The alarm clock placed by his pillow, undaunted by the humming of the fan, was marking off time with a dull tocking. The clock was a sardonic embellishment to his daily life, for he had never once used to it wake him. His consciousness flowed on, day and night, like a murmuring brook; he was long used at night to maintaining himself transparent like crystal within it, and the alarm clock was the friend, the Sancho Panza, that turned the custom into a comedy on his behalf. The cheap sound of its mechanism was a splendid source of comfort: it made a farce of any continuity in him.

The human mind, he explained, developed by the creation and progressive chemical reinforcement of neural networks of variable length, from two to fifty neurons, if not more. As a human brain contained several billion neurons, the number of combinations, and therefore of possible circuits, was staggering--it went way beyond, for example, the number of molecules in the universe.

The number of circuits used varied greatly from one individual to the next, which sufficed, according to him, to explain the countless gradations between idiocy and genius. But, even more remarkably, a frequently used neuronal circuit became, as a result of ionic accumulations, easier and easier to use--there was, in short, progressive self-reinforcement, and that applied to everything: ideas, addictions, and moods. The phenomenon was proven for individual psychological reactions as well as for social relations: to conscientize mental blocks only reinforced them; trying to settle a conflict between two people generally made it insoluble. Knowall then launched a pitiless attack on Freudian theory, which was not only based on no consistent physiological foundations, but also led to dramatic results that were directly contrary to the chosen goal. On the screen behind him, the succession of diagrams that had punctuated his speech stopped and was replaced by a brief and poignant documentary devoted to the mental--and sometimes unbearable--sufferings of Vietnam veterans. They couldn't forget, had nightmares every night, could no longer even drive or cross the street without assistance, they lived constantly in fear and it seemed impossible for them to readapt to a normal social life. It focused then on the case of a stooped, wrinkled man who had only a thin crown of disheveled red hair and who seemed to be truly reduced to a wreck: he trembled constantly, could no longer leave his house, and was in need of permanent medical asssistance; and he suffered, suffered without end. In the cupboard of his dining room he kept a little jar, filled with oil from Vietnam; every time he opened the cupboard and took out the jar, he broke down in tears.

"Stop," said Knowall. "Stop." The image froze on the close-up of the old man in tears. "Stupidity," continued Knowall. "Completed and utter stupidity. The first thing this man should do is take his bottle of Vietnamese soil and throw it out the window. Every time he opens the cupboard, every time he takes out the bottle--and sometimes he does it up to fifty times a day--he reinforces the neuro-circuit, and condemns himself to suffer a little more. Similarly, every time that we dwell on the past, that we return to a painful episode--and this is more or less what psychoanalysis boils down to--we increase the chances of reproducing it. Instead of advancing, we bury ourselves. Whenever we experience sadness, disappointment, something that prevents us from living, we must start by moving out, burning photos, avoiding talking to anyone about it. Repressed memories disappear; this can take some time, but they disappear in the end. The circuit deactivates itself."

The sole way, it seemed to her often enough when she was working at writing a poem, to use words with meaning, would be to choose words, for themselves, and invest them with her own meaning: not her own, perhaps, but meaning which was implicit in their shape, too frequently nothing to do with dictionary definition. The words which the tradition of her art offered her were by now, in chaos, coerced through the contexts of a million inanities, the printed page everywhere opiate, row upon row of compelling idiocies disposed to induce stupor, coma, necrotic convulsion; and when they reached her hands they were brittle, straining and cracking, sometimes they broke under the burden which her tense will imposed, and she found herself clutching their fragments, attempting again with this shabby equipment her raid on the inarticulate.

