Le Dieu de l'Ire

Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny. Deus Irae. 1976. NY: Dell Publishing, 1980.

• Pete tells to a girl named Turine why men got banned from the Garden of Eden.

“'How did man and God get separated?' Like a child, she listened attentively, awaiting the true tale.

Pete said cryptically, 'A quarrel so old that the story is garbled. Somehow God set man up where He could reach man daily, regularly; they were in direct touch, the way you and I are now. But something happened and somehow they wound up like Leibnitz's windowless monads, near each other but unable to perceive anything outside; only able to scrutinize their own beings. A sort of schizophrenia evidently set in, on the part of one of them or both; autism—separation. And then man — '

'Man was driven out. Physically away.'

Pete said, 'Evidently man did something, or anyhow God thought he had. We don't know precisely what it was. He was corrupted, anyhow, through nature or some natural substance; something made by God and part of His creation. So man sank out of direct contact and down to the level of mere creation. And we have to make our way back.'” (43)

• During his pilgrimage, Tibor meets the Great C, a robot that has been built before Earth were destroyed by nukes (prewar). The robot is pretty talkative and serves as a witness of the past before the apocalypse.

“'You know,' the Great C said, 'I have existed a long time. I remember life before the Smash. I could tell you many things about it. Life was much different then. You wear a beard and hunt animals in the woods. Before the Smash there were no woods. Only cities and farms. And men were clean-shaven. Many of them wore white clothing, then. They were scientists. They were very fine. I was constructed by engineers; they were a form of scientist.' She paused. 'Do you recognize the name Einstein? Albert Einstein?''” (100)

• Tibor is still on his pilgrimage. He meets a very interesting kind of bird

The bird sang words, now. Brighten up the corner, it called. Again it sang the few words, and then thrilled out, Praise him from whom the wing and trees, the rocks and thank you. Tweet, toddle. It started from the beginning again, tracing each previous outburst.
A meta-mutant bird, he realized. A teilhard de chardin: forward oddity. . . .” (125)

• Pete is following Tibor. On his way, he finds an autofac (a porte-manteau word probably made out of 'automated factory'). He approaches the machine, which is dysfunctional, and addresses it with much reverence:

“'Uh—Your Fabricatorship?' he ventured.
Nothing.
'… Processor, Producer, Distributor, Maintainer,' he went on, a portion of the ritual now occuring to him, 'Great Maker-Good on warranties, excluding labor and parts. I, a humble consumer, Pete Sands by name, beg leave to make representations before you.'” (169)

• Rilke's poem Abend (173):

Der Abend wechselt langsam die Gewänder,
die ihm Rand von alten Bäumen hält;
du schaust: und von dir scheiden sich die Länder,
ein himmelfahrendes und eins, das fällt;

und lassen dich, zu keinem ganz gehörend,
nicht ganz so dunkel wie das Haus, das schweigt,
nicht ganz so sicher Ewiges beschwörend
wie das, was Stern wird jede Nacht und steight;

und lassen die (unsäglich zu entwirnn)
dein Leben, bang und riesenhaft und reifend,
so dasz es, bald begrenzt und bald begreifend,
abwechselnd Stein in dir wird und Gestirn.

• Tibor and Pete talk about paintings and how Wieth's pictures “looked exceptionally real.”

“'Pete,' he said, 'there are an infinite number of ways of showing how things actually look. They are all of them right, because they show it. Yet each artist goes about it differently. It is partly what you choose to emphasize and partly how you do it. It is plain that you have never painted.'” (212)

Voilà de quoi manger

 A reading I greatly enjoyed was Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman. First published in 1969. The edition I read: Virago Modern Classics (London, UK), 1979.

Below are some lengthy quotes from the book surrounded by minimal context.

