#self.identity

[aamjp]

Ham on Rye

“‘More and more we will discover our own truths and our own way of speaking, and this new voice will be uncluttered by old histories, old mores, old dead and useless dreams…’

”Thump, thump, thump…“ (109)

“The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, no matter what you chose, they sliced a bit more off you, until there was nothing left. The age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst possible way, like voting for the presidential candidate who reminded them most of themselves.” (174)

“He couldn’t keep his pecker-mind off of snatch-thoughts.” (181)

“The band began to play again and the boys and girls began to dance again and the lights revolved overhead throwing shades of gold, then red, then blue, then green, and gold again on the couples. As I watched them I said to myself, someday my dance will begin. When that day comes I will have something that they don’t have.” (194)

See: Sie müssen schlafen aber ich muss tanzen

[aamjp]

“He was encompassed in the name yet not encompassed in the name having as yet no name other than the desire to be called by a name.” (18)

“There is no discipline of forgetting; we are at the mercy of random natural processes, like stroke and amnesia, and such self-interventions as drugs, alcohol, or suicide. Abu, however, can perform on himself precise local suicides, temporary amnesias, painless aphasias.” (26)

"Gossip, perhaps, but Piazzi Smyth was not a man to inspire trust; you had only to see the way he tied his cravat." (288)

[aamjp]

[aamjp]

Brain Pickings: ‘Why Can’t You Remember Your Future? Physicist Paul Davies on the Puzzlement of Why We Experience Time as Linear’

“As our lives tick on, gradually robbing the future of potential and robbing the past of relevance, we trudge along the arrow of time dragging with us this elusive curiosity we call a self — an ever-shifting packet of personal identity, mystifying in how it links us to our childhood selves and misleading in how it maps out our future selves.”

I must read Thinking, Fast and Slow.

[aamjp]

"Everyone tells their story and no-one believes a word of it or pays the slightest attention." — p.306 of something.

[aamjp]

Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner

"Such moments were...impossible to represent precisely because they were ready-made literature, because the ease with which they could be represented entered and cancelled the experience: where life was supposed to be its most immediate, when the present managed to differentiate itself with violence, life was at its most generic, following the rules of Aristotle, and one did not make contact with the real, but performed such contact for an imagined audience." — p64

“Who wasn’t squatting in one of the handful of prefabricated subject positions proffered by capital or whatever you wanted to call it, lying every time she said “I”; who wasn’t a bit player in a looped infomercial for the damaged life? If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.” – p.101

A particularly bright star, a satellite, a plane – something to that effect, at least, from p.146

[aamjp]

​There’s No Such Thing As ‘You,’ But That’s Okay

Do you think there's typically a big difference between the character we present and our innate self? I don't think there's often a huge gap. Sometimes the way we respond is based exactly on who our innate self is, but generally, our self is much more diffused than that. Sometimes your actions might seem a little out of whack from who you truly are, but I think that means you're not necessarily acting out of character, you're just acting out of the most common form of your character. In the book, I used Daniel Dennett's idea of the narrative center of gravity. We tell ourselves a story that “I am this person” in a way to help make the world more comprehensible to ourselves.

[aamjp]