The Lost Scrapbook Quotes

“Now my sole function in this world is to serve as receptacle for the proof that I am inconsequential; every experience I accrete is only another stroke of an eraser.”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“I grieve to think that closeness requires some measure of distance as its preserver, if only as a safety measure, because it certainly seems as if connection, in a deeper sense, introduces a specter of estrangement; for to come into contact with someone is to change her—there is that certainty; it reminds me of a game that Robin told me about told me about one day after school, as we were walking down Annatta Road certainly twenty years ago: find a word, a familiar word, on a page, and then stare at it for a while, just let your eyes linger upon it; and soon enough, sometimes after no more than a few seconds, the word comes to look misspelled, or badly transcribed, or as if there are other things wrong with it; so I tried it once, with the most familiar word there is: love, first verb in the Latin primer, the word known to all men; and after no more than five seconds I could swear that it wasn't the same word I had always known: it looked odd, misshapen, and as if it had all kinds of different pronunciations, except the one I had always believed was correct, and had always used; and so there was dissonance...”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“[B]etter the beauty of struggle and futility than the illusion of accomplishment; for as we struggle, he would seem to say, so are we beautiful.”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“and I attempted, above all, to get at the truth, not the masquerade that declares itself as genuineness when, habitually, the truth is invoked, but a wholesale leveling of the artifices of personality, a selfless plunge into...into what I had thought must remain forever hidden, to the substance of what I had always kept in shadow ... to that point where self becomes sorrow ...”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“I mean, Ken has a policy of never taking even a one-granule snort when he's doing a show, and, though he's never said anything, it's assumed he expects the same from us; but there it is, God's terrestrial goodness, in exceedingly admirable quantity, and all of us just start giggling because, well, we just can't believe it... ; and we're all just standing there with our brains salivating, and then Kenny, y'know, while kind of looking down at the ground, Kenny hauls off and says:
-Aw, what th' fuck ... ; it's our last week, i'n' it...? and he heads to the table in the corner and sits down;”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“[L]et them be their own Rorschach tests[.]”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“-So how about you?, I said: what do you do, if you don't mind my asking;
-Not at all, he said: I'm into mitosis;
-Aren't we all, I said;-”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“And the man then said Oh, please: Just let me know if you come upon bark textures that recall the erosion patterns of human hope...And then he disappeared behind a tree...and the forest fell into silence...”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“and all I could see was a teary streaking of lights and little bubbles of color before I had to close up again, to shut myself in; so it couldn't be, it couldn't be the case, there's no way that all this was moving around me, Einstein was wrong-”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“...and as he swigged another dose, it just kind of came clear to me that the guy was nothing but sadness, really nothing but that, the weakest link in the Great Chain of Being, and that if when raging he was pathetic then in triumph he was tragic; and it also seemed as if, at some level, the guy knew this, that he also was aware that the whole package he had put together for himself had been misconceived, and that any effort to refashion it would just reconfirm its faultiness; and that the zone he inhabited was one that he himself had built, but as a barrier, of course to prevent the world from getting too close but also to forestall any seepage of self, whose effects on other folks he could too easily foresee; and that the poor loonster had become addicted to the language of communication because he knew that each word showed just how hopeless he was-and that people would sense this, and so would stay even further away ...; the guy, in short, had built himself a quicksand situation, a real no­winner, and I just figured OK: give him what he wants and keep the fuck away; don't only ignore him, but force yourself to forget; acknowledge his desire and leave him to his internal exile...”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“...but what I am not interested in, Ms. Clipboard- or Mr. Canker or Mrs. Murmur or Call-me-Carol, all of you- is your questions; even your pointing and tipping Enoch pencils have six sides, my dear definers: pay heed whereon you pinch!; I am interested, almost exclusively, in being interested, and your reductivist probings are only intended to cordon off wings of my mansion;”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“I’m talking about those times when you're driving out on the Interstate at night, when the darkness is such that you feel as if you’re sailing out into the void, through virtually coordinate-free space.”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“-So, OK, that's part of it, he said: but for me, the more significant thing is that, every time, the Coyote just comes back: the world somehow allows him another chance; he's always given another shot, as if he had not just killed himself; that's what matters in these films;...You see the puff of dust, but he just comes back with another, identical story, and then it all begins again; and that's why I find these films literally miraculous: they're miracle plays, pathologically repeated, in which all the vio­lence and destruction have very little to do with the central premise- this miraculous capacity for coming back;”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“and it goes, the music just goes, without faltering, without hesitation, not depleted through repetition, but enriched; and as it goes- without faltering, without hesitation- the rapid-rushing piece instantly becomes the soundtrack to what I am looking at, regardless of what it may be: the varied tilts of oldsters' hats, wind-gusts corduroying the park's grass, the sparkling of pram wheels, children stepping onto the water fountain's access ledge and hunchbacking behind their button-pushing hand and jutting lips;”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“or is that too straightforward a statement, have I been insuffi­ciently artful in encoding my sentiments...in camouflaging them for esthetic effect. well, too fucking bad...my life has convinced me of few things, but the absoluteness of the negative is one of them... light bends, it diffracts, it scatters, but darkness fucking endures... it is what remains when the strayed-in rays and scintillas have long disappeared... it is the fundament, the ground... and I am one who can tell you this: behold my black body..”