hardwood floors

"'Perhaps I'm expressing myself in an exaggerated way, and I'm also quite aware that all or most people to whom I might say these things would find them exaggerated. But my way of speaking accords with my view of life; surely it's out of the question I might speak some other way. I haven't yet learned to feign contentment, satisfaction or a sense of well-being I don't feel, and anyone who thinks I might learn is mistaken. I'm too weak to pretend and deceive... It's such a relief to be permitted to confess one's weakness after months of nerve-racking restraint, which have demanded more strength than I possess. Since I cannot possibly go on indefinitely performing duties that bring out the worst in me, I'm now looking for work that will appeal both to my pride and to my weakness. Shall I succeed in finding it? I truly cannot say, but one thing I do know for certain is that I must search until I've succeeded in convincing myself that happiness and duty can coincide. ... 

... I cannot live and at the same time despise my life. I must find myself a life, and a new life, even if all of life consists only of an endless search for life.'" 

The Tanners, Robert Walser

tobacco tongue bath

Assassination (1987)

"'...but what's the point of pondering this further? I have other things to think about. For example, I feel happy this morning--my limbs feel like fine flexible wires. When I feel my limbs, I am happy, and then I'm not thinking of any other person on earth, not a woman, not a man, I'm quite simply thinking nothing at all.'"

The Tanners, Robert Walser

"'But you're at the bottom of the funnel, bud.'"

Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar

Remember who you are and what you stand for.

The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)
"Leave me something to eat."

"I was anxious for the dispersal of the fixed constellations, that dirty luminous propaganda..."

The Pillow Book (1996)

Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar

venus square uranus

Belly of an Architect (1987)

"but once again I imposed the false order that hides chaos, pretending that I was dedicated to a profound existence while all the time it was one that barely dipped its toe into the terrible waters. ...I describe and define and desire those rivers, but she swims in them. I look for them, find them, observe them from the bridge, but she swims in them. ... 

... let the execution be quick, quickly back to the false order of being alone and recovering one's self-sufficiency, self-knowledge, self-awareness."

Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar

"'I'm walking back and forth in an apartment whose floor is tiled with flat stones and one of these stones is the exact spot where I ought to stop so that everything would come into its proper focus.'"

Rain Man (1988)

"guided by the nighttime signs, following routes ...of an attic lit up in the darkness of a street's end"

"Seated in a café they carefully reconstructed their routes, the quick changes, trying to find some telepathic explanation and always failing, and yet they had met in that labyrinth of streets, they almost always met and they laughed wildly, certain of some enriching power. Oliveira was fascinated by La Maga's store of nonsense, her calm disdain for the simplest calculation. What for him had been analysis of probabilities, choice, or simply faith in himself as a dowser, for her was simple chance. ...Thus they went along, Punch and Judy, attracting each other and repelling, as love must do if it is not to end up as calendar art or a pop tune. But love, that word..."

Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar

"'Don't learn any stupid facts,' he would advise her. 'Why wear glasses if you don't need them?'"

Rocky (1976)

Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar

"and always an alarm clock or jigsaw puzzle hidden in the wrong place"

"She stands in the middle of the desert like a rock made of camphor... Everything is out of proportion--hands, feet, thighs, ankles. She's an equestrian statue without the horse, a fountain of flesh worn away to a mammoth egg. Out of the ballroom of flesh her body sings like iron. Girl of my dreams, what a splendid cage you make!"

"Into the Night Life..." Black Spring, Henry Miller

"What a country!"

"The Stock Tip" Seinfeld (1990 TV)

"...for nothing can be more cool and objective, more soothing and staying to the victim of emotion, than the astrological picture of his plight."

A Devil in Paradise, Henry Miller

Rain Man (1988)

"What impressed me, in the urinal by the Luxembourg, was how little it mattered what the book contained; it was the moment of reading it that counted, the moment that contained the book, the moment that definitely and for all time placed the book in the living ambiance of a room with its sunbeams, its atmosphere of convalescence, its homely chairs, its rag carpet, its odors of cooking and washing, its mother image bulking large and totem like, its windows giving out on the street and thrown into the retina the jumbled issues of the idle sprawling figures, of gnarled trees, trolley wires, cats on the roof, tattered nightmares dancing from clotheslines, saloon doors swinging, parasols unfurled, snow clotting, horses slipping, engines racing, the panes frosted, the trees sprouting. The Story of Robinson Crusoe owes its appeal--for me, at least--to the moment in which I discovered it. It lives on in an ever-increasing phantasmagoria, a living part of a life filled with phantasmagoria."

"A Saturday Afternoon," Black Spring, Henry Miller

"Where is the warm summer's day when I first saw the green-carpeted earth revolving and men and women moving like panthers?"

Barfly (1987)

Black Spring, Henry Miller

Rain Man (1988)

"It is not your fault if you have no unused phrase for what you feel... it is enough that you feel... 

