I recently read a very curious novel called Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany. The plot is quite nightmarish, both in its content and lack of resolution. The prose is also very poetic at times and the meaning hard for me to grasp, adding to its dreaminess. Many passages in the novel had very direct (and often equally strong and illusive) meaning to me through the lens of my yoga practice and related experiences. But I’m not sure if that meaning I found was intended, given that the book isn’t about yoga or spirituality as far as I can tell, again adding to the sense of weirdness I experienced while reading. It is also the shear abundance of these passages that made the novel stand out as unusual to me. Here are some of those quotes:
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Here I am and am no I.
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I don’t have a name, he thought. Tides and tides rolled from the tangled cords. These things I’m writing, they’re not descriptions of anything. They’re complex names.
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What is this part of me that lingers to overhear my own conversation? I lie rigid in the rigid circle. It regards me from diametric points, without sex, and wise. We lie in a rigid city, anticipating winds. It circles me, intimating only by position that it knows more than I want to. There, it makes a gesture too masculine before ecstatic scenery. Here, it suggests femininity, pausing at gore and bone. It dithers and stammers, confronted by love. It bows a blunt, mumbling head before injustice, rage, or even its like ignorance. Still, I am convinced that at the proper shock, it would turn and call me, using those hermetic syllables I have abandoned on the crags of a broken conscience, on the planes of charred consciousness, at the entrance to the ganglial city. And I would raise my head.
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I want wonderful and fascinating and marvelous things to happen to me and I don’t want to do anything to make them happen.
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Actions are interesting to watch. I learn about the actors. Their movements are emblems of the tensions in this internal landscape, which their actions resolve. About-to-act is an interesting state to experience, because I am conscious of just those tensions. Acting itself feels fairly dull; it not only resolves, it obliterates those tensions from my consciousness. Acting is only interesting as it leads to new tensions that, irrelevantly, cause me to act again.
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Laughter grasped the back of his tongue to shake it loose. Flesh lay too heavy in his mouth. So it retreated, and heaved itself against the spoke of his spine.
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[C]ertain images lose their freedom and resonance if, when we regard them with a straight face, we do so through the diffraction of a name.
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No, I am not really satisfied now. I wonder at that light in the sky, this afternoon. I wonder at the stories I’ve heard about two moons when I know, first hand, what I do about the one.
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“I’m trying to—” Kid looked up at Bill, frowning in the pause—“to construct a complicitous illusion in lingual catalysis, a crystalline and conscientious alkahest.”
“…again?” Bill asked.
“You listen to that too carefully and you’ll figure out what it means.” Kid let the frown reverse into a grin. “Then the words will die on you and you won’t understand anymore.” -
It is not that I have no future. Rather it continually fragments on the insubstantial and indistinct ephemera of then.
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A word sets images flying through the brain from which auguries we recall all extent and intention.
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Now I cannot tell whether the feeling itself was misperceived or merely its record inaccurate!
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But part of the training is a sort of self-discipline: Any questions that sparks certain internal reactions in me, causes me to think certain thoughts, to feel certain feelings, rather than rush into some verbal response that, informative or not, is still put up mainly to repress those thoughts and feelings, I’m supposed to experience them fully in the anxiety of silence.
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[A] poet is interested in all those things, acclaim, reputation, image. But as they’re a part of life. He’s got to be a person who knows what he’s doing in a very profound way. Interest in how they work is one thing. Wanting them is another thing—the sort of thing that will mess up any real understanding of how they work. Yes, they’re interesting. But I don’t want them.
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Life is a very terrible thing, mostly, with points of wonder and beauty. Most of what makes it terrible, though, is simply that there’s so much of it, blaring in through the five senses. In my loft, alone, in the middle of the night, it comes blaring in. So I work at culling enough from it to construct moments of order.
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With only the memory of knowledge, and bewilderment at whatever mechanic had, for minutes, made that knowledge as certain to me as my own existence, I sat, trying to sort that mechanism’s failure, which had let it slip away.