Glass Life (2021) Movie Script
We accept all these images
as we accept the climate.
Every search, click,
and like is claimed as an asset,
and we don't mind.
Listen, where were you in all this?
From Walter B. to Kim K.
No paradise like the past.
Photography, phonography,
the cinema, radio,
television, video, and the Internet
have made ever-greater quantities of memory
potentially accessible.
Will I be nostalgic for this time?
Comparatively little attention
has been devoted
to what people forget, and why.
And why.
In the glass life, everything can be used.
It is all material.
We are smooth as glass.
Frictionless, porous.
Sourceless.
Where are you now?
The sky is falling,
Apple's stock is rising.
Look up at the sky,
look down at the screen in your hands.
And the scenes come together
like congregations of clouds
which gently join and slowly disperse.
Or hang solemnly still.
Source: Virginia Woolf.
Is this how the Internet works?
What is the weather doing?
Question: can an apple fall upwards?
Our brains, he realized,
will go to baroque lengths,
magic tricks, even,
to preserve the integrity of our worldview.
The more there is to know,
the more we feel truth is elusive.
Deny, deny, deny,
even if the truth is obvious.
That's the playbook.
Promiscuity between the seer and the seen.
The body is a sheet of plain glass.
To see right through to the mind.
Deny, Deny, Deny.
Words should say exactly what they mean;
why do they betray us?
To say that is to say this.
The bankers, the captains of industry.
Everyone.
The bankers, the captains of industry,
the oil barons.
The tulip bulbs of 17th-century Holland
which generated a wild, speculative rush
that quickly disappeared,
leaving behind nothing but flowers.
Will I be nostalgic for this time?
Berenice Abbott said,
"I have tried to be objective.
What I mean by objectivity
is not the objectivity of a machine,
but of a sensible human being
with the mystery of personal selection
at the heart of it."
She kind of invented the bird's-eye view.
Accidental mother of
surveillance technology.
Mother, first other, whatever.
Between the here and
now of lived experience
and the ideal
is a distance which creates
and maintains desire.
And we know that in love,
the reach exceeds the grasp.
This photograph says "I am happy."
This one says "I am free."
We appear to be both obsessive
documenters of our experience,
yet largely indifferent to
or overwhelmed by the archives we create.
There was a before time,
and there will be an after time.
We return nowhere.
Between life and death,
we become other than ourselves.
I want my shelf life to be longer.
Life points beyond itself.
Or does it?
He says the word "image" is in bad repute
because we have thoughtlessly believed
that a drawing was a tracing,
a copy, a second thing.
Distorted dream symbol.
"Dreaming of systems so perfect
that no one will need to be good."
The first modernity
suppressed the growth
and expression of self
in favor of collective solutions,
- but by the second modernity...
- The self is all we have.
...too many people had come
to feel excluded from the future.
"You can have any color car you want,
so long as it's black."
Source: Henry Ford. Year: 1909.
The alienation is real,
as a surfeit of weak ties
suffocates stronger bonds,
yet stronger bonds seem available
only through the online tools
that have diminished them.
"The will to remain alive
which drives all humans forward,
how constant surveillance
robs us of the will.
The life-sustaining inwardness,
born in sanctuary,
that finally distinguishes
us from the machines."
"As recalcitrant users,
we will not be obstacles."
Still dreaming of systems so perfect
that no-one will need to be good.
In the usual order of things,
lives run their course like rivers.
Sometimes they jump their beds.
Reasoning without desire,
is not reasoning.
In order to think, to want, to know,
things much have a consistency, a weight...
"She has sanded her personality
down to the bare essentials;
she laughs at what is funny,
she cries at what is sad."
Under the gaze of an
algorithmically constituted,
collective Other...
the ubiquitous face looking down upon us
whose smile we desire dearly.
Hmm. Do I?
No more room for the "I" of social media.
The "I" of performed
identity in the name of profit.
The "I" of instrumentalized sentiment
and performative justice.
The archiving makes the self
seem richer and more substantial
even as it becomes more tenuous.
Everything is significant or irrelevant,
depending on which view suits our needs.
Perfect joy excludes
even the very feeling of joy.
"For in the soul filled by the object,
no corner is left for saying 'I.'"
I perform my fabricated joy.
And so he says, "We vacillate
between anxious self-branding
and the self-negating practice
of seeking some higher authenticity:
we have to watch ourselves become ourselves
in order to be ourselves,
over and over again." Yes.
We have to watch ourselves become ourselves
in order to be ourselves,
over and over again.
