We are phosphenes in the eyes of Pain.

"This imminence of a revelation that does not take place is, perhaps, the esthetic fact." --Daniel Stern, The Suicide Academy (1968)

"God, what a jungle of saving it was once you started." -ibid

My heart dumps its whole store of love everytime. It doesn't know deserving or undeserving. All it knows is the imperative need to bestow.

'The prophets feel God's threat to humanity, which appears just to them. Today, when human beings threaten themselves, the prophets are confused.' --Elias Canetti, The Secret Heart of the Clock, tr Joel Agee (1989)

'I know only one redemption: that what is endangered be kept alive, and at this moment of redemption I do not ask myself how brief or how long it will be.' --ibid

'If they with their prospects of hell could hold out--why not we with our prospects?' --ibid

'It's been a long time since the swindlers started from scratch.' --ibid

...i made myself forget so i could indulge in the luxury of believing an impossibility. (Because all the possible things i could believe, were hateful to me.)

The trouble with the idea of reincarnation, is that being an animal is not the punishment. Being human is.

Assuming that because there is power, there must be a center of power ("God"), is just as absurd as assuming that the universe has a physical center that it expands from.

The doctrine of the soul: an ethical prescription. For, once you divide it into ego & unconscious, the former belongs to everyone [society] & the latter, to no one [or nature]. Its uniqueness resides in the sum of accidents of place. Which can only be grasped partially, at moments, in glimpses. Perhaps these alone are what should be preserved.

Ghost: the one who uses my terminal [at work] when i'm not there. --The "unconscious". It has its own work to do.

Hope would kill you yourself before it consents to die. Hope is ruthless.

New Year's Day: our yard full of thousands of birds.

   'Naked in Clay

  Like horrible amphibians come up for air,
mournful grimaces rise to the lip.
Through the Sahara of the Substance
walks a gray verse, a dromedary.

  A twisted face of cruel dreams glows phosphorescent.
And the blind man who died full of voices
of snow. And rise at dawn, poet, nomad,
to the raw, merciless day of being a man.

  The Hours go by feverishly, and in the corners
they miscarry blond centuries of happiness.
Who casts out so much line; who pitilessly
descends our nerves,
already frayed cords, to the tomb?

  Love! And you, also. Black blows from a stone
are engendered in your mask, and smash it.
The tomb is yet
a woman's sex that attracts man!'

--Cesar Vallejo, The Black Heralds, tr Richard Schaaf & Kathleen Ross (1990)