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Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future QUOTES

Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future QUOTES

1 " I live in a time of fear and the fear is not of war or weather or death or poverty or terror. The fear is of life itself. The fear is of tomorrow, a time when things do not get better but become worse. This is the belief of my time. I do not share it. The numbers of people will rise, the pain of migration will grow, the seas will bark forth storms, the bombs will explode in the markets, and mouths fighting for a place at the table will grow, as will the shouting and shoving. That is a given. Once the given is accepted, fear is pointless. The fear comes from not accepting it, from turning aside one's head, from dreaming in the fort of one's home that such things cannot be. The fear comes from turning inward and seeking personal salvation. The bones must be properly buried, amends must be made. Also, the beasts must be acknowledged. And the weather faced, the winds and rains lashing the face, still, they must be faced. So too, the dry ground screaming for relief. There is an industry peddling solutions, and these solutions insist no one must really change, except perhaps a little, and without pain. This is the source of the fear, this refusal to accept the future that is already here. In the Old Testament, the laws insist we must not drink blood, that the flesh must be properly drained or we will be outcasts from the Lord. They say these rules were necessary for clean living in some earlier time. I swallow the blood, all the bloods. I am that outlaw, the one crossing borders. The earlier time is over. "

― Charles Bowden , Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future

2 " There can't be a summing up, a set of commandments, a safe and sacred way. That is the path to ruin. There is appetite, there is the shift of things, the change in weather, the melting of the ice, the new rivers gouged, and the songs we make up to help us keep going. "

― Charles Bowden , Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future

3 " The arts also fail me. Words I know too well to trust. The skeleton of grammar creates a wall that wards off sensation. Sex can only be described sequentially, one stroke after another. Vocabulary discerns distinctions, just as hormones sand down such matters. The visual arts frame things so that they are safe. Dance is the twitching of the body of one species. Music, I still retain hope for music, that bath of sound that words can barely describe and seldom add to. Music echoes with the bark, the grunt, the trilling, the scream, the explosion of the volcano, the purring of the stream. Art seems less an open door than a gilded cage. Van Gogh painted about three hundred canvases during his year in that nut house. The others, the splattering expressionists and impressionists and cubists and dada folk and surrealists, they’re safe. A dripping clock can never punch you in the face like crows rising off a wheat field. I think most of human art and all of human costume results from our notorious discomfort with our own skins. "

― Charles Bowden , Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future