BLOCKQUOTE.org

Where we are all more or less the same, the need to manufacture difference, to create and stigmatize “others,” may become a temptation, one easily susceptible to political exploitation. The psycho-sociological, possibly even biological mechanisms of mimetic rivalry, aggression, and a death drive, visible in larger groups and nations, may well first emerge in small disaffected factions and cells that can seem to constitute themselves out of the blue, parting ways with the familial, parental, and religious-cultural environments into which they had heretofore blended, gray on gray.

Hent De Vries’s introduction to Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World

Already an incredibly interesting book.

Why I love Saul Bellow.

Lily does not speak clearly; I guess she was taught in boarding school that a lady speaks softly, and consequently she mumbles, and I am hard of hearing on the right side, and the wind and the tires and the little engine . . .

Eugene Henderson in Henderson the Rain King

There was a time when people felt as if structure in most forms were a constraint and they attacked it, which in a culture is like an autoimmune problem: the organism is not allowing itself the conditions of its own existence. We’re cultural creatures and meaning doesn’t simply generate itself out of thin air; it’s sustained by a cultural framework. It’s like deciding how much more interesting it would be if you had no skeleton: you could just slide under the door.

Marilyn Robinson in The Paris Review

But mine is different.

It follows from all this that in all the arts the output of trash is both absolutely and relatively greater than it was in the past; and that it must remain greater for just so long as the world continues to consume the present inordinate quantities of reading-matter, seeing-matter, and hearing-matter.

Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay. A Traveller’s Journal, quoted by Walter Benjamin

Melt

His name was Milt. I was too young to understand that. I heard Melt. Melt was what looked to be happening to his face and arms, and the noises from his throat suggested his voice was melting along with his face. I scarcely remember Milt and his wife Cleo, though I have the impression that my mother was fond of them, and they of our family.

My clearest memory of them is the night we visited Melt in the hospital. He wore a spotted-pattern gown and wires, and when we walked into his room he wore a smile. He was drinking a carton of milk with a straw in it and he asked if I wanted to drink. He said it was skim milk. The word that I heard him say was skin. I imagined skin floating in the milk like pulp in orange juice. When years later while I still drank milk I could not overcome an aversion to skim milk, imagining the skin-pulp. I may not have said a word in reply (I was a shy child) but I didn’t take Melt up on the offer.

There’s not much else I remember of Melt and Cleo beside their being two kind and gentle people. I remember the night; whatever time of year it was it was not a cold night.

I suppose as children we enjoy some immunity from prosecution for the limits of our language, and in our elder years we overcome the zeal to prosecute. I may be thinking of ideals. Children learn early to ridicule and not every old person masters the thrill of it.

If Melt or Cleo or even my mother learned my malapropisms, if I ever voiced them, no one teased me for them, and I never felt embarrassment for having misheard the words when I learned better. My memories of the night and of Melt are warm. I am given to believe the one thing is related to the other.

Play, rewind, play, rewind.

Behind their house a half acre of lawn pushes the sky, the blades lazy and flapping over each other, half-drunk with rain. Maybe tonight or maybe tomorrow dad will mow it to keep from the double work of mowing an overgrown lawn. Keeping a lawn at a manageable length is important, as school work and other work is important, if one wants to keep the work manageable.

We bounce in the deck chairs under the shade of the eave. I explain that the lager in my hand is almost identical to the lager in his hand, the one coming to exist when the other was bought out and reformulated, and then not long ago restored. So now there are two. This is how it was explained to me. He empties his bottle and opens a full bottle of the other kind of beer that I bought him. It’s smooth, he says. I add that it’s faintly sweet, and he agrees, it is.

At dinner my parents update me on our relatives. We relish the dysfunction because it is normalcy; it means all is well. The dishes come. They’re the same dishes we always order. The waiter spoons bean curd onto a hot plate. It sizzles. Mom asks for the mushrooms that I won’t eat, and I am happy to oblige. Dad is happy with lo mein. I tell them which of the animals on the placemat I’ve seen in the last month. The ones I haven’t seen are the snake, the boar, the horse, and the dragon. On the ride back to the city I will see a horse.

After dinner we drive around looking for somewhere to rent a movie. From the road our eyes strain to locate the red kiosks that are all that remain since the rental chains that forced the local shops out of business also closed. Dad and I touch through a few menus on the first kiosk without finding Up or anything interesting. The selection seems to cater to people who are not us but who we know live nearby. Choices reinforce choices, I think; companies want to know what customers want so they can sell them more of what they want, shaping taste into a hall of mirrors, or something like Narcissus’s pool. The second kiosk doesn’t have the one we want to see but it has Where the Wild Things Are, which we can live with.

We sleep. When we wake, we watch a trio of goldfinches scold the gopher dangling from the bird feeder. He heeds them, grudgingly, and before long a shadow shows him bouncing in the gutter that overhangs where we sat the last afternoon. Then he’s circling the potted plants — inside the pots — then back up the downspout to the roof, screeching his sovereignty, and then the bird feeder shimmies on its hook. The finches leave, the finches fly back.

Our true experiences are not at all garrulous. They could not communicate themselves even if they tried. That is because they lack the right word. Whatever we have words for, that we have already got beyond. In all talk there is a grain of contempt. Language, it seems, was invented only for what is average, medium, communicable. With language the speaker immediately vulgarizes himself.

Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

Hey, hey.

We were in her backyard. I was five and she was probably eight. I thrust my belly out and growled, “Hey, hey, hey!” She took the words as a cue. She set her hands on her hips and held her elbows out and leaned toward me and recited,

“Hey, hey — what do you say?
This was made In the U.S.A.”

We had different ideas.

Dona vida. Dona gizmos.

Sociologist Jacques Ellul paraphrases the reply his friend, “a very competent surgeon,” gave to a question “about technical progress in surgery”:

Currently, we carry out heart transplants, liver transplants and kidney transplants. But where do those kidneys, that heart and those lungs come from, in fact? They must be healthy organs. Not affected by an illness or the like. Moreover, they must be fresh. In fact, there is just one source: traffic accidents.

So, to carry out more operations, we need more traffic accidents. If we make traffic safer, fewer of those wonderful operations will be carried out.

“The Treachery Of Technology”