Hyphae

Welcome to my little jar of quote colonies that live in this ecosystem. I hope you find some threads to pull on.

“I play the kind of punk rock music that has existed since the time of the great painters in the caves at Lascaux.” - John Darnielle of “The Mountain Goats”

“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. I am going to write fire until it comes out my ears, my eyes, my noseholes — everywhere. Until it’s every breath I breathe. I’m going to go out like a fucking meteor!” - Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light

“But it also speaks to the nature of these books, which is that weird fiction is, at its heart, providing a fourth way of interpreting the world, by allowing fiction — rather than religion, philosophy or science — to try to interpret the unknowable.” - Jeff VanderMeer

“Once the mycelial thought is learned, it is impossible for it to not influence all of one’s activities. Connections form easily and yet stay malleable enough to be revised as new information emerges. As the actions of this adaptive thinking process go on to affect the world, they are built upon by others, creating a feedback loop throughout a community. If sustained, these loops have the potential to build other systems, each with their own feedback loops, leading to an exponential increase in complexity and resilience in the meta-system. As these systems stack, integrate, and synchronize, they refine the meta-system’s ability to learn from, create, design, evolve, and self-organize itself into the most appropriate emergent model that the meta-system’s environment requires. In the theory of self-organized criticality, the mechanisms that lead to minor events are the same that lead to major ones. Thus, a forest never reaches a state of equilibrium, but constantly advances from one state to the next. So too can a group of humans that initially organizes around a single issue create a whole culture that is informed, competent, and clear about its values, leading toward focused designs for regeneration in the meta-culture.” - Peter McCoy, Radical Mycology

“Der Mensch spielt nur, wo er in voller Bedeutung des Wortes Mensch ist, und er ist nur da ganz Mensch, wo er spielt.” - Friedrich Schiller

“What artists do is make a particularly skillful selection of fragments of cosmos, unusually useful and entertaining bits chosen and arranged to give an illusion of coherence and duration amidst the uncontrollable streaming of events. An artist makes the world her world. An artist makes her world the world. For a little while. For as long as it takes to look at or listen to or watch or read the work of art. Like a crystal, the work of art seems to contain the whole, and to imply eternity. And yet all it is is an explorer’s sketch-map. A chart of shorelines on a foggy coast.” - Ursula K. LeGuin, ~World-Making

“Most Kesh poetry was occasional—the highest form, according to Goethe—and much of it was made by what we call amateurs, people doing poetry as a common skill, the way people do sewing or cooking, as an ordinary and essential part of being alive. The quality of such poetry, sewing, and cooking of course varies enormously. We have been taught that only poetry of extremely high quality is poetry at all; that poetry is a big deal, and you have to be a pro to write it, or, in fact, to read it. This is what keeps a few poets and many, many English departments alive. That’s fine, but I was after something else: the poem not as fancy pastry but as bread; the poem not as masterpiece but as life-work.” - Ursula K. Le Guin, ~ Text, Silence, Performance

“Copernicus told us that the earth was not the center. Darwin told us that man is not the center. If we listened to the anthropologists we might hear them telling us, with appropriate indirectness, that the West is not the center. The center of the world is a bluff on the Klamath River, a rock in Mecca, a hole in the ground in Greece, nowhere, its circumference everywhere.” - Ursula Le Guin, A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to be

“Take hormones, be a slut, the world’s collapsing and the new one is in the ruins. Allies, give your money to trans people without expectations of “visibility”. We aren’t ambassadors, we aren’t your awareness campaign. All this gender talk is boring theres a life out there free of this weight. TDOV is tricky because when we speak of visibility being a trap we do not mean the choice to be loud or hide. It needs saying in times like this. The life before did not fuck us like it does now but it bought safety with a psychic death. Theres no real bright side to the times we are in, but remember how funny gay people used to be before media training? Now they quote reality TV and make grindset slay. The gallows humor potential is presently off the charts. It’s do or die these days and i hope your can enjoy the do-ing. The victory is in the struggle and so is the joy and I must remind you their world could never be enough for us anyway. No state could ever grant you legitimacy. These fascist ghouls will be defeated and now’s the time to dream bigger than mashing our wild amorphous spirits into small, clockable piggy banks to bully dollars, votes and “culture” (or culture war) from. Identity is mostly a big trap by the shirt-tucking straight world’s entitlement to digestible definitions. Forever building a panopticon of categories. The inward search is yours and a project that will last forever. And we search alongside you, what a joyful thing it is to have no finish line to huff and puff your way towards! Identity is a not an equation to be solved but a reality to experience. You are the universe experiencing itself in a impossibly unique, sexy and fucked up way and I am honored to meet you out there. We are more powerful together, as a mess, a massive katamari of unruly flesh-never as cannonfodder for this or that murky identitarian movement. Monsters of all land unite. Fuck this dystopia. Trans kids will dance on the rubble of empire.” - bum.lung

“For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.” - Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“Look, we can have unions and we can have the death of the Poetry Foundation, the university, and the police. We can have everything if we commit to a radical transformation starting with ourselves. If we work collectively and prioritize the poets with the least. If we figure out how to read and teach poetry outside the university. If we develop techniques to pry money out of the hands of comfortable writers, editors, tenured professors, and staffers who, though they may agree with us, still will not act to help us survive. If we are willing to cultivate an anti-work culture that will see us put less time into our writing and more into stealing what we need to feed and house the poor.” -Jamie Berrout, Essays Against Publishing

“Take it easy, but take it!” - Woody Guthrie