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Darkness Invades The Dreams Of The Glassblower. Of All The Unpleasantries His Dreams Grab In Out Of The Night Air, An Extinguished Light Is The Worst. Light In His Dreams, Was Always Hope: The Basic, Moral Hope. As The Contacts Break Helically Away, Hope Turns To Darkness, And The Glassblower Wakes Sharply Tonight Crying, "who? Who?"

-Thomas Pynchon

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Darkness Invades The Dreams

Thomas Pynchon

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Darkness Invades The Dreams Of The Glassblower. Of All The Unpleasantries His Dreams Grab In Out Of The Night Air, An Extinguished Light Is The Worst. Light In His Dreams, Was Always Hope: The Basic, Moral Hope. As The Contacts Break Helically Away, Hope Turns To Darkness, And The Glassblower Wakes Sharply Tonight Crying, "who? Who?"

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She May Know A Little, May Think Of Herself, Face And Body, As ‘pretty’…but He Could Never Tell Her All The Rest, How Many Other Living Things, Birds, Nights Smelling Of Grass And Rain, Sunlit Moments Of Simple Peace, Also Gather In What She Is To Him.

Some Typewriters In Whitehall, In The Pentagon, Killed More Civilians Than Our Little A4 Could Have Ever Hoped To.

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He Decided That We Suffer From Great Temporal Homesickness For The Decade We Were Born In.

I Mean What They And Their Hired Psychiatrists Call Delusional Systems. Needless To Say, ‘delusions’ Are Always Officially Defined. We Do Not Have To Worry About Questions Of Real Or Unreal. They Only Talk Out Of Expediency. It’s The System That Matters. How The Data Arrange Themselves Inside It. Some Are Consistent, Others Fall Apart.

Despair Came Over Her, As It Will When Nobody Around Has Any Sexual Relevance To You.

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Asking Questions

Everybody Who Says The Same Words Is The Same Person If The Spectra Are The Same Only They Happen Differently In Time, You Dig? But The Time Is Arbitrary. You Pick Your Zero Point Anywhere You Want, That Way You Can Shuffle Each Person's Time Line Sideways Till They All Coincide.

He Was Visited On A Lunar Basis By These Great Unspecific Waves Of Horniness, Whereby All Women Within A Certain Age Group And Figure Envelope Became Immediately And Impossibly Desirable. He Emerged From These Spells With Eyeballs Still Oscillating And A Wish That His Neck Could Rotate Through The Full 360 Degrees.

A Number Of Frail Girls... Prisoners In The Top Room Of A Circular Tower, Embroidering A Kind Of Tapestry Which Spilled Out The Slit Windows And Into A Void, Seeking Hopelessly To Fill The Void: For All The Other Buildings And Creatures, All The Waves, Ships And Forests Of The Earth Were Contained In This Tapestry, And The Tapestry Was The World.

Every Weirdo In The World Is On My Wavelength.

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But A Few Choosing To Venture Deeper Into The Painful Corridors Of Their Affliction, Found After A While That They Could Now Grind And Polish Ever More Exotic Surfaces, Hyperboloidial And Even Stranger, Eventually Including What We Must Term ‘imaginary’ Shapes (which Some Preferred To Term Invisible).

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A Screaming Comes Across The Sky.

Someday It'll All Be Done By Machine. Information Machines.

Oh, This Beer Here Is Cold, Cold And Hop-bitter, No Point Coming Up For Air, Gulp, Till It's All--hahhhh.

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So The City Became The Material Expression Of A Particular Loss Of Innocence – Not Sexual Or Political Innocence But Somehow A Shared Dream Of What A City Might At Its Best Prove To Be – Its Inhabitants Became, And Have Remained, An Embittered And Amnesiac Race, Wounded But Unable To Connect Through Memory To The Moment Of Injury, Unable To Summon The Face Of Their Violator.

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