Dialogues

 In each of us there is, as it were, an ascesis, in part turned against ourselves. We are deserts, but populated by tribes, flora and fauna. We pass our time in ordering these tribes, arranging them in other ways, getting rid of some and encouraging others to prosper. And all these clans, all these crowds, do not undermine the desert, which is our very ascesis; on the contrary they inhabit it, they pass through it, over it.

Reminiscence

 https://yoyochey.blogspot.com/2009/12/i-recently-went-to-hip-hop-show-paying.html

Immanence

Immanence, Jack London, Buck

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.

The "summit of life", the apex, this "complete forgetfulness" is immanence of course, but also maps to the apex of the normal distribution, the tip of gabriel's horn even, the point of inscription that is the minutest cylinder/cone of infinite length but finite volume, the point at which "In the Penal Colony" the inscription of the sentence/judgement is contemporaneous with death.

Ahab

 Bungle away at it then, and bring it to me (turns to go). Oh, Life! Here I am, proud as Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers. I would be free as air; and I’m down in the whole world’s books. I am so rich, I could have given bid for bid with the wealthiest Prætorians at the auction of the Roman empire (which was the world’s); and yet I owe for the flesh in the tongue I brag with. By heavens! I’ll get a crucible, and into it, and dissolve myself down to one small, compendious vertebra. So.

Fitzgerald on Crack

"Instead of being so sorry for yourself, listen—"she said. (She always says "Listen," because she thinks while she talks—really thinks.) So she said: "Listen. Suppose this wasn't a crack in you—suppose it was a crack in the Grand Canyon."

"The crack's in me," I said heroically.

"Listen! The world only exists in your eyes—your conception of it. You can make it as big or as small as you want to. And you're trying to be a little puny individual. By God, if I ever cracked, I'd try to make the world crack with me. Listen! The world only exists through your apprehension of it, and so it's much better to say that it's not you that's cracked—it's the Grand Canyon." 

Dance of the Seven Veils

 

El Aleph

 On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph’s diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror’s face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I’d seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny — Philemon Holland’s — and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon — the unimaginable universe.

Rebel Without a Cause

 

Moby Dick / Lucretius

Come, Ahab’s compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! man has ye there. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.

- Herman Melville

NAND Logic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAND_logic

Ode on a Grecian Urn

 "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

gd bless the child

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_1LfT1MvzI

Emerson, via BKR

 "There is a process in the mind very analogous to crystallization in the mineral kingdom. I think of a particular fact of singular beauty and interest. In thinking of it I am led to many more thoughts which show themselves, first partially, and afterwards more fully. But in the multitude of them I see no order. When I would present them to others they have no beginning. There is no method. Leave them now, and return to them again. Domesticate them in your mind, do not force them into arrangement too hastily, and presently you shall find they will take their own order. And the order they assume is divine. It is God's architecture." - Journals, Jan 7, 1832

"Joy emerges as the sole motivation for philosophizing." (PI:84)

"I am no longer myself but thought's aptitude for finding itself and spreading across a plane that passes through me at several places" (WIP:64)

This operation takes place as if the personae were so many divers, descending from the plane of immanence into the sea below, where singularities lie scattered like so many stray pearls. Braving the depths, the personae collect these shimmering ordinates (chiffres) and then return to the surface, where these singularities will be thrown on a table of immanence like "a handful of dice from chance-chaos" (Flaxman 2019, WIP:75)

Giant Steps

In Giant Steps, Coltrane incarnates ideas within modal scales, like boxes inside boxes, a nested solo.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30FTr6G53VU

the primary order ... grumbles beneath the secondary organization of sense

 LOS, 125

On Friendship

Even as truth seems to bring friends together, to secure their fidelity, and to underwrite their contracts, Deleuze insists that friendship constitutes the means with which thinking becomes a problem and becomes conscious of itself as a problem. Inversely, then, perhaps the problem of philosophy can only be posed “‘between friends,’ as a secret [confidence] or a confidence [confiance], or as a challenge when confronting an enemy, and at the same time to reach that twilight when one distrusts even the friend” (WIP: 2). Perhaps the problem of philosophy is posed between friends because only in such a relationship, which is precisely a matter of mutual trust (confiance), can we introduce distrust. Perhaps only among friends can we risk the risk.

Gregg Flaxman, 2005

Gregg Flaxman on Deleuze's "Philosophy".

