The Chronology Of Water Book Quotes

In water, like in books—you can leave your life.

He treated...my scarred as shit past and body as chapters of a book he wanted to hold in his hands and finish.

If you have ever fucked up in your life, or if the great river of sadness that runs through us all has touched you, then this book is for you. So thank you for the collective energy it takes to write in the face of culture. I can feel you.

I believe in art the way other people believe in god. I say that because books and paintings and music and photography gave me an alternate world to inhabit when the one I was born into was a dead zone. I say it because if you, even inside whatever terror itches your skin, pick up a pen or a paintbrush, a camera or clay or a guitar, you already have what you are afraid to choose. Volition. It was already in you.

You do not deserve most of what has happened or will. But there is something I can offer you. Whoever you are. Out there. As lonely as it gets, you are not alone. There is another kind of love. It’s the love of art. Because I believe in art the way other people believe in god. In art I’ve met an army of people - a tribe that gives good company and courage and hope. In books and painting and music and film. This book? It’s for you. It’s water I made a path through. I’m not speaking out of my asshole when I say this. Come in. The water will hold you.

In water, like in books-you can leave your life.

Let your imagination change what you know. Suddenly a gray rock becomes ashen or clouded with dream. A ring round a rock is luck. To find a red rock is to discover earthblood. Blue rocks make you believe in them. Patterns and flecks on rocks are bits of different countries and terrains, speckled questions. Conglomerates are the movement of land in the freedom of water, smoothed into a small thing you can hold in your hand, rub against your face. Sandstone is soothing and lucid. Shale, of course, is rational. Find pleasure in these ordinary palm worlds. Help yourself prepare for a life. Recognize when there are no words for the pain, when there are no words for the joy, there are rocks. Fill all the clear drinking glasses in your house with rocks, no matter what your husband or lover thinks. Gather rocks in small piles on the counters, the tables, the windowsills. Divide rocks by color, texture, size, shape. Collect some larger stones, place them along the floor of your living room, never mind what the guests think, build an intricate labyrinth of inanimates. Move around your rocks like a curl of water. Begin to detect smells and sounds to different varieties of rock. Give names to some, not geological, but of your own making. Memorize their presence, know if one is missing or out of place. Bathe them in water once each week. Carry a different one in your pocket every day. Move away from normal but don’t notice it. Move towards excess but don’t care. Own more rocks than clothing, than dishes, than books. Lie down next to them on the floor, put the smaller ones in your mouth occasionally. Sometimes, feel lithic, or petrified, or rupestral instead of tired, irritable, depressed. At night, alone, naked, place one green, one red, one ashen on different parts of your body. Tell no one.

Listen I can see you. If you are like me. You do not deserve most of what has happened or will. But there is something I can offer you. Whoever you are. Out there. As lonely as it gets, you are not alone. There is another kind of love. It’s the love of art. Because I believe in art the way other people believe in god. In art I’ve met an army of people - a tribe that gives good company and courage and hope. In books and painting and music and film. This book? It’s for you. It’s water I made a path through. I’m not speaking out of my asshole when I say this. Come in. The water will hold you.

Maybe that’s true about all larger than life people, or it may be that no one really ever knows them at all - we just have experiences near them and claim them as our own. We say their names and wish that something intimate is coming out of our mouths. But intimacy isn’t like in books or movies.

I wrote story after story. There was no inside out. There were words and there was my body, and I could see through my own skin. I wrote my guts out. Until it was a book. Until my very skin made screamsong.

In my dissertation the novels I’d chosen were astonishing pieces of noisy art. White Noise and Almanac of the Dead and Empire of the Senseless - a book which I promise you, if you’ve never read it, will scrape your eyeballs

You know, in your life. What's next?" I didn't have a plan. I had grief. I had rage. I had my sexuality. I liked books more than people. I liked to be drunk and high and fuck so I didn't have to answer questions like this.

But that woman I’d let into the house ravaged who I had been. Her zany brain force would not go. I didn’t want to fuck. I wanted to read. I didn’t want to go numb every night. I wanted to travel the country of ideas and feel thoughts and blast open the top of my head. I didn’t want to drink until I dropped. I wanted to write. A whole other book.

I didn’t have a plan. I had grief. I had rage. I had my sexuality. I liked books more than people. I liked to be drunk and high and fuck so I didn’t have to answer questions like this. As I’m telling this I realize there is another way to tell it. Tenderly. Quiet and small.

UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS Associative binding of experiences in memory to create an internal chronology would also help explain why most precognitive dreams are only identified as such in hindsight. Even if premory is just an aspect of memory and obeys most of the same principles, the stand-out exception is that only with memory for things past can we engage in what psychologists call source monitoring. We can often tell more or less how we know things from past experience because we can situate them, at least roughly, in relation to other biographical details. We can’t do this with experiences refluxing from our future, because they lack any context. We don’t know yet where or how they fit into our lives, so it may be natural for the conscious mind to assume that they don’t fit at all.12 Again, it is natural and inviting to think of precognition as a kind of radar or sonar scanning for perils in the water ahead. A metaphor that Dunne used for precognitive dreaming is a flashlight we point ahead of us on a dark path. But it makes more sense that our brains are constantly receiving messages sent back in time from our future self and are continually sifting and scanning those messages for possible associations to present concerns and longstanding priorities without knowing where that information comes from, let alone how far away it is in time. Items that match our current concerns or preoccupations will be taken and elaborated as dreams or premonitions or other conscious “psi” experiences, but we are likely only to recognize their precognitive character after the future event transpires and we recognize its source. And even then, we will only notice it, by and large, if we are paying close attention. That matching or resonance with current concerns may be important in determining the timing of a dream in relation to its future referent. For instance, it is possible Freud dreamed about the oral symptoms in the mouth of his patient Anna Hammerschlag when he did because of a confluence of events in his life in 1895 that pre-minded him of his situation all those years later, in 1923—including his relapse to smoking his cigars after his friend Wilhelm Fliess had told him to quit. Again, his thoughts about his smoking may have been the short circuit or thematic resonance between these two distant points in his life, precipitating the dream. Incidentally, there is no reason to assume that that single dream of Freud’s was the only one in his life about his cancer and surgeries. Multiple dreams may point to the same experience via multiple symbolic or associative avenues, so it would be expected that some of Freud’s later dreams, especially closer to 1923, may have also related to the same experiences. We’ll never know, of course. But dreamers frequently report multiple precognitive dreams targeting the same later upheaval in their lives, especially major experiences like health crises and life milestones.

Fear God and give him glory, for the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him that made heaven and the earth and the sea and fountains of waters.

think that everyone that knew Kesey knew him differently. Maybe that’s true about all larger than life people, or it may be that no one really ever knows them at all - we just have exper - iences near them and claim them as our own. We say their names and wish that something intimate is coming out of our mouths. But intimacy isn’t like in books or movies.

Will wolfed down his sandwich, drank half his water, and went to work examining the boxes. He discovered that all of them had dates scrawled on the side, so he cranked up to his highest speed, motored around the room rearranging them, and had them neatly arranged in chronological order in less than twenty minutes. Three equal rows, forty boxes in each, lined up in the center of the room. Some were sealed; most were open. Their weight varied greatly; some were packed solid and heavy with books and ledgers, while others contained nothing but rolled-up maps.

For two thousand years, maybe more, the ceremonies had been celebrated every autumn in the small town of Eleusis near Athens, becoming more famous and elaborate with the passing years. By Roman times, the mystery temple at Eleusis was a huge building half the size of a foot- ball field, and people came there from the far corners of the ancient world. All new initiates had to go through preliminary ceremonies at the river Ilissos in the month of Anthesterion, our February, in which they offered sacrifices, cleansed them- selves in the water, and listened to instruction. A year and a half later, in Boedromion (our September), they marched to Eleusis, arriving at dusk. They entered the temple, and the ceremony of initiation was enacted. No one today knows what it was, but ancient writers agreed that those who passed through it had no fear of death afterward.

Maybe this is how the steelhead feels when it's caught-thrashing itself against water, then land - a lfedeath fight. How some get released and others get eaten and others just float away, too weak to surivive. All those body blows and wounds. Or when they swim upstream to spawn then die. Are they killing themselves? Or making life? Inside her house, Hannah made me a cup of green tea. But tenderness couldn't touch me then. I went swimming in the river alone every night that week. At a spot where hoodlums and teens gor drunk and jumped in to shoot the rapids. Nobody care that I was there. Or that I was older than them. Or alone. In nightwater, I didn't have to feel what people are supposed to feel. There is a glooming pease there. At the end of the rapids, there is a still. In water, like in books - you can leave your life.

I thought about starting this book with my childhood, the beginning of my life. But that's not how I remember it. I remember things in retinal flashes. Without order. Your life doesn't happen in any kind of order. Events don't have cause and effect relationships the way you wish they did. It's all a series of fragments and repetitions and pattern formations. Language and water have this in common. All the events of my life swim in and out between each other. Without chronology. Like in dreams. So if I'm thinking of a memory of a relationship, or one about riding a bike, or about my love for literature and art, or when I first touched my lips to alcohol, or how much I adored my sister, or the day my father first touched me – there is no linear sense. Language is a metaphor for experience. It's as arbitrary as the mass of chaotic images we call memory – but we can put it into lines to narrativize over fear.