Category: quotes

Biosemiotics is the idea that all life is involved in meaning making. It has been defined as ‘the study of distinctions that make organisms, what they recognize, what they intend, and what they know’. This happens at the level of single-celled organisms, which can collect information and make decisions. The plasmodium of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum, for example, is an amoeba-like cell with some surprising abilities. When presented with a maze in the lab, it can find the shortest route through it in a way that would be impossible were it only to be responding to basic environmental signals with behavioural reflexes. You could say that the plasmodium has its own perception of the world, composed of a wide array of information collected from the environment, which it evaluates and uses to make decisions for future behaviour.

PLANTA SAPIENS, Paco Calvo & Natalie Lawrence

We have to think into the experiences of other organisms dramatically different from ourselves, however rudimentary or complex they might be. So different in fact that their experiences might be generated without any of the familiar animal thinking machinery. No brains, neurones or synapses. I began to think about the sapience of plants. We are so entrenched in the dogma of neuronal intelligence, brain-centric consciousness, that we find it difficult to imagine alternative kinds of internal experience.

PLANTA SAPIENS, Paco Calvo & Natalie Lawrence

(The speculative realism crowd will have a field day with this, if they’ve pried themselves away from “ferreting out the specific psychic reality” of rocks.)

The work authored by Sir Wilford Stanley Gilmore was truly substantial, running to more than two thousand pages, and the publisher in the brief foreword, rather unconventionally, did not concede to mandatory expressions of politeness praising those persons whose support had made the present volume possible; nor did he adhere to the custom of wishing to recommend, to a general audience, this lesser-known scholar to his readers’ distinguished attention, no, not at all; instead, employing a fairly harsh tone, the writer of the introduction objected to his readers’ potential accusations, according to which the whole thing would have been more comfortable, more easily navigable, as well as daintier, if it had been published in two volumes, and with this invective, thoroughly unjustified, presented with no explanation—not to mention the startling openness of its formulation or rather its unconstrained tone (almost continually employing such expressions as “go fuck yourselves,” “shit,” and “your mother’s cunt”)—the impression was created that the writer of this introduction was not any kind of separate personage but none other than the author himself…

A MOUNTAIN TO THE NORTH,… Laszlo Krasznahorkai

Subversion, breakdown, and crisis in meaning are leitmotifs of the age. Woolf identified its prevailing sound as “breaking and falling, crashing and destruction.” Grammar was violated, syntax disintegrated; and Joyce’s Ulysses was the “calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows.”

The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction, Stephen Kern

Robbe-Grillet claims that, whereas the novels of Balzac or Dickens do not require readers, since they perform all the latter’s work themselves, his own writing calls for active readers who will piece it all together.

Tom McCarthy, from his introduction to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s JEALOUSY

See also Fuck The Average Reader.

Catasterization signals an end to the era of metamorphosis. When someone can no longer be transformed, but has to be saved, he is cast into a star. In the world of Zeus, these are the cases where there is no other way out. So it could be said that life on earth was constellated with stories suspended, attached to the vault of the sky. For the Vedic people, what took place in space among Sirius, Orion, Aldebaran, and the Pleiades was the scene that preceded every other scene and coincided with the manifestation of that which appears. Between Rudra, Prajāpati, Uṣas, and the Devas, astonished spectators, was the space where all that was essential to know took place.

THE CELESTIAL HUNTER, Roberto Calasso

Some of the Celtic Christian literature that emerged from these centuries took the form of the immram, a word which might be translated perhaps as a ‘wonder-voyage’, a sea journey to an otherworld.* The immrama – The Voyage of Mael Duin’s Boat, The Adventure of Bran and The Voyage of Brendan being among the best known – are set on the seaways. They are narratives of passage, which move easily from the recognizable to the supernatural, fading from known into imagined geographies with minimal indication of transition. In these tales, the actual territories of Scotland, Iceland, Orkney and Shetland are connected by the sea roads with fabled places such as the Hesperides, the Island of the Blessed, also known as the Fortunate Isles (an archipelago that was still marked on charts of the west Atlantic into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), and Hy-Brazil, the island of happiness off the west coast of Ireland, where sickness is impossible and contentment assured.

THE OLD WAYS, Robert Macfarlane

The grotesque figure of Gradus, a cross between bat and crab, was not much odder than many other Shadows, such as, for example, Nodo, Odon’s epileptic half brother who cheated at cards, or a mad Mandevil who had lost a leg in trying to make anti-matter.

PALE FIRE, Vladimir Nabokov (link)

East Anglian writer Eliza Vaughan discovered, while researching herbal cures in Essex, that two young brothers suffering from ague (shivering fits) were cured by taking ‘four fat spiders in a glass of gin, three times daily for a fortnight’.

FOLKLORE OF ESSEX, Sylvia Kent