MY REALITY HUNGER

• And thus spoke his Zarathustra, “I should believe only in a God that would know how to dance.”

• How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

• Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lambsquarter, cutgrass, saw brier, nutgrass, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads nodding in a soft morning breeze like a mother’s hand on your check. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. Horses in the distance standing rigid as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

• Deep down, you know you’re him.

• Rumor has it that you possess a rare and unusual sensitivity, and that, on occasion, you have been known to display it to others. I, too, have been pointed out as having this kind of talent, and wondered if we could schedule a match.

• Soon it will be over,
  which is precisely what the child in my dream said,
  holding my hand, pointing at the roiling sea and the sky
  hurtling our way like so many buffalo,
  who said it’s much worse than we think,
  and sooner; to whom I said
  no duh child in my dreams, what do you think
  this singing and shuddering is,
  what this screaming and reaching and dancing
  and crying is, other than loving
  what every second goes away?
  Goodbye, I mean to say.
  And thank you. Every day.

• Was this what his brain had been up to all along?

• Thy slain me in hate, yet I die in love!

• Practical morality. Nothing put off until tomorrow. How to grow up. Laughter as a peace offering. No love abstracted, instead everything made concrete and demonstrated.

• He forgot where he was, and jumped into the ocean.

• It is worth noting the distinction between doubting the work and doubting yourself. An example of doubting the work would be, “I don’t know if my song is as good as it could be.” Doubting yourself might sound like, “I can’t write a good song.” These statements are worlds apart, both in accuracy and in impact.

• In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the *new*. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.

• This is a safe space for dangerous ideas.

• We’re tough men, together, through the horrors of life.

• If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, then we are nailed to eternity. It is a terrifying prospect. In the world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht). If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness. The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? Parmenides posed this very question in the sixth century. He saw the world divided into pairs of opposites: light/darkness, fineness/coarseness, warmth/cold, being/non- being. One half of the opposition he called positive (light, fineness, warmth, being), the other negative. We might find this division into positive and negative poles childishly simple except for one difficulty: which one is positive, weight or lightness? Parmenides responded: lightness is positive, weight negative. Was he correct or not? That is the question. The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.

• A certain Panteley hit Ivan with his heel.
  A certain Ivan hit Natalya with a wheel.
  A certain Natalya hit Semyon with a muzzle.
  A certain Semyon hit Seliphan with a washbasin.
  A certain Seliphan hit Nikita with an over-shirt.
  A certain Nikita hit Roman with a board.
  A certain Roman hit Tatiana with a shovel.
  A certain Tatiana hit Elena with a pitcher.
  And a fight broke out.
  Elena beat Tatiana with a fence.
  Tatiana beat Roman with a mattress.
  Roman beat Nikita with a suitcase.
  Nikita beat Seliphan with a serving tray.
  Seliphan beat Semyon with his bare hands.
  Semyon spit into Natalya's ears.
  Natalya bit Ivan's fingers.
  Ivan kicked Panteley with his heel.
  Ack, we thought, good people fighting each other.

• WE ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR OUR DREAMS.

• Rhubarb is susan not susan not seat in bunch toys not wild and laughable not in little places not in neglect and vegetable not in fold coal age not please.

• My biggest regrets are failures of kindness.

• Tybalt, the reason that I have to love thee doth much excuse the appertaining rage. To such a greeting: villain am I none. Therefore farewell. I see thou knowest me not.

• I cannot tell you what a strawberry tastes like. If you want to know, take a bite.

• Some look at children with (often unknowing) scorn – the embodiment of their own impossibilities staring back at them. A tragic glare I hope to never possess.

• I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.

• That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.

• A few moments of deep silence can only do good to us in this world of noise.

• To Bob Dylan, for Mr. Tambourine Man.

• What thou lovest well is thy true heritage.

• The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rail on which my soul is grooved to run.