Status Updates From An Image of My Name Enters ...

"If I can put the world inside me (pictures like a phantasmagoria), then I can show it to other people. I want to be a medium of a kind. Everything is about striving for greater impersonality, along with greater clarity. If I am empty, at least I will be clear. If I am clear, perhaps I can be useful."

"I've realized that language makes a visual image. Language is effective. It's a good screen. ... This is my sole goal in life, generating images with language. Nothing else matters. I'll sacrifice everything for just one perfectly bright, indelible verbal picture."

"Language's most basic operation is, I realize, to cause us to believe that something invented is a given."

"The stranger isn't my love or my lover. The stranger is someone I seem to have forgotten, whose story I must nevertheless tell. Again, today, if I must choose between love and memory, I choose memory."

"We knew, intuitively, that 'Oregon Trail' was about a perverted and risible idea of sex [...] We knew this because there was no option to turn back. There was no option to found a school or become an artist or live on a commune. There was no option to practice philosophy. There was nothing to do but be a family and head west. And we continue to dwell in this country."

"The problem is that, although the membrane that separates the world of commerce [...] from the sensitive surfaces of our bodies is tissue thin and actually nonexistent, everyone goes around acting like it's this impenetrable barrier."

"It doesn't, apparently, need to be this way, but, honestly, who cares about that when you can text that person who makes you feel like your bones are on fire and made of ice, both at the same time?"

"[T]he human project is totally incoherent. [...] People could choose to behave otherwise, yet they never do. It astounds me. People never stop to consider their own beliefs."

"[Seven Brides for Seven Brothers]' other cherished notion is that it is OK to do violent, criminal things if one does them as part of a group. OK to abduct people, OK to organize a lynching party, OK to "settle" the West, OK to marry the nominally willing, OK to produce families of seven or more children, OK to do it because a mob does it, OK to do it because a nation does so."

"I must take advantage of this narrow opening in my heart."

"I want to remember. Yet, what I want to know even more, what I retain an insatiable hunger for, is knowledge of my relations' lack of desire for memory. It is not history that they have thrown away, for they do not have that power, but rather key parts of their own intimate experience."

"From the Latin imago, image may indicate a three-dimensional representation, such as sculpture; above all, it has to do with imitation [...] Images are not exclusively ocular. Much as memory is not exclusively ocular."

"The past is a paradox: although we have dwelled in it when it used to be the present, now it can no longer admit our bodies. [...] Memory images, a strange sort of naturally occurring psychic media, are generated by the inexorable movement of the arrow of time, as what was once the inhabited present becomes the permanently foreclosed past."

"Something loose and heavy wobbled in the air. It made an abstract noise, as if it desired to fall into place."

"On the one hand, the poet shows advanced control of the literary language. On the other, What the fuck?"

"Please bear with me. Stay with me through this part-the part where I am an extremely confused person:"