Free Solo

"That’s the most magnificent crack on planet earth."

https://fsharetv.co/movie/free-solo-episode-1-tt7775622

The Unknown Masterpiece, Balzac

Nature’s way is a complicated succession of curve within curve.

wolves on love

But the wolves, Deleuze and Guattari insist, are a multiplicity.

They live in packs and as such their existence is only partly individual.
A pack of forever variable intensities, wolves express the way bodies
are continually composed and recomposed through desire. They are
linked together as a multiplicity in which ‘each element ceaselessly
varies and alters its distance in relation to the others’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 2004: 34). To become-wolf is to surrender the unity of
the supreme self to the multiplicities that make the subject but one
intensity in a larger pack. Held together and fueled by desire, such
packs are fluent and irreducible to the One. This is also how we must
understand making love. To love somebody is ‘to find that person’s
own packs’. These packs are the multiplicities enclosed within that
person. Love is joining these multiplicities together, ‘to make them
penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person’s’ (Deleuze
and Guattari 2004: 39). Such ‘heavenly nuptials’, created by moving
through so many bodies in each other, is making love through a
body without organs (Deleuze and Guattari 2004: 40).

Joshua Ramey, Gilles Deleuze and the Powers of Art (2006)

Desert Islands and Other Texts (2004)

on repetition

If repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the
general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive opposed to
the ordinary, an instantaneity opposed to variation, and an eternity
opposed to permanence. In every respect, repetition is a transgression. It
puts law into question, it denounces its nominal or general character in
favor of a more profound and more artistic reality. (DR 2-3)

deleuze on art

Art

. . . does not imitate, above all because it repeats; it repeats all the repetitions, by virtue of an internal power (an imitation is a copy, but art is simulation, it reverses copies into simulacra). Even the most mechanical,the most banal, the most habitual and the most stereotyped repetition finds a place in the work of art, it is always displaced in relation to other repetitions, and it is subject to the condition that a difference may be extracted from it for these other repetitions. For there is no other aesthetic problem than that of the insertion of art into everyday life. The more our  daily life appears standardized, stereotyped, and subject to an accelerated reproduction of objects of consumption, the more art must be injected into it in order to extract from it that little difference which plays simultaneously between other levels of repetition, and even in order to make the two extremes resonate—namely the habitual series of consumption and the instinctual series of destruction and death . . . [art] aesthetically reproduces the illusions and mystifications which make up the real essence of this civilization. (DR 293)

Trancendental Empiricism

Empiricism truly becomes transcendental, and aesthetics an apodictic discipline, only when we apprehend directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible:  difference, potential difference and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity.  It is in difference that movement is produced as an “effect,” that phenomena flash their meaning like signs.  The intense world of differences, in which we find the reason behind qualities and the being of the sensible, is precisely the object of a superior empiricism.  (DR 57)

becoming

But they had been young once. The odor of their armpits 
and haunches had mingled into a lovely musk; their eyes had 
been furtive, their lips relaxed, and the delicate turn of their 
heads on those slim black necks had been like nothing other 
than a doe’s. Their laughter had been more touch than 
sound. 

Then they had grown. Edging into life from the back 
door. Becoming.

- The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

It's a Power Constellation: Macolm Gladwell on Country Music

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/16-the-king-of-tears

“THE THING THAT PUSHES US OVER THE TOP INTO TEARS IS DETAILS. WE CRY WHEN MELANCHOLY COLLIDES WITH SPECIFICITY. AND SPECIFICITY IS NOT SOMETHING EVERY GENRE DOES WELL.”

“THAT’S HOW YOU GET TEARS. YOU MAKE THE STORY SO REAL AND THE DETAILS SO SHARP AND YOU ADD IN SO MANY EMOTIONAL TRIGGERS THAT THE LISTENER CANNOT ESCAPE…[IT’S] FAR EASIER JUST TO FALL BACK ON THE BLAND CLICHE THAT ‘WILD HORSES COULDN’T DRAG YOU AWAY.’ COUNTRY MUSIC MAKES PEOPLE CRY BECAUSE IT’S NOT AFRAID TO BE SPECIFIC.”

https://twitter.com/ninthstbakery/status/1155483383864201216

Bridges

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9-yfeA2JZs

James Salter, a Sport and a Pastime

"I see myself as an agent provocateur or as a double agent, first on one side — that of truth — and then on the other, but between these, in reversals, the sudden defections, one can easily forget allegiance entirely and feel only the deep, profound joy of being beyond all codes, of being completely independent, criminal is the word."