We have to watch ourselves become ourselves
in order to be ourselves,
over and over again.
What about a desire to
keep oneself off the books?
We may now be in multiple places at once,
here in my body, but
there in speech or vision.
Time, in the 14th century as it emerged,
a symptom of a new Puritan discipline
and bourgeois exactitude.
It was a new gilded age. A concentration.
A concentration of economic power
not seen since the 1920s.
And it would remain so.
The distance between life and death in USA.
All of us in the teeth of Google.
Closer. Shorter.
All of us in the teeth of Google.
New mutant forms of capitalism.
Social media's court of public opinion.
Secret surplus capture.
Extensive personal information
that users did not or would not provide.
It was lawless, there was a void,
so... it was filled with money.
They long ago photographed
every street and house on the planet
without asking anyone's permission.
Frictionless. Poreless skin.
But they could zoom in on
the pores if they wanted to.
The days passed like waves.
So it is with the experience of the self
in the age of its digital reproducibility.
When I encounter reproductions of the self,
my own or that of others,
they do not elicit the moral recognition
that attends the embodied
self in the here and now.
Keynes says knowing the past
doesn't give you any
purchase on the future.
Father of neoliberalism.
Don't say "neoliberalism."
It sounds annoying.
Don't say "neoliberalism."
It sounds annoying.
A nation based on freedom
is just another place to go shopping.
Hume thought that the
pursuit of "modest" luxuries
like porcelain cups or a fashionable dress
made people more demanding and creative.
Needs are in reality
the fruits of production,
but every pleasure is a trap.
Someone says, "If you can have women
competing against each other,
it's great television."
Weightless digital terms.
Baroque and perverse privacy policies.
Every casual search, like, and click
was claimed as an asset.
We don't mind.
What is it about the body's relationship
to these big outdoor architectural spaces?
How do you know your size now?
Without knowing, without
having time to know.
I was thinking about how the gigantic
envelopes the body, makes you feel small...
The miniature gives us a sense of control
as if we can hold something in our hands,
have a grasp of all of it.
What is your body's
relationship to your phone?
In the glass life.
How do you know what size you are?
- In the glass life.
- Or how much space to take?
Online there is always distance.
But it is not in our power to
take such a distanced view.
We continually project
the body into the world
in order that its image might return to us:
onto the other, the mirror,
the animal, and the machine,
and onto the artistic image.
What? Sundered.
Where the self is sacrificed
to make room for the desires of another.
I seemed to believe I had no identity.
I seemed to believe I had
no identity, let alone a soul,
outside of the perception
others had formed of me.
Swallowing us as nature
or history swallows us.
It is capricious, the digital other.
Askesis, a withdrawal from
the world in order to see.
But we are not withdrawing.
We are everywhere. Everywhere this.
I, I, I.
We are just the means to other ends.
Decision rights vanish
before one even knows
there was a decision to make.
Accumulation by dispossession.
Not a wave but the tide itself.
"Dreaming of systems so perfect
that no one will need to be good."
Echo chamber/auto affection.
It's gonna recommend you what you want.
Fascism promises you
a part in something
bigger than yourself too.
Fascism promises you
a part in something
bigger than yourself too.
Our machines are disturbingly lively...
Plato.
...and we ourselves, frighteningly inert.
...you can't yell fire
in a crowded theatre.
You can have free speech,
but you can't yell fire
in a crowded theater.
We are aphorism cannons;
we speak in snippets.
Never trust the teller, trust the tale.
Source: DH Lawrence.
We say things like "I guess, who cares?"
But we care very much.
I don't even think of you.
I say that to say this.
I think of you... all the time.
But how can I say "I love you" differently?
They have left us only absences, defects,
negatives to name ourselves.
So sorry
That I was such a fool
I didn't know
God could be...
The sense of scale is all off.
And to follow her voice
was like following a voice
that speaks too quickly to
be taken down by a pencil.
And the voice was my own voice,
saying without prompting
undeniable everlasting
contradictory things.
Source: Virginia Woolf.
The voice was the
narrative, it was the story.
I go to a website called
"Harness Your Voice."
Lacan said, "The voice is what's left
when signifying is done."
Source...
"The voice is what's left
when signifying is done."
Someone says, "Ronald Reagan used
to tear up every time he saw the flag."
And Beatrice yells...
"O God, that I were a man,
I would eat his heart in the marketplace,
and my tongue will
tell the tale of my anger,
or my heart will break concealing it."
Source: Shakespeare. Source: Shakespeare.