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“...for I have read about oceanic feelings, but I know about dying of thirst in the middle of the ocean... and I have heard about the thousand points of light, but I have seen that they provide no warmth, no canopying glow ...”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“...meanwhile, throughout this orchestrated space, harmonious hundreds of people were milling, window shopping, pushing strollers, and holding soda cans in round keep-' em-cool sleeves, while their abundant children, in large sneakers, straggled along or spir­ited about -and a piped-in rendition of Let It Be, performed by a high-cholesterol string ensemble, made the whole thing look like affectless, Nijinskian choreography...”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“and I again turned through the magazine's first few pages, past the Guess Jeans ads and Eternity by Calvin Klein ads and pitches for Crisca clothes, filled with beautiful people imitating suffering; and then words came to me, words arrived in my mind, quickly and insistently, words representing the real sound of my feeling: The shot has been lost; the experiment has not been worth it; the species does not deserve to continue; it is much too late ...; I took a single step, and suddenly wanted to weep:”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“the figures are shadow-swept, various, self-involved, and as turbulent as waves, as standing waves ...; and as I look at them, as I curl more tightly into shin-warmth on my preferred bench, I wonder which of these figures, too, are runaways, which of these scudding clumps are the moving forms of runaways ...but runaways whom I don't recognize, whose rightfulness I don't acknowledge: which of these figures am I denying ...; because it would take, I am sure, only a glance, only one shared eye-shudder, for all this to end, for their circumstances suddenly to reverse; it would only take one glance upon them...and one glance from them...; this, then, would be interpenetration, genuine interpenetration, a real refutation of figure and ground...;”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“...so I just finished stuffing my bike with invisible air and went home; and thus ended my career as a hostage- briefly, inconclusively, with consummate inconsequentiality: a nonevent realizing its full potential, brave new currents in con­temporary invisibility-”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“...and I was thinking of what it would be like to have such a wound, to lift up the bottom of my shirt at school and have bandages to show, white brushstrokes on belly, when a horrendous force Huhhh catapulted me forward and my neck whipped back and I crumbled down to the pavement and my entire face began to cry;”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“The man holding me had a pistol in his other hand; I saw it in the comer of my eye just before I felt its cold hardness crunch into my temple; pressed against my face, the pistol was hard in a way that seemed absolute, bone-smashing, beyond argument, and cold in a way that seemed perfect and permanent;”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“...And all the while, accompanying my every step, The Photographer is sounding in my head, purling incessantly through my clamped-on Walkman; it's a good piece, Glass's homage to Muybridge, minimalism used to maximal effect: with its repeating rhythms, endlessly rechurning, the music resembles a wave that doesn't move, a standing wave; that's what you listen to, the change and unchange of the wave, not any emergent melody: listening not above, but within;”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“it's true what they sang in that song, that video killed the radio star-how in the long war between the senses, the eye, in its unstoppable scorched-earth campaign, has mobilized a kind of technologi­cal Gresham's Law against radio, and has almost entirely sidelined it;”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“...when I read to her, her quietness, her peacefulness, was what I sought to hear, and it echoed in me as if in an expanding cavern, and often left me trembling with love; and so, then and there, after taking a final gulp of my decaf, I decided to indulge in even more self-pampering: I lifted my legs down from the chair, and, with lightness and celerity, stole upstairs...”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“Thus, in short, in sum, in all, it was but a babystep for Chomsky, graced with this understanding of the ineffable richness of our bio-abilities, to become the universalist that he be, to extend his understanding to the political realm ...and to leap, by bio-necessity, into his political work-”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“-jeez, these guys, with their on-again, off-again rela­tionships, lutgen said;
-Yeah, Dave said: now you see them, now you see them once more;
-They're virtual insects!, Jurgen said;
-Virtually innumerable, said Dave;
-I wonder, though, if we haven't got it wrong, Jurgen said: I mean, I wonder if maybe these guys' natural condition isn't to be lit up-if their ground state isn't actually when they're glowing;
-Hm, said Dave: so what they're actually doing is turning off their lights­
-Right: momentarily going under;
-Flashing darkness­
-Projecting their inner voids­
-Their repeating, periodic depressions ...
