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The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

Ben Lerner

When the narrator feels like an octopus, when he says his limbs are starting to multiply, he means he has inklings of orders of perception beyond his individual body.
BEN LERNER

Mean Octopus Order
Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass “conceptualism” that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.
BEN LERNER

Contemporary Fiction Historical Past
I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who’ve made a commercialized fetish of the culture’s stupidity.
BEN LERNER

Artist Culture Stupidity
Every relationship can feel saturated by market logic or at best purchased at the price of the immiseration of others.
BEN LERNER

Feels Logic Saturated
I guess when I’m frightened or in pain or maybe very bored I’ve tried to hold myself together by imposing a narrative order on the experience as it happens.
BEN LERNER

Bored Order Pain
I’m trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in medical contexts, even in trivial ones.
BEN LERNER

Lost Medical Trying
I was a violent, bipolar, compulsive liar. I was a real American.
BEN LERNER

Bipolar Liars Real
I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.
BEN LERNER

City Grid Sincerity
Most of us start from that position of irony now and what I wanted to do – really felt like I had to do if I was going to write another novel – was move towards something like sincerity.
BEN LERNER

Irony Moving Writing
The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.
BEN LERNER

Awe Exciting Inspiring
My concern is how we live fictions, how fictions have real effects, become facts in that sense, and how our experience of the world changes depending on its arrangement into one narrative or another.
BEN LERNER

Fiction Real World
The problem is that if you’re self-conscious about being a person on whom nothing is lost, isn’t something lost – some kind of presence? You’re distracted by trying to be totally, perfectly impressionable.
BEN LERNER

Kind Self Trying
I don’t think it’s always a sign of respect for persons (inside or outside of fiction) to pretend to be able to represent, to have access to, their multi-dimensionality at every moment. That doesn’t imply people aren’t multi-dimensional.
BEN LERNER

Fiction People Thinking
I remember I had this recurring dream that we were playing a night game and instead of eye black we had mashed up the glowing bodies of fireflies and put that under our eyes. So our faces were glowing – a kind of night vision.
BEN LERNER

Dream Eye Firefly
If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgment of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
BEN LERNER

Admitting Kind Practice
Maggie Nelson cuts through our culture’s prefabricated structures of thought and feeling with an intelligence whose ferocity is ultimately in the service of love. No piety is safe, no orthodoxy, no easy irony. The scare quotes burn off like fog.
BEN LERNER

Cutting Feelings Fog

The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

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The transpersonal is more awe-inspiring, more exciting than the thing we confuse it for.

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