Favorite passages, quotes, poems

[RainyCoast]

Rather than devoting all my free time to watching pornography, I spend part of it working at the food bank. …But psychoanalytic thought does not conceive of ethics in this way. It is through enjoyment itself, not the sacrifice of it, that I genuinely encounter the other. An insistence on enjoyment is at the same time an insistence on ethical subjectivity.

 

-Todd McGowan

[RainyCoast]

As Hegel puts it, “The self-knowing Spirit knows not only itself but also the negative o f itself, or its limit: to know one’s limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself.”

 

-Todd McGowan

[RainyCoast]

I was released from forms,

from the perpendiculars,

straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds

of thought

into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends

of sight …

in nature there are few sharp lines.

 

-A. R. Ammons, from “Corsons Inlet,” Corsons Inlet: A Book of Poems (Cornell University Press, 1965)

[RainyCoast]

To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one’s self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray.

 

— Gilles Deleuze, Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

[RainyCoast]

People settle for any known set of identifications, however painful, lest they fall out of the familiar symbolic order into the real of anxiety which opens onto a void of actual emptiness at the center of being.

 

Ellie Ragland

[RainyCoast]

I don’t believe in the virtue of using language for ‘self expression.’ The language that interests me is the one that can actually destroy all the circular, enclosed, narcissistic forms of the subject and of oneself

 

Michel Foucault

[RainyCoast]

This is the monstrosity in love, that the will is infinite and the execution confined, that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit.

 

William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

[RainyCoast]

Be like the headland against which the waves break and break: it stands firm, until presently the watery tumult around it subsides once more to rest. ‘How unlucky I am, that this should have happened to me!’ By no means; say rather, ‘How lucky I am, that it has left me with no bitterness; unshaken by the present, and undismayed by the future.’ The thing could have happened to anyone, but not everyone would have emerged unembittered. So why put the one down to misfortune, rather than the other to good fortune? Can a man call anything at all a misfortune, if it is not a contravention of his nature; and can it be a contravention of his nature if it is not against that nature’s will? Well, then: you have learnt to know that will. Does this thing which has happened hinder you from being just, magnanimous, temperate, judicious, discreet, truthful, self-respecting, independent, and all else by which a man’s nature comes to its fulfillment? So here is a rule to remember in future, when anything tempts you to feel bitter: not, ‘This is a misfortune,’ but ‘To bear this worthily is good fortune.’

 

Marcus Aurelius | Meditations

[RainyCoast]

All beings by nature

are Buddhas,

as ice by nature is water.

Apart from water

there is no ice;

apart from beings,

no Buddhas.

 

Hakuin Ekak

[RainyCoast]

"Whatever is turned away from is marked as a danger to be faced or a loss to be mourned"

 

-Joseph Smith, Arguing with Lacan

[RainyCoast]

Even now,

decades after,

I wash my face with cold water—

 

Not for discipline,

nor memory,

nor the icy, awakening slap,

 

but to practice

choosing

to make the unwanted wanted.

 

—Jane Hirshfield, “A Cedary Fragrance,” Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins, 2001)

[RainyCoast]

...

 

Yet even today, to look at a tree

and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed.

 

There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror.

 

Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door,

ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle.

 

Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket

gives off -

the immeasurable's continuous singing,

before it goes back into story and feeling.

 

In Borneo, there are palm trees that walk on their high roots.

Slowly, with effort, they lift one leg then another.

 

I would like to join that stilted transmigration,

to feel my own skin vertical as theirs:

an ant-road, a highway for beetles.

 

I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart.

To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch,

and then keep walking, unimaginably further.

 

 

Jane Hirshfield

[Jibralta]

Near this Spot

are deposited the Remains of one

who possessed Beauty without Vanity,

Strength without Insolence,

Courage without Ferocity,

and all the virtues of Man without his Vices.

 

This praise, which would be unmeaning Flattery

if inscribed over human Ashes,

is but a just tribute to the Memory of

Boatswain, a Dog

 

~John Hobhouse for Lord Byron

[RainyCoast]

We live in a culture that venerates wellness and self-improvement, both as industry and personal discipline. Yet the strategies of modern cultural production are bent constantly towards the repression of emotion, the obsessive management of general feelings that, unchecked, might expose two great unspoken truths. The first is that much of modern life is traumatic, unbearable, and profoundly frightening. Acknowledging this openly allows for a second truth, more dangerous in the scope of its possibility: that it might not have to be this way.

