| Episodes |
1) It thrilled him [Jefferson], not to be a saint for once, not to be a champion. Not to bear, for once, the responsibility of something noble or good. Didn't he believe that one must pursue his happiness? Such a pursuit is as ruthless as any other.
Steve Erickson, Arc d'X 25
2) As he [Jefferson] continued with her [Hemings] the furor of the streets outside retreated to the low hum of her inner passage. The next shudder took her by surprise as did the one after, and when she felt herself plummeting into the blaze of the crescent moon, when she felt herself grab the fire of his hair and pull him to her, she knew, with rage, that her violation was total: when she came she knew, with fury, that this was the ultimate rape, the way he'd made her give herself not just to his pleasure but to her own. Then he turned her over and plunged himself into her. But it was too late. If he'd intended to make his own possession of her complete, she had also, if for only a moment, felt what it was like not to be a slave.
Steve Erickson, Arc d'X 28-29
3) I've asked myself whether I love Sally. I believe I have come to love her, even if it's not the way I loved my wife. Sally was the woman who was there when I was closer to the end than the beginning, when I wasn't so willing to surrender my moments only to my convictions. Surrendering to passion, I came to believe my convictions not less, but more.
Steve Erickson, Arc d'X 46
4) It seemed urgent to Wade not to miss whatever the graffiti might say today of all days; he found the corner and was down to his last match. He struck the match and held it up to the wall, and was immediately disappointed by the most innocuous and meaningless bulletin yet: THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.
Steve Erickson, Arc d'X 64
5) The issue is to what extent Jefferson's darkness made his light possible. I worked from the premise that for somebody in trouble, the pendulum had to swing. Otherwise, he was simply a hypocrite. I assume he was a man of genuine contradictions.
Steve Erickson, qtd in Rifkin
6) It said, I DREAMED THAT LOVE WAS A CRIME.
Steve Erickson, Arc d'X 77
7) I was surprised by love again. She was black and white. She was quiet and wild, her voice watery and melancholy, her smile sweet and hushed. She was the most beautiful woman I ever knew and for as long as it would last I was a force of nature. And if I had never really known her in order to write about her here, then I would have dreamed her, on and on into my nights with no sight of her ever to break the spell and cast another in its place. Maybe that would have been better. But she wasn't a dream.
Steve Erickson, Arc d'X 109
8) "I've been owned by everyone," she said, and in the dark he heard the resolution in her voice. "I've been owned by this one and that one, my whole life. And the biggest thing I ever did was to free myself. I did it with a knife. I cut myself loose. And now I find out I didn't do it after all. Do you understand? I find out I didn't do it. You've freed me today of the burden of having killed a man. But if I didn't kill him, it means I'm still a slave. God damn everyone who's ever owned me," he heard her say.
Steve Erickson, Arc d'X 131
9) [Clinton was] last in morality, last in integrity, last in the hearts of his historians -- that doesn't seem too unreasonable, does it, as long as we're not too distracted by the fact that these historians are the same well-credentialed liars who routinely discounted two centuries of oral history, circumstantial evidence and eyewitness testimony as to whether the author of the Pursuit of Happiness was the sort who would sleep with a slave. That the third president of the United States shouldn't have been the sort to have slaves at all was regarded as a moral inconsistency so trivial and tedious that for 200 years good manners compelled the country to ignore it until the bad manners of science made it as impossible to ignore as Stendhal's gunshot at the opera -- or maybe it's a fart in church, I've never really gotten the quote straight. Just as the Noonans and the Bennetts and the Lynne Cheneys would have us be an America where making money is more righteous than having sex, so we would be an America more offended by the idea of Thomas Jefferson fucking a black woman than owning one. Bad luck or just plain poor political sense on William Jefferson Clinton's part not to have owned Monica as he diddled her, in which case we might be able to rank him on a more Jeffersonian level.
