"Portion of Wall Misplaced, Whereabouts Unknown"

"Dieter was hunched forward, balanced on the balls of his feet, his chin jutting out from his chest. He had his hands up, palms out, fingers splayed. He patted the air in front of the hole, swiping at it, running his hands back and forth and up and down along an invisible plane, mere inches from the guards' faces. They stared, transfixed. No one spoke. Dieter continued to slide his hands through the air, reaching forward again and again, each time stopping in the space where the wall once stood. 

The two guards stood frozen in contemplation. The bushier one opened his mouth and then closed it. The other opened his own mouth and left it that way. 

'Upon further examination,' said the first, 'I might want to revise my initial opinion.' 

'I was just thinking the same thing,' said the other. 'I can't say it looks exactly the same as other walls I've seen. But there's clearly a wall there--I feel sure of that.' 

His partner squinted. 'I feel the same way. I wasn't sure how to say it, but you--you've described it perfectly' 

'Not all walls are the same.' 

'Certainly not.'"

The Pickle Index, Eli Horowitz

The Trouble With Angels (1966)

"... the curve of a tree trunk, a muscle or a column, will display the essence of its form--for the tree, sap, for the muscle, blood, and for the column, an inner cohesive core providing structural integrity. Therefore, a convex wall will be characterized not only by an outward expansion but also by an inward-looking characterization."

"The Convex Wall," Archetypes in Architecture, Thomas Thiis-Evensen

Francesco (1984)

"Gravity will always draw objects and ourselves down, representing in the extreme an annihilation of existence. That something stands up against this force by rising up is therefore synonymous with survival--and survival implies freedom from the earth."

"Gravity and Motion from Above Downward," Archetypes in Architecture, Thomas Thiis-Evensen

Psycho III (1986)

best-quality deputy

John Lurie & the Lounge Lizards, "Show 122," Sunday Night (1989 TV)

"Anyway, ringmastering was for ringmasters, and I still had the bat cages to clean. 'You are so good with the shovel,' Zloty would say, tousling my hair. 'You are a true master. I would not deprive you of an opportunity to display your talents.' Sometimes I thought about the farm, the dirt-prod, the three unfinished mounds, but never for very long--there were so many bat cages.

That was six years ago. I think. ... I'm no longer a little girl, and I'm no longer such a sucker for enchantment. I used to dream of someday standing in the center of the ring myself, mesmerizing a hushed throng of ladies and gentlemen, spinning acts into feats. Now I mostly dream of a waterproof blanket, and mostly I keep my mouth shut."

The Pickle Index, Eli Horowitz

"The show was just beginning when I arrived. Zloty stood in the center of the ring, his arms outstretched, tracing circles in the air to indicate the boundlessness of the wonders we were soon to witness. He used words like intrepid and spellbound and liability waiver. He said we were privileged to witness such feats. Had I ever really witnessed anything before? I searched my memories, but mostly it was just a whole bunch of ordinary seeing. On the farm, there was only the work and how the work got done. You looked at the dirt mounds, you looked at your hands, splinter-rich from the dirt-prod, and then you went to bed. But to witness something--to become an accomplice just by watching--that was something else. 

...By the grand finale the bleachers were almost empty. But I hardly noticed--I was entranced. I stayed until the end, when had the troupe came out to take a bow to scattered, anemic applause. And I stayed to watch Rueben push a wide broom across the dirt floor and into a pile in the corner. And while they dismantled the ring and packed up the lights, I curled into a wooden crate filled with novelty wigs and buried myself deep inside. If I wasn't chosen, I would choose. I'm a performer now, I thought, and I felt the netting of a wig settle into place just above my ears. I thought about my dirt-pod still lying next to those three mounds, and then I fell asleep."  

The Pickle Index, Eli Horowitz

Trust (1990)

"... I understood that we would forever be trailing five years behind the dream of prosperity. I saw that I was not the chosen one. There was no chosen one. My purpose in the world, which once seemed so clear and crisp, had fallen away, and in its place was just the glacial creep of the hard days ahead."

