Swallowing Geography Quotes

She is the wanderer, bum, émigré, refugee, deportee, rambler, strolling player. Sometimes she would like to be a settler, but curiosity, grief, and disaffection forbid it.

Loners are the opposition. Pensive, thoughtful and furious, marooned with stories that need to be spoken out loud and no one to listen, curries to be cooked and no one to taste, days and days of traffic signals to be manoeuvred and no one to congratulate except other loners: they find each other because like all good maps there are familiar signs that lead the way. The loner who both observes and creates worlds necessarily speaks with many tongues. It is with these tongues that she explores the contours of the centre and the margins, the signs for somewhere and elsewhere and here and now.

She swallows and swallows the water. And as she swallows she swallows the possibility she will always be alone. Swallows the river that will flow into the sea that is made from other waters that have flowed from mountains and hills, that will leak into oceans. She swallows geography, learns to swim in changing tides and temperatures, learns different strokes of the arms and legs, learns to speak in many tongues. She does this because she has no choice but to do so, and she comes out of the river to find him there, holding her earrings in his hand, and he says, ‘But they don’t fit. Who are you?’" (from "Swallowing Geography" by Deborah Levy)

The arrogance of metaphor when facts save people's lives. The succour of metaphor when facts inadequately describe people's lives.

J.K. watches a storm rage into the crimson afternoon. The sky is electric. Rain whips her bare arms and legs. Dustbins are hauled into the air, caught on the wind’s curve. Bags and pillowcase unpacked for a while, toothbrush, perfume, books, a little pile of yellow feathers, J.K. knows she too is caught in the wind. She is Europe’s eerie child, and she is part of the storm." (from "Swallowing Geography" by Deborah Levy)

Standing in the courtyard with a glass eye; only half the world is intelligible. The stones are wet and mossy and in the crevices are black toads. A big door bars the entrance to the cellar; the steps are slippery and soiled with bat dung. The door bulges and sags, the hinges are falling off, but there is an enameled sign on it, in perfect condition, which says: “Be sure to close the door.” Why close the door? I can’t make it out. I look again at the sign but it is removed; in it’s place there is a pane of colored glass. I take out my artificial eye, spit on it and polish it with my handkerchief. A woman is sitting on a dais above an immense carven desk; she has a snake around her neck. The entire room is lined with books and strange fish swimming in colored globes; there are maps and charts on the wall, maps of Paris before the plague, maps of the antique world, of Knossos and Carthage, of Carthage before and after the salting. In the corner of the room I see an iron bedstead and on it a corpse is lying; the woman gets up wearily, removes the corpse from the bed and absent mindedly throws it out the window. She returns to the huge carven desk, takes a goldfish from the bowl and swallows it. Slowly the room begins to revolve and one by one the continents slide into the sea; only the woman is left, but her body is a mass of geography. I lean out the window and the Eiffle Tower is fizzing champagne; it is built entirely of numbers and shrouded in black lace. The sewers are gurgling furiously. There are nothing but roofs everywhere, laid out with execrable geometric cunning.

For a moment I felt the quiet hungering thing that comes inside when you return to the place of your origins, and then the ache of mis-belonging. It was beautiful, this place, and it was savage. It swallowed you and made you a part of itself, or it you proved too inassimilable, it spit you out like the pit of a plum. I’d left here of my own will, and yet it seemed the city had banished in much the same way I’d banished it. Seeing it now after so long, seeing the marsh grass pitching wildly around the edges of the city, the rooftops hunkered together with their ship watches and widow walks, and behind them, the steeples of St Philip’s and St Michael’s lifted like dark fingers, I was not sorry for loving Charleston or for leaving it. Geography had made me who I was.

Load poems like guns— war's geography calls you to arms. The enemy has no signs, counter-signs, colors signals symbols! Load poems like guns— each moment is loaded with bombs bullets blasts death-sounds— death and war don't follow rules you can make your pages into white flags a thousand times but swallow your words, say no more. Load your poems— your body— your thoughts— like guns. The schoolhouses of war rise up within you. Maybe you are next.

During the twenty-first century the border between history and biology is likely to blur not because we will discover biological explanations for historical events, but rather because ideological fictions will rewrite DNA strands; political and economic interests will redesign the climate; and the geography of mountains and rivers will give way to cyberspace. As human fictions are translated into genetic and electronic codes, the intersubjective reality will swallow up the objective reality and biology will merge with history. In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection. Hence if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world.

