PART 1
[ pg. 16 ] … domesticity shrinks the soul of a beast. If God had meant for animals to live indoors, he would have given them second mortgages.
[ pg. 22 ] Do you know why young males, especially, love, simply love, to see things blow apart?
” It’s freedom, ” said Switters brightly. ” Freedom from the material world. Subconsciously, people feel trapped by our culture’s confining buildings and its relentless avalanche of consumer goods. So, when they watch all this shit being demolished in a totally irreverent and evil-may-care fashion, they experience the kind of releaser the Greeks used to get from their tragedies. The ecstasy of psychic liberation.”
” Things. Cosas. Things attach themselves like leeches to the human soul, then they bleed out the sweetness and the music and the primordial joy of being unencumbered upon the land. Comprende? People feel tremendous pressure to settle down in some sort of permanent space and fill it up with stuff, but deep inside they resent those structures, and they’re scared to earth of that stuff because they know it controls them and restricts their movements. That’s why the relish the boom-boom cinema. On a symbolic level, it annihilates their inanimate wardens and blows away the walls of their various traps. ”
[ pg. 34 ] There were, in his opinion, drugs that diminished ego and drugs that engorged ego, which is to say, revelatory drugs and delusory drugs; and on a psychic level, at least, he favored awe over swagger. Should he ever aspire to become voluntarily delusional, then good old-fashioned alcohol would do the job effectively and inexpensively, thank you, and without the dubious bonus of jaw-clenching jitters.
[ pg. 46 ] ” All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously. ”
[ pg. 59 ] ” Meditation, ” said his teacher, “hasn’t got a damn thing to do with anything, ’cause all it has to do with is nothing. Nothingness. Okay? It doesn’t develop the mind, it dissolves the mind. Self-improvement? Forget it, baby. It erases the self. Throws the ego out on its big brittle ass. What good is it? Good for nothing. Excellent for nothing. ‘
[ pg. 61 ] ” There exists a false aristocracy based on family name, property, and inherited wealth. But there likewise exists a true aristocracy based on intelligence, talent, and virtue. ”
[ pg. 107 ] ” What is it, ” Maestra had asked quite rhetorically, ” that separates human beings from the so-called lower animals? Well, as I see it, it’s exactly one half-dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism – as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glowworms or raccoons – Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake. ”
PART 2
[ pg. 138 ]
” Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates ”
” Send in the Clowns ”
” The stiff-witted and academic seem not to comprehend that it is entirely possible to be ironic and sincere at the same instant; that a knowing tongue in cheek does not necessarily preclude an affectionate glow in heart. ”
[ pg. 140 ] ( Sing Ha Beer ) ” Tastes like butterfly piss. Of course, it’s brewed by Buddhists. Guess it takes a Christian to put some muscle in a liquid refreshment. ”
[ pg. 184 ] ” Lies may disappoint God or exasperate him, but ultimately his compassion dissolves them, cancels, them out. The Devil, though, he grows fat on our lies; the more you lie to him, the better he likes it. It’s an investment in his firm, it increases the value of his stock by fostering the practice of lying. Only truth can hurt the Devil. That’s why honesty has been banished from almost every existing institution: corporate, religious, and governmental. Truth can be dangerously liberating. Did I mention that the Devil’s other name is El Controlador? He who controls.”
[ pg. 189 ] Sigmund Freud once wrote that ” Wit is the denial of suffering,” meaning not that the witty, the playful among us, deny that suffering exists – in varying degrees, everyone suffers – but rather that they deny suffering power over their lives, deny it prominence, use jocularity to keep it in its place. Freud may have been right. Certainly, a comic sensibility is essential if one is to outmaneuver ubiquitous exploitation and to savor life in a society that seeks to control ( and fleece ) its members by insisting they take it symbols, institutions, and consumer goods seriously, very seriously, indeed.
[ pg. 192 ] ” From the time of the invention of the alphabet, if not before, all technologies have originated in language, but in cyberspace, we don’t see or hear information so much as wee feel it. Technology may at last be outstripping language, not merely leaving the nest but killing the mother, if you will. You know, we don’t really see darkness, or even light, we feel neurologically their effect on surrounding surfaces. The binary digital system – Brother One and Sister Zero – that makes computers possible is a kind light / dark relationship to begin with, and when you start to factor in the electron rather than the word as the primary information link between the brain and the external world …
[ pg. 201 ] : Humanity is generally offensive, ” he told her happily. ” Life’s an offensive proposition from beginning to end. Maybe those who can’t tolerate offense out to just go ahead and end it all, and maybe those who demand financial compensation for offense out to have it ended for them. ”
[ pg. 212 ] When one was living two inches off the ground, one remained close enough to the earth to experience its tug, share its rhythms, recognize it as home, and not go floating off into some ethereal ozone where one behaved as if one’s physical body was excess baggage and one’s brain a weather balloon. On the other hand, one had just enough loft so that one gilded above the frantic strivings and petty discontents that preoccupied the earthbound, circumnavigating those dreary miasmas that threatened to bleach their hearts a single shade of gray.
PART 3
[ pg. 225 ] ” I suspect there’s a bid for empowerment behind it all, the power going to whoever seizes the right to coin the names. In reality made of language, the people who get to name things have psychological ownership of those things. Couples name their pets and children, madison Avenue names the products that dominate our desires, theologians name the deities that dominate our spirit – ‘Yahweh’ changed to ‘Jehovah’ changed to plain ol’ generic ‘God’ – kids name the latest cultural trends or rename old ones to make them theirs; politicians name streets and schools and airports after one another or after the enemies they’ve successfully eliminated: they took Martin Luther King’s life, for example, and then by naming their pork barrel projects after him, took possession of his memory. In a way, we’re like linguistic wolves, lifting our legs on patches of cultural ground to mark them with verbal urine as territory that we alone control.”