Steve Erickson, "The New Sanctimony"
10) Next to him on the wagon seat the squire's five-year-old son watched the smoke too. Into the night the little boy smelled it. He smelled it in his food and his bath. In the air outside his bedroom window that should have been ripe with the scent of spring rain, he smelled nothing but the burning body of the black female slave. He woke in the middle of the night vomiting; and lying in the bed the next day, depleted and delirious, his five-year-old head was filled with excruciating visions: staring into nothingness above him, he waited for the woman's ashes to fall from the sky, to clot the branches of the trees and hang from the rafters of the house like black snow. The boy's name was Thomas.
Steve Erickson, Arc D'X 8-9
11) America wearies of democracy. Thirty years after a war that wounded its heart, 20 years after a scandal that scarred its conscience, 10 years after fiscal policies that ridiculed its sense of responsibility and fairness, the country has nearly exhausted the qualities by which democracy survives and flourished. America feels at the end of its power, and the result is a hysteria of which we're barely conscious, a hysteria in which democracy appears as a spectacle of impotence and corruption. As Americans we have come to act more oppressed by freedom than invigorated by it, more concerned with freedom from rather than freedom to. We divide between the vast majority of us who --out of futility, confusion or indifference -- are so disengaged from democracy we never vote at all, and those of us who vote not to thoughtfully resolve complicated issues but to express our rage.
Steve Erickson, "American Weimar"
12) The little girl stood in the doorway awhile and looked at the woman on the bed who was her mother. She was afraid to approach, and then Sally turned slightly, slightly raised her hand to her little girl, slightly called her little girl's name. Polly ran to her side. Tears ran down Sally's face. She thought she remembered something somewhere far in the past when she was a little girl herself, a dying mother in a house far away, beckoning her children to her. But she didn't see how she could have a memory of anything like that, other than in a dream.
Steve Erickson, Arc d'X 151
13) John Locke, whom Thomas considers one of the three greatest men that ever lived, once wrote of the right to life, liberty and property. But when Thomas, updating Locke, wrote instead of the pursuit of happiness, the country born of that pursuit broke loose of history. Thomas' own happiness is embodied by his property, the fourteen-year-old slave girl he owns, who one afternoon finds herself free of the bonds of his ownership and must choose either to return to her country as his property or to leave everything behind in freedom, including her family and home. So the girl named Sally becomes the first modern American, changing the outcome of not just one revolution but two, and the man who inspired both is consumed by the dark expression of his own idealism. Later, when Sally wakes in a strange theocratic city that is outside of history, the country she invented is only a dream she had the night before. In the mouth of a volcano, a man named Etcher rewrites the Unexpurgated Volumes of Unconscious History stolen from the archives of the church. And in the year 1999, in the city of Berlin, a middle-aged, washed-up American novelist watches a small guerilla army in the dead of night rebuild the Wall so the world might understand again what freedom is. Seeping into all these places and times are the domination and submission of sexual obsession, and the obsessions of those who have been changed by the promise made in a dream, by a girl who chose to remain the slave of the man who defined modern freedom.
Steve Erickson, "Formula for Arc d'X"
14) "My God," he sputtered one night in an exceptionally lucid moment, "does all of history think with its dick?"
Steve Erickson, Arc d'X 284
15) It's an accumulation of things that were born out of the Puritanism and repression that were part of this country from the start. Americans are now fifty rears removed from the redeeming experience of World War II, where we could say, without any real fear of history contradicting us, that we were the good guys, and in that fifty years we've had nothing but experiences that taint that sense of righteousness. The media has played a big part in this--its growing omnipresence has forced us to see aspects of ourselves that previously could just be conveniently ignored or disguised. We're caught in a series of profound and deeply disturbing paradoxes: we've won the cold war and we don't feel good about it, the economy is empirically improving and we don't feel secure in it, crime is statistically declining and we don't feel safe, we live in an age of sexual repression while being exposed to a constant cultural barrage of sexuality, albeit an artificial sort of sexuality. All of this has alienated us from ourselves in fundamental ways. The violence we dread we also glamorize. The sexuality that our Puritan roots condemn we live out vicariously through the media, even while AIDS makes sexual contact less tenable and accessible. These are paradoxes of experience we're unable to resolve, and Americans aren't people who have much us for ambiguity.