Maybe someday breakthroughs in neurobiology will enable us to explain communism and the crusades in strictly biochemical terms. Yet we are very far from that point. During the twenty-first century the border between history and biology is likely to blur not because we will discover biological explanations for historical events, but rather because ideological fictions will rewrite DNA strands; political and economic interests will redesign the climate; and the geography of mountains and rivers will give way to cyberspace. As human fictions are translated into genetic and electronic codes, the intersubjective reality will swallow up the objective reality and biology will merge with history. In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection. Hence if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world.

The humanities, in contrast, emphasise the crucial importance of intersubjective entities, which cannot be reduced to hormones and neurons. To think historically means to ascribe real power to the contents of our imaginary stories. Of course, historians don’t ignore objective factors such as climate changes and genetic mutations, but they give much greater importance to the stories people invent and believe. North Korea and South Korea are so different from one another not because people in Pyongyang have different genes to people in Seoul, or because the north is colder and more mountainous. It’s because the north is dominated by very different fictions. Maybe someday breakthroughs in neurobiology will enable us to explain communism and the crusades in strictly biochemical terms. Yet we are very far from that point. During the twenty-first century the border between history and biology is likely to blur not because we will discover biological explanations for historical events, but rather because ideological fictions will rewrite DNA strands; political and economic interests will redesign the climate; and the geography of mountains and rivers will give way to cyberspace. As human fictions are translated into genetic and electronic codes, the intersubjective reality will swallow up the objective reality and biology will merge with history. In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection. Hence if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world.

David Henderson’s 1970 poem “Keep on Pushing,” also analyzed the geographies of urban warfare in the Summer of 1964’s Harlem Riots. Henderson warned of the crude mathematics of wide avenues that can swallow protest pickets, easily dismantle popular barricades, and muster five hundred cops in fifteen minutes, but he also suggests how, “For Harlem/ reinforcements come from the Bronx / just over the three-borough Bridge. / a shot   a cry   a rumor / can muster five hundred Negroes / from idle and strategic street corners / bars  stoops   hallways   windows.

It became clear that he would demand the Corridor and would swallow all of Poland. The Poles are proud people and would take a stand. Their tragedy through the centuries lay in a fact of geography, that they lived between the Russians, in the East, and the Germans and Austrians, in the West. They have been buffeted by both before and it was to clearly follow after 1939. France and England had a pact to protect the territorial integrity of Poland, if attacked. On Sunday, the third of that fateful September of 1939, France and England declared war against Germany.

The suspicion that certain ancient authorities possessed good knowledge of the real shape of the Atlantic and its islands, and of the lands on both sides of it, must also arise from any objective reading of Plato's world-famous account of Atlantis. [...], this story is set around 11,600 years ago -- a date that coincides with a peak episode of global flooding at the end of the Ice Age. The story tells us that 'the island of Atlantis was swallowed up by the sea and vanished', that this took place in 'a single dreadful day and night' and that the event was accompanied by earthquakes and floods that were experienced as far away as the eastern Mediterranean. But of more immediate interest to us here is what Plato has to say about the geographical situation in the Atlantic immediately before the flood that destroyed Atlantis: 'In those days the Atlantic was navigable. There was an island opposite the strait [the Strait of Gibraltar] which you [the Greeks] call the Pillars of Heracles, an island larger than Libya and Asia combined; from it travellers could in those days reach the other islands, and from them the whole opposite continent which surrounds what can truly be called the ocean. For the sea within the strait we are talking about [i.e. the Mediterranean] is like a lake with a narrow entrance; the outer ocean is the real ocean and the land which entirely surrounds it is properly termed continent ... On this land of Atlantis had arisen a powerful and remarkable dynasty of kings who ruled the whole island; and many other islands as well, and parts of the continent ...' Whether or not one believes than an island called Atlantis ever existed in the Atlantic Ocean, Plato's clear references to an 'opposite continent' on the far side of it are geographical knowledge out of place in time. It is hard to read in these references anything other than an allusion to the Americas, and yet historians assure us that the Americas were unknown in Plato's time and remained 'undiscovered' (except for a few inconsequential Viking voyages) until Colombus in 1492.