Tuesday, August 21, 2012

The Lion In Love - Aesop

The Lion In Love - Aesop


And it was all those mediocre untalented directors who pulled your fangs Rob.

That you traded your body thrusting, thrusting, thrusting for so they could ride on your back to the box office NOT as it turned out.

Just as you have conspired - knowingly or not - with Cronenberg to defang DeLillo by ringing that fucking NYSE bell this morning.

Occupy do not ever forgive him for this. Do not ever forgive either one of them for this. 

Cronenberg will get his "30 pieces of silver" in financing for his next film for this.

Rob will get maybe some acting acclaim.

THE USUAL for bending over to take it up the ass. 

Friday, August 17, 2012

TimesTalk Interview with Cronenberg, Rob Pattinson and David Carr And Werner Herzog


David Cronenberg born 1943

Just before 44.xx Cronenberg remarks that Packer's Chief of Theory Vija Kinski is really a philosopher. Carr pushes for a deeper dialogue than the sound bites so far from Cronenberg. At 44.xx Cronenberg discusses Fukuyama, The End Of History, Hegel, evolutionary theory based on progression towards the ideal when in fact evolution is constant diversification. He sounds impressive for the  mob of fangirls in the audience.

Fukuyama first published this in 1992 so Cronenberg is about 20 years behind in his (ahem) brilliant intellectual auteur status. Since then Foucault has become mainstream in Europe and in seminars and academic conferences in the US and the world. Jean Baudrillard will follow Foucault as the first major philosopher to challenge the great one. These two are the deep structure of DeLillo's Cosmopolis. Apparently Cronenberg doesn't know that. 

Please listen to his mish-mash at 44.xx when he begins to fidget and squirm trying to sound profound as his confidence begins to disintegrate. He dissembles, and Rob saves him with his strange pronunciation of Hegel as Hi-gel indicating he has never discussed Hegel in any academic classroom and doesn't know anything, where he makes a quick shift to Calvin and Hobbes, a free association of philosophical jargon here, and makes a joke then saying he doesn't know what he is talking about. Arrrrggggh. 

Now listen to Cronenberg's contemporary Werner Herzog on University of California TV. This is 2 hours that you will never forget as long as you live. You will be in the presence of a fully realized human being of great personal culture who grew up with an outdoor toilet, no phone until puberty, never saw a movie until he was 11. You will be in the space of greatness and an audience at UC that is so enthralled no one even coughs or sneezes. You will laugh, cry, weep, and know what it is to be a spontaneous fully evolved person of great joy. A Nietzschean ubermensch. A superman, a superhero.

Werner Herzog will be one of Rob Pattinson's upcoming directors. He will know then the poseur and fake that Cronenberg is.  Listen and you will know before Rob does.



Werner Herzog Born 1942

There is no way that even the least sophisticated person cannot know the great chasm of difference between these two men. Let us pray that Herzog will open Rob's eyes to the bullshit artist he now idolizes. 

Cronenberg takes Rob all around the world as his boy toy to pimp his film and revels in the attention Rob is getting for him and for his film. The cheap publicity stunts (NYSE) and half-assed interviews and still the reviews of the more major - using the term loosely - reviewers have little good to say of it. But they are not blaming Rob. Breathe a sigh of relief Rob.

Herzog 

American criticRoger Ebert wrote that Herzog "has never 

created a single film that is compromised, shameful, 

made for pragmatic reasons or uninteresting. Even his failures are spectacular."[4]

This is how it is done folks by a filmmaker of integrity.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Rob Pattinson Is Cronenberg's New Boy Toy

Cronenberg's Cosmopolis Winning the MTV Award 2012 Over Hunger Games
Rob Pattinson says Cronenberg says he doesn't make commercial films. He was ecstatic over this win. Does this pic look like a man who doesn't care?

The Young Beautiful Cronenberg As An Actor - Forget the film

He looks gender ambiguous to me. How about you? Shall we have a little vote on it?

