what does it mean, insane?

A psychotic world we live in. The madmen are in power. How long have we known this? Faced this? -And-how many of us do know it? Not Lotze. Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. Or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up. I suppose only a few are aware of all this. Isolated persons here and there. But the broad masses…what do they think? All these hundreds of thousands in this city, here. Do they imagine that they live in a sane world? Or do they guess, glimpse the truth…?

But, he thought, what does it mean, insane? A legal definition. What do I mean? I feel it, see it, but what is it?

He thought, it is something they do, something they are. It is their unconsciousness. Their lack of knowledge about others. They’re not being aware of what they do to others, the destruction they have caused and are causing. No, he thought. That isn’t it. I don’t know; I sense it, intuit it. But-they are purposely cruel…is that it? No. God, he thought, I can’t find it, make it clear. Do they ignore parts of reality? Yes. But it is more. It is their plans. Yes, their plans.  The conquering of the planets.  Something frenzied and demented, as was their conquering of Africa, and before that, Europe and Asia.

Their view; it is cosmic. Not of man here, a child there, but an abstraction: race, land. Volk. Land. Blut. Ehre. Not of honourable men but of Ehre itself, honour; the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them. Die Gute, but not good men, this good man. It is their sense of space and time. They see through the here, the now, into the vast black deep beyond, the unchanging. And that is fatal to life. Because eventually there will be no life; there was once only the dust particles in space, the hot hydrogen gases, nothing more, and it will come again. This is an interval, ein Augenblick. The cosmic process is hurrying on, crushing life back into the granite and methane; the wheel turns for all life. It is all temporary. And they-these madmen-respond to the granite, the dust, the longing of the inanimate; they want to aid Natur.

And, he thought, I know why. They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God’s power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off. it is not hubris,  not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate-confusion between him who worships and that which is worshiped.  Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.

What they do not comprehend is man’s helplessness. I am weak, small, of no consequence to the universe. It does not notice me; I live on unseen. But why is that bad? Isn’t it better that way? Whom the gods notice they destroy. Be small…and you will escape the jealousy of the great.

Philip K. Dick
The Man in the High Castle

Sun and Steel

Do I, then, belong to the heavens?
Why, if not so, should the heavens
Fix me thus with their ceaseless blue stare,
Luring me on, and my mind, higher
Ever higher, up into the sky,
Drawing me ceaselessly up
To heights far, far above the human?
Why, when balance has been strictly studied
And flight calculated with the best of reason
Till no aberrant element should, by rights, remain-
Why, still, should the lust for ascension
Seem, in itself, so close to madness?
Nothing is that can satisfy me;
Earthly novelty is too soon dulled;
I am drawn higher and higher, more unstable,
Closer and closer to the sun’s effulgence.
Why do these rays of reason destroy me?
Villages below and meandering streams
Grow tolerable as our distance grows.
Why do they plead, approve, lure me
With promise that I may love the human
If only it is seen, thus, from afar-
Although the goal could never have been love,
Nor, had it been, could I ever have
Belonged to the heavens?
I have not envied the bird its freedom
Nor have I longed for the ease of Nature,
Driven by naught save this strange yearning
For the higher, and the closer, to plunge myself
Into the deep sky’s blue, so contrary
To all organic joys, so far
From pleasures of superiority
But higher, and higher,
Dazzled, perhaps, by the dizzy incandescence
Of waxen wings.

Or do I then
Belong, after all, to the earth?
Why, if not so, should the earth
Show such swiftness to encompass my fall?
Granting no space to think or feel,
Why did the soft, indolent earth thus
Greet me with the shock of steel plate?
Did the soft earth thus turn to steel
Only to show me my own softness?
That Nature might bring home to me
That to fall, not to fly, is in the order of things,
More natural by far than that improbable passion?
Is the blue of the sky then a dream?
Was it devised by the earth, to which I belonged,
On account of the fleeting, white-hot intoxication
Achieved for a moment by waxen wings?
And did the heavens abet the plan to punish me?
To punish me for not believing in myself
Or for believing too much;
Too earger to know where lay my allegiance
Or vainly assuming that already I knew all;
For wanting to fly off
To the unknown
Or the known:
Both of them a single, blue speck of an idea?”

Yukio Mishima

How I Write

Sitting at a desk in a room by myself, near a window with no view. On an electric typewriter. Occasionally I’ll test out a sentence in longhand on a lined pad, but I’ve composed on a typewriter since I was twelve.

I imagined myself as someone who writes every day, from nine to one, from two to six, regular, productive, disciplined. That’s my fantasy. For reality, take this week: Sunday I spent two hours at my desk and wrote four pages. Monday I walked around the West End with a visitor from America. Tuesday I was at the typewriter from ten until noon, from two until five, and despite many breaks for coffee or Diet Pepsi, reworked one page from Sunday and wrote seven new ones. Most of Wednesday was spent reading someone else’s novel. So far today I have written four drafts – eight pages – of this article.

When really driven, working at top speed, I may manage twenty pages in a day, but between three and ten is more usual.

A lot of those pages get thrown away. Ten years ago my first and final drafts were nearly identical, except for neatness. Today I can’t read my first drafts without feeling I should give up the hopeless attempt to write. Partly this is because my critical standards are higher now than they were when I was twenty, but objectively I think they are worse because I’ve changed my habits. I no longer have to squeeze my writing between classes or a job. Writing is all that I do, and the only proof I have of work is a pile of typed pages. So I work things out on paper which I would once have done in my head. My first drafts are full of blind alleys, failed attempts, unnecessary scenes. By the second draft I have a better idea of what I want to say.