 

Laurie Penny, Meltdown of the Phantom Snowflakes

[RainyCoast]

Darkness narrows the river’s

silver path. I’m heading

home myself, up the steep hill,

a little breathless. A chill

from the woods touches my arm.

How we come to evening.

 

Norita Dittberner-Jax, from “Evensong,” Crossing the Water (Nodin Press, 2017)

[RainyCoast]

The first necessity of life is shelter. Shelter against nature. The first prayer is for protection. The first sign of life is pain.

 

John Berger, “The White Bird” (1988 )

[RainyCoast]

In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness —from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis.

 

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

[Jibralta]

We live in a culture that venerates wellness and self-improvement, both as industry and personal discipline. Yet the strategies of modern cultural production are bent constantly towards the repression of emotion, the obsessive management of general feelings that, unchecked, might expose two great unspoken truths. The first is that much of modern life is traumatic, unbearable, and profoundly frightening. Acknowledging this openly allows for a second truth, more dangerous in the scope of its possibility: that it might not have to be this way.

 

Laurie Penny, Meltdown of the Phantom Snowflakes

 

In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness —from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis.

 

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

 

Very true, both!

[RainyCoast]

Very true, both!

 

reminds me there is more choice and power at the margins than immediately apparent too.

[RainyCoast]

Love bestows innocence. It has nothing to forgive. The person loved is not the same as the person seen crossing the street or washing her face. Nor exactly the same as the person living his (or her) own life and experience, for he (or she) cannot remain innocent. Who then is the person loved? A mystery, whose identity is confirmed by nobody except the lover. How well Dostoevsky saw this. Love is solitary even though it joins. The person loved is the being who continues when the person’s own actions and egocentricity have been dissolved. Love recognises a person before the act and the same person after it. It invests this person with a value which is untranslatable into virtue.

 

— John Berger, “Between Two Colmars,” in About Looking

[RainyCoast]

Hope is reactionary: it cocoons actuality in the gossamer of the tolerable, dulling the thirst for change.

 

Despair is revolutionary: it grinds the knife-edge of the intolerable against the whetstone of actuality, sparking the will to change.

 

Whoever tolerates the present will never risk everything to change it.

 

Only those who realize they have no future left to lose will be willing to stake everything on the total transformation of the present; a transformation in which every envisageable future is abolished, the better to invite the facelessness of what will come.

 

The only appropriate mode of thinking for a culture on the edge of extinction is the thinking that stimulates pain.

 

— Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound

[RainyCoast]

“Everyone carries a room about inside him. This fact can even be proved by means of the sense of hearing.

If someone walks fast and one s up one’s ears and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet,

one hears, for instance, the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall.”

 

- Franz Kafka, Blue Octavo Notebooks

[RainyCoast]

“A little hypocrisy and a little compromise oils the wheels of social life”

- Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

[RainyCoast]

The work with kids I did was group therapy and I did it with a brilliant therapist who is still a good friend. And there were kids, you know, from… I guess the youngest might have been fourteen but they were mostly in their middle to late adolescence, sometimes up to twenty-five or thirty. And I guess the effect of it was mostly that you didn’t have to be afraid of anything that the mind does. Even though you can be thunderstruck at it, at its absurdity and sometimes obscenity, there really wasn’t anything to be afraid of. And I think that may have helped me write some poems that I might not have been able to write otherwise. Just that, being able to say “Oh, look, this is what mind does. And so what? Let’s think about it or talk about it or write about it.” If I got anything from that work, it would have been that. Although there were scary things too: kids trying to kill themselves, and sometimes succeeding. But basically it was that: realising how many different things consciousness can do, and how forgivable almost all of it is.

 

-C.K. Williams In conversation with Ahren Warner

[RainyCoast]

I feel best when my sense of emancipation preserves the memory of what it emancipates from.

 

-Jacques Derrida