David > Recent Status Updates

"How Copenhagen ended. This way the museyroom. Mind your boots goan out.
Phew!"
- Say ... this is Joyce critiquing the Copenhagen interpretation developed by Bohr & Heisenberg! then "museyroom" is a thought experiment, and "mind your boots" is an admonition against the unknowns of atomic latticing ... "Phew!" the relief we have not fallen through the floor

"The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns connection."

"True art can issue only from a purely anonymous source."

"Death (I implore you to believe this!) is the true Yes-sayer. It says only Yes. In the presence of eternity."

"True singing is a different breath, about / nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind."
- The Sonnets to Orpheus, III

"Language keeps watch over the difference that keeps watch over language." (12)
Language is a system of different sounds. Difference ensures that words have distinct meanings. Derrida's performative grammar nicely captures the circularity of the project of meaning-making

"Man bears God's guilt, and it would only be fair if someday God were to decide to bear our guilt. It is unclear how He, being both holy and a stranger to guilt, would manage that. But in my opinion He would actually have to become a man to accomplish it." (803-4)

"The line between the earthly and the heavenly is fluid, and one need only let one's eyes rest upon a single phenomenon and it breaks apart into a double perspective." (733)

"Is there anything more pious than imitation of the gods?" (707)

"What lies within is reflected in the external world and, seemingly without being willed, becomes the reality of events that are bound up in the individual and were always one with him. For we wander in the footsteps of others, and all of life is a pouring of the present into mythic forms." (669)

"You will have to grow very old in order to learn that, by way of compensation, your bitterest suffering was also deception and illusion." (538)

"He was not alone down there. Someone else was sitting there, a white shimmer in the starlight." (501) -- a chilling supernatural encounter

"At any rate, the first part of the sentence hung there in suspense, like a fine thread that would never snap."

"More hummingbirds."

"I heard a little trill: a hummingbird was nesting in his bass voice."

"I suddenly saw the word racism in a new light. It literally appeared to me--at once harmless and lethal. The more harmless the more lethal."

"Was it tradition? Inertia? Perhaps they're the same."

"When a revolutionary movement meets with success, such things become proof that one was in on it from the start. It's difficult to distinguish total devotion to a cause from a quest for position, ambition for money or power."

"I remember like an owl. Memories come back in 'bursts of images.' "

"We knew we existed, we must be doing surprising things since people came from such far-off places to see us—but did the far-off places exist?"