Ideas don’t usually come at the typewriter,  but away from it. It may look like loafing, but where would the writing be without the epiphany in the bathtub, the connection made while daydreaming or watching TV? I make lists and notes, storing them up for the day when I know how to use them.

Bits and pieces come together, sometimes after years. I am startled, looking through old notebooks, to discover just how long a particular idea has been in my head. The seeds of the novel I am writing now go back to a story I wrote while I was still at school. It was a science fiction story. The novel isn’t. I’m attracted to the ideas of science fiction, but I’m not primarily a science fiction writer.

Beginning to write, the plot is uncertain, but I have the end in mind, often in precise detail. Those final sentences are, in Dorothea Brande’s words, “a raft to swim towards”. Later, when the story takes an unexpected direction,  I worry about forcing the ending, and decide to change it. But usually I don’t have to. I find when I get there, the words are right, the details just as I imagined before I understood their full significance. It no longer seems as if I made It up, but as if I managed to find my way to a place that was waiting to be discovered.

Lisa Tuttle
How I write

four or five lines

I do find it harder to write now than before, both novels and journalism. When I worked for newspapers, I wasn’t very conscious of every word I wrote, whereas now I am. When I was working for El Espectador in Bogotá, I used to do at least three stories a week, two or three editorial notes every day, and I did movie reviews. Then at night, after everyone had gone home,  I would stay behind writing my novels.  I liked the noise of the Linotype machines, which sounded like rain. If they stopped, and I was left in silence, I wouldn’t be able to work. Now, the output is comparatively small. On a good working day, working from nine o’clock in the morning to two or three in the afternoon, the most I can write is a short paragraph of four or five lines, which I usually tear up the next day.

Gabriel García Márquez
Interviewed by Peter H. Stone
Paris Review Winter 1981

stories imposed themselves on me

As far as I’m concerned, I believe the subject chooses the writer. I’ve always had the feeling that certain stories imposed themselves on me; I couldn’t ignore them, because in some obscure way, they related to some kind of fundamental experience — I can’t really say how. For example, the time I spent at the Leonico Prado Military School in Lima when I was still a young boy gave me a real need, an obsessive desire to write. It was an extremely traumatic experience which in many ways marked the end of my childhood—the rediscovery of my country as a violent society, filled with bitterness, made up of social, cultural, and racial factions in complete opposition and caught up in sometimes ferocious battle. I suppose the experience had an influence on me; one thing I’m sure of is that it gave rise to the great need in me to create, to invent.

Up until now, it’s been pretty much the same for all my books. I never get the feeling that I’ve decided rationally, cold-bloodedly to write a story. On the contrary, certain events or people, sometimes dreams or readings, impose themselves suddenly and demand attention. That’s why I talk so much about the importance of the purely irrational elements of literary creation. This irrationality must also, I believe, come through to the reader. I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love. The novels that have fascinated me most are the ones that have reached me less through the channels of the intellect or reason than bewitched me. These are stories capable of completely annihilating all my critical faculties so that I’m left there, in suspense. That’s the kind of novel I like to read and the kind of novel I’d like to write.  I think it’s very important that the intellectual element, whose presence is inevitable in a novel, dissolves into the action, into the stories that must seduce the reader not by their ideas but by their colour, by the emotions they inspire, by their element of surprise, and by all the suspense and mystery they’re capable of generating. In my opinion, a novel’s technique exists essentially to produce that effect — to diminish and if possible abolish the distance between the story and the reader. In that sense, I am a writer of the nineteenth century. The novel for me is still the novel of adventures, which is read in the particular way I have described.

Mario Vargas Llosa
Interviewed by Susannah Hunnewell and Ricardo Augusto Setti
Paris Review Fall 1990

Girls – give him a taste of his own medicine!!

Guided masturbation

Guided masturbation is so much fun – especially when your sub obeys your every single word. Watching them work themselves up,  hear them moaning and begging you to let them go faster or please,  please will you touch them. That’s fun.  Asking them if they’re close, how close and if they want to cum for you like a good puppy.  Then telling them they’re not allowed, to stop moving their hands and stop thrusting on the bed.

When they’re so wet and horny and ready to cum but they don’t because they want to be good for you is so much fun. The whine in their voice when they beg, the red of their bitten lips, the trembling of their thighs – oh, and that husky catch in their throat when you make them do it all over again. Oh so much fun.

MommyMaxie

legs tied wide apart

You know what would be good? Your legs tied wide apart while I experiment on you with my teeth and tongue and hands, and maybe a load of toys as well –

remember the kisses

I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.

Charles Bukowski

Sonnet In Search Of An Author

Nude bodies like peeled logs
sometimes give off a sweetest
odour, man and woman

under the trees in full excess
matching the cushion of

aromatic pine-drift fallen
threaded with trailing woodbine
a sonnet might be made of it

Might be made of it! odour of excess
odour of pine needles, odour of
peeled logs, odour of no odour
other than trailing woodbine that

has no odour, odour of a nude woman
sometimes, odour of a man.

William Carlos Williams