Walter T. Vollmann

 

 

“

Illumination is the first step toward alleviation. It is difficult to perform emergency surgery in pitch darkness.”

Walter T. Vollmann

…….

The Vimalakirti Sutra, seventh century:

“This body is like a flame born of longing and desire…

This body is impure, crammed with defilement and evil…

This body is like the abandoned well on the hillside, old age pressing in on it…

This body has no fixity, but is destined for certain death.”

…

Read the rest at Vice Magazine: “THEY JUST WANT TO LOOK IN THE MIRROR” - William T. Vollmann Becomes a Woman - Vice Magazine

……..

Suppose that you do not rent whores, and a whore approaches you in the night-lit street, brave and desperate. Suppose that a member of some cult sets out to convert you. Suppose that someone begs you for money.--No, suppose simply that someone sits down beside you in your subway car and begins to talk to you. In how many cases will you answer?

…

In this period of our literature we are producing mainly insular works, as if all our writers were on an airplane in economy seats, beverage trays shading their laps, face.- averted from one another, masturbating furiously.

Consider, for instance, the New Yorker fiction of the past few years, with those eternally affluent characters suffering understated melancholies of overabundance.

Here the Self is projected and replicated into a monotonous army which marches through story after story like deadly locusts.

Consider, too, the structuralist smog that has hovered so long over our universities, permitting only games of stifling breathlessness.

So how ought writers fulfill their role, and accomplish something?

THE RULES

1. We should never write without feeling.

2. Unless we are much more interesting than we imagine we are, we should strive to feel not only about Self, but also about Other.

Not the vacuum so often between Self and Other.

Not the unworthiness of Other.

Not the Other as a negation or eclipse of Self.

Not even about the Other exclusive of Self,

*(because that is but a trickster-egoist's way of worshiping Self secretly)*.

We must treat Self and Other as equal partners. (Of course I am suggesting nothing new. I do not mean to suggest anything new.

Health is. more important than novelty.)

3. We should portray important human problems.

4. We should seek for solutions to those problems. Whether or not we find them, the seeking will deepen the portrait.

5. We should know our subject, treating it with the respect with which Self must treat Other. We should know it in all senses, until our eyes are bleary from seeing it, our ears ring from listening to it, our muscles ache from embracing it, our gonads are raw from making love to it. (If this sounds pompous, it is perhaps because I wear thick spectacles.)

6. We should believe that truth exists.

7. We should aim to benefit others in addition to ourselves.

http://www.conjunctions.com/archives/c15-wv.htm