Favorite quotes, one per author.

-- William James Varieties of the Religious Experience

-- Samuel Delaney Palimpsest ; Dhalgren 633

-- Carl Jung

The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.

With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipent lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?

Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa: of the incalculable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.

-- Joyce, Ulysses

"Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." - Antoine de Saint Exupéry

"What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?" - Thomas Pynchon

"Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation, and in the process of reasoning then pursues the same course. I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest." Albert Camus

""But this road doesn't go anywhere," I told him.
"That doesn't matter."
"What does?" I asked, after a little while.
"Just that we're on it, dude," he said."
— Bret Easton Ellis

Old friend, you may kneel as you read this, for now I come to the sweet burden of my argument. I did not know what I had to tell you, but now I know. I did not know what I wanted to proclaim, but now I am sure. All my speeches were preface to this, all my exercises but a clearing of my throat. I confess I tortured you but only to draw your attention to this. I confess I betrayed you but only to tap your shoulder. In our kisses and sucks, this, ancient darling, I meant to whisper.

God is alive. Magic is afoot. God is alive. Magic is afoot. God is afoot. Magic is alive. Alive is afoot. Magic never died. God never sickened. Many poor men lied. Many sick men lied. Magic never weakened. Magic never hid. Magic always ruled. God is afoot. God never died. God was ruler though his funeral lengthened. Though his mourners thickened. Magic never fled. Though his shrouds were hoisted the naked God did live. Though his words were twisted the naked Magic thrived. Though his death was published round and round the world the heart did not believe. Many hurt men wondered. Many struck men bled. Magic never faltered. Magic always led. Many stones were rolled but God would not lie down. Many wild men lied. Many fat men listened. Though they offered stones Magic still was fed. Though they locked their coffers God was always served. Magic is afoot. God rules. Alive is afoot. Alive is in command. Many weak men hungered. Many strong men thrived. Though they boasted solitude God was at their side. Nor the dreamer in his cell, nor the captain on the hill. Magic is alive. Though his death was pardoned round and round the world the heart would not believe. Though laws were carved in marble they could not shelter men. Though altars built in parliaments they could not order men. Police arrested Magic and Magic went with them for Magic loves the hungry. But Magic would not tarry. It moves from arm to arm. It would not stay with them. Magic is afoot. It cannot come to harm. It rests in an empty palm. It spawns in an empty mind. But Magic is no instrument. Magic is the end. Many men drove Magic but Magic stayed behind. Many strong men lied. They only passed through Magic and out the other side. Many weak men lied. They came to God in secret and though they left him nourished they would not tell who healed. Though mountains danced before them they said that God was dead. Though his shrouds were hoisted the naked God did live. This I mean to whisper to my mind. This I mean to laugh with in my mind. This I mean my mind to serve till service is but Magic moving through the world, and mind itself is Magic coursing through the flesh, and flesh itself is Magic dancing on a clock, and time itself the Magic Length of God.

- Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

SEEN AS IN DISTANT FRIEZE LIKE BABYLON OR THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

Much later than all of this the astronaut has a dream; he dreams that he is a character in a story which I am writing about him and as he opens his eyes to confirm what for him can only be a monumental nightmare he sees me staring at him, infinitely patient, infinitely wise, infinitely hurt, knowing everything that he will never understand and he says, closing his eyes, "but why are you writing all this? It isn't even the present let alone the future; it's the past, it all happened a long, long time ago, it's as far in the past as Babylon or the Holy Roman Empire; don't think of me, think of Centaurus, think of the moons of Ariel. I'm only a damned anachronism: why bother, why bother?" and I say to him then putting the paper away and leaning back into my own couch of torment, "of course, of course, but don't you see, you're the future too: the future and the past intermingled and there's no understanding one without the other because we are all linked together; you, history, myself, the possibility, the two of us touching for a moment in that simulation of motion known as narration and what else is there? In the long run everything is history," and the astronaut says "That's too much for me, I don't understand anything you're saying," and falls quickly back to sleep falling, to his muddled perception, into a long, long spiralling tunnel and at one end of this tunnel is the center of the earth and at the other is the moon and somwhere between the two he whirls in orbit endlessly, seeking, the fine tensors of his eyes guiding him unerringly to the other side of the planet.

- Barry N. Malzberg, "Still-Life"

"Shall I ever again have any of those prodigious reveries which sometimes came to me in former days? One day, in youth, at sunrise, sitting in the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; and again in the mountains, under the noonday sun, above Lavey, lying at the foot of a tree and visited by three butterflies; once more at night upon the shingly shore of the Northern Ocean, my back upon the sand and my vision ranging through the Milky Way;--such grand and spacious, immortal, cosmogonic reveries, when one reaches to the stars, when one owns the infinite! Momentsdivine, ecstatic hours; in which our thought flies from world to world, pierces the great enigma, breathes with a respiration broad, tranquil, and deep as the respiration of the ocean, serene and limitless as the blue firmament; . . . instants of irresistible intuition in which one feels one's self great as the universe, and calm as a god. . . .

-- William James Varieties of the Religious Experience

― Damn, Atreyu! (x Jeremy), Wednesday, August 2, 2006 1:29 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Wow, was just sadly reflecting earlier today that I never have this sort of "revery" anymore myself.

But he said to Ground now neither that attitude had been under dual control—nor that it had not. He tried to think as he would. He tried to contemplate the poised moments of force compounding the interior equilibrium—that interior and multiplied division of spirals that also stood still in their own no less breathing braids. Yet try as he would, he no more lost Ground than he could unbind the calcium and phosphate salt from the protein fibers they made bone, nor than unbind these two settling bones of his from the differences between their ends. He had to begin in his own way but knew what would be, and partly because the beginning was not now but long before.

He timed the following momentous transmission:

IMP PLUS TO CAP COM. NERVE FIBERS INCLINED TO ORIENT BY CONVERGING ON CENTERS OF GROWTH THAT ARE ACTIVE. VISION HARDENING TOWARD MILKY AND TOWARD BONE, CAP COM, BUT A WHILE AGO GIBBOUS EARTH WAS VISIBLE THROUGH WINDOW BY MEANS OF SHEAROW MEMBRANE. ALSO SEVERAL ELECTRODES ADRIFT ARE VISIBLE AS IS BRAIN HOUSING ADRIFT.

- Joseph McElroy

Ratanous had been hanging around too long. I thought we had killed him years ago and dumped his body, throat-shot, into the icy Hassayampa. But he kept turning up, or seeming to turn up. I could not even be sure he existed, except that other people whose judgment I trust seem to think they have seen him here and there. I saw him once at the end of a dark alley in Nagoya, standing in a group of transvestites, and another time walking up a road on Mount Kenya with a band of Wakamba, but both times he got away before I could reach him. I did not even know how he came by his name, or when I had first heard it, who told it to me or whether perhaps I had given it to him myself. He had never harmed me, but I knew without doubt that he could. (Not necessarily that he would, but I couldn’t be sure.) I would have to kill him, or try to kill him—that was clear enough. Maybe he was up the Hassayampa. It would be his kind of country, as it was mine: empty and high and bleak, full of ruins and large animals.

- Robert F. Jones