notes & quotes from winter-spring 2024

02 Aug 2024

Here’s an attempt at putting together all the quotations I amassed this winter and spring from a variety of podcasts and book. Hope I’ll keep doing that. There’s some jewels in there.

January

For The Wild episodes :

• “Myth is a wild way of telling the truth.” -Martin Shaw

• “Belonging is a skill. “ Toko-Pa Turner

• “All kinds of love is just the love of God.” -Fariha Róisín
  • On a related note : “The Pali term for “celibacy” (in striking contrast to our own word) is brahmacariya, meaning to behave, or walk, in a divine or sublime way.” -Mary Talbot in The Joy of No Sex

• “Fermentation is a strategy for food safety, above all else really.” -Sandor Ellix Katlz

• “The book makes me aware of what I need to learn.” -Francesca Lia Block (on writing)

• “Too many poets, not enough soldiers.” -Tyson Yunkaporta * He also shared the idea that new age x liberation promise = neoliberal coopting (individuaism cannot free us)

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Benjamín Labatut arc - Louisiana Channel :

• “Fiction is a tool, it’s a human tool, we have kind of developed to give reality a human shape to understand what is presented to us.”

• “Litterature as a way of life, as a monastic calling” about the defunt poet who teached him how to write without publishing a single poem himself

• Discovering vs inventing, posture in the writing life, and writing with others

• William burroughs : magicians must be in some ways inhumans. it’s a bit the same with writers

• “When you’re not writing a book that is connected to something bigger, you’re not only writing a bad book, you’re hurting us.”

• “Litterature should become more ritualistic.”

• “Litterature as an older crazy sister of science”

• “We cannot survive without mysteries.”

• “A deep search for truth will lead you to uncertainty. It’s like uncertainty is the highest form of wisdom that we can inspire to.”

• “Writings should give you access to the world, but it should also darken it for you so it becomes mysterious again.
• The fact that a citrus tree dies from “overabundance” : on its last year it grows so much fruits its branches break. Such a mesmerizing spectacle to imagine (happening in his book When We Cease to Understand the World)

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February

Podcasts :

• For the intuitives, pt. 2 (The Emerald)
  • “Civilisation is all that is not mysterious.”
  • “Modernity wants witches to burn.”
  • “The charlatan is always the pioneer.’’
  • Question : where does conspiracy theories and folklore meet? is this our new folkore? what is the difference between conspiracy theories and folklore?
• Deep Time Diligence (Emergence Magazine)
  • '’The only proper way to store data is through intergenerational story telling.’’
• On narrative art (Weird Studies)
  • “Plot as cloth line on which you hang landscape”
  • “What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.” -Joy William
  • Nick Land says that Hyperstition always call to the Old Ones (Lovecraft expression), aka bring back the old irrational chaotic energy.
  • “We are all 16th century car mechanics.”

Reading :

• From Are fictional dystopias blocking us from better futures? by Micheal Harris
  • Lepore identifies a “radical pessimism” in contemporary dystopian fiction: “Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century… It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one.””
  • “Going back slightly further, we might similarly reference Susan Sontag’s 1965 essay The Imagination of Disaster and its critique that Cold War-related science fiction fantasies help to normalize that which we should never become accustomed to, namely the potential destruction of humanity. Or Dutch historian and sociologist Fred Polak’s argument in his 1973 book The Image of the Future, that our images of the future are nihilistic and full of despair: “[W]e may well ask ourselves if the decline in utopian thinking is not also a decline in social progress itself.””

March

Podcasts :

• “Works of art are machines for destroying ideology.” - Weird Studies, on The Naked Lunch
• “The idea of the nation state is a spell.” - The Death Panel, on Collapse
  • Which made me at the time to ever again want to engage with the state, but then today in august, reading about state programs for work, I feel so annoyed that this machine is not used efficiently and I want to means of the machine

April

Podcasts :

• “Magick is the art of experiencing truth.” -Allan Chapman, quoted in Occult Experiments in the Home

May

Podcasts :

• Against Everyone with Connor Habib
  • On medecine
    • You must not attack directly the illness or, like your enemies, it will simply run elsewhere
    • Monsters are afraid to look upon their own image (applied to medecine)
    • There is a time to heal and a time not to heal
    • Is the future about creating new illness for meaning?
    • “Love the enemies, the enemies are the symptoms”
    • Very fascinative translocative medecine experimenth where they healed animal with their “90 degrees” techniques in a veterinary clinic and the animal stay healed and even healed their owner
    • Cross medecine : if it hurts at the right, heal it with the left, if it hurts at the bottom, heal it from the top
  • On horror
    • “Horror is the art of freedom.”
    • “Everything that makes you feel full freedom also feels terrifying.”
• The Emerald (episode about the moon)
  • “There’s no contradiction between measurements and mysteries.”

Reading :

• Dark Awakenings by Matt Caldin
  • “For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” -Eclesiastes 1:18
  • “What is life and sanity depend not on finding the truth but on deliberately cultivating delusions? What if there is indeed a total perspective, but to gain and know it and identify with it is to invite your own deepest disaster?”
  • “I know of no greater absurdity than that propounded by most systems of philosophy in declaring evil to be negative in its character. Evil is just what is positive; it makes its own existence felt.”- Schopenhauer
  • Meditation on foulness in the Theravada text The Book of Protection
  • Reminder to read someday lovecraft essay Supernatural Horror in Literature
  • Ethos anthropoi daimon. A man’s character is his daimon. -Heraclite.
  • The book (turned movie in 1971) The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley about possession from a devil of lust
  • Schlobin’s 3 elements of horror
    • 1-Distorsion of cosmology
    • 2-Dark inversions of signs, symbols, processes and expectations
    • 3-Monster-victim relationship with archetypal devastation of human will
  • In western world, gore horrifies us because we have a tendency to think about owning the body vs being the body, aka it’s a betrayal (see about this Theodor Roszak talks of anti-organic fanaticism in Where the Wasteland Ends)
• Defending Ancient Springs by Kathleen Reine
  • ’‘[…] a revolutionary in the cause of the ‘Kingdom not of this world’», p.59
  • ‘Literature is but a branch of Religion, and always participate in its character: however, in our time, it is the only branch that still shows any greenness; and, as some think, must one day become the main stem.’ p.60 -Carlyle
  • The word ‘‘Juvenilia’ : ‘‘works produced by an author or artist while still young.’’
  • “The chief difference between the metaphors of poetry and the symbols of mysticism is the the latter are woven together into a complete system.” -Yeats, p.73
  • “to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination, Nature is Imagination itself “ -Blake, p.74