Nat Ware > Recent Status Updates

"If we live without contestation under the law of language, these states are in us as if they did not exist... If we throw ourselves against this law, we can in passing fix our consciousness on one of them and, silencing discourse within ourselves, linger over the surprise it gives us. It is better to shut oneself in, to make it night, to remain suspended in this silence in which we sneak up on the sleep of a child."

"Divine or poetic apprehension is on the same level as the fruitless apprehension of the saints in that we can still, through it, appropriate that which surpasses us, and, without grasping it as a real possession, at least link it to ourselves, to what we have already touched. In this way, we do not die entirely: a thread, undoubtedly tenuous... links the apprehended to the self..."

“In summer the room got so hot, tar would splatter on the machine... And the memory was incredibly fragile. Someone wearing a woolen sweater could wipe it clean… And this mouse crawled inside it once. Chewed on some wires and was burned to a crisp. We rescued the machine but never managed to get rid of the stench. It always smelled of charred meat, singed hair, and burned whiskers.”

all of this is so fascinating and the prose is great. I've been really interested in Fred Moten's conception of "mathopoetics" lately and I think that will be something I look into after this. these people discovering mathematic principals that so deeply disturb them they are driven insane or to extreme acts of violence, so evocative.

first chapter already very captivating and totally crushing.

finally started this and I’m seeing why people in book club have had mixed reactions when I ask them how they liked it lmao

"Victorian drains, as with the cloud, performed a second sleight of hand: they transmuted waste into its etymological twin, vastness. Both waste and vastness derive from the Latin vastus- desolate, but also empty, expansive. The drains cleansed the waste from each household and also provided a never-ending supply of fast-running water... a (seemingly) unlimited resource that could be summoned on command."

"Such a woman is the infected carrier of the past: before her the structure of our head and jaws ache- we feel that we could eat her, she who is eaten death returning, for only then do we put our face close to the blood on the lips of our forefathers." Barnes writes with such a bewildering force it's crazy.

“Everything was moving, everything was slowly turning, there was music coming from somewhere. He watched the people inside the elevators, deftly falling. High up, in the walkways, an occasional figure looking down, head and upper body. He wondered if the thing the woman tried to give him in the street might be a newborn child. The same musical phrase over and over, coming from somewhere.”

a master at work…

zama is now

"... a 1997 Toronto Star article described [Lee Harvey] Oswald and McVeigh as 'spiritual brothers, true representatives of a type that emerges every now and then to act out a reoccurring American nightmare'. In fact, Oswald acts as the prototype of McVeigh 'and of all McVeigh's to come'." obviously Dellilo's Libra is a huge source of inspo for this book but it is truly insane seeing the mirroring of Oswald & McVeigh.

really fascinating chapter on McVeigh's interest in UFO conspiracy. gives a great overall history of the ties btwn project paperclip / ufo & abductee communities / white supremacist groups