• Duncan is a graduate student. In the following exceprt, he talks to Marian, the main character and narrator:

“'They all say, Go on to graduate studies, and they give you a bit of money; and so you do, and you think, Now I'm going to find out the real truth. But you don't find out, exactly, and things get pickier and pickier and more stale, and it all collapses in a welter of commas and shredded footnotes, and after a while it's like anything else: you've got stuck in it and you can't get out, and you wonder how you got there in the first place.''” (96)

• This passage is about Ainsley, who shares an appartment with Marian, and her plan to seduce a man (named Leonard) only in order to get pregnant and get rid of him right after that:

“Things hadn't gone according to schedule. It appeared that Ainsley had overshot the mark. At the first encounter she had made herself into an image of such pink-gingham purity that Len had decided, after her strategic repulse of him that evening, that she would require an extra-long and careful siege. Anything too abrupt, too muscular, would frighten her away; she would have to be trapped with gentleness and caution. Consequently he had begun by asking her to lunch several times, and had progressed, at intervals of medium length, to dinners out and finally to foreign films, in one of which he had gone so far as to hold her hand. He had even invited her to his apartment once, for afternoon tea. Ainsley said later with several vigorous oaths that he had been on this occasion a model of propriety. Since by her own admission she didn't drink, she could not even pretend to permit him to get her drunk. In conversation he treated her as though she was a little girl, patiently explaining things to her and impressing her with stories about the television studio and assuring her that his interest in her was strictly that of a well-wishing older friend until she wanted to scream. And she couldn't even talk back: it was necessary for her mind to appear as vacant as her face. Her hands were tied. She had constructed her image and now she had to maintain it. To make any advances herself, or to let slip a flicker of anything resembling intelligence, would have been so out of character as to give her dumb-show irrevocably away. So she had been stewing and fussing in private, suffering Len's overly-subtle manoeuvrings with suppressed impatience and watching the all-important calendar days slide uneventfully by.” (119)

• Clara, who is Marian's friend, just gave birth. She  talks to Marian, who is visiting her at the hospital:

“' . . . I watched the whole thing, it's messy, all that blood and junk, but I've got to admit it's sort of fascinating. Especially when the little bugger sticks its head out, and you finally know after carrying the damn thing around all that time what it looks like; I get so excited waiting to see, it's like when you were little and you waited and waited and finally got to open your Christmas presents. Sometimes when I was pregnant I wished like hell we could just hatch them out of eggs, like the birds and so on; but there's really something to be said for this method.' She picked up one of the white roses, and sniffed at it. 'You really ought to try it sometime.'” (128)

• Duncan is ironing shirts and talks to Marian:

“'It's like term-papers, you produce all that stuff and nothing is ever done with it, you just get a grade for it and heave it in the trash, you know that some other poor comma-counter is going to come along the year after you and have to do the same thing over again, it's a treadmill, even ironing, you iron the damn things and then you wear them and they get all wrinkled again.'” (143)

• Leonard talks to Marian about Ainsley's pregnancy:

“. . . 'God, I feel just sick about it,' he said. 'I was so shocked when she told me, god I'd just called her up to see if she'd have coffee with me, she's been sort of avoiding me ever since that night, I guess all that really shook her up, and then to have that hit you over the phone. I haven't been able to work all afternoon. I hung up right in the middle of the conversation, I don't know what she thought about that but I couldn't help it. She's such a little girl, Marian, I mean most women you'd feel what the hell, they probably deserved it, rotten bitches anyway, not that anything like that has ever happened to me before. But she's so young. The damn thing is, I can't really remember what happened that evening. We came back for coffee, and I was feeling sort of rotten and that bottle of scotch was sitting on the table and I started in on it. Of course I won't deny that I'd been angling for her, but, well, I wasn't expecting it, I mean I wasn't ready, I mean I would have been a lot more careful. What a mess. What'm I going to do?'” (156)

• Fisher, one of Duncan's roomates, talks about Alice in Wonderland at a dinner with Marian:

“' . . . I've got into Lewis Carroll, that's really more profound. The nineteenth century is very hot property these days, you know.' He threw his head back against the chair and closed his eyes; his words rose in a monotonously-intoned chant through the black thicket of his beard. 'Of course everybody knows Alice is a sexual-identity-crisis bok, that's old stuff, it's been around for a long time, I'd like to go into it a little deeper though. What we have here, if you only look at it closely, this is the little girl descending into the very suggestive rabbit-burrow, becoming as it were pre-natal, trying to find her role,' he licked his lips, 'her role as a Woman. Yes, well, that's clear enough. These patterns emerge. Patterns emerge. One sexual role after another is presented to her but she seems unable to accept any of them, I mean she's really blocked. She rejects Maternity when the baby she's been nursing turns into a pig, nor does she respond positively to the dominating-female role of the Queen and her castration cries of 'Off with his head!' And when the Duchess makes a cleverly concealed lesbian pass at her, sometimes you wonder how conscious old Lewis was, anyway, she's neither aware nor interested; and right after you'll recall she goes to talk with the Mock-Turtle, enclosed in his shell and his self-pity, a definitively pre-adolescent character; then there are those most suggestive scenes, most suggestive, the one where her neck becomes elongated and she is accused of being a serpent, hostile to eggs, you'll remember, a rather destructively-phallic identity she indignantly rejects; and her negative reaction to the dictatorial Caterpillar, just six inches high, importantly perched on the all-too-female mushroom which is perfectly round but which has the power to make you either smaller or larger than normal, I find that particularly interesting. And of course there's the obsession with time, clearly a cyclical rather than a linear obsession. So anyway she makes a lot of attempts but she refuses to commit herself, you can't say that by the end of the book she has reached anything that can be definitively called maturity. She does much better though in Through the Looking Glass, where, as you'll remember...'” (193-4)

• Marian thinks about the dinner at Duncan's apartment:

“. . . She was considering the total absence all evening of any reference to or question about herself, though she had assumed she was invited because the two room-mates wanted to know more about her. Now, however, she thought it more than likely that they were merely desperate for new audiences.” (201)

• After Marian 'escaped,' she is back with Peter, who is her fiancé:

“. . . Now that she had seen him again, the actual Peter, solid as ever, the fears of the evening before had dwindled to foolish hysteria and the flight to Duncan had become a stupidity, an evasion; she could hardly remember what he looked like. Peter was not the enemy after all, he was just a normal human being like most other people. She wanted to touch his neck, tell him that he shouldn't get upset, that everything was going to be all right. It was Duncan that was the mutation.
But there was something about his shoulders. He must have been sitting with his arms folded. The face on the other side of that head could have belonged to anyone. And they all wore clothes of real cloth and had real bodies: those in the newspapers, those still unknown, waiting for their chance to aim from the upstairs window; you passed them on the streets every day. It was easy to see him as normal and safe in the afternoon, but that didn't alter things. The price of this version of reality was testing the other one.” (215)

Comment Gargantua nasquit en façon bien estrange (IV)

Eulx tenens ces menuz propos de beuverie, Gargamelle commença se porter mal du bas. Dont Grandgousier se leva dessus l'herbe et la reconfortoit honestement, pensant que ce feut mal d'enfant, et luy disant qu'elle s'estoit là herbée soubz la Saulsaye, et qu'en brief elle feroit piedz neufs : par ce luy convenoit prendre couraige nouveau au nouvel advenement de son poupon, et encores que la douleur luy feust quelque peu en fascherie ; toutesfoys que ycelle seroit briefve, et la joye qui toust succederoit luy tolliroit tout cest ennuy, en sorte que seulement ne luy en resteroit la soubvenance.

« Couraige de brebis (disoyt il) depeschez vous de cestuy cy et bien toust en faisons un aultre.

— Ha ! (dist elle) tant vous parlez à votre aize, vous aultres hommes. Bien de par Dieu je me parforceray, puisqu'il vous plaist. Mais pleust à Dieu que vous l'eussiez coupé.

— Quoy ? dist Grandgousier.

— Ha ! (dist elle) que vous estes bon homme, vous l'entendez bien.

— Mon membre ? (dist il). Sang de les cabres, si bon vous semble, faictes apporter un cousteau.

— Ha ! (dist elle) jà Dieu ne plaise, Dieu me le pardoient, je ne le dis de bon cueur : et pour ma parolle n'en faictes ne plus ne moins. Mais je auray prou d'affaires aujourd'huy, si Dieu ne me ayde, et tout par vostre membre, que vous feussiez bien ayse.

— Couraige, couraige (dist il). Ne vous souciez au reste et laissez faire au quatre bœufs de devant. Je m'en voys boyre encore quelque veguade. Si ce pendent vous survenoit quelque mal, je me tiendray près : huschant en paulme, je me rendray à vous. »

Peu de temps après, elle commença à souspirer, lamenter et crier. Soubdain vindrent à tas saiges femmes de tous cousiez. Et, la tastant par le bas, trouverent quelques pellauderies, assez de maulvais goust, et pensoient que ce feust l'enfant, mais c'estoit le fondement qui luy escappoit, à la mollification du droict intestine, lequel vous appellez le boyau collier, par trop avoir mangé des tripes, comme avons déclairé cy dessus.

Dont une horde vieille de la compaignie, laquelle avoit reputation d'estre grande medicine et là estoit venue de Brizepaille d'auprès Sainct Genou devant soixante ans, luy feist un restrinctif si horrible que tous ses larrys tant feurent oppilez et reserrez que, à grande poine avecques les dentz, vous les eussiez eslargiz, qui est chose bien horrible à penser. Mesmement que le diable, à la messe de sainct Martin escripvant le quaquet de deux Gualoises, à belles dentz alongea son parchemins.

Par cest inconvenient feurent au dessus relaschez les cotyledons de la matrice, par lesquelz sursaulta l'enfant, et entra en la vene creuse, et gravant par le diaphragme jusques au dessus des espaules (où ladicte vene se part en deux), print son chemin à gauche, et sortit par l'aureille senestre.

Soubdain qu'il fut né, ne cria comme les aultres enfans : « Mies ! mies ! ». Mais à haulte voix s'escrioit : « A boire ! à boire ! à boire ! », comme invitant tout le monde à boire, si bien qu'il fut ouy de tout le pays de Beusse et de Bibaroys.

Je me doubte que ne croyez asseurement ceste estrange nativité. Si ne le croyez, je ne m'en soucie, mais un homme de bien, un homme de bon sens croit tousjours ce qu'on luy dict, et qu'il trouve par escript. Est ce contre nostre loy, nostre foy, contre raison, contre la Saincte Escripture ? De ma part je ne trouve rien escript es Bibles sainctes, qui soit contre cela. Mais si le vouloir de Dieu tel eust esté, diriez vous qu'il ne l'eust peu faire ? Ha pour grace, ne emburelucocquez jamais vos espritz de ces vaines pensées, car je vous diz, que à Dieu rien n'est impossible. Et s'il vouloit les femmes auroient doresnavant ainsi leurs enfans par l'aureille.

Bacchus ne fut il engendré par la cuisse de Jupiter ?

Rocquetaillade nasquit il pas du talon de sa mère ?

Crocquemouche de la pantofle de sa nourrice ?

Minerve, nasquit elle pas du cerveau par l'aureille de Jupiter ?

Adonis par l'escorce d'un arbre de mirrhe. Castor et Pollux de la cocque d'un œuf, pont et esclous par Leda ?

Mais vous seriez bien dadvantaige esbahys et estonnez, si je vous expousoys presentement tout le chapite de Pline, auquel parle des enfantemens estranges et contre nature. Et toutesfoys je ne suis poinct menteur tant asseuré comme il a esté. Lisez le septiesme de sa Naturelle Histoire, capi. iij, et ne m'en tabustez plus l'entendement.

"Vénus, descends des cieux"

CHOEUR
          Vénus, ô Vénus, c'est à toi
          D'enchaîner le dieu de la guerre ;
          Il rend le calme à la terre
          Quand il repousse sous ta loi
Dieu des Plaisirs, divinités des Arts,
          Nous languissons à vos regards !

MINERVE
          Implore, Amour, le secours de ta mère !
On détruit mes autels, on t'insulte à Cythère.
Lance tes traits vainqueurs sur un dieu redouté.
          C'est à Vénus d'écarter nos alarmes,
Qu'elle éprouve aujourd'hui le pouvoir de ses charmes
Qui lui donnent sur moi le prix de la beauté !

