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The Saint Whose Water Can Light Lamps, The Clairvoyant Whose Lapse In Recall Is The Breath Of God, The True Paranoid For Whom All Is Organized In Spheres Joyful Or Threatening About The Central Pulse Of Himself, The Dreamer Whose Puns Probe Ancient Fetid Shafts And Tunnels Of Truth All Act In The Same Special Relevance To The Word, Or Whatever It Is The Word Is There, Buffering, To Protect Us From. The Act Of Metaphor Than Was A Thrust At Truth And A Lie, Depending Where You Were: Inside, Safe Or Outside, Lost.

-Thomas Pynchon

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The Saint Whose Water

Thomas Pynchon

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The Saint Whose Water Can Light Lamps, The Clairvoyant Whose Lapse In Recall Is The Breath Of God, The True Paranoid For Whom All Is Organized In Spheres Joyful Or Threatening About The Central Pulse Of Himself, The Dreamer Whose Puns Probe Ancient Fetid Shafts And Tunnels Of Truth All Act In The Same Special Relevance To The Word, Or Whatever It Is The Word Is There, Buffering, To Protect Us From. The Act Of Metaphor Than Was A Thrust At Truth And A Lie, Depending Where You Were: Inside, Safe Or Outside, Lost.

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In The Eighteenth Century It Was Often Convenient To Regard Man As A Clockwork Automaton. In The Nineteenth Century, With Newtonian Physics Pretty Well Assimilated And A Lot Of Work In Thermodynamics Going On, Man Was Looked On As A Heat Engine, About 40 Per Cent Efficient. Now In The Twentieth Century, With Nuclear And Subatomic Physics A Going Thing, Man Had Become Something Which Absorbs X-rays, Gamma Rays And Neutrons.

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.

But As With Maxwell's Demon, So Now. Either She Could Not Communicate, Or He Did Not Exist.

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?"

The Reality Is In This Head. Mine. I'm The Projector At The Planetarium, All The Closed Little Universe Visible In The Circle Of That Stage Is Coming Out Of My Mouth, Eyes, And Sometimes Other Orifices Also.

Behind The Hieroglyphic Streets There Would Either Be A Transcendent Meaning, Or Only The Earth.

What North Europe Thinks Of As Its History Is Actually Quite Provincial And Of Limited Interest. Different Sorts Of Christian Killing Each Other, And That's About It.

My Belief Is That "recluse" Is A Code Word Generated By Journalists... Meaning, "doesn't Like To Talk To Reporters."

Ills Are Many, Blessings Few, But Dreams Tonight Will Shelter You.

For Every Kind Of Vampire, There Is A Kind Of Cross

For A Moment She'd Wondered If The Seal Around Her Sockets Were Tight Enough To Allow The Tears Simply To Go On And Fill Up The Entire Lens Space And Never Dry. She Could Carry The Sadness Of The Moment With Her That Way Forever, See The World Refracted Through Those Tears, Those Specific Tears, As If Indices As Yet Unfound Varied In Important Ways From Cry To Cry.

To Have Humanism We Must First Be Convinced Of Our Humanity. As We Move Further Into Decadence This Becomes More Difficult.

There Are Stories, Like Maps That Agree... Too Consistent Among Too Many Languages And Histories To Be Only Wishful Thinking.... It Is Always A Hidden Place, The Way Into It Is Not Obvious, The Geography Is As Much Spiritual As Physical. If You Should Happen Upon It, Your Strongest Certainty Is Not That You Have Discovered It But Returned To It. In A Single Great Episode Of Light, You Remember Everything.

Remembers Everything

But On The Way Home Tonight, You Wish You'd Picked Him Up, Held Him A Bit. Just Held Him, Very Close To Your Heart, His Cheek By The Hollow Of Your Shoulder, Full Of Sleep. As It It Were You Who Could, Somehow, Save Him. For The Moment Not Caring Who You're Supposed To Be Registered As. For The Moment, Anyway, No Longer Who The Caesars Say You Are.

