Blood Orchid Quotes

“Now I dream of the soft touch of women, the songs of birds, the smell of soil crumbling between my fingers, and the brilliant green of plants that I diligently nurture. I am looking for land to buy and I will sow it with deer and wild pigs and birds and cottonwoods and sycamores and build a pond and the ducks will come and fish will rise in the early evening light and take the insects into their jaws. There will be paths through this forest and you and I will lose ourselves in the soft curves and folds of the ground. We will come to the water’s edge and lie on the grass and there will be a small, unobtrusive sign that says, THIS IS THE REAL WORLD, MUCHACHOS, AND WE ARE ALL IN IT.—B. TRAVEN. . . .”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

“Imagine the problem is not physical. Imagine the problem has never been physical, that it is not biodiversity, it is not the ozone layer, it is not the greenhouse effect, the whales, the old-growth forest, the loss of jobs, the crack in the ghetto, the abortions, the tongue in the mouth, the diseases stalking everywhere as love goes on unconcerned. Imagine the problem is not some syndrome of our society that can be solved by commissions or laws or a redistribution of what we call wealth. Imagine that it goes deeper, right to the core of what we call our civilization and that no one outside of ourselves can effect real change, that our civilization, our governments are sick and that we are mentally ill and spiritually dead and that all our issues and crises are symptoms of this deeper sickness. Imagine the problem is not physical and no amount of driving, no amount of road will deal with the problem. Imagine that the problem is not that we are powerless or that we are victims but that we have lost the fire and belief and courage to act. We hear whispers of the future but we slap our hands against our ears, we catch glimpses but turn our faces swiftly aside.”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

“There will be no first hundred days for this future, there will be no five-year plans. There will be no program. Imagine the problem is that we cannot imagine a future where we possess less but are more. Imagine the problem is a future that terrifies us because we lose our machines but gain our feet and pounding hearts. Then what is to be done?”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

“I don’t know what to make of myself. A lot of the time, despite my deepest hungers and best efforts, I see blackness. But I am planting a young oak tree. I really am. It’ll be here centuries after I’m gone. Assuming I choose to leave.”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

“I am not of sound mind. I cannot seem to stop moving - as I write this I have clocked 7,000 miles by truck in the last thirty days and I am hunkered in a motel room high in the Rocky Mountains and yet no nearer to God. I seek roots, just so long as they can accommodate themselves to around seventy-five miles and hour and no unseemly whining about rest stops or sit down dinners. I am, I suspect, a basic American, a perpetual violation that loves the land and cannot kick the addiction of velocity. A person fated never to settle yet always seeking the place to settle. Like cocaine-powered athletes, lying presidents, Miss America, and the Internal Revenue Service, I am not a role model. I am always hungry.”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

“Toward the end of the sixteenth century, an Indian noble named Pachakuti Yamki tries to make sense out of this rather dark moment. In his account, he has Wayna Ahapaq busy issuing new laws and taxes as he slumbers at Quito with his war machine at idle.
Then the news comes to him that a plague has broken out at the capital, Cuzco. At midnight Wayna Ahapaq turns his face toward the sea and looks upon a million people whom he does not know. And he realizes they are the living souls about to die. And then the next day at dinner time a messenger arrives wearing a black cloak. He kisses the ruler and gives him a small locked box and a key. The boss man tells the messenger to open the box, but the visitor says, nope, he can’t do that, the Creator has ordered that only Wayna Ahapaq has that responsibility. When Wayna Ahapaq turns the key and lifts the lid things flutter out like butterflies. Within two days, his chief general is dead, along with many of the best officers. The Inca understands. He orders a stone house built, enters it and dies. I like this story because Wayna Ahapaq has his vision of a million living souls, takes the key, and opens the box. He refuses to be a victim, he assumes responsibility. True, he dies. But he refuses to be a victim, and victims can never fix anything because they cannot fight.”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

“We too live in a dead culture with dead gods and yet we are flailing outward into space, the depths of the seas, the secret crevices of the earth, the once sacrosanct gardens of our cells. We are mining the double helix, poking about in the strange codes of life itself.”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

“There can be no reality without fantasy. We can never be large enough to touch the solid, feel the living, move with the energy unless we imagine ourselves as more than we can ever really be. Without bullshit we cannot make it to the real shit.”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

“Her smile is slight, like that of a little girl, and the eyes often small as if she is peering through a gun slit at a disappointing world. The hands are callused from work and rough when they touch and she is very strong. Once she grabs me from behind, puts on a choke hold and I begin to go black into unconsciousness. Then she giggles and releases her hold and light floods back into my brain and I marvel at her strength and caprice.”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

“I speak for the mongrel, the mestizo, the half-breed, the bastard, the alley cat, the cur, the hybrid, the mule, the whore, the unforeseen strain that pounds against all the safe and disgusting doors. I speak for vitality, rough edges, torn fences, broken walls, wild rivers, sweat-soaked sheets. Who would want a world left mumbling to itself, a perfect garden with the dreaded outside, the fabled Other held at bay and the neat rows of cultures and genes safe behind some hedgerow? I dread a world that is all Iceland, the people fair, their genealogies stretching back in a dull column for a millennium, their folkways and mores and lifeways and deathways all smug and pointless. I speak for graffiti.”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

“The roots getting thicker by the year, at first fine lines like lace on the bark of our lives, the skin of our life, the hopes of our life, and then coarsening as more and more wealth and power and energy surges through and at first the roots begin to look like snakes, then like cables and later like giant aqueducts, the hidden heart pounding to the beat of explosives, this massive web becomes fat and arrogant and when the ax sinks in there is nothing but blood, geysers of blood, thick, sticky, virulent. CAUTION: Do not dab it against your tongue. The lab report is never returned to us, we can only guess. But clearly bad blood.”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

“At present I am shedding about one or two thousand dollars a month. None of the money I give away is tax deductible. I have gotten it into my head that if the government will sanction my giving, then I am giving to a cause or place or thing that is either ineffectual, malignant, or the enemy. So I do not give to such places. I have no job, I have no money. My child support runs $600 a month, the wave is getting larger behind my back. I will see what will happen. That is my advantage: something will happen. I have done my damnedest to make sure of this fact. I live in a world and time where all is limbo. I am no longer of this world and time: I have lit some kind of fuse. True, I drink cheap wine. But I eat good meat. There is an expression for my condition: The wolf is at the door. But I want the wolf at the door. I am tired of living in a world without wolves.”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America

“At present I am shedding about one or two thousand dollars a month. None of the money I give away is tax deductible. I have gotten it into my head that if the government will action my giving, then I am giving to a cause or place or thing that is either ineffectual, malignant, or the enemy. So I do not give to such places. I have no job, I have no money. My child support runs $600 a month, the wave is getting larger behind my back. I will see what will happen. That is my advantage: something will happen. I have done my damnedest to make sure of this fact. I live in a world and time where all is limbo. I am no longer of this world and time: I have lit some kind of fuse. True, I drink cheap wine. But I eat good meat. There is an expression for my condition: The wolf is at the door. But I want the wolf at the door. I am tired of living in a world without wolves.”
― Charles Bowden, Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America