Steve Erickson, qtd. in Larry McCaffery and Takayuki Tatsumi 406-7
16) "Sir?" she said. He took hold of her sleeping gown by the neck and pulled it, and she heard it tear. "Sir," she could barely choke it out again; he tore the rest of the gown off her. Naked, she now pulled away toward the other side of the bed, but he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to him. He took from the bedpost the long blue strip that she'd surreptitiously shredded from the curtains that had hung in his bedchamber in Virginia. It's my fault, she thought, for taking a piece of the curtain to tie back my hair: "I didn't know," she said; "I thought it was all right." He tied her wrists with the cloth. "Please," she said, but he held her tight, and then, when he loosened his robe, she saw him. In a panic she tried to bolt, but her wrists were bound and he held her by her legs. She fell back onto her bed. Behind her he pulled her hips toward him so she was on her knees, and took her long black hair in a knot in his fist. Before he buried her face in the pillow she had one last chance to gaze up at the crescent-moon window, to look for the light of torches, to listen for the sounds of voices. The window was black and silent.
Steve Erickson, Arc D'X 24-25
17) A deep freeze has settled in the American soul. The nation gets meaner and more petty until rage is the only national passion left -- and then it is anger not at those on top, which is the anger America was born of, but at those on the bottom. Increasingly, we view individual freedom not as the fundamental building block of collective freedom but as an affront to collective sensibility or security.
Steve Erickson, "American Weimar"
18) When Etcher called out the girl's name and then called again, and went into the front room where Polly was frozen in the open doorway, he never assumed it would be Sally Hemings standing there on the porch outside, on the eve of a choice that would change everything, staring aghast into Polly's face, which stared back. The mother, at fourteen, was several years younger than the daughter.
Steve Erickson, Arc d'X 279
19) Doubt is a critical component of both democracy and its leadership. In the eyes of democracy, doubt is not just moral but necessary; the psychology of democracy must allow for doubt about the rightness of any given political position, because otherwise the position can never be questioned. . . . In contrast, the psychology of theocracy not only denies doubt but views it as a cancer on the congregation, prideful temerity in the face of divine righteousness as it's communicated by God to the leaders of the state.
Steve Erickson, "George Bush and the Treacherous Country"
20) I invented a country, she had heard Thomas say, with the arrogance of a man who thinks it's the business of men to make countries and the business of women to make jewelry. But it had taken her all her life to realize it was she who made the country and that the country had always been hers to make, that it waited for either her yes or her no that afternoon in the place de la Bastille so as to be born one thing or the other, as an embryo waits for one chromosome or another to be born man or woman.
Steve Erickson, Arc d'X 285
21) We have secretly come to fear and resent that the American dream itself may be a delusion. This is the source of our rage . . . the rage that would devour democracy. It is a rage at ourselves, which we can barely stand to live with but which is the only thing that seems to pump blood through the national heart anymore.
Steve Erickson, "American Weimar"
22) "It's the final resolution of the dilemma of power," he heard Thomas say in the dark, "to be at once both king and slave. To at once lead an army and be its waterboy. To command every man and woman within miles, and be subject to the whim of any little colored child who wanders in and orders me to dance like a puppet, or make a funny face, or wear something silly on my head such as the peel or an orange or an animal turd. Sometimes I just wish for a woman, is all."
Steve Erickson, Arc d'X 289
23) Slavery has been a running theme in my books. The slavery Sally has to deal with in Arc d'X exists as much in her head as it does socially--she struggles against how her sense of identity has been bound to the men in her life and their expectations of her. Related to this are the themes of submission and domination. These things are part of the dynamic between people, and there are times to liberate yourself from that dynamic and times to creatively use it.