Information. What's Wrong With Dope And Women? Is It Any Wonder The World's Gone Insane, With Information Come To Be The Only Real Medium Of Exchange?

Right And Left; The Hothouse And The Street. The Right Can Only Live And Work Hermetically, In The Hothouse Of The Past, While Outside The Left Prosecute Their Affairs In The Streets Manipulated By Mob Violence. And Cannot Live But In The Dreamscape Of The Future.

Real Flight And Dreams Of Flight Go Together. Both Are Part Of The Same Movement. Not A Before B, But All Together.

Time Is Never Wasted If You Remember To Bring Along Something To Read.

Perhaps Its Familiarity Rendered It Temporarily Invisible To You.

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.

What Sort Of An Age Is This Where A Man Becomes One's Enemy Only When His Back Is Turned?

She Thougt Of Sunrise Over The Library Slope At Cornell University That Nobody Out On It Had Seen Because The Slope Faces West.

It Is Simply Wrong To Begin With A Theme, Symbol Or Other Abstract Unifying Agent, And Then Try To Force Characters And Events To Conform To It.

Everybody Gets Told To Write About What They Know. The Trouble With Many Of Us Is That At The Earlier Stages Of Life We Think We Know Everything- Or To Put It More Usefully, We Are Often Unaware Of The Scope And Structure Of Our Ignorance.

Why Should Things Be Easy To Understand?

I Came," She Said, "hoping You Could Talk Me Out Of A Fantasy." Cherish It!" Cried Hilarious, Fiercely. "what Else Do Any Of You Have? Hold It Tightly By It's Little Tentacle, Don't Let The Freudians Coax It Away Or The Pharmacists Poison It Out Of You. Whatever It Is, Hold It Dear, For When You Lose It You Go Over By That Much To The Others. You Begin To Cease To Be.

The Lord's Angel, Gebrail, Dictated The Koran To Mohammed The Lord's Prophet. What A Joke If All That Holy Book Were Only Twenty-three Years Of Listening To The Desert. A Desert Which Has No Voice.

Length Is Usually Intensity. Not Time.

In Recent Weeks, In True Messianic Style, It Has Come Clear To Her That Her Real Identity Is Literally, The Force Of Gravity. I Am Gravity, I Am That Against Which The Rocket Must Struggle, To Which Prehistoric Wastes Submit And Are Transmuted To The Very Substance Of History.

It All Comes Down, As It Must, To The Desires Of Individual Men. Oh, And Women Too Of Course, Bless Their Empty Little Heads.

A Weapon Based On Time . . ." Mused Viktor Mulciber. "well, Why Not? The One Force No One Knows How To Defeat, Resist, Or Reverse. It Kills All Forms Of Life Sooner Or Later. With A Time-weapon You Could Become The Most Feared Person In History." "i'd Rather Be Loved," Said Root. Mulciber Shrugged. "you're Young.

Like So Many Named Places In California It Was Less An Identifiable City Than A Grouping Of Concepts--census Tracts, Special Purpose Bond-issue Districts, Shopping Nuclei, All Overlaid With Access Roads To Its Own Freeway.

The Anarchist Is Dressed All In Black. In The Dark You Can Only See His Eyes. It Dates From The 1930's. Porky Pig Is A Little Boy. The Children Told Me That He Has A Nephew Now, Cicero. Do You Remember, During The War, When Porky Worked In A Defense Plant? He And Bugs Bunny. That Was A Good One Too.

Danger's Over, Banana Breakfast Is Saved.

It's Been A Prevalent Notion. Fallen Sparks. Fragments Of Vessels Broken At The Creation. And Someday, Somehow, Before The End, A Gathering Back To Home. A Messenger From The Kingdom, Arriving At The Last Moment. But I Tell You There Is No Such Message, No Such Home -- Only The Millions Of Last Moments . . . Nothing More. Our History Is An Aggregate Of Last Moments.

