest…the liquid didn't increase by a whit,there was the same bit of sticky goo at the bottom…if only you understood…I'm like the pine trees,that it's not for lack of love that I don't say anything…

"I do everything a woman wants except take my hat off, so that she won't forget who's boss.”
….building a boat so that I could depart one day instead of ending up like my father in the stable, facedown in a pool of urine and feces and vainly groping on all fours for the exit
"Shoot"

I see you looking for tracks in the carpet but if we can be here at all we can leave tracks. Or not. The real issue is that every line is a broken line. You retrace your steps and nothing is familiar. So you turn around to come back only now you've got the same problem going the other way. Every worldline is discrete and the caesura ford a void that is bottomless. Every step traverses death.

"Came out of nowhere. Anders."
“Anders."
"The first name of Mr. Celsius."
"Anders," he said.
"Anders Celsius."
She found this satisfying. Came out of nowhere. There is almost nothing left of nowhere. When a missing fact emerges without digital assistance, each person announces it to the other while looking off into a remote distance, the otherworld of what was known and lost.

There were wads of time during weeks we looked out sealed windows at the cold, burdening girth of the world. Around the house she dressed only in towels or, just that once, an impromptu slit pillowcase.
The other thing was that our life ran away with us in ways that withered only her.
I never lifted a finger.

If I told my literary friends what I had done, would they approve? Would some condemn my actions out of hand? Would some understand and forgive me? Is it always possible for a man to know what is good and what is bad? In the midst of these deliberations, I broke down and began to cry helplessly….

Walter continued in a low voice: "You're right when you say there's nothing serious, rational, or even intelligible left; but why can't you see that it is precisely this growing rationality, infecting everything like a disease, that is to blame? Everyone's brain is seized with this craving to become more and more rational, to rationalize and compartmentalize life more than ever…It can't go on like this.”

I am not saying I have lost hope. It just doesn't come by so often any more. It has moved away. It was quite undramatic, it did not slam the door behind it, it is more as if, like an animal, it has found new hunting grounds, like a cat that has moved next door or a plant that has scattered its seeds where they are more likely to grow.

He had barricaded himself in his house. For life. All our lives the three of us have shared the desire to barricade ourselves from the world. All three of us were born barricade fanatics. But Glenn had carried his barricade fanaticism furthest.

We knew the price of Christine's criminally low price…Child care was like everything else.You got what you paid for,and your child paid for what you could not pay for…Christine's corrections wagon idled at the curb.I walked Bernie out…Christine…fired up a DVD…What played now appeared to be that movie about the crucifixion…
"Do you think the kids are ready for this?"I said.
"Was He ready?"said Christine…

One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes, one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one’s silences. I am responsible in every way. My silences are immaculate. Let me make that clear. Clear to God above all. The rest I can forgo.

We had loved each other, yes, if only over and around other people, and we had married each other, even if only in a neighborly sort of way. But divorcing was something only one of us could do to the other.
It was her hands, finally, that were inseparable.
I could never get them to let go of each other and seek any hold on me.