Steve Erickson, qtd. in Larry McCaffery and Takayuki Tatsumi 404
24) On the other hand, some small more intimate treachery on the part of the King of France might well have saved his head . . . . He needed a slave of his own. He needed some black vessel to receive the blackness in his heart and soul and leave him strong enough for the right and good. He needed to commit some trivial duplicity, betraying his vain, viperous little Austrian queen; in so identifying the part of him that cried for redemption he might have redeemed his country if not his throne. Now his blood bubbles up with all the rest, and so does his queen's.
Steve Erickson, Arc D'X 45
25) Over all of my novels hovers the ghost of America. In the first two books, Days Between Stations and Rubicon Beach, that ghost manifests itself in Los Angeles which is not an aberration of America but rather the farthest extension of the American idea, taken to the point of no return. In Tours of the Black Clock the ghost manifests itself in the Twentieth Century, when America returns to the dark heart of the Old World to infect the Third Reich with its anarchic spirit. In a political memoir I wrote called Leap Year, a traveler searches the country for America only to find the United States. This new novel, Arc d'X, is about the choice made one afternoon in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution by a fourteen-year-old American black girl. It's about a man named Thomas who believes in the natural-born right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the last of which gives birth to the millennium two centuries laterâ€"not the millennium of the calendar but the millennium of the spirit.
Steve Erickson, "Formula for Arc d'X"
26) Once, when I had the chance, I chose something else--love or safety or the home that made me its slave, I don't know, but I chose to go back with him and be his slave and because I made that choice, because I loved him or because I was afraid to be without him, because I was afraid to be free, everything changed. Everything about my life changed. Did I return with him just so I'd have one more chance to kill him? Did I return with him just so I'd have one more chance to be raped by him, or to be made love to by him, or to wonder which was which?
Steve Erickson, Arc d'X 176
27) We have not grown up enough to accept that America has never been innocent at all,: it is not possible to call innocent a country where the original residents were systematically wiped out and the new tenants built a society in large part on the labor of people who were shipped over in chains from another continent in the hulls of boats. These original sins do not negate America's idealism and romanticism. But that such an idealist and romantic country was created out of such profound transgressions a more complicated paradox than we can entertain.
Steve Erickson, "American Weimar"
28) Everything that's truly irrevocable finally had to do with love or freedom, but whether you act in the name of the first or the second, one of them ultimately bows to the other and that's the most irrevocable thing of all.
Steve Erickson, Arc d'X 193
29) Certainly no one would find Jefferson very normal, an eccentric, aging widower with a vaguely scandalous past, shuffling around in his shabby clothes in his strange house with all its weird inventions, on top of a remote, foggy Virginal hill. But no one would have to wonder if he really believed in democracy, or have to ask whether he believed in it more than his own power.
Steve Erickson, "American Weimar"
30) "And what if she had answered yes? When I asked her to go back to America with me, what if she had promised different? What if, there in the square of the Bastille among the glass and blood and gunpowder, she had said Yes I'll return with you to America as the slave of your pleasure, instead of turning as she did and disappearing from my life forever into Paris' roiling core, while I stood at the top of the street screaming her name? What if my life had chosen my heart rather than my conscience? What if I'd put a price on her head and shackled her naked in the cabin of my ship like the property she was, what if I'd smuggled her back to Virginia pleasing my heart every day for the rest of my life and left my conscience to God or the hypocrites who claim to serve him? Let them try to stop me from taking her back, Paris and its revolution. Let it shrivel and petrify like a small black fossil, my tyrannic conscience. Happiness is a dark thing to pursue," the old man hisses at Georgie, his eyes glimmering brighter and madder at the bald boy, "and the pursuit itself is a dark thing as well."
