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‘—Haire & Russell—extremely well connected—rallied support from the finest of London’s medical, artistic & progressive circles. H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley & his brother,—evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley,—among a long list of supporters. Many figures associated with—Bloomsbury Group,—Clive Bell—Vita Sackville-West—Leonard Woolf (Virginia Woolf’s husband)—publicly endorsed the congress—backdrop to—transformations—’

‘—stories worth telling,—give us a glimpse into what cannot be known or remembered—Saidiya Hartman notes in her writing on the violent silences—‘to displace the received / authorised account—to imagine what might have happened / might have been said / might have been done’—archives are shaped by history as much as by erasure. One must learn to run their fingers along the craters & write ‘with & against the archive’.’

‘—ever since I dropped out of MIT—West Coast, where all the computer companies were. I have a pretty good grasp of California plant life—Its reproductive strategy is to drop—heavy, oily leaves around its base—trapped heat—highly flammable oil consummate their tragic love affair and burst into flame,—eucalyptus seedpods need fire to open up—while the ashes of the fallen competing trees enrich the soil with nutrients.’

‘A—poppy in a field of burdocks—thistles—he carries the love of antiquity in his entrails. He will never cease to be interested—Moonlight washes in—‘How to render in words those things for which there is no language, those impressions—mysteries of the soul unknown to the soul itself?’ He has no answer to any of these questions, but somehow feels important to ask them to honour their existence—Saint Anthony, Bruegel—’

‘Beckett dug a lot, they say—He could be seen in the distance, digging like a madman—Hölderlin—run towards the earth—You might want to—invent a language within a language—Alexander Grothendieck : It is when we fear making mistakes that the error within us becomes immutable, like a rock—& you’re nothing but the synthesis of the humanity that precedes you—you’ll give human consciousness to human consciousness.’

‘—Lady Patience established her eccentricity at an early age—stubbornly independent,—yet lacking the common sense to take care of herself—reading and ciphering at an early age,—expressed no interest at all in—coquettish skills—‘Well,—At least you’re not totally ignorant. If you can read, you can learn anything—I suppose you will learn,—For I have a will that you will, even if you do not yet.’ She—left me bewildered.’

‘Kropotkin deplored—Darwin’s theory—Hobbesian notion of a violent—competitive state of nature in which species, including humans, were locked in constant struggle for survival—Kropotkin laid the groundwork for—an autopoietic impetus—resists pre-determined hierarchies in favour of self-regulated equilibrium. Hirschfeld was always interested in bridging—medicine x art—to bring them into dialogue &—infect one another.’

‘—poured-epoxy membrane of its floor was luminescent—gelatinous—tautly stretched—like perfectly set jelly—artificial birdsong playing on a loop—they outsourced for outsourcing’s sake,—subcontractor outsourced too, till nobody knew any more who was controlling what—They were courteous, friendly—in the variation—tones they used to speak—a coordinate—within some grid or schema of class and ethnicity—Boulevard Voltaire.’

‘It’s baffling—a city that feels like a twin to one you know—with language as the only difference. The experience was unforgettable—The oppressor tends to forget almost instantly, while the oppressed carry the pain for generations. These experiences fueled my curiosity about the history—a fascination that continues to this day—Born & raised in Tokyo, I’d lived through countless earthquakes—we’re no match for nature.’

‘—hearing his father screaming—Y rushed into the living room, ‘Stop harassing my mum,’ he said in a steady voice—Many professed indifference,—Incredibly,—sympathetic to—fascists. A’s admiration of M. Curie—rubbed off on Y—a woman doing things women were not supposed to,—it was time to connect with his Greek side,—Everything made him feel guilty—knowing that he could afford to buy as much bread as he needed—aspirin,—’

‘—language is a system, speech is an act—human beings kill each other over words—do you know the story of Chekhov’s millionaire? I answered—man made a million marks, lay down on them, & shot himself—And this truth is passed on from generation to generation by the people who tell us stories. The Earth does not archive things well—When it’s true, writing comes from an ember within one’s being—for poems—we have ghosts.’

‘You only ever spoke Flemish—in a fury—This is how I remember your hunger strike—You see, I write this book to ask—questions I never did—to better understand you—My writing : a continuation—a deterritorialisation of language—to pay homage—dialogue & resistance—anti-heroes of medical history, dissecting the Clinic—searching, in the depths of death, the anatomy of a life worth living. Spanning a century—six countries—’

‘‘I believe it’s for you. As for what it means, how should I know? I’m a fool, not an interpreter of dreams,’—strange,—random occurrence. ‘Why do they risk their lives simply to destroy? They’ve made no effort to take—It’s a pattern,—weeks from now, you’ll perhaps understand why,’—In the matter of the Fool, that which we do not know is almost more significant than that which we do—his prescience,—however obscurely,—’

‘—the transitory edifice,—a sort of link between the past & the future—the eternity of time disfigures us. Then—in the air she spun around—what she was deep down, in the black hole of her consciousness—What is intense? The truth. You often say ‘that speaks to me’ about things you think you like, but what speaks to you? Deep down, what speaks to you? Eyes. & questions like—Where does time begin—why do things float?’

‘Every other man she had met, married or unmarried, younger or older, eschewed any deviation from patriarchal norms. Were such men to find out what swirled around in her head, they would run a mile. It’s why she willed herself to—him—someone with whom she could share her concealed world—1924,—despite knowing that it would create a minor scandal, gave—heart—a full moon ascended over Cairo’s night sky—closest comrade—’

‘—there was Monique Wittif, Violette Leduc, Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker—They had a different kind of beauty from what I saw everywhere, because they’d made it themselves—N introduced me—These people adopted me the way you adopt a strange dog—I became part of the clan. I became—regular. The girls were kind—so I unwound. Conformism—to avoid social punishment—all the while masking—I translated her language—she's thinking.’