Source: Lacan.
That's Shakespeare.
Plato.
I sit and see myself talking.
You feel like everyone is watching you,
but they are just watching themselves.
The distribution of the sensible,
or the system of divisions and boundaries
that define, among other things,
what is visible and audible
within a particular
aesthetic-political regime.
What you can say.
But I say that to say this.
I think of you all the time.
We come up with elaborate ways
to say one thing while speaking another.
The voice is the narrative.
It is the story.
The voice is the
narrative. It is the story.
The world of power changed.
The powerful is lowered toward the trivial.
The trivial is raised up to power.
Crowd-pleasing, risk-averse.
Beveled edges, pink, some
sort of return to childhood.
Soothing pinks. Chalk.
Looks good on the phone.
Flusser describes a shape
that escapes some cycle of capitalism;
an intestine during digestion
which can't be bought, only contemplated.
Year: 1985.
What is the role of beauty in all this?
The green earth, the sea, the sky.
The deepest diver.
Augustine described it
as a plank amid the waves of the sea.
Year: 400 A.D.
Beauty brings copies of itself into being.
The will to make more and more
so that there will eventually be "enough."
Beauty is sometimes disparaged
on the grounds that it causes
a contagion of imitation.
The great works of art.
The reproductions of
the great works of art.
Who will watch the watchers?
I saw the same clouds in every picture.
The ideal woman has always been generic.
My identity became a source of profit
with no way out.
I sat and watched myself speak.
Trying to start connecting
back to the beginning.
She tossed her head like a snake.
Ambassadors, animals, Apple,
Balenciaga, Bayer, beauty,
Bellmer, Berenice, blonde,
body, breasts, car, Czanne,
climate, clock, Christina,
computer, criminal, crying,
death, earth, elephant, egg,
eye, female, fashion, Ferrari,
fetus, fire, flower, fruit,
glass, heart, helicopter, hell,
humiliation, laughing, Lee Miller,
Marilyn, Marxism, me, money,
mother, mouse, museum,
muscles, myth, Netflix,
nude, office, painting,
pantyhose, paradise,
Park Chung-hee, Paula Rego,
peach, perspective, Picasso, Prada,
police, pool, quid pro quo,
Rome, snake, statue, swan, sun,
textile, theater, threat, tongue,
touch, transparency, vase, war,
woman, women, wrestling,
yolk, Zeus, zoo.
Why did the "tongue-out" emoji
suddenly seem to
encapsulate the current time?
Everybody wastes years. It's okay.
The lips were all too red,
they were glowing and glowing,
and I couldn't figure out
where I'd seen that color.
They were digital Mickey Mouse.
Remember the apple is red, the sky is blue.
Dream about control
and about losing control.
Loop. Too much a body
and too disembodied. Loop.
All of our institutions are
coming apart at the seams.
It dropped so low in my regard
I heard it hit the ground
And go to pieces on the stones
At the bottom of my mind.
Source: Emily Dickinson.
As recalcitrant users,
we will not be obstacles.
It starts with a hard look in the mirror.
But don't fall for the myth
of individual responsibility.
We know who keeps the score.
We know who keeps the score.
To have so little confidence
in your own reality.
You are marinating yourself
in the conventional wisdom.
You are creating a cacophony in which
it is impossible to hear your own voice.
She says they believe they are acting
out of their own volition,
but they are actually running
a series of scripts and loops.
The locus of power is carefully hidden.
This is a joke.
Posturing at happiness, pretending at joy,
laughing at nothing. This is a joke.
Fascism promises you
a part in something bigger than yourself,
and so not always needing
to be saying "I... I... I."
Since the order of the world is
shaped by death, shouldn't we fight?
Yes.
But your victories will never be lasting.
Source: The Plague.
Source: The Plague.
That is what we learn
in a time of pestilence.
Economic successes rooted
in profound moral failures.
He says, "We didn't lose
anyone that we could have saved."
We're talking about grieving a living loss,
one that keeps going and
going, that does not have a point.
A loop.
Do you have a vague sense of suffering?
We can help you wrap language around that.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end,
which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose?
Disturbing the dust on
a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know. I do not know.
Other echoes inhabit the garden.
Shall we follow?
"Go", said the bird,
for the leaves were full of children,
hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
"Go, go, go," said the bird:
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
Language ran dry a long time ago.
And anyone listening would already agree.
A loop.
He says, "I wish we could
have our old life back.
We had the greatest
economy that we've ever had,
and we didn't have death."
