stet by james chapman

james chapman gave me this book and i read it

i know james chapman because his fugue state press published noah's book the human war

while reading stet i wrote down page numbers of pages with sentences i wanted to type and here are some of them

Memory is a matter of holding a remembered object with steady, unharmful pressure on all sides. If the pressure is reduced from any side, the object (which is so frail it doesn't exist) will form a crack.

The crack could be said to have been there all along, if you want to think that way.


Pain is the electrical transmission of accurate information.


In Asia, some of the brightest children are taught to cast aside the clutter of thought and action and desire and to enter the void of pure awareness, awareness of nothing but awareness, and this is an accomplishment. In the West you are considered to have lived if you've done something, and not if not, so that spiritual and ineffective people there are taught to produce artworks.


...her prayers seemed to rise into the air about three meters, and then returned in an unaccelerating curve back to the worshiper. This is the cycle of prayer, from the heart back into the same heart. The inventor of a conductive grease that would make this prayer cycle run faster would deserve our thanks no more than the inventor of the automatic pistol. Only the slowest possible journey for the prayer lets us forget we are praying to ourselves, lets us believe the prayer that returns to us unchanged is an answer.


Do you trust your heart to beat, or would you rather criticize its work? When a despairing heart gives up, it takes its critic with it.


In the dark, two people watch a film, and if they are decently raised they will not discuss the merits of the film while it is unspooling. They will wait till the lights come up, and hope to agree with each other, and it can be terrible if one hates what the other loves. The weaker one (usually the one who loves more) will change opinion, and that is what we mean by tragedy. But if the two of them understand each other, then they can go home together and in the dark, with nobody watching, they can speak of feelings and not opinions, they are still free.


Have you ever written a letter to your beloved, and then had to rewrite it repeatedly, trying to please a third party?


Let us suppose that Felix Dzerzhinsky was made cruel and bloodthirsty by a single man, a schoolteacher, who must have beaten the lad, and made the rest of the class laugh at him, thus causing an ordinary boy to become a vicious killer overnight. Is this really possible? In the movies, yes, anything can happen, if it is required to happen.

But in forgiving Dzerzhinsky, Stet also must forgive the ones who created him. They too have their sad stories.


This man who enters Stet's flat, he could be named anything, but we will not name him. Why is he here? A true desire will pull at you, but when you perform the desires of others, you are pushed. In other words, he is a worker, and so unaware of his own desires that he looks blurry, out of focus, and he moves slowly through the light and dark of Stet's room as if underwater.


In the future we will invent invisible trains that will send prisoners into the air without their knowledge, they will be converted into labor, they will disappear and hydroelectric dams will appear, without need for guards or barbed wire.


...is a train the train or its tracks? The tracks have already arrived at camp, the tracks have even already returned to Leningrad after years of imprisonment. Yet the train, still approaching the camp, believes it is about to arrive.


Engineering is always moral engineering. But safety is not the true goal. The goal is to reveal every possible truth, both good and bad. Accidents are precious, because when the cars leave the rails and plunge into the abyss, it is then we see the whole system at once--the destruction, always beautiful and heartstopping to observe, is really caused by the train's impulse to lose itself, to leave us. We build the trains, and they express ourselves.