Losing Faith Is A Complicated Business And Takes Time. There Are No Epiphanies, No "moments Of Truth." It Takes Much Thought And Concentration In The Later Phases, Which Thenselves Come About Through An Accumulation Of Small Accidents: Examples Of General Injustice, Misfortune Falling Upon The Godly, Prayers Of One's Own Unanswered.

If They Can Get You Asking The Wrong Questions, They Don't Have To Worry About Answers.

Asking Questions

It Takes, Unhappily, No More Than A Desk And Writing Supplies To Turn Any Room Into A Confessional.

This Spiritualist, This Statistician, What Are You Anyway?

Who Claims Truth, Truth Abandons. History Is Hir'd, Or Coerc'd, Only In Interests That Must Ever Prove Base. She Is Too Innocent, To Be Left Within The Reach Of Anyone In Power,- Who Need But Touch Her, And All Her Credit Is In The Instant Vanish'd, As If It Had Never Been. She Needs Rather To Be Tended Lovingly And Honorably By Fabulists And Counterfeiters, Ballad-mongers And Cranks Of Ev'ry Radius, Masters Of Disguise To Provide Her The Costume, Toilette, And Bearing, And Speech Nimble Enough To Keep Her Beyond The Desires, Or Even The Curiosity, Of Government.

Get Too Conceptual, Too Cute And Remote, And Your Characters Die On The Page.

There Is Nothing So Loathsome As A Sentimental Surrealist.

Someday She Might Replace Whatever Of Her Had Gone Away By Some Prosthetic Device, A Dress Of A Certain Color, A Phrase In A Letter, Another Lover.

It Is A Curve Each Of Them Feels, Unmistakably. It Is The Parabola. They Must Have Guessed, Once Or Twice - Guessed And Refused To Believe - That Everything, Always, Collectively, Had Been Moving Toward That Purified Shape Latent In The Sky, That Shape Of No Surprise, No Second Chance, No Return. Yet They Do Move Forever Under It, Reserved For Its Own Black-and-white Bad News Certainly As If It Were The Rainbow, And They Its Children...

There Was No Difference Between The Behavior Of A God And The Operations Of Pure Chance.

They Plot, They Plot, Sleeping Or Afoot They Never Let Up.

Explosion Without An Objective', Declared Miles Blundell, 'is Politics In Its Purest Form'.

Liebig Himself Seems To Have Occupied The Role Of A Gate, Or Sorting-demon, Such As His Younger Contemporary Clerk Maxwell Once Proposed, Helping To Concentrate Energy Into One Favored Room Of The Creation At The Expense Of Everything Else.

Murphy's Law, That Brash Proletarian Restatement Of Godel's Theorem.

But With A Sigh He Had Released Her Hand, While She Was So Lost In The Fantasy That She Hadn't Felt It Go Away, As If He'd Known The Best Moment To Let Go.

Let The Peace Of This Day Be Here Tomorrow When I Wake Up.

You Go From Dream To Dream Inside Me. You Have Passage To My Last Shabby Corner, And There, Among The Debris, You’ve Found Life. I’m No Longer Sure Which Of All The Words, Images, Dreams Or Ghosts Are ‘yours’ And Which Are ‘mine.’ It’s Past Sorting Out.

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.

If America Was A Person, And It Sat Down, Lancaster Town Would Be Plunged Into A Darkness Unbreathable.

The Saint Whose Water Can Light Lamps, The Clairvoyant Whose Lapse In Recall Is The Breath Of God, The True Paranoid For Whom All Is Organized In Spheres Joyful Or Threatening About The Central Pulse Of Himself, The Dreamer Whose Puns Probe Ancient Fetid Shafts And Tunnels Of Truth All Act In The Same Special Relevance To The Word, Or Whatever It Is The Word Is There, Buffering, To Protect Us From. The Act Of Metaphor Than Was A Thrust At Truth And A Lie, Depending Where You Were: Inside, Safe Or Outside, Lost.

If The World Offered Nothing, Nowhere To Support Or Make Bearable Whatever Her Private Grief Was, Then It Is That World, And Not She, That Is At Fault.

