Question Everything

“The bourgeois (which today comprises all of mankind, including ‘the people’) has the same attitude toward the classics as toward religion: it knows they exist, would be sorry if they didn’t, realizes they serve some vague purpose, but makes no use of them and finds them very boring.”

“…Desire, a function central to all human experience, is the desire for nothing nameable. And at the same time this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is, there wouldn’t even be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack.”

“There is always change, as a neo-environmentalist would happily tell you; but there are different qualities of change. There is human-scale change, and there is industrial-scale change; there is change led by the needs of complex systems, and change led by the needs of individual humans. There is a manageable rate of evolution, and there is a chaotic, excitable rush toward shiny things perched on the edge of a great ravine, flashing and scrolling like sirens in the gathering dusk.”

“There is a certain domain that has to remain unseen in order for our lives to remain meaningful. My point is that, maybe, to survive, we have to break out of this phantasmatic horizon of our lives and we have to learn to look at our lives, as it were, from outside, as one among objects.”

“In spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody. The essential substance of every thought and feeling remains incommunicable, locked up in the impenetrable strong-room of the individual soul and body. Our life is a sentence of perpetual solitary confinement.”

“The first creative act is to create silence–it is not that silence is broken, but that silence itself breaks, interrupts, the continuous murmur of the Real, thus opening up a clearing in which words can be spoken. There is no speech proper without this background of silence: as Heidegger knew, all speech answers “the sound of silence.” Everything makes love with silence: this, of course, does not mean that there is a sexual relationship between Something and Nothing, but, precisely, its failure: this lovemaking is failed. That is to say: the voice of silence, that of “a poem buried in the silence of things,” is not a silent support, protective and caring of the poet’s words, but that which speaks “to ignore” the poet, a brutal malevolently neutral entity which “alert, behind my poem […] denies me, chokes my voice.”

“We inhabit a deeply imagined world that exists alongside the real physical world. Even the crudest utterance, or the simplest, contains the fundamental poetry by which we live. This mind fabric, woven of images and illusions, shields us. In a sense, or rather, in all senses, it’s a shock absorber. As harsh as life seems to us now, it would feel even worse — hopelessly, irredeemably harsh — if we didn’t veil it, order it, relate familiar things, create mental cushions. One of the most surprising facts about human beings is that we seem to require a poetic version of life. It’s not just that some of us enjoy reading or writing poetically, or that many people wax poetic in emotional situations, but that all human beings of all ages in all cultures all over the world automatically tell their story in a poetic way, using the elemental poetry concealed in everyday language to solve problems, communicate desires and needs, even talk to themselves. When people invent new words, they do so playfully, metaphorically — computers have viruses, one can surf the internet, a naive person is clueless. In time, people forget the etymology or choose to disregard it. We dine at chic restaurants from porcelain dinner plates without realizing that when the smooth, glistening porcelain was invented in France a long time ago, someone with a sense of humor thought it looked as smooth as the vulva of a pig, which is indeed what porcelain means. When we stand by our scruples, we don’t think of our feet, but the word comes from the Latin scrupulus, a tiny stone that was the smallest unit of weight. Thus a scrupulous person is so sensitive he’s irritated by the smallest stone in his shoe. For the most part, we are all unwitting poets.”

“The ego isn’t wrong; it’s just unconscious. When you observe the ego in yourself, you are beginning to go beyond it. Don’t take the ego too seriously. When you detect egoic behavior in yourself, smile. At times you may even laugh. How could humanity have been taken in by this for so long? Above all, know that the ego isn’t personal. It isn’t who you are. If you consider the ego to be your personal problem, that’s just more ego.”

  “As the embodied soul continuously passes, in this body, from boyhood to youth to old age, the soul similarly passes into another body at death. A sober person is not bewildered by such a change.”  BhagavadGita 2.13 

“There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.”

Desire in Relationships

“I feel too tightly constricted in everything that signifies Myself: even the eternity that I am is too tight.”

“The World and Life are one. Physiological life is of course not “Life”. And neither is psychological life. Life is the world.”

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”

“I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”