The Pickle Index, Eli Horowitz

"Despite the festive atmosphere, the air was rank with an unmistakable Kornblattery. The man was apprehended, yes, but his ideas remain, airborne pustules of mental infection, wafting along a gentle breeze of passivity. A figure like Zloty Kornblatt does not simply materialize out of the fermented mists, and his network of dedicated followers does not simply wither away in his absence. At this moment, highly trained disruptor cells lurk just a river's width from Destina, in Burford, our nation's spiritual pantry, a city of earthly fold living happy, brine-spattered lives. These humble people aren't distracted by Destina's insatiable appetite for novelty, the endless chase of new flavors, delicious foods, fresh vegetables. They don't have to worry about being first to discover the new treat of tomorrow; there, tomorrow is the same as today and yesterday, only slightly more vinegary. Yes, theirs is an innocent, authentic existences, uncluttered by the pleasant odors and dull administrative powers of our capital city."

The Pickle Index, Eli Horowitz

(subterranean)

The Paper Chase (1973)

"I'd started wetting the bed again, yeah. After two years dry."

Escape from L.A. (1996)

"Till the Morning Comes," The Ones That Got Away, Stephen Graham Jones

your collecting has been restricted

White Lightnin' (2009)

"Don't come near me, Jennifer, I wouldn't know what to say to you now. My memories of you have coexisted for too long with too many dialogues between us that never occurred and I don't want to add more exchanges to this jumble. Don't have the wherewithal to parse imaginaries."

The Revolutionaries Try Again, Mauro Javier Cardenas

"(... simply what? what have you done with the memory of what was given to you? -- forget her?)"

It's Pat (1994)

"(how many times does the Virgin Mary need to appear to remind us of what we already know? how many times do we need to induce ourselves into believing she has come to warn us again that we're on the wrong path? in how many places around the world does she need to appear for no one to disbelieve anymore? or are her recurrent appearances what perpetuate disbelief?)"

The Revolutionaries Try Again, Mauro Javier Cardenas 

"-- Why are you telling me all of this Rolando? -- oh -- so you were not asleep -- he doesn't say -- what is he supposed to say? -- I'm sharing all these tender memories with you so you'll know -- what? -- that I am not what I am? --"

The Revolutionaries Try Again, Mauro Javier Cardenas

"... builds a / valentine out of a blue / leaf & tree pitch for his missing sister"

Figures for a Darkroom Voice, Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson

Wise Blood (1979) 

"Distance is not something to believe in, & yet, you are so far from the image of yourself."

Figures for a Darkroom Voice, Noah Eli Gordon & Joshua Marie Wilkinson

(I was first shown how things grow here.)

"--and she seems to be talking to the plants or petting the plants as if trying to console them -- That's my grandmother she's apologizing to the tomatoes and the potatoes because we'll have to eat them soon."

The Revolutionaries Try Again, Mauro Javier Cardenas

Oh Lord, let this be my motto:

"I in You, and Ye in me."

  

"his bountiful inner life would have shielded him from his bountiful inaction"

The Revolutionaries Try Again, Mauro Javier Cardenas

"The PTA Disbands," The Simpsons (1995)

"... discovering the possibility of an alternative life in which he did not have to submit to the embarrassing myths about himself -- everyone thinks they're the chosen ones, Drool -- although he had approached fiction and piano playing the same way, thinking of them not simply as activities to pass the time before he died but as transcendental callings, which was an exhausting way to live ..."

The Revolutionaries Try Again, Mauro Javier Cardenas

"... the hobble / of too much replaced by the common limp / of too little. But I almost got there."

"The Seekonk Woods," The Past, Galway Kinnell

"I have read it and each time I have heard / his voice saying it under my voice, / and in fact in those auditoriums / that don't let you 'hear yourself,' sometimes / I hear only his voice, ..."