It is not in our power to
take such a distanced view.
as we accept the climate.
Every search, click,
and like is claimed as an asset,
and we don't mind.
Listen, where were you in all this?
From Walter B. to Kim K.
No paradise like the past.
Photography, phonography,
the cinema, radio,
television, video, and the Internet
have made ever-greater quantities of memory
potentially accessible.
Will I be nostalgic for this time?
Comparatively little attention
has been devoted
to what people forget, and why.
And why.
In the glass life, everything can be used.
It is all material.
We are smooth as glass.
Frictionless, porous.
Sourceless.
Where are you now?
The sky is falling,
Apple's stock is rising.
Look up at the sky,
look down at the screen in your hands.
And the scenes come together
like congregations of clouds
which gently join and slowly disperse.
Or hang solemnly still.
Source: Virginia Woolf.
Is this how the Internet works?
What is the weather doing?
Question: can an apple fall upwards?
Our brains, he realized,
will go to baroque lengths,
magic tricks, even,
to preserve the integrity of our worldview.
The more there is to know,
the more we feel truth is elusive.
Deny, deny, deny,
even if the truth is obvious.
That's the playbook.
Promiscuity between the seer and the seen.
The body is a sheet of plain glass.
To see right through to the mind.
Deny, Deny, Deny.
Words should say exactly what they mean;
why do they betray us?
To say that is to say this.
The bankers, the captains of industry.
Everyone.
The bankers, the captains of industry,
the oil barons.
The tulip bulbs of 17th-century Holland
which generated a wild, speculative rush
that quickly disappeared,
leaving behind nothing but flowers.
Will I be nostalgic for this time?
Berenice Abbott said,
"I have tried to be objective.
What I mean by objectivity
is not the objectivity of a machine,
but of a sensible human being
with the mystery of personal selection
at the heart of it."
She kind of invented the bird's-eye view.
Accidental mother of
surveillance technology.
Mother, first other, whatever.
Between the here and
now of lived experience
and the ideal
is a distance which creates
and maintains desire.
And we know that in love,
the reach exceeds the grasp.
This photograph says "I am happy."
This one says "I am free."
We appear to be both obsessive
documenters of our experience,
yet largely indifferent to
or overwhelmed by the archives we create.
There was a before time,
and there will be an after time.
We return nowhere.
Between life and death,
we become other than ourselves.
I want my shelf life to be longer.
Life points beyond itself.
Or does it?
He says the word "image" is in bad repute
because we have thoughtlessly believed
that a drawing was a tracing,
a copy, a second thing.
Distorted dream symbol.
"Dreaming of systems so perfect
that no one will need to be good."
The first modernity
suppressed the growth
and expression of self
in favor of collective solutions,
- but by the second modernity...
- The self is all we have.
...too many people had come
to feel excluded from the future.
"You can have any color car you want,
so long as it's black."
Source: Henry Ford. Year: 1909.
The alienation is real,
as a surfeit of weak ties
suffocates stronger bonds,
yet stronger bonds seem available
only through the online tools
that have diminished them.
"The will to remain alive
which drives all humans forward,
how constant surveillance
robs us of the will.
The life-sustaining inwardness,
born in sanctuary,
that finally distinguishes
us from the machines."
"As recalcitrant users,
we will not be obstacles."
Still dreaming of systems so perfect
that no-one will need to be good.
In the usual order of things,
lives run their course like rivers.
Sometimes they jump their beds.
Reasoning without desire,
is not reasoning.
In order to think, to want, to know,
things much have a consistency, a weight...
"She has sanded her personality
down to the bare essentials;
she laughs at what is funny,
she cries at what is sad."
Under the gaze of an
algorithmically constituted,
collective Other...
the ubiquitous face looking down upon us
whose smile we desire dearly.
Hmm. Do I?
No more room for the "I" of social media.
The "I" of performed
identity in the name of profit.
The "I" of instrumentalized sentiment
and performative justice.
The archiving makes the self
seem richer and more substantial
even as it becomes more tenuous.
Everything is significant or irrelevant,
depending on which view suits our needs.
Perfect joy excludes
even the very feeling of joy.
"For in the soul filled by the object,
no corner is left for saying 'I.'"
I perform my fabricated joy.
And so he says, "We vacillate
between anxious self-branding
and the self-negating practice
of seeking some higher authenticity:
we have to watch ourselves become ourselves
in order to be ourselves,
over and over again." Yes.
We have to watch ourselves become ourselves
in order to be ourselves,
over and over again.
