Only in a pampered, post-industrial society such as ours do we have the luxury of creating artisanal cults around labour that takes place at ankle level.
D.H. LAWRENCE:
Life and love are life and love, a bunch of violets is a bunch of violets, and to drag in the idea of a point is to ruin everything. Live and let live, love and let love, flower and fade, and follow the natural curve, which flows on, pointless.
LEONARD MICHAELS:
At night, lying in the bunkhouse, I listened to owls. I'd never before heard that sound, the sound of darkness, blooming, opening inside you like a mouth.
ADRIENNE RICH:
For a mass audience in the United States is not an audience for a collectively generated idea, welded together by the power of that idea and by common debates about it. Mass audiences are created by promotion, by the marketing of excitements that take the place of ideas, of real collective debate, vision, or catharsis; serve only to isolate us in the littleness of our own lives—we become incoherent to each other.
LEONARD MICHAELS:
We are actors in a pornographic movie. Nothing is at stake.
Then it returned quickly to cinematic obligations-- to suck and lick with conviction. The camera adhered to it, lucid, neutral, ubiquitous. The camera's look. Nearly like her mouth, assimilating advertisements of the male, but only in its totalitarian looking. The camera's invincible distance. The look of looking.We twisted up together in New York. Intimacy was insult; love could hate.
[The attempt to fictionalize the mechanisms of porn, its depletions, what Mark Grief will do in his book. Imagine it going digital. All of us-- going digital. All of this in one paragraph.]
D.H. LAWRENCE:
She was happy and ready: the happy wife, the ready woman in possession.
Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives. Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else. “Listen,” we say. “Everything will be okay.” And then, as if our lives depend on it, we make sure it is.
WILLIAM GASS:
I may have many reasons for keeping our date, but having promised becomes the moral one.
GABY WOOD:
...in saying that the android was anxious, the reporter had projected onto the jerkily breathing machine the emotions it elicited in him.
The species that came to invent wealth created poverty, for its own kind as well as for the natural landscape. In wealth and poverty alike the human species now impoverishes the planet.
MARGARET ATWOOD:
By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, Take me to your leaders. Even I - unused to your ways though I am - would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them.
Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths.
These are worth it. These are what I have come for.
LEONARD COHEN:
Because you did not wrestle with your angel. Because you dare to live with G-d. Because your cowardice has led you to believe that the victor does not limp.