-So then, I suppose, we should really call them douse bugs---;.
-Exactly...
-Or nature's faders---;.
-Flying extinguishers­
-Buzzing snuffers-!
-Or maybe­
-Or maybe, despite what it looks like, maybe they really are glowing constantly, Jurgen said: but, through some malign unknown mechanism, their everlasting light is peri­odically swallowed up by un-understood atmospheric forces;
-So then they're being occluded­
-Rudely occluded­
-Denied their God-given right to shine ...
-So that, I suppose, would make them-o horror-victims­
-Yeah: victims of predatory darkness­
-Of uncontrollable flares of night;
-So it isn't bioluminescence, but eco-eclipsis­
-Exactly: ambient effacement­
-Nature's station-identification­
-Ongoing lessons in humility ...
-In fact, that might explain the nits' efficiency factor, Jurgen Said: you know, these guys burn so cleanly that they produce what's known in the trade as cold light they put together this real slow oxidation reaction within these little cell-structures called photocytes, using a really weird enzyme and substrate that're, like, named for the devil; and the result is virtually 100% efficient: almost no heat is lost at all...
-So, in fact, these folks should be our heroes­
-Exactly: our role models­
-Our ego ideals---;.
-Hosts of syndicated talk shows­
-Spokes-things for massive advertising campaigns---;.
-In fact, children should be forced to leave their families and go be raised by them­-MacArthur winners, all...”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“I hear his heartbeats as my own, I feel his urgency as my own, our covalent union making of us both a new, charged, unknown substance; so too my skin, my liquidy skin, is both our separation and our merger, it is our shared, evanescent frontier; yet when he kisses the valley of my belly so long and so shiver-warm I realize that I am also beyond his skin's extremity, I am past the barrier of his skin, I am also living within him, for the juncture is no longer clear: utterly, entirely, I feel his response to me, I feel his churning when I surge; and it is sublime circuitry, this overlap, this confusion, giving me new contours, new periphery, expand­ing me into added dimensions,...”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“...but now, though, because I have still not gotten there, I feel as if distance- as if distance itself-has developed a density, a viscosity, and that I am pushing against it, that I am fighting distance's density; so I press the pedal, and the car surges, and I attempt to push to the terminus of distance, and when this does not happen and I am still not there I feel as if the tenacity of time will smother me- that I will be smothered by the atrocity of distance, by the painful failure of simultaneity; and I struggle to keep the gas pedal within civilized limits, and I go astride cars and around cars, and I am doused in the unthought thought: Please let me get to him quickly;”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook

“...because the guy was oblivious, anyway, he was so into what he was doing: rooting through the ranks of rubbish, sorting it out, putting some on the central worktable, then moving some of that selected shit around, stacking it, arraying it, then circulating around the table and sizing the shitpile up, from different angles, with incendiary eyes ... ; and then, the next evening, I saw there was more shit, the guy must have been bringing it in...”
― Evan Dara, The Lost Scrapbook