The Baudelaire Fractal Quotes

“With an obscure hesitation one steps into the day and its frame and its costume. Between the puzzlement and its summary abandonment, between the folds of waking consciousness and their subsequent limitation, is a possible city. Solitude, hotels, aging, love, hormones, alcohol, illness – these drifting experiences open it a little. Sometimes prolonged reading holds it ajar. Another’s style of consciousness inflects one’s own; an odd syntactic manner, a texture of embellishment, pause. A new mode of rest. I can feel physiologically haunted by a style. It’s why I read ideally, for the structured liberation from the personal, yet the impersonal inflection can persist outside the text, beyond the passion of readerly empathy, a most satisfying transgression that arrives only inadvertently, never by force of intention. As if seized by a fateful kinship, against all the odds of sociology, the reader psychically assumes the cadence of the text. She sheds herself. This description tends towards a psychological interpretation of linguistics, but the experience is also spatial. I used to drive home from my lover’s apartment at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. This was Vancouver in 1995. A zone of light-industrial neglect separated our two neighbourhoods. Between them the stretched-out city felt abandoned. My residual excitement and relaxation would extend outwards from my body and the speeding car, towards the dilapidated warehouses, the shut storefronts, the distant container yards, the dark exercise studios, the pools of sulphur light, towards a low-key dereliction. I would feel pretty much free. I was a driver, not a pronoun, not a being with breasts and anguish. I was neither with the lover nor alone. I was suspended in a nonchalance. My cells were at ease. I doted on nothing.”
― Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal

“Delusion needs an architecture;”
― Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal

“Do you ever wish to quit the daily comedy of transforming into the I-speaker without abandoning the wilderness of sensing? The sensation isn’t morbid; it is ultimately disinterested.”
― Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal

“Reading unfolds like a game called ‘I,’ in public gardens in good weather, in a series of worn-down hotel rooms, in museums in winter, where ‘I’ is the composite figure who is going to write but hasn’t yet.”
― Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal

“Yet in the city I was discovering, the collage of fantasy, pigment, quotation, and architecture that I walked through daily in my outfits and my obsessions, I came to notice small-scale transpositions, tiny openings within the texture of the present, where choices towards a freed thinking could be possible.”
― Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal

“Since I couldn't then write the poems I wanted to write, I would be the poet of the anonymous fuck. This was not so much a substitution as a technique of self-invention, an experimental method for the grandness of becoming. Other poets, I would later learn, had mentors, whatever mentors were. I had fucking.”
― Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal

“I felt the sadness thoroughly. I believed it then. I wrote the sadness in my diary, I drank the sadness in my room or in cafés, I fucked the sadness. I almost believed I was the sadness.”
― Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal

“The edges that separate things are conventional rather than inherent or inevitable. While it may make use of these edges in passing, the work of desire is borderless.”
― Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal