Cycle 32: Of Habit, Habitats, and the Order of Things
For our house is our corner of the world . . . a real cosmos . . .
—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Reader's Indigestion
Quietly he read, restraining himself . . . Hope it’s not too big . . . He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
To read or not to read, that is the question.
Inhabiting space, the mind partitions it into closed places. The dining room is for eating, the bathroom for shitting, the bedroom for fucking, . . . But sometimes we displace a habit to give ourselves a thrill. (Let’s fuck on the dining table, piss in the bedroom!)
Housing more than our things, our houses house our habits.
The terror and glamour of the uninhabited.
Habit, from Indo-European ghabh-, to give or receive.
But what does habit give or receive? The mind. Sometimes the body resists.
How to recover the strangeness of a place before it was inhabited? How to remember the strangeness of the body? Passion of mystics and artists.
To disinhabit one’s habits.
How many Remembrance of Things Pasts have I read on the toilet?
Habit’s negative pleasures – chiefly the inhibition of change – too often mistaken for positive pleasures.
Reading while shitting kills two birds with one stone.
Usefulness a ruse of habit. (To habit, whatever perpetuates it is useful.)
How can a philosophy, a poem surpass the interest of my bowels’ gross and subtle contractions, relaxations?
&
Shit to shit, said the Zen master.
But let us not be too severe with ourselves. Why castigate ourselves for catching up on world politics, for learning about the history of Buddhism on the toilet?
A habit is disrupted. Suddenly you hear, smell what you’ve long since stopped hearing or smelling, and you glimpse the unformed plenitude surging beneath the familiar formations of your mind.
What astonishments will emerge?
So much depends on the intestines’ voluminous coils, spiraling back to countless ancestors - nameless ones who read only the earth, the sky, and each other.
Only foolish idolatry could elevate words above shit.
Reading is always reading about something. Shitting, however, doesn’t have to be about anything.
What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
Did Joyce waste his life?
Every time I resist the urge to read on the toilet, I can remind
myself –
Shit when you shit and read when you read and write when you write, then silence.
A Time to Eat
A pleasant simple habitual and tyrannical and authorized and educated and resumed and articulate separation. This is not tardy.
—Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
I write where I eat.
Writing feeds my hunger for the world.
Eating is writing and writing is eating.
Eating is the world writing my body. (Eating is my body riding the world.)
In the mouth of the world.
Eating separates the delicious from the disgusting, the bland from the inedible, too much from enough. Writing separates the interesting from the insipid, the essential from the insignificant, the trulse from the frue.
Eating I separate the broccoli from the rice from the sausage on my plate. Eating I mix the green with the white with the flesh in my belly. Writing I separate the bright from the dull from the pointed from the curved. Writing I mix the true with the false with the real with the imaginary to make a fantastic stew.
Come, eat me. Then I’ll eat you.
Never write to eat, never eat to write.
Eating is also a habit of the hands and of the mind. Writing is also a habit of the mouth and of the belly.
The world an eternal banquet feasting on itself.
The only books worth writing are those that are feasts.
A habit is not a habit without a time or place. (Displace it! Distime it!)
To surprise a habit, seize the beginning of a repetition and swerve.
Eating a kumquat is not a habit. Eating a chicken liver is not a habit. Eating a pumpkin seed is not a habit. Yes breakfast is a habit yes yes lunch is a habit yes yes yes dinner is a habit but eating a cheddar cheese pancake is not a habit and this pluot is not yesterday’s nectarine is not tomorrow’s Asian pear is not yesterday’s pluot. This sweetness is not Plato is not Hegel is not even Spinoza. This cantaloupe is this cantaloupe and that makes it not a watermelon and not a habit even if breakfast is a habit. The sun rising is not a habit and when you eat the sun for breakfast you are not a habit you are a sweetness that is not any other sweetness because this sun is not any other sun. Just this one.
+
You can’t eat what you write. (That’s why I write.)
I will never get tired of rice, or of
Edible writing.
Eating is a verb that separates the eater from the eaten. But this is just a manner of thinking.
Scrbblng
Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I sing . . . disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks . . .
—Christian Bök, Eunoia
Art also is just a habit.
The artist cannot help repeating himself either, the only difference is he plays with his repetitions.