‘—the ordinary operators of a process—going on for a long time—born into a rotten world. Materialism, wage labour—lived on their faces—at the supermarket—cars—on the screens. Babies have a neural system interconnected to preferential pathways—in my naivety, I wanted to—break the chains of conditioning—No book saved me—The principle of the food chain is killing—I wondered, is the beauty of the Universe a coincidence?’

‘—fuyu,—comes from the verb fuyu, an arcane way of saying fueru, ‘to amass’—a time for stockpiling the seeds of life, whereas haru (spring), denotes the time of year when these seeds take root & spread out haru, ‘to extend’—releasing energy. It occurred to me that we should really start with winter when we list off the four seasons. Though of course, the idea of discrete seasons is another of those human inventions.’

‘Shinichi Fukuoka, our bodies—largely fluid entities. Once tangled up in words,—bodies harden into solid forms. Now I can see this as the moment when I started yearning to break free from language-oriented ‘logos’, and move toward a natural ‘physis’—I keenly felt the limits of TV. In times like these, there’s barely room to breathe—we ignore the facts, preferring simplistic narrative—an archive in Aomori Prefecture—’

‘—the simplistic fantasy—when we die, we become stars in the night sky. I’m not sure there’s such a thing as the afterlife, but—it’s crossed my mind—The mountain forests only turn this colour 1 or 2 weeks out of the year. I happened to be there at the right time. I’m not too fond of the Yoshino cherry hybrids that you see planted in long rows in places like Ueno Park, specifically to lure people in—a cruel industry—’

‘The mines always attracted workers from outside, lured by industrialists in need of cheap—docile labour—fleeing rural precarity—treated as foreigners. ‘—place ravaged by the greed—short-sightedness of—generations of businessmen—,’ Marguerite Yourcenar,—you understood too well the marginalising effects of a dominant language—‘Words,’ Anne Carson—‘if you let them, will do what they want to do & what they have to do.’’

‘Our forebears passed life on to us—& so we pass on life—& after our life—atoms will form new combinations—Human beings pour their thoughts into the thoughts of others—Like rats—weasels—born into the world as it stands—But most humans go further—language exists—Memories spread blots of darkness deep within—know by heart—There's something infinitely beautiful in faces—creating—past—present—& the future—consciousness—’

‘—when E smelled—flowering jasmine,—a surge of anger—unwilling to accept Nature recycling life so soon after the loss of so many—Everything they had was shared. In return, visitors shared stories—wolfing down—‘hunger recipes’,—glad to swap—food for tales—stories redolent of Federico García Lorca—Catalunya,—1936—‘So, I kept her name etched in my thoughts,’—words struck a chord—motivated—to do difficult things gladly—’

‘—we rushed—like lemmings heading for oblivion—On Monday—I didn’t want to rise—didn’t want to cook breakfast—I wanted to—eat rolls, then stroll through the park—sit when I felt like it—walk when I felt like it. I wanted to be alone—free. ‘Time to get up,’ said Adam, turning off the alarm—Animals are much more direct. They fight it out straight away & the best animal wins—Human behaviour, my dear—is very complicated.’

‘It starts out like a blessing, giving you the tongues of the animals—makes you a beast—‘Is that what you want—take the blood of kings—& drown it in the blood of the wild hunt? To be as a beast among beasts, simply for the sake of the knowledge it brings you?’ I sat—beside him. ‘I do not know,’ I said—I learned to do as Molly did, stealing bits of time for myself—Boyishly, I viewed—raids as a thing impersonal to me.’

‘—farmers in the countryside,—may have been quite different—Naoya Shiga—Today, however, it seems as though all regions of Japan, both urban & rural, have lost touch with the systems that we used to have for making sense of life & death—Something that’s been on my mind since they first detected the cancer is the historical timing—Natsume Soseki—A part of me feels like—must have happened for a reason—that’s just life.’

‘—smell of the bay—stronger as if the day smells of men,—horses—cooking—temporary things that had to surrender each night to the ocean’s power—chaos & revelry—Ships must dock & unload as the rising & falling of the tides allow, & those who fish for a living must follow the schedules of the finned creatures, not those of men—Molly Nosebleed—a lively one, her voice shriller than the gulls—Barnacles cut into her—knees—’

‘—upset by memories of lost umbrellas. I remembered a particularly nice one—Inevitably I lost it—mourned for it—it rained all day–At that moment it seemed conscience does not necessarily make cowards of us all. ‘Thank God you came—I had no hope you would—You must be crazy,’—He looked at me miserably &—added, ‘But sometimes love has nothing to do with it—Better late than never. At least I will have—making you happy.’’

‘—I don’t know which is the greater obstacle: language or death. Writing is my experiment—where resistance is the norm—you spoke three languages: Hals, the local dialect; Standard Dutch, the regional tongue; and French, the language of the bourgeoisie—At 14, you chose to study Latin and Greek—Colonial medicine was an ideological tool of empire—who builds it, who benefits from it, and who, in the end, is left behind.’

‘In Owens’s lifetime the rule was—you could make art about the poor so long as you held them at a distance—scrutinised them—slotted them into socio-economic sub-headings to show the various ills—they represented. Owens was told by one publisher that they were not interested in writing about poor people, the implication being of course that one condition, poverty, cancels out the other, being a person. (Intro, Nolan)’