"The sum of small acts begins to unite them, the pure calculus of love."

Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition

A Ring in Which Combray was Locked

We would follow the tow-path which ran along the top of a steep bank, several feet above the stream. The ground on the other side was lower, and stretched in a series of broad meadows as far as the village and even to the distant railway-station. Over these were strewn the remains, half-buried in the long grass, of the castle of the old Counts of Combray, who, during the Middle Ages, had had on this side the course of the Vivonne as a barrier and defence against attack from the Lords of Guermantes and Abbots of Martinville. Nothing was left now but a few stumps of towers, hummocks upon the broad surface of the fields, hardly visible, broken battlements over which, in their day, the bowmen had hurled down stones, the watchmen had gazed out over Novepont, Clairefontaine, Martinville-le-Sec, Bailleau-l'Exempt, fiefs all of them of Guermantes, a ring in which Combray was locked; but fallen among the grass now, levelled with the ground, climbed and commanded by boys from the Christian Brothers' school, who came there in their playtime, or with lesson-books to be conned; emblems of a past that had sunk down and well-nigh vanished under the earth, that lay by the water's edge now, like an idler taking the air, yet giving me strong food for thought, making the name of Combray connote to me not the little town of to-day only, but an historic city vastly different, seizing and holding my imagination by the remote, incomprehensible features which it half-concealed beneath a spangled veil of buttercups.

-- Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

Deleuze #1

Deleuze #1

What is the shape of a flower without petals?

A frame without a door? 

Or a donut with no hole? 

Life is overwritten by consciousness, filled with excuses,

Excavated 

Leaving 

Railroad ties without rails

And a body without organs.  

you know who you are

Human

"I made you in my image"

possession, delusion, vision, hypnotism, trance, hallucination, and narcosis

Indeed, Artaud likens the cinema to possession, delusion, vision, hypnotism, trance, hallucination, and narcosis because, in all of these experiences, we are inhabited by an "other" logic, our brain and bodies given over to a force that lies outside of us.  With respect to the moving image, Artaud's question is not, What is the nature of thinking? but, What is this thing that thinks inside of me?

G-d inscribes a "law" in us that makes us equal to the incredible variety of nature.

-- from Gregory Flaxman, "This is Your Brain on Cinema"

bread is an intensive surface

Parallax, or the Story of the Three Steeples

 At a bend in the road I experienced, suddenly, that special pleasure, which bore no resemblance to any other, when I caught sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, on which the setting sun was playing, while the movement of the carriage and the windings of the road seemed to keep them continually changing their position; and then of a third steeple, that of Vieuxvicq, which, although separated from them by a hill and a valley, and rising from rather higher ground in the distance, appeared none the less to be standing by their side.

In ascertaining and noting the shape of their spires, the changes of aspect, the sunny warmth of their surfaces, I felt that I was not penetrating to the full depth of my impression, that something more lay behind that mobility, that luminosity, something which they seemed at once to contain and to conceal.

The steeples appeared so distant, and we ourselves seemed to come so little nearer them, that I was astonished when, a few minutes later, we drew up outside the church of Martinville. I did not know the reason for the pleasure which I had found in seeing them upon the horizon, and the business of trying to find out what that reason was seemed to me irksome; I wished only to keep in reserve in my brain those converging lines, moving in the sunshine, and, for the time being, to think of them no more. And it is probable that, had I done so, those two steeples would have vanished for ever, in a great medley of trees and roofs and scents and sounds which I had noticed and set apart on account of the obscure sense of pleasure which they gave me, but without ever exploring them more fully. I got down from the box to talk to my parents while we were waiting for the Doctor to reappear. Then it was time to start; I climbed up again to my place, turning my head to look back, once more, at my steeples, of which, a little later, I caught a farewell glimpse at a turn in the road. The coachman, who seemed little inclined for conversation, having barely acknowledged my remarks, I was obliged, in default of other society, to fall back on my own, and to attempt to recapture the vision of my steeples. And presently their outlines and their sunlit surface, as though they had been a sort of rind, were stripped apart; a little of what they had concealed from me became apparent; an idea came into my mind which had not existed for me a moment earlier, framed itself in words in my head; and the pleasure with which the first sight of them, just now, had filled me was so much enhanced that, overpowered by a sort of intoxication, I could no longer think of anything but them. At this point, although we had now travelled a long way from Martinville, I turned my head and caught sight of them again, quite black this time, for the sun had meanwhile set. Every few minutes a turn in the road would sweep them out of sight; then they shewed themselves for the last time, and so I saw them no more.

