In what way names were applied to things. Filtration. Not every word that has been applied, still exists. Through proliferation and differentiation. Airborne. Here, this speck and this speck you missed.
Numbers in cell division. Spheres of doubt. The paradigm's stitchery of unrelated points. What escapes like so much cotton batting. The building, rather, in flames. Does flight happen in an order.
-Myung Mi Kim
Mystery is blind, but wills you
To untie the cloth, in eternity.
-Joy Harjo
Define loneliness?
Yes.
It's what we can't do for each other.
What do we mean to each other?
What does a life mean?
Why are we here if not for each other?
-Claudia Rankine
There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you've been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.
You've stopped being here in the world.
You're in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.
You're not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.
Then you're in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.
You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.
You see again how far away
each thing is from every other thing.
-Louise Glück
Howling
as it
falls
To find the form
of dust
once more
-Nai Palm
"Peasant so that she whom the wind wounds can emerge from the mountain's head"
-Aimé Césaire
Gately remembered some evil ****ing personal detoxes[...]Abrupt Withdrawal. The Bird. Being incapable of doing it and yet having to do it, locked in. A Revere Holding cage for 92 days. Feeling the edge of every second that went by. Taking it a second at a time. Drawing the time in around him real tight. Withdrawing. Any one second: he remembered: the thought of feeling like he'd be feeling this second for 60 more of these seconds -- he couldn't tell. He could not ****ing deal. He had to build a wall around each second just to take it. The whole first two weeks of it are telescoped in his memory down into like one second -- less: the space between two heartbeats. A breath and a second, the pause and gather between each cramp. An endless Now stretching its gull-wings out on either side of his heartbeat. And he'd never before or since felt so excruciatingly alive. Living in the Present between pulses. What the White Flaggers talk about: living completely In The Moment. A whole day at a crack seemed like tit, when he Came In. For he had Abided With The Bird.
-David Foster Wallace
"Written texts make available the notion that one knows what one has merely read"
-Anne Carson
"Now that the human mind has grasped celestial and terrestrial physics, both vegetable and animal, there remains one science, to fill up the series of sciences or observations--social physics. This is what men have now most need of..."
-Auguste Comte
"The moment you can wholly define why you love someone it is no longer true love. The French use je ne sais quoi to express this invisible force."
-Slavoj Žižek
"They seek superficial beauties, immediately available and enjoyed; above all, they want the unexpected and the novel. Accustomed to the struggles and monotony of practical life, they crave lively and rapid emotions, sudden revelations, brilliantly depicted stories of truth or wrongdoing which offer immediate escapism and plunge them directly and almost violently straight into the subject."
-Alexis de Tocqueville
Through the staked fence, moving about, I see
a scattering: of soldiers, trees, and roads;
and an old woman standing by her gate
who shews on a black hunk of bread with salt.
What have these grey huts done to anger you,
my God? and why must so many be killed?
A train passed, wailing, and the soldier wailed
as its retreating path got trailed with dust.
-Marina Tsvetayeva
"Either the hidden properties which governed the behavior of subatomic particles were nonlocal-- meaning they could instantaneously influence one another at an arbitrary distance-- or else the very notion of particles having intrinsic properties in the absence of observation had to be abandoned. The latter opened up a deep ontological void-- unless one adopted a radical positivism and contented oneself with developing a mathematical formalism which predicted the observable and gave up on any idea of an underlying reality. Naturally, it was this last option which won over the majority of researchers."
-Michel Houellebecq
How will this "virtual terraform" affect the consumer? One area of application, Ostman suggests, lies in virtual interactive environments populated by synthetic sentiences and evolvable avatars that can change to become increasingly independent from the humans they represent. Ostman predicts the emergence of virtual shopping malls that have dynamic environments adapted to the needs, preferences, and desires of an individual consumer. Instead of the static spaces of present-day malls, these virtual malls would "read" a consumer's avatar for initial information about the consumer. Then,[...]adjust the environment and behaviour of synthetically sentient characters so they coadapt with the consumers desires. If your responses indicate that you like purple, the environment will increasingly display this color. The effect, Ostman predicts, will be so compelling it will make the experience more like entertainment than shopping. [...] What does the human participant receive that makes this co-optation into a capitalistic marketing process worthwhile for her? Not just any entertainment, but Entertainment so intense and personally tailored to her individual responses and psychology that it is irresistible.
-N. Katherine Hayles (1999)
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.
-Ivan Illich