The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

I desire therefore I exist.

I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.

I see her as a series of marvellous shapes formed at random in the kaleidoscope of desire.

His main principles were indeed as follows: everything it is possible to imagine can also exist.

Some cities are women and must be loved; others are men and can only be admired or bargained with

Do you not feel’, said the Doctor in his very soft but still crisp-edged voice, ‘that invisible presences have more reality than visible ones? They exert more influence upon us. They make us cry more easily.

Evil is usually attractive, because evil is defiant.

Abandoned lovers were often lured into the false embrace of faithless mistresses and this caused the Minister the gravest concern for he feared that one day a man would impregnate an illusion and then a generation of half-breed ghosts would befoul the city

I can no longer tell the difference between memory and dream. They share the same quality of wishful thinking.

With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He was a grinning skeleton.

Love is the synthesis of dream and actuality; love is the only matrix of the unprecedented; love is the tree which buds lovers like roses.

She stayed beside me until I slept, waveringly, brilliantly, hooded in diaphanous scarlet, and occasionally she left an imperative written in lipstick on my dusty windowpane. BE AMOROUS! she exhorted one night and, another night, BE MYSTERIOUS! Some nights later, she scribbled: WHEN YOU BEGIN TO THINK, YOU LOSE THE POINT.

I am happy only in that I am a monster.

Consider the nature of a city. It is a vast repository of time, the discarded times of all the men and women who have lived, worked, dreamed and died in the streets which grow like a willfully organic thing, unfurl like the petals of a mired rose and yet lack evanescence so entirely that they preserve the past in haphazard layers, so this alley is old while the avenue that runs beside it is newly built but nevertheless has been built over the deep-down, dead-in-the-ground relics of the older, perhaps the original, huddle of alleys which germinated the entire quarter.

The demands of ritual are always stronger than those of reason.

The earth turned on the pivot of her mouth.

I returned slowly through the mists of winter. Time lay more thickly about me than the mists. I was so unused to moving through time that I felt like a man walking under water. Time exerted great pressure on my blood vessels and my eardrums, so that I suffered from terrible headaches, weakness and nausea. Time clogged the hooves of my mare until she lay down beneath me and died. Nebulous Time was now time past; I crawled like a worm on its belly through the clinging mud of common time and the bare trees showed only the dreary shapes of an eternal November of the heart, for now all changes would henceforth be, as they had been before, absolutely predictable. And so I identified at last the flavour of my daily bread; it was and would be that of regret.

Even if it is the dream made flesh, the real, once it becomes real, can be no more than real.

MINISTER: All he has done is to find some means of bewitching the intelligence. He has only induced a radical suspension of disbelief. As in the early days of the cinema, all the citizens are jumping through the screen to lay their hands on the naked lady in the bathtub! AMBASSADOR: And yet, in fact, their fingers touch flesh. MINISTER: They believe they do. Yet all they touch is substantial shadow. AMBASSADOR: And what a beautiful definition of flesh! You know I am only substantial shadow, Minister, but if you cut me, I bleed. Touch me, I palpitate!

I was the only man alive who knew time had begun again.

The introduction of cinematography enabled us to corral time past and thus retain it not merely in the memory - at best, a falsifying receptacle - but in the objective preservative of a roll of film. But, if past, present and future are the dimensions of time, they are notoriously fluid. There is no tension in the tenses and yet they are always tremulously about to coagulate. The present is a liquid jelly which settles into a quivering, passive mass, the past, as soon as - if not sooner than - we are aware of it as present. Yet this mass was intangible and existed only conceptually until arrival of the preservative, cinema. The motion picture is usually regarded as only a kind of shadow play and few bother to probe the ontological paradoxes it presents. For it offers us nothing less than the present tense experience of time irrefutably past. So that the coil of film has, as it were, lassoed inert phenomena from which the present had departed, and when projected upon a screen, they are granted a temporary revivification. [...] The images of cinematography, however, altogether lack autonomy. Locking in programmed patterns, they merely transpose time past into time present and cannot, by their nature, respond to the magnetic impulses of time future for the unachievable future which does not exist in any dimension, but nevertheless organizes phenomena towards its potential conclusions. The cinematographic model is one of cyclic recurrences alone, even if these recurrences are instigated voluntarily, by the hand of man viz. the projectionist, rather than the hand of fate. Though, in another sense, the action of time is actually visible in the tears, scratches and thumbprints on the substance of the film itself, these are caused only by the sly, corrosive touch of mortality and, since the print may be renewed at will, the flaws of aging, if retained, increase the presence of the past only by a kind of forgery, as when a man punches artificial worm-holes into raw or smokes shadows of fresh pain with a candle to produce an apparently aged artefact. Mendoza, however, claimed that if a thing were sufficiently artificial, it became absolutely equivalent to the genuine.

The world, that is, of earthquake and cataclysm, cyclone and devastation; the violent matrix, the real world of unmastered, unmasterable physical stress that is entirely inimical to man because of its indifference. Ocean, forest, mountain, weather - these are the inflexible institutions of that world of unquestionable reality which is so far removed from the social institutions which make up our own world that we men must always, whatever our difference, conspire to ignore them. For otherwise we would be forced to acknowledge our incomparable insignificance and the insignificance of those desires that might be the pyrotechnic tigers of our world and yet, under the cold moon and the frigid round dance of the unspeakably alien planets, are nothing but toy animals cut from coloured paper.

The habit of sardonic contemplation is the hardest habit of all to break.

I toppled off my pyrotechnic tiger and, as I plunge downwards, endlessly as Lucifer, I ask myself: "What is the most miraculous event in the world?" And I answer myself: "I am going to fall into my own arms. They stretch out to me from the bottom of the pit.

There had never been such roses as those that bloomed that summer. They clambered everywhere and dripped as if perspiring the heaviest most intoxicating perfume, which seemed to make the very masonry drunk. The senses fused; sometimes these roses emitted low but intolerably piercing pentatonic melodies which were the sound of their deep crimson colour and yet we heard them inside our nostrils.

Destruction is only another aspect of being.

The world exists only as a medium in which we execute our desires. Physically, the world itself, the actual world - the real world, if you like - is formed of malleable clay; its metaphysical structures is just as malleable.