Milky Way on the right (us), Andromeda on the left, getting closer every day. NASA says maybe they'll collide, soon, right quick, in a few billion years, or maybe they'll just "dance around and eventually merge to become one large elliptical galaxy." Like the Tupamaros used to say, O bailan todos o no baila nadie. There is also this possibility, which is, I'll admit, a relief.
"All writing is forbidden us save that which we recognize to be inadequate."
—William Carlos Williams, The Great American Novel
"to generalize the offensive means to radicalize disaffection with whichever hierarchy you choose to excercise our destructive creativity against the society of the spectacle to sabotage the machines and goods that sabotage our lives to promote indefinite general wildcat strikes always to have mass meetings in all the seperate factories to elect delegates who can be recalled by the base to keep continuous links between all the places of struggle to overlook no useful technical means of free communication to give a direct use value to everything that has an exchange value to occupy permanently the factories and the public buildings to organize self-defense of the conquered territories and on with the music"
—Nanni Balestrini, The Unseen
His teeth began to chatter. God-All-Mighty! He thought, why haven’t I realized it all these years? All these years I’ve gone around with a—SKELETON—inside me! How is it we take ourselves for granted? How is it we never question our bodies and our being?
A skeleton. One of those jointed, snowy, hard things, one of those foul, dry, brittle, gouge-eyed, skull-faced, shake-fingered, rattling things that sway from neck-chains in abandoned webbed closets, one of those things found on the desert all long and scattered like dice!
He stood upright, because he could not bear to remain seated. Inside me now, he grasped his stomach, his head, inside my head is a—skull. One of those curved carapaces which holds my brain like an electrical jelly, one of those cracked shells with the holes in front like two holes shot through it by a double-barreled shotgun! With its grottoes and caverns of bone, its revetments and placements for my flesh, my smelling, my seeing, my hearing, my thinking! A skull, encompassing my brain, allowing it exit through its brittle windows to see the outside world!
He wanted to dash into the bridge party, upset it, a fox in a chickenyard, the cards fluttering all around like chicken feathers burst upward in clouds! He stopped himself only with a violent, trembling effort. Now, now, man, control yourself. This is a revelation, take it for what it’s worth, understand it, savor it. BUT A SKELETON! screamed his subconscious. I won’t stand for it. It’s vulgar, it’s terrible, it’s frightening. Skeletons are horrors…
—from "Skeleton," in The October Country, 1955.
b.