If you write a novel in which nobody has a shit, nobody pisses, farts, cuts themselves, nobody has an awful fugue where they are aware of their blood circulation or their swollen liver or the wheeze in their lungs or the spot on the line of their jaw – what are you saying about the world at that point? You’re saying that the important thing is nothing to do with embodiment. You’re saying that the important thing is that we’re not like animals, whereas of course we are animals.

“I only trust people who are funny, men or women, or who admit to having made horrible mistakes.”

“The sending out of words to a blind future is what any writer does. It is a simple occupation (nothing special, chosen, or justifiable) that replicates the sending of messages without envelopes, speech traveling forward to a listener. It reproduces the sensation of being all mechanics and body, loaded with events, and projected onto a blind No One. It echoes the turning around of Orpheus in the underworld, because he wouldn’t have been a poet if he hadn’t turned. Why should he have trusted anything but his instincts? Everything is there while everything is Orpheus.”

“When I am alone, working, I never think of my readers. And in terms of what I am after, I don’t think of them either. I think about the problem I am creating for myself as I go along. The problem is, as you describe it, the difficulty of reconciling multiple registers of consciousness and language. Soul and sticky atoms. I think a lot about my readers when I am giving a reading and hoping that they can hear the subliminal logic behind the music of the speeding words. If someone is alone reading my poems, I hope it would be like reading someone’s notebook. A record. Of a place, beauty, difficulty. A familiar daily struggle.”

“I try to let the words write the words, not interfering, until a meaning begins to reveal itself to me. It emerges from the random mass of words facing me as a mind that happens to be mine for that moment. I think what I am always after is discovering the interrelationship between the parts that are given, because I don’t see, or want to see, any conflict between mind, body, context, intelligence, memory, stars, weather, and emotion. I really want to understand consciousness in the end. To pass under the ‘gates of wrath.’ To feel how the mind takes form.”

“It’s just part of being human, to be in a rage. And I do believe in political poetry. It has to be poetry first⁠—as depth and sound and rebounding words⁠—and I revise, fanatically, over and over and over again, but I’m very committed to certain ideas, however they come out. I think at some point I became a sort of permanent adolescent, wanting to participate in a rebellion against grown-ups.”

“People who are destabilized by historical forces are more intelligent than the secure ones who have got the formulas in place. The safety of received tastes and opinions, confirmed in furniture and inherited artworks, stops the true brain, the brain of the seeking blind. When people are uprooted and insecure, their tables are alive with the conversation of prophets—philosophy, music, literature, God. But when the people are safe, the repetition of a formula goes around and around.”

Lament

The dream of mourning

[N]othing happens anymore. Nothing any longer has the time to happen. There is no duration left fro anything to unfold in. Nothing can anchor itself in the world long enough to make sense. While the present still has a duration, the hyperpresent no longer does. It is pure currency, pure instantaneity. [...] Self-forgetting occurs through surrender - willing abandonment to the immersive force of the flow of synchronisation.

[T]his writing and rewriting of the present - as if it were a palimpsest - continues to accelerate, demanding that we forget at an ever higher frequency. What was if of no concern; all has beens are eliminated in favour of what is, with little regard of what will be.

Where Epicurus makes the inevitability and finality of death the principal argument for living and taking pleasure in the present, postindustrial ideology uses the promise of immediate pleasure as a diversionary technique that tries to ward off death, its inevitability and its finality, by eternalising the present.

Beyond simply making us forget, amnesia makes us more present. Just as paradoxically, it appears that this enhanced presence corresponds to a deficit in the intensity of experience, and so, in a way, it corresponds to an absence. In a currency that is ever more current, everything has the same value as everything else. The postindustrial era's spectacular anaesthesia/amnesia is intimitaly linked to a domain of the present, the current, that is ever more condensed, ever more instantaneous. Amnesia has perhaps brought to light a newfound inability to disconnect ourselves from what is right in front of us, an inability to perceive in any way other than through a relationship with a hyper-current world.

This operational equivalence between death and forgetting leads us to the following paradoxical state of affairs: by establishing forgetting as the primordial function for the warding off of death, we betray a deeper intuition of their equivalence, and effectively realise this equivalence. The forgetting of death becomes death by forgetting.

Of course, repetition and forgetting ventilate the sensorial field, providing free spaces and a rhythmics appropriate to the consumption and distribution of cultural products. But at the same time - and this is undoubtedly what makes the whole operation work - by transfixing us, by anaesthetising us, they reaffirm an eternally identical, unalterable present, thus contributing to the decoupling of finite-being and projected-being. They therefore participate in the projection of being into a symbolic space that distances it from death.