[ pg. 234 ]
Conversely, civilized man’s great weakness, his flaw, his undoing, perhaps, was his technologically and/or religiously sponsored disconnection to nature and to that disputed dimension of reality sometimes referred to as the “spirit world,” ..
Today Is Tomorrow had suggested that if civilized man’s humor ( and the imagination and individualism that spawned it ) could somehow be wed to primitive man’s organic wisdom and extradimensional pipeline, the union would result in something truly wondrous and supremely real, the finally consummated marriage of darkness and light.
[ pg. 244 ] Switters had always loved that expression, ” Make fine dreams. ” In contrast to the English, ” Have sweet dreams, ” the French implied that the sleeper was not a passive spectator, a captive audience, but had some control over and must accept some responsibility for his or her dreaming. Moreover, a “fine” dream had much wider connotations that a “sweet” one.
[ pg. 261 ]
” That’s right. I’m on the run from the Killer B’s. ”
” Pardon? What have killer bees to do with? … ”
” B for Belief. Be for Belonging. The B’s that lead to most of the killing in the world. If you don’t Belong among us, then you’re our inferior, or our enemy, or both; and you can’t Belong with us unless you Believe what we Believe. Maybe not even then, but it certainly helps. Our religion, our party, our tribe, our town, our school, our race, our nation. Believe. Belong. Behave. Or Be damned. ”
[ pg. 264 ] ” God is a fixed point, naturally, God is eternal and absolute, God doesn’t change. But man’s concept of God, man’s interpretation of God, the way we view God has changed many times over history. Sometimes we think of him as more intimate, other times more impersonal and aloof; in some centuries he was seen to be primarily angry and judgmental and vengeful; in others, more loving and accepting. Our image of God evolves. ”
[ pg. 281 ] ” Besides, ” she went on, ” the pain of love does not break hearts, it merely seasons them. The disappointed heart revives itself and grows meaty and piquant. Sorrow expands it and makes it pithy. The spirit, on the other hand, can snap like a bone and may never fully knit. ”
[ pg. 328 ] ” My grandmother, ” he said, ” confessed to me once that before she’d ever let herself become deeply involved with a man, she’d make sure to get him drunk. Maestra claims you can never know who a person really is unless you’ve seen how they behave when under the spell of Bacchus. It’s a hard and fast rule with no exceptions: a bad drunk will make a bad husband. Or wife, for that matter. Sobriety, for some people, is a thin and temporary disguise. ”
[ pg. 338 ] ” I don’t believe Almighty God is concise. A prude. Didn’t he design these bodies for us to enjoy? Mary is said to have remained always celibate, a virgin in partu; yet she and Joseph lived together in wedlock. She would have had to do something to relive his sexual tension. ”
[ pg. 358 ] ” Etymologically a prophet is somebody who ‘speaks for’ somebody else, so I take prophecy with about the same amount of salt as I take press releases from a corporate shill. A prophet is just a proclaimed mouthpiece for invisible taciturn forces that allegedly control our destiny, and prophecy buffs tend to be either neurotically absorbed with their own salvation or morbidly fascinated by the prospect of impending catastrophe. Or both. A death wish on the one hand, a desperate, unrealistic hope for some kind of supernatural rescue operation on the other.”
[ pg. 361 ] ” I mean, it’s hardly headline news that the corporate state and its media are using the latest gadget-com and gimmick-tech to dumb us down as steadily as if they were standing on a stool and pounding our brains with a frozen ham. Or that an abundance of information can exacerbate ignorance, if the information is of poor quality. Or that people can be lavishly entertained right round the clock and still feel empty and disconnected. ”
PART 4
[ pg. 397 ] And so he came to recognize that there were two kinds of people: those who were curious about the world and those whose shallow attentions were pretty much limited to those things that pertained to their own personal well-being. He concluded further that Curiosity might have to be added to that list of traits – Humor, Imagination, Eroticism, Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics – that, according to his grandmother, separated full fledged humans from the less evolved.
[ pg. 416 ] ” I think what is at issue here, ” Domino went on, ” is a kind of mindful playfulness. I have observed it in Mr. Switters, and I suspect it could be extricated from Today Is Tomorrow’s philosophy – a philosophy, by the way, that seems almost to have resulted from combining aspects of an archaic shamanic tradition with a kind of Zen non-attachment and irreverent modern wit. Mr. Switters defeats melancholy by refusing to take things, including himself, too seriously. ”
[ pg. 419 ] Governments – and the armed agencies that served them – loathed intellectuals and artists and freethinkers of every stripe, but they didn’t particularly fear them. Not anymore. They didn’t fear them because in the modern corporate state, artists, intellectuals, and freethinkers wielded no political or economic power; had no real hold on the hearts and minds of the masses. Human societies have always defined themselves through narration, but nowadays corporations are telling man’s stories for him. And the message, no matter how entertainingly couched, is invariably the same: to be special, you must conform to be happy, you must consume.
[ pg. 423 ]
” Terrorism is the only imaginable logical response to America’s foreign policy, just as street crime is the only imaginable logical response to America’s drug policy. ”
” Politics is where people pay somebody large sums of money to impose his or her will on them. Politics is sadomasochism. ”