I club her thighs with my dong, ..."

 Under the Roofs of Paris, Henry Miller

"We need a penny's worth of human sympathy."

Wise Blood (1979)

"You are face to face with your brother and you withhold the embrace. That is what I can't forgive you for. Look at Max! He is almost your double! Three times around the globe and now you have met yourself face to face. How can you run away from him? ... 

... You died, you say, and you've been holding one long funeral ever since. But you're not dead, and you know you're not. What the hell does spiritual death matter when Max is standing before you? Die, die, die a thousand deaths--but don't refuse to recognize the living man. Don't make a problem of him. It's flesh and blood, Boris. Flesh and blood. He's screaming and you pretend not to hear. You are deliberately making yourself deaf, dumb, and blind. You are dead before the living flesh. Dead before your own flesh and blood. You will gain nothing, neither in spirit, nor in the flesh, if you do not recognize Max your true brother."

The Cosmological Eye, Henry Miller

"You'll realize light is as important as the body itself."

Cronos (1993)

"Live alone, in a room where the windows are painted stuck. Old salmon paint that reminds you of those who were beautiful when you were a child. They were still young when this paint was slapped on creamy over dust. They saw streetcars in the traffic out the window. The war was over. Now you are as old. They seemed happier. 

You'll need a BEFORE. A concentration camp photo of a cousin that looked like you. Or someone fat. Here the resemblance needs be less exact. Especially if it's passport size and overexposed. You'll realize light is as important as the body itself. Begin to experiment. Shawl your head with a towel after a bath. You're only a blur in the steamy mirror, and the glow from the bare bathroom bulb shimmers about you like a halo. 

Extra time can be spent visiting churches. Each day walk to one farther away. You won't get lost -- sooner or later you'll come to a church and inside will be the same smell of the Middle Ages, their weather of cool plaster and smokey light. You'll discover the past can be preserved if enclosed in a temple. Though the empty vestibules return you to modern times -- cheap racks of free holy cards. Imagine the saints naked. 

Knotted muscle in forearms. Biceps bulging. Neck tapers from shoulders with the grace of marble. Shoulders sculptured into a chest defined as armor. Stomach flat. Legs rippling power, planted on the floor as you continue to heave upward, fists knurled through handles, straining at the stuck window. 

Finally it's time to confront the mirror in a skin of natural daylight. The hottest August anyone can remember. Slick with sweat, bare, gazing at your body. Face no longer important, spirit inseparable."

"To Acquire a Beautiful Body," Brass Knuckles, Stuart Dybek

"the taste of doorknobs / you kiss before squinting"

The Conversation (1979)

"(The story goes the priest / has carried a torch for Cherry / since grammar school / when he was just Wally Zwia, / nobody's father, not this saint / drunk enough to have removed his collar, / neck raw as a watchdog's.)"

"Cherry," Brass Knuckles, Stuart Dybek

Pillow Book (1996)

"Look. Look. Look. You forgot to take your shirt, and there's your book! and there's your pen! sitting on the table."

"Gravity's Angel," Mister Heartbreak. Laurie Anderson (1984)

("thirty two pages long")

Mr. Mom (1983)
"...can I ...have a moment ...to myself, please?" 

"he writes me a letter, a letter, a letter"

Nexus, Henry Miller

"No coffee, no apple pie."

"Each day the work grew a little tougher. The great moment came when I stood at the bottom of the hole swinging shovelsful of dirt over my shoulder. A beautiful piece of work. A hole in the ground? There are holes and holes. This was a consecrated hole. A special, from Adam Cadmus to Adam Omega."

Nexus, Henry Miller

"God himself could not have picked a better goat."

A Shock to the System (1990)

Nexus, Henry Miller

"He was the sort of man I would have been proud to call a friend. But I was too bashful to make advances..."

There Will Be Blood (2008)

"Whenever I went deep enough into my childhood I was no longer outside, on the fringe, but snugly inside, like a pip in the fleshy heart of a ripe piece of fruit. I might be standing in front of Annie Heineken's candy shop, in the old 14th Ward, my nose pressed against the windowpane, my eyes aglitter at the sight of some chocolate-covered soldiers. That abstract noun, 'the world,' hadn't yet penetrated my consciousness. Everything was real, concrete, individuated, but neither fully named nor wholly delineated. I was and things were. Space was limitless, time was not yet. Annie Heineken was a person who always leaned far over the counter to put things in my hand, who patted me on the head, who smiled at me, who said I was such a good little fellow, and sometimes ran out into the street to kiss me goodbye, though we lived only a few doors away.  