Steve Erickson, Arc d'X 260-61
31) It seems Americans have come to feel more burdened by freedom than invigorated by it, and at the crux of this profound disillusionment is the illusion of innocence. Whether it's assassinations or political scandals or O.J. driving down the freeway, it seems like nothing happens in this country that isn't interpreted by the media or the cultures as the end of American innocence, and it's a little odd since America has never been an innocent country. It's not possible for a country that was born out of the twin experiences of wiping out all the people who were originally here and bringing over people in chains in the hulls of boats to be innocent. Which isn't to say that America isn't a genuinely idealistic country and which isn't even to say this idealism is necessarily hypocritical. The great paradox of America has been the conflict between its true idealism and its false innocence, and this pathological contradiction is at the root of the country's current cynicism and spiritual bankruptcy. When we began to come face to face with the fact that we're not an innocent people, one of two things was going to happen: America was either going to grow up or begin to die because it couldn't stand the truth, and because everything it believed about itself was based on a delusion. Lately the country's been dying more than growing. There certainly remains a lot of denial in America. The most popular movie of 1994 was one in which the quintessential American was portrayed as noble precisely for how dimwitted he was. Forrest Gump was a pretty neat manifestation of America's ongoing struggle to hang on to this idea of itself as innocent.
Steve Erickson, qtd. in Larry McCaffery and Takayuki Tatsumi 406
32) In the subsiding blaze of the room the old man's face appears like a vision in the hole of the U-Bahn tunnel at Kochstrasse; and now Georgie is repelled by this grotesque old man in ragged clothes, the torn pants on his long legs and the shoes with holes and the lining of his coat drooping from the hem, who's invaded Georgie's long dream. But the feeling gets much worse when Georgie says, "Who are you?" and the old man answers, his stare unbroken and his smile unchanged, "America," and laughs softly afterward as though he's made a joke.
Steve Erickson, Arc d'X 259
33) He separated and entered her. Both of them could hear the rip of her, the wet broken plunder, a spray of blood across the tiny room. She screamed. She screamed so her brother would hear, so the whole hotel would hear. She didn't care if he killed her for it, if he pulled the hair out of her head for it, she screamed so they'd all know that their secret had found her. It was their secret, she'd seen it in all their faces, in London and Paris. But he didn't strike or kill her, and then she knew it had been a secret to him too, and he couldn't bear to live with it anymore. She screamed as the tip of him emptied his secret far inside her.
Steve Erickson, Arc D'X 25
34) The truth is that the Sally Hemings episodes in Leap Year are the least satisfying parts of the book. I didn't do as much with her as I would have liked, in part because the concept of the book didn't really allow for it. Afterwards I felt like I needed to go back and reexplore things that had presented themselves to my surprise, especially the contradictions in Jefferson. This is a good example of the kind of unfinished business in one book that carries over into the next. With Arc d'X I wanted to get more deeply into the impossible conflict between Jefferson's ideals and his passions. Here was a guy who, as a young man and member of the Virginia legislature, tried to pass a number of measures that would have loosened the bonds of slavery in America, but later, as his power and reputation and moral stature grew, his passion for abolition diminished, just about the time he became the only man other than Washington who might have addressed the issue of slavery and gotten away with it. I became fascinated with the idea that perhaps Jefferson loved Sally and that, in America at that time, the only way a free white man could love a black woman was if he owned her. If Sally had been free, the culture and society would not have accepted their relationship, but because Jefferson won her as a slave, society turned its head, at least until he got down to the business of running for president. It was the fascination of placing Jefferson within that kind of web that initially inspired Arc d'X.
Steve Erickson, qtd. in Larry McCaffery and Takayuki Tatsumi 411
35) "Do you ever think of telling them?" "Yes." "Will you?" "I don't know." Patsy asked, "Doesn't it still trouble you? It used to trouble you. I mean, the slaves." "Yes." "Everyone here says it's rather dreadful." "They're right. It's rather dreadful." "So why--?" "Because we're weak," he answered.