Nolan has been criticized by a number of reviewers for the way he has portrayed Batman's sexual relations and the sexuality of the women in his Batman films. In The Dark Knight Rises they have said that this has been corrected somewhat. Anne Hathaway's Catwoman is confident sexually and Bruce Wayne is displaying seductive sexual interest for the first time in Nolan's Batman series. Interesting. 

So I began to think about Cronenberg. His recent Cosmopolis reviewers have reported that there is a lot of sex in it that is not sexy. eXistenZ? Naked Lunch? A History of Violence? Eastern Promises? Videodrome? Dead Ringers? All of them have sex in them that is not sexy with the exception of A History Of Violence between Viggo and Bello. There is no way Cronenberg is going to tamper with what Viggo wants to do in a scene. Viggo is the dominant one in this pairing of actor and director. 

Crash has lots and lots of sex in it that I do not find sexy but pornographic, but that is the way Ballard wrote it. Cronenberg decidedly has sexual issues. He imposes his arid sexuality on his characters or he chooses material that is already that way. The exception is  A History Of Violence. In Eastern Promises Cronenberg focuses his camera on the body of Viggo using the ploy for showing the viewer his gangster tattoos. It works. Definitely. Viggo is lovely.

Gender ambiguity - James Spader
James Spader was super hot in Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape, and playing opposite Susan Sarandon in White Palace in the early 90's. In 1996 Spader plays Ballard in Crash for Cronenberg. Again lots of hot sex that is not hot, but is very physical and pornographic. And the camera focusesing on Spader's body. From the reviews of Cosmopolis he is repeating his sexual problems with women yet one more time. 
Too many instances to brush off now. Once again Rob Pattinson is being castrated. For other times see HERE. His face and body once again used as pornography void of sex. In one trailer we see him asking for the stun gun, the camera on his naked upper body. Again the erotic male body.
Sexy Hot Spader - Cool Cronenberg Sex
Trailer For Crash  - Lots of Sex
And again we have lots of sex without sex. 
Seems to be a trademark of a Cronenberg film eh? 
A repetition compulsion maybe?

In Rob Pattinson he has found a malleable mind to mold and it seems Rob Pattinson, adoring him now instead of Stewart, is his latest Boy Toy.

DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis alternates between the limo (Order of Production) and the outside (Order of Seduction). It is Elise who seduces him on, away from the limo, to let the world will him. Eric Packer is following her all day without searching for her, just finding her as Destiny keeps their paths crossing. At the end is an ecstatic sexual encounter beginning in a naked body sequence being filmed. Cronenberg said in an interview that it was too over the top to be believed so not cinematic. He uses "not cinematic" whenever he wants to get rid of something. Since Spencer Tunick's naked body installations have been performed all over the world, it appears DeLillo has put them in his novel in the Hades scene as a movie set where naked Eric Packer lies down beside his naked wife Elise Shifrin without knowing it is she at first. (Cronenberg has said he cut it out because it was a fantasy.) Is that a fact.  (She is the "woman who keeps disappearing" as Zizek will describe these film women. these Gradivas.) As they leave the naked bodies to get their clothes in some seclusion she shimmies up his body in passion and kisses him in ecstasy and "he knew he loved her" and just at the moment he knows she slithers down his naked body and away like Gradiva. Or Eurydice. It is the woman here in the novel who has hystericized on the male body, Packer's, inverting the process. (Baudrillard The Perfect Crime; Fatal Strategies)


Sarah Gadon has given Cronenberg the rationalization he requires of the character of Elise as cold and asexual. Sarah has used post modern sound bite lingo to say in an interview, "She is not going to let her husband hystericize on her (Gadon's words), so she exits the marriage. She's out of it. Yet another misreading by Cronenberg. 


Alan Sheridan in his 1980 Foucault: The Will To Truth discusses this in the chapter Sexuality, Power and Knowledge. 
Foucault elicits four great strategies that have emerged in Western society since the late eighteenth century.The 'hystericization' of the female body is a process whereby the woman's body is seen as an organism saturated with sexuality.....(p. 187)

The result has been the femme fatale we all know from noir film. At the present time she has almost vanished. There are no men for her says Baudrillard. He proposes the 
solution of the female 


hystericization of the male and his body, and this seems to be going on with Rob Pattinson initiated by his role of Edward Cullen. Meyer has dreamed Edward into existence, and Rob Pattinson has fulfilled the dream. The new sexy male is a type portrayed by Pattinson with all his gender ambiguity David Bowie style refined beauty. So we have the male version of the femme fatale in Rob Pattinson, and Cronenberg appears smitten and willing to pimp his latest Boy Toy, his latest Ken doll. And Rob is complicit.


“I forget who said that films are desires visualized, but for me, at least, film is the visualization of the director’s desire. But the director’s desire doesn’t appear in the film directly. It appears in all kinds of convoluted forms. My fear that my desire will appear in my films has always caused me to be extremely wary of making films, hasn’t it? Haven’t I made films to hide my desires instead? Trying to hide them made them appear even more vividly.”
Nagisa Oshima
March 31, 1932 – January 15, 2013
(Source: strangewood)


Blyth
If Elise is out of it instead of DeLillo's drawing of her leading Eric Packer to transcendence, then the film falls apart and becomes just another "hard" Cronenberg film instead of "soft". Blyth has discussed the pairing of the relation fear/hatred in his book on Zen. We fear what we hate and we  hate what we fear.

In avoiding sensuous, ecstatic sex in his films is  out of Cronenberg's personal fear of the erotic sexuality of women, and displaces the erotic by focusing his camera on the body of the male. In this way he can satisfy his urges for the male body without acting out his desires. His Lack is assuaged for awhile until he finds a new Boy Toy to parade around and pimp to sell his movies, to get him financing that he is not able to get otherwise because his films are lacking in some way that he himself cannot see.

It is his denial of sensuous, erotic female sexuality that cripples him.




Monday, August 13, 2012

Rob Pattinson - Eric Packer - Cronenberg to Ring in NYSE Tomorrow


Zizek spoke at Occupy Wall Street and one of the things he said was,

The Holy Spirit is here.

This is what Cronenberg trashed by ringing the bell at the NYSE opening.

Rob Pattinson Betrays DeLillo AND Occupy






What a sick sick sick feeling I have on reading this.

Ringing the bell for the opening of NYSE is a publicity move to DEFANG  Delillo's Cosmopolis. 
SLAVOJ ZIZEK Speaking at OCCUPY - HERE


It is DETERRENCE to detract from the heart of the novel and Rob is complicit because he doesn't see the Game. But The Cronenberg does. He wants fame for his deliberate misreading of DeLillo's novel and for his movie and for his box office. 


Shame on you Rob for getting sucked into this! Shame. Just. Say. No. Evidently you misread the novel yourself and/or just accepted Cronenberg's authorial position on it. 

THIS IS A KNIFE IN THE HEART OF DON DELILLO!

Talk about getting your heart ripped out. I will never forgive you for this. Now this is REAL BETRAYAL!

Just to take the heat off your Break Up Porn Scandal!

Disgusted. Boycott the opening of this movie. Wait until it hits the discount theatres. Or see on DVD at your local library.


What do "30 Pieces of Silver" amount to for Cronenberg in creating this visual "floating mask" of Deterrence for the New York Stock Exchange?

You can bet he 
garnered some future financing that he is always talking about for pimping Rob Pattinson to do this. 

A boy being pimped by a man. 

Does Kristen want a man or a boy?

We know his girlfans want the perpetual, infantilized boy.

A spectacle inducing misperception. It isn't going to work.
____________________________________
David Fincher, attention David Fincher!

Please do a remake of Cosmopolis with Andrew Garfield. It is too important a novel and film to be eviscerated.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Reading Eric Packer Through Erik Satie




Erik Satie "Trois Gymnopédies"




How to Play Gymnopedie No1 by Erik Satie on 

Piano Lesson Pt1


If you listen to this music while you are reading this you will feel what Eric Packer says this music does for him. If you have access to a piano you can play it yourself with this fine tutorial. No previous music knowledge needed.

He rode to the marble lobby in the elevator that played Satie. (C 8)

I have two private elevators now. One is programmed to play Satie's piano pieces and to move at one-quarter normal speed. This is right for Satie and this is the elevator I take when I'm in a certain, let's say, unsettled mood. Calms me, makes me whole. (C  28-29)

In the Krasny youtube interviews DeLillo emphasizes that Eric Packer is not a normal Wall Street cyber financier. He reads poetry in different languages, he appreciates the art of Rothko, he listens to Satie and rap music. He has turned Satie into his very own musak musik elevator music. 

DeLillo's emphasis here is to project a character who is a  consumer of high avant garde culture. An aesthete perhaps. This contrasts with his Philip Dick sexual seduction dialogue with Elise. The paradox makes the dialogue very sexual indeed. 

I am equally sure that The Cronenberg did not include Eric Packer's ride down on his own elevator listening to Satie. 

Again we turn to Babette Babich, and a chain of signifiers floating all through Cosmopolis:

Nancy Babich, Nietzsche, excess, limits, implosion, aphoristic writing, musical writing, discontinuous, non linear, non- descriptive, non-explaining writing, writing that is all short, choppy dialogue even more so (Baudrillard) than the choppy, start and stop in quarter inches Foucauldian grid of New York City traffic and the power/knowledge/capital grid of our world where "there is no outside".
New York City Street Map

Agnes Martin


Tuesday, August 7, 2012

DeLillo's Yen and Cronenberg's Yuan in Cosmopolis - Reading Through Lacan


Las Meninas - Diego Valazquez


Cronenberg has gone for the literal by using DeLillo's exact words in his Cosmopolis dialogue. But then strangely Cronenberg eliminates Yen (Japanese currency), replacing it with Yuan (Chinese currency), destroying the Lacanian resonance with yen: a whim for something; an innocuous wanting; and when, "He didn't know what he wanted, then he knew,  he wanted a haircut." Actually this is not a want is it? Is it a yen turning into a want as he persists with his plan? And he will keep his Appointment in Samarra to get it. A yen. Packer then begins to yen (want?) for yen, a play on the verb and the noun.

Then Packer wants all the yen - yenning? - that there is, he wants to want, he wants to Desire, but having no Lack, cannot. He wants all the Rothkos (does he want the sudden break, the cut in his life as Rothko had?), in fact the entire chapel, a religious setting these paintings were painted for. He wants all the volts the stun gun has. "Make me feel something I don't know." Then he wants to LOSE all Elise's heritage. 

Rob has said, "I think he was searching for something. He wanted something."  Cronenberg shuts him up once again. The first time being "....the world will die" the resonating quote of Ayn Rand. Is this the time Cronenberg pats Rob on the head? Good boy.  Does Cronenberg just want to touch Rob's hair like all his fangirls want to? Is this why Cronenberg gave him a slicked down 1950's hairdo (an armoured helmet of hair as Diane Rubenstein might say), perfectly groomed, not looking at all as if he might want, have a yen for, a haircut? What is Cronenberg thinking here?

In a literal recognition of the present economic world prominence of China over Japan, Cronenberg replaces the Japanese currency of the yen with the Chinese currency of the yuan, thus revealing his complete ignorance of the importance in our thinking about our world given us by Lacan that DeLillo has mirrored. (This is an auteur filmmaker?)

Ah, but a Lacanian reading still triumphs. The word yuan in the mouth of a native English speaker does not have the same resonance as spoken by a Chinese. Yuan. Roll it in your mouth. Feel its sound. Feel all the resonance of yearning in the sound of this word, the yawning longing it draws from the native English speaking mouth. Cronenberg has concealed and revealed from himself, concealed and revealed himself to us. In wishing to dispose of yen, a very very mild and almost invisible want, he has substituted yuan, a yearning, a longing. For what Mr. Cronenberg? What are you masking  with this  "floating sign" to escape knowing something you don't want to know that you feel? What if we consider Zizek's terminology of  unknown knowns at this point? Is it Death?

"Money has lost its narrative. Money talks only to itself," says Vija Kinski.

"The New York City skyline of skyscrapers has lost its narrative," says Baudrillard in The Spirit of Terrorism. The Twin Towers of totalitarian monolithic proportions faced each other saying that although we appear to be two, we really are one. They are mirror images reflecting each other into infinity saying, "There is no outside." How clairvoyant do you think DeLillo is now?

"Money for paintings. Money for anything. I had to learn how to understand money," sahe said. "I grew up comfortably. took me awhile to think about money and actually look at it. I began to look at it. Look closely at bills and coins. I learned how it felt to make money and spend it. It felt instensely satisfying. It helped me be a person. But I don't know what money is anymore." (C 29)

Didi Fancher is talking about the loss of representation; the concrete feel of money. The signifier and the signified. Vija Kinski is talking about cyber-capital, Virtual Reality Capital, money as "floating sign", the signified and the signifier parted forever, money floating free as CODE (just air as Packer says)  in Virtual Reality.

Benno Levin:

"But how can you make words out of sounds? These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link.....Mirrors and images. Or sex and love. These are two separate systems that we miserably try to link. (C 55)


The loss of representation so carefully elucidated by Foucault in The Order of Things in chapter one with Valazquez's Las Meninas. In the painting among the royal family of Philip IV,                                                                                                                                                               is the painter. The painter is looking at you. The canvas he is painting you cannot see, only its back. At the far end of the painting, among the shadowy paintings on the wall, a figure midway on stairs appears to be lit by the invisible source of the light that allows you to see the royal family and the painter himself  But it is not another painting, it is a mirror,  "It offers us at last that enchantment of the double that until now has been denied us, not only by the distant paintings but also by the light in the foreground with its ironic canvas." (TOT 7)

I attended Leo Steinberg's seminar on Valazquez and he spent an evening on this painting. He did not mention the faraway "painting" that upon a closer look betrayed itself as a mirror. In Barcelona at the Picasso Museum there are all the studies of Las Meninas that Picasso did. I wish I could take another look.

You are in the light that is lighting the painting. You are the invisible subject Velazquez is gazing at. Foucault then discusses the royal family in this painting that is a portrait of them.

These proper names would form useful landmarks and avoid ambiguous designations; they would tell us in any case what the painter is looking at, and the majority of the characters in the picture along with him. But the relation of language to painting is an infinite relation. It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visual, they prove supersably inadequate. 

Neither can be reduced to the other's terms; it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say.( TOT 9)

And in this way Foucault gives us THE CUT with representation in the Dominating Discourse of painting paving the way to the modernist era with its lack of representation.


Thursday, July 5, 2012

Nancy Babich: Code For A Smart Gun: Babette Babich Is A Smart Gun

Babette Babich

Babette Babich - what a name. Straight out of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, eh.

Nancy Babich BAM!

Nancy Babich is CODE 


In Cosmopolis Nancy Babich is CODE for a smart gun.


Babette is Jack Gladney's wife in DeLillo's White Noise.


Jack Gladney is THE international specialist in Hitler Studies.


Babette Babich is THE international specialist in Nietzsche.


Nietzsche is the philosopher that Hitler pressed to his bosom. 


Nietzsche is the philosopher that Ayn Rand memorized and read from age 16 until her late 30's. Beyond Good and Evil was her first book in English and she underlined all her favorite passages says Barbara Branden quoting her in her book The Passion of Ayn Rand.


Nancy Babich is CODE for Babette Babich. Babette Babich is CODE for the entire book. 


Babette Babich is the "smart gun" who shoots soft and deadly bullets that shatter masks.


Nietzsche: Words written in blood are not to be read but learnt by heart


Babette Babich wrote Words In Blood, Like Flowers - Philosophy and Poetry, Music and Eros in Holderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger


The Blogs of Babette Babich - Profile
Click on her pic on the far right for details of her profile and blogs

WORDS IN BLOOD - DeLillo writes a sentence or paragraph on one sheet of paper.He then reads it and edits it.He rewrites it.He keeps doing this until he gets it exactly the way he wants it to be. 
Cosmopolis was WRITTEN IN BLOOD. 
"Words written in blood are not to be read but to be learnt by heart" - Nietzsche
The Cronenberg read Cosmopolis in one sitting, pasted the dialogue into screenplay software in 6 days.Shot the film in 6 weeks.Edited it on the quick.Showed it in Cannes one year later.
Wham bam thank you ma'am!
ROB PATTINSON LEARNED THE WORDS BY HEART. He says they still echo in his inner ear. Rob Pattinson is following Nietzsche's urging. 
Cronenberg probably didn't even know Nietzsche said what he said.

1 day ago
AlteredbyaVampire(ABV Kiri) posted: I always find myself going back to *The Nancy Babich* part of the story.....
1 day ago
Lydia posted:  I've always wondered where Delillo came up with the name.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Immortal Poem - Eric Packer (un) dying- a Cosmopolis

Immortal Poem by Miroslav Mika Antić
I-
If they tell you: I died,
and you liked me,
something in you as well
may suddenly turn grey.
On your lashes a mist,
An ashen trace on your lips.
Have you ever thought
of what it really means to live?
                                      It was a matter of silences, 
                                      not words.- Cosmopolis, p.5
As snow on a warm palm
the childhood fades within you.
Worries...
Are there any worries?
Sorrows...
Are there any sorrows?
Up the ladder of imagination
Climb bravely into the youth.
That pretty but devious rainbow
there awaits for you.
And live!
Live completely!
Do not nibble on days as mice.
Chew on air
Race with the wind and the birds.    
                                     He stood a while longer, watching a single gull lift
                                    and ripple in a furl of air, admiring the bird, thinking into it,
                                     trying to know the bird, feeling the sturdy earnest beat
                                     of its scavenger's ravenous heart. - Cosmopolis, p.7
For every eternity is brief.               
Suddenly: those laughing faces         
in some mirror                                 
turn to wrinkled.
Suddenly: a tear lurks
around some corner.
Troubles arrive at fingertips.
Years become more grey.
Suddenly the world, while walking
becomes more narrow
and the laughter more quiet
and quiet
and askew somehow.
So live, but completely!
That is how I did.
Ages only I have travelled
for half a century.
I admit it: silly at times.
At times, the wrong way.
But I never stood still.
I went always.
And went...
Spin a golden thread
out of your aorta
and sew the cracked places
through which the wonders shudder.
And never imagine life
as a scared goodbye
but as a permanent welcome
and constant begining of awakening.
II-
And then, for once seriously
think what it means to die
and where is it that man goes away.
What is it that calls for him forever.
Do not go to cemeteries.
You will understand nothing.
Cemeteries are the darkest fair
and a sad theatre.
Whilst playing with restlessness
and with the unformed,
don't you feel the need
to secretly enter new
layers of mind?
neighboring futures?
I will explain it sometimes
if you find me there.
You know what I'll do:
I'll break your toy called pain,
if you dare.
I am not lying.
I am inventing
that which needs to exist,
only you haven't unraveled it yet,
because you haven't looked for it.
Remember: reality is more real
is you add more of the unreal.
You will recognize me through silence.
The eternal don't speak.
To wise out the wisdom,
cherish the listening skill.
After infinite births
and some petty deaths
once you understand
that all you breathed in
is not life,
really, come by,
so I can touch you with light
and turn you into a thought.
The farthest of futures has its future too,
which hears the call of its future inside.
And no worlds are empty.
That, which we are unaware of,
is not inexistance,
but the existance without us.
                        Nothing existed around him. There was only the noise in his
                        head, the mind in time. When he died he would not end. The
                        world would end. - Cosmopolis, pg.6

