Sunday, August 13, 2023

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Dog Star Man.

"To what sad, precarious, and miserable existence does he vow himself—he who takes up a literary career? From that day he must consider himself cut off from human beings, active life; he no longer lives—he is the spectator of life. All sensation comes to him as motif for analysis. Involuntarily he develops two distinct personalities, and, lacking other subjects, one becomes the spy on the other. If he lack a corpse, he stretches himself on the slab of black marble and buries the scalpel deep in his own heart. And what desperate struggles must he endure with the Idea, that elusive Proteus, who takes all manner of forms to escape captivity, and who will only deliver his oracle when he has been forced to show himself in his true aspect! This Idea, when one holds it, frightened, trembling, vanquished, one must nourish, clothe, fold round in that robe so difficult to weave, to colour and to arrange in graceful curves. During this long-drawn-out task the nerves become irritable, the brain on fire, the sensibilities quickened, and then nervous disorder comes with all its odd anxieties, its unconscious hallucinations, its indefinable sufferings, its morbid capriciousness, its fantastic depravity, its infatuations and motiveless dislikes, its mad energy and nervous prostration, its searches for excitement and its disgust for all healthy nourishment." --Gautier's Life of Baudelaire

Kellie Dream.

"You cannot go ten feet in this county without finding some signpost of memory for me — some spot where someone I could tell you about died, or got kissed, or broke the law, or had an epiphany. This is cognition in the wild, as you might find in the mind of a Micronesian outrigger pilot or a London taxi-driver who has demonstrated his possession of 'The Knowledge': navigation of an environment where the external markers of place are at the same time internal markers of one’s own motion through time." --Justin Smith-Ruiu

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