Love With Your Mouth Shut, Help Without Breaking Your Ass Or Publicizing It: Keep Cool, But Care.

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.

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

What’s This? What Are The Antagonists Doing Here – Infiltrating Their Own Audience? Well, They’re Not Really. It’s Somebody Else’s Audience At The Moment, And These Nightly Spectacles Are An Appreciable Part Of The Darkside Hours Of Life Of The Rocket Capital. The Chances For Any Paradox Here, Really, Are Less Than You Think.

Laboring Through A World Every Day More Stultified, Which Expected Salvation In Codes And Governments, Ever More Willing To Settle For Suburban Narratives And Diminished Payoffs--what Were The Chances Of Finding Anyone Else Seeking To Transcend That, And Not Even Particularly Aware Of It?

You May Never Get To Touch The Master, But You Can Tickle His Creatures.

I Was Dreaming ... About My Grandfather. A Very Old Man, At Least As Old As I Am Now, 91. I Thought, When I Was A Boy, That He Had Been 91 All His Life. Now I Feel As If I Have Been 91 All My Life.

She Touched The Edge Of Its Voluptuous Field, Knowing It Would Be Lovely Beyond Dreams Simply To Submit To It; That Not Gravity's Pull, Laws Of Ballistics, Feral Ravening, Promised More Delight. She Tested It, Shivering: I Am Meant To Remember. Each Clue That Comes Is Supposed To Have Its Own Clarity, Its Fine Chances For Permanence. But Then She Wondered If The Gemlike "clues" Were Only Some Kind Of Compensation. To Make Up For Her Having Lost The Direct, Epileptic Word, The Cry That Might Abolish The Night.

Let Me Be Unambiguous. I Prefer Not To Be Photographed.

Through The Machineries Of Greed, Pettiness, And The Abuse Of Power, Love Occurs.

Idle Dreaming Is Often Of The Essence Of What We Do.

All Variables Are Independent.

A Woman Is Only Half Of Something There Are Usually Two Sides To.

What, I Should Only Trust Good People? Man, Good People Get Bought And Sold Every Day. Might As Well Trust Somebody Evil Once In A While, It Makes No More Or Less Sense.

He Gazes Through Sunlight's Buttresses, Back Down The Refectory At The Others, Wallowing In Their Plenitude Of Bananas, Thick Palatals Of Their Hunger Lost Somewhere In The Stretch Of Morning Between Them And Himself. A Hundred Miles Of It, So Suddenly. Solitude, Even Among The Meshes Of This War, Can When It Wishes So Take Him By The Blind Gut And Touch, As Now, Possessively. Pirate's Again Some Other Side Of A Window, Watching Strangers Eat Breakfast.

My Mother Is The War,' Declares Roger Mexico, Leaning Over To Open The Door.

Not Me, Paranoia's The Garlic In Life's Kitchen, Right, You Can Never Have Too Much.

A Screaming Comes Across The Sky.

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).

We Are Here Among You As Seekers Of Refuge From Our Present-your Future-a Time Of Worldwide Famine, Exhausted Fuel Supplies, Terminal Poverty-the End Of The Capitalistic Experiment. Once We Came To Understand The Simpl...truth That Earth's Resources Were Limited, In Fact Soon To Run Out, The Whole Capitalistic Illusion Fell To Pieces. Those Of Us Who Spoke This Truth Were Denounced As Heretics, As Enemies Of The Prevailing Economic Faith. Like Religious Dissenters Of An Earlier Day.

So Generation After Generation Of Men In Love With Pain And Passivity Serve Out Their Time In The Zone, Silent, Redolent Of Faded Sperm, Terrified Of Dying, Desperately Addicted To The Comforts Others Sell Them, However Useless, Ugly Or Shallow, Willing To Have Life Defined For Them By Men Whose Only Talent Is For Death.

Life's Single Lesson: That There Is More Accident To It Than A Man Can Ever Admit To In A Lifetime And Stay Sane.