He's surrounded by untalented people, as we all are. Originality is a device that untalented people use to impress other untalented people, and protect themselves from talented people...
- Valentine, this is the last time ...
- Most original people are forced to devote all their time to plagiarizing. Their only difficulty is that is they have a spark of wit or wisdom themselves, they're given no credit. The curse of cleverness. Now wait, Brown. Stop. Stop there where you are and relax for a moment. We still have some business to straighten out. He needs to talk or he'll come to pieces, isn't that what you told me before he got here? Well let him talk, he's said some very interesting things. But don't let him talk to himself, that's all he's been doing, that's all he does when he talks to you and you don't listen, he knows you don't. Let him talk, then, but listen to him. He may not say anything clever, but that's just as well. Most people are clever because they don't know how to be honest. He paused.
- Come, my dear fellow. If you don't say anything I shan't be able to use you in this novel, the one in which Brown figures so monumentally since everyone thinks he's honest because he doesn't know how to be clever.

- Because, my dear fellow, no one knows what you're thinking. And that is why people read novels, to identify projections of their own unconscious. The hero has to be fearfully real, to convince them of their own reality, which they rather doubt. A novel without a hero would be distracting in the extreme. They have to know what you think, or good heavens, how can they know that you're going through some wild conflict, which is after all the duty of a hero.

-Esther it isn't the secrecy, the darkness everywhere, so much as the lateness. I mean I get used to myself at night, it takes that long sometimes. The first thing in the morning I feel sort of undefined, but by midnight you've done all the things you have to do, I mean all the things like meeting people and, you know, and paying bills, and by night those things are done because by then there's nothing you can do about them if they aren't done, so there you are alone and you have the things that matter, after the whole day you can sort of take everything that's happened and go over it alone. I mean I'm never really sure who I am until night, he added.

-And do you know the worst thing? she went on. -Do you know the hardest thing of all? The waiting. A woman is always waiting. She's ... always waiting.

-Listen ... , he said. He'd withdrawn his hand on the table top automatically. -That's what it is, this arrogance, in this flamenco music this same arrogance of suffering, listen. The strength of it's what's so overpowering, the self-sufficiency that's so delicate and tender without an instant of sentimentality. With infinite pity but refusing pity, it's a precision of suffering, he went on, abruptly working his hand in the air as though to shape it there, -the tremendous tension of violence all enclosed in a framework, ... in a pattern that doesn't pretend to any other level but it's own, do you know what I mean? He barely glanced at her to see if she did.
-It's the privacy, the exquisite sense of privacy about it, he said speaking more rapidly, -it's the sense of privacy that most popular expressions of suffering don't have, don't dare have, that's what makes it arrogant. That what sentimentalizing invades and corrupts, that's what we've lost everywhere, especially here where they make every possible assault on your feelings and privacy. These things have their own patterns, suffering and violence, and that's ... the sense of violence within its own pattern, the pattern that belongs to violence like the bullfight, that's why the bullfight is art, because it respects its own pattern ...

This passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, shake hands with the latest novelist, get hold of the latest painter, devour ... what is it? What is it they want from a man that they didn't get from his work? What do they expect? What is there left of him when he's done his work? What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology.

That romantic disease, originality, all around we see originality of incompetent idiots, they could draw nothing, paint nothing, just so the mess they make is original ... Even two hundred years ago who wanted to be original, to be original was to admit that you could not do a thing the right way, so you could only do it your own way. When you paint you do not try to make it better, so you copy masters, only masters, for with each copy of a copy the form degenerates ... you do not invent shapes, you know them, auswendig wissen Sie, by heart ...

But I don't get pissed, y'all don't even see through the mist
How the fuck can I be white, I don't even exist
I get a clean shave, bathe, go to a rave
Die from an overdose and dig myself up out of my grave
My middle finger won't go down, how do I wave?

His characters sing of lost paradises and unforgettable hopes, and the song is one of cruelty and greed; exploitation, cheating, lies. The deceived sing of their deception, learn its causes and regain the truths of their dreams.

[ref Brecht]

— But this one there's no name it's, they use computers. He brandished a flyer carrying a man's face eradicated by punched holes and numbers.
— They use, they call it coded anonymity, where they can make more meaningful evaluations of qualifi...
— What do you need to put your anonymity in code for?
— Respecting the dignity of the private individ...
— Nobody knows who you are anyway.

There is nothing so vain, absurd, ridiculous, extravagant, impossible, incredible, so monstrous a chimera, so prodigious and strange, that [melancholy men] will not fear, feign, suspect and imagine unto themselves. Lod. Vives said in a jest of a silly country fellow that killed his ass for drinking up the moon: ut lunam mundo redderet, you truly may say of them in earnest; they will act, concieve all extremes, contrarieties, and contradictions, and that in infinite varieties.

- Vulgarity, cupidity, and power. Is that what frightens you? Is that all you see around you, and you think it was different then? Flanders in the fifteenth century, do you think it was all like the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb? What about the paintings we've never seen? the trash that's disappeared? Just because we have a few masterpieces left, do you think they were all masterpieces left, do you think they were all masterpieces? What about the pictures we've never seen, and never will see? that were as bad as anything that's ever been done. And your precious van Eyck, do you think he didn't live up to his neck in a loud vulgar court? In a world where everything was done for the same reasons everything's done now? for vanity and avarice and lust? and the boundless egoism of these Chancellor Rolins? Do you think they knew the difference between what was bizarre and what was beautiful? that their vulgar ostentation didn't stifle beauty everywhere, everywhere? the way it's doing today? Yes, damn it, listen to me now, and swear by all that's ugly! Do you think any painter did anything but hire himself out? These fine altarpieces, do you think they glorified anyone but the vulgar having men who commissioned them? Do you think a van Eyck didn't curse having to whore away his genius, to waste his genius, to waste his talents on all sorts of vulgar celebrations, at the mercy of people he hated?

Blood flowed over his broken tooth. He'd turned away, but swung about again unable to stop. - Yes, I remember your little talk, your insane upside-down apology for these pictures, every figure and every object with its own presence, its own consciousness because it was being looked at by God! Do you know what it was? What it really was? that everything was so afraid, so uncertain God saw it, that it insisted its vanity on His eyes? Fear, fear, pessimism and fear and depression everywhere, the way it is today, that why your pictures are so cluttered with detail, this terror of emptiness, this absolute terror of space. Because maybe God isn't watching. Maybe He doesn't see. Oh, this pious cult of Middle Ages! Being looked at by God! Is there a moment of faith in any of their work, in one centimeter of canvas? or is it vanity and fear, the same decadence that surrounds us now. A profound mistrust in God, and they need every idea out where they can see it, where they can get their hands on it. Your ... detail, he commenced to falter a little, - your Bouts, was there ever a worse bourgeois than your Dierick Bouts? and his damned details? Talk to me of separate consciousness, being looked at by God, and then swear by all that's ugly! Talk to me about your precious van Eycks, and be proud to be as wrong as they were, as wrong as everyone around them was, as wrong as he was. And Basil Valentine flung out a hand to the broken hulk on the floor, toward which he backed the retreating figure before him. -Separation, he said in a voice near a whisper, - all of it cluttered with separation, everything in its own vain shell, everything separate withdrawn from everything else. Being looked at by God! Is there separation in God!

The 9/11 Truth movement is really distinguished by a kind of defiant unfamiliarity with the actual character of America's ruling class. In 9/11 lore the people who staff the White House, the security agencies, the Pentagon and groups like PNAC and the Council of Foreign Relations are imagined to be a monolithic, united class of dastardly, swashbuckling risk-takers with permanent hard-ons for Bourne Supremacy-style "false flag" and "black bag" operations, instead of the mundanely greedy, risk-averse, backstabbing, lawn-tending, half-clever suburban golfers they are in real life. It completely misunderstands the nature of American government -- fails to see that the old maxim about "the business of America is business" is absolutely true, that the federal government in this country is really just a lo-rent time-share property seasonally occupied by this or that clan of financial interests, each of which takes its 4-year turn at the helm tinkering with the tax laws and regulatory code and the rates at the Fed in the way it thinks will best keep the money train rolling.

The people who really run America don't send the likes of George Bush and Dick Cheney to the White House to cook up boat-rocking, maniacal world-domination plans and commit massive criminal conspiracies on live national television; they send them there to repeal PUCHA and dole out funds for the F-22 and pass energy bills with $14 billion tax breaks and slash fuel efficiency standards and do all the other shit that never makes the papers but keeps Wall Street and the country's corporate boardrooms happy. You don't elect politicians to commit crimes; you elect politicians to make your crimes legal. That is the whole purpose of the racket of government. Another other use of it would be a terrible investment, and the financial class in this country didn't get to where it is by betting on the ability of a president whose lips move when he reads to blow up two Manhattan skyscrapers in broad daylight without getting caught.

But according to 9/11 Truth lore, the financial patrons of democratic government were game for exactly that sort of gamble. According to the movement, the Powers That Be in the year 2000 spent $200 million electing George Bush and Dick Cheney because they were insufficiently impressed with the docility of the American population. What was needed, apparently, was a mass distraction, a gruesome mass murder that would whip the American population into a war frenzy. The same people who had managed in the 2000 election to sell billionaire petro-royalist George Bush as an ordinary down-to-earth ranch hand apparently so completely lacked confidence in their own propaganda skills that they resorted to ordering a mass murder on American soil as a way of cajoling America to go to war against a second-rate tyrant like Saddam Hussein. As if getting America to support going to war even against innocent countries had ever been hard before!

The truly sad thing about the 9/11 Truth movement is that it's based upon the wildly erroneous proposition that our leaders would ever be frightened enough of public opinion to feel the need to pull off this kind of stunt before acting in a place like Afghanistan or Iraq. At its heart, 9/11 Truth is a conceit, a narcissistic pipe dream for a dingbat, sheeplike population that is pleased to imagine itself dangerous and ungovernable. Rather than admit to their own powerlessness and irrelevance, or admit that they've spent the last fifty years or so electing leaders who openly handed their tax money to business cronies and golfed in Scotland while middle America's jobs were being sent overseas, the adherents to 9/11 Truth instead flatter themselves with fantasies about a ruling class obsessed with keeping the terrible truth from the watchful, exacting eye of The People.

What you call dreaming is very real for the warrior.

Breakfast is the only meal of the day that I tend to view with the same kind of traditionalized reverence that most people associate with Lunch and Dinner. I like to eat breakfast alone, and almost never before noon; anybody with a terminally jangled lifestyle needs at least one psychic anchor every twenty-four hours, and mine is breakfast. In Hong Kong, Dallas or at home — and regardless of whether or not I have been to bed — breakfast is a personal ritual that can only be properly observed alone, and in a spirit of genuine excess. The food factor should always be massive: four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half-pound of either sausage, bacon, or corned beef hash with diced chiles, a Spanish omelette or eggs Benedict, a quart of milk, a chopped lemon for random seasoning, and something like a slice of Key lime pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the best cocaine for dessert…. Right, and there should also be two or three newspapers, all mail and messages, a telephone, a notebook for planning the next twenty-four hours and at least one source of good music…. All of which should be dealt with outside, in the warmth of a hot sun, and preferably stone naked.

There are times, however, and this is one of them, when even being right feels wrong. What do you say, for instance, about a generation that has been taught that rain is poison and sex is death? If making love might be fatal and if a cool spring breeze on any summer afternoon can turn a crystal blue lake into a puddle of black poison right in front of your eyes, there is not much left except TV and relentless masturbation. It's a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.

The so called "Russian Soul" can be also explained by origins of the Russian people. Proverbial slowness of Finns ("hot finish lads!") can be seen as phenomenon of Russian soul. Enigmatical Russian Soul is simply Russian man, uncertain, slow to decide, hesitating, never sure of itself, never sure of its own decision. Forest man with a milky skin, with thin blond hair. Not a Slav, but a Finn, Finn, Finn! And don't accuse me of racism. Happily we have Turks and all sorts of Mongols amongst us. But the sick from alcoholism urban Russian Europeans are descendants of native Urgo-Finns and their tribes. They have shadowy mysterious souls because for hundred generations their ancestors were living by the river banks in the forests. They like to get drunk and to weep. Of too many trees, of too much of river's water the Russian Soul is created.

[I]f once you're started in living, you're born into sin, then? And how do you atone? By locking yourself up in remorse for what you might have done? Or by living it through. By locking yourself up in remorse with what you know you have done? Or by going back and living it through. By locking yourself up with your work, until it becomes a gessoed surface, all prepared, clean, and smooth as ivory? Or by living it through. By drawing lines in your mind? Or by living it through. If it was sin from the start, and possible all the time, to know it's possible and avoid it? Or by living it through. I used to wonder how Christ could really have been tempted, if He was sinless, and rejected the first, and the second, and the third temptation, how was He tempted? ... how did He know what it was, the way we do, to be tempted? No, He was Christ. But for us, with it there from the start, and possible all the time, to go on knowing it's possible and pretend to avoid it? Or ... to have lived it through, and live it through, and deliberately go on living it through.

- You listen to me. I've just taken a lot from you. I've taken a lot from people just like you. Just like you. That's tough, isn't it, just like you, that this town is loaded with people just like you, the world is loaded with people just like you. The honest men who are too good to fit anywhere. You're one of the people, aren't you. Look at your hands, have you ever had a callus? You don't get them lifting glasses. Who are you, to be so bitter? Have you ever done one day of work?
- Look
- And now I understand. And you talk to me about life, about real life, about human misery, Benny went on. He was not speaking loudly, nor fast, still the cold but vehement and level tone of his voice drew several people to turn around, and listen and watch. The other sat his ground with a patient sneer. - I offered you work, and you were too good for it. We buy stuff from guys like you all the time, writing under pen names to protect names that are never going to be published anywhere else, but they keep thinking they'll make it, what they want to do, but never quite manage, and they keep on doing what they're too good for. It's a joke. It's a joke, Benny repeated, and it was now that his voice began to rise.
-I know you, I know you. You're the only serious person in the room aren't you, the only one who understands, and you can prove it by the fact that you've never finished a single thing in your life. You're the only well-educated person, because you never went to college, and you resent education, you resent social ease, you resent good manners, you resent success, you resent any kind of success, you resent God, you resent Christ, you resent thousand-dollar bills, you resent Christmas, by God, you resent happiness, you resent happiness itself, because none of that's real. What is real, then? Nothing's real to you that isn't part of your own past, real life, a swamp of failures, of social, sexual, financial, personal, . . . spiritual failure. Real life. You poor bastard. You don't know what real life is, you've never been near it. All you have a thousand intellectualized ideas about life. But life? Have you ever measured yourself against anything but your own lousy past? Have you ever faced anything outside yourself? Life! You poor bastard. Benny started to laugh.

The advantage of having a dog for company lies in the fact that it is possible to make him happy; he demands such simple things, his ego is so limited. Possibly, in a previous era, women found themselves in a comparable situation--similar to that of domestic animals. Undoubtedly there used to be a form of demotic happiness, connected to the functioning of the whole, which we are no longer able to understand; there was undoubtedly the pleasure of constituting a functional organism, one that was adequate, conceived with the purpose of accomplishing a discrete series of tasks--and these tasks, through repetition, constituted a discrete series of days. All that has disappeared, along with the series of tasks; we no longer really have any specific objective; the joys of humans remain unknowable to us, inversely, we cannot be torn apart by their sorrows. Our nights are no longer shaken by terror or by ecstasy. We live, however; we go through life, without joy and without mystery; time seems brief to us.

Art is always aimed (like a rifle, if you wish) at the middle class. The working class has its own culture and will have no truck with fanciness of any kind. The upper class owns the world and thus needs know no more about the world than is necessary for its orderly exploitation. The notion that art cuts across class boundaries to stir the hearts of hoe hand and Morgan alike is, at best, a fiction useful to the artist, his Hail Mary. It is the poor puzzled bourgeoisie that is sufficiently uncertain, sufficiently hopeful, to pay attention to art. It follows (as the night the day) that the bourgeoisie should get it in the neck.

