Blackbird Braille: Winter (6)

1. He: The struggle against yourself is the only means by which you may lay a hand on the world.
2. He: Can you really compensate for the limits of your argument with the extremity of your commitment?
3. He said, words appear to make other words disappear.
4. He asked us, 'what if you contracted transformation sickness? What if you woke one day and wished things went back to how they were before?'
5. He said, You unknowingly lived all your life in error, and you discovered it in the moment at which it became too late to change course.
6. He said: It is right to strike back. Acting from the desire for vengeance is the only true motivation. The enemy is momentarily reduced by your taking revenge against him, but the bond between you, tightens. The world in which you are both embedded, expands.‬
7. ‪He said, actions always show otherwise. Escape is not a return staged in the guise of escape‬
8. He said, Being simultaneously 'inside' and 'against' is belonging's true form.
9. He said, 'Imagine breaking down a wall on the day of liberation. Now imagine breaking down a wall every day, until you are sick of it.'
10. He said, 'I want to be part of the problem because I am part of it. I don't want to be part of the solution because I am not part of it.'
11. He: the most appropriate form of response to the world is formulated through this twofold operation: I am schismatic; am I schismatic enough?
12. Isn't he the one who said, 'every instance of acquired knowledge takes you further from the life that you have been prevented from living'?
13. He said, 'the damaged life is not more able to understand what is inflicted upon it. It knows the edge but not the force behind.'
14. He said, 'the one who endures knows every detail of the boot but nothing of the foot inside.'
15. He said, 'it is difficult for the oppressed to accept that the perpetrator has no rationale, no motive. The boot hides no foot.'
16. Didn't he say, 'knowledge is also impoverishment'?
17. He said, 'individualism is a disease,' or he said, 'individualism is susceptible to diseases that are all its own.'
18. He said, 'check your transference.'
19. He: I was given the very last piece of blank paper. The mark I made upon it was poorly done. And in the wrong place. I could not rub it out.
20. He: The measure of an individual's commitment upturns the value of what is committed to. The best individuals fight for the worst causes.
21. He: discover no fellowship between yourself and the world. Move quickly to cut off the chance for reconciliation.
22. He: Let no platform be the only rule. Let every platform be empty. Let some emptiness be another platform. Let ideas find no platform. Let the idea of platforms be not the idea.
23. He: As I cannot trust my desires, they are not mine but this world's, I must set my course by the compass of what I refuse.
24. He: The true symbol withholds all but the edge of what it symbolises.
25. He: favour the broken over the mended.
26. He: The changing of the law changes what is to be done. And it changes what is to be not done. What is to be undone remains constant.
27. He: The grain is not in the heap. The heap is in the grain.
28. He: A politics should be judged only on the inconsistencies of its denunciations.
29. He: Experiment is the difficult path towards conventionality.
30. He: What is planned cannot be. Whatever is real must first emerge other than as a plan.
31. He: All events, except the miraculous, contain within them all that has ever happened in the world to prevent miracles.
32. He: Whoever speaks up for the ideal of communism without also vigorously asserting its impracticality, says nothing significant about communism.
33. He: Those who may act, may not know. And those who may know, may not act. Those who may feel, may not act or know.
34. He asked: Were you afraid to ask of your own presence amongst those assembled, 'Must I be the one to cause these companions to question each other'?
35. He: The authority of the elder (as assigned by virtue of accident) is preferable to that of the veteran (implying a meritocracy of wounds).
36. He: Youth, not willing to permit what it does not countenance, is expelled from its own principles into adult resignation.
37. He: One’s acts either succeed by confirming the world as it is, or fail in their attempt to change it.
38. He: I did nothing. The worm did everything. 
39. He: dominion is renewed by rebellion, observance by neglect, conformity by festival.
40. He: A trap sprung by the warning against it. 
41. He: A hero is not a role model but one whose flaws and misdemeanours are elevated to a cosmic significance. 
42. He: Ideals will die from drought or flood - and popular enthusiasm is as poisonous to a principle as absolute disinterest.
43. He said, In refusing to look where the eye is directed, that is to look elsewhere, is also to risk compromising the integrity of the concept of elsewhere.
44. He: We must live as always less than we were before, and know ourselves to be the last  - but even our decline will not result in disappearance.
45. He: Nothing of the world that ever lived, lived by any means other than its failure to process its contradictions. Nothing of the world that ever died, died from any cause other than its failure to process its contradictions. 
46. He: Our principle was a readiness to leave this world at a moment's notice. Then the moment arrived. And the principle became incomprehensible.
47. He: There is no act of renunciation that did not first begin in love. There is no secession which did not first begin in belonging.
48. He: Where there is no farmer, there is still a farm. Where there is no boss, there is still a factory. 

He variations:

The rule of difference is found in attempting the same, and contrariwise. Whoever attempts to avoid reference to Kafka, becomes bad Kafka. Whoever attempts to write as Kafka, avoids Kafka. These are the subsets of what is called mimetic desire. Above is a collection of aphorisms, in part derived from, or 'inspired' by, Kafka's 'He'. The texts began as a self-mocking of hubris and portentousness and they lack what Borges calls the 'smoothing (the reversing, altering, turning over) by usage, which is the collective dimension of true 'sayings'. They are numbered for ease of reference and for no other reason - the ordering is accidental.