Madison > Recent Status Updates

“Perhaps history…is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated…at the bottom of a fold, it’s impossible to determine warp, woof, or pattern anywhere else... We are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see.”

A simple trick from the backyard astronomer: if you are having trouble seeing something, look slightly away from it... eating animals has an invisible quality. Thinking about dogs, and their relationship to the animals we eat, is one way of looking askance and making something invisible visible.

"...the truth being that Amherst College in the 1960s was for me a devourer of the emotional middle, a maker of psychic canyons, a whacker of the pendulum of Mood with the paddle of Immoderation."

The very worst pain is the arid pain of total violation that comes after the tears are all used up, the pain that stops up every space through which you once metered the world, or the world, you.

Tuesday: Nothing. Existed.

"The life of a man, he said, is only long enough to fully enjoy the works of another man."

Yet even if there is something like a self living invisibly inside us, who is to say that it is not toyed with in the same way as the visible matter encasing it?

"What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters... they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all."

"Coincidence...is like the manifestation of God at every moment on our planet. A senseless God making senseless gestures at his senseless creatures. In that hurricane, in that osseous implosion, we find communion. The communion of coincidence and effect and the communion of effect with us."