I First Learnt the Facts From a Lunatic

...'because we must always listen to the language; it is our first sign of the presence of a master's hand; and when we do that, when we listen, it is because we have first pronounced the words and performed the text, so when we listen we hear, hear ourselves singing the saying, and now we are real readers, we are participating in the making, we are moving the tune along the line, because no one who loves literature can follow these motions, these sentences, half sentences, of William Gaddis, very far without halting and holding up their arms and outcrying hallelujah there is something good in this gosh awful God empty world.'...

...'is it a stew of disease and impairment, madness and suicide that produces the artist, Keats consumptive and Beethoven deaf, Dostoevsky epileptic, Byron's foot and Homer's blindness if he existed at all, Baudelaire and Schiller and enough madness and suicide to please God himself, Schumann and Kleist suicides, Hölderlin insane and the most agonising of them all of course yes, sitting there empty eyed in a white gown on exhibit for his loathsome sister's teatime guests, wasn't that she'd betrayed the man, the artist, sold him out no that's to be expected, he's expendable, just the vehicle or the husk of it for the work that's what she corrupted, worse than murder'...

"To produce the eerie noise which preceded the appearance of the ghost Olivier...went to enormous trouble. He made as many as fourteen separate sound tracks. On one he had recorded fifty women shrieking; on another the groans of as many men; a third consisted of a dozen violinists scraping their bows across the strings on a single screeching note. These various tracks had then to be blended in different volumes and intensity until they produced a noise which seemed to him to resemble - on what authority is uncertain - 'the lid of hell being opened'".

- David Foster Wallace, from “The Pale King”

Genesis - Maya Deren