Finished reading: The Book of Elsewhere by Keanu Reeves & China Miéville 📚
What An Opening Line
A room, full of violence to come.
Highlights
Insubordination’s a lesser evil than independence, I guess.
Something and its opposite can both be true.
You will only perceive your tools when they are broken.
Or he simply had not noticed. No matter.
He listened.
But only an idiot thinks the ways they were trained are automatically the best.
I’ve told you that the usual story is bullshit.
Nothing that’s happened hasn’t happened before.
You’re the one who still thinks you can figure out whats and whys. You’ll be disappointed.
Only broken tools know they are tools.
Secrets beget and attract secrets.
Gods and monsters. Aliens and avatars. Entropy versus change. Death versus life. Ideals, ideas, and dumb luck.
All gods are disappointments. Nothing more thrilling than a god that keeps its distance, right? A hidden god. So faith can become a wager.
Nothing but the quotidian propagandas of cultures in which some command the many
What I’m saying is pattern recognition is what got monkeys signifying. And it’s also what gives you paranoia and psychosis.
Humans have to die. But even is so, that doesn’t mean we should be in a hurry on our way, does it?
On becoming a metaphor: At times it feels insulting. As if it only matters what we are insofar as we mean other things.
We all make rituals of our lives, and for them.
Just because he did not know what it meant, just because it was contradictory, opaque, did not mean metaphor failed. Such moments might be its vindication.
It’s not life versus death, it’s change versus entropy. Motion against Thowless.
Memory is a labyrinth.
Found Poems
I know the period, that little watching eye. And I know the comma, which to me has always looked like a beckoning finger. What word is that? I asked once, of one such curling little inkworm. Asked it of he of whom I’ll tell you.
No word, said he. It is a pause. As if for breath.
and begins the pointless business of failing to breathe
Had I been grown perhaps I would have asked myself whether I had slept and dreamed. As a child I knew I had not.