feverishly, the pages of the book

It is true that the people concerned in books were not what Francoise would have called 'real people.' But none of the feelings which the joys or misfortunes of a 'real' person awaken in us can be awakened except through a mental picture of those joys or misfortunes; and the ingenuity of the first novelist lay in his understanding that, as the picture was the one essential element in the complicated structure of our emotions, so that simplification of it which consisted in the suppression, pure and simple, of 'real' people would be a decided improvement. A 'real' person, profoundly as we may sympathise with him, is in a great measure perceptible only through our senses, that is to say, he remains opaque, offers a dead weight which our sensibilities have not the strength to lift. If some misfortune comes to him, it is only in one small section of the complete idea we have of him that we are capable of feeling any emotion; indded it is only in one small section of the complete idea he has of himself that he is capable of feeling any emotion either. The novelist's happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, imepenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immaterial sections, things, that is, which the spirit can assimilate to itself.

Proust, Swann's Way 64

the Dionysian mirror of the world

It is a mirror, because as a mode of immaterial production it relates to the structuring of theoretical paradigms, far ahead of concrete production. It is thus an immaterial recording surface for human works, the mark of something missing, a shred of utopia to decipher, information in negative, a collective memory allowing those who hear it to record their own personalized, specified, modeled meanings, affirmed in time with the beat - a collective memory of order and genealogies, the repository of the word and the social score.

Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music 9

blindsight

For a genuine poet, metaphor is not a rhetorical figure but a vicarious image that he actually beholds in place of a concept.

Weber, Max Weber: Selections in Translation 95

transcripting

I went to hear Krishnamurti speak. He was lecturing on how to hear a lecture. He said, "You must pay full attention to what is being said and you can't do that if you take notes." The lady on my right was taking notes. The man on her right nudged her and said, "Don't you hear what he's saying? You're not supposed to take notes." She then read what she had written and said, "That's right. I have it written down right here in my notes."

Cage, Silence 269

peculiar language

A really distinguished style varies ordinary diction through the employment of unusual words. By unusual I mean strange words and metaphor and lengthened words and everything that goes beyond ordinary diction. But if someone should write exclusively in such forms the result would either be a riddle or a barbarism. A riddle will result if someone writes exclusively in metaphor; and a barabarism will result if there is an exclusive use of strange words. . . . It is therefore necessary to use a combination of all these forms. The employment of strange words and metaphor and ornamental words and the other forms of speech that have been mentioned will prevent the diction from being ordinary and mean; and the use of normal speech will keep the diction clear.

Aristotle, Poetics 1458a

Koan #347

Once a yogi, sitting on the banks of the Ganges, saw a scorpion fall into the water. He scooped it out, only to be bitten by the scorpion. It happened again, and again, with the same result. A bystander asked the yogi: "Why do you keep rescuing that scorpion, only to have it bite you?"

"It is the nature of scorpions to bite," replied the yogi. "And it is the nature of yogis to help others when they can."

Hindu Mondo

The whole surface of the tegument...

It is not in the straight line, but in the point of light - the point of irradiation, the play of light, fire, the source from which reflections pour forth. Light may travel in a straight line, but it is refracted, diffused, it floods, it fills - the eye is a sort of bowl - it flows over, too, it necessitates, around the ocular bowl, a whole series of organs, mechanisms, defences. The iris reacts not only to distance, but also to light, and it has to protect what takes place at the bottom of the bowl, which might, in certain circumstances, be damaged by it. The eyelid, too, when confronted with too bright a light, first blinks, that is, it screws itself up in a well-known grimace.

Lacan, Seminar XI 94

You insist upon their being together?

QUESTION: What do you have to say about rhythm? Let us agree it is no longer a question of pattern, repetition, and variation.

ANSWER: There is no need for such agreement. Patterns, repetitions, and variations will arise and disappear. However, rhythm is durations of any length coexisting in any states of succession and synchronicity. The latter is liveliest, most unpredictably changing, when the parts are not fixed by a score but left independent of one another, no two performances yielding the same resultant durations. The former, succession, liveliest when (as in Morton Feldman's Intersections) it is not fixed but presented in situation-form, entrances being at any point within a given period of time.

Cage, Silence 15

When a man is asleep...

I would fall asleep, and often I would be awake again for short snatches only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or to open my eyes to settle the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness, to savour, in an instantaneous flash of perception, the sleep which lay heavy upon the furniture, the room, the whole surroundings of which I formed but an insignificant part and whose unconsciousness I should very soon return to share.

Proust, Remembrance of Things Past 4

death and the groove

A spiral scratch, its gleaming dark circle is the black hole into which memories are poured, only to emerge again as ghost voices, life preserved beyond death. Frozen in time within the grooves, a voice, an instrument, a sound, becomes the living dead and is worshipped in the way that a loved one, deceased, may be adored for years by the bereaved.

Toop, Haunted Weather 168