III -                                           
If they tell you: I died                        
this is what will happen.
Thousands of colorful fishes
will flutter through my eye.
And the earth will hide me.
And the weeds will hide me.
While I'll be flying high.
Remember: there are no limits,
only temporary limts.
I will sail above you at dusk
in wind slick as silk.
I will unravel horizons,
contoures of ages unborn
and images of future
through the beating of invisible wings.
And as a silent pendulum
swinging in the immense,
I will hang upon myself
as upon a golden belt.
Do you really think my arm,
my knee
or head
can turn into clay,
beech root or grass?
That some tiny secret
or fear
can tomorrow become
silence
darkness
and dust?
I am really from stars, you know.
All made of light.
Nothing in me will shorten or stifle
I'll just return
at some accidental dawn
to some distant sun   
my eyes golden. (...)           
                          He wanted to be buried in his nuclear bomber, his Blackjack
                          A. Not buried, but cremated, but buried as well. He wanted 
                          to be solarized.He wanted the plane flown by remote control
                          with his embalmed body aboard, suit tie and turban, and the
                          bodies ofhis dead dogs, his tall silky Russian woolfhounds
                          reaching maximum altitude and leveling at supersonic dash
                           speed and then sent plunging into the sand, fireballed one
                          and all, leaving a work of land art, scorched earth art that
                          would interact with the desert.... - Cosmopolis, pg 209.


Never bother to ask:                
how is one to live but:              
how is one not to die
after all these deaths.           What did he want that was not posthumous? 
                                                                                    - Cosmopolis, pg 209.           
If they tell you: I died,              
worry not. In every century      
someone mistakes me              
for tired and old.                       
Never as many people
in one single man.
Never as many different
in the same.(...)
To be humanly multiple      
is not to be dehumanized.   
I am divisible with everything,   
and yet indestructible.            
                           But his pain interfered with his immortality. It was crucial to his
                            distinctiveness, too vital to be bypassed and not susceptible,
                           he didn't think, to computer emulation. The things that
                          made him who he was could hardly be indentified much less
                           converted to data, the things that lived and milled in his
                          body, everywhere, random, riotous, billions of trillions, in the
                          neurons and peptides, the throbbing temple vein, in the veneer
                        of his  libidinous intellect. So much come and gone, this is who 
                        he was, the lost taste of milk licked from his
                        mother's breast, the stuff he sneezes when he sneezes,  
                       this  is  him and how a person becomes the reflection 
                       he sees in    dusty window when he walks by.  
                                                                                                     - Cosmopolis, pg 207.
And all these wondrous stages    
and the renewal of me          
are nothing but a whirl          
unified,                                 
persistent,                            
long. (...)                              
Why then say farewell?         
What is it that we regret?       
If they tell you: I died,
you know - it is not what I can do  
                             His hand contains the pain of his life, all of it, emotional
                           and other, and he closes his eyes one more time. This is
                           not the end. He is dead inside the crystal of his watch
                            but still alive in original space, waiting for the shot to
                            sound.- Cosmopolis, pg 209.
Love is the only air                            
I inhaled.                                            
And laughter only language                  
I understand in the world.                    
I dropped by this place
to wink at you a bit.
To leave behind something
as a  fluttery trace.
Do not be sad. (...)