I honestly think that at times, out there on the fringe, when I got very quiet and still, I half expected someone to behave towards me exactly as Annie Heineken used to. Maybe I was running off to those faraway places of my childhood just to receive again that piece of candy, that smile, that embarrassing parting kiss. I was indeed an idealist. An incurable one. (An idealist is one who wants to turn the wheels back. He remembers too well what was given him; he doesn't think of what he himself might give. The world sours imperceptibly, but the process beings virtually from the moment one thinks in terms of 'the world.'" [sic]

Plexus, Henry Miller

Another Country (1984)

"In short, he was usually in a miserable condition, always ailing, griping, sneezing, and always blaming it on the cigarettes which he swore he would cut out next week or next month, and which sometimes he did do, to my great amazement, but only to go back to them, only to smoke more heavily....

... He had copies of magazines ten and fifteen years old, and newspapers too, which were treated in the same manner. Occasionally he would take a batch of these with him, open them up on the trolley or the train, skim through them rapidly, then fling them out the window. 'That's that!' he would say, smiling ruefully. He had cleared his conscience."

Plexus, Henry Miller

(Forward, I tell myself. Let's go! We are here.)

The Blues Brothers (1980) 

"It is on such a day as that I am apt to make one of those haphazard encounters which will alter the course of my life. The stranger coming towards me greets me like an old friend. We have merely to exchange a few words and the intimate stenographic language of ancient brothers replaces the current jargon. Communication is cryptic and seraphic, accomplished with the ease and rapidity of born deaf-mutes. For me it has only one purport--to bring about a reorientation. Altering the course of my life, as I put it before, means simply--correcting my sidereal position. The stranger, fresh from the other world, tips me off. Given my true bearings. I cut a fresh swath through the chartered realms of destiny. Just as the dream street swung softly into position, so I now wheel into vital alignment. The panorama against which I move is awesome and majestic. A landscape truly Tibetan beckons me onward. I know not whether it is a creation of the inner eye or some cataclysmic disturbance of the outer reality attuning itself to the profound reorientation I have just made. I know only that I am more solitary than ever. Everything that occurs now will have the quality of shock and discovery. I am not alone. I am in the midst of other solitaries. And each and every one of us speaks his own unique language! It is like the coming together of distant gods, each one wrapped in the aura of his own incomprehensible world. It is the first day of the week in the new cycle of consciousness. A cycle, need I say, which may last a week or a lifetime. En avant, je me dis. Allons-y! Nous sommes là." [sic]

Plexus, Henry Miller

"I am a freshly minted coin ready to fall into the palm of the first comer."

Manhunter (1986)

Plexus, Henry Miller

"That's how it begins. A duet which they have rehearsed a hundred times."

The Paper Chase (1973) 

"Curious, but any feelings of lineage or of ephemeral connections with the past which might arise in me were usually evoked by one of three curiously disparate phenomena: one, narrow, olden streets with miniature houses; two, certain unreal types of human beings, generally dreamers or fanatics; three, photographs of Tibet, of the Tibetan landscape particularly. I could be disoriented in a jiffy, and was then marvelously at home, one with the world and with myself. Only in such rare moments did I know or pretend to understand myself. My connections were, so to speak, with man and not with men. Only when I was shunted back to the grand trunk line did I become aware of my real rhythm, my real being. Individuality expressed itself for me as a life with roots. Efflorescence meant culture--in short, the world of cyclical development. In my eyes the great figures were always identified with the trunk of the tree, not with the boughs and leaves. And they were all variations of the one man, Adam Cadmus, or whatever he be called. My lineage stemmed from him, not from my ancestors. When I became aware I was superconscious I could make the leap back at one bound."

Plexus, Henry Miller

7, Section 3

The Fly II (1989)

Fratres Semper!

"'What will you do when we get there?' In Polish, of course. 

'Drnzybyisi uttituhy kidjeueycmayi,' said Stasu. Which meant, in our own vernacular, 'Take it easy.'"

Plexus, Henry Miller

the windup and pitch

Age of Summerhood (2013)

"With all the advantages of an American upbringing had I not (in my twenty-eighth year) been obliged to seek this lowest of all occupations? And was it not with extreme difficulty that I succeeded in earning sixteen or seventeen dollars a week? Soon I would be leaving this world to make my way as a writer, and as such I would become even more helpless than the lowliest of these immigrants.... 

... The strange thing was, I reflected, that most everybody I knew already considered me a writer, though I had done little to prove it. ...Everything, yes everything, was noted, analyzed, compared and described--for future use. Studying an object, a face, a facade, I studied it in the way it was to be written down (later) in a book, including the adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, parentheses and whatnot."

Plexus, Henry Miller

"the Carpathian Mountains moving up from under the moon"

Indecent Proposal (1993)

"'...One doesn't want appreciation...one wants a response. To tell you the truth, I don't know what I want of you, or anybody, for that matter. I want more than I get, that's all I know. I want you to step out of your skin. I want everybody to strip down, not just to the flesh, but the soul. Sometimes I get so hungry, so rapacious, that I could eat people up. I can't wait for them to tell me things... how they feel... what they want... and so on. I want to chew them alive... find out for myself... quick, all at once. Listen...'" 

Sexus, Henry Miller