Punctuated by Accidental Nefariousness

Some bits from an excellent book I recently read. They really deserve their full contexts, but I wanted to save a few highlights at least. From . . .

A Handbook of Disappointed Fate
by Anne Boyer

Of which I wrote . . . An essay collection dense with poetic words and challenging thoughts. A wide-ranging collection of topics expressing beauty and sorrow, bitterness and insight. Entirely engrossing.

source

From "When the Lambs Rise Up Against the Bird of Prey"

The lamb does not learn by following desire or refining it: the lamb learns by understanding the world as a system, in all its variation and relation, so that it may effectively remain alive inside it. . . .

The lamb knows how to read the motion of the air and knows the air's stillness. It knows the pattern of the bird of prey's flight, the slight shift in temperature resulting from the bird's shadow, the sound of the bird's cry overhead and the other sounds from which the bird's cry distinguishes itself. The lamb knows the general system of sound: the must understand quietness, too, so that the lamb can understand the quiet's relation to predation. . . .

The bird of prey may have talons, but to have talons is to conceive the world in an eye-to-claw-to-beak relation. The bird of prey makes only acquisitions. Its knowledge is a series of kills. The bird of prey knows what it knows only in a system built from desire's instances, maintained in the expectation of desire's satiation: a hawk-eye sees with the arrogance of only the particular of what it wants, not the whole of what is. A bird of prey understands a kill to be the world in its entirety when, in fact, a kill is only dinner, and dinner is not the entire world.

From "Shotgun Willie"

I would have chosen to have lost, among my memories, those of the self and the self's failures, and to have retained the memories of our lavish world: but the self, as it was, remained, and the holes in my mind were exactly the places in which the lavish world disappeared. This is the problem with memory: that we are cursed by it to keep account not of the endless beauty of the world, but of our own failure; that we can be visited, nightly, by the local memory; that we are never neglected by the unfailing, nightly company or our errors.

From "Click-Bait Thanatos"

If there were some sort of totality leak, and all of humanity were represented in the form of data before us, it would be a laundry list of "sad" punctuated by accidental nefariousness.

From "How to Go from Art to Poetry"

The boredom of the object world was already lethal, even when you were a baby. You wanted to experience something beyond the obvious limitations of lips and fingertips, and this is why you worked so hard to acquire language at such an early age. You learned to talk but then also you went looking for something that existed beyond the boundary of your immediate social circumstances. This is why you learned to read.

What you saw when you looked over the shoulder of a person who was reading was a code. It spelled out "you are not alone."

From "Please Stand Still the Doors Are Closing"

Capitalism wasn't just economics, it was a system of organizing lives, and part of this organization was the distribution of suffering, and a subset of distribution of suffering was who would sweat more, and where (hot yoga or the bus stop?). It organized who would make art and who would profit from it and who would suffer it.

From "The Season of Cartesian Weeping"

The only thing sadder than existing is not existing.

From "Woman Sitting at the Machine"

One chemotherapy treatment costs more money than I've made most years of my life. Could a poet on an alien earth explain how on this earth the sick body of a worker is the source of more profit than her healthy body at work?