Without admitting to myself that what lay buried within the steeples of Martinville must be something analogous to a charming phrase, since it was in the form of words which gave me pleasure that it had appeared to me, I borrowed a pencil and some paper from the Doctor, and composed, in spite of the jolting of the carriage, to appease my conscience and to satisfy my enthusiasm, the following little fragment, which I have since discovered, and now reproduce, with only a slight revision here and there.

---

Alone, rising from the level of the plain, and seemingly lost in that expanse of open country, climbed to the sky the twin steeples of Martinville. Presently we saw three: springing into position confronting them by a daring volt, a third, a dilatory steeple, that of Vieuxvicq, was come to join them. The minutes passed, we were moving rapidly, and yet the three steeples were always a long way ahead of us, like three birds perched upon the plain, motionless and conspicuous in the sunlight. Then the steeple of Vieuxvicq withdrew, took its proper distance, and the steeples of Martinville remained alone, gilded by the light of the setting sun, which, even at that distance, I could see playing and smiling upon their sloped sides. We had been so long in approaching them that I was thinking of the time that must still elapse before we could reach them when, of a sudden, the carriage, having turned a corner, set us down at their feet; and they had flung themselves so abruptly in our path that we had barely time to stop before being dashed against the porch of the church.

We resumed our course; we had left Martinville some little time, and the village, after accompanying us for a few seconds, had already disappeared, when, lingering alone on the horizon to watch our flight, its steeples and that of Vieuxvicq waved once again, in token of farewell, their sun-bathed pinnacles. Sometimes one would withdraw, so that the other two might watch us for a moment still; then the road changed direction, they veered in the light like three golden pivots, and vanished from my gaze. But, a little later, when we were already close to Combray, the sun having set meanwhile, I caught sight of them for the last time, far away, and seeming no more now than three flowers painted upon the sky above the low line of fields. They made me think, too, of three maidens in a legend, abandoned in a solitary place over which night had begun to fall; and while we drew away from them at a gallop, I could see them timidly seeking their way, and, after some awkward, stumbling movements of their noble silhouettes, drawing close to one another, slipping one behind another, shewing nothing more, now, against the still rosy sky than a single dusky form, charming and resigned, and so vanishing in the night.

---

I never thought again of this page, but at the moment when, on my corner of the box-seat, where the Doctor's coachman was in the habit of placing, in a hamper, the fowls which he had bought at Martinville market, I had finished writing it, I found such a sense of happiness, felt that it had so entirely relieved my mind of the obsession of the steeples, and of the mystery which they concealed, that, as though I myself were a hen and had just laid an egg, I began to sing at the top of my voice.

- Marcel Proust, from "Swann's Way"

double crossbar

https://www.instagram.com/p/BsULnSGlpDg/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm3rDbXbZRI

Exchange Theory of Value

https://youtu.be/aj9coPGuFkM

dogon egg

Know yourself

https://genius.com/3271875

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself

"See nature in the world and it will complete your beauty."

magic number

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_Mfoxd6ZMI

Pierrot

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bn17-77Hpmv/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=enjjdjc4zpri

The Swifts of Duke Tower

Singularity

"What is an ideal event? It is a singularity -- or rather a set of singularities or of singular points characterizing a mathematical curve, a physical state of affairs, a psychological and moral person. Singularities are turning points and points of inflection; bottlenecks, knots, foyers, and centers; points of fusion, condensation, and boiling; points of tears and joy, sickness and health, hope and anxiety, "sensitive" points...The singularity belongs to another dimension than that of denotation, manifestation, or signification. It is essentially pre-individual, non-personal, and a-conceptual. It is quite different to the individual and the collective, the personal and the impersonal, the particular and the general -- and to their oppositions.  Singularity is neutral. On the other hand, it is not "ordinary": the singular point is opposed to the ordinary." LS (52)

Follow the borderline

I'll play the blues for you

https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=AP5oHxLAYlA

my funny valentine

https://youtu.be/8SGAcP7Zh6U

I am Difference, Hear Me Roar

Duke Gardens

Irrationality is Difference

Irrationality is difference (i.e. nonsense).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR7M2zl6C5Q

Love had a thousand shapes

"Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she thought"  [cf. el aleph]

"She was not inventing; she was only trying to smooth out something she had been given years ago folded up; something she had seen."

- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Beauty is the cutting edge

Arpeggio

"beauty asks nothing for, or of itself"

"every perception is hallucinatory"

he is our perverted g-d

Society of Control

https://www.nadir.org/nadir/archiv/netzkritik/societyofcontrol.html

Peru

https://www.instagram.com/p/BeuIo8-FjgX/

Proust

"For there were, in the environs of Combray, two 'ways' which we used to take for our walks, and so diametrically opposed that we would actually leave the house by a different door, according to the way we had chosen: the way towards Méséglise-la-Vineuse, which we called also 'Swann's way,' because, to get there, one had to pass along the boundary of M. Swann's estate, and the 'Guermantes way.'" - Proust

Mirror in the Sky What is Love

https://www.instagram.com/p/BbH6zXnjJYK/

http://68.media.tumblr.com/5142cd964a7aa6b3625b22ccd228da08/tumblr_ougsecNPLf1qzh19go1_500.jpg

born under a bad sign

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_Under_a_Bad_Sign_(song)

let the right one in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_the_Right_One_In_(film)

The Birds

Agnes Martin

"The panic of complete helplessness drives us to fantastic extremes...But helplessness when fear and dread have run their course, as all passions do, is the most rewarding state of all.” 

Played Out

https://genius.com/27038

https://genius.com/5945

https://genius.com/54126

https://genius.com/1990

The Meaning of Life is the Pursuit of Immanence

Becoming Alice

ask the grammatologist: if loving you is wrong, I don't want to be right

Perfect Storm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perfect_Storm_(film)

J-o-b

In Wine There is Truth

thrown for a loop

11-9

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/people-are-saying-the-date-of-trumps-win-119-is-the-new-911-september-11th/

bits and bobs

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bits_and_bobs

Chaplin's Desires

“We think to much and feel too little…what do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.”

– Charlie Chaplin

Hassan Sabbah

Swiss Army Man

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Army_Man

Sex Machine Man

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_Up_(I_Feel_Like_Being_a)_Sex_Machine

Barnes Foundation

Bartleby

The thing that fascinates me about Bartleby as deconstructed in Deleuze's "The Formula" is that in his impotence, his silence, his passivity, and his reticence he sparks the world to want to destroy or change him.  It is not that he is unknowing - he knows what the attorney asks of - but all the more it is his knowing that spark a confounded rage.  It is as if evil exists in the world, and what it seeks is characters like Bartleby, who feign weakness, because their strength is virtual, abstract.  They may own nothing, but it is their possession of the knowledge (which is neither an affirmation nor a negation) of the futility of their counterparts that makes them despised.  They could take action supposedly, but they "prefer not to".  And why is that?  "Do I dare to eat a peach?" says Prufrock.  Do they lack the organizational skills to mount an effort, or do they feel doomed to failure, or are they addicted to feeding the ego depressed nihilistic thoughts, or are they simply catatonic due to a head trauma?  Perhaps they feel to disturb the universe is immoral. Evil seeks out Bartleby, just as it seeks out Gregor Samsa, just as it seeks out Prufrock.  Like a sugar ant drawn by the minutest vibrational scent of a cookie crumb from across the room, evil senses an amplitude that lies within Bartleby.  It is not that the attorney is evil per se, but desire is his formula, where Bartleby's is a cloak of indiscernability, a poorly evolved protective mechanism that must be the result of some recessive gene.  It is no wonder that he hides under his desk, wouldn't you if you knew what he did?

Split the duchies / Have you seeing doubles like Noah

http://genius.com/3340723/Dj-eddie-f-lets-get-it-on/Bridge-notorious-big-split-the-dutches-fill-it-with-the-skunk-we-about-to-get-wicked-in-the-joint-uh-notorious-is-glorious-coughing

http://genius.com/2859874/Dj-eddie-f-lets-get-it-on/Have-you-seen-doubles-like-noah

Ginger is a Tuber

He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner, properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian then; but no; he never eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts. My mind then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the human constitution of living entirely on ginger-nuts. Ginger-nuts are so called because they contain ginger as one of their peculiar constituents, and the final flavoring one. Now what was ginger? A hot, spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger, then, had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably he preferred it should have none.

-Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener"