It Does Not Matter Who We Are

Let's talk about our beliefs and what we can learn about them. We believe nature is solid and time a constant, matter has substance and time a direction, that there is truth in flesh and the solid ground. The wind may be invisible, but it's real. Smoke, fire, water, light, they're different, not as to stone or steel, but they're tangible, and we assume time has an arrow because it is as a clock; one second is one second for everyone, cause precedes effect. Fruit rots, water flows downstream, we're born, we age, we die, the reverse never happens. None of this is truth, say goodbye to classical reality, because our logic collapses on the subatomic level into ghosts and shadows [. . .] From Job's friends insisting that the good are rewarded and the wicked punished, to the scientists of the 1930s proving - to their horror - that not everything can be proved, we've sought to impose order on the universe. But we've discovered something very surprising: while order does exist in the universe, it is not at all what we had in mind.

Life is thus given as a gift, whence it is evident that anyone would have declined it with thanks had he looked at it and tested it beforehand.

What is the nothing? Our very first approach to this question has something unusual about it. In our asking we posit the nothing in advance as something that "is" such and such' we posit it as a being. But that is exactly what it is being distinguished from. Interrogating the nothing - asking what and how it, the nothing, is - turns what is interrogated into its opposite. The question deprives itself of its own object.

What appears in the night is the night that appears.

The humanities are interpretive arts, whatever else they may be; they teach necessarily improvisational, real-time, and unpredictable practice, because that is the lion's share of living.

Capital seeks the freedom to render life precarious, unstable, and in need of "protection," which it will then sell back to us in the form of private security forces, and it also seeks the freedom to shut down quality public educational opportunities in order to conceal the shoddiness of their offerings and then sell them to the disadvantaged.

As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which God they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have an unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings.

We cannot help but to think of the world as a human world, by virtue of the fact that it is we human beings that think it.

The Whitechapel murders have continued to provide a common vocabulary of male violence against women, a vocabulary now more than one hundred years old. Its persistence owes much to the mass media's exploitation of Ripper iconography. Depictions of female mutilation in mainstream cinema, celebrations of the Ripper as a 'hero' of crime, intensify fears of male violence and convince women that they are helpless victims.

Whenever in my dreams I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear, bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then - not in dreams - but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.

As for the "eyes of too ruthless public": damn their eyes. No art ever yet grew by looking into the eyes of the public, ruthless or otherwise. You can obliterate yourself and mirror God, Nature, or Humanity but if you try to mirror yourself in the eyes of the public, woe be unto your art.

Good lord! of course you don't have to like the stuff I write. I hope the time will never come when I get so fanatical as to let a man's like or dislike for what I happen to "poetare" interfere with an old friendship or a new one.

A kind of banalisation of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup. Warhol's screen-prints show the process at work. His portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy drain the tragedy from the lives of these desperate women, while his day-glo palette returns them to the innocent world of the child's colouring book.

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