Pessimistic Passage of the Day...

[Mr. D.]

My mother is a very wise woman. She wasn't your typical hausfrau. She had tro majors and two minors in college. She went back and got a Masters in Socialwork in her 40's and worked as a director of a private agency for decades. She said one thing that stuck with me:
Mr. D's. Mom said, "I know that this is Hell, but I'm not going to let it ruin my day!"

[Bleak&Icy]

We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants that are there or the flies that are hovering around us or the mosquitoes that are sucking our blood. -- U.G. Krishnamurti

[Bleak&Icy]

The so called self-realization is the discovery for yourself and by yourself that there is no self to discover. That will be a very shocking thing because it's going to blast every nerve, every cell, even the cells in the marrow of your bones. -- U. G. Krishnamurti

[Bleak&Icy]

"[...]I had hoped to deduce from my sense of sin the existence of a Supreme Being[...] Alas, I was unable to transcend the simple human fact that whatever spiritual solace I might find, whatever lithophanic eternities might be provided for me, nothing could make my Lolita forget the foul lust I had inflicted upon her. Unless it can be proven to me--to me as I am now, today, with my heart and my beard, and my putrefaction--that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a joke), I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art." -- V. N (of course), Lolita

[Bleak&Icy]

"'I think he's out of his mind. The kind of thing he's been teaching should have gotten him into trouble somewhere, and probably did. Not that he ever cared what happened to him, or to anyone else. That is, those that he could influence, and some more than others. The things he said to us. The lessons in measurement of cloacal forces. Time as a flow of sewage. The excrement of space, scatology of creation. The voiding of the self. The whole filthy integration of things and the nocturnal product, as he called it. Drowning in the pools of night...'" -- Who else but TL? "The Night School"

[Bleak&Icy]

ISABELLA

Be ready, Claudio, for your death tomorrow.

CLAUDIO

Yes. Has he affections in him,
That thus can make him bite the law by the nose,
When he would force it? Sure, it is no sin,
Or of the deadly seven, it is the least.

ISABELLA

Which is the least?

CLAUDIO

If it were damnable, he being so wise,
Why would he for the momentary trick
Be perdurably fined? O Isabel!

ISABELLA

What says my brother?

CLAUDIO

Death is a fearful thing.

ISABELLA

And shamed life a hateful.

CLAUDIO

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison'd in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.

ISABELLA

Alas, alas!

CLAUDIO

Sweet sister, let me live:
What sin you do to save a brother's life,
Nature dispenses with the deed so far
That it becomes a virtue.

ISABELLA

O you beast!
O faithless coward! O dishonest wretch!
Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice?
Is't not a kind of incest, to take life
From thine own sister's shame? What should I think?
Heaven shield my mother play'd my father fair!
For such a warped slip of wilderness
Ne'er issued from his blood. Take my defiance!
Die, perish! Might but my bending down
Reprieve thee from thy fate, it should proceed:
I'll pray a thousand prayers for thy death,
No word to save thee.

CLAUDIO

Nay, hear me, Isabel.

ISABELLA O, fie, fie, fie!
Thy sin's not accidental, but a trade.
Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd:
'Tis best thou diest quickly.

-- W.S. Measure For Measure

[Bleak&Icy]

MARY (bitterly). Because he's always sneering at someone else, always looking for the worst weakness in everyone. (Then with a strange, abrupt change to a detached, impersonal tone.) But I suppose life has made him like that, and he can't help it. None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self for ever." -- Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey into Night

(To contrast with Krishnamurti's idea of the non-existence of the self.)

[Bleak&Icy]

"I am imbued with the notion that a Muse is necessarily a dead woman, inaccessible or absent; that a poetic structure--like the canon, which is only a hole surrounded by steel--can be based only on what one does not have; and that ultimately one can write only to fill a void or at the least to situate, in relation to the most lurid part of ourselves, the place where this incommensurable abyss yawns within us." -- Michel Leiris, Manhood

[Bleak&Icy]

"Always Alone" by Thomas Wiloch

We're always alone, she tells me.
I couldn't hear the words above the crowd. I touched her shoulder. She turned to me.
What? I shouted.

From Stigmata Junction (Naked Snake Press, 2005)

[gveranon]

Several years ago, the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling wrote an article about futurism for Wired magazine. This article is full of provocative sentences; here are a couple of them:

"If the future were really predictable, we'd all hang ourselves right after killing our children."

"Real futurism means staring directly into your own grave and accepting the slow but thorough obliteration of everyone and everything you know and love."

--from "The Future? You Don't Want to Know."