Synapses

“Synapses in motion tend to stay in motion. Synapses at rest tend to stay at rest.” 

 
― Richard Powers, Galatea 2.2

The first step..

"The first step — especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money — the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art."

– Chuck Palahniuk

Borges..

Lie-ins..

"My dream has always been to suspend myself in space when I write, and lying horizontal in bed is the closest to doing that."

– Richard Powers

Greene: ways of escape..

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic and fear which is inherent in a human situation.”

― Graham Greene, Ways of Escape

Richard Powers on books, far and near..

"I would love my books to seem like Mondrian at thirty meters, and then like Jackson Pollock at thirty centimetres. From far away, they may seem as if they are kinds of crystalline perfections dominated by an architectonic sense, but then you get closer and start to see the peculiarities, the fractal breaking, and the rippling of these structures. The protagonists in the stories, who are searching for a view of the world, find that the telescope is somehow pointed back upon them, and the knowledge that they succeed in acquiring is always situated, always contingent and qualified, and far messier than they ever anticipated. Ideally, these books leave their readers tinged with that nervousness of thinking, “This is an essay, a clean worldview that I am gradually closing in on.” But there comes some moment in the story where the decisions, the character interaction, or the milieu shifts into an unexpected place, and the turbulence inside of the order is revealed. I want the narrative development to pull the rug out from underneath the reader’s feet. The reader, who has been thinking up until this moment that he was reading one kind of book, now needs to completely reassemble all theories he had about what kind of book he is reading."

– Richard Powers

Freud: decisions..

“When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. In vital matters, however, such as the choice of a mate or a profession, the decision should come from the unconscious, from somewhere within ourselves. In the important decisions of personal life, we should be governed, I think, by the deep inner needs of our nature."

– Sigmund Freud

Be a mere assistant..

"Be a mere assistant to your unconscious. Do only half the work. The rest will do itself."

– Jean Cocteau, Diary of an Unknown

Borges, again..

“At my age, one should be aware of one's limits, and this knowledge may make for happiness. When I was young, I thought of literature as a game of skillful and surprising variations; now that I have found my own voice, I feel that tinkering and tampering neither greatly improve nor greatly spoil my drafts. This, of course, is a sin against one of the main tendencies of letters in this century--the vanity of overwriting-- ... I suppose my best work is over. This gives me a certain quiet satisfaction and ease. And yet I do not feel I have written myself out. In a way, youthfulness seems closer to me today than when I was a young man. I no longer regard happiness as unattainable; once, long ago, I did. Now I know that it may occur at any moment but that it should never be sought after. As to failure or fame, they are quite irrelevant and I never bother about them. What I'm out for now is peace, the enjoyment of thinking and of friendship, and, though it may be too ambitious, a sense of loving and of being loved.”

― Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph and Other Stories

To say goodbye..

“To say good-bye is to deny separation; it is to say Today we play at going our own ways, but we'll see each other tomorrow. Men invented farewells because they somehow knew themselves to be immortal, even while seeing themselves as contingent and ephemeral.”

― Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions

Marion Milner on not being able to paint

"One thing I noticed about certain of my free drawings was that they were somehow bogus and demanded to be torn up as soon as made. They were the kind in which a scribble turned into a recognizable object too soon, as it were; the lines drawn would suggest some object and at once I would develop them to make it look like that object. It seemed almost as if, at these moments, one could not bear the chaos and uncertainty about what was emerging long enough, as if one had to turn the scribble into some recognizable whole when in fact the thought or mood seeking expression had not yet reached that stage. And the result was a sense of false certainty, a compulsive and deceptive sanity, a tyrannical victory of the common sense view which always sees objects as objects, but at the cost of something else that was seeking recognition, something more to do with imaginative than common sense reality."