All Gall Is Divided_The Aphorisms of A Legendary Iconoclast

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All Gall Is Divided_The Aphorisms of A Legendary Iconoclast Page 7

by Richard Howard


  Retreating to the drama of the glands, attentive to the confidences of the mucous membrane, Disgust makes us all physiologists.

  If it weren’t for blood’s insipid taste, the ascetic would define himself by his refusal to be a vampire.

  The spermatozoon is the bandit in a pure state.

  To stockpile fatalities, to flounder between catechisms and orgies, to wallow in the distraction, and — besotted nomad — to model oneself on God, that stateless exile …

  Not knowing humiliation, you are ignorant of what it is to arrive at the last stage of yourself.

  My doubts I have acquired painfully; my disappointments, as if they had always been waiting for me, came of their own accord — primordial illuminations.

  On a globe composing its own epitaph, let us have enough decorum to behave as nice corpses.

  Like it or not, we are all psychoanalysts, amateurs of the mysteries of the heart and the undies, deep-sea divers into horrors. Woe to the mind with a transparent abyss!

  In sloth, we slide toward the nadir of the soul and of space, toward the antipodes of ecstasy, where the Void begins.

  The more we frequent men, the blacker our thoughts; and when, to clarify them, we return to our solitude, we find there the shadow they have cast.

  Disabused wisdom must hark back to some geological era: the dinosaurs may have died of it…

  When I was barely adolescent, the prospect of death flung me into trances; to escape them, I rushed to the brothel, where I invoked the angels. But with age, you become used to your own terrors, you undertake nothing more in order to be disengaged from them, you become quite bourgeois in the Abyss. — And although there was a time when I envied those Egyptian monks who dug their own graves in order to shed tears within them, if I were to dig mine now, all I would drop in there would be cigarette butts.

 

 

 


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