Writing is inhabiting. Seeing and sawing the writer builds himself a house of words.
A house divides the world into inside and outside. This is inhibiting. This writer writes inside, this one outside. Only a few can balance their pencils on the threshold.
The habit of writing is neither good nor bad.
What makes a habit good or bad?
Where are you when you’re writing?
Perhaps I should have cultivated other habits.
A new book, a new set of habits.
Can a book be written without habits? (Such a book must be unreadable even if it weren’t unwritable.)
Narrative is a habit I can live without.
Maybe the habit of writing will weaken my bad habits. Then again, it might reinforce them.
To make a habit of examining one’s habits.
The habit of writing is composed of very many other habits.
I can easily imagine giving up writing. Whether I can really do so is another matter.
The controlling habit of writing is the habit of controlling.
Joyce had his epiphanies, Proust his moments bienheureux, Woolf her moments of being. All I have are my habits.
X
To wake up bit by bit, habit by habit until one stumbles out of the shadow into brilliant astonishment.
We think we choose freely, but our habits choose for us.
We see the world through our habits, he wrote.
The Thinkwalkers
The passage of time (my History) leaves behind a residue that accumulates: photographs, drawings, the corpses of long-since dried-up felt-pens, shirts, non-returnable and returnable bottles, cigar wrappers, tins, erasers, postcards, books, dust, and knickknacks: this is what I call my fortune.
—Georges Perec, Species of Spaces
Karma.
The mind never sleeps, in the dark it keeps running. Where?
Habit never sleeps - we wake up knowing what we’re supposed to do.
Because habit is not just repetition but also the little gaps between repetitions, difference is possible.
Without habit, how can anyone go on?
Habit’s lucid interruptions – flashes of life between recurrent deaths.
Joy and sadness, habits too.
Our dreams are the dreams of habit.
Thinking never sleeps. (There are those who say, thinking is sleep.)
Thinking has always been my greatest temptation.
Homo habitus.
Creatures of habit, we primarily experience difference as a deviation from habit.
Habitus interruptus.
Spinning round an empty center, habit spins the circular self.
Has there been any writer more habitual than Proust? Naturally no one has surpassed his eloquence on habit’s disruptions and distortions.
Our thoughts are the thoughts of habit.
After the last repetition, before the next one – mind the gap.
Sleepwalkers.
Stop thinking – give yourself to wonderment.
While you sleep, habit remembers for you.
The habits of the dead live in us.
The habits of the dead live on us.
:
Show me your habits and I’ll tell you your dreams.
Sometimes I get tired of the habit of being human.
Sleep is the purest of all habits.
Backwards and Frowards
The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them out for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.
—Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way
The body leans forward, the mind back. Always flying forward backward in the same breath, always avoiding now – human all too human. Is our passion for double lives – living in the past, living for the future – what makes us human? The body darts there, there to avoid dwelling here. The mind recalls this that - but can’t remember where it is. Step by step, memory by memory we divide, double ourselves, populating ghostworlds, hallucinating ever-receding, ever-returning pasts and futures.
The habit of nexting is the other face of the habit of remembering. The artist’s double subversion: Let the next thing be to remember to return to this moment, and again this moment, and again . . .
Always in search of the there there when we’re already in the middle of the miraculous here here.
The past moves backward, the future forward, the present from side to side, vibrating.
Encountering silence, the mind - accustomed to the disquiet of desiring and remembering - recoils.
Some wish they had no past, others that the future would never come, but the present keeps on coming, bearing past and future in it.
Alpha looks ahead, omega looks back - mu just looks.
The body never gets ahead of itself, never falls behind. How is it that the mind always does?
Most never arrive.
Haunted by ghosts because we can’t forget. Hunted by ghosts because we can’t remember.
The man without a past, the man without a future – tragedies. The man without a past, without a future – comedy. (Or nirvana?)
Underlying all the mind’s repetitions, the habit of forgetting lies under all the body’s habits.
The past grows, the future shrinks, but the present, always different, is always the same: though always dividing and multiplying, nothing can ever be added to it, nothing taken away.
Binding the present in repetition’s loops, habit binds the future to the past. The present unbound unchains both past and future - the self unravels - nowhere to go but here, nothing to know but now.
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