middle cyclones and other references

People distort the personality of what kind of person can do that work. They say it has to be a professional who’s done this before, who’s in the system. Let me tell you this: I’ve got a great job right now and I’m making a great living, and it’s a wonderful time in my life and everything is really really good. Yet I would drop that if the opportunity came to run for another job where it was my chance at being able to serve people. The politician class is made up of guys who have been fondling themselves about this since they were in high school. These are people who are seeking these positions of power because it completes a missing piece of themselves.

‎Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height.

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand, and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop, very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say, it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only all the time.
- Marie Howe

For much of my life now I’ve been trying to undo my westernized damaged brain by tempering it with some Eastern holistic community-based, we’re-all-relatives connected kind of thinking. A culture that views animals and plants as inanimate piles of protoplasmic structure to be manipulated however cleverly hubris can imagine to manipulate it will view its citizens the same way. And other cultures the same way. Our respecting and honoring the pigness of the pig, therefore, creates the ethical and moral framework upon which we respect and honor the Maryness of Mary and Tomness of Tom.

It is how we respect and honor the least of these that determines how we honor and respect the greatest of these. As a culture, as a nation, we cannot occupy a respected place in the world unless and until we restore sacredness to life. You and I are much more than a dissected pile of organs, blood, bone, and flesh. Life is more than just pieces and parts; it is breath, interaction, spontaneity. Gifts and talents, creativity and intuition, entrepreneurship and work ethic—these define the individual as much as hair color, skin color, and language.

And people are often unable to do anything, imprisoned as they are in I don’t know what kind of terrible, terrible, oh such terrible cage. […] Do you know what makes the prison disappear? Every deep, genuine affection. Being friends, being brothers, loving, that is what opens the prison, with supreme power, by some magic force. Without these one stays dead. But whenever affection is revived, there life revives.

When I made The Devil Wears Prada, it was the first time in my life that a man came up and said, ‘I know how you felt. I have a job like that.’ First time. … For men, the favorite character that I’ve ever played is Linda in The Deer Hunter, without question. The heterosexual men that I’ve spoken to over the years, they say, ‘That’s my favorite thing you’ve ever done.’ Or Sophie. And they were a particular kind of feminine, recessive personalities. No question that this person was not going to dominate the conversation at a dinner party. So they fell in love with her, but they didn’t feel the story through her body.

Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.

I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes & barrens & wilds. It still dwarfs & terrifies & crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens & orchards & fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.

I don’t enjoy other people - it’s a secret a lot of people don’t know which is I don’t enjoy strangers or other people…most people.

The entrancement of film is that the reading protocols are invisible. You give yourself to a film, ideally, in a gigantic darkened auditorium: and it washes over you. It makes its own reality inevitable. And you don’t have to ever think about your efforts in reading or constructing it. You can’t slow or speed up that experience (I mean, now technically you can, but you don’t want to, you want to succumb). It masters you totally.

The seduction of a comic is secretly the exact opposite. People don’t think about it, but you learn to read a comic book. It’s a very complicated reading protocol. A very active one. It’s like you’re in a damp world and you have to keep striking matches to light it up. You’re constantly working to decide—do I read the words in the panel, do I read the word in the box at the top, do I look at the picture, do I skip ahead and look at where the pictures are going to go later on, do I do it fast, do I do it slow, do I read every word, do I mainly see it? What am I doing here? You’re always deciding how to make the narrative come alive. It’s actually a much more complicated form of reading than reading text! Because you’re making these switches from the visual to the verbal. So one is a completely globally active reading protocol, and the other is this sublime, passive dreamlike surrender. And I don’t think you can ever get from one to the other. They’re almost opposite ends of the aesthetic experience.

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.