SA4QE - The Slickman A4 Quotation Event
“Then words imprinted themselves on his mind, large, powerful, compelling belief and respect like the saying of a god in capital letters:
TO CLOSE ONE’S EYES IN THE PRESENCE OF A LION
He felt, as in a dream, the layered meanings of the words that stood upright in his mind as if carved in the stone of a temple.”
What passes for reality seems to me mostly a load of old nonsense invented by not very inventive minds. The reality that interests me is strange and flickering and haunting.
Well, said Tom's father, sometimes a problem is like a shovel, and only has one handle.
Time's arrow, we are told, is a one-way thing... Memory's arrow, like the needle of a compass too close to a lodestone, spins in all directions.
The people who run the world now were children once. What went wrong? What is it that with such dismal regularity goes wrong? Why do perfectly good children become rotten grown ups? If I say there's a language failure somewhere does that make sense? Keep in mind my claim that everything is language. Am I saying then that there's an everything failure? Yes, because nothing has a chance of working right when people won't listen to what it says and with the proper action say the right things back.
The first time I saw her was in a dream, the colours were intense; the air was fall of vibrations; everything seemed magnified and slowed down.
The street lamps were lit but the sky was still light. She was waiting at a bus stop. A sign said BALSAMIC although there was nothing vinegary about the place, no friars and no Gilead in sight. There were nondescript buildings in warm colours, perhaps leaning a bit, perhaps painted on canvas. She was waiting for the bus; there were obscure figures queuing behind her.
[...]
There was the sign that said BALSAMIC; the letters were sharp and clear; they riffled like rail departures but the name stayed the same. There were those shaky-looking buildings and the bus stop and there she waited, the thin woman with the straw-coloured hair, blue eyes, and pale face, unknown but seeming to look at me round the edges of my memory. Sleeping or waking, I'd never seen her before.
Again and again she gestured with her clenched fist and said, 'Yes!' silently. She wanted me to follow her. Why? Here came the bus: FINSEY-OBAY, yellow, pink, and orange rice paper and bamboo lit from within like a Japanese lantern. Such a light against that not-yet-dark sky! Again she looked at me as she boarded the bus and I felt that thrill of terror as I stepped back. And again the sense of loss. What did she want? How could I find her again?
“I’m not sure of anything right now,” I confessed. “I may be a figment of my own imagination.”
“But that’s all anyone is; it’s the human condition. We’re given a name at birth and photographs are taken. We come to be known by name and face and from this we piece together an identity and fix it in memory. This identity is not physically part of us; a knock on the head can make it go away."
What passes for reality seems to me mostly a load of old rubbish invented by not very inventive minds.
