#confabulations

We tend to associate intimacy with closeness and closeness with a certain sum of shared experiences. Yet every day total strangers, who will never say a single word to one another, can share an intimacy. An intimacy contained in the exchange of a glance, a nod of the head, a smile, a shrug of a shoulder. A closeness which lasts for a second or for the duration of a song being sung and listened to together. An agreement about life. An agreement without clauses.

Time, as Einstein and other physicists have explained, is not linear but circular. Our lives are not points on a line—a line that is today being amputated by the Instant Greed of the unprecedented global capitalist order—rather, we are the centres of circles. The circles surround us with testaments addressed to us by our predecessors since the Stone Age, and by texts that are not addressed to us but that can be witnessed by us— texts from nature, from the universe—and they remind us that symmetry coexists with chaos, that ingenuities outflank fatalities, that what is desired is more reassuring than what is promised. Then, sustained by what we have inherited from the past and what we witness, we will have the courage to resist and continue resisting in as yet unimaginable circumstances. We will learn how to wait in solidarity. Just as we will continue indefinitely to praise, to swear, and to curse in every language we know.

“To be a human being is the main thing above all else. And that means to be firm and clear and cheerful, yes, cheerful in spite of everything and anything, because howling is the business of the weak. To be a human being means to joyfully toss your entire life in the giant scales of fate if it must be so, and at the same time to rejoice in the brightness of every day and the beauty of every cloud.”

what are you reading atm? and what do you think about it?

"You often come out of a page when I'm reading, and sometimes out of a page I'm trying to write; come out to join me with a toss of your head and a smile."

I propose a conspiracy of orphans. We exchange winks. We reject hierarchies. All hierarchies. We take the shit of the world for granted and we exchange stories about how we nevertheless get by. We are impertinent. More than half the stars in the universe are orphan-stars belonging to no constellation. And they give off more light than all the constellation stars. Yes we are impertinent. And I guess that I approach and chat up readers in the same way. As if you too were orphans.

“Ever expanding human poverty and the ongoing pillaging of the planet are justified in the name of a utopia to be guaranteed by Market Forces, when they are unregulated and allowed to operate freely; a utopia in which, in Milton Friedman's words, 'each man can vote for the colour of the tie he wants.' In any utopian vision happiness is obligatory. This means that in reality it's unobtainable. Within their utopian logic compassion is a weakness. Utopias despise the present. Utopias substitute Dogma for Hope. Dogmas are engraved; hopes flicker, by contrast, like the flame of a candle.”

Language cannot be reduced to a dictionary or stock of words and phrases. Nor can it be reduced to a warehouse of the works written in it. A spoken language is a body, a living creature, who's physiognomy is verbal and whose visceral functions are linguistic. And this creature's home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate.