STILL LIFE WITH WOODPECKER – QUOTES
CH 15
Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.
CH 32
There are essential and inessential insanities.
Inessential insanities are a brittle amalgamation of ambition, aggression, and pre-adolescent anxiety – garbage that should have been dumped long ago. Essential insanities are those impulses one instinctively sense are virtuous and correct, even though peers may regard them as coo coo.
Inessential insanities get one in trouble with one-self. Essential insanities get one in trouble with others. It’s always preferable to be in trouble with others. In fact, it may be essential.
CH 35
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.
CH 38
There’s always the same amount of good luck and bad luck in the world. If one person doesn’t get the bad luck, somebody else will have to get it in their place. There’s always the same amount of good and evil, too. We can’t eradicate evil, we can only evict it, force it to move across town. And when evil moves, some good always goes with it. But we can never alter the ratio of good to evil. All we can do is keep things stirred up so neither good nor evil solidifies. That’s when things get scary. Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top.
CH 43
There’s no longer any moral consensus. In the days when it was generally agreed what was right and what was wrong, an outlaw simply did those wrong things that need to be done, whether for freedom, for beauty, or for fun. The distinctions are blurred now, a deliberately wrong act – which for the outlaw is right – can be interpreted by many others to be right – and therefore must mean that the outlaw is wrong. You can’t tilt windmills when they won’t stand still.
Speaking of that, this is not an easy time for lovers, either. With the divorce rate up to sixty percent, how can anyone attend a wedding with a straight face anymore? I see lovers walking hand in hand, looking at each other as if nobody else was alive on the earth, and I can’t help thinking that in a year, more or less, they’ll each be with someone new. Or else nursing broken hearts. True, most lovers don’t work at it hard enough, or with enough imagination or generosity, but even those who try don’t seem to have any ultimate success these days.
I guess love is the real outlaw.
CH 46
We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love.
Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won’t adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is to sign on as it accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean security is out of the question. The words ‘make’ and ‘stay’ become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free.
CH 53
As any of the learned professors would explain, plied with sufficient tequila, no matter how fervently a romantic might support a movement, he or she eventually must withdraw from active participation in that movement because the group ethic – the supremacy of the organization over the individual – is an affront to intimacy. Intimacy is the principal source of the sugars with which this life is sweetened. It is absolutely vital to the essential insanities. Without the essential (intimate) insanities, humor becomes inoffensive and therefore pap, poetry becomes exoteric and therefore prose, eroticism becomes mechanical and therefore pornography, behavior becomes predictable and therefore easy to control. As for magic, there’s none at all because the aim of any social activist is power over others, whereas a magician seeks power over only himself; the power of higher consciousness, which, while universal, cosmic even, is manifest in the intimate. It would seem that a while human being would have the capacity for both intimacy and social action, yet sad to say, every cause, no matter how worthy, eventually falls prey to the tyranny of the dull mind. In the movement, as in the bee house or the white ant’s hill of clay, there is no place for idiosyncrasy, let alone mischief.
CH 56
When we’re incomplete, we’re always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we’re still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go an and on – series polygamy – until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.
When two people meet and fall in love, there’s a sudden rush of magic. Magic is just naturally present then. We tend to feed on that gratuitous magic without striving to make any more. One day we wake up and find that the magic is gone. We hustle to get it back, but by then it’s usually too late, we’ve used it up. What we have to do is work like hell at making additional magic right from the start. It’s hard work, but if we can remember to do it, we greatly improve our chances of making love stay.
CH 63
Nevertheless, she had to recall with a twinge that Bernard hadn’t much use for labor unions. It wasn’t that Bernard objected to strikes – he approved of just about anything that stirred the stew – but that he believed that the time was long past when unions were effective in controlling the vices of big business, that unions, in fact, had become big business, had perhaps surpassed big business in relative stench of corrupt practices and violent hanky-pankies. It was the Hawaiian mongoose syndrome all over again. Who shall control those who control those who control?
CH 106
Funny how we think of romance as always involving two, when the romance of solitude can be ever so much more delicious and intense. Alone, the world offers itself freely to us. To be unmasked, it has no choice.
CHAPTERS UNKNOWN
When the mystery of the connection goes, love goes. It’s that simple. This suggests that it isn’t love that is so important to us but the mystery itself. The love connection may be merely a device to put us in contact with the mystery, and we long for love to last so that the ecstacy of being near the mystery will last. It is contrary to the nature of mystery to stand still. Yet it’s always there, somewhere, a world on the other side of the mirror (or the Camel pack), a promise in the next pair of eyes that smile at us. We glimpse it when we stand still.
The romance of new love, the romance of solitude, the romance of objecthood, the romance of ancient pyramids and distant stars are means of making contact with the mystery. When it comes to perpetuating it, however, I got no advice. But I can and will remind you of two of the most important facts I know:
1. Everything is part of it.
2. It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.
If you’re honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values. Then you’re forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal. This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws.
Don’t let yourself be victimized by the age you live in. It’s not the times that will bring us down, any more than it’s society. When you put the blame on society, then you end up turning to society for the solution. Just like those poor neurotics at the Care Fest. There’s a tendency today to absolve individuals of moral responsibility and treat them as victims of social circumstance. You buy that, you pay with your soul. It’s not men who limit women, it’s not straights who limit gays, it’s not whites who limit black. what limits people is lack of character. What limits people is that they don’t have the fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone direct it. Yuck….It’s a wonderful time to be alive. As long as one has enough dynamite.
Outlaws, like lovers, poets, and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon.
The difference between a criminal and an outlaw is that while criminals frequently are victims, outlaws never are. Indeed, the first step toward becoming a true outlaw is the refusal to be victimized. All people who live subject to other people’s laws are victims. People who break laws out of greed, frustration, or vengeance are victims. People who overturn laws in order to replace them with their own laws are victims. ( I am speaking here of revolutionaries.) We outlaws, however, live beyond the law. We don’t merely live beyond the letter of the law-many businessmen, most politicians, and all cops do that-we live beyond the spirit of the law. In a sense, then, we live beyond society. Have we a common goal, that goal is to turn the tables on the ‘nature’ of society. When we succeed, we raise the exhilaration content of the universe. We even raise it a little bit when we fail.
When war turns whole populations into sleepwalkers, outlaws don’t join forces with alarm clocks. Outlaws, like poets, rearrange the nightmare.
The trite mythos of the outlaw; the self-conscious romanticism of the outlaw; the black wardrobe of the outlaw; the fey smile of the outlaw; the tequila of the outlaw and the beans of the outlaw; respectable men sneer and say ‘outlaw’; young women palpitate and say ‘outlaw’. The outlaw boat sails against the flow; outlaws toilet where badgers toilet. All outlaws are photogenic. ‘When freedom is outlawed, only outlaws will be free.’ There are outlaw maps that lead to outlaw treasures. Unwilling to wait for mankind to improve, the outlaw lives as if that day were here. Outlaws are can openers in the supermarket of life.
A person’s looking for a simple truth to live by, there it is. CHOICE. To refuse to passively accept what we’ve been handed by nature or society, but to choose for ourselves. CHOICE. That’s the difference between emptiness and substance, between a life actually lived and a wimpy shadow cast on an office wall.
What I’m saying is simply that every totalitarian society, no matter how strict, has had its underground. In fact, two undergrounds. There’s the underground involved in political resistance and the underground involved in preserving beauty and fun–which is to say, preserving the human spirit.
