Mon Mots - Various Authors
"She was a poetess of profanity, an oracle of epithets who could outcuss a bathroom wall.
"God, we were concerned about things: War, prejudice, injustice, education. Together we were insufferable, pontifical, self-righteous voice of the Eucharist, pipelines to the Almighty. We could not be wrong, because we were young, humanistic, and full of sh...t.
"The (Old) South of humanity and goodness is slowly rising out of the fallen temple of hatred and white man's nationalism. The town retains her die-hards and nigger-haters and always will. Yet they grow older and crankier with each passing day. When '________' digs another four hundred holes in her plentiful graveyards, deposits there the rouged and elderly corpses, and covers them with the sand, lowcountry soil, the another while army of the Old South will be silenced and not heard from again. The religion of the Confederacy and apartheid will one day be subdued by the passage of years. The land will be the final arbiter of human conflict; no matter how intense the conflict, the victory of earth and grave will be undeniable and complete."
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"How can one deal with the past, with all of those things that fade and slip away? Memories betray us by disappearing in time, becoming less and less distinct, more and more diffuse and transparent. Sometimes memories assume lives of their own; they turn into fantasies that begin to move, spreading themselves out in tastes and colors and odors, all the signs recognized by our senses, and then from the past they create a completely different reality, a past that never existed but even so lives on in distinct images, perhaps even more distinct than the real memories."
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"This is supposed to be the greatest country in the world, but '___________' is right: It's a sell, '________'. I must have forty different 'passwords' for banking and telephone and credit card and internet accounts, and forty different account numbers, and you add them all up and that's our lives. And it's all ugly, physically ugly. The strip malls in "__________' and the Kmarts and Wal-Marts and Home Depots...all plastic and chrome ..."
"No Time to Think" Bob Dylan
"His iPod was magic. His digital TV was magic. The Internet was magic. Even his father's car, the machine through which boys once achieved their first dominion over the physical world, was now controlled by a computer. Diagnosis of malfunction didn't involve tinkering with an engine and getting covered in oil. The car plugged into another impenetrable computer at the dealership. Were anything to go wrong with the technical furniture of '_________'s' life -- and these days, machines didn't sputter on you develop a funny hissing sound, or start to squeak; they either worked or they stopped dead -- the notion of fixing it himself would never enter his head. There were sorcerers for such things, although the concept of repair had itself grown arcane; one was far more likely to go out and buy another machine that magically worked, then magically didn't. Collectively, the human race was growing ever more authoritative about the mechanics of the universe. Individually, the experience of most people was of accelerating impotence and incomprehension. They lived in a world of superstition. The relied on voodoo -- charms, fetishes, and crystal balls whose caprices they were helpless to govern, ye without which the conduct of daily life came to a standstill. Faith that the computer would switch on one more time and do as it was asked had more a religious than a rational cast. When the screen went black, the gods were angry.
'______' was born to a country whose culture had produced the telephone, the flying machine, the assembly line, the Interstate highway, the air-conditioner, and the fiber-optic cable. His people were brilliant with the inanimate -- with ions and prions, with titanium and uranium, with plastic that would survive a thousand years. With sentient matter -- the kind that can't help but notice when a confidant suddenly drops off the map the moment the friendship becomes inconvenient, disagreeable, demanding, and incidentally also useful for something at last -- his countrymen were inept. It was if no on had ever sickened before. Ever languished before, ever confronted the you know what. As if mortality were one of those silly superstitions ---like that one must always drink eight glasses of water a day, that had now been summarily debunked in the Health section of Tuesday's Science Times.
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"Her blank eyes burrowed through the fetid air between herself and her visitor. They were without content; hollow pools of meaninglessness. They were not eyes but voids sunk between two jutting pen-houses of bone and two bloodless hummocks of cheek. They suspended two raw rods of grief before their own immobility, like frozen fountains in a bright wintry air; and on these rods the fluttering rage of a futile grief were hung"__________________________
Quotes
"The business of life is the acquisition of memories. In the end it's all there is." (Paraphrased from what the "butler" said in "Downton Abbey."
"Fortune handed me an advantage from which Fate then drew a tax."
"Carelessness is the handmaiden to tragedy."
"To taste the absolute joys, you also have suffer absolutely for them.
"The brain has the company of all the books its ever read"Here there is neither a sense of life nor joys, but the vast shipwreck of life's esteems."
1/24/12
"For those with faith, no explanation is necessary, for those without, no explanation is possible. St. Thomas Aquinas
"Hope is a form of madness. A benevolent one, sure, but madness all the same. Like an irrational supersitition...not based on any kind of logic, its just unfettered optimism grounded in nothing but faith in things that are out of our control"
"Great minds are sure to madness near allied, and thin partitions do their bounds abide. John Dryden
"But anyone who also has been young knows that the great grief of love is that your body feels the most when it knows the least."
"But all fever has exhilaration inside its delirium and fire consumes more than it warms."
"Obey the request of the stone..."
"...the middle distance between a farewell and a benediction."
"There are those who believe that if grace belongs to God, then luck belongs to the devil who looks after his own"
"It is more honored in the breach than in the observance (easier said than done.")
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Authors'bon mots -- discovered, appreciated, gathered from various sources and arranged for you(quotes that make for a poem of sorts on their own--wish I might be so talented!)
"...Review their crowns into thy Kingdom preserving them spotless, blameless and without reproach, unto ages of ages
...shifts in alliances between person and person, or country and country -- diversions that fill our days with seeming import, but then displaced by whatever thing follows. Time out of time when fate hung suspended, secrets were revealed and fortunes could be reversed in stories of the Old Ones roaring across the midwinter skies, the wild Hunter of a thousand names, in pursuit of his White Lady with her streaming hair and starry distaff, the whirlwind before the storm
... the soul is symphonic, such is the sweetness of music that it banishes human weakness and fear and draws us back to our original state of grace, reuniting us with heaven
...spiritual flames illuminating the passage of time
...breathing the ancient earth itself, the slow exhalation of mountains and tides swelling and contracting pulling the soul down to its muse
***
... insight and asset, not evasion, not an escape from the world, but an immersion in the deepest possible confrontation with reality
...in old age most writers fell silent and existed without force in a precious obscurity indistinguishable from death
...the future full of promise and suggestion, now unreadable distant an inaccessible compulsion.
...an invisible whip-thin no-man's land
... now a mausoleum to the undead and a terrarium of aggrieved neglect.
***
...a man in a mask is most himself
...giving coherence and continuity to his memory
...he would never had had a clue that anything coherent was discernible beneath the stagnant surface of the visible world
***
...a Castrato in the parlatorio? Whatever next?
...the desperate rage of a trapped animal
...the hoarse pathos of his solitary regret (and)
...l'esprit de l'escalier (stairway wit)
...giving away nothing but the vague auguries of a confidence trickster
...he never made the mistake of plying a busted gambler who was pious or gowned in un-purchasable pride
***
.. the heart does not know its station
...a true love sees things through to their end
...the future was no longer an accusation or a threat or a precious resources running out
...blackberries lured him into sun-pricked chambers
...being at once bituminous and having the sweetness of flowers"
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For love of language:
black chowdron and bukkenade
sweet and sour egredouce
greengages, camelade and peppery gauncil
mazzards, darioles and bigaroons
skirrets, rampions and querns
caritas and sapientia
skink, chook, dugite and wagtail
yes, it's English!
In my reading travels certain phrases strike me as being very nice indeed, as follows:July 18
"...as though it were a tiny ocean at the mercy of her reticence."
..."What happens to anyone in exile -- they are finally free."
..."We're free from the duties of fate."
"Her life would wear the mask of paradise."
"....there is another (name of person) -- another dreamer in the last days of youth -- somewhere between enthusiasm and disaster, not yet in the shadow of paradise, not yet in the bounty of its ruins."
"Every fiber in your body tingles. You are in the place that was meant for you. Everything has to be arranged like this to get you here. And you were ready.
It's something you feel, like a weight in both hands; it's the faith that embodies God but incorporates logic."
..."Beauty is merciless"
"The past is a mess of lines, like a sketch seen from afar.Our perception of the future is the past in disguise."
June 8, 2012
...Oh if there's an original thought out there, I could use it right now ..." Bob Dylan
...infrequently -- but nonetheless deliciously -- loving pure and chaste from afar was a grand thing !
...from admiration it was but a small step to desire for acquisition...
...the daunting ordinariness of everyday life...
...sly and cutting (remarks) the kind that are tricky to confront, but felt all the more sharply for being served with that spice of helplessness...
...The dead required nothing from the living, and there as nothing the living could offer the dead. All in all it was a relaxed and amiable relationship.
..."Forget the dead you've left, they will not follow you ..." Bob Dylan
June 6?
“…Only the coldest least imaginative rationalism could fail to be moved by the message
…the impudence of human contemplation…
…there is nobility in anything that endures…
…nothing repels credit like desperation…
…blur by repetition the perfections of their last encounter
…distinction preserved from vulgarity by the music’s sophistication…
…foolish words should not be rewarded by precious tears…
... transformed you beyond your own recognition…
…resurrection of the spirit and eternal spring
…the will (?) of the gods as fickle as March winds…
…the ebony heart of a persimmon tree…
…bereft and unmoored like a wraith unbidden…
... hope incarnate…
…existence is incidental…
…hard earned peculiarities
…a sublime concubine, a summer peach to bring endless spring to his autumn years…
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“…little clouds and gleams of possible rejoinders passing across his features…”
“…ferociously schooled…”
“…love and contempt…”
“…demure blandishments…”
“…prodigious strategy…”
“…the muse stalks with majestic thread…”
“…a clarified antipathy, a somehow reassuring trustlessness.”
“…perhaps being old friends didn’t mean very much, they shared assumptions rather than lives…”
“…nettles among the poppies…”
“…a bumptious self-confidence…”
“….(her) cultivated demureness feared marriage would flatten to a prosaic partnership:
“…an idealism that refused to be suffocated by gritty reality.”
“…in the fullness of time…the wreckage of the past.”
“…we all require big and small lies to survive…”
”…handed his life over to a shadow.”
“…seized his soul…”
“…an exalted foreboding”
“…only great artists feel small in the presence of art.”
“…knight of doleful countenance.”
“…the slow seeping of one’s allotted days.”
“…fine and buff clad…”
“…benediction of the rain…”
“…temperamental lavishness and unprepossessing glories…”
“…donnish conceit…”
“…asperities and collusions…”
“…incandescent patina…”
“…”il gran fifiuto” (apparently the great decision between yeah or nay?_)
Che fece ... il gran rifiuto
by C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933)
(Translation )
For some people the day comes
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It's clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,
he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he'd still say no. Yet that no-the right no-
drags him down all his life.
when they have to declare the great Yes
or the great No. It's clear at once who has the Yes
ready within him; and saying it,
he goes from honor to honor, strong in his conviction.
He who refuses does not repent. Asked again,
he'd still say no. Yet that no-the right no-
drags him down all his life.
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Photo: As a child this was the view from our apartment.
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“What don’t you know?”
“….I can’t know what it is that I don’t know. That’s philosophically self-evident.
…Indeed, isn’t the whole business of ascribing responsibility (to historical events) a kind of cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or its all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is --- was—a chain of individual responsibilities all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that everybody an simply blame everyone else. But of course my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened. That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.”
“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation
Patrick Lagrange
Patrick Lagrange
From FLOATER
“….They all got out of here any way they could The cold rain can give you the shivers They went down the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee All the rest of them rebel rivers”
Bob Dylan
…“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke “There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late”
Bob Dylan
“Suppose the word were only one of God’s jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?’
George Bernard Shaw