"The Last Holy Fragrance (In memoriam James Wright)," The Past, Galway Kinnell

(it's about a) doggone

"... she scribbles her spine's / continuation into immaterial et cetera, ..."

"The Angel," The Past, Galway Kinnell

An Angel at My Table (1990)

"Ruth had been brought up to believe in revelations, in words of awful import spoken on special occasions, in strange languages or other unusual ways. The doctors might call it delirium, but how could they be sure? Things that were hidden from the wise were revealed to babes and sucklings."

Oil!, Upton Sinclair

"--Ruth was back in those childhood days on the lonely hills of Paradise, when Paul had been her only childhood friend, a refuge from a family of fanatics, with a father who beat her to make her think like him. Back there she had known that Paul was a great man, and had followed him all these years; she had watched his mind unfolding, and learned everything she knew from it--and now, to see it destroyed by a brute with a piece of iron pipe!"

Oil!, Upton Sinclair

"--but the more it changed, the more it was the same thing."

The Unbelievable Truth (1989)

"This was Big Magic."

Oil!, Upton Sinclair

"In this white flame of suffering Paul's spirit had been tempered to steel, and the crowd of workers shared this process, and took new views of solidarity; Bunny felt the thrill of a great mass experience, and yearned to be part of it, and then shrunk back, like a young man in the Bible story who had too many possessions."

Oil!, Upton Sinclair

"To the hour of his death, the elder Ross never really understood this strange son of his. He was always being surprised by the intensity with which Bunny took things, which to the father were part of the nature of life. The father kept two compartments in his mind, one for things that were right, and the other for things that existed, and which you had to allow to exist, and to defend, in a queer, half-hearted, but stubborn way. But here was this new phenomenon, a boy's mind which was all one compartment; things ought to be right, and if they were not right, you ought to make them right, or else what was the use of having any right--you were only fooling yourself about it."

Oil!, Upton Sinclair

Age of Summerhood (2013)

"... 'Gee whiz, Dad!' exclaimed the boy. 'Eli was saying every word that you taught him! Do you suppose he really believes it all?' 

Dad answered that only the Holy Spirit could tell that. Eli was a lunatic, and a dangerous one, but a kind that you couldn't put in an asylum, because he used the phrases of religion. He hadn't wits enough to make up anything for himself, he had jist enough to see what cold be done with the phrases Dad had given him; so now there was a new religion turned loose to plague the poor and ignorant, and the Almighty himself couldn't stop it."

Oil!, Upton Sinclair

9 1/2 Weeks (1986)

"Dad's mind wasn't like that; it got on one subject and stayed there, and ideas came through it in a slow, grave procession; his emotions were like a furnace that took a long time to heat up. Sometimes on these drives he would say nothing for a whole hour; the stream of his consciousness would be like a river that has sunk down through the rocks and sand, clean out of sight; he would be just a pervading sense of well-being, wrapped in an opulent warm overcoat, an accessory, you might say, of a softly purring engine running in a bath of boiling oil, and traversing a road at fifty miles an hour. If you had taken his consciousness apart, you would have found, not thoughts, but conditions of physical organs, and of the weather, and of the car, and of bank-accounts, and of the boy at his side. Putting it into words makes it definite and separate--so you must try to take it all at once, blended together. 'I, the driver of this car, that used to be Jim Ross, the teamster,  and J. A. Ross and Co., general merchandise at Queen Centre, California, and now J. Arnold Ross, oil operator, and my breakfast is about digested, and I am a little too warm in my big new overcoat because the sun is coming out, and I have a new well flowing four thousand barrels at Lobos River, and at sixteen on the pump at Antelope, and I'm on my way to sign a lease at Beach City, and we'll make up our schedule in the next couple of hours, and "Bunny" is sitting beside me, and he is well and strong, and is going to own everything I am making, and follow in my footsteps, except that he will never make the ugly blunders or have the painful memories that I have, but will be wise and perfect and do everything I say.'"

Oil!, Upton Sinclair