We have to watch ourselves become ourselves
in order to be ourselves,
over and over again.
What about a desire to
keep oneself off the books?
We may now be in multiple places at once,
here in my body, but
there in speech or vision.
Time, in the 14th century as it emerged,
a symptom of a new Puritan discipline
and bourgeois exactitude.
It was a new gilded age. A concentration.
A concentration of economic power
not seen since the 1920s.
And it would remain so.
The distance between life and death in USA.
All of us in the teeth of Google.
Closer. Shorter.
All of us in the teeth of Google.
New mutant forms of capitalism.
Social media's court of public opinion.
Secret surplus capture.
Extensive personal information
that users did not or would not provide.
It was lawless, there was a void,
so... it was filled with money.
They long ago photographed
every street and house on the planet
without asking anyone's permission.
Frictionless. Poreless skin.
But they could zoom in on
the pores if they wanted to.
The days passed like waves.
So it is with the experience of the self
in the age of its digital reproducibility.
When I encounter reproductions of the self,
my own or that of others,
they do not elicit the moral recognition
that attends the embodied
self in the here and now.
Keynes says knowing the past
doesn't give you any
purchase on the future.
Father of neoliberalism.
Don't say "neoliberalism."
It sounds annoying.
Don't say "neoliberalism."
It sounds annoying.
A nation based on freedom
is just another place to go shopping.
Hume thought that the
pursuit of "modest" luxuries
like porcelain cups or a fashionable dress
made people more demanding and creative.
Needs are in reality
the fruits of production,
but every pleasure is a trap.
Someone says, "If you can have women
competing against each other,
it's great television."
Weightless digital terms.
Baroque and perverse privacy policies.
Every casual search, like, and click
was claimed as an asset.
We don't mind.
What is it about the body's relationship
to these big outdoor architectural spaces?
How do you know your size now?
Without knowing, without
having time to know.
I was thinking about how the gigantic
envelopes the body, makes you feel small...
The miniature gives us a sense of control
as if we can hold something in our hands,
have a grasp of all of it.
What is your body's
relationship to your phone?
In the glass life.
How do you know what size you are?
- In the glass life.
- Or how much space to take?
Online there is always distance.
But it is not in our power to
take such a distanced view.
We continually project
the body into the world
in order that its image might return to us:
onto the other, the mirror,
the animal, and the machine,
and onto the artistic image.
What? Sundered.
Where the self is sacrificed
to make room for the desires of another.
I seemed to believe I had no identity.
I seemed to believe I had
no identity, let alone a soul,
outside of the perception
others had formed of me.
Swallowing us as nature
or history swallows us.
It is capricious, the digital other.
Askesis, a withdrawal from
the world in order to see.
But we are not withdrawing.
We are everywhere. Everywhere this.
I, I, I.
We are just the means to other ends.
Decision rights vanish
before one even knows
there was a decision to make.
Accumulation by dispossession.
Not a wave but the tide itself.
"Dreaming of systems so perfect
that no one will need to be good."
Echo chamber/auto affection.
It's gonna recommend you what you want.
Fascism promises you
a part in something
bigger than yourself too.
Fascism promises you
a part in something
bigger than yourself too.
Our machines are disturbingly lively...
Plato.
...and we ourselves, frighteningly inert.
...you can't yell fire
in a crowded theatre.
You can have free speech,
but you can't yell fire
in a crowded theater.
We are aphorism cannons;
we speak in snippets.
Never trust the teller, trust the tale.
Source: DH Lawrence.
We say things like "I guess, who cares?"
But we care very much.
I don't even think of you.
I say that to say this.
I think of you... all the time.
But how can I say "I love you" differently?
They have left us only absences, defects,
negatives to name ourselves.
So sorry
That I was such a fool
I didn't know
God could be...
The sense of scale is all off.
And to follow her voice
was like following a voice
that speaks too quickly to
be taken down by a pencil.
And the voice was my own voice,
saying without prompting
undeniable everlasting
contradictory things.
Source: Virginia Woolf.
The voice was the
narrative, it was the story.
I go to a website called
"Harness Your Voice."
Lacan said, "The voice is what's left
when signifying is done."
Source...
"The voice is what's left
when signifying is done."
Someone says, "Ronald Reagan used
to tear up every time he saw the flag."
And Beatrice yells...
"O God, that I were a man,
I would eat his heart in the marketplace,
and my tongue will
tell the tale of my anger,
or my heart will break concealing it."
Source: Shakespeare. Source: Shakespeare.
Source: Lacan.