Steve Erickson, Arc D'X 22
36) We weren't ready to leap because we still had one more impulse left to exhaust, after the others of idealism, realism, heroism, confidence, and naiveté that had characterized the previous half-dozen elections. That was the impulse of cynicism. George Bush, of course, was the perfect vehicle for this impulse--in fact his cynicism was ultimately too naked and complete for Americans to accept, which is why Clinton won the 1992 election. By 1992 Bush's cynicism was so manifest that Americans couldn't deny it even in the midst of all their other denials. To have elected Bush again would have been to have denied the future and accepted the inevitability of betrayal, and that would have been spiritual death, because it would have meant we no longer dared to have faith. 1992 was the first important American presidential election of the twenty-first century, which is almost certainly going to devour itself even faster than the twentieth century has. In 1992 Americans were faced with the prospect of departing this century revealed as a country for which cynicism was the only identity left, but some constant of American faith was intact enough not to allow that to happen.
Steve Erickson, qtd. in Larry McCaffery and Takayuki Tatsumi 410
37) Thomas wasn't remotely a superstitious man, so he didn't easily accept the prospect of apparitions. He was, on the other hand, habitually tormented about his slaves, whose ownership he could barely bring himself to accept but whose freedom he could not bring himself to give.
Steve Erickson, Arc D'X 13
38) That night Thomas dreamed about the hanging man. He hung from a beam just below the pain in Thomas' head, not in the king's palace but a bare room of empty shelves and tattered deep-blue curtains. The hanging man was gaunt and old, not at all like the king; it wasn't long before Thomas realized it wasn't the king but himself, hanging in the study of his home in Virginia. The home was dilapidated, ruined, which Thomas somehow found more shocking than his own body spinning in the smoke that curled in through the window. Sometimes in this dream Thomas was standing below looking up at himself, and sometimes he was up there hanging from the beams of the ceiling looking down at his slaves, who were watching him. James will cut me down soon, Thomas thought in his dream. Sally will put cold rags around my scarred neck and run her fingers through my hair. But Sally and James didn't come, and the black faces below were pitiless. For a moment in his dream he believed it was his slaves who had strung him up here, but then he knew that wasn't it. Then he knew he'd done it himself.
Steve Erickson, Arc D'X 22
39) He recognized the smoke, of course; he new it all along. He knew it the moment he first smelled it. And as she burned outside, somewhere unseen but certainly burning, the smell that he'd known since he was five years old that had caused the first of these pains in his head and the first of his many visions, now became the smell of his own freedom. His best hope thaws that she would burn so hot, that her immolation would be so intense, the very heat of the black annihilation would burn the rope that held his life. At that moment he loved the smell. At that moment, as the rope choked him tighter, he inhaled its sensuality; he was filled with desire for the burning slavewoman. He could see his slaves below him. He could see them shrink back from the sight of his erection. It would become so big that the weight of it would snap the rope above him and send him groundward, and then send him through the window to the pyre, where he would thrust himself into the ashes of her thighs.
Steve Erickson, Arc D'X 23
40) He was filled with exultation at his new conviction, born in his dream, that no ashes of a burning woman would ever rain down from the sky, as he'd believed when he was a child, but that such ashes were only the soft sensual harbor of his desire, waiting between her legs. He followed the smoke to her quarters. What if James, he wondered, should try to stop me? I should have to flog him then, or sell him. He had never flogged or sold a human being. It thrilled him. He felt like a master, a king.
Steve Erickson, Arc D'X 23
41) It thrilled him, the possession of her. He only wished she were so black as not to have a face at all. He only wished she was so black that his ejaculation might be the only white squiggle across the void of his heart. When he opened her, the smoke rushed out of her in a cloud and filled the room. It thrilled him, not to be a saint for once, not to be a champion. Not to bear, for once, the responsibility of something noble or good. Didn't he believe that one must pursue his happiness? Such a pursuit is as ruthless as any other. This possession made him happy, until he came. Then he sank out of his own sight, refusing to look at himself or what he'd done. He fell asleep, half on the bed and half on the floor.