What Goes Around May Come Around, But It Never Ends Up Exactly The Same Place, You Ever Notice? Like A Record On A Turntable, All It Takes Is One Groove's Difference And The Universe Can Be On Into A Whole 'nother Song.

If There Is Something Comforting - Religious, If You Want - About Paranoia, There Is Still Also Anti-paranoia, Where Nothing Is Connected To Anything, A Condition Not Many Of Us Can Bear For Long.

Hey, Over Here! Have Your Picture Taken With A Reclusive Author! Today Only, We'll Throw In A Free Autograph! But Wait, There's More!

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.

All Investigations Of Time, However Sophisticated Or Abstract, Have At Their True Base The Human Fear Of Mortality.

The General Public Has Long Been Divided Into Two Parts; Those Who Think That Science Can Do Anything And Those Who Are Afraid It Will.

Every Weirdo In The World Is On My Wavelength.

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

What Are The Stars But Points In The Body Of God Where We Insert The Healing Needles Of Our Terror And Longing?

The Hand Of Providence Creeps Among The Stars, Giving Slothrop The Finger.

There Is A Theory Going Around That The U.s.a. Was And Still Is A Gigantic Masonic Plot Under The Ultimate Control Of The Group Known As The Illuminati. It Is Difficult To Look For Long At The Strange Single Eye Crowning The Pyramid Which Is Found On Every Dollar Bill And Not Begin To Believe The Story, A Little. Too Many Anarchists In 19th-century Europe—bakunin, Proudhon, Salverio Friscia—were Masons For It To Be Pure Chance. Lovers Of Global Conspiracy, Not All Of Them Catholic, Can Count On The Masons For A Few Good Shivers And Voids When All Else Fails.

There Is No Real Direction Here, Neither Lines Of Power Nor Cooperation. Decisions Are Never Really Made – At Best They Manage To Emerge, From A Chaos Of Peeves, Whims, Hallucinations And All Around Assholery.

I Dream That I Have Found Us Both Again, With Spring So Many Strangers' Lives Away, And We, So Free, Out Walking By The Sea, With Someone Else's Paper Words To Say.... They Took Us At The Gates Of Green Return, Too Lost By Then To Stop, And Ask Them Why- Do Children Meet Again? Does Any Trace Remain, Along The Superhighways Of July?

You Know What A Miracle Is. Not What Bakunin Said. But Another World’s Intrusion Into This One. Most Of The Time We Coexist Peacefully, But When We Do Touch There’s Cataclysm.

Some Of Us Are Afraid Of Dying; Others Of Human Loneliness. Profane Was Afraid Of Land Or Seascapes Like This, Where Nothing Else Lived But Himself.

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

Our History Is An Aggregate Of Last Moments

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.

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

"you Are So Close." "to Whom? Margravine, Not Even To Himself. This Place, This Island: All His Life He's Done Nothing But Hop From Island To Island. Is That A Reason? Does There Have To Be A Reason? Shall He Tell You: He Works For No Whitehall, Non Conceivable Unless, Ha, Ha, The Network Of White Halls In His Own Brain: These Featureless Corridors He Keeps Swept And Correct For Occasional Visiting Agents."

If Patterns Of Ones And Zeros Were 'like' Patterns Of Human Lives And Death, If Everything About An Individual Could Be Represented In A Computer Record By A Long String Of Ones And Zeros, Then What Kind Of Creature Would Be Represented By A Long String Of Lives And Deaths?

[oedipa Maas] Awoke At Last To Find Herself Getting Laid.

Teamwork," Koteks Snarled, "is One Word For It, Yeah. What It Really Is Is A Way To Avoid Responsibility. It's A Symptom Of The Gutlessness Of The Whole Society.

All The Animals, The Plants, The Minerals, Even Other Kinds Of Men, Are Being Broken And Reassembled Every Day, To Preserve An Elite Few, Who Are The Loudest To Theorize On Freedom, But The Least Free Of All.

This Is America, You Live In It, You Let It Happen. Let It Unfurl.

Shall I Project A World?

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