It isn't just that McFarlane's Family Guy shamelessly plagiarizes from The Simpsons, nor is it just the endless cheap references to bad pop culture icons. Family Guy is much worse and much more evil than that: an anti-Simpsons antidote for zombies who want to get rid of the annoying buzz of vestigial decency in their rotting heads. They want that decency removed, and Family Guy does it non-stop, scene by scene, undoing the unwanted education all those Simpson episodes forced down their throats with a spoonful of sugar. McFarlane's show reinforces their meanest, dumbest instincts.

It was only much later, after I had begun to learn the language of the flesh, that I undertook to help in shouldering a portable shrine, and was at last able to solve the puzzle that had plagued me since infancy. They were simply looking at the sky. In their eyes there was no vision: only the reflection of the blue and absolute skies of early autumn, Those blue skies, though, were unusual skies such as I might never see again in my life: one moment strung up high aloft, the next plunged to the depths; constantly shifting, a strange compound of lucidity and madness.

I promptly set down what I had discovered in a short essay, so important did my experience seem to me.

In short, I had found myself at a point where there were no grounds for doubting that the sky that my own poetic intuition had shown me, and the sky revealed to the eyes of those ordinary young men of the neighborhood, were identical. That moment for which I had been waiting so long was a blessing that the sun and the steel had conferred on me. Why, you may ask, were there no grounds for doubt? Because, provided certain physical conditions are equal and a certain physical burden shared, so long as an equal physical stress is savored and an identical intoxication overtakes all alike, then differences of individual sensibility are restricted by countless factors to an absolute minimum. If, in addition, the introspective element is removed almost completely--then one is safe in asserting that what I had witnessed was no individual illusion, but one fragment of a well-defined group vision. My "poetic intuition" did not become a personal privilege until later, when I used words to recall and reconstruct that vision; my eyes, in their meeting with the blue sky, had penetrated to the essential pathos of the doer.

And in that swaying blue sky that, like a fierce bird of prey with wings outstretched, alternately swept down an soared upwards to infinity, I perceived the true nature of what I had long referred to as "tragic."

When I examine closely my early childhood, I realize that my memory of words reaches back far farther than my memory of the flesh. In the average person, I imagine, the body precedes language. In my case, words came first of all; then--belatedly, with every appearance of extreme reluctance, and already clothed in concepts--came the flesh. It was already, as goes without saying, sadly wasted by words.

[. . .]

Many people will express disbelief that such a process could already be at work in a person's earliest years. But that, beyond doubt, is what happened to me personally, thereby laying the ground for two contradictory tendencies within myself. One was the determination to press head loyally with the corrosive function of words, and to make that my life's work. The other was the desire to encounter reality in some field where words should play no part at all.

Fever or not, I always have such a buzzing in both ears that it can't get much worse. I've had it since the war. Madness has been hot on my trail ... no exaggeration ... for twenty-two years. That's quite a package. She's tried a million different noises, a tremendous hullabaloo, but I raved faster than she could, I screwed her, I beat her to the tape. That's how I do it. I shoot the shit, I charm her, I force her to forget me. My great rival is music, it sticks in the bottom of my ear and rots ... it never stops scolding ... it dazes me with blasts of the trombone, it keeps on day and night. I've got every noise in nature, from the flute to Niagara Falls ... Wherever I go, I've got drums with me and an avalanche of trombones ... for weeks on end I play the triangle ... On the bugle I can't be beat. I still have my own private birdhouse complete with three thousand five hundred and twenty-seven birds that will never calm down ... I am the organs of the Universe ... I provide everything, the ham, the spirit, and the breath ... Often I seem to be worn out, my thoughts stagger and sprawl ... I'm not very good to them. I'm working up the opera of the deluge. As the curtain falls, the midnight train pulls into the station ... The glass dome shatters and collapses ... The steam escapes through two dozen valves ... The couplings bounce sky-high ... In wide-open carriages three hundred musicians soused to the gills rend the air, playing forty-five bars at once...

For twenty-two years she's been trying to carry me off ... at exactly midnight ... But I can fight back ... with twelve pure symphonies of cymbals, two cataracts of nightingales ... a whole troupe of seals being roasted over a slow fire ... It's bachelor's work ... that's for sure. It's my second life. Anyway it's my business.

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge--unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.