Steve Erickson, Arc D'X 25
42) When the blood stopped, after he'd taken her many times over the weeks that followed, he didn't wash her with the rags anymore. It was the hemorrhaging of his conscience to which Thomas tended. If he couldn't quite forgive the way he fucked her, he accepted it as the dark thing that allowed him otherwise to be good.
Steve Erickson, Arc D'X 26
43) He stopped. Behind him the revolution continued upriver. In the cold of the winter his words left tiny clouds before his face. "I'm a poor champion," he finally said after a moment. No one spoke. "I'm only as bright as the whitest light in any man can be, tempered as it is in every man by whatever black impulse he can't ignore. At my best I have only been the slave of a great idea. It's an idea which no man holds but which rather holds him. It's to no man's credit that he has such and idea, it's merely his good fortune that such an idea possesses him with such force and clarity that he can't help but serve it. What you do here stirs the slaves of the world to life. What you do here leaves the world's sleeping tyrants with no dreams but the endless counting of the few remaining days left to them. You should remember," and now Sally almost thought she could hear his voice break, "that whenever a poor champion fails a great idea, it's not the failure of the idea itself. The idea is as great as it ever was.
Steve Erickson, Arc D'X 35
44) The loss of Sally was different from the loss of Maria or the loss of his wife; in them he'd lost a part of what he constantly revealed of himself to the world. In Sally he lost a part of what the world never knew, of what he had never known about himself, and now he believed he'd never know it. In the short run this was a relief. In the long run he knew that what he couldn't release between her legs would eat away his heart. He had no choice about America. As a free black she could not sleep in his white American bed. It was the nature of American freedom that he was only free to take his pleasure in something the possessed, in the same way it would ultimately be the nature of America to define itself in terms of what was owned. So he had no choice about that. If he'd had one he would have freed her, so long as he could have her. Once, if he'd had the choice, he would have freed them all, before it became easier for him to believe it was too late for such a choice that such a choice had already been made for him.
Steve Erickson, Arc D'X 38
45) One should not make the rash promises of one's ideals before so many witnesses. I told her I would never marry another. Perhaps I wouldn't have anyway. Perhaps I said that not so as to ease her passage into death but to deliver myself to the forbidden that I had denied myself so long even as I hungered for it.
Steve Erickson, Arc D'X 45
46) I've invented something. As the germ of conception in my head it was the best and wildest and most elusive of my inventions. It's a contraption halfcrazed by a love of justice, a machine oiled by fierce hostility to those who would ride the human race as though it were a dumb beast. I've set it loose gyrating across the world. It spins through villages, hamlets, towns, grand cities. It's a thing to be confronted every moment of every day by everyone who hears even its rumor; it will test most those who presume too glibly to believe in it. But I know it's a flawed thing, and I know the flaw is of me. Just as the white ink of my loins has fired the inspiration that made it, so the same ink is scrawled across the order of its extinction. The signature is my own. I've written its name. I've called it America.
Steve Erickson, Arc D'X 46
47) I spent all the years up to that point as the slave of my head's convictions rather than my heart's passions, and never felt as alive as the first night I took her. Never felt as alive as those moments when I knew I'd done something that could never be forgiven. In the nights that have passed since, I accepted such moments not as the crimes that contradicted what I believed in but as the passionate chaos that justified and liberated the god of reason living within me. I've asked myself whether I love Sally. I believe I have come to love her, even if it's not the way I loved my wife. Sally was the woman who was there when I was closer to the end than the beginning, when I wasn't so willing to surrender my moments only to my convictions. Surrendering to passion, I came to believe my convictions not less, but more.
Steve Erickson, Arc D'X 45-46