That's Shakespeare.
Plato.
I sit and see myself talking.
You feel like everyone is watching you,
but they are just watching themselves.
The distribution of the sensible,
or the system of divisions and boundaries
that define, among other things,
what is visible and audible
within a particular
aesthetic-political regime.
What you can say.
But I say that to say this.
I think of you all the time.
We come up with elaborate ways
to say one thing while speaking another.
The voice is the narrative.
It is the story.
The voice is the
narrative. It is the story.
The world of power changed.
The powerful is lowered toward the trivial.
The trivial is raised up to power.
Crowd-pleasing, risk-averse.
Beveled edges, pink, some
sort of return to childhood.
Soothing pinks. Chalk.
Looks good on the phone.
Flusser describes a shape
that escapes some cycle of capitalism;
an intestine during digestion
which can't be bought, only contemplated.
Year: 1985.
What is the role of beauty in all this?
The green earth, the sea, the sky.
The deepest diver.
Augustine described it
as a plank amid the waves of the sea.
Year: 400 A.D.
Beauty brings copies of itself into being.
The will to make more and more
so that there will eventually be "enough."
Beauty is sometimes disparaged
on the grounds that it causes
a contagion of imitation.
The great works of art.
The reproductions of
the great works of art.
Who will watch the watchers?
I saw the same clouds in every picture.
The ideal woman has always been generic.
My identity became a source of profit
with no way out.
I sat and watched myself speak.
Trying to start connecting
back to the beginning.
She tossed her head like a snake.
Ambassadors, animals, Apple,
Balenciaga, Bayer, beauty,
Bellmer, Berenice, blonde,
body, breasts, car, Czanne,
climate, clock, Christina,
computer, criminal, crying,
death, earth, elephant, egg,
eye, female, fashion, Ferrari,
fetus, fire, flower, fruit,
glass, heart, helicopter, hell,
humiliation, laughing, Lee Miller,
Marilyn, Marxism, me, money,
mother, mouse, museum,
muscles, myth, Netflix,
nude, office, painting,
pantyhose, paradise,
Park Chung-hee, Paula Rego,
peach, perspective, Picasso, Prada,
police, pool, quid pro quo,
Rome, snake, statue, swan, sun,
textile, theater, threat, tongue,
touch, transparency, vase, war,
woman, women, wrestling,
yolk, Zeus, zoo.
Why did the "tongue-out" emoji
suddenly seem to
encapsulate the current time?
Everybody wastes years. It's okay.
The lips were all too red,
they were glowing and glowing,
and I couldn't figure out
where I'd seen that color.
They were digital Mickey Mouse.
Remember the apple is red, the sky is blue.
Dream about control
and about losing control.
Loop. Too much a body
and too disembodied. Loop.
All of our institutions are
coming apart at the seams.
It dropped so low in my regard
I heard it hit the ground
And go to pieces on the stones
At the bottom of my mind.
Source: Emily Dickinson.
As recalcitrant users,
we will not be obstacles.
It starts with a hard look in the mirror.
But don't fall for the myth
of individual responsibility.
We know who keeps the score.
We know who keeps the score.
To have so little confidence
in your own reality.
You are marinating yourself
in the conventional wisdom.
You are creating a cacophony in which
it is impossible to hear your own voice.
She says they believe they are acting
out of their own volition,
but they are actually running
a series of scripts and loops.
The locus of power is carefully hidden.
This is a joke.
Posturing at happiness, pretending at joy,
laughing at nothing. This is a joke.
Fascism promises you
a part in something bigger than yourself,
and so not always needing
to be saying "I... I... I."
Since the order of the world is
shaped by death, shouldn't we fight?
Yes.
But your victories will never be lasting.
Source: The Plague.
Source: The Plague.
That is what we learn
in a time of pestilence.
Economic successes rooted
in profound moral failures.
He says, "We didn't lose
anyone that we could have saved."
We're talking about grieving a living loss,
one that keeps going and
going, that does not have a point.
A loop.
Do you have a vague sense of suffering?
We can help you wrap language around that.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end,
which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose?
Disturbing the dust on
a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know. I do not know.
Other echoes inhabit the garden.
Shall we follow?
"Go", said the bird,
for the leaves were full of children,
hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
"Go, go, go," said the bird:
Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
Language ran dry a long time ago.
And anyone listening would already agree.
A loop.
He says, "I wish we could
have our old life back.
We had the greatest
economy that we've ever had,
and we didn't have death."
It is not in our power to
take such a distanced view.