L'AMOUR
Toi, par qui l'univers reconnaît mon empire,
Qui soumets les mortels, qui règnes sur les dieux,
Toi qui sortis des mers pour embellir les cieux,
          Reine de tout ce qui respire,
Si j'ai fait tes plaisirs, si j'ai mis dans tes yeux
          Ce charme éternel qui m'attire,
Unis dans tes regards tous les feux que j'inspire ;
Rends le tyran du monde esclave dans ma cour ;
Tout terrible qu'il est, qu'il aime, qu'il soupire,
Qu'il adore Vénus et respecte l'Amour !

MINERVE
Vénus, que ta gloire réponde
A l'espoir qui nous a flatté !
Triomphe ! C'est à la beauté
De faire le bonheur du monde !

DUO ET CHOEUR
Vénus, ô Vénus, c'est à toi
D'enchaîner le dieu de la guerre :
          Il rend le calme à la terre
Quand il repose sous ta loi.

L'AMOUR
Ranimez-vous, Plaisirs : Vénus, descends des cieux.
          La paix va descendre avec elle.

CHOEUR
Ranimons-nous ! Vénus descend des cieux.
          La paix va descendre avec elle.

L'AMOUR
          La nature se renouvelle.
Un pur éclat se répand dans ces lieux ;
          Ces sont mélodieux
Font taire enfin la trompette rebelle.
         Vénus descend des cieux !

La Connaissance Totale

". . . total knowledge is only possible through the paradoxical acceptance of total mystery, an erasure of everything we think we know."

-- Richard Doyle. "Afterword" of The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick.
New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2011. 900.

Give it some thought

". . . perhaps the most helpful critical approach is one which emphasizes fragmentation rather than continuity, concentrating on the way in which the various kinds of modern fiction differ . . ."
— C. S. Ferns. Aldous Huxley: Novelist. London: The Athlone Press. 1980. 13.

Les "propagandistes commerciaux"

L'analyse la plus convaincante que j'ai jamais entendu du fonctionnement fondamental de la publicité :

We no longer buy oranges, we buy vitality. We do not buy just an auto, we buy prestige. And so with all the rest. In toothpaste, for example, we buy, not a mere cleanser and antiseptic, but release from the fear of being sexually repulsive. In vodka and whisky we are not buying a protoplasmic poison which, in small doses, may depress the nervous system in a psychologically valuable way; we are buying friendliness and good fellowship, the warmth of Dingley Dell and the brilliance of the Mermaid Tavern. With our laxatives we buy the health of a Greek god, the radiance of one of Diana's nymphs. With the monthly best seller we acquire culture, the envy of our less literate neighbors and the respect of the sophisticated. In every case the motivation analyst has found some deep-seated wish or fear, whose energy can be used to move the consumer to part with cash and so, indirectly, to turn the wheels of industry.

Huxley in Brave New World Revisited. 1958.

Yeah, baby!

"a job that gives you time to do whatever you want while you're sitting at your desk, and attending events with free food: that's the epidemy of good life"

—John (just John, not the Apostle)

La drogue idéale

. . . the need for frequent chemical vacations from intolerable selfhood and repulsive surroundings will undoubtedly remain. What is needed is a new drug which will relieve and console our suffering species without doing more harm in th elong run than it does good in the short. Such a drug must be potent in minute doses and synthesizable . . . it should produce changes in consciousness more interesting, more intrinsically valuable than mere sedation or dreaminess, delusions of omnipotence or release from inhibition . . .

—Aldous Huxley, "The Doors of Perception" in The doors of perception; and, Heaven and hell. 1954. Perennial Library, Harper & Row. 1956.

Procureur de la République Desproges française

"Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas."
"Heureux celui qui a pu pénétrer les causes secrètes des choses."

Virgile, Les Géorgiques.

Couverture médiatique du mariage de "Kate & William" en Grande-Bretagne

Sur le site internet d'Acrimed, à propos du mariage princier britannique : "Les événements de cette nature ont leurs publics. On peut le déplorer sans les mépriser."