derrida, jacques

The death of the other, this death of the other in “me,” is fundamentally the only death that is named in the syntagm “my death,” with all the consequences that one can draw from this. This is another dimension of awaiting [s’attendre] as awaiting one another [s’attendre l’un l’autre], awaiting oneself at death and expecting death [s’attendre soi-même à la morte] by awaiting one another [s’attendant l’un l’autre], up to the most advanced longevity in a life that will have been so short, no matter what.

[j. derrida, from Aporias]

einstein, albert

"All I want to do is learn the way God thinks. All the rest is details."

- a. einstein

newman, charles

the novel “is, in fact, the oldest of abstract forms, the first mixed-media. Its thrust from the beginning has been aleatory—syncretic, not synthetic—held together by the tension of its own formal contradictions, testimony both to the interpenetrability of experience and the necessity for recombinant expression.”

rich, adrienne

"For the Dead"

I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer

The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself

I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight

rilke, rainer maria

"the dew is different, but the stars are still the stars of your nights. and isn’t the whole world yours? for how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. you felt in such complete harmony with god, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. you thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. for your love was equal to everything."

merwin, w.s.

"For A Coming Extinction"

Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours

When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrifices
Join your work to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important

cixous, hélène

"Wherever she loves, all the old concepts of management are left behind. At the end of a more or less conscious computation, she finds not her sum but her differences. I am for you what you want me to be at the moment you look at me in a way you’ve never seen me before: at every instant. When I write, it’s everything that we don’t know we can be that is written out of me, without exclusions, without stipulation, and everything we will be calls us to the unflagging, intoxicating, unappeasable search for love. In one another we will never be lacking."

[hélène cixous, tr. cohen(s); “the laugh of the medusa”]

apter, emily

translatio imperii - "the translator considers thought content a prisoner...which he translates into his own language with the prerogative of a conqueror..."

translatio studii - respect for "untranslatable affective gaps, the nub of intractable semantic difference, episodes of violent cultural tranference and counter-transference..." as an ethical attitude for literary scholars

sartre, j. p.

"A vast entity, a planet, in a space of a hundred million dimensions; three-dimensional beings could not so much as imagine it. And yet each dimension was an autonomous consciousness. Try to look directly at that planet, it would disintegrate into tiny fragments, and nothing but consciousnesses would be left. A hundred million free consciousnesses, each aware of walls, the glowing stump of a cigar, familiar faces, and each constructing its destiny on its own responsibility. And yet each of these consciousnesses, by imperceptible contacts and insensible changes, realizes its existence as a cell in a gigantic and invisible coral. War: everyone is free, and yet the die is cast. It is there, it is everywhere, it is the totality of all my thoughts, of all Hitler's words, of all Gomez's acts; but no one is there to add it up. It exists solely for God. But God does not exist. And yet the war exists."

- from Les Chemins de la liberte

brautigan, richard

i have been very slowly and gently rereading brautigan's trout fishing in america, wearing sunglasses out on my landing, often hungover, sometimes with a cigarette. i finished it today and miss it already. it is very beautiful and makes the world look more beautiful by proximity.

"There was a bowl of goldfish next to the bed, next to the gun. How religious and intimate the goldfish and the gun looked together.
They had a cat named 208. They covered the bathroom floor with newspaper and the cat crapped on the newspaper. My friend said that 208 thought he was the only cat left in the world, not having seen another cat since he was a tiny kitten. They never let him out of the room. He was a red cat and very aggressive. When you played with that cat, he really bit you. Stroke 208's fur and he'd try to disembowel your hand as if it were a belly stuffed full of extrasoft intestines."

- from "Room 208, Trout Fishing in America"

oliver, mary

someone is feeling a little sentimental lately.

"Wild Geese"
Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

bellow, saul

"People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned."

orwell, george

"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection,
that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty,
that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly
intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be
defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of
fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol,
tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that "non-attachment" is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for "non-attachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work."

[g. orwell, "reflections on gandhi"]

cavell, stanley

"I am necessarily the owner of my pain, yet the fact that it is always located in my body is not necessary. This is what Wittgenstein wishes to show--that it is conceivable that I locate it in another's body. That this does not in fact, or literally, happen in our lives means that the fact of our separateness is something that I have to conceive, a task of imagination--that to know your pain I cannot locate it as I locate mine, but I must let it happen to me. My knowledge of you marks me; it is something that I experience, yet I am not present to it...My knowledge of myself is something I find, as on a successful quest; my knowledge of others, of their separateness from me, is something that finds me."

[s. cavell]

wittgenstein, ludwig

"Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits."

[l. wittgenstein, tractatus logico-philosophicus]

roethke, theodore

"What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance?"

[from "In a Dark Time"]

foucault, michel

"Your question is: why am I so interested in politics? But if I were to answer you very simply, I would say this: Why shouldn't I be interested? That is to say, what blindness, what deafness, what density of ideology would have to weigh me down to prevent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject to our existence.... The essence of our life consists, after all, in the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves."

[m. foucault]

okay okay okay already. yes, i do still draw hearts next to foucault's name in my notebook.

poor pitta

avoid most Rajasic foods: coffee, garlic (!!!), onions, peppers, hot spices...also cigarettes and alcohol, of course.

also bad: sour fruit, bananas, beets, green olives, radish, tomatoes (!), turnips, corn, quinoa (!), rye, black and red lentils, nuts (!!!)...

so many spices!: asafoetida, basil (!!), bay leaf, cayenne, cloves, ginger (!), marjoram, mustard seeds, nutmeg, oregano, paprika, rosemary, sage, savory, tamarind, thyme...(this might be the most difficult part)...

why am i not a vata? they get to eat everything!

kafka, franz

"Oh to be a Red Indian, instantly prepared, and astride one's galloping mount, leaning into the wind, to skim with each fleeting quivering touch over the quivering ground, till one shed the spurs, for there were no spurs, till one flung off the reins, for there were no reins, and could barely see the land unfurl as a smooth-shorn heath before one, now that horse's neck and horse's head were gone."

[F. Kafka, "Longing to Be a Red Indian"]

faulkner, william

"It always takes a man that never made much at any thing to tell you how to run your business, though. Like these college professors without a whole pair of socks to their name, telling you how to make a million in ten years, and a woman that couldn't even get a husband can always tell you how to raise a family."

aww, Jason's talking about me!

"...the strange thing is that man who is conceived by accident and whose every breath is a fresh cast with dice already loaded against him will not face that final main which he knows before hand he has assuredly to face without essaying expedients ranging all the way from violence to petty chicanery that would not deceive a child until someday in very disgust he risks everything on a single blind turn of a card no man ever does that under the first fury of despair or remorse or bereavement he does it only when he has realised that even the despair or remorse or bereavement is not particularly important to the dark diceman and i temporary and he it is hard believing that a love or a sorrow is a bond purchased without design and which matures willynilly and is recalled without warning to be replaced by whatever issue the gods happen to be floating at the time..